If you're going to charge money for the Blitz, maybe take the Poppy Playtime route. What Mob Entertainment (developers of Poppy Playtime) did was when a new chapter came out, they made the previous chapters free. That way people could play all the previous chapters free of charge OR buy the new chapter and get all the previous chapters for no extra cost. New people could get into the game without needing to pay an exurbanite amount of money to do so. This means people are paying for the exclusivity of being "first" to own the bio or ASD. But when the Blitz comes out, they'll be paying to be the "first" to own the Blitz while everyone else who gets the game gets to play as the Bio and/or ASD without needing to know people and/or get lucky with a stray nest. In a PvP server, that means getting hatchie killed very quickly after if you get nested at all.
#DLC changes
high dust
shy goblet
But people can have dlc dragons for free, by being nested. The devs need to make money somehow without upping the base price which is why the dlcs exist. This game encourages socialization and you can make good friends through being nested (as i have many times personally)
terse crystal
I feel like the game already does this in a sense with the current system. You pay for the ability to be among the first people to play as blitz, by spawning in.
Once people start upstatting, which tends to happen right away afaik, the ability to spawn in as a dlc dragon becomes next to useless because everyone will be getting upstatted blitzes from nests. You do still have the emotes that others won't have which is a nice feature that won't affect anyone's gameplay negatively.
It sounds like a great idea for that game, but considering people don't need to pay an exurbanite amount of money to play this game or get a DLC as the DLCs have very low price points, I just don't see the point in it for DoD.
Also worth pointing out, though not very important, that Bio isn't a DLC dragon ^^ It's a kickstarter exclusive dragon
high dust
Quite; you can get the dragons from nesting without buying the DLC like you could play the characters in Evolve without buying them if you got placed in a match with the DLC characters. However, people don't typically give away dragons in all modes. In PvE and I'm assuming in RP servers (I don't know the culture around RP servers, so I'm going on the assumption that people put the desire for story first over competition) that checks out. However, in competitive modes or in servers that don't allow nesting at all (because those do exist), then DLC/exclusive dragons aren't a thing.
high dust
The game is $20 (USD). You cannot borrow it from a friend and you cannot make an alternate account on the same computer and borrow it from yourself, you HAVE to buy it for every account you have. Dragons cannot be inbred with their siblings or parents. If you want to legitimately upstat your dragons, you will need 6-8 dragons. That's $120-$160 right there in accounts JUST for breeding. If you're in a PvP server, you can't use your breeder dragon to just mosey around the map or, God forbid, fight. So, you'll need to be on a different dragon. You could maybe never use that dragon ever again or get another account with another $20. Then the DLC ASD costs $8. Wanna breed ASDs? That's $168-$224 right there instead of $120-$160. (Remember, they can't be genetically linked! Again, this might not be one person buying hundreds of dollars of accounts, but multiple, but it's still hundreds of dollars going to the devs)
Then there are the emote packs and the songtracks. And, of course, you get to the Patreon. The tiers are $5-$20/month (that's anywhere from one emote pack to one game per month) and there are 1,542 members currently pledged. Even if every single person there was pledging the lowest possible amount ($5), that is $7,710 from Patreon alone per month. We don't know how many games, emote packs, DLCs, and songtracks are being bought per month.
Yes, the developers deserve compensation for their time. However, to say that "they need to make their money somehow" and make every dragon after the first 3 paid content in a paid game is just nonsense. It's akin to the HTYYD game model or modern gacha game models, except you can get some of the paid things in some modes if people are giving them away.
kindred fox
People do nest in pvp, you just cannot run around solo
People do nesting events in pvp sometimes too
But also, you think 8k monthly is enough to pay the 6+ people working for him in addition to him being able to live from it?
He pays lead admins, I would assume lead moderators too, animators, concept artists, Echo and he has to live from something
terse crystal
There's 15 people on the team in total. That 8k from patreon might pay for a couple of those. The rest deserve a living wage too, I believe.
"make every dragon after the first 3 paid content is just nonsense"
Absolutely agree. That'd be ridiculous. Luckily, there are only 3 DLC dragons planned in total at the moment with 3 free dragons already in game, at least 2 more having been designed / revealed so far (Frostfel and at least one of the ocean dragons), 4 quest-unlockable dragons planned (the KS threshold dragons), 1 KS dragon acquired through specific breeding ingame (hybrid).
