If you’ve been waiting all this time to play Kickstarted indie MMO Embers Adrift on Steam and for some reason didn’t want to try it while it’s been free-to-play for months, then today is your day.
Readers will surely recall that last October, Stormhaven Studios told players that its payment processor, Digital River, had been withholding player purchase/sub payments to it (and apparently to lots of other clients) since June of 2024. Presumably, the studio is still pursuing a legal remedy there, but in the meantime, it set the game free-to-play in an effort to make sure players’ access to the game wasn’t disrupted, then began work on a Steam version. All these months later, it’s finally here – in “soft launch” form.
“The goal of the Steam ‘soft launch’ is to allow us the time to work through any major issues with the game, purchases, or accounts before we start deprecating legacy login & download flows,” Stormhaven says. “By this time next month our standalone launcher will no longer allow you to download the latest version of the game; Steam will be required to download all future patches. Finally, at some point within the next few weeks legacy logins using the forum username & password will no longer be considered a subscriber in game.”
There are some caveats here. If you already bought the game before the Digital River enswindlement, you do not have to buy it again; you can follow the team’s walkthrough on how to claim a key to apply it and make sure you properly link your accounts so your characters show up through Steam. Likewise, if you never bought a copy – if you’ve been playing F2P since October – then you’ll need to buy one (it’s $29.99) and then follow similar instructions for making sure your account links to Steam. The game will also resume its subscription fee.
“The past few months everyone who has logged in has been able to enjoy our subscriber benefits at no cost (for the why see here). Now that we are spinning up a new payment provider it becomes necessary to make these benefits part of a monthly subscription once again. And while we strive to make the Embers Adrift experience enjoyable for all of our customers regardless of your subscription status, we also recognize the need to broaden our appeal to those who are not currently supporting us. For non-subscribers we have expanded the active character limit from one to two; this means that if your subscription lapses you can have two active characters to enjoy. […] Another things to note is that in order for your account to be recognized as a subscriber you must log in with Steam credentials and have an active subscription. If you login with the legacy method (forum username & password) then you will have to activate characters and lose subscriber benefits until you login with your Steam credentials again. Note that this only applies after we deprecate legacy logins as subscribers within the next few weeks.”
We’re assuming the account bits are the tricky part of the transition and why it took so long – but hopefully, it’ll inject some cash into the indie studio in a hurry.
