dude, I did not say that, I explicitly said that devs make mistakes too.
Itâs not free. The âfreeâ part refers to the demo that has 3 rotating civs from the base game, the first act of the campaign as well as access to unranked mutliplayer. You are still required to purchase the full game via this DLC that was handed out for free to everyone who purchased AoE 3 prior to August 2023:
The free version is also Steam exclusive as on Microsoft Store, you can only purchase the base game without any demo:
I donât really know why people still think that AoE 3 is entirely free.
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On a much smaller scale, 3DE players can highlight the WE Esports intro that appeared only in that game and had no connection to the game itself. How is that a good alocation of resources? Iâm sure it wasnât cheap to make.
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Because youâre trying to twist the topic.
If the cancellation is a result of the game not being profitable, which is in turn the result of several bad business and marketing decisions WE had made, we are criticizing those decisions.
If it NOT a result of ânot profitableâ, but internal politics, poor management, total miscommunication between the player community, we are calling them idiots.
We donât need to know whether the final decision is a well-calculated business move, or who had the say (and thatâs common knowledge. Thank you very much). We are talking about who caused it.
Like we donât need to learn how each part of the car functioned when it crashed into a wall. We want to know why the driver didnât press the brake.
WE from top-down must have also believed 3K and mobile would attract swarms of Chinese players that totally outweigh the âvocal minoritiesâ that had been loyal to the series for 20 years. How had that plan been doing?
Edit: and we have already more than one evidence of how tone-deaf WE as a whole has been. Maybe theyâd still financially survive and even succeed as a non-AOE dev after they finally attracted the âwider audienceâ in their dreams. But what do I care?
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WE from top-down must have also believed 3K and mobile would attract swarms of Chinese players that totally outweigh the âvocal minoritiesâ that had been loyal to the series for 20 years. How had that plan been doing?
I assume quite well. Mobile Gotcha games rake in profits (as much of a cancer as they are, I hold them fully responcible for every terrible cash grab that PC games have tried inserting in the last 2 decades)
And if the Devs arenât making moves to change the civs other than patch notes, that indicates to me theyâre more worried about pissing off those who paid than those who havenât.
But what do I care?
clearly quite a lot or you wouldnât keep posting on the forum.
And yet again you returned to the âthey made a decision, and it must be a right one, lemme find out whyâ mode. Something you cannot get away with. Something you just denied a few minutes ago.
As an âas-a-dev-myselfâ, are you not even aware of corporates never admitting mistakes?
When Blizzard said âdo you guys not have phones?â, did they make the precise calculation of how many people theyâll appeal and how many theyâll piss off? Or when they butchered Warcraft reforged and OW2? Who were the brilliant business mastermind behind those decisions?
Or when Atari rushed the production and release of ET?
Or when Sony dumped 400 millions into Concord?
Because they still havenât gone all-in to the âwider audienceâ. Iâm warning people of the outcome when they did. And they will.
I care about them being a competent and responsible AOE dev, not anything else they want to become.
BTW, you skipped the biggest chunk of my point. And the entire âitâs NOT freeâ response
Maybe thatâs exactly why you fit the current gaming industry so perfectly: never admitting mistakes
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Iâm honestly not sure what youâre accusing me of here, you asked a question, I answered it.
As an âas-a-dev-myselfâ, are you not even aware of corporates never admitting mistakes?
When Blizzard said âdo you guys not have phones?â, did they make the precise calculation of how many people theyâll appeal and how many theyâll piss off? Ot when they butchered Warcraft reforged and OW2? Who were the brilliant mastermind behind those decisions?
Or when Atari rushed the production and release of ET?
Or when Sony dumped 400 millions into Concord?
I understand you are angry, I donât have the answers to why every company made the choices they made other than generally speaking, if they have shareholders, itâs whatever corperate wants.
âDo you guys not have a phone?â you would have to ask Wyatt Cheng in that moment what he was thinking. I donât agree with Blizards strategy of attempting to market a mobile game to PC gamers who expected a PC game. I suspect under preasure, boos, expectations to sell it, he paniced and attempted to make a bad joke and it backfired. Iâm not saying âhes rightâ or âwhat he said wasnt out of touchâ. He was wrong, and it was out of touch. The Warcraft reforged phiasco I at least know some of because I knew people involved, Activision did an audit and the budget got cut. It was also part of why Morheim left. OW2 I have no idea but I imagine something similar given it was announced in the covid day and media growth skewed in a way that wasnât going to be sustainable, a lot of people made (bad) long term plans on that growth rate and scalled back when it wasnât sustained. I have no clue on the others I didnât follow Concord (other than what you stated, maybe a tax write off). No clue what ET is.
