Ark Survival Ascended: Even WORSE Than We Thought...

it's time to break it all down because we've got a bunch more Intel coming our way from the land of Ark which on the surface looks sick but there's more here that meets the eye and you know me I always try to dig around which is led me from point A to B to point C and Beyond I mean this Journey's not over yet but I wanted to give you a little peek behind the curtain what's going on everybody welcome back to the channel it's Lieutenant buzz lightbeer and Arc is up it's down it's everywhere in between and I'm going to try to lay this all out for you and by the way again this is unscripted you really seem to like that format from the last video so here it is again remember to hit subscribe and ring the notifications spell to receive my latest upload alerts likes comments Shares are of course greatly appreciated chapters are up in place and in case you want to jump around to different areas of this video and here we go survivors fire [Music] so just like a strong dose of morning caffeine let's drop a triple shot of espresso onto this one with the latest from the corporate suits over at snail games who by the way have remained really silent ever since boasting about ascended strong early sales more than that in a bit now I haven't had time to actually check this out for myself but I did receive an invite to play myth of Empires prior to launch which I think is starting in February and and you're probably like whate what the hell is that doing in an arc video good question by the way and it's here because after a nearly 2year legal battle over stolen source code Angela games finally settled with snail essentially tying them together for future work dear God which includes marketing and distribution of myth of Empires okay so tldr this game is about to get the full snail games treatment anyone want to place bets on how long it's going to survive this time but this also means that snail will share in the profits once it goes on sale via Steam and the biggest questions are number one will it attract pre- lawsuit player counts honestly I don't know and number two is how much has snail Twisted this into a cash shop MTX pay to win party still there should be a little money coming their way which is of course going to make them happy which is just what the snail doctor ordered because snail's stock again fell below the dollar a share basement closing at just 95 cents a share by the end of the day Friday and by the way that's just 1 cent higher than their alltime low of 94 cents a share again tldr here their stock has lost over 2third its value since going public and at 95 cents it is still rated at overvalued by stock analyst which basically means hey don't spend your hard-earned money on this and overall it's pretty salty news right now for snail by the way see what I did there anyways initial ascended sales will have provided a cash infusion but how much hopefully we get that full picture soon as February should bring the quarter 4 snail games financials and I'm very keen on seeing how well they fared you know I've got theories on all that but with Arc 2 kind of still dangling out there possibly late 2024 more than likely much later than that they've got legal issues surrounding senior staff on that project and Ark provides over 90% of all snails operating income ascended sales how did those go will it be enough there's just a mountain of uncertainty when it comes to snail and Arc especially if you read between the lines man it's like I planned out that one perfectly because with this week's wildcard Community update there's a ton of technical jargon being flung at readers all to say something very simple to the players if you read between the lines microtransactions are upon us now over the past past few weeks wild card has slowly revealed this new custom Cosmetic System which on the surface does sound pretty rad players can create their own skins and costumes for quite a few things from you know dinos to weapons all I got to say is I just want the Buster sword from Final Fantasy that's it game over I beat happy one swipe of that thing and I'm ready to ascend anyways let's get back to the details early February will require clients to manually install the mods to use them on officials big hint there about mtxs by the way use them on official early April an auto download system will be there and in place so essentially you can be on official servers and if someone is using one of these Cosmetics you'll be able to see them or at least that's how I read it and of course we get a few quick looks at this system in play a clean glass wall a lamp post a Tic Tac Toe table along with a full statement about a policing system in place by overwolf you know how I feel about them and wildcard and by the way there's your second big hint as to the possibility of this being a microtransaction system because a policing system will cost money how do they pay for that they charge for mtxs and so this all begins with ascended and does it all start to give you the feeling that it's slowly Brick by Brick turning into one big cash shop ASC support was pulled to make way for this definitive Arc experience you can call it remastered you can call retooled whatever definition you want to give it there but they charge for Arc survival ascended which was also bringing along mod support across all the platforms and with that premium mods then out of the blue we get these Adventure Packs fomo sets in hey guys we know we told you ascended was a one-time purchase for all the maps but now we've got these extra skins we've got dynamite and the Oasis or which looks to be close to Titan size only $1 1999 by the way I made up that price but now we've got custom Cosmetics cutting through the to what they will be micr transactions it all feels like too much by the way let me know if you're reading this the way I laid it out but for now onwards to more Ark news because there's a fresh round of mods to review with the latest mod spotlight you know for all those players out there that really want to customize their ascended experience of which I wish I could report progress has been made but yesterday I logged in for the first time in weeks sorry I've strayed a bit and I've been spreading myself around even trying out a bit of poor which is just a straightup copy of Arc but it functions way better just being honest anyways back to ascended on PC but it was again running like ass I have pretty much the best components money can buy I've got a 4090 a huge processor tons of ram I can run pretty much any other game out there without a hitch hell I could probably control the space station here from my gaming PC but ascended is man as much as I feel like going into a profanity lace TI raade here about the performance of this game I'm just going to press pause for right now and try and keep it safe for