I remember my brother introduced me to boundless when he showed me a video he that he thought was cool. I believe the youtubers name was zanyzebra and i remember watching it wanting to look into the game but was uncapable due to the high price tag. however a solution soon came to bless me known as a 5$ steam sale 
. Overall I believe a while back it got a little bit of mainstream media because Playstation also did a small video to promote it.
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But would it be the kind of players you want? Most F2P games I have ever played were chocked full of what many call trolls Etc. They have no real vested interest in the game because it was free.
While the steam version is decently priced but could maybe be dropped a little more being the game has been out so long now. The Playstation price is definitely out of range of where it should be.
Sadly from what I have seen posted here it is something that has to be negotiated with Sony. Since this is what is listed on Palystation (Copyright 2014-2018 Wonderstruck, Turbulenz Limited. All Rights Reserved.) Monumental is still working on things and will have to negotiate that price change.
I think if they can get the price down to where it should probably be at this stage and get a promotion out when they do it could spike more into the game.
At the same time the NPE does need some work. So I guess we will see where it goes. But for me F2P is just a no. I would rather have players that have something invested in the game and are less like to be playing it just to see what kind of trouble they can make.
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Far be it for me to suggest pissing off Sony, but if Monumental lowered the price of the PC version, wouldn’t Sony have to follow suit or deal with complaints from their player base?
PC version is already cheaper
I think everything hinges on what Monumental plans to do with the game.
The game is fun and a lot of us put many hours into the game, but if I’m honest I have cut my hours back drastically as many others have. Some have just quit the game, and from a business perspective ideally you want an influx of new players not just a catering to the current player base or the players that have quit because they aren’t going to just go out and buy the game again.
Boundless, just estimating here at most had 2200 players around Feb 2019, that is being generous I’d imagine. Basing that number on Steam DB “concurrent” players of 1100 and doubling that for PS players. If you take every month after that, the max concurrent on Steam DB is around 300, doubling that to 600.
I say all that because if I were Monumental and I wanted to make my best effort to make Boundless profitable it needs a HUGE influx of new players. I would also focus all the updates on the new players to see if it’s even possible to get new players interested in the game and if that number of players would warrant continuous updates.
Free to Play, might be an easier option though, by updating the “in-game” shop with new cosmetic (yes including pants) new masks, new totems and various other cosmetic items. They could even add blocks to that (even though I wouldn’t be a fan of the idea) but that is all more or less low hanging fruit and would be much easier to add.
Free to Play or not, the New Player Experience needs to change and the current price is way too expensive unless you go through 3rd Party sites.
Again, from a pure business perspective, catering only to the current player base or players that have put in a good chunk of hours into the game is probably not ideal.
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Free to play without a better NPE and ensuring that the previous F2P weekend experience does not reoccur…thats my only worry. Being trapped for hours on McRib while waiting for a spot to open up while dealing with the rubber banding hellacious lag…no thank you.
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I would suggest a 90% off sale on playstation for a couple weeks. You would pick up a fair few new players and miss out on those free to play trolls. The influx wouldn’t be so bad to make worlds full.
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While I have a PS5, I do play on PC.
I’d be ok with them completely dropping Sony. Sorry… it is probably one of the larger reasons we haven’t got an update for the game and the transfer taking longer than it should.
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IT is currently on steam for $20
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I’d agree. The Playstation is limited hardware. There’s only so far you can take it. But a PC can be upgraded over and over.
Boundless is limited by the Playstation’s hardware and a major update could push the game beyond what the Playstation is designed to handle.
The game has probably already been pushed as far as the Playstation could handle and that’s why we never got that last update.
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The PS5 can handle the game fine and could do with an upgrade to accommodate its superior hardware Vs the PS4.
Also it would be a terrible business decision. I checked one of my planets that has had 547 visitors and 208 have been playstation players. MMOs are usually designed to run on pretty basic PCs, because they’re trying to maximise potential player numbers and therefore make more money.
My suggestion would be to:
- Fix the new player experience.
- Release a PS5 upgrade. (I personally wouldn’t object to paying for this.)
- Release the game on Xbox, assuming that Sony’s exclusivity is over
- See if the Switch 2, when it releases, can do the game justice and release it there too.
Basic sliders for graphics, draw distance, etc would be setup behind the scenes to tailor the experience accordingly for the capability of each system. The PC already has that option hence why you can run the game on a pretty low end PC that is much worse than PS5 is capable of.
