These Game Studios Are Facing Reality

welcome back everyone I have got brilliant stories for you today three of them to be precise and it's all examples of developers on games listening to their communities and trying to give people what they actually want as an example the third most wishlisted game on Steam right now is being delayed and not because it's broken not because it's getting bad feedback but instead because it's just not good enough we've got the total war development team making big PR moves to try and well make their player base feel a little bit better about things we'll get into that and then also pay payday do you remember payday 3 the last time I heard about payday 3 it was them getting roasted by the opra GX Twitter account that said their own Twitter account does seem to admit that they basically are a dead game that is something though that they want to change and if you'll forgive the cheese you can make a change by checking out bellular do games we are doing cool things over there we've got loading screen that we publish every single day and of course where we get access to our videos ad free and we're cooking up new things we've got we've got a project that should have things looking very snazzy soon I cannot wait to share that with you but I will see is in times of cpms honestly being absolutely crazy just up and down sometimes videos getting demonetized your guys' support really does uh really does help and really does matter to me and the team with that being said our first story eight out of 10 feedback ain't good enough for the frost Punk 2 developers Frost Punk 2 has been delayed to September so it's getting a few months DeLay So from April 15th to 22nd Frost Punk 2 ran a closed beta for its digital deluxe edition pre-ordering customers now often yes right the whole idea of buying an addition of a game and getting beta access that is a very common uh you know thing that people do in terms of monetization I suppose what I can say here is they've clearly actually listened to those players instead of just doing a beta purely for the sake of selling more deluxe editions so basically people got access to a slice of frost Punk 2 that gave them an idea of what the game is going to be about and here is what 11-bit Studios have said based on surveys we received from you playing the average rating you gave the beta was 8 out of 10 we're super grateful for that and I don't think this is them misrepresenting things like the first thing that we did is we checked like what player sentiment is in various different places and essentially people have some problems with the UI the way that some mechanics are presented and how limited the beta was broadly right it didn't set the world on fire but people were receptive enough to the fact that Frost Punk 2 isn't just Frost Punk but more it is a different take on a city Builder set in the same world and as a result there is a bit of a shift from the micromanagement of the placement of individual workers and happiness to a more sort of wide societal Focus which of course does make sense as a followup right like you go from survival into then how do we form our society indeed if you take a TV show I love like Battlestar Galactica yes lots of that was shooting syons and things but it was also how does society rebuild for the story though what they're basically saying is that 8 out of 10 is not good enough that they've went through feedback and they're acting on it not to change what the game is or to to deal with it not running well um not that sort of thing no to specifically adapt to player feedback and to make sure that the launch build meets people's expectations of course a big thing that we've had in the industry yes is Early Access games that have been really quite the failure quite insane but we have had loads of Early Access hits like Dave the diver many many others that have just done a brilliant job of finding product Market fit and if you're doing a sequel to a game there is a quite defined expectation a defined product Market fit from your last thing so if your new thing is going to be different in a few ways you really do have to make sure that it still is going to work for your initial audience because obviously you want to carry forward your win into the next game by still appealing to that audience so here's what they said we believe these additional features are something you deserve to see in game in day one not a patch added after release the list is too long to go through all at once but the highlights include new additions to game mechanics extensive UI and ux enhancement and by popular demand a new city feat fure we like called Zoom stories which if it is what I think it is I'm very much down for that that being said I hear Zoom stories and I immediately think of software as a service and uh zooming people which isn't what I want to think about so what does that actually mean well in terms of mechanical changes the stuff they're doing is all about making the game feel more Dynamic and detailed right so just more stuff for your player interactions whether that be like the core temperature mechanic uh granularity Workforce stuff Resource Management on the side of UI it's basically about Clarity and not completely confusing new players and then to bridge that Gap from the original Frost Punk to frost Punk 2 in terms of uh granularity and detail this Zoom thing is basically you being able to zoom in on an individual map area to uh I suppose get a more Frost Punk One Tone or or feel it'll be interesting to see how they Implement that so basically that's all fantastic news Frost Punk is awesome I absolutely have a bias towards game set in cold places given the one that we did so this is great usually pre-order betas are just a way to make some money right they're not really listened to as much as they should be and often those pre-order betas are so godamn close to launch that not really that much can be done so this is exactly what we need to see they've taken the hit of delaying the game basically I think because they know they need to get this right this to me seems like a publisher and developer who are thinking about long-term value who actually think that the relationship with