Same studio, same month, opposite price tags
NeuraGrowth publishes two games right now, and a visitor comparing them side by side would be right to raise an eyebrow. One asks for money. The other asks for nothing.
Grand Skat is a classic Skat card game. It teaches you the rules across seven lessons, then lets you play offline against the computer or at the free online tables. It costs $9.99 on itch.io for the PC edition, and it is on the Microsoft Store for Windows. One purchase covers the premium features wherever you play. You can also play a free version in the browser at weldowo.pl without buying anything.
Unity in Capsule is a neon twin-stick survivors game. One capsule against endless waves, level-up perks, four modes, an online leaderboard. A run takes ten to fifteen minutes. It costs nothing. Not a trial, not a demo with the good half locked away. The whole game, free on itch.io, donations welcome if you feel like it.
People assume the free one is bait for the paid one. It is not. They were priced by the same rule, and the rule produced two different answers.
A price tag is a claim that the thing is finished
When you pay for something, you are not just buying features. You are buying the maker's statement that this is done, that it works, and that you will not be asked for more money later to make it whole. That claim is the actual product. Break it once and the next thing you publish starts from behind.
Grand Skat can make that claim. The rules are complete, the lessons are written, the offline game works with no connection, and there is nothing behind a second paywall. It has a defined finish line and it crossed it.
Unity in Capsule cannot make that claim yet, and pretending otherwise would be a lie told for $4. It is an early build. We are still adding to it. The honest version of that sentence is not "early access, $4.99, roadmap coming soon". The honest version is: it is free while it is growing, play it now, tell us what breaks.
A leaderboard with nobody on it is just a spreadsheet
There is a practical reason on top of the honest one. Unity in Capsule has an online leaderboard with top scores for each of its four modes: Boss Hunt, Kill Count, Survival and Point Run. A leaderboard is only interesting when there are people on it. Charging admission to a scoreboard nobody has climbed yet is a good way to guarantee it stays empty.
Grand Skat does not have that problem. Skat is a hundred-year-old game with a fixed rulebook. Its value does not depend on how many other people bought it this week. That difference in how the two games create value is exactly why one can carry a price on day one and the other cannot.
Four things our games will never do
"Free" has been ruined by a decade of games that are free the way a fishing hook is free. So it is worth being specific about what we are not doing, because these are commitments, not current limitations.
- No ads. Not between runs, not on the death screen, not a rewarded video for one more life.
- No in-app purchases. There is no shop, no currency, no starter bundle. There is nothing to sell you inside the game because we did not build a hole for it.
- No energy timers. You can play until you are bored. Nothing charges up while you are away.
- No loot boxes and no paid seasons. The rare golden perks that change a run outright, the allied minions, the support towers, the healing orb, the screen-clearing purge, are earned in the run. They are not sold.
If Unity in Capsule ever gets a price, it will be because it became a finished game worth one, and everyone who played it for free will still have the whole thing. The one arrangement we will not use is the one where the game is free but your attention is the product.
It is the same rule that prices the flashcards
This is not a games policy. It is how the whole shop works, and the games just made it visible.
Every printable and every guide in the catalogue is a one-time purchase. You download the file and it is yours. No subscription, no per-seat licence, no cloud account that can decide to stop working. The free sample decks on this site are complete small decks, not the first four cards of a deck you have to buy to finish. Same rule, different medium: pay once for something finished, or take the free thing that is genuinely free.
A studio that sells a card game, a survivors game, bilingual flashcards and developer guides could easily end up with four different sets of ethics. Having one rule that survives contact with all four is worth more than any single price tag.
Originally published at neuragrowth.co. I run a one-person digital-products studio and write up what breaks in production.
If you write CLAUDE.md files, I keep a set of working templates here: neuragrowth.co/free/claude-md-templates.
