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[Unknown Soldier]

 

[StreetsofBeige]

It just hit me, it says 'most' of the team. So who actually kept their jobs over this disaster? I feel bad for the people doing the work they were 'managed' 'directed' to do.

Another example of the wrong people getting the axe?

Whose left is probably a combo of this as the studio winds down. A small number from each department.... (assuming they got these internally and dont outsource any of these functions to third party companies who specialize in handling this for small companies).

- Execs. Always some or all as last man standing
- HR to handle layoffs admin
- Finance to do to final financials and payroll
- If they got any internally hired legal/lawyers to wrap up the company
- A skeleton crew to handle any gaming related issues because the game is still available

By the looks of it, you dont need 95% of gaming dev team, 100% of sales and marketing.

 

[bighugeguns]

Yeah and a lot of people can't handle gambling with that much money, so they foolishly try to be as creatively safe (boring!!!!) as possible thinking it's some kind of insurance, they think it's safe because delusional people online / internally reinforce the belief. It's tragic.

You're in a world of danger when you cruise in spaces where brutal honesty and even mockery is shunned.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Good post. You're right, ego is a problem, as I say though , criticism can be used for the greater good if it's genuine. Constructive criticism can be a godsend to improve on something.

Unfortunately some in the industry use the more abusive examples as a way to cut criticism off and form a short of barrier/protection from all of it and in the end they do harm to themselves. It's a part of growing up i suppose. Look within from time to time but I get the impression a few people don't want to do that.

It's difficult situation tho, social media plays on people's narcissism and egotism, making them more difficult to reach when it's not going well and if you are successful or high profile you attract the sycophants and fakes who use them for their own means and if that means lying and pretending to be subservient then so be it.

Some of the worst are the shills, the Xbox shills and others. The events, the free stuff, the limited edition box sets, the chairs, the games and yet they have the nerve to try to dictate what the customer should be feeling and saying. The sheer arrogance and sly nature of that is quite something!

Aside from egos there's also a wacky way gaming works too.

In most industries when you make a product, or entire brand line, or even a mom and pop open up a variety store down the street, every other industry seems to have enough sense that you got a stash of money or loans to do it, but also budget it in a way that it can last.

Ok, maybe the thing sucks and sells terribly. But you still got enough funds and runway to last a year kind of thing. You do that for sake or survivability as well as giving the product a chance to sell and pick up customers. So if you can build up steam can be a success. You just got to make a good product, adjust it, but have enough budget to give time to make it better.

It seems a lot of these studios also get a giant bag of money. But by the time the game releases, if it sucks or sells terribly they are already broke with no more dimes to pay staff or office. So they spend every penny and pray it launches well to keep the coffers going instead being more modest and save some of that budget to last if the launch is meh.

They treat the money as all or nothing. It's like a guy who is blessed he's got a lot of money. Instead of putting it into some safe stuff and roll the dice on more risky bets to make some money, the guy puts it all on volatile tech stocks (home run or major strike out). So if it's a strike out, he's got no money left to cover his bills for a year because he went all in! He's already broke by the end of week!

Wild way of conducting business. Even a mom and pop restaurant opening up wont shut down in 30 or 60 days. It might fail, but it'll probably still last a year before closing shop.

 

[RafterXL]

This just reaffirms everything we've said about western game developers today. They don't live in the real world. They insulate themselves in a bubble where they are constantly patting each other on the back, and telling each other how great they are. Then they release their games, reality sets in and they can't handle it.

Everyone I knew who had any connection to the team or project had the same sentiments:
"This is lightning in a bottle.""I trust this team wholeheartedly.""If there's one project nobody in the industry is worried will fail, it's yours.""This has mainstream hit written all over it.""There's no way this will flop.""I could play this game all day."

If everyone you know had this opinion, you need to know new people, because most of us saw this for the first time and immediately knew it was in trouble. If everyone you know is blowing smoke up your ass, that should set off an alarm that you need to get your product outside of that eco chamber and find out the truth.

