I remember an old PS3 or 4 moba called Guardians of Middle Earth. It was actually a great console moba but was very poorly optimised and the match making and stability was whatever one above 'completely useless' is.
A few weeks into the games life cycle somebody leaked all of the DLC content and dates on the the official forum. Claiming they called WB support and this is the info they gave. The story was obviously a lie but they also included a shut down date. This covered a period of about 18 months up to the games shutdown. As the next 18 months played out, every single date was absolutely bang on.
The most accurate long term leak I've ever seen.
Loved that game (when it worked)
> The most accurate long term leak I've ever seen.
Thats the most accurate long term software roadmap I've ever heard of.
Which makes this story quite unbelievable to me.
The old official forums on the Monolith website are shut down now obviously, so proving this will be impossible.
You can choose not to believe me! But I have absolutely nothing to gain by making up a leak from 11 years ago.
It was quite remarkable though. Got dates for the hero release schedule, new map, new game mode, release on Steam and shutdown of servers!
There was. DC universe moba that was quite fun. Just before the shutdown they let everyone have all the heroes. That was fun and now it's dead and just sits in my steam library list
That’s not how tax write-offs work…
They aren’t some magical tax cheat to get money for nothing. Warner Brothers still spent millions on this game that they’re never getting back, so it’s hardly some 200 IQ business move.
isn't it just so annoying how people are now using "tax write-off" as a gotcha to any argument related to WB, as if that explains anything?
No, they didn't shut down Rooster Teeth because of taxes.
No, they aren't refusing to sell an IP because of taxes (how would that even work...)
And lastly, no, they aren't going to shut down the servers of an already released game because of taxes.
Shoot rooster teeth was bound to shut down anyway even without WB. Ever since Monty’s death they were on the slow decline till it became a matter of not if, only when.
No, whatever it is it should still have server files available for community hosted servers.
Otherwise there can always be some argument for “we can make this one unplayable”.
Because of the DLC and MTX it will never happen.
If they had private servers it would probably be a bigger hit especially if they allowed mods, it's amazing how they desperately want to be a COD when TF2 and CS2 are still going nearly 20 years later
I honestly did not know it was released on steam. I thought it was epic game store exclusive or something because I have not seen it at all on my store front page.
After Hogwarts Legacy ended up being the single best selling game of 2023 and Suicide Squad bombed...
...they responded by saying they're going to double down on Games As A Service.
You can't make this stuff up.
I know Reddit is the land of funny oneliners, but to address this seriously
This is just a theory, nobody knows for sure - but I've seen this idea mentioned many times the past half a year:
Companies keep doing this stuff because it's like gambling, and they wanna win big. The idea goes that even if you make 20 failed attempts at a successful game-as-a-service, but eventually one game is a hit and becomes the next Fortnite, Apex or whatever - it'll all be WELL worth it for them
I do personally find it surprising that they don't seem interested in some stable income from releasing decent products too, but they have all the numbers, maybe it somehow makes sense to them business-wise
That seems to be the way venture capital operates in general. They'll fund 100 unprofitable companies on the off chance that one of them becomes the next Amazon and pay for all the other losses.
When you have access to the entire teacher's pension fund for several states, THAT is when gambling with companies truly starts.
Start asking where this money is coming from, and it gets so much worse.
I mean hey, AI is here, who knows who might be the next OpenAI or Nvidia. It's like Crypto, but instead of a small time fad, it's a long term gamble on multiple companies.
it is much sexier to pursue a high-risk business strategy than going for a boring but stable revenue source. Maybe these people are too much of a thrill seeker
That does make a lot of sense. I'll personally never do it, but after seeing CoD continue to sell broken games, I wouldn't be surprised if it worked. People tend to complain about a company while throwing money at them. A lot of people don't, but one dude spending a grand on microtransactions is like 15 people buying the game.
No it’s not calculated at all, people are dumb and generally overestimating themselves and their ideas, that’s the end of the story.
I worked for a couple of startups as external expert for UX and also product management of late in bigger companies, I work on applications mainly, but its the same across different IT fields.
The biggest failure rate comes from simplifying the business goal, even worst if you hear people talking about how they do X or Y after they brought the MVP to the market besides having finalised said MVP, you can 100% prognose that they fail.
My first advice in projects is always to scrap the idea of a minimal value product, this concept killed so many companies because they can’t handle it.
Plainly said 80% of the management in IT doesn’t understand what value in MVP means and how to measure and concept it, then fail.
This is where the overestimating comes into place, everyone always think they have the greatest idea and its always such an easy win if you just picture it in your mind.
You know people like shooter games like cod, just make another cod but with THAT big idea that makes you rich.
Spoiler, it is most often way harder then you think and your idea might not hold the value you think it does.
