If this is really the only time they talked about it, then i might have really imagined somethings.
Cause what I remember involves something saying about “splitting the team”, and Mike doesn’t mention that, only that they are already working on things for 1.2 and 1.3, so this memory of mine was likely before this stream.
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I don’t know if it was mentioned anywhere else. This is just the only instance I know of.
I don’t think it was mentioned in the forums. Maybe reddit or their discord?
Given they’ve had a solid 1,3k players at the end of 0.9 ongoing I don’t think there’s any chance of them having to file to be bancrupt.
Might be the case… albeit to be fair… to not have that happen how about giving a bit more love to the MTX aspect? I know the game has a shelf-price, but that’s more a hindrance to avoid mass botting since bots come with a price-tag and that needs to be recuperated rather then simply making automated e-mail addresses in a massive amount.
1,3k players is very good to sustain such a small company a very… very long time, not to speak of spikes happening through updates.
No… not at any reasonable pace.
There’s work on the Unity engine, which means it makes it easier, sure… but LE clearly has a lot of custom code segments solely created to support their game, it’s supported by Unity but definitely has large aspects which they needed to make on their own.
Which means documentation on that alone would need a while to get up to pace, not to speak of the respective coding norms established in the company which might - and very likely do - differ from the individual.
And if they don’t follow such guidelines strictly then it’s worse for a newcomer since documentation might be outdated, faulty or outright missing in places, several pieces being custom aspects without any followed guideline, then it can take quite a few months to even remotely come close to the productivity of what other developers have in the company.
And from what I heard (could be 100% false) it doesn’t seem like LE’s codebase is a prime example one would give a student to learn from… to say it mildly 
Depends on how they handle it.
Steam takes a 30% cut, but only if you sell through Steam.
You can offer your keys on 3rd party and Steam takes no cut at all, which is important to know as a developer to plan for, but needs more marketing off-platform.
Also we don’t know how prevalent in-game sales are… and LE uses regional pricing as well, leading to area selling for less then half the ‘base’ price.
Overall I think 20 million is in the high area given that the US and the EU are a big market but depending on where the bot accounts were bought from (which will be a massive influx of money after all) they’ll have sold for vastly less.
Mostly less then devs are paid though. Prices for IT personal of any sort of through the roof, wages for others are down the drain very much so in many areas.
I’ll be very sceptical until this is showcased in reality, both via the size of updates and/or the quality of updates we’re given.
Depending on the metric used it can be true or false. Monetary buffer is not being lovely, it just means nobody has buried a product yet.
Influx/outflux of customers is also a metric for example, as would be ongoing players.
I think it feels less so.
The baseline mechanics provided to feel more expansive then PoE early on did, PoE felt more ‘fleshed out’ though by far.
As for completeness… I don’t get the feeling from the campaign there, hence that breaks any sort of metric to go by for my at least.
That was obviously hyperbole, but a game can’t continue as EA forever. They need a stream of money coming in to support not only the employees but also the servers. Before the launch hype, I don’t think they had enough consistent income to keep it up for long.
Considering only a small percentage of players buy MTX (even though EA players should, by definition, have a higher percentage of those), it’s no wonder they didn’t really focus on that, since it would take away from development in other more important areas.
This is already been shown to be true. You’ve had lots of regular patches fixing a bunch of stuff and rebalancing stuff, many times on a weekly schedule.
There is only one metric that can be used and that is EHG giving up and shutting down their servers, like happened with many online games in the past, or them continuing to provide game servers and continuing to work on it.
The former seems very unlikely anytime soon, though.
Fair, but they don’t really do much in the way of non-steam stuff, there is Nexus for the various streamers but I’d be surprised if that was a material number of the sales.
Regional pricing is also a fair point & likely as unknowable as the number of bots.
Absolutely, but they still need to be paid, which was my point.
Yeah, it depends when the number of employees picked up (if they were up to speed several months before 0.9, prior to that would be when the “increased cadence” would be benchmarked against), what they’re doing & how fast they can get up to speed.