That's 10 dragons so far that you can't buy VS a total of 3 planned that you can buy. Many more dragons are planned (roadmap) and there is nothing that suggests all of them, or even half of them, will be DLC at this time. It certainly wouldn't fit with the current dragons.
And yes, upstatting by buying a dozen accounts would be rather expensive. Not sure how this connects to the point of making DLC dragons free, but either way;
But that's not something the developers intend for you to do, it's not what you're supposed to do, so that kinda sounds like a personal problem if someone wants to do that 
This is a social multi-player game first and foremost designed around social gameplay with nesting and upstatting being a core part of the game. People who absolutely do not want to play like that, this game (at least currently) might just not be for them. That's okay. Not a single game in existence is tailored towards every single gamer on the planet to love it. No need to spend $200 on a game whose core gameplay you hate 😅
kindred fox
List of free dragons: SS, FS, IR, Frostfel, I believe one more from the ocean?
(4-5)
List of unlockable (some are Kickstarter free dragons - they don't have to unlock them): Singe crest, Nurse, Ice Behemoth, Water Behemoth, elemental hydra, another water dragon, venom drake and many more (8+)
We can count 3 elementals too!
List of Kickstarter/Patreon
exclusive dragons: Bio, Mimikor
List of DLC dragons: ASD, BS, Fire behemoth
(5)
So DLC vs Free? 5 DLC/paid and at least 13 free ones
high dust
List of free dragons: SS, FS, IR, Frostfel, I believe one more from the ocean?
(...
There are 3 base dragons: The Flamestalker (fs), Shadow Scale (ss), and Inferno Ravager (ir), 1 DLC dragon: Acid Spitter Dragon (asd), and 1 exclusive dragon: Bioluminescent (bio). 1 more DLC draogn is coming out: Blitzstriker (Blitz). Any other dragons you've listed have never been put into the game, have never been played, and are only in concept. If the developers stopped developing the game right now, these are the dragons we would have. 50% of the roster would be PAID CONTENT in a PAID GAME. So, no, there aren't "13 free dragons to 5 paid ones". There are "3 free dragons to 3 paid ones". Once the "free" ones come out then we'll talk.
This game is 1.0, so it has fully come out. (I am aware of the "soft release" but it is a release) Anything else that comes out is an update, something to add on top of the full game. This, what we're playing, is the game that came out. 40% of the dragons in the base game were paid content, and 50% were paid content by the first update.
floral marsh
There are 3 base dragons: The Flamestalker (fs), Shadow Scale (ss), and Inferno ...
Except it hasn't "fully come out". It is still very much listed as early access on steam, and the warning even says it may or may not change further, and that if the game in its current state bothers you, you should wait to purchase.
Also, the bio was promised in the Kickstarter in 2019. For better or for worse, that train has already long left the station-- to make the bio free now would break the agreement they made with Kickstarters who paid into those tiers (and remember, they already changed the agreement with regards to shimmer and the stretch goal dragons, which are now quest unlockable). We don't need to completely shaft the Kickstarter supporters again.
As for true DLC like blitz and asd, maybe the asd at least should have been a starter (would be nice to have a base dragon, wyvern and drake). But there are multiple reasons for release order - the free singe crest and brood watcher were held back by rig/model redesigns due to animation problems (as was the inferno if you remember that far back). Blitz, because of its legless design, is honestly just easier to animate and didn't need major model updates. Also, as was already pointed out, you can achieve breeding with fewer than 6 accounts via having friends (aka how the game is designed). You can also achieve the same thing with 2 accounts with the DLC and 4 without-- spawn on the two accounts that have it and breed in the accounts that don't. Rinse and repeat. Then when you have a finalized breeder store it on an account that doesn't have spawn unlocks, and keep the accounts that do have spawn as fighters. But again, even that is kind of cheating the system which is designed to make you cooperate with other players to upstat in the first place, in which case... You should be able to cooperate with your friends to nest in those without spawn access
high dust
Except it hasn't "fully come out". It is still very much listed as early access ...
