The efficiency of capitalism. Spend god-knows-how-many millions of dollars and time, then realize you’d rather spend 125 million all over again just to go back and spend even more millions to hire back the dame numbers again in 1-3 years.
They make 5 billion a year, thats less than 2.5% of the money they make every year, it’s a rounding error to make the spreadsheets look real good to the money lenders .
My company just let me go with a 6 figure package (x amount of pay + stocks). They could have easily kept me there for another year, but that’s not as good for the spreadsheets.
Yeah that was kinda my point. All that matters is what the spreadsheet looks like now. It would have probably been a net positive to keep me given they are only going to grow and spend a fortune on hiring and new stocks. That’s a different spreadsheet though, I also live in a country where it’s expensive to fire full time employees collectively, so it’s not like they are paying these kinds of sums for everyone. It’s pretty cheap to make things look good on paper.
Yeah, their whole goal is to look good on papers and stock market. Not to grow as actual company. They would rather cripple themselves than to strengthen themselves by slow growth…
Welp, I already didn’t like the games EA currently makes. Looking forward to going well out of my way to avoid buying anything they put out, no matter how good the reviews, trailers, etc. seem.
It was such a unique twist on the tactic rpg genre, nothing quite like it. Plus it had great music (including a musical cameo at the bar), good progression, and a decent story.
I enjoyed what I played of it, but…ran into a game-breaking bug. Not sure what else to say. They’re probably right that if city builders are best on mouse, you can’t easily enjoy that on Switch.
Yeah, and they had so much DLC that was not even always bad value for money… but you need to have a hell of a proposition for people to leave that investment behind.
I hope the take away from this is that no matter if a game is live service or not it needs to run, not nickel dime players, and be good. Or it will bust.
If they wanted to focus on live service, I’m surprised they made a trilogy of games. In the meantime a bunch of other devs just kept adding content to the one game their players play.
Not good for Payday’s fans to compete within their trilogy for attention.
Rush your development, causing network issues, bugs, missing QoL features
Push ahead with monetization schemes despite problems
Players vanish
Surprised Pikachu face
Congratulations Starbreeze, you made a game so shitty that it’s not even worth pirating. They will practically have to relaunch the game to reclaim the playerbase at this point.
Don’t forget taking forever for an initial patch release, despite there being multiple game breaking bugs.
The state the game was at release was absolutely awful.
The only folks who kept playing that I know were folks grinding for the final levels/achievements/weapons. Which consisted of playing in unenjoyable ways like using bad load outs, doing stupid crap like tagging a billion guards, etc. Who wants to pay money for an unenjoyable grind?
They released a decent patch, some new content and DLC but everyone has already moved on. They totally screwed themselves, sucks it’s an IP that I like, but more games need to fail like this so publishers stop doing the same bullshit
Way too late to form a strike team, are they even working to fix it?
Years ago the CEO put comments to the media about wanting to make a game to run over the long term. If you want that then don’t put out a game that flops at the start.
The developers have full on ignored player feedback, and just putting in what they feel like and maybe a handful of Payday 2 brought in as a bonus. Infrequent updates on the Steam Community, never responding to users, releasing a DLC people couldn’t play and saying “have a nice weekend” on X.
A patch finally comes but it introduces new bugs, many big issues still unaddressed, game still dropping frames and unoptimized.
Are the devs shitfaced drunk while making this game? If they can get money while hardly doing work I’d want to work there.
I uninstalled the game, and even if the game were to massively improve, I wouldn’t return as the studio treats players like nothing but money generators.
Stop blaming Devs and blame corpo above them. Can’t guarantee that’s the case here but it’s almost always their fault rather than the Devs when things go wrong on a launch like this.
Maybe they should unionize or walkout or something, costumers can’t fight their fight.
As proven with Volition, if we don’t buy their game in protest they are closed down anyway instead of getting another shot at something we actually want, nothing can change from this side.
Man, was this game a disappointment. So many privacy agreements just to install the bloody thing. The entire experience was a letdown. PD2 was so so so much fun and this game arrived just wobbly and with pre-shat pants. What a damn dud.
It’s refreshing to see evil motherfuckers being evil openly instead of trying to hide it with doublespeak or outright denying it. I love Coffee Stain Studio’s games and how they handle monetization, and this announcement makes me worried for both the studio and their projects.
Don’t worry, the business model of companies like Embracer is literally to strip mine “inefficient” businesses run by artists through short circuiting the positive feedback loop between game developers passionate about what they do and loyal fans, trashing the work environment for the employees by cutting everything, and ripping off fans until they realize the place that made the art they love is alive only in name.
gamedeveloper.com
Aktywne