If you are asking for âwhy did they do the things they didâ because they thought it was the right call. There was evidense that 3 Kingdoms was a viable expansion idea (workshop downloads), there may have been additional influence from on high to target the chinese market. The community wanted more standard âmultiplayer/single playerâ packs, they delivered one. People have opinions on the 3 kingdoms civs being âviableâ, they wagered more people would be ok with them.
BTW, you skipped the biggest chunk of my point. And the entire âitâs NOT freeâ response
Maybe thatâs exactly why you fit the current gaming industry so perfectly: never admitting mistakes
Iâve lost track of what it is you want me to respond to. If its your âwho was driving the carâ analogy, let me be clear, Iâm not saying Developers, Managers, and especially Execs donât make mistakes. I said that in my first post in this thread
and problems can arrise from these roles. Sometimes you do have someone in the industry whos not actually passionate and just needs the work, sometimes they may be passionate but just not good at the job. People are human, humans make errors and mistakes, that can result in a bad game.
Though I do think itâs a bad anology. The driver did not crash, the driver didnât take you to where you wanted to go. Or even more acurately, the driver didnât offer you the option to go where you want to go (you donât have to pay the driver). Now arguing that the driver should be listening to riders asking to go to where you want to go, and theyâre dumb for not doing that is completely valid and I support your right to do it
You are mixing many things up:
Their intention, the execution of their intention, and customer interest.
And Iâm sure you know the difference
We all know the corporateâs intention is to make money. Thank you very much. We donât need your professional insights for that piece of info.
BUT
- They could be misinformed
- Their calculation could be wrong
- The execution can make mistakes
- Even the world can change: When Ubisoft planned Assassins Creed Shadows it was 2020. Now after many years of making, the trend they tried to chase had been gone.
- They could be inert and fail to response in time
- Even if all those went right, we still donât have to buy it.
Sony paid the studio hundreds of millions to make Concord. Advertised it as the flagship game-as-service. Dumped infinite marketing resources into it. Literally. Including a short animated film. Added an expensive price tag for a life service game. Still pushed its marketing and release after everyone hated it and no more than a few thousand people came to beta testing.
It sold around 20k copies and had a maximum of few hundred concurrent players.
But all those decisions must have been right.
Literally the biggest and best known crash in video game history. Are you really a game dev as you claim?
That you think this even needs to be argued or asked tells a lot about the mentality of the current game industry and why it sucks.
We donât need to ask them. They should come to ask us.
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Sony paid the studio hundreds of millions to make Concord. Advertised it as the flagship game-as-service. Dumped infinite marketing resources into it. Literally. Including a short animated film. Added an expensive price tag for a life service game. Still pushed its marketing and release after everyone hated it and no more than a few thousand people came to beta testing.
It sold around 20k copies and had a maximum of few hundred concurrent players.
But all those decisions must have been right.
Again, youâre putting words in my mouth. I did not state, at any point, that devs donât make mistakes. I, in fact, explicitly, stated that they do.
I was responding with my initial post, which apears to be the one youâre taking the most issue with, to a specific comment about development that implied project managers are often to blame for the decline of the video game industry and I explained my point of view (which you donât have to agree with) that the greater issue is the pursuit of profit over entertainment and creative process.
This was not meant to defend the AoE2 devs, itâs not meant to say âdevs canât make mistakesâ, they can and do.
Literally the biggest and best known crash in video game history. Are you really a game dev as you claim?
Blatent attempts at character assassination aside, No, I was not aware of the Atari ET video game which is what you reffered to (so much so that while I recognized ET I assumed it was an acronym for some other game). I am very aware of the Video game crash of 1983. I appreciate the bit of trivia. You learn something new everyday 
We donât need to ask them. They should come to ask us.
I agree. I typically run a mixture of surveys, meet and greets, podcasts, and other ways to reach people to either find out why players want a thing or to explain in details why we do the things we do or why we canât/wonât do a thing they want. If your question is can they do better? yes, absolutely
We are saying making 3K and later cancelling AOE3 (you brought that up) were mistakes, and you came in and said they need to eat and have pressure from shareholders blahblahblahblah
I donât know what you want to add here. We all know that value piece of professional insight that corporates need to make money. Thank you. We are talking about whether and why it was a mistake. And OP stating the company is now mostly yes-man provides some evidence.
