FICTIONAL EXAMPLE: not a real person, not real corpus. Part of the examples/ worked corpus (persona: Sam Rivers). See examples/README.md.

ADR-001: Launch paid, not free-to-play

goal:launch-paid-game-v1 already assumed a paid launch when it was written in January. This ADR is the moment that assumption got seriously tested and formally reaffirmed, in writing, before the store page price field could no longer be changed without confusing anyone who'd already wishlisted.

Context

Building the store page in February forced a real decision: the price field has to hold something before the page goes live. A friend in the dev-meetup Discord relaunched their own game free-to-play with cosmetic add-ons that same week and their wishlist count visibly jumped, which was enough to make me second-guess a plan I'd been building toward for a month. The store page draft (2026-02-27) could not go up without this settled first.

Options considered

Option A: Free-to-play with cosmetic purchases

• Pros: lower barrier to install, matches what just worked for a friend, larger top of funnel.
• Cons: needs a live-ops loop (cosmetics, a shop, ongoing content) I have no capacity to run solo without either crunching or letting the game go stale. Also close to the "dark-pattern monetization" the vision explicitly rules out: cosmetic shops drift there without deliberate restraint I don't currently have bandwidth to enforce. Rejected on capacity and on the vision's own terms, not on principle alone.

Option B: Paid, fixed price at launch

• Pros: one clean transaction, no live-ops tail, a price is a forcing function for a real ship date (exactly what principle:ship-before-its-ready needs: a free demo with no purchase moment lets "almost done" drift indefinitely). Matches the goal:launch-paid-game-v1 success criteria as already written.
• Cons: smaller top of funnel than free, no cosmetic-shop safety net if unit sales come in low. Accepted, since the smaller, honest funnel is the trade the vision already said I'd make.

Decision

Launch at a fixed price, $14. No free tier, no cosmetic shop, no live-ops loop.

Consequences

This locks the store page's price field for real starting with the 2026-02-27 draft, and closes off F2P tooling work I would otherwise have been tempted to start instead of cutting the tutorial. It keeps goal:launch-paid-game-v1's success criteria meaningful as written: "100 paid units" only means something if paid was never in question. What I'll watch: wishlist-to-purchase conversion in the first week after launch, since a fixed price with no funnel de-risking (no demo-to-cosmetic bridge) means that number carries more weight than it would under Option A.