And the list of creators he linked and thanked at the end of that post tells you all you need to know about who he surrounds himself with. Fucking Kahlief "please gimme a game key" Adams is on that list and he's never seen a shitty game he didn't slurp or had a bad take he didn't endorse.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

This just reaffirms everything we've said about western game developers today. They don't live in the real world. They insulate themselves in a bubble where they are constantly patting each other on the back, and telling each other how great they are. Then they release their games, reality sets in and they can't handle it.


If everyone you know had this opinion, you need to know new people, because most of us saw this for the first time and immediately knew it was in trouble. If everyone you know is blowing smoke up your ass, that should set off an alarm that you need to get your product outside of that eco chamber and find out the truth.

And the list of creators he linked and thanked at the end of that post tells you all you need to know about who he surrounds himself with. Fucking Kahlief "please gimme a game key" Adams is on that list and he's never seen a shitty game he didn't slurp or had a bad take he didn't endorse.

Personally, I think a lot of game makers can be smarter than that.

They know making games is a project based thing where many hop around from company to company. Especially contract work. You do this or that for 2 years, get paid and did your job. Now youre done and transition to another gig. By the time the game launches, many of them are already working on a different game. So what do they care if the game sucks? They already got paid. As long as they can get a another job who really cares.

Going by what I read, some of the people on the game came from the Concord studio (I think). So the posterboy trainwreck of possibly all time (some people will say Pacman or ET on 2600 is worse), and you still got these employees getting hired at another studio. So it shows moving from one place to another cant be that hard.

Knowing that, they can make their wishy washy shitty game on other people's dime (big game publisher or external investor group) and not really care. It's not their money. They got to work on making their dream game which most people think is crap, got paid and at worst move onto another gaming contract.

In other jobs, you want the company to be successful because being stable having a FT job is important. Nobody wants to or expects their kind of job to be freelancer/contract/project based as a normal way of employment.

 

[RafterXL]

Personally, I think a lot of game makers can be smarter than that.

They know making games is a project based thing where many hop around from company to company. Especially contract work. You do this or that for 2 years, get paid and did your job. Now youre done and transition to another gig. By the time the game launches, many of them are already working on a different game. So what do they care if the game sucks? They already got paid. As long as they can get a another job who really cares.

Going by what I read, some of the people on the game came from the Concord studio (I think). So the posterboy trainwreck of possibly all time (some people will say Pacman or ET on 2600 is worse), and you still got these employees getting hired at another studio. So it shows moving from one place to another cant be that hard.

Knowing that, they can make their wishy washy shitty game on other people's dime (big game publisher or external investor group) and not really care. It's not their money. They got to work on making their dream game which most people think is crap, got paid and at worst move onto another gaming contract.

In other jobs, you want the company to be successful because being stable having a FT job is important. Nobody wants to or expects their kind job to be freelancer/contract/project based as a normal way of employment.

Actually, that's a really interesting point. The more gaming has gone from a labor of love to just another business to more these people job hop. And up to now that has been a really easy thing for them to do. But a reckoning is coming.



The money people are getting tired and timid and the financing is drying up. Maybe that means we will finally go back to the days when people were actually invested in the things they produce, because failure will actually have negative consequences for their careers?

 

[EN250]

"The internal pre-reveal feedback, even from unbiased sources, was quite positive, and where it was negative, it was constructive, and often actionable. People who played the game, including us, had a blast. And since we were an independent, self-published studio built with royalties in mind, many of us were hoping this could finally be the thing that broke the millennial financial curse."

Well, who were those playing the game? relatives that didn't want to be harsh to the team and telling the actual truth? How the hell you mess up so bad from the start, you have people telling you everything you're doing in your run of the mill generic as hell game is totally 10/10 destined to be a mega hit? lmao

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Well, who were those playing the game? relatives that didn't want to be harsh to the team and telling the actual truth? How the hell you mess up so bad from the start, you have people telling you everything you're doing in your run of the mill generic as hell game is totally 10/10 destined to be a mega hit? lmao

Easy. Focus group tallies or internal surveys evaluating products can be total shit shows.

I'll tell you how they work.