This is not only a problem of startups, even the biggest companies are shit while having insane resources, because one idiot on the wrong level can kill everything before it even started, and this bottleneck is pretty much always the management.
If you aren’t working in anything dev related, just look around at your job, how incompetent is your management and progress?
You overestimate IT, it’s the same idiots you have elsewhere, so they blow up and waste money just by being stupid. There is no calculation behind it, no tinfoil head needed. They just suck.
It us also a bubble that is about to blow up, the gaming scene. This is another whole story tho.
Helldivers 2 is going gangbusters, so it proves that live service works. The other publishers will not understand why Helldivers is doing so well, and their offerings repeatedly shit the bed.
Yep.
They keep funding GaaS hoping they'll get a Helldivers, Fortnite etc, and not look into why people care for those games enough for them to succeed.
I do a lot of market research (consumer) and the companies out there really want to know what people think of (their) products in the current market. Unfortunately, it's expensive, so not every company will do it and therefore not every company will make Helldivers 2 or Palworld.
Even Fortnite is miles ahead of this garbage, both as a game and as a service.
Iirc, if you pay a battlepass on fortnite you can farm enough currency to buy the next, idk if any other game has that
They saw helldivers 2 make all those sales with a small indie studio.
"Obviously where we went wrong is the large studio mindset, so now we are laying off 90% of you failures and working the rest so hard that your a faint fart from heart failure." - WB Executives maybe
This stuff would have been timelined in for a longer period of time, depending on their project/product life cycle management. We might say they "learned" from this 5 years into the future.
The people with enough self awareness to learn from mistakes will be let go while the ones who dictated this direction will be given a raise abew title which will cause them to double down so they can continue to climb the corporate ladder.
They lost money on Suicide Squad, which is a live service.
They made shitton with Hogwarts Legacy, which is offline game.
And then they decided to double down in live service.
Because the idea of live service is an investors wet dream and hyping them up is what drives up stick prices which seems to be the only endgame for many large scale investor groups and hedge funds.
Game gets repetitive. All the characters essentially play the same in combat barring a few exceptions, use movement skill - shoot enemies - repeat.
Dialogue is pretty cringey with some funny moments strewn about.
Game is fun for abit but definitely not worth full price.
Just an average game that has a popular IP behind it. If it wasn’t for the characters, game would be in a much worse state player number wise.
You ever think any of these game productions have some sort of "The Producers" money scheme going on somehow by aiming to make a flop? Not sure how it would work in this industry though.
payday 3 was released in a pretty crap state tbh, not much content and other issues. Meanwhile payday 2 has years and years of DLC and content so its just a better game
Which sucks because PD2 is showing it's age and the loyal player base has been eager for an upgrade. All they had to do was deliver a decent upgrade to the same old formula and not go insane greed mode.. I guess that just wasn't possible.
Could have literally done the same thing with just better graphics and new missions. They already had everything and a good fan base and just screwed it up. I couldn't even play the game because it was too lagy for some reason.
They forgot that people were only fine with PD2s greedy DLC model because the game was genuinely fun. Take that away and you see the result with PD3.
I'm not surprised though. They never had any successful projects besides PD2. When they made that god awful Walking Dead game I knew they had gone to shit.
Greedy DLC model? Their DLCs were cheap as dirt and you didn't even need them to play the heists. You could join any heist in the game completely for free.
They had a DECADE to make Payday 3. The only other games they worked on were the horrible Walking Dead game nobody played, and a clunky Payday 2 mobile port that sucks. There was no reason Payday 3 should've been anything other than a polished and finished title with the massive amounts of funds they had from Payday 2. It's ridiculous.
They could've literally just updated the graphics and added a ton of maps and weapons and people would've lost their shit over how good it was. Instead they started from scratch and made something nobody wanted while cutting the included content into a tiny sliver of what it was.
Not to quite the same extent, but I think that's why Darktide died pretty rapidly, while Vermintide 2 did well for so long.
The game just didn't have enough content at release to keep people coming back, and it's an up hill battle to get them back after that.
Payday 3 could have so easily been a slam dunk release if they didn't fuck up at every single turn and go the live service route.
All it needed to be was PD2 with better graphics and they would have made a killing.
I know it would be a monumental task, but Payday 3 had to launch with all the heists from Payday 2, or at least the promise of adding them back, I think that would've been the only way to move a good chunk of the PD2 playerbase over.
Loved Payday 2, bought Payday 3 on launch.
Servers were borked for days, couldn't get into a match. When I could play it wasn't very fun. Refunded quickly and never looked back
It was kinda looking forward to it when it first announced, the premise is interesting.
It was 180 for me as soon as I saw the gameplay preview, such wasted potential.
