4-5 MORE months to a new cycle? You will have 0 player base by then.
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Its okay to set down LE and enjoy other games. LE will hold up just fine. Take a note from Palworld Devs and just enjoy what experiences are created. Games take time. Id prefer a longer season if that means more polish and less over worked / stressed devs in the industry.
10 Likes
They should have never released 1.0 to begin with since we are still on EA in some ways. They where in EA for a long time, and they could have remained so until 1.4-1,5 where done.
I think it would have been the correct decision. Release a game in a unfinished state is ok. Releasing a game in alpha state is not ok.
Best thing now is to let the public completely forget about LE until itâs DONE. So that when people come back we have a FF14 situation where everyone is happy about itâs miracle and give the game support.
Donât boil the frog. That ends poorly
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Iâm personally not a fan of the cycle / season model. Iâm not sure it takes pumping the game full of changes every four months or so to keep people playing anyway. There just needs to be fun content that people want to play with their friends. Releasing a 20 dollar expansion every 1.5 to 2 years that eventually gets rolled into a full price base game behind the most recent expansion is what I would prefer, with small pieces of content added in between as surprise updates. In short, Iâd rather pay for something that plays like a full price PC game than get a gimmicky mess that changes constantly like a mobile game for free.
Other than keeping people playing who are too compulsive to stop and the handful of high rollers overlapping on that Venn diagram, I donât really see what you gain by going with the other update models. You certainly donât get higher quality content or a better lifestyle for the ground-level developers.
Thereâs an old saying in the comedy industry: Funny before money. We need a similar aphorism in the video game industry. Make high quality content and people will pay to play it.
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Considering what they are trying to move forward into 1.2, that will be impossible. The fact that they prioritized the items in 1.2 over monolith expansion was bizarre.
I think the refresh event will give them a very good idea of who their core audience is. Iâm kind of pessimistic on those numbers though.
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This I agree with. IMO, they should have stayed in EA/beta until all of the core stuff had been added.
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In a perfect world, sure. Ideally weâd still be in EA. However, if LE was still in EA, it would be massively behind in content (because theyâd still only have a handful of devs) and theyâd also be running out of money and probably ready to just file bankruptcy.
2 Likes
I think a later polished 1.2 addressing community concerns would be better than a rushed buggy update with less content before Q1. A larger update with more content(as they are combining 1.2 and 1.3) is more likely to bring in more people. Yeah, its not adhering to their outlined timetable/cycle schedule and it will mean a drop till the big patch but maybe better in the long run.
Are you sure about that? How many devs have they hired in the past 6-7 months? Bearing in mind that new employees donât immediately start pumping out âquality contentâ on day 1, getting them up to speed takes a while, a few months at least.
Again, are you sure about that? Do you have any clue as to the state of their finances (given Iâve not been able to get hold of their statutory accounts). We have very little clue as to how many sales they had around/after 1.0 & even using the increase in peak users on steam charts (from ~40k in March 23 up to ~258k in Feb 24, call it 200k for simplicity), thatâs âonlyâ an additional ~200k users â ~$7m in sales (ish, there would also be sales of the various supporter packs but thatâs an impossible number to guess so Iâll ignore it for the moment) before tax if we assume VAT is ~20%, less steamâs cut of ~30%(?) the devs âonlyâ get ~$4m. Perhaps we uplift that by 20% for sales of the various supporter packs & call it $5m.
If the average dev costs ~$100k per year (& bearing in mind that the US is pretty expensive to hire employees in & we know that EHG are spread all over the world so their average salary cost would be much lower than in the US and the non-programmer roles presumably cost less as well), that $5m would cover 50 (again, pulling numbers out of my arse since I donât know how many employees EHG have) for 1 year, 2 if the average salary is only $50k. So why do you think that the sales around/after launch would magically allow them to hire oodles more developers & allow them to start pumping out content? Plus we donât know how much cash they had pre-1.0. Iâm not sure how many new devs the 1.0 sales enabled them to hire versus giving them the financial security of an additional few years. And unless you can point to some specifics, you canât make the statements youâve just made. I do know how much programmers & IT support people in the UK & Ireland/Romania/Brazil cost (because thatâs where the company I work for has their employees based) & itâs significantly less expensive than the US (Romania/Brazil are at least).
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From their posts after launch, at least close to 100.
It doesnât take that long. Depending on their previous programming knowledge, they can start producing in 2-4 weeks. Even if initially itâs just smaller stuff (which nevertheless frees other devs for the bigger stuff anyway).
Iâm only going from statements Aaron made on his stream. He is very close to EHG devs and has knowledge of many things outsiders donât. And he stated that launch gave EHG a very healthy financial cushion.