Marketing department does their own product surveys or spends money hiring companies like Nielsen (Circana) to do 6 month long focus groups. They do a ton of questions and feedback and have a big database of numbers and notes.

Later in the year, the marketing department calls everyone into a big pow wow to hype up the new product to get everyone comfortable it'll be a smash hit showig stats on a powerpoint like.........

- 92% of people said it tastes great!
- The overall rating of Product X is 8.7/10! Rock solid!

Sounds good right? Well sure it does. Because they cherry picked the best questions with good feedback and excluding all the shitty feedback like......

- 90% said it smells lousy
- 74% people said it's overpriced
- 80% said they wont buy it because the package is too bag and started breaking apart handling it

You get the idea. So of course in those big board room meetings every slide the product team shows will always trend to being the best product in the universe. But dig into the details and it's not as good as it seems.

But they need to hype up the product so everyone is positive, excited, and they keep their jobs. If the product gets bad feedback, then there's chance the execs will ask WTF is going on? You guys have spent a few years coming up with this line of products and half the time the feedback is crap? Geez.

 

[Arsic]

He deserves these comments IMO.

 

[Faltherion]

He deserves these comments IMO.

Ehhh he gave them the ad spot for free at no charge and his intentions were on the nice side. In a way, I feel bad for Geoff because now I am sure he feels guilty.

At the end of the day, it's not like players didn't give the game a fair shot. They had over 100K players day 1 but the game didn't grab them and it also had issues. They should of not shadow dropped and did a early access release instead or some sort of a closed alpha/beta for real world feedback.

 

[Arsic]

Ehhh he gave them the ad spot for free at no charge and his intentions were on the nice side. In a way, I feel bad for Geoff because now I am sure he feels guilty.

At the end of the day, it's not like players didn't give the game a fair shot. They had over 100K players day 1 but the game didn't grab them and it also had issues. They should have not shadow dropped and did an early access release instead or some sort of a closed alpha/beta for real world feedback.

I've said before but the two faults:
-Geoff saving this for last and then overhyping it on social media after. It should've been in the middle.
-Second major issue is the devs needed to launch betas, get feedback for 6 months, and do real marketing.

Instead you've got a costly lesson like concord on what not to do.

 

[Faltherion]

I've said before but the two faults:
-Geoff saving this for last and then overhyping it on social media after. It should've been in the middle.
-Second major issue is the devs needed to launch betas, get feedback for 6 months, and do real marketing.

Instead you've got a costly lesson like concord on what not to do.

Yeah, I'll have to agree on both of those.

 

[MiguelItUp]

I've said before but the two faults:
-Geoff saving this for last and then overhyping it on social media after. It should've been in the middle.
-Second major issue is the devs needed to launch betas, get feedback for 6 months, and do real marketing.

Instead you've got a costly lesson like concord on what not to do.

Yeah, saving it as the last reveal really didn't do it any favors. I just really, really, REALLY do not understand why they though it was a good idea to release a new IP (let alone a F2P competitive GaaS) without months of testing with external players. It needed a lot more time in the oven. Performance was poor and the gameplay just didn't click with the majority. They had confidence (or an ego) that was big enough to think they could just drop this like they did Apex Legends and potentially have the same amount of success.

The whole 3v3 to 5v5 thing alone was kind of embarrassing. I mean, it didn't take a lot of people long to say, "3v3 is too little for a map so big." Rather than a, "we're listening to you" kind of reaction, it felt more like a floundering kind of thing to me.

 

[rkofan87]

My honest reaction

 

[ChorizoPicozo]

Flawless Victory

 

[Heimdall_Xtreme]

We want games like this

 

[KanKamAndNob]

We want games like this

Ngl, was looking forward to more ToA at the State of Play, but I agree. More straight character action games that isn't just leeching off of Hidetaka Miyazaki's work would be great. Add some hot waifus and it's even better.
On to the topic at hand, Highguard barely pulls in 3,000 and it's only been 3 weeks.

 

[RCX]

Pretty much applies to all of gaming no?

You aren't wrong. It's probably the main reason I'm rarely interested in new releases these days.