their players is somewhat sacred and that they can't [ __ ] it up and this is how you keep the brand value of frost Punk alive and well you make sure that whenever there's a numbered Frost Punk that it's damn good if you do that then in 10 years people will still be thinking about Frost Punk because you treated them right and perhaps it is the case more and more as your industry looks to notable examples of failure a lot of the stuff going on with say Paradox interactive maybe some lessons are being learned that uh yes we can talk about the quarter we can talk about the the half of a year but what actually matters oddly enough is the long term because it takes years and years and years to make a video game if it takes that long and it takes all that money why screw it over for the sake of 3 or 6 months GG this is exactly what I want to see with that said Warhammer 3 then so the tldr here is they did a DLC it basically completely cocked up in pricing they changed a whole bunch of things then delayed a DLC that DLC Thrones of Decay was then sold to people either as a complete bundle or in three separate parts but in a way where to me it did not feel price gouging as an example I wanted to play one of the legendary Lords so that is the pack that I got I got my Lord got the units and there you go Happy Days of course people want to see follow through and there's worry right um so some of the people who are leaking to Legend basically suggesting there's maybe three more dlc's left in this and then people also leak to him alleged contents of multiple DLCs so what they've done here is they've talked about the next DLC right what's actually happening but also what they're saying in between the lines and just what they're saying as a sides I think is fairly relevant because it basically is a Dev team saying please don't worry we really do want to keep on doing this and they will be saying that because hyena got chopped creative assembly had a whole bunch of job Cuts because of the decisions of their parent and Company Sega and there is been lots of chaos so let's talk about the next three faction DLC so we got legendary Lords for Korn with skull taker for the ogre kingdoms with gfag maner and for Orcs and goblins with gorbad ironclaw all looking fairly reasonable but what struck me the most is just how much they were saying really really we actually want to do this we actually want to do our job here um which is I think directly speaking to to community sentiment but also breaches of Community Trust because creative assembly have been uh pretty rough with player feedback in the past their some of their Community Management uh responses to things really bit them in the ass so this is a Dev team that has been battered up a little bit they are coming off a bit of a high point with Thrones of Decay but they still do seem to be very aware that they need to continue delivering the goods so they repeated several times that there will be a slanesh themed DLC a lot of people have been a little bit worried that maybe the more uh shall we say adult focus of sles would be skipped over to avoid controversy of course from the company who sells us an additional blood DLC what's going on with that anyway they also explained that they want to work on rebuilding existing factions with chunkier DLCs they Nam drop norska vampire counts and lizard men beyond that they also said they'll be responding to smaller elements of feedback for factions and balance uh just in the form of updates that's actually kind of notable because they really did for a while just keep things in their big like main numbered updates they essentially said that like this DLC is not going to be out anytime soon it will take a little bit of time but that they do want to keep on issuing updates so that basically well the game's not just sort of left to wether in the vine now the next thing I think is a degree of admitting reality here because they talked about Realms of chaos that campaign that um I don't know some people have played but everybody knows that the real thing is Immortal Empires and basically they've made the hard Choice here the new Lords in this pack will not have Realms of chaos campaign because basically that's not what people want and I completely agree now I know how you could look at this and think Michael what the hell you godamn sellout they are literally doing DLC but they're not supporting them in the campaign for Warhammer 3 that's insane and I absolutely get why you may say that I totally do I would actually contend that the Realms of chaos campaign um I I mean I don't want to say it's of negative value I I get that it uh you know it it tries some things and maybe in another timeline it could have worked out better but for the core player base Immortal Empires the big entire Warhammer fantasy map that is actually the thing that people give a [ __ ] about and if dropping support for that means that Immortal Empires is in a better State and they can develop more content I think that's actually a good thing here's a quote from Richard Aldridge the game director the big news is that you've shown us where the importance of the game is and that's mortal Empires mortal Empires is the quintessential Warhammer experience and he's right that makes total sense and I've got to imagine whenever they start going into 40K maybe they will choose a little bit of a different idea with this now subjectively that makes complete sense having one of these factions be playable in the Realms of chaos campaign is uh is basically of no value to me as a customer um I know a lot of other people feel like that and also they basically said that they do have the Telemetry right like they know that people are not playing that content as much now what this video is of course uh yes it's four people in a room talking that's fine but it also is piece of marketing it's one that's framed in a way that is reintroducing to audiences the people who are making the game and I think trying to humanize them and trying to fix up some of that relationship they also said it's a new format and I think this is all uh meaningful in the wake of the allegations that developer Julian McKinley um basically had where he was just kind of hung