Itâs actually more, though. 200k just means the most concurrent players in a 24h period. Which means that the total number of players was much higher, because of different time zones.
I donât know how many sales they had in EA, but I doubt it was anywhere near the 1M they reached with all the hype. Aaron also mentioned in his stream a month or so ago that LE was getting close to 2M sales, so thatâs a very considerable sales boost which wasnât likely to happen while still in EA.
This all means we can safely assume at least 1M sales since launch was announced (since many of them happened in those couple weeks before 1.0, which would technically means they were still EA sales, but wouldnât happen without the launch announcement). That means at least 35-ish million, since many people bought the ultimate and deluxe packages, which brings the average sale number slightly up.
Gamesensor also had an article claiming LE sold 400k copies in the first 3 days out of EA, though I usually take claims from those sites with a big grain of salt.
Either way, launch hype clearly boosted their sales by a lot. Their announcement of hiring 100 devs was shortly after all of the initial sales success, so we can safely assume that launch did give them a big financial boost.
And having about a dozen devs (like they had pre-launch) vs 100 working on the game means that content would be way way behind if it was still in EA.
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They had way more than a dozen pre-1.0. I remember Mike mentioning somewhere in the 70-80 ball park (which I queried as to how many were contractors versus employees) & that was a few years ago. But yes, ~1m sales would be a nice cushion (likely around $20m after tax & storefront cut).
I seem to remember Mike saying it was about a dozen, but maybe he was talking about the core team only.
But yes, it seems like it was around that range for everyone involved in the team, including non-devs.
Yup, non-devs need to be paid just like devs do⌠All of the QA, service desk, accountants (and thereâs likely to be more than one in a company that large), HR, etc. Iâd also be quite surprised if EHG went from a dozen or so up to 70-80 in the span of a few months, that would be incredibly chaotic. Though I thought the dozen or so was fairly early on (several years ago, probably around the time I bought LE) & they would have needed significantly more staff to get MP done, so Iâd have thought that the spike in employee numbers would have happened some time before 0.9.
Either way, it seem like they at least doubled their team with launch, so things are bound to roll out much faster now than it did before. If we were still in EA, maybe weâd only now be getting Nemesis/Harbinger. Itâs hard to say, but we can expect that things are now being implemented faster.
Especially with how Mike said they learned from launch and now have multiple teams working on multiple seasons at once, so they can be rolled out in a staggered fashion.
Either way, the point is that LE is still far from dying. But I expect weâll keep seeing âgame is daedâ posts anyway, considering theyâve been a feature of all online games, even for wildly successful ones like CS2 or PUBG.
Well, not even the all might PoE was able to do that. And by how people reacted to D4, I imagine they didnât also (or at least it was a way worse game on release than LE).
I agree entirely with DJ there, and have nothing more to add. But I would like to hear why you think that. How would LE be better off if it was still in EA?
That really depends on the complexity of the project, how it is structured, and what tasks you need the new staff for.
I consider 2-4 weeks overly optimistic. During that time, a newcomer is more of a burden. They keep the senior devs busy with questions. It takes the senior devs probably longer to explain everything and answering questions than doing the work themselves would. Itâs an investment, teaching the newcomer about the codebase, version control, how everything is documented, whom you have to ask to get certain answers etc.
The first few leagues added mechanics comparable to what this Uprising event will bring. A few shrine effects here and new enemy modifiers. Nemesis. BloodlinesâŚ
People often forget that early PoE hadnât have all those intricate league mechanics, it was very basic. Running maps was the endgame. Or docksâŚ
LE now feels more complete than PoE before the 2.0 patch.
4 Likes
I share the same feeling too.
I was trying to find the thread some Dev made a while ago, talking about how they figured they needed to split up the team in mini-teams to work in multiple projects/cycles at the same time to be able to maintain the desired 3~4 months cycle timeframe.
But this happened only after launch because of the mass incoming players and the ability to hire more people cause of the investments they got.
Spent the last 1:30 hours searching in the forums, no luck so far. Now Iâm almost starting to think I imagined the whole thing, because itâs the second time I try finding it for more than an hour. geez.
If anyone happens to stumble upon it at any time, please quote me to it.
Do you tread into the cesspool that is reddit at times? I never do, but I heard that the devs post there, too.
People like constancy. Pretend itâs football. If the NFL was like, well, some of our stars are injured, weâre going to push kick off until December, folks might get mad.
I would be less concerned about releasing major content updates around cycles. Players like routines. I do at least. Focus the cycles around the ladders, not content releases.
Every holiday season new amazing games are released. If you want to avoid that, set your league to start Oct and end January. Nov/Dec will always be bloodbaths
I donât think that was a thread. Mike said that in one of his streams.
1 Like