And we didnât go deeper into, which I believe you are also very aware of (and defend anyway), all the lies, arrogance, gaslighting in the process. All pointing to a studio that is deeply rotten. And I believe the shareholders didnât force them to do that
I literally said Atari and ET and I assume you should know Atari is THE video game company at that time.
Hope you enjoyed the reading (in the last few minutes)
Yet every decision by Worldâs Edge has been right according to you.
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I would also like to point out that AoE3 was terribly mismanaged in one area in particular: singleplayer content. To summarize, none of the DLCs had actual campaigns, nor a good amount of singleplayer scenarios, in fact every other DLC in the series had more than any one of the AoE3 DLCs. Even the Knights one for AoE4 had 4 scenarios, which is a low amount, but itâs still more than any AoE3 expansion.
Well maybe the Freyr one is an exception to that because it has 1 scenario, but other AoM DLCs since had more campaign content, the Chinese one having 8 I believe, and now the Japanese one will have 12 levels. The opposite is true for AoE3 where every subsequent DLC had less content.
The African DLC merely had 3 historical battles, the USA and Mexico ones had only one (fucking 1!!!) each, with a second battle paywalled behind both of those DLCs (not either, you needed to own both). Then the Malta + Italy one had zero scenarios, no other DLC in the franchise except for cosmetic packs had 0 levels. Even V&V had 4 original scenarios on release!
Now the point is, that Worldâs Edge stated multiple times that the majority of players are campaign-only. We canât fact-check that, but for the sake of argument letâs suppose itâs true, and if itâs true, then they managed the game with extreme incompetence. 6 scenarios spread across 4 DLC, in a game where the majority supposedly plays only singeplayer scenarios⊠They failed to cater to their biggest market, no wonder the game died.
Now, if campaign enjoyers are the majority, then they didnât make content for them, which equals low sales. If they are not the majority and that statement is false, then they still alienated a substantial part of the playerbase, which they didnât do in any other game except for AoE4 I guess, because in other games they add a decent amount of scenarios per DLC.
So no, we canât blame the players for the death of the game, only Worldâs Edge for being incompetent.
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And yet they didnât host tournaments or make a good MP UI either.
They had been completely tone-deaf and out-of-touch for a long time. AOE2/4 used to get better management just because they had people who cared dedicated to them. But now Iâm not sure anymore.
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BTW,
They delivered none. Period.
Funny how you keep stating ânot defending themâ while inserting your defenses secretly all the time. Sounds very familiar to me.
Less than 50% positive on steam
Barely better than TMR (overpriced), V&V (literal s**t) and ROR (lacking), while having none of the outstanding problems of those three----then it must have a far bigger problem than any of them
Many positive comments made the exact same criticism.
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They did not lie. you are just stuck in your Eurocentric view of the world. âMedievalâ meaning after the fall of Rome does not mean jack crap to the chinese. The devs made a choice for story telling that the fall of the Han Dynasty was the chinese equivalent to the fall of Rome, thereby ushering in the Middle ages for China
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So is âweâre arenât splitting Chineseâ just misunderstood due to our eurocentrism? Does âwe need five civs to tell the stories we want to tellâ mean three civs because we need to interpret that statement through a sino-centric lens?
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Nobody has claimed that the Three Kingdoms period was the Middle Ages except that AI-generated speech the devs made about it.
No, itâs not the Middle Ages. China does not have a âMiddle Agesâ as western views would define it. But we have to define the time-frame of the game somewhere. And this is it, unless you want to start delving into AoE1 or AoE3âs areas.
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I found many sources stating that medieval China starts from the fall of the Han while others prefer to start with Sui. One is too early the other too late for the fall of Rome but still to have 3k in a medieval game seems to be acceptable or debatable at the very least, not completely out of proportion.
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âMedievalâ itself does not mean jack crap to the Chinese.
There is NO equivalence of fall of Rome in China. Why does it have to have one? Why does other parts of the world have to have something equivalent to Europe? This is the most Eurocentric of all.
And arrogance. âOh dear Chinese players we know your history better than you do and here is our perfectly medieval retelling of your own history based on a novelâ
WE may have started a whole new branch of historical studies: find the European medieval equivalence in other parts of the world
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you are right. youâre not allowed to talk about Chinese history unless you can prove Chinese ancestry.
You are also right, Medieval is an English word. We should delete the Chinese civilization from the game too.
There are a billion and one ways to talk about Chinese history in a less offensive and less cash-grabbing way, and WE chose the only way that is both offensive and cash grabbing, just like among all the professional PR outsource companies, they chose to hire shills who could not even make a point.
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