I refer you to your previous comment “depends on the metric used”.
Star Citizen says hi. How many hundreds of millions have they brought in?
But they also had box sales so the need for regular MTX income was lower than for GGG.
Which, to be fair, was a big change from 0.9 & prior when we used to have bug fixes for the first few weeks after a patch then nothing till the next one.
I’m genuinely not sure what those words in that configuration means.
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It means I had a brain fart, and in retrospect I don’t even know where I went with that.
They neither were quality wise out of the norm nor size-wise anything beyond expected amounts of a dev team doing post-release patches as should be planned for anyway.
Might be… might be not, just not substantial enough to see a major difference, especially at their size, and especially at their size compared to PoE’s dev team in 1.0.
Not to speak that GGG has 135 people working for them which includes everyone working at PoE 1 and PoE 2.
Obviously supporting roles can be shared between both… but it still showcases that EHG is likely close to being as big as GGG is without taking PoE 2 into consideration.
They just lack the year long experience and the very efficient setup in collecting data and using those metrics to optimize their process.
To be fair their server structure is at least revolutionary, so they have ‘something’ to show…
Star Citizen generally shows a lot of tech demos rather then being a proper complete product
At least they further the industry as a whole with their massive miss-usage of funding.
If GGG’s team is just 135 people and you don’t just mean 135 devs, then EHG should be bigger by now, since they had around 70-80 and hired another 100 with 1.0.
Yeah, GGG had a total of 114 employees in 2022.
Which I would say should give the 135 for April 2024 a solid standing of it being ‘the company’ they have.
Baffling low number for what they do.
That’s what sounds off/wrong. Increasing to 100 is one thing, increasing by 100 though…
I was a big fan, but everything gonna too slow. Where is promised Cycle 3-4 months, not 5-6?
I was pretty sure I read something about them hiring 100 more people. But I can’t find it, so I might be remembering wrong. Like I was under the impression they had a dozen pre-1.0. 
That was well before 1.0 though. Like, several years.
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Yeah, probably several years back.
Only thing I could find today while I was searching about their team splitting was this post from 2021 saying they were already more than 50 total members by then.
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I’m not the Llama, but I agree with him.
The game feels very incomplete, with new mechanics still being tested (see the dodge introduced in 1.1) and without a solid roadmap.
When the game was released, there was clearly a demand for a new action RPG - see how many concurrent players the game had.
But, by releasing Last Epoch in the state it’s currently in, I think EHG may have driven some of those players away. Players that maybe would have kept playing (or at least returning) to the game if it had been released later, in a more polished state.
But I agree with DJ - I think EHG was keenly aware of this, but was also forced to release the game due to their financial situation.
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To be fair, dodge feels like something that wouldn’t have been added if it stayed in EA. It was a feature that was added by request by a lot of new players post-launch.
If WASD was simple to implement, I’m sure it would have been released in 1.1 as well.
As for the roadmap, I’m fairly certain they had a roadmap, probably pretty close to the one they released after launch.
To be fair once again, I’m pretty sure the lack of polish wasn’t the main problem but simply the fact that there is only one real endgame activity, which is farming monos over and over again, which isn’t appealing to many players.
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That’s fair. The verb ‘feel’ already points out the subjective nature.
One reason why I assume people perceive LE as incomplete is the expectations they have. LE’s campaign for example is in a good spot for the ‘to be continued’ sign. Aside from EHG having announced that the story is supposed to be longer, it is clear that they strive for a larger arc.
PoE took the lazy man’s approach to campaign creation to keep people somewhat busy. Three rather short acts run in three different difficulties. But the story - for me - always felt incomplete back then. Too much stuff just hinted at. IIRC, many of the lore snippets you find during the acts were also introduced over time. And I am pretty sure GGG said early on that the campaign isn’t finished and that they will add new acts in time. There was some post I remember where Chris Wilson said that a new act takes a year to make, and act 4 would come much later.