You only need to look to No Man’s Sky to see how a well developed game can utilise the capabilities of each format to achieve amazing results.
And lastly, the only reason the game hasn’t been further developed by either wonderstruck latterly or Monumental subsequently is due to lack of money, in Wonderstruck’s case, and lack of capability (no development team in place) or due to current financial climate in the gaming sector in Monumental’s. Sony don’t own the game, they didn’t even publish it on playstation, so they would have zero say in how a company chooses to develop their product. And if you’d seen the sheer volume of shovelware that gets released on playstation weekly you’d realise that Sony aren’t that discerning so long as they get their cut.
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Yeah I’d have to agree that the PlayStation 5 can definitely handle boundless fine with whatever update.
I’d hate for them to drop PlayStation as some of the best players are on PlayStation. Ahem.
And no one really knows for sure what the actual hold up is. (Probably PlayStation dev kit)
I’m with @econodog . A price change on PlayStation would definitely help get more people.
The new player experience has been talked about for ages now. Yes it’s clunky. But we all played through it and are still here. Part of that is because we found people to play with and worked together and helped each other learn through the beginning stages of the game.
I’m just gonna keep waiting patiently and trust monumental will get things sorted. It’s all I can do as a player. 
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The PS devkits are expensive and PS is slow to approve/QA stuff. A lot of the playerbase is on PS.
I’m curious if they’ve considered bringing it to the Switch & Xbox.
I do think they need to hire a dev dedicated solely to Boundless, at least a 6mo temp contract to take care of a few important things and maybe an update.
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I’d agree, but I quit due to feeling like I was alone during my new NPE and really not knowing what I could and couldn’t do. If my friend had not kept asking me to come back and play with him, I would have never come back.
If Monumental is dropping large chunks of money on things like Kongregate I’d highly doubt it is a money issue. I think it’s more 1) having to have developers to work on the Sony side as I am sure the game has two separate code bases for PC and PS. That said you also have to jump through hoops for Sony (look at what happened with HellDivers 2) and you’d understand.
I haven’t seen the code for Boundless, but speculating here, it’s probably a jumbled mess and comparing a game like NMS with a very large team to that of Wonderstruck … is a little lopsided.
The whole point, a lot of things would be updated a lot faster without Sony involved. A quick Google search shows how much of a pain it is to deal with them. On top of, I could be wrong again, but the game wasn’t originally developed to be cross platform and if that is the case, they would have two codebases and having had to manage 2-3 different code bases as a developer myself it’s a royal pain in the ass.
Try building a mobile App and putting it on Apple and Android stores one is much easier than the other as you have to jump through a lot of hoops, much like you have to do with Sony.
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It would be dumb to stop supporting 40-50 percent of your customer base overnight. And shrinking your potential customer base is, frankly, idiotic. If wonderstruck managed to make the game to the level we have now with, I’m guessing, not a lot of money and a small team then there’s no reason why any business with bigger financial backing can’t develop on multiple systems and produce further content.
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Side note: They aren’t dropping PS.
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I agree it would be silly, and somewhat idiotic, but I question what level of game we have now if it never got above 1100 players and having not seen the code myself, I question it’s quality.
But, back on topic, Free to Play? Sign me up … anything we can do to get more players is very much needed and I have no problem with Sony or PS as I said I own a PS5, but sadly consoles in the end are just PCs that can’t be upgraded. But if consoles also bring more players in, I’m all for it.
Totally wasn’t implying this, I’m just stating that I attribute a lot of the issues both on development and licensing to Sony. Maybe @philelliott can enlighten me 
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Sony is no longer has any rights to publishing Boundless. A condition of Square Enix relinquishing PC publishing rights and handing them back to Wonderstruck was that SCEE did the same - which then enabled them to sell/transfer to Monumental.
As to why there has been zero development since Monumental acquired the game, I have zero insight. I’m surprised, based on what was said at the time, but I’m sure they have good reasons - maybe once they started looking at the code, they understood the level of challenge; maybe it’s just a money/resource thing.
But to be clear, without Monumental acquiring the game, I think it’s extremely likely the game would have closed down years ago. So while it’s a shame that the game is stuck where it is, at least it exists.
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I appreciate you sir and also glad you still keep an eye out both for the game and the community.
I also totally agree, I am thankful Monumental came along and picked it up.
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