The Bazaar Season 1 is here, and there’s good news for the new deckbuilder’s community as developer Tempo walks back its controversial monetization changes alongside the arrival of new hero Mak. Founded by former Magic and Hearthstone pro Andrey ‘Reynad’ Yanyuk, the card-based autobattler has proved a winning combination that falls somewhere between Hearthstone Battlegrounds, TFT, and Slay the Spire, and it’s just stepped into its official 1.0 release with some big adjustments.
The Bazaar moved into open beta in March, becoming a free PC game for all after a paid early access period. Unfortunately, the tide of hype that had built up among its community and via attention on Twitch and YouTube was rather dramatically stemmed by the game’s monetization strategy. The system allowed players to pay for a premium tier of its Prize Pass offering new cards for certain heroes, which could then be separately purchased for real money directly once the next season began.
Now, that’s been changed. The Prize Pass has been turned into a single-free track that offers 60 base tiers. The two expansion packs will appear at tier 15 and 30 – for Season 1, they are Dooley’s ‘Dooltron’ expansion and Vanessa’s ‘The Gang’ expansion respectively. Every rank up takes 500 experience, and you cannot buy tier skips with Gems (the currency earned by playing); instead, a 15-tier skip is priced at $9.99.
In addition to this, you can buy each expansion directly for 3,000 Gems, although you won’t get a refund if you also reach the unlock tier afterwards. Once a season concludes, expansions that are rotating out of the Prize Pass will now be automatically granted to all players. All heroes, including newcomer Mak, are now priced at 3,000 Gems. There are still special discounts applied to the first and second heroes you buy.
Yanyuk says the team was unsatisfied that players could pay for the premium pass and not gain all the rewards. As a make-good to anyone who bought a pass during the open beta season, you’ll have all rewards unlocked regardless of whether you completed the full progression or not. Finally, the free daily Ranked Ticket has made its return.
The response from players so far has been tremendous. A thread on the official subreddit praises the “massively improved” system. “I was extremely frustrated with The Bazaar and the dev team’s decisions over the past few months,” user ‘TipNo750’ writes, “but this seems like not only a step in the right direction, but a massive leap towards a healthy and positive play environment for everyone. Very excited to get home tonight and rip some games with Mak.”
The post’s most-upvoted comment, written by ‘wavecadet,’ writes, “Pretty sure they just solved like 80% of the issues [in] this patch. Happy with how things are looking.” They then follow up, adding, “I made this comment before I realized I can just buy the item packs for 3k if I want to get one instantly, so I’m entirely content.”
The Bazaar Season 1 is live now. You can play for free. You’ll need to download the Tempo launcher to join the action. Yanyuk explains that the team is working on bringing The Bazaar to mobile devices, which may result in the game no longer using the launcher in future, but says that any final decision there will be made “a while from now.”
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