The Banner Saga: Factions earning "a lunch every other week"

Early Kickstarter success The Banner Saga isn't making much moolah for developer Stoic Games - yet.

Factions, the free-to-play, multiplayer, combat-only portion of The Banner Saga, pays for itself and not much more, Stoic has revealed.

“I joke that we probably could’ve made the same amount if we just put a tip jar in the game. But Factions is at this point paying for its own servers and maybe a lunch every other week," art director Arnie Jorgensen told Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Creative director Alex Thomas said the team of three was "so afraid of a bad backlash" that it didn't try to monetise the game very much, and technical director John Watson said Stoic refused to go down the pay-to-win route.

Happily, the single-player side of the The Banner Saga is a premium product, so it may bring some cash in to Stoic's coffers when it turns up - especially as it's going to be brimming with conversation and story content from former BioWare staffers. It may lure players into the Factions side of things, too, and Stoic doesn't plan to end support.

“We really haven’t been supporting Factions much recently. If Factions really was our focus and we wanted to make that a profitable thing, there’s lots of stuff on the table for us to do. But we haven’t had time to do any of it because of single-player," Thomas said.

“We’re gonna finish chapter one of the single-player, and then we’re gonna turn around and spend some time on Factions again,” Jorgensen added.

New features and changes introduced in either portion of the game will be imported to the other, too.

“Everything we do can go both ways. If we make new classes in chapter one, we can modify them a bit and then put them in Factions,” said Watson.

“That’s what we want Factions to be. We make that content, then we put it in Factions in between single-player chapters," Jorgensen said.

Factions arrived on Steam in February.

Thanks, Polygon.