Why Lethal Company Outsold Call of Duty

picture this you are a Roblox developer known for making psychological horror games even though the platform is massive with thousands of games being created every single day your games still manage to stand out in fact two of them are even nominated for the game's official bloxy Awards when you decide to Branch off and start making games for steam it's not long before you create several more horror games using your Unique Style these games are relatively small but very well received as they get plenty of positive reviews at this point your Development Career is already more than impressive many developers strive to be where you are but you're not done you start working on your newest project a game like you've never made before in May 2022 you announce that it'll be called lethal company June arrives and the first phase of development is done by October you create what you call the flower man which makes testing the game immensely uncomfortable the journey is long winding and one of the most intense and prolonged prototyping phases of any game you've worked on before while you do enlist help with play testing and some assets it is essentially a solo Endeavor as you update your fans on patreon you're unsure about how the game will turn out what if after months of effort it turns out to be a confusing and broken mess by September you're working on bug fixing and the game is almost complete finally in October you release An Early Access version of the game and people love it oh what a move what the dead end that is the abridge story of how zers Made wethal Company a game that took over the internet and is now reported to have outsold Call of Duty like any good work lethal company takes inspiration from other games and genres borrowing Concepts from games like fast phobia and basic Dungeon Crawlers however this game is anything but unoriginal as lethal company's creativity is one of its biggest strengths starting with inside the ship a select menu of cosmetics and upgrades makes every paycheck feel like a valuable ration that must be strategically spent if you played the game before you know buying the right gear and traveling to the right moons can make all the difference in your success as a scavenger speaking of space travel lethal companies is noticeably immersive While most of the game is spent a foot on planets the space travel half of the game is equally enjoyable people joke about it having more than Starfield but sometimes it honestly feels feels like it directing the ship as you manually typee in each location is surprisingly fun you can use the terminal to access locations supplies and lore and the fact that only one person can use it at a time makes it feel like they're actually steering the while many modern games carry the burden of a ready up system with lethal company you can rest assured that if you take too long getting a snack your friends will just move on without you real talk though being able to hang around and get a drink of water before you go to the next moon is one of the most refreshing Parts about this game those Cosmetics I mentioned earlier also add an element of progression as you can both upgrade your ship and make it feel like home through various decor ations the ever looming quota ensures that every day has Stakes as it progressively increases upping the ante and prompting you to go out into the unknown outside the ship recruits old and new have no idea what to expect as creatures roam both out and within the moon's respective entrances inside you'll find where the game earns its reputation without giving away what one can find in there I will say that the contents are one unpredictable two valuable and three nightmare fuel pure nightmare fuel knowing that the company you work for is not privy to extending deadlines everyday counts and somehow you'll find yourself still still going in deeper even when every Instinct you have is telling you to turn back that company by the way is intriguingly mysterious featuring the same type of cryptic Mythos that makes so many other Indie Concepts popular this same cryptic mystery haunts the players within every room as the game's unique Ambience and melancholic piano contribute to a sense of paranoia even when you're with your friends the combination of risk and reward is what makes exploring lethal companies so addictive sometimes the only way you can tell what you're looking at is with the scan button which matches the ship's door in the way you'll be spamming it when you realize you haven't heard from T-Bone in a while one of the best parts about lethal company is how you can tell that each obstacle and item has been carefully crafted for an in-game purpose in the past there have been many games made with a similar vibe to lethal companies in mind and while they might have managed to be scary their lack of tangible progression and strategy left players often wanting more in Lethal company not only do you encounter conflict in all sorts of shapes and sizes but the items you can buy from the store are specifically built with countering them in mind as you venture in and out of planets with strategies and rewards around every corner all the while unconventional Graphics paint the scene perfectly some planets feel like abandoned Wasteland lands that haven't been visited in centuries While others give the uneasy feeling that something has recently gone terribly wrong perhaps one of the game's most praised auditions is its use of voice chat as it uses proximity combined with a few twists to make things extra immersive this is the exact type of gameplay that people want expertly balancing both a scary and fun experience I haven't even covered the secrets team roles and Trauma this game offers but that's because when it comes to lethal company the less you know the better but you don't need to know lethal company secrets to see how fun and Innovative it is you might have not even had to play the game to see it as tens of thousands of Clips have swept across social media with moments that can only be described as effortlessly hilarious these aren't just YouTubers or five-star voice actors making these videos they're regular people sharing their in-game experiences which shows just how funny a little bit of teeth and dynamic voice cheat can be I think it's a I told you it's a worm so how about Call of Duty a franchise that has been well established for decades well personally I haven't seen a clip go viral since that one streamer was cheating of course Modern Warfare 3 had the franchise's standard features returned turn a reliable shooter you can count on to give you some crisp and thematic gameplay but just like we ACC company the less I say the better only for a much worse reason look into what people are saying about the campaign and you will find a myriad of complaints citing unoriginality slow pacing and the insulting recycling of the last installment While most Call of Duty campaigns have passed as good if not forgettable Modern Warfare 3s is seen as particularly awful if lethal company is an example of innovation then Modern Warfare 3 must be a visual manifestation of writers block I know many people don't like to compare games of different genres but rest assured we're not pitting two indie games against each other here this is a solo developer and a massive company and I want to show that Indie developers often give more and should get more than blatant cash grabs like Modern Warfare 3 because this game is uninspired hollow an essentially glorified DLC now rather than explain how the movement physics or map rotation is subpar I'm just going to read some of the game's ratings as it stands lethal company is currently an overwhelmingly positively reviewed game with over 990,000 people having reviewed it Call of Duty however only Sports a fragment of that with 5,000 in reviews that all point to it being a mostly negative experience according to one player the game feels bad to play it's clunky and unintuitive shooting feels like it's gotten worse the story is abysmal and the zombies are inexcusably bad the menus are cluttered and disorganized and slow another simply States quote won't crash if you don't play it these types of reviews are not hard to find some people are even amazed that such a big budget could make something so bad it's kind of like my birthday at the Cheesecake Factory but enough about that it's clear to see that Modern Warfare 3 was not the best addition to the franchise but perhaps the game's price or op optimization can save it no it can't that's because Call of Duty is Infamous for having some of the worst game optimization in recent history for those of you who are unfamiliar optimization is basically how efficiently a game can contain its content a well optimized game will be carefully programmed to use the least amount of storage possible according to steam Modern Warfare 3 is an absolute storage Destroyer requiring an SSD with 149 GB available at launch if the game's HQ and Battle Royale are not already installed this makes the game a burden especially on Console players as the game can sometimes take up half of their entire storage quick conspiracy theory is Call of Duty taking up all that space because the devs are bad at optimization or is it just so it can dominate the rest of your library and leave no room for competition who' for Thought either way its gargantuan space requirement has made Call of Duty one of the hardest to install games when it comes to the price of the game it goes for an above average $70 as opposed to a standard $60 count and that doesn't even include the battle pass the reason for this has not been stated okay well how about we shift the heat over back to lethal company surely a game with several moons creatures and infinitely generating rooms shouldn't be that much better I mean this is the most fun I've had on a game since Prime fortnite it's got to have its issues 1 gab and $10 that's all it takes but lethal Company still manages to feel like it offers more excitement all the while still being an early access as for updates Call of Duty often leaves its players disappointed in its lack of content with many finding themselves enjoying the initial release only to be left wanting more it's almost become an annual tradition at this point to see players hype up its releases only to once again be betrayed by how the game is neglected when it comes to lethal company zers has already announced plans to update the game every 1 to two weeks additionally cycling in and out what you can find every release this means that the game will be able to maintain its sense of unpredictability even if you already have hundreds of hours if you watch my other videos you know I'm a big fan of keeping games simple that's why I love lethal company because the way the developers talking about it it looks like it's going to keep its fundamentals while still changing random content in a drip fed frequency a perfect recipe for longevity seeing the not so Stellar reviews it's obvious that Call of Duty suffers from a lack of quality and the game would be much better off if it was polished enough to work properly but even if this game ran in Perfect Harmony could we really say that the reviews would be that much better earlier this month when I found lethal company it was because me and my friend decided we wanted to play something new so I checked the new and trending page a section where I had found a lot of other good games before and there it was now at the time we had never heard of this game but the simple concept of exploring planets along with the horror tag captured my attention and despite only going in with half a full crew size we were already dying of laughter 10 minutes in but more importantly the gameplay felt fun what's really interesting about lethal company is that the game was mostly spread by word of mouth if you didn't catch it on steam's new and trending page you definitely found out about it through its many Clips however when it comes to Modern Warfare 3 the formulaa gameplay makes it hard for any Clips to surface without Word of Mouth Call of Duty is left to solely bring in players through advertisement but despite it having millions of dollars poured into its marketing it only has a fraction of lethal company's reviews if you already have something it doesn't matter how much someone tries to sell it to you they will never be as successful as someone selling something new and when it comes to watching videos of people having hysterical fun you can forget about it best you'll get is someone punching their monitor because there's nothing creative about cod's gameplay anymore despite having access to an entire development team countless installments an unlimited budget and Nicki Minaj this game is only getting carried by the fact it's called Call of Duty it's like nepotism for video games for at least a moment in November a leviathan like Call of Duty was getting outsold by a single developer that is crazy that's like if you had one developer in a room making a game an entire funded team in a room making a different game and the one developer did better oh wait that's that's not a metaphor that's exactly what happened it almost makes me wish that video game companies would hire Indie developers as leads to direct new projects kind of like movie studios do I mean can you imagine if developers like zers had the resources of these giant games combined with their own creative Innovation we could be playing an ultra realistic version of lethal company in VR with Nicki Minaj lethal company outselling Call of Duty was not a stroke of luck it actually makes perfect sense when you stack unique aesthetic gameplay and fun against a corporation phoning it in this is exactly what should happen one of the reasons I'm so happy that Call of Duty got outsold was because it showed that consumers still value Ingenuity while lethal company is no doubt proof of one developers talent and determination it's also a sign that the gaming landscape might start to be changing soon hopefully the success of lethal company can be the Domino that pushes down the industry towards more interesting games and you know less of this if you want to see more behind the scenes content about how lethal company was made I highly recommend checking out zeker patreon which will be in the description below but what do you think have you gotten a chance to play lethal company and do you have any horror stories to tell let me know in the comments I'm lofa

Channel: Lufa

Views: 796,688

Keywords: lethalcompany

Id: Fwv4ykn0bdc

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 06 2023