3 mil. sold copies but no updates/content/seasons. How is this possible?

General
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First of all I want to love LE, some aspects in this game how are absolutely great. Dont want to make a hate thread but facts say that LE atm is kind of dead with 2k average players each day.

Imo next season will decide LEs future.
They always claim to be a small team and so on and thats kind of a reason why everyhting is implemented/improved so slow.

I mean, they sold 3 mil copies, thats like 100 mil. $. I m aware they have fixed costs for whatever. But taking nearly 8 months for another season without adding ANY content or improving stuff I dont get it. They waste ressources and throwing in this nonsense stuff like lizards/love epoch what so ever.

And talking of a small team with 100 § earnings just by selling this game seems to me hypocritical.
So what they do with all that money? Why are things implemented so slowly?

I really hope they nail it with next season, but I am still critical. All classes except sentinel stay untouched? But lets wait for patch notes.

Nevertheless I really think they should put more pace into their game in future to give LE a chance. Every 8 months adding content is just much to slow.

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Yes, you should. Mike mentioned, that only 10% of skills will be untouched, lil tweaks here and there. And for sure A LOT of them for sentinel. And new marksman skill. And more more more
It’s gonna be a long read :grin:
Also new servers and backend stuff

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Pretty normal after a 9 months Season

Factually wrong, we had the Imperial Uprising Event thats brought a tiny bit of content. Not much I admit

Lizards are very appreciated in the community, a lot of people seems to love them. And from what the devs have said it was a really tiny investment for a great return (in term of fun).
Also Love Epoch is a April Fool joke. I guess it required one work day of one the CM. So not really a lot of dev time included.

Not sure I understand this one. Every Class is getting touched. Sentinel a lot. Marksman is getting a new skill. Mike (Senior Dev) said in his recent stream almost 90% of the skill are touched.

A bunch of reason have been said for such a long hiatus. They changed their mind on what 1.2 was going to be about, POE2 cause a delay, they took extra time to finally squashed most of the bugs (hopefully all).

They do aim at a 3-5 months target for every release. Its true that since 0.9 they have not hit it. :crossed_fingers: Hopefully they nail it in the future.

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That’s just never going to happen. Bugs are an unfortunate fact of life.

IMO, a benefit of S2 being pushed back is a little bit of extra time to deal with bugs though, which is good.

While kinda doing that? Nowhere near as virulent as some to be fair & everybody is frustrated by the delay since S1, so I’m not having much of a go.

Staff costs are always a major part of a company’s cost base, especially in a creative company that requires lots of people to do stuff.

I’m honestly not sure what you mean there.

Yeah, I’m very curious from a professional point of view as well.

It is, and pivoting/changing your mind mid season is a major part of that.

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I mean it is strange to still talk about a “small indie team” who does not have money and thats the reason why things are so slow implemented.
A company earning 100 mil. $ is not a “small team” anymore. Just hire more people if things take much too long.
And yes staff cost, PR, technical costs and so on. But still…100 Mil $… thats so much money.
Just wondering how they used this big amount in the last 8-12 months without providing much to the game.
Sometimes there is 3-4 weeks not even any news/announcement given by ehg, just silence.

But yes, hopefully this will change in 2 weeks.

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Yes & no.

Yeah, that’s fair.

And you would be surprised by just how quickly you can work your way through that. If the average salary is $100k (this might be a bit on the low side but they’re not all based in the US), 100 staff @ $100k each is $0.8m a month plus various employer taxes (which can be anything from .2% in Romania, 7.7% in the US up to ~32% in Spain & ~50% in Brazil, ish, I can’t remember off the top of my head but those figures are reasonably close, I’m the payroll accountant for a multinational company), so you could add another ~20% odd to that which gets you to ~$1m a month, or $12m a year. So that $100m would “only” last ~8years on wages alone. Plus that’s their lifetime sales and theyve been going for something like 5 odd years (granted with much fewer people early on).

Plus, don’t forget that that $100m is before Steam takes a cut (~30%?) and various countries take their vat (ball park of 20%), so EHG would probably have only seen on the region of $60m-$70m of that, which is only ~5 years of salaries, ignoring all the other costs…

So it won’t go as far as you’re expecting.

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Because they did a huge overhaul of all the endgame. This is not something you can do in the scope of a 3-4 month season. It takes a long time to properly design and implement. The changes they have announced so far are far bigger in scope than what GGG did in any of their leagues.

There is an old programmers joke (that’s not really a joke):
-How long will it take you to finish this project?
-10 days
-What if I hire another programmer to help you?
-30 days

More people doesn’t mean it gets done faster, most of the time. It just means you can do other stuff at the same time.

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Not sure I’d go that far. The atlas passive tree was mahoosive when it was implemented.

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It certainly was. But this season also has an atlas tree-like mechanic, along with a a monolith revamp, added cemeteries, a new faction, new bosses/champions, an uber boss, sets crafting, along with a beta WASD support.
Probably a bunch more smaller stuff as well.

So I’m pretty confident that this is bigger in scope. Whether or not it is as well implemented remains to be seen in 12 days. :slight_smile:

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That $100 million (or whatever it is) is why we don’t get gouged in the cash shop and its why you buy stash tabs with in-game gold

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No, that was always a thing.

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It was always a thing because a box price was always planned. I believe he meant that if the game was F2P, there would be some mandatory MTX, like PoE and stash tabs.

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Yep, 30%

Then they should’ve provided a properly planned out update for the 3-4 month scale.

That’s also not right, the core updates of PoE have similar sizes given they update their core systems then. Like a new Atlas with new mobs and mechanics on top of the normal league mechanic.

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That wouldn’t have solved the end-game issues, though.

It’s still bigger. What they’ve announced is similar in scope to the Atlas and Harvest leagues in one.

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I mean… ‘only’ the weaver mechanic itself would’ve been a good choice already.
Only focused balancing for the worst outliers rather then broad sweeping changes for 1.2 also.
The set mechanic isn’t a direly needed implementation at the moment as well (albeit a nice one).

Those things would’ve gone a long way, it’s mostly their planning and content-pipeline at fault I would argue, but that’s hindsight 20/20 (my eyesight clearly improved since the last mention of this saying :stuck_out_tongue: ) mostly. The focus on end-game would’ve been fine if the schedule was upheld, reliable steady updates fixing issues is something people like a lot more then ‘when is something finally coming?’. It’s slower paced… but also keeps people more engaged.

As for the scope… hrmm… Harvest was a very small one mechanically, it plainly spoken implemented nothing majorly ‘new’ and was mostly contained in a single area as well. Ignoring the initial design which was a messy disaster :stuck_out_tongue:
Scope-wise the biggest ones definitely was settlers, which is bigger content wise then what is provided by LE by far.
Large-scale rework of Scarabs as well as the town? It has multiple design-intensive mechanics inside there with bosses on top. Auto-map running, the unique enchanting, disenchanting, the whole management aspect there with all the setup, a market and also being fairly dialogue heavy compared to the usual updates is a rather big deal I would say.
Sure, only a ‘single’ mechanic… but with massive amounts of actual content behind it.

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Once a year, yes.

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And they still keep their schedule otherwise, which is the main argumentation line there.

EHG will go roughly into that direction along the line I imagine… but the current situation is simply ‘eh’. Much like people complain about the PoE 1 situation even going so far as to say ‘GGG gave up on it’… and that’s simply not boding well.

Understandable why it happened in both situations. Mismanegement also in both simply. Gotta accept that part… because otherwise it wouldn’t have happened in the first place :stuck_out_tongue:

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Wrong and that isn’t the issue. PoE 1 is over 9 months has 8k players and also has most of it’s player base playing PoE 2. That’s because it’s a game that established itself by putting out frequent content for over a decade.

Last Epoch really dropped the ball, it had a catastrophic launch. Lack luster meaningless Season 1. Then identity problems and couldn’t add new seasons or content so Last Epoch died. The game currently is on life support. (not being mean just stating reality)

With that said I’m very optimistic about Season 2 but lets be honest they need a grand slam and 200k+ concurrent players. They need stable servers, a great launch and player retention or well the future will be very bleak. Which is why they delayed the launch. Season 2 is that big a deal and everyone know it because of how poorly things have gone since LE officially launched.

I do love the EHG Dev team, I hope they are ready for success this time. Then hope they use momentum to deliver CONSISTENT content every 3-4 months till the game really has legs to stand on and become an established ARPG in the genre.