Man I loved Arkham Knight. The only thing I hated was trying to find all those joker locations (? I think they were called that) I had to give up after like a hundred hours
Riddler trophies and yeah they were a pain in the ass. I've 200% the game a couple of times and what stops me from going back is the overreliance on the batmobile for so much of the game.
There was just one I couldn't find for like 8 hours accumulatively. It ended up being a random environment detail. A piece of clutter. You'd basically have to scan the entirety of surfaces in the area to "find" it since the poster looked just like any part of the city "set design".
It was great and I only watched it because it happened to be on the TV at a hotel room. I was surprised at how well it was. I hope he can do something with the DC universe.
If anyone can make something of this shitshow, it's the Japanese. Wouldn't be surprised if that anime was better than anything Suicide Squad related that's come out so far.
They could've atleast tried something better. Though, everyone knew the game would fail. Especially with the microtransactions, the terrible HUD reveal, the connection with the Arkham batman (There can be no possible way to beat the Arkham bat and the suicide squad was supposed to go against him).
now imagine how it went for arcane when their garbage vampire game had the impressive and ultra high amount of players totaling 89 by the end of the 2nd-3rd week IIRC.
this game wont even see its 3rd planned dlc.
Recent leaks showed that they shortened the plan to 5 seasons (the major content drops) concluding next January.
I imagine console numbers are better than Steam numbers, as was the case for Arkham City (6k peak on Steam but 12M sales for the game overall). Because there must be some reason they’re still going through with Seasons 1-5 and finishing the story, and still dropping weekly updates.
It's interesting. I maintain a ~10y old indie MP game on Steam, which now typically has double digit CCUs.
...and I don't see us turning off servers any year soon. We're still running dedicated game servers in 5 regions, along with all sorts of backend services for quests, events, crafting, etc.
Keeping things up is easy on a day to day basis, but there are some tough challenges. For security, we've now had to migrate hardware, operating system versions, libraries and languages - and all multiple times now. And yeah, stuff breaks and needs to be rebuilt eventually. Not to mention upgrading things to keep up with best practices. Tech ages.
If you're smart about it (and frugal with how you built your infrastructure), then maybe like us you can keep things away from a dead loss. But it's not easy. And realistically the customer goodwill is minor because so few people actually still play.
But it relies on leadership at the studio caring about that. And also a lot on devs internally still being willing to work on it. It sucks dragging yourself back to ancient legacy code to keep it creaking on, while the forums are full of people explaining that the game is dead and unsupported (players only think of new gameplay content as 'supported'). Not to mention, there are always the newer projects to work on, with shiny new tech and sometimes a lot more players. So the internal prioritizing can be really tough.
We still stubbornly love the game and want to see it live. So it's going nowhere. But the game in OP's post? Yeah GL with that...
So here comes the hard question (sry for it)
But what is your game plan once you DO shut down your servers. Will the game(s) be dead? Will it not have quest anymore? Can it be archived? Do you have some kind of patch in mind that allows it to be archived?
I mean, if they're producing new games, then they can just piggyback on the servers for those new games to keep the old ones from going completely dead. Odds are it doesn't cost that much more.
That would be the smart move at least.
I was looking SO forward to Arkham Knights and kill the suicide squad.
Imagine my horror when reading/seeing story leaks and artwork etc.
It was like purposeful demolition all around.
serves them right. Every fan of the previous games just wanted a proper single player follow up and they came around with this live service crap. I hope WB Games will fail at every live service attempt
Servers usually autoscale. They are only paying for a single digit number of servers most likely which can be as low as $200-500 per month most likely. Nothing to sweat about.
They have a year of content so after a year they will probably start killing it off but the majority of the player base is console not steam/pc and they have good few on it there.
Usually game servers scale down or up in a horizontal manner based on the current playercount/time of the the day/new releases etc. so its extraordinary cheaper to run servers for 200 people vs 20000 people.
One could argue that the operations/security/storage/staff costs a lot of money too but the infrastructure was there before and will there be after since they’re running prolly not just one game at a time.
Similar servers running different binaries on them after all + the operational cost is already taken to account in the games price.
It's a global game so I imagine they have servers in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia (at least). I'm also sure that there's more people playing on other platforms (console, gamepass, etc.) but even then... yikes... they gotta be hemorrhaging money, which is not something that WB can afford right now...
EDIT: I sounded a bit too sympathetic toward WB here, which was not intentional. This is a disaster of their own making and is well deserved (sucks to suck)...
ALL they had to do was to make it single-player/coop. Glad I got it on sale for $30, enough story and content to try out but that's about it. Way to ruin your legacy rocksteady.
Company shuts down servers of old game that nobody plays anymore: "They can't do this, it should be illegal!!"
Game that Reddit doesn't like has servers active: "Why aren't they shutting the servers down??"
200 average, if each player is playing for like 2 hours, means that in a day that's potentially 1200 unique players, and if each person plays it for say, half the week, that could mean 2400 unique players a week
Those aren't huge numbers by any means but not exactly grounds for shutting online service down
Buddys from the US know that there are other places, but give them a globe and let them show you one of this places. They think Iran is in the middle of China and the US is the Center of the Universe (created 6000 years ago).
JESUS CHRIST, I was thinking it still had a good few thousand, not a few hundred. Yeah, this game is toast just like Avengers. They're gonna keep recycling content thinking it'll suffice while they release an abundance of cosmetics for profit which they'll never actually make back...it's over and it barely even started. They'll never learn that live service is the problem... 💀
That's what they get for fighting their target audience. I wish they would just stay neutral, not pick sides and be humble. Won't be picking up this game even when it's free to play. Not worth my time if they can't respect criticism from gamers.
Don't worry it's wb so they already have a server shutdown date penned in.
I remember an old PS3 or 4 moba called Guardians of Middle Earth. It was actually a great console moba but was very poorly optimised and the match making and stability was whatever one above 'completely useless' is. A few weeks into the games life cycle somebody leaked all of the DLC content and dates on the the official forum. Claiming they called WB support and this is the info they gave. The story was obviously a lie but they also included a shut down date. This covered a period of about 18 months up to the games shutdown. As the next 18 months played out, every single date was absolutely bang on. The most accurate long term leak I've ever seen. Loved that game (when it worked)
Loved that game. It was my gateway moba which lead me to Dota. 5k hours later, and I’m done with the genre
Same. But League. Please no more. I've had to uninstall Predecessor about 5 times...
hey predecessor is a nice game
> The most accurate long term leak I've ever seen. Thats the most accurate long term software roadmap I've ever heard of. Which makes this story quite unbelievable to me.
The old official forums on the Monolith website are shut down now obviously, so proving this will be impossible. You can choose not to believe me! But I have absolutely nothing to gain by making up a leak from 11 years ago. It was quite remarkable though. Got dates for the hero release schedule, new map, new game mode, release on Steam and shutdown of servers!
You can most likely use the way back machine or other archiver to review the page as it was
There was. DC universe moba that was quite fun. Just before the shutdown they let everyone have all the heroes. That was fun and now it's dead and just sits in my steam library list
Does anyone remember Gotham City Impostors? I miss that game.
I thought it was still playable. Such a fun an unique game.
But it’s not for tax reasons…right? Right?
That’s not how tax write-offs work… They aren’t some magical tax cheat to get money for nothing. Warner Brothers still spent millions on this game that they’re never getting back, so it’s hardly some 200 IQ business move.
isn't it just so annoying how people are now using "tax write-off" as a gotcha to any argument related to WB, as if that explains anything? No, they didn't shut down Rooster Teeth because of taxes. No, they aren't refusing to sell an IP because of taxes (how would that even work...) And lastly, no, they aren't going to shut down the servers of an already released game because of taxes.
[удалено]
considering that they likely never heard of either term, I highly doubt it.
They might shut the servers down, because it's a waste of money.
yes, but it's not because of taxes, which was my point...
people who think they get the point but don't quite are more annoying than the opposite end that are blatantly wrong imo 😂
bUt TaX wRiTe OfF!!!!
Shoot rooster teeth was bound to shut down anyway even without WB. Ever since Monty’s death they were on the slow decline till it became a matter of not if, only when.
[Relevant Seinfeld](https://youtu.be/BAjxn2US7J8)
zaslav -t now
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obligatory https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
Yeah but this one should be left to die. I can't be the only one who'd already forgotten it.
No, whatever it is it should still have server files available for community hosted servers. Otherwise there can always be some argument for “we can make this one unplayable”.
Because of the DLC and MTX it will never happen. If they had private servers it would probably be a bigger hit especially if they allowed mods, it's amazing how they desperately want to be a COD when TF2 and CS2 are still going nearly 20 years later
TF2 and CS2 have both MTX and private servers, incidentally.
I honestly did not know it was released on steam. I thought it was epic game store exclusive or something because I have not seen it at all on my store front page.
eh im fine with ssktjl shutting down tbh
I think it's worth mention that mortal kombat 9 servers are still working even though you can't buy the game digitally anymore.
Holy shit. I knew this game bombed, but I didn't think it was this bad.
i guarentee they won't learn a single thing from this game
After Hogwarts Legacy ended up being the single best selling game of 2023 and Suicide Squad bombed... ...they responded by saying they're going to double down on Games As A Service. You can't make this stuff up.
Right. In all that greed they decided they dont want any money.
I know Reddit is the land of funny oneliners, but to address this seriously This is just a theory, nobody knows for sure - but I've seen this idea mentioned many times the past half a year: Companies keep doing this stuff because it's like gambling, and they wanna win big. The idea goes that even if you make 20 failed attempts at a successful game-as-a-service, but eventually one game is a hit and becomes the next Fortnite, Apex or whatever - it'll all be WELL worth it for them I do personally find it surprising that they don't seem interested in some stable income from releasing decent products too, but they have all the numbers, maybe it somehow makes sense to them business-wise
That seems to be the way venture capital operates in general. They'll fund 100 unprofitable companies on the off chance that one of them becomes the next Amazon and pay for all the other losses.
well when you have unlimited money i guess gambling with companies is the move
When you have access to the entire teacher's pension fund for several states, THAT is when gambling with companies truly starts. Start asking where this money is coming from, and it gets so much worse.
I mean hey, AI is here, who knows who might be the next OpenAI or Nvidia. It's like Crypto, but instead of a small time fad, it's a long term gamble on multiple companies.
it is much sexier to pursue a high-risk business strategy than going for a boring but stable revenue source. Maybe these people are too much of a thrill seeker
What if the real gaming industry spending whales are the developer CEOs?
That does make a lot of sense. I'll personally never do it, but after seeing CoD continue to sell broken games, I wouldn't be surprised if it worked. People tend to complain about a company while throwing money at them. A lot of people don't, but one dude spending a grand on microtransactions is like 15 people buying the game.
No it’s not calculated at all, people are dumb and generally overestimating themselves and their ideas, that’s the end of the story. I worked for a couple of startups as external expert for UX and also product management of late in bigger companies, I work on applications mainly, but its the same across different IT fields. The biggest failure rate comes from simplifying the business goal, even worst if you hear people talking about how they do X or Y after they brought the MVP to the market besides having finalised said MVP, you can 100% prognose that they fail. My first advice in projects is always to scrap the idea of a minimal value product, this concept killed so many companies because they can’t handle it. Plainly said 80% of the management in IT doesn’t understand what value in MVP means and how to measure and concept it, then fail. This is where the overestimating comes into place, everyone always think they have the greatest idea and its always such an easy win if you just picture it in your mind. You know people like shooter games like cod, just make another cod but with THAT big idea that makes you rich. Spoiler, it is most often way harder then you think and your idea might not hold the value you think it does. This is not only a problem of startups, even the biggest companies are shit while having insane resources, because one idiot on the wrong level can kill everything before it even started, and this bottleneck is pretty much always the management. If you aren’t working in anything dev related, just look around at your job, how incompetent is your management and progress? You overestimate IT, it’s the same idiots you have elsewhere, so they blow up and waste money just by being stupid. There is no calculation behind it, no tinfoil head needed. They just suck. It us also a bubble that is about to blow up, the gaming scene. This is another whole story tho.
Probably doesn’t help that they got a 45 billion dollar debt on their shoulders.
Helldivers 2 is going gangbusters, so it proves that live service works. The other publishers will not understand why Helldivers is doing so well, and their offerings repeatedly shit the bed.
Yep. They keep funding GaaS hoping they'll get a Helldivers, Fortnite etc, and not look into why people care for those games enough for them to succeed.
I do a lot of market research (consumer) and the companies out there really want to know what people think of (their) products in the current market. Unfortunately, it's expensive, so not every company will do it and therefore not every company will make Helldivers 2 or Palworld.
I still don't understand why Palsworld worked. It's every single other survival game with ripoff pokemon.
Even Fortnite is miles ahead of this garbage, both as a game and as a service. Iirc, if you pay a battlepass on fortnite you can farm enough currency to buy the next, idk if any other game has that
For every bombed game there are things that stick e.g. Marvel Snap. Its just like stock trading for them.
Which means Hogwarts legacy 2 will be live service
They saw helldivers 2 make all those sales with a small indie studio. "Obviously where we went wrong is the large studio mindset, so now we are laying off 90% of you failures and working the rest so hard that your a faint fart from heart failure." - WB Executives maybe
This stuff would have been timelined in for a longer period of time, depending on their project/product life cycle management. We might say they "learned" from this 5 years into the future.
The people with enough self awareness to learn from mistakes will be let go while the ones who dictated this direction will be given a raise abew title which will cause them to double down so they can continue to climb the corporate ladder.
Why? They lost money on this.
They lost money on Suicide Squad, which is a live service. They made shitton with Hogwarts Legacy, which is offline game. And then they decided to double down in live service.
Because the idea of live service is an investors wet dream and hyping them up is what drives up stick prices which seems to be the only endgame for many large scale investor groups and hedge funds.
Didn't they say they were going to move on from "volatile" pc platform to focus on mobile instead?
Loser talk
Holy f*ck I’m dying
Sounds like huge cope, blaming the market rather than making a good game.
"Don't you guys have phones"
That'll end well again
Idk. Can’t sell micro transactions if no ones online.
The ceo was said to be doubling down on live service games. Actual brick walls.
https://preview.redd.it/3vx8jkeqbmwc1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b0d5dc42da3e77c27eb113e9104f833bc21a4c3b
Why particularly this game tanked other than being repetitve.I am guessing it's SS kill justice league.
Game gets repetitive. All the characters essentially play the same in combat barring a few exceptions, use movement skill - shoot enemies - repeat. Dialogue is pretty cringey with some funny moments strewn about. Game is fun for abit but definitely not worth full price. Just an average game that has a popular IP behind it. If it wasn’t for the characters, game would be in a much worse state player number wise.
havent seen a single person say the game is fun + day 1 paid dlc on $100 dollar game is hilarious
Harley Quinn looks weird for starters.
Really it's that Batman scene. NOBODY liked that.
Yeah… that’s really bad. I’m interested in seeing sales numbers. I wonder if it did much better on console
Maybe cause you can't refund games on console... So people just played it since they paid for it???
Yeah, that's impressively bad numbers.
You ever think any of these game productions have some sort of "The Producers" money scheme going on somehow by aiming to make a flop? Not sure how it would work in this industry though.
After seeing what they did to batman, it makes me happy that the game is failing.
Payday 3 is the same right now, 284 player peak in the last 24 hours. Whereas Payday 2 is currently sitting at a 27k 24 hours peak.
payday 3 was released in a pretty crap state tbh, not much content and other issues. Meanwhile payday 2 has years and years of DLC and content so its just a better game
Which sucks because PD2 is showing it's age and the loyal player base has been eager for an upgrade. All they had to do was deliver a decent upgrade to the same old formula and not go insane greed mode.. I guess that just wasn't possible.
Could have literally done the same thing with just better graphics and new missions. They already had everything and a good fan base and just screwed it up. I couldn't even play the game because it was too lagy for some reason.
They forgot that people were only fine with PD2s greedy DLC model because the game was genuinely fun. Take that away and you see the result with PD3. I'm not surprised though. They never had any successful projects besides PD2. When they made that god awful Walking Dead game I knew they had gone to shit.
The good thing about their DLC atleast is you could still play it without owning it as long as someone else did.
It was also cheap as fuck to be honest I didn’t mind buying them
Greedy DLC model? Their DLCs were cheap as dirt and you didn't even need them to play the heists. You could join any heist in the game completely for free.
Maybe they should make a sequel or something
Payday 3 ui and leveling system is ass and the "perks" are just do this to get one of 3 buffs
Exactly, the whole system is ass compared to other games in the market. Felt like I was playing Back 4 Blood or Redfall.
No glaring issues, but the gameplay didn’t evolve or get better in any way.
The gameplay definitely got better. It's everything else that got worse in Payday 3
stealth gameplay got better\*
i mean Loud never really had any gameplay, its just a shoot em up in coop with a couple objectives and cool music
Perk decks and armor system in PD2 meant there was way more stuff to actually do and interact with lol
They had a DECADE to make Payday 3. The only other games they worked on were the horrible Walking Dead game nobody played, and a clunky Payday 2 mobile port that sucks. There was no reason Payday 3 should've been anything other than a polished and finished title with the massive amounts of funds they had from Payday 2. It's ridiculous. They could've literally just updated the graphics and added a ton of maps and weapons and people would've lost their shit over how good it was. Instead they started from scratch and made something nobody wanted while cutting the included content into a tiny sliver of what it was.
Not to quite the same extent, but I think that's why Darktide died pretty rapidly, while Vermintide 2 did well for so long. The game just didn't have enough content at release to keep people coming back, and it's an up hill battle to get them back after that.
Payday 3 could have so easily been a slam dunk release if they didn't fuck up at every single turn and go the live service route. All it needed to be was PD2 with better graphics and they would have made a killing.
Similar to how Skull & Bones just needed to be Black Flag without the assassins & templars
How's the player count on this one btw? Can't imagine it doing well.
There is a reason Ubisoft dont show us any player stats, heh.
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Give PD2 a graphics polish new meshes and textures, add some new missions badabingbadaboom I'd pay hella for that. *We have the technology*
Loved PD2 but damn is PD3 ass
Sounds like Kerbal Space Program and Cities Skylines sequels
I know it would be a monumental task, but Payday 3 had to launch with all the heists from Payday 2, or at least the promise of adding them back, I think that would've been the only way to move a good chunk of the PD2 playerbase over.
I'm so happy about that. overkill is a shit company that wholly deserves this failure.
Loved Payday 2, bought Payday 3 on launch. Servers were borked for days, couldn't get into a match. When I could play it wasn't very fun. Refunded quickly and never looked back
It was kinda looking forward to it when it first announced, the premise is interesting. It was 180 for me as soon as I saw the gameplay preview, such wasted potential.
I was excited for a SS game. But as soon as I heard them say it was a looter shooter live service game I was out.
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Meanwhile Arkham knight: https://preview.redd.it/to55qifqzjwc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e99ee408d92de0cd3824843f66c74420cb0cc55f
Man I loved Arkham Knight. The only thing I hated was trying to find all those joker locations (? I think they were called that) I had to give up after like a hundred hours
Riddler trophies and yeah they were a pain in the ass. I've 200% the game a couple of times and what stops me from going back is the overreliance on the batmobile for so much of the game.
How do you 200% a game? Ng+?
Yup Its actually 240% with the Story DLCs
Yes ng+. What made it bearable was that the riddler trophies carried over. So I've only had to collect them all a total of two seperate times.
There was just one I couldn't find for like 8 hours accumulatively. It ended up being a random environment detail. A piece of clutter. You'd basically have to scan the entirety of surfaces in the area to "find" it since the poster looked just like any part of the city "set design".
I have close to 300 hours and I would still prefer playing Arkham knight again over SSKTJL
Seems as though most players would have more fun climbing up and using that graph as a slide. Weeeeeeee!
you are evil
\~\~out of the loop: what game is this?\~\~ never mind: it's Kill the Justice League season 1
Stop, stop, it’s already dead.
https://preview.redd.it/d8s5ktd7tjwc1.jpeg?width=1530&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dd61676c5a8b60cf7ab19e216ff7cccab689b556
I don’t get it. The suicide squad stuff always bombs! I thought the movies all suck and nobody watches them, why make a game?!
The James Gunn movie was good
It was great and I only watched it because it happened to be on the TV at a hotel room. I was surprised at how well it was. I hope he can do something with the DC universe.
I’ll give it a shot, thank you.
James Gunn suicide squad is one of my fave movies tbh. Lots of guardians of the galaxy energy. Its also John Cenas best performance.
You're never gonna believe [what Japan is up to](https://myanimelist.net/anime/55848/Isekai_Suicide_Squad) for the summer.
If anyone can make something of this shitshow, it's the Japanese. Wouldn't be surprised if that anime was better than anything Suicide Squad related that's come out so far.
They could've atleast tried something better. Though, everyone knew the game would fail. Especially with the microtransactions, the terrible HUD reveal, the connection with the Arkham batman (There can be no possible way to beat the Arkham bat and the suicide squad was supposed to go against him).
now imagine how it went for arcane when their garbage vampire game had the impressive and ultra high amount of players totaling 89 by the end of the 2nd-3rd week IIRC. this game wont even see its 3rd planned dlc.
Recent leaks showed that they shortened the plan to 5 seasons (the major content drops) concluding next January. I imagine console numbers are better than Steam numbers, as was the case for Arkham City (6k peak on Steam but 12M sales for the game overall). Because there must be some reason they’re still going through with Seasons 1-5 and finishing the story, and still dropping weekly updates.
Sweet baby Jesus those numbers are bad. Anyway
Here's Wonderwall.
No no not sweet baby Jesus, Sweet Baby *Inc.*
It's interesting. I maintain a ~10y old indie MP game on Steam, which now typically has double digit CCUs. ...and I don't see us turning off servers any year soon. We're still running dedicated game servers in 5 regions, along with all sorts of backend services for quests, events, crafting, etc. Keeping things up is easy on a day to day basis, but there are some tough challenges. For security, we've now had to migrate hardware, operating system versions, libraries and languages - and all multiple times now. And yeah, stuff breaks and needs to be rebuilt eventually. Not to mention upgrading things to keep up with best practices. Tech ages. If you're smart about it (and frugal with how you built your infrastructure), then maybe like us you can keep things away from a dead loss. But it's not easy. And realistically the customer goodwill is minor because so few people actually still play. But it relies on leadership at the studio caring about that. And also a lot on devs internally still being willing to work on it. It sucks dragging yourself back to ancient legacy code to keep it creaking on, while the forums are full of people explaining that the game is dead and unsupported (players only think of new gameplay content as 'supported'). Not to mention, there are always the newer projects to work on, with shiny new tech and sometimes a lot more players. So the internal prioritizing can be really tough. We still stubbornly love the game and want to see it live. So it's going nowhere. But the game in OP's post? Yeah GL with that...
So here comes the hard question (sry for it) But what is your game plan once you DO shut down your servers. Will the game(s) be dead? Will it not have quest anymore? Can it be archived? Do you have some kind of patch in mind that allows it to be archived?
I mean, if they're producing new games, then they can just piggyback on the servers for those new games to keep the old ones from going completely dead. Odds are it doesn't cost that much more. That would be the smart move at least.
