The single purchase model of acquiring a game seems to be making a slight resurgence as of late. Guild Wars 2 used it in MMOs and recently The Elder Scrolls Online followed suit with it; Apple also made a point of giving such ‘pay once and play’ games a starring role on the front page of their App Store. It feels good to see it coming back.

Even games that aren’t fully released yet are beginning to adopt the system, with the latest being Nival who are making a little game called Blitzkreig 3. The game is still undergoing closed alpha testing and was previously announced to be going to have a premium account system, dropping all in-game currencies and microtransactions from the game. There will be additional campaigns for the game though, available through the form of DLC.

“The pendulum is swinging once again when it comes to how consumers want to pay for their games. The market is shifting back towards a cleaner, simpler and more transparent model of one-time payments. This trend inspired us to return to the classic distribution model of the series, thus honoring the series’ traditions.” said Nival CEO Sergey Orlovsky in a statement announcing the change.

The single payment model is not exactly innovation, after all those of us older than a certain age remember it fondly (sort of) as the way all games used to be priced when we were children. A return to it after the years of freemium scare stories has to be a positive for the industry though.