Hi Folks,

The EBF5v2.0 Steam Beta is now live!

For a spoiler free summary of all the new content and features you can check out this Steam announcement and here’s the official v2 trailer (this one does contain some spoilers). You are more than welcome to stream and make videos of the v2.0 content, but please do not spoil anything in the titles, thumbnails or video descriptions until the beta is over!

To take part and gain access to the new updated content you need to own the game on Steam. From your Steam library list of games right click on Epic Battle Fantasy 5, select Properties, go to the Betas tab, and from the drop down menu select v2.0. You may need to update and/or restart Steam first. Once the update is downloaded and you start the game you’ll want to make sure you’re on the right version by checking that the main menu says “Deluxe version 2.0.3 (or higher) BETA BUILD”. Your old saves should be compatible with the update, but you should make sure to have backups in case there are any problems. At this time the update is in English only, and we’ll hopefully have the other languages ready in about a month or so.

To report any bugs you find please head on over to the EBF Discord channel and post them into #ebf5_bug_reports. Please include as much information as possible such as a description of what happened and screenshots. For the most part it should (fingers crossed) be quite stable since we’ve already done a round of testing and weeded out a bunch of bugs.

Hey guys, I finally got round to doing something that I’ve been avoiding for a whole year, and that’s reading through people’s reasons for refunding Epic Battle Fantasy 5.

Steam asks users to select a reason for their refund, and also gives them the option to leave a comment. 3.5% of EBF5 units were refunded, and 0.3% were cancelled due to payment issues. Let’s take a look at the reasons for refunds, starting with the most common…

By far the biggest reason for refunds was that the game was “not fun” – this was roughly 50% of the refunds. Some examples include:
“I just found it boring and repetetive.”
“Some parts appealed to me, but others did not.” (puzzles, graphics, music, story, difficulty level, etc)
“The other games in the series are free and more or less just as good.”
“It’s decent but I don’t like it enough for $15.”
“Bought it ’cause it had good reviews but it wasn’t fun or what I expected.”
“I liked the other games but I guess my tastes have changed or I’ve just had enough of it.”

I’m alright with those. I much prefer users admitting that the game isn’t for them and getting a refund, rather than trying to get their money’s worth and leaving a bad review after a few hours of boredom.

Quite a lot of people bought the game before getting their launch-day discount coupon, and wished to purchase it again later. Totally fair.

There was a surprising amount of accidental purchases:
“I don’t really want to play it now, but maybe later.”
“I meant to buy it as a gift for someone.”
“My friend bought it on my account as a joke.”

Many of these accidental purchases were also people not realising that the game was only for Windows.

Altogether, around 20% of the refunds were due to various accidental purchases.

Poor performance was the main refund reason that I expected to see, but it wasn’t that common after all. Maybe around 15-20% of the refunds were due to “low framerate”, “system requirements not met”, “game crashes”, etc. Very few people specified that they could not run the game at all, which was nice to see.

A handful of people said that a lack of controller support was the reason that they refunded the game – but not enough for me to consider adding it. Similarly, a handful of people mentioned a lack of 4k support, or fullscreen mode not working for whatever reason. I can’t support every type of hardware, especially cutting-edge stuff, so I’m not gonna beat myself up about that – and some of these issues could have been resolved by sending me a message anyway.

Overall, I think things went very well, and this feedback was more positive than I expected. A high refund rate is not always a bad thing – it may mean a lot of people are impulse buying your game because it looks good. EBF5’s refund rate is a little bit below the average, from what I recall.

I made a video showing off some of the new 7th Heaven outfits coming soon to EBF5.

I also made a 1080p wallpaper pack which includes every outfit, which you can get on my Patreon for $1.
That also gets you early access to the EBF5 v2.0 beta, and other perks.

Here’s a freebie wallpaper from the pack: