Why Nubs! Arena Is Free for the First 24 Hours After Launch

Nubs! Arena, a fast-paced top-down PvP combat game from Rangatang (Netherlands) and Glowfish (Belgium), will be released on 15 May 2025 and will be available for free for the first 24 hours. We spoke to Rangatang co-founder Olivier Thijssen about this strategy.

GamesMarkt: Why did you decide to make the game free (to keep) for the first 24 hours? Surely to build up a large player base... wouldn't Game Pass or PlayStation Plus be an option?

Olivier Thijssen (Rangatang co-founder): "For a multiplayer game, the size of the player base is an inherent part of the quality of the gameplay experience to the players, so our thinking with giving it away for free for a day was based around this idea and making sure we get in as many people as possible on day 1 so everyone can have a great time playing with each other. The game also has local multiplayer where 4 people can play together on 1 screen, and that's a real blast too, so the game isn't wholly dependent on the online factor but still we wanted to give Nubs as good a shot as possible by ensuring people can play online or locally. Of course, we hope all those people will get their friends to play and possibly buy a cosmetic pack or two to support the continued development of the game, but you can't rely on the assumed behaviour of players so we want to just put out the best possible experience we can at launch and hopefully, we'll be able to keep making it even better once enough people are trying it out."

"On the platform side, we focused on Steam first to keep things simple but console versions are definitely on our minds as a potential next step. I think that game would be the perfect fit for something like Game Pass or PlayStation Plus where people can just jump in and have a go to see if they like it, so hopefully we can try for those platforms once enough people are playing it on Steam."

The full interview with Rangatang co-founder Olivier Thijssen, which also covers how they plan to monetise the game afterwards, how it all came together and what it's like to be an indie studio in the Netherlands, can be found here as a Plus article.

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