It sounds basic, but it was refreshing to hear a developer talk about their multiplayer shooter in terms of custom lobby rules and scaring the pants off your buds instead of metas and MMR. We’re in something of a golden age of co-op games about getting scared with your friends—Lethal Company and Phasmophobia made proximity chat a mainstream feature, and one of the best-selling games on Steam right now is another co-op thriller called R.E.P.O.—but the trend hasn’t caught on in casual PvP shooters. If Midnight Murder Club was released 20 years earlier, it probably would’ve been a Source mod with a small but vibrant server culture.
It’s a lot harder to wrangle my friends together to play something these days, and you can double that if the game costs money. I asked Velan what Midnight Murder Club is like alone if my friends don’t pick it up to play with me, and it was like I’d walked right into the question they hoped for:
“We know that party games live and die on being able to get your whole friend group to pick it up,” Harrison said. “So we have two versions of the game. We have Midnight Murder Club, it’s going to be coming out at $20. But then we also have Midnight Murder Club Guest Pass Edition. That is a free download, and you can join a lobby hosted by anybody who owns the full game.”
To be clear, the Guest Pass Edition is not a demo. It’s the full game playable for free as long as you play with someone who owns it. No other strings attached.
This isn’t new, but maybe it’s been forgotten since online matchmaking. The original Starcraft could be installed as the full version which required a CD and a CD key to run, or as a version that didn’t require a CD or a key and could only by used to join multiplayer games.