So, credit to someone finding this: http://forum.eternalcrusade.com/thr...tion-from-the-devs.58047/page-14#post-1253654 I figured it deserved its own thread. Here is the SOTC: http://steamcommunity.com/games/375230/announcements/detail/593737697911675434 "First of all, we want to thank you for getting us to this place. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you. We're fully aware that the scope of this game changes due to a lot of reasons in the last 4 years and believe me, we want nothing more to get there. So we figured out a way to get there. Mainly since money doesn't grow on trees. When we have the choice of launching and having a good runway to expand the game post launch, you choose that instead of developing for more months and launch without any runway to expand. It just doesn't work that way in the real world. Then we would be taking your money and running away with it. But we aren't. We decided to focus on the core shooter and our MMO elements suffered through fewer iterations. It didn't bother us because we're iterating more on them right now. Now you have a persistent world third-person shooter. It is a game. We love it a we have played it daily for almost 2 years now. Can you classify us as a lobby shooter? Sure. No denying that but we are more than just a lobby shooter. The largest MMOs in the world have less world persistence than we do. Don't take my word for it, google "Crossfire". Is it an excuse for not reaching our goals yet? Not at all. It's a statement saying we aren't done yet. And maybe you'll agree with our assessment in the next months of free updates. This week we have the first patch addressing issues that emerged over the weekend, ranging from fixing the world map, server issues, balancing factions and individual classes, fixing fortresses so they can be won. We'll also make it up to you with items in the store, make it more clear and that the crates behave appropriately, make sure you have your RTC, reimburse RTC in certain cases and free stuff. This I've always said. We make it up to you. We might want your money but we're also fair. Everything you're missing, we'll make up to you, with Pop-Khorne on top. So to summarize, a patch this week, a patch next week with even more wargear, fixes and improvements, some surprises as a token of our appreciation and a bumpy ride this weekend. To make it even less bumpy we will be pushing harder for spinning up our regional servers. Of course, you should see an expansion in about 3 months after getting a couple of monthly content updates till then. Thank you for hanging in there with us. The Eternal Crusade team" Discuss.
Yes, by a user who cares (kudos by the way). My question is more why it doesn't come from the Dev's to the forum, but we have to scrap our information together
If the picture in the blog post is their entire team then they have a team of 40 something people. Support staff such as administrative personnels get like 30-40k a year, programs usually go from 60k to 80k. They need literally millions to operate a year (that is excluding office leasing, utilities, insurances, etc etc). This game currently at peak time only has 1500 people, dropped from 3k at release. It's not possible to fund such a large team through micro transactions from a player population so small and fast dropping even lower. Remember, the people that actually buys micro transactions are the very small minority. That's why free to play games requires such a large player population to make them profitable. Few years ago, in Bandai's financial release, they've stated they need to sell at least half a million copy on console to be profitable. Since this game doesn't have to pay console fees, they probably need to sell a bit less but still much higher than current sell number below. According to data provided here: steamspy.com/app/375230 This game sold less than 100k copies, around 80k (much of that would be early access owners so they are not getting new money in). Majority of that profit will not go back into developers but will be given to their publishers. Remember, the devs has also give up portion of the profit to Game Worshop for licensing fee. The financial reality is that this game's future is pretty GG. The developers also have a contractual duty to port it to consoles due to publishers wants to milk a bit more return. They are definitely focusing on that part of their contract first before doing any meaningful development back on the PC platform. So in their blog they say they are going to patch this week, patch next week, then more content coming out. The patches at most are going to be small graphical bug fixes in maps with some tweaks on current in game numbers (reduce weapon damage, reduce or buff HP that sort of things that can be easily changed with a flick of a few numbers). Future contents are probably some that half done currently but shelfed at release, so the few features that they did demo on during alpha but not in release are going to be the "future contents" and the most likely scenario is going to be a few more maps/game modes and few vehicles, perhaps individual transports such as bikes (they must've already made the graphical models). Now knowing, Bandai's probably losing money as of now and thus won't invest more into this IP, and developer are barely recuperating costs thus having little to invest into the future, the developers, if want to keep sustain the game and even release new contents, have to literally move into a garage, cut their salaries, fired the support staff, and just work on the game as if it is a charity project. Don't see that happening, if they have that kind of devotion they would've done it long ago. Bandai also has a shit history of marketing in none asian markets. They released a very good Warhammer Fantasy game few years back, Warhammer Mark of Chaos (almost no bugs very good game mechanics very good graphics very good single player campaign very true to Warhammer Fantasy) but almost no one has heard of it because they did jack crap for marketing. They are continue repeating that mistake on Eternal Crusade. Currently, all the publicity Eternal Crusade's getting is how shitty it is. Bandai picking up this project is probably one of the worst thing that could've happened outside the developer's trying to swallow a giant elephant whole.
I just realised there is another thread about this. Although the title wasn't as pretty @Cupcakeunleashed Let us keep this one nice and objective guys! Hopefully they can give us a run down of what the patch will contain this Twitch. I wonder how much balancing/fixing they can accomplish for the first patch. Also good to see that more store items are coming next week
