Raiders of the Broken Planet Relaunching as a Free-to-Play Game Called Spacelords

Spanish developer MercurySteam announced this weekend that its online action-adventure video game, Raiders of the Broken Planet, is being relaunched as a free-to-play title called Spacelords.

The relaunch will take place on August 23. On the same day, the developer will release what was to be Raiders of the Broken Planet‘s fourth campaign (also for free), Council Apocalypse, which comes with four new missions and new character Valeria.

“When we launched Raiders in September last year, we hoped its low price point of 9.99 per campaign would open it up to a large number of users, but it didn’t work as we planned,” Game Director Enric Álvarez told DualShockers at an event in Spain. “Our vision is to see our game enjoyed by millions of users for years to come, and putting all of the game’s rich content into their hands for free is the way to realize it.”

As for why the game is called Spacelords, Álvarez explained:

We felt that Raiders only focused on one specific side of the battle for the Broken Planet: the Raiders. But this is about the Aleph, a mythical substance from the Broken Planet, a substance everybody wants – the Raiders, the antagonists, each of the invading human faction. All of them know that whoever controls the Aleph will dominate the universe as the ultimate Spacelord. So, the new brand is not going to change the game lore at all. Quite the contrary. Spacelords comes to embrace all of them – Raiders and antagonists – under one umbrella.

DualShockers has tons of information from the event, which includes FAQs for existing and new players, so make sure to head over there for details.