New World

Morrow said:

Lol yeah it was baffling how bad the cosmetic store was at launch when they had the most potential to make a huge amount of money. Millions of dollars in lost profit.

Also, this game was supposed to be mainly about selling Prime. You can't do that if you don't have a large active playerbase that keeps playing.

What the fuck is going on?

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If they had half a fucking brain they would've made it a 5$ sub or free with prime. On a side note, fuck cosmetic shops in MMO's. That shit is fucking cancer. I can't stand seeing people have cool ass shit in the game that they didn't actually get from doing things in the actual game. I wanna be like "oh hey that's a sweet ass looking sword, where'd you get it?". That was easily one of my favorite things about old school MMO's like EQ. Saw a cool looking dude rocking stuff you'd never seen before and you knew they were badass just by looking at them.

Lumi said:

If they had half a fucking brain they would've made it a 5$ sub or free with prime. On a side note, fuck cosmetic shops in MMO's. That shit is fucking cancer. I can't stand seeing people have cool ass shit in the game that they didn't actually get from doing things in the actual game. I wanna be like "oh hey that's a sweet ass looking sword, where'd you get it?". That was easily one of my favorite things about old school MMO's like EQ. Saw a cool looking dude rocking stuff you'd never seen before and you knew they were badass just by looking at them.

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I'm "hoping" that whenever they pull their head out of their ass, turn off player collision in PVE content and introduce a raid - that we'll get some nice armor / weapon skins out of that. But ya, I would have much rather paid a sub and got my royal outfit the old fashion way.

I'll pick the game back up more whenever they do server merges. But let me know if you need anything Lumi .

McFly said:

They're actually killing this fucking game. It's going to make a good retrospective.

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Which I think is intentional at this point. Amazon was under zero pressure to release this game under any time frame. Bezos makes more per day than this entire game development cost to make make.

They captured a million + sales and will let it ride off into the sunset. The damage is done, the majority of all sales the game would generate have already been made, and now there is only around 10% of players still around. With no sub, a terrible cash shop, and a tiny player base....there is no reason for them to support this any longer and they can move on to something else.

They wrote this game off when they released it a full year too early and knew this would be the case.

You get lots of cosmetics, emotes, and even store credit for having prime. Check your Twitch

Dumping and moving on is a bad idea - you set the tone for future games. If people see you dump shit early, they won’t support future releases

Cybsled said:

You get lots of cosmetics, emotes, and even store credit for having prime. Check your Twitch

Dumping and moving on is a bad idea - you set the tone for future games. If people see you dump shit early, they won’t support future releases

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I feel like people generally say that cause Amazon itself has a history of dumping products. But I personally just look at it through the lens that AGS, with a whopping two titles (NW and LA), one of which they didnt design, they just havent worked out all the problems a mature company would have worked through already. The other issues is that either management takes no advice from the employees or a chunk of employees just have no passion for the project. Probably both the more I think about it, granted who the management is and how they got that position - and how many complaints from devs that have worked on the project in the past or worked with the code that NW is based off of. Regardless of all that, the only thing that will help NW steer into a more positive direction is just time, but as we all know games as a service worst enemy is just that - time. Out of all that, whoever thought AGS's first entry into the market should be an MMO is retarded.

Cybsled said:

Dumping and moving on is a bad idea - you set the tone for future games. If people see you dump shit early, they won’t support future releases

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This is such a great point I think it's worth expanding on, if you wouldn't mind.

Well you can bucket it into two silos which can interplay off each other

1) Live Service Game stability/ support
2) RMT in your games (DLC, cosmetics, etc)

#2 is bolstered by confidence in point #1. People will not be willing to invest additional money into "shinies" or "boosts" unless they think the game will be stable, supported, and around for a while. Companies like Activision have slowly learned this - Sure, you can shit out CoD titles every year, but if the title is tossed out like trash when the next one comes out, what motivation does the gaming population have to spend on RMT? Warzone was sort of their answer to that when they confirmed Warzone would continue to be around and would change, but you could still keep the cosmetics and shit you buy and the box sale of whatever COD title you owned would also play into this model. This instilled gaming population confidence and sales soared. But then confidence in the platform began to falter because of perceived p2w, cheaters, and balance issues. This hurts your RMT prospects.

You can also see it with some of the Korean p2w games - they get strong initial support, then they get dumped except for cosmetic updates. P2W aside, this has soured gamers on these games (esp in the West). Why do I want to spend all this money on a gacha game if they are going to put it on life support in a year or two? People have less confidence in the core game.