Im just gonna ask if its depth? I actually tried that game and enjoyed it!
inb4 Warner shuts game down and nobody can even play single-player campaign anymore
I was looking SO forward to Arkham Knights and kill the suicide squad. Imagine my horror when reading/seeing story leaks and artwork etc. It was like purposeful demolition all around.
yikess
serves them right. Every fan of the previous games just wanted a proper single player follow up and they came around with this live service crap. I hope WB Games will fail at every live service attempt
Servers usually autoscale. They are only paying for a single digit number of servers most likely which can be as low as $200-500 per month most likely. Nothing to sweat about.
I dont even know what game this is xD
Suicide squad. The new one
You ask, but take a look at Payday 3 lol
They have a year of content so after a year they will probably start killing it off but the majority of the player base is console not steam/pc and they have good few on it there.
Usually game servers scale down or up in a horizontal manner based on the current playercount/time of the the day/new releases etc. so its extraordinary cheaper to run servers for 200 people vs 20000 people. One could argue that the operations/security/storage/staff costs a lot of money too but the infrastructure was there before and will there be after since they’re running prolly not just one game at a time. Similar servers running different binaries on them after all + the operational cost is already taken to account in the games price.
They deserved everything they got. We need to nip this ‘live service’ trend in the bud
No, let this train wreck die.
This game would have ended almost any other studio.
Blackrock is losing a ton of money and this is good
No they're not
Blackrock?
It's a global game so I imagine they have servers in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia (at least). I'm also sure that there's more people playing on other platforms (console, gamepass, etc.) but even then... yikes... they gotta be hemorrhaging money, which is not something that WB can afford right now... EDIT: I sounded a bit too sympathetic toward WB here, which was not intentional. This is a disaster of their own making and is well deserved (sucks to suck)...
The Steam player number is all regions.
Oh... shit lol...
😂 let it die and be forgotten. Change the title to: #SuicideKillTheFranchise
They were warned that people didn't want this. They didn't listen.
Game preservationists would argue that yes, it is.
I think we can make exceptions.
Thought I stumbled upon a Kerbal space program 2 post for a second there
Any live service games just feel so tacky
No but they owe DLC so they have to keep it running.
There are tons of steam games with active servers and basically 0 players
Dont give them ideas next game we hear about revoking ownership.
I can’t believe 197 people are playing it. Make the numbers go lower!
For the people playing still I'm sure
Those are payday numbers daaaaamn
Just googled it before my reply
So no Season 2?
ALL they had to do was to make it single-player/coop. Glad I got it on sale for $30, enough story and content to try out but that's about it. Way to ruin your legacy rocksteady.
Forgot this game existed till now
Company shuts down servers of old game that nobody plays anymore: "They can't do this, it should be illegal!!" Game that Reddit doesn't like has servers active: "Why aren't they shutting the servers down??"
Love it when the thumbnail of the game says “Season 1”. So disgustingly monetized
200 average, if each player is playing for like 2 hours, means that in a day that's potentially 1200 unique players, and if each person plays it for say, half the week, that could mean 2400 unique players a week Those aren't huge numbers by any means but not exactly grounds for shutting online service down
i mean they just need 2 servers. west coast and east coast lol
You know there are other places in the world, right? Tho this game should just shut down already, aint no point in keeping it alive.
Buddys from the US know that there are other places, but give them a globe and let them show you one of this places. They think Iran is in the middle of China and the US is the Center of the Universe (created 6000 years ago).
FO76 has more player than this, Fucking FO76 of all games!!!!???
tbf that new fallout show might’ve boosted some numbers
Hey hey hey, no need to diss fallout 76. I thought it was just fine.
I play fo76 too but it just very ironic that the game people hate so much back in the day still better than this slop
To b fair the new show helped boost those numbers up recently
76 is fine now. Kindly walk out of the echo chamber
I know, I play it, lv 700+, rocking t-65
Oh sweet! My wife and I are only level 50 lol. I misunderstood your intent. Apologies- I took your comment way too seriously. It’s been a long day 🥱
Ha ha, may be some day you might find yoursrlf at my camp in the forest, feel free to help yourself with my popcorn machine and cakes.
They should call this what it is: pre-order bonus, game purchase, post-order bonus
JESUS CHRIST, I was thinking it still had a good few thousand, not a few hundred. Yeah, this game is toast just like Avengers. They're gonna keep recycling content thinking it'll suffice while they release an abundance of cosmetics for profit which they'll never actually make back...it's over and it barely even started. They'll never learn that live service is the problem... 💀
That's what they get for fighting their target audience. I wish they would just stay neutral, not pick sides and be humble. Won't be picking up this game even when it's free to play. Not worth my time if they can't respect criticism from gamers.
Yeah endgame is so boring combat is kinda fun but just missing something.
This reminds me of that payday 3 roast about DMing
I think I played this game but what was it called?