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PoE 1 offers a vastly higher amount of content to get you over the timeframe compared to LE though.
That sustains long-term players.

Hence nah… not really wrong when taking it into consideration. It’s not possible for EHG to provide the content width available in a product which is 10+ years released by now.

Agreed there, fully.

Season ‘0’ was fine with the factions… but the factions were implemented in a rather awful way. Major information issues and clutter on CoF side - hasn’t been solved yet - and base functionality of a market not adhered to in MG - also not solved yet.

But I fully agree that EHG has to become consistent and also needs to work on their overall quality. Several of the provided things were simply facepalm moments for the design decisions. Reaction time is also extremely slow to solving issues. And the height of nonsense was the community vote for ‘should we actually fix bugs?’ :joy:

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I have a little insight here, but I’m not affiliated with EHG, but I have been neck deep in studying the industry for nearly 30 years.

First of all, consider EHG staff is a fraction of the size of other teams. Heck, the whole company might not even be as big as the team that manages a D4 patch release pipeline.

Now, from all available sources, 100 is an approximate since the typical category is “51-200” in the places that track this data. Rumor has it that Monolith Productions, with no live service games, spent a reported $100m on TRYING to get a Wonder Woman game into/past greenlight (where the execs nod and say they agree the game will make a profit) and had nothing to show for it, supposedly they were a svelte 130ish people when WB closed the doors on them.

Still, that isn’t the real question. The real question is “Why TF did it take so long to create something meaty considering you made so much damn money?” along with “Is this the typical (big) content cycle cadence we can expect from your team?” Oh, “P.s. your competition looks mighty fine when LE goes dry, or only has a trickle of changes and content for 5, 6, or NINE months. Except PoE2. F-that game; no amount of lipstick makes that pig look good enough to play.”

People have added good numbers in this thread, salary info was probably over estimated since the company is based in a low cost of living US state of Virginia. If it were LA, Seattle, Austin, or other game hub I’d agree with a $100k/yr average, but in VA? More like $60-$70k for line level workers, $80k-$90k for leads, with the rare principle or manager hitting into the low-mid 100k and QA and low skill admin staff dragging everyone down with their pittance $32k-$38k/yr (some don’t even make that much in LA, much less in Virginia).

My estimate is that EHG has about $10-15m in actual runway for the LE team (depending on how successful the cosmetics have been), and $20m in emergency funds. Considering their staff size (remember, only ~70% of the staff likely regularly “work” on the game, the rest are overhead or involved in maintaining the LE network and security) and the reported sales of 3m units this is the best we can get without access to their MTX records.

At the rate it took them to release this season, they’ve got one more season before they get worried. And one more after that if they can’t turn things around. PoE really raked in the money when a new season started, that’s why Overwatch and D4 stole that business model. The surge of players is insane and drove cosmetic (and stash tab) sales through the roof for the first 3 weeks or so. After the first month most see big drops in their population (and therefore revenue).

LE and EHG needs to match the release cadence of PoE1 and D4 if they want to see the same revenue surges.

That said, this isn’t Microsoft Office, or some stable piece of financial software or something. You don’t get to add the same level of predictability to game development. It is CREATIVE and that brings a risk of trying to solve novel problems. That means things will be late and you can’t do anything about it.

Think of the Sistine Chapel. The Architect could probably do a calculation and say “with this many people working doing this, that and the other, we can finish in ‘X’ amount of time” and come pretty close to that estimate. The architect knows how much productivity to expect from each worker on something easily trained and (this is key) totally, easily, repeatable which makes it easy.

Now, asking Michael Angelo about “How long do you think it will take to paint this here Sistine Chapel?” You’re going to get a lot SWAGs (scientific wild-a**-guess), and “um… about.”

Others had done amazing frescos before, and maybe they could give an estimate of that work, but to do something as big as that ceiling? At that quality level? And finding out a bunch of the plaster he painted on was too wet and he’d have to redo those areas? Also, it was the first fresco he ever painted.

I’m sure he said “Hmm, I think it’ll take about a year,” with it ending up taking four years despite having assistants doing the crap work. That’s game development.

EDIT: I was really hoping to see my forum tags. At least the “First Traveller” one. But no such luck. That’s ok, forget the forums, fix the game!

EDIT 2: Still no forum badges showing, sheesh!