work so again tldr the servers are ass the game runs like ass at least for me on PC so it's no sugar for me today and I guess it's back to PO world as always links to the full crunch can be found in the video description because now it's over to that digging I've been doing and by the way this is not all of it just a little sampling concerning ascended sales and snail games now you know in the past I've been vocal about my let's call it disbelief towards how well this game is doing financially and if I'm wrong I'm wrong I can admit it we'll find out soon when the quarter 4 financial report is released but you know for me things just didn't add up snail boasted about 600,000 plus units sold on Steam in the first two weeks of launch but ever since then not a whisper about those ascended sales numbers now I mentioned po World earlier every time they hit a milestone it's like 2 million 3 million what are they up to now 8 million sales there's some kind of press release you know what I mean but for ascended we got nothing then slowly but surely we start to get these extra cost items dropped in every month you've got things like premium mods Adventure Packs now we've got Cosmetics which I admit wildcard did not exactly describe them as microtransactions but they have all the familiar symptoms of a microtransaction program hell we've even had Jeremy stylet himself publicly say that he wants the entire wild card development team to concentrate on ascended future not Arc 2 and these Adventure Packs was a way to directly fund that effort add that to the pile of Ark 2 is not happening fodder okay I'll get to the point of all this there's a current conversation within the community that ascended is in trouble go figure I voiced my concerns and thoughts on this with past uploads yeah the steam numbers aren't good evolved has way more players than ascended and so on and I still stand by my statements about ascended future but until we get the snail quarter 4 report again we aren't going to know things like how well it did on Playstation we can only see ascended on the Xbox playlist top 50 just behind Farming Simulator 22 and we can see the current player counts over on Steam so I decided to try another route and I reached out to vgn insights for assistance because they had just published a report outlining the top 10 games by revenue for steam 2023 but I was hoping they could help me with a game not on that list ascended and honestly I thought I would get nothing but the sound of silence I mean who am I to them right but to my surprise they responded and quickly I might add sending along their internal projections for ascended based on reviews and concurrent player counts which as of an update from a few days ago puts ascended at 42 .3 million in sales on Steam before steam takes their platform cut and takes into account things like returns okay now we're in business because with this first piece of the puzzle we can then theorize about the rest and thank you again to VG insides for the help math time $ 42.3 million in sales minus 25% for steam so that's 10575 million equals 31,725 th000 for steam alone and I have no idea on Microsoft PC copies I can't think it was that many unless you were one of those fers who bought it on purpose to cheat by the way nothing in this crunch about that platform being allowed to crossplay again anywh who back to the sales numbers by snail's own reporting they said that their PC sales and console sales are damn near one: one showing here from their fiscal year 2022 Revenue chart one: one means equals so 31.7 million * 2 and you get $635 million in profits from ascended it sounds like a boatload of cash right and for snail it's been a hell of a long time since they've seen that kind of return but here's where I did a little more digging I did a little more math and a little more theorizing because you know that's how I roll and according to built in.com the average developer salary in the United States where wild card is located is just over $160 Grand a year with the possibility of another $4,700 in bonuses meaning they make roughly $120,000 a year now I'm probably going to get some comments to the contrary but you know that's what I've got to work with of course those corporate suits are going to make far more than that and there will be others on the low end of the estimate but yeah wild card has roughly what 55 devs on staff 55 devs times an average of $10,000 a month per Dev they're spending $6.6 million a year just on the dev team alone so time for Basics 64 mil in projected ascended sales which by the way is mostly front-loaded sales minus half a million in Dev salaries a month just for wild card and we haven't even touched the corporate salaries over at snail games and all the other Studios and all of their staff all the R&D cost the current debt load snail was carrying from before ascended launch remember they went into the hole with NR for 4 million bucks hell even sheih High's wife takes home a cool million doll a month salary just for being named to the board of snail games and again dropping a huge dose of honesty on you snail has proven time and time again that they are incompetent at money management so they could easily burn through the ascended cash even faster than what I've spelled out of course I'm doing some fill-in the blanks here but maybe now those Adventure Packs those cosmetic microtransactions and even those premium mods maybe now all of that is starting to make more sense for you and I'm not even touching the subject of the overwhelmingly negative Steam Reviews for ascended the low player counts which many have stated will improve once the other Maps were released again none of that factors in here just the math from VG insights which they themselves commented on when they sent along the sales chart comparing evolved and ascended showing ascended strong early sales but then being caught and dying off in comparison to evolved a game that did not have a large fandom at time of release so yeah hopefully this unscripted format works for you please let me know in the comments but from the math I'm seeing not those low player counts ascended underperformed and snail is again walking that Financial tight RPP each and every day that financial report comes closer to going public remember to hit subscribe and ring the notifications Bell to receive my upload alerts likes comments Shares are of course greatly appreciated all my socials are found in the video description shout out to the nearly 190,000 of you that have stuck with me 200k is nearly in sight so come along for the ride hit subscribe and help me get there until the next one this is Lieutenant busz lightbeer signing [Music] off [Applause]

Channel: LtBuzzLitebeer

Views: 85,514

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Id: pAOojHz1Szc

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 27 2024