news item: AnimalBall games now free

[The press release below is pretty cool news. The AnimalBall gang are nifty people. A while back I reviewed Instant Game: Barebones Edition and RPG Pundit took a look at Sandbox Hill. Both Hill and their mythic Greek game, Ascension to Olympus, look right up my alley.]

Everything's Free at Animalball Games!

After many months of studying the market, spending dozens of dollars on various demographic studies, and reviewing the balances in their checking accounts, Animalball Games has decided to start offering its products for free download. Games that had previously been for sale through RPGNow, like the Steadfast Shield and Sandbox Hill, are now available for free download.

Animalball Co-Founder Kyle Jones stated, "We stuck with a 'traditional' business model for nearly two years, but realized we just weren't making any money selling pdfs of our games through the internet. After consulting with some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the rural midwest, we decided to go to a radically different business model-- volume, volume, volume. Our advisors concluded that we could move far more product if we reduced the price. We figured that nothing's lower than free, so we can really expect to move large volumes of product under our new business model."

Animalball's other Co-Founder, Mike Jones, added, "We're still creating great roleplaying games and over the next few weeks we'll roll out several more games that were originally intended for retail. But we decided that getting people to actually play our games was more important than making money. We decided that we do this because we enjoy it, not because we want to get rich from it."

Click here to go to Animalball's download page.

Animalball Games is a small, independent publisher of free, unique games that do not fit the traditional mold of "mainstream" rpgs. When developing its products, ABG heavily depends on the assistance of its online community to give feedback, input and playtesting help. It is ABG's philosophy that the best games are those developed by the gamers themselves.