Different classes had zero difference but their starting point on the grid, or their visual appearance. One could argue that this was a clever design choice, as this saves a lot of work that goes into designing specific classes, subclasses, etc.
There was no trade system that could feel half-baked, for there was none, aside from the fact that people could have a trade window open for direct trade. PoE felt so incomplete in that aspect that 3rd party developers basically laid the groundwork for what GGG implemented later on their website. Even after 10 years of service, trade in PoE feels like incomplete and unintuitive garbage - people just got used to the frustration it brings, I guess.
From a technical perspective, PoE ran worse than LE does - if we ignore the first few troublesome days.
Desyncs and rubber banding in PoE were so bad that people used macros to repeatedly send /oos to the chat. It’s the reason I never bothered with HC in PoE, even though I liked that in D2. I died so often because I desynced after any sort of movement skill.
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3-4 months is an estimated time frame. Doing exactly 3-4 month time frame was never promised.
Cycles can either end early or be longer. In this case 1.1 cycle 2 is going to be longer at least till Q1 of 2025. When 1.2 cycle 3 drops
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Awww man, I spend one day playing MonHun and chilling with the wife instead of browsing the forums for new threads since it’s been slow, and I miss this entire juicy thread of discussion/arguments!
Even though I’m late, for the record, I think the label of EA would prevent a lot of the complaints we’ve seen on the forums regarding the state of systems that aren’t up to snuff. It’s easier to say “wow, boss Ward sucks, I bet they’ll fix it before release” vs “it’s almost a year since 1.0 launched and we still have buggy systems like boss Ward!”
Unfortunately, I also agree that the launch padded their pockets which is a good thing for producing more quality content.
LE is a very good game and while there are systems that need updated, it’s not a broken game like Wolcen was/is (last I played).
Lastly, I’ll end with that I agree with SolidMetalKnight that I’d take a story driven GD/TQ experience over seasonal/cycle content any day. Polish the game you have and keep releasing great content even after years (look at Titan Quest Eternal Embers for a 15+ year old game at dlc release and Grim Dawn’s new expansion early next year as great examples). Ultimately, EHG settled on cycle content and I can live with that. I’ll still play it and will play GD and TQ2 (once it releases in EA in Dec./Jan.)
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More employees does not nec mean a good game. Palworld was made with 12 person team and concord had hundreds and still failed. Look at The Veilguard and how hard that will flop.
Hard thing to judge.
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The size of a company is a pointer as to what they should be able to achieve in a specific timeframe, as well as the respective quality you should be able to expect.
For example… I don’t expect great graphics from Dwarf Fortress, even in the graphical version on Steam… and I don’t expect weekly updates for fixes, it’s 2 people after all actively working on it.
I expect similar quality as to what other games of the genre can provide - at least coming close to it - when the amount of employees rises.
So, if EHG gets close to GGGs employee count I expect the same quality and cadence of updates after taking into account a time for them to get their systems up to par and optimal to provide quality content.
We’re not even remotely close to that though, GGG was a garage company which steadily increased in size, still being surprisingly small by the time of 1.0… which caused the small updates, they were expected.
Over time they got bigger though and hence had more capacity, and their methods also become more refined (while messing up majorly in-between, but that’s par the course)… with EHG? We have the size already, but we don’t have the quality or cadence of updates yet.
That’s why people start to be disgruntled.
Not to speak that a live-service game has other (understandable) expectations then one which is stand-alone.
First of all we can expect it to just be ‘gone’ in the future, which is a major negative and EHG has to make up for that otherwise, we’re basically having a ‘time limited’ product.
Secondly the live-service model itself wants us to play on and on and on… hence the expectation is obviously there for the devs to provide that, which is very wonky since end-game is monotonous and the other mechanics are unfinished or in a basic state (no finished campaign, dungeons are extremely basic, arena is very simple setup).
Hence this leads all to people simply saying ‘Yeah, it doesn’t yet provide what a live-service game which is released is supposed to provide’, which is a solid base game for the time with competition in mind + reliant updates that are able to keep up with the competition as well.
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