Could You Spare a Dime?
A few weeks ago, I reviewed The Bazaar. It’s a roguelite deckbuilder where you buy and sell items to make a board, which you use to fight other players. I ended up recommending it because it was a lot of fun, and very accessible. At the end of the review, I left this one little disclaimer:
This is a live service game. The information in this review covers up to the July 21 2025 patch. This information has an expiration date. There could be a patch in the future that screws with the game or at least makes this review outdated. I tried my best to review the core systems of the game, the stuff I don’t think should change. This game doesn’t have any actual gambling. That’s just me being facetious. This was not sponsored, although I wish it was.
I knew the review would have an expiration date, I just thought it would be a few years off like a can of Spam, and less like a gallon of milk. The game I spent several thousand words praising was released on Steam in its second 1.0 release, and with it came one tiny, itty bitty little changey wagey: It’s no longer free to play.
That shouldn’t be a problem, right? If the game is as good as I say it is, then it’s probably worth the money, right? I’ll just head on over to Steam and purchase the game for the low, low price of… $40? Forty dollars? At least it comes with every character unlocked, right? Oh, it doesn’t include the newly released character Stelle? The character that was one of the big selling points of the move to Steam? How much is she, then? Must be something like five, or maybe ten dollars, I bet. She’s $20. That’s right, folks. Now you can enjoy the once free to play game The Bazaar for only sixty dollars.
After this unfortunate change, I find myself genuinely conflicted. Do I still recommend the game? It’s still the great game I sank hundreds of hours into, the same addictive card game that I still have open as I’m typing this, but can I really still recommend it?
This isn’t a re-review of the game, just a status update along with my thoughts on the new monetization, and some stuff I’ve noticed with live service games. It’s not just about the money.
You don’t need to read the review for the game to understand this article, but you can find it here.
The Update
On August 13, The Bazaar released on Steam. When the game was still new, in its paid beta stage, there were no plans of a Steam release. They had their monetization planned out, and their own launcher was working fine. A few months later, they changed course.
According to the developers, “The free-to-play model failed “. Keeping the game free to play while also releasing regular content updates was not going to be possible. It makes sense. You can’t develop a game for free. You need to pay to keep the lights on, pay for server costs and every piece of new content is the result of dozens of employees, which also need to be paid (something the higher ups at Load Last Save don’t seem to understand).
At first, this monetization problem would be solved by offering micro transactions. It had a battlepass, which is mandatory in all games. I heard a new version of Chess is coming out with one. There were cosmetics, again, mandatory, and a subscription. For a monthly fee you could get more rewards from playing and a special bonus cosmetic each month. You still had to play the game to unlock things, and you’d still have to pay for the other content, but you got more lootboxes from playing.
This was supposed to keep the game going while still keeping it accessible. You would pay for what you want. You could even unlock characters with the in-game currency you get just by playing, so you could get all future content for free.
After the update, the subscription is gone, but everything else is the same. Now you have to pay to play, you get the base roster, but there are still micro transactions, even though you can get the cosmetics by playing.
Side Quest: Fake Money
These micro transactions are done using one of my least favorite things ever: Fake money. If you want to buy something, you don’t just charge it to your card and be done with it. You need crystals. You buy the crystals with money, then you buy the thing you want with the crystals. This infuriates me. I’m not saying The Bazaar is a predatory game, but fake money is a predatory tactic. It’s used by less scrupulous games to make you spend more.
It works on two fronts: the psychological front and the inconvenience factor. Psychologically, it separates the money and the value. You’re not spending $20 to buy a digital swimsuit for your favorite waifu, you’re spending 500 Fun Crystals for the privilege. Fun Crystals aren’t real. You can’t pop a few into a vending machine and get a soda. These fake little things exist only to buy stuff in this one game. I’m not spending money, I’m spending Fun Crystals… which happen to cost real money.
The inconvenience factor is the most obvious and frustrating one. You want to buy that swimsuit. It’s on sale for only 500 Fun Crystals. You hop on over to the shop, ready to spend your money, only to be met with a row of options with different values and prices, none of which match what you want. The cheapest option offers 400 Fun Crystals for ten dollars. That’s not enough. The next option offers 900 Fun Crystals for twenty-two dollars. Do you spend twenty for 800 Crystals, or do you pay a little more for a little more? When you finally buy the fake money, you buy the item you want, equip it and now your little character is lookin’ hot in a summer outfit, and you kick your little feet and clap in excitement. Then you realize you have 300 Fun Crystals left over that you can’t spend on anything because nothing in the store costs 300. What a let down. Wait a second… if you buy another pack of 400 Crystals, you’ll have enough for the summer hat to complete your outfit! Why not? You already spent that money, might as well use it. What harm can five more dollars do?
