Yesterday, Square Enix announced that its party shooter Foamstars would launch on February 6th for PS4 and PS5. Despite comparisons to Splatoon, it’s received praise for doing different things. Since it’s also out on day one for PlayStation Plus subscribers, it’s almost guaranteed to have a healthy player base initially.
After that is a different matter, but Square Enix is working to ensure extensive post-launch content for those who stick around. It confirmed to VGC that there would be at least one year of additional content. A Season Pass offering free and Premium content (the latter focused on cosmetics) is also confirmed. As with other games, completing challenges and partaking in matches will earn XP to level it up.
As producer Kosuke Okatani says, “The system [we’ve adopted] has been used by many modern games, so it’s going to be very familiar to all the players enjoying the game.” However, Rich Briggs, executive director of publishing strategy at Square Enix, confirmed that anything tied to gameplay – from new characters and modes to maps – would be free.
“The key thing here is making sure that anything tied to core gameplay – a new character, mode, or map – having the dual season pass structure means that every user will get those for free, so we’re not segmenting the players, and then for those who want to take it a step further with more cosmetic items, or the ability to unlock characters faster, we do offer that option.”
That last part seems to imply that players must reach certain tiers in the free section of the Season Pass to unlock a character, while Premium Pass owners get them immediately, like in Overwatch 2. Time will tell.
Okatani confirmed a plan for the first year of post-launch content but wants to gather player feedback and adjust things accordingly. Though Briggs didn’t comment on plans changing if Foamstars doesn’t perform well, he did say, “Right now we’ve announced that we have a year of support planned, but that obviously means that depending on what we see from players and the game’s success, we can be flexible on what that means in terms of moving beyond that year.”