I will have to politely disagree. They also put on the Steam Page this trailer which I thought was cool and made me want to play the game. Just like the statement "it hasn't fully come out", it isn't completely true. (That trailer shows 2 dragons that don't exist, a biome that doesn't exist, a map that doesn't exist, and the titan/giant that doesn't exist; RIP people who wanted to play the alligator snapping turtle and hide in the water like me) The numbering system (1.0) is called a sequence-based identifier. They're standard among games. (Major).(Minor).(patch) is a sequence pattern. For example, if you have a fully released game (version 1.0) and want to add your first patch to fix bugs, you would make it version 1.0.1. Betas and Alphas in an unfinished project go in the (Minor) part. If I want to put a game on Steam that has a lot of stuff on it (For example, an animal game with like 10 animals and a vast map but nothing to do), I would date it as version 0.1 as it is the first version. However, the game will have quests, nesting, and a combat system later on, so I cannot label it at 1.0 because it is not complete. If I release a bug patch, I will release it at 0.1.1. If I finish everything I wanted to and release it, but then think of something really cool and implement it, like a whole new animal, I would label it at 1.1.0 because that would be an entire thing, way more than a bug fix or patch.
I agree that the developers shouldn't go back on their promises to the kickstarters. However, in looking back, you shouldn't forget to look forward. There are people in front of you as well and making the ASD permanently locked to everyone except the handful of people who still play from five years ago would not be cool. I'm not saying to make the bio free. I'm saying that 40% of the dragons now are paid DLC/exclusive in a paid game with paid skins. Aren't skins Patreon exclusive? Wouldn't those be more prestigious?
floral marsh
I will have to politely disagree. They also put on the Steam Page [this trailer]...
Right below that trailer on the steam page, RIGHT ABOVE the purchase button is a giant blue banner with a disclaimer that the game is in early access, may have major bugs/issues, may be missing features, and may never update again. Buy at your own risk. If someone skipped past that because they were excited by a trailer, then that's on them- it's not like it's hidden in the fine print. Steam tries very hard to make it apparent that buying early access games is a risk.
Regarding update numbering, what is considered major/minor/path varies company by company. Not all companies consider major patches to be full releases, and you can have enough content being updated at a single time to consider it a major patch without declaring the game complete and released. Theoretically, every public/live update with new features (except for something like a hot fix) could be considered a major update. They don't really have any correlation with full release except maybe as a convention. But conventions are not standards.
The ASD is a DLC and isn't exclusive - there's nothing stopping new players from paying for it 5 years from now. The same is not true of bio. And the skins are kinda iffy. The OG, all Kickstarters get it because they are Kickstarters skin is the black (melanistic skin). Which is also totally unlockable. So not exclusive. The white and gray skins are tier exclusive (not all kickstarters get it), and at least in legacy, it also wasn't exclusive because you could nest it even if you didn't own the skin (hard to say if that still applies in 1.0 because nesting is changing). Then there's the shimmer, which is exclusive, except that it's shared between patron and Kickstarter, so that's not Kickstarter exclusive either. Looking at Patreon, you only get crimson if you subscribe at the dragon tier, but just like KS white and gray, it's not exclusive because it can be nested. The shimmer is shared with KS, so not exclusive to PT, and the gold you have to accumulate $200 on patreon to unlock the only truly exclusive skins in the game (and non patrons complain that they can't breed in gold anymore as well). So... They're not really more prestigious. They could be if they were more like the patreon gold pearl- unique, interesting, and non-nestable. And finally, remember that there will be skins for free too... It's not that non-iconic colors will only be available to Kickstarter or patreon players
floral marsh
Getting back to the original post, though... I think that while the poppy playtime model works extremely well for story based or region based games like WoW or poppy playtime, I don't think it would work as well for character selection choices in DoD because you don't need to sequentially progress. You don't have to own the ASD DLC before you can play the Blitz, and you don't need to own the Blitz before you can play the fire drake. But you do need to finish Azeroth (Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms) before you are high enough level to do the Outlands, which you need to finish before you are high enough level to do Northrend(?). So pay to play only the new content kind of makes sense, especially because that's where the majority of players will be playing. In DoD and other creature survival games, that doesn't occur. You can spawn any dragon you own at any time, and there is a good reason to want to have adults on all available dragons on your account at once. There's also not less reason to play asd after the blitz releases-- they're supposed to fill totally different niches, and you'll still find even old time players playing asd long after the fire behemoth drake releases as well. And, as I've pointed out, needing to know people is a major part of game progression. I DO think there does need to be more for solo players to do so that you aren't forced into a clan to engage with most game mechanics, but... Long term I think the fix here is to work on releasing more free dragons in the future.