I seriously hate this system. It’s made to inconvenience and frustrate the user into spending more money than they need to. I don’t care much for government regulation in videogames, but I seriously think this practice should be outlawed. Sell all the digital bikinis you want, just sell them to me with a real price tag. If the game’s developers came to my house and started looking under the couch for loose change, it’d be less shameful than this fake money practice they do.
It’s not just the money (it’s mostly about the money)
The Bazaar is a live service game. It exists as long as the developers can keep the game running. If they can’t, they pull the plug and the game is gone. Unless they release some devkit so you can host your own servers, which I don’t think will happen, you won’t be able to play the game after it’s gone. This isn’t much of a problem if the game is free. There’s no barrier to entry, you just download the game and start playing. If you want more content, you can pay for it. I don’t think I feel comfortable recommending someone spend upwards of forty dollars on a temporary product.
I don’t want to be a doomer, but the way this game is going, it doesn’t look like it will go on much longer, either. The game first released in a paid beta for the same price, with the promise that it would become free to play at some point in the future, when it “launched”. This beta period had notable streamers playing it, and it was heavily publicized. Heavily is subjective, but it was advertised more than it is now.
Now, after its Steam release, it peaked at 7,831 players (according to Steam Charts), and it has kept a consistent 5,000 players. This doesn’t include the people still playing via the Tempo launcher. Most games on Steam see their biggest player counts just after release, then they drop off by about 70%.
If the game was struggling to stay alive with a publicized paid beta, paid micro transactions and a subscription model, all on their own private launcher where no one was taking a cut of the profits, I don’t think they can keep going after the Steam release. I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong on this, but I’ve seen how these things go many, many times before.
I used to play Legends of Runeterra. It was a League of Legends card game. It had the same model: free to play, pay for expansions, unlock things with in-game currency. Then they couldn’t keep the game going and had to shut down. This was the League of Legends card game, with a massive IP behind it, and Riot Games’ money, and it couldn’t survive. It’s a real shame, too. That game was one of the most fun card games I’ve played. It had a lot of cool synergies you could build around, letting you make some crazy decks. It was a lot like The Bazaar, in that sense.
Do I still recommend the game?
What I said about the game in my review still stands. The game is still the same, it’s still a ton of fun and it’s really well made.
There have been some other changes on the gameplay side. They got rid of the starting selections. Before the update, you started the game by picking from one of three options: extra gold, an enchanted item or a skill. This lead to some great decision making from the very start of the game, and it let you play in different ways. Sure, there were some strong options, like Pygmalien getting icy Premium Piggles and getting an entire board with freeze, winning from day one, but it was fun. The randomness is part of the game, and getting crazy, broken builds is the whole point of the game.
They also changed how enchanted items work. You can enchant an item with poison or fire, and it would put that status on your opponent. Some items scaled really high, so you could put fire on an item and have it get to thousands of burn. This was incredibly overpowered, but also incredibly fun. Now they lowered the ratios, so your poison and burn are both heavily reduced, to the point where enchanting an item with either seems like more of an inconvenience than anything.
They nerfed a lot of items, too. To keep drawing parallels between this and Legends of Runeterra, this is the balance philosophy that Riot Games has adopted. If something is too strong, they nerf it. This balances the game somewhat at the cost of making it less fun to play. I don’t agree with either the “nerf always” or “buff always” philosophies. Game balance is hard, and some things need to have their effectiveness reduced, but nerfing everything all the time leads to stagnation. This is the case with the game as it is now. The viable build pool went from an olympic swimming pool to an inflatable kiddie pool, with a lot of niche builds disappearing, getting replaced by predictable, dependable builds.
With all this in mind, do I still recommend the game? Well, they shifted their monetization philosophy multiple times, they constantly pivot on gameplay decisions, the game is an expensive live-service game and it will probably go under before next year.
I personally don’t recommend it at this point. It’s still a great game. If you played the game before August 8 2025, you got to keep your free to play account. This is how I got in. I’m still a filthy free-loader. If the game were free, I’d tell you to try it out. Since it isn’t, I can’t justify the price tag.
If you still think it’s worth the forty dollars and you don’t think it will shut down, it’s available on Steam.
If you’re still craving a deckbuilder, I highly recommend Slay the Spire. It’s cheaper, and it will still give you hundreds of hours of fun gameplay. Read my “review” of Slay the Spire here.
If you want a more casual, laid back, but still deep and interesting game, check out Balatro. I also reviewed it. You can find the Balatro review here.