out to dry right they just sort of let him take all the public flak um of the community in the wake of Rome 2 having very very public problems ah man I mean look it's probably the case that if you went up to Julian and you just said the words the siege of Carthage he'd probably go because that was a rough situation I really do want to get into that more in the future for now this is CA trying to show a different side of themselves trying to basically work off Thrones of Decay being good and sell a story of decently long-term confidence in Warhammer 3 people are worried that there'll be two or three more DLCs and then that will be that the way that they talked about it would absolutely make you think that they want to run this game basically like it is a just fullon forever game and to be completely honest with you I think that would actually be kind of good I mean why not just have Warhammer Total War One game Immortal Empires and lots of support going forward cuz look the strength here is not really in the numbered games as an example the most recent DLC that I purchased is stuff for the Empire faction that I played when I bought Warhammer 1 when it came out clearly Warhammer Total War is is just a big platform and I think that means that if they can revamp some of their store offerings and frame that in the right way to people that there could be a long tail in this anyway the next story is payday 3 and to get you up to speed on that basically right Payday 2 had loads of DL seeds loads of development it really ended up being a fantastic experience people loved it and had a big healthy player base payday 3 came out and it had a bit of a problem didn't have any of that DLC I mean of course it didn't it's a new game but it's just that problem of what happens when there is a game loads of people enjoy it and there's a new version but the new version cannot compete in terms of content and features with the prior version because the prior version has years and years and years of DLC development that happened and one of the things that really pissed people off the most was the online connection you had to always be online and you actually couldn't even play the game solo that's obviously unpopular so it's not much of a surprise that whenever they did essentially a feature request board imagine a subreddit but it's people up voting and down voting uh game features basically it existed and it was done by developers to give them a better insight into what their Community actually prioritized right they did that and the offline play ended up being the number one thing and that all brings me to today so what's happened is chapter 2 boys and blue is a DLC it dropped June 27th and it's basically given people a look at what star breze are planning alongside a free character some gear that kind of thing and basically a rework to their DLC pricing model and they've also confirmed that they're adding the solo mode but it's not actually offline and they go to explain this so so this is a really useful thing because a lot of the time right you buy a game there's no offline play and you're just angry it seems stupid the idea that you've bought a disc and that disc will like I mean if it's physical it'll load something up but then you can't do anything with it like that just feels ghoulish and weird and not like the experience of buying a video game that we had in the past which was who cares what as a multiplayer mode you can put the disc in and probably play something so what they basically said is that so much of the progression unlocks and stuff like that is all totally serers sight loads of stuff is serers sight so to do an offline play they would basically have to cut that cord the problem is if uh you cut that cord without doing a lot of the architecture work to make that uh well function then you'll get loads of bugs you'll get loads of problems so what they've basically done here is a beta test right a beta test in order to make sure that the game can actually run without issues on solo mode on local hardware that actually means it may as well be offline play for the majority of your play session the thing it does though is it keeps an online connection for at least the first few moments of play and here's how they described it right and it's interesting this gives us an insight into the software engineering that ultimately produces gripes that we have with games here's the quote given the size of this feature we decided to split it into two steps at least the first step is solo mode beta what it does is skip the matchmaking step meaning you'll still have to log in and have access to the internet but only for the initial identification and startup what we're actually testing is how the game runs on your computer in instead of our servers now you might be thinking hang on a second when I play a video game it runs on my computer it's not like uh GeForce uh Cloud whatever the Nvidia thing is where it's a cloud gaming service well in a lot of these games your client uh you know there's a lot of work being done in your client like the graphics and stuff but actually quite a lot of game logic is happening serers site if you want to do an offline mode then there are things that you will have to have the local client be able to do without a server so step one is to test that step two will basically be to I suppose pull the plug right they'll do whatever they need to do to make work offline and then finally you can play Payday 3 offline that's going to be that now to be honest with you I think it's it's a really interesting thing I do not personally believe that this will be itself helpful to Payday 3 in a grand uh gamechanging trajectory changing way and the reason why is because I don't think that this is something that people are angry about because it literally ruins their gameplay right now it's far more of a principal thing it's the idea that you own a game and you cannot play it offline that is the thing that feels bad so I think that means that it absolutely soared to the top of the feature request board because basically for a lot of us and I'll definitely say me included that just is something that I feel I should be able to have when I buy a video game now if it's a