Recently, I’ve been thinking about the power of giving over getting. I think there’s a magic of abundance that results when people ask “how can I give something amazing?” instead of simply asking “how can I get more?”
The value you give has a way of coming back to you in remarkable and surprising ways.
We’ve been discussing this principle at Latitude in depth over the last few months. I think all of us who love games can see many ways where the industry has fallen prey to a “how can we get more from players?” mindset. But that’s not who we want to be.
We want to be a company that grows by creating and delivering real value that players enjoy, rather than finding ways to receive money from players that we didn’t earn. There are several ways we can improve to live this value fully, but we’d like to announce one change today that will bring us closer.
We chose early on to monetize with subscriptions, largely because of the ongoing costs of the AI, but also because we think subscriptions are much better than some other ways at aligning developer incentives with providing value (as opposed to say maximizing micro transactions or time spent watching ads).
But many people are wary of subscriptions because it can be so easy to forget to cancel. Some subscription businesses even go out of their way to make canceling as difficult as possible.
But, if you aren’t using AI Dungeon, and you simply forgot to unsubscribe, then what value have we given you for the money you’ve spent?
The truth is we haven’t. That $10 a month (or whatever amount you paid) didn’t give you any value. And we didn’t really earn it.
So, instead of us holding those unearned dollars, we’re making a new refund policy. Any player who forgets to unsubscribe can email us and get a refund back up until the last month they played, no questions asked. This will be true whether it’s been two months or two years since you stopped playing, but kept paying. The only exception will be payments made through Apple where we unfortunately are unable to issue refunds ourselves (players must request them from Apple directly).
If you didn’t get any value from AI Dungeon during that time, we’d rather give you back that money and keep improving the game until we can give you the value you deserve.
In the end, we only win when you win, and we want to win together. We want to keep building amazing experiences that you love, and we hope you’ll continue to support us so we can continue making them better and better.
Thank you for all of your support. You make everything we do possible.
— Nick Walton