free-to-play game I'll totally understand something like that not existing but if it's a game that I'm buying with money I absolutely expected to be some sort of offline functionality I don't think this will change their steam charts though or anything like that the only thing that will change that is more content more engaging progression loops and basically new reasons to play Payday 3 with your friends that compete favorably against Payday 2 it's a little bit like in the total war coverage I've done on this channel where I mean if you're creative assembly you're in a bit of a sticky position if you make a historical Total War Game well a lot of people like Rome and like Medieval 2 they're just playing Medieval 2 and they end up in a situation where their new games are being out competed by Medieval 2 Total War and it's a bit like that for these developers and it's a real hard place if you know the history of starb they have had like man the most stressful looking financial problems and it's it's cool that they've been able to survive through the other end thing is though they must be in a hard position cuz if they wanted to make more money right now and there's often you know many thousands of people playing Payday 2 they could probably go and make Payday 2 DLC that probably earn the More Than This the boys in blue DLC for payday 3 but of course if they put resources into that they're not putting resources into payday 3 and they kind of need to make payday 3 work I've got to imagine that payday 3 was architected given what they know about Payday 2 and given that actually people will play Payday for basically ever as long as you keep on giving it DLC that probably means that payday 3 is designed to make their job easier to make it more possible for them to make more DLCs to make things function well right it's probably better architected so so if they start investing into the older thing well I mean there is a bit of a sort of robbing Peter to pay Paul thing going on it's it's short term but of course if you're a player you're playing Payday 2 you might not care about DLC for payday 3 because payday 3 plus DLC has not reached the threshold for you where you'd play it instead of Payday 2 now this patch has came out and I just want to end on some of the numbers from Steam it's pretty rough but I do have to give it a caveat so this is a game that as an example was on Game Pass and that does mean that there's like what 30 odd million people who just have access to this outside of steam now that said even though loads of people could be accessing this on Game Pass for PC given where I think PC players are steam I've got to imagine that this is decently representative of the PC audience and it's something I'd love to kick over to you if you have Game Pass do you engage with it on PC I mean I have game pass on um on our console recently played still wakes the deep I mean godamn they just released octopath traveler one and two just there to play that's a hell of a good deal but for some reason the idea of firing up the the Xbox game app in my PC just feels wrong man I don't know it was weird so let me know what that's like for you to take a look at these numbers first the good news now good news is the game is in all time mostly negative and uh it is recently a little bit better and then if you go on the DLC page for boy and blue well what you actually see is it's very positive and that is really really heartening in a situation like this obviously the consumer hasn't got the the best treatment with payday 3 and that's definitely something that developers have to acknowledge and recognize but if you empathize with the developers there's probably a reason why this is not an ideal situation and if they choose to stick with the game and to keep on making that content and we see as uh you know as in a case like this where it has a very positive overall review that's exactly the sort of behavior that we want to cheer it's all well and good to call out problems and you know that we do that a lot here but I deeply believe that that has got to be backed up by well whenever the opposite of the problems happen whenever people try and whenever they try to make good in things well I think we should have the door open to say Well done good job we respect that now in terms of player counts you can see a gargantuan positive lineup in that chart but the problem is the y- AIS so we are still in the very very low thousands again there could be lots of people in Game Pass but this is not the sort of number that uh you know that they'll really be able to sustain uh sort of long-term and Dev team on what is positive though boys and blues came out you can see it as sustaining those higher numbers that means the big hope is that if they're able to just weather this storm and keep on making that content and do well by their players move this offline feature I mean it's not like the offline feature is suddenly going to give them 50,000 players concurrently but it will signify we've listened to you we care and we've changed this and we've done the work and even though a lot of those players will probably put a tiny percentage of their overall payday 3 play time into doing solo offline I think the fact that the gesture was made will make those people far more willing to pick up DLC and to become active uh and engaged in that player base so that's basically crack with that let me know what you think now yesterday we published 19 games in June and there really is something for everyone in that video uh there's three games that have absolutely I mean they're going into my backlog there's too many goddamn games but yeah be it strategy Souls like cozy game like seriously everything's there so check out that video for the games that are coming out in July with that said welcome to July I hope it's a [ __ ] good month for you I'll see you next time

Channel: Bellular News

Views: 181,614

Keywords: frostpunk 2, frostpunk, payday 3, payday 3 boys in blue, boys in blue, payday 2, starbreeze, 11bit, 11 bit, warhammer 3, total war warhammer 3, warhammer 3 total war, thrones of decay, warhammer DLC

Id: B7yxXsK9nWo

Length: 21min 49sec (1309 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 02 2024