AGS has the distinction of being a new guy, so what they do with #1 will not only impact #2 for this game, but #2 for every game in the future. And in turn that hurts profitability.

popsicledeath said:

This is such a great point I think it's worth expanding on, if you wouldn't mind.

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Companies who come around to clean up their products often get a lot of leeway. For example, people really liked some of the latter expansions to civ games and gave plenty of leeway even if a launch like beyond earth is pure garbage. You establish legitimacy that way.

The opposite is true. If you have a ditched title in your library you are going to always hesitate to buy a new product from them. Lots of people avoided civ 6 who bought 5 even though both were arguably similarly bad. BE poisoned the well.

This argument can be made with many titles. For all my shit talk, eq devs do tend to care about their products long term, and will eventually adjust things like tlps or overseer and etc. I like most everyone took blizzard on faith for a long time, but will question future products now. Amazon will not get my support on principle going forward; if they fix new world and have a baller product in a year or two they could win me back.

But does that happen? Or do these companies shit on the minority of us while cashing checks from the majority of gamers.

Maybe the entire existence of the gaming industry and practices of gamers is the exception that proves the rule.

Sure, most big name game companies can fuck off as far as I'm concerned. Meanwhile traditional studios making traditional games seem to be earning enough profit despite the industry being a dumpster fire to not care what I think. Their only concern seems to be figuring out how to make mobile gaming money or selling more cosmetic items. Are the most successful games even catering to us anymore?

If we bail on a product, they just cater to the less discerning audience. If they bail on a product, they alienate us, but then are usually bailing on a game to target the less discerning audiences.

The die-hard old-school gamers, or however one wants to describe it, are no longer important. Just random dudes that want to play he's to get away from reality for a bit are no longer the important demographic.

Our wives/girlfriends and sissy kids are now the gamers. They're easier marks, willing to spend more money for a shittier product. Hell,much of it is essentially spending our money to ruin our hobby. Or worse, raise a stink about boycotting Amazon or Disney+, but when the wife or kid wants their game or to watch shows, well, then what? Happy wife, and all.

Amazon can drop support or development on a product like this and alienate the hardcore, serious gamers.... Because that's part of the point. Ultimately, we no longer matter, and boycotting them doesn't hold their feet to the fire so much as reinforce their notion it was a mistake to even try to appeal to the discerning minority.

They'll realize their mistake wasn't alienating the "real" gamers, but ever trying to appeal to them in the first place. But yeah, they won't get your money.... Next time? They don't care, and probably will still get a lot of our money anyhow.

That really nails it. I've seen posts on FoH about how mobile games make infinitely more money than classical gaming ever will.

Why dedicate resources to it then? Go after the easier money and tell "gamers" to fuck off.

If everyone goes into the mobile market it will become saturated and then hostile to most newcomers. Mobas as an example. Mmos had a bit if saturation right around wow (eq2 eve etc) and at times after but for the most part could be considered dry now. Nothing keeping a GOOD mmo from fortunes if one came along and fucking worked.

popsicledeath said:

But does that happen? Or do these companies shit on the minority of us while cashing checks from the majority of gamers.

Maybe the entire existence of the gaming industry and practices of gamers is the exception that proves the rule.

Sure, most big name game companies can fuck off as far as I'm concerned. Meanwhile traditional studios making traditional games seem to be earning enough profit despite the industry being a dumpster fire to not care what I think. Their only concern seems to be figuring out how to make mobile gaming money or selling more cosmetic items. Are the most successful games even catering to us anymore?

If we bail on a product, they just cater to the less discerning audience. If they bail on a product, they alienate us, but then are usually bailing on a game to target the less discerning audiences.

The die-hard old-school gamers, or however one wants to describe it, are no longer important. Just random dudes that want to play he's to get away from reality for a bit are no longer the important demographic.

Our wives/girlfriends and sissy kids are now the gamers. They're easier marks, willing to spend more money for a shittier product. Hell,much of it is essentially spending our money to ruin our hobby. Or worse, raise a stink about boycotting Amazon or Disney+, but when the wife or kid wants their game or to watch shows, well, then what? Happy wife, and all.

Amazon can drop support or development on a product like this and alienate the hardcore, serious gamers.... Because that's part of the point. Ultimately, we no longer matter, and boycotting them doesn't hold their feet to the fire so much as reinforce their notion it was a mistake to even try to appeal to the discerning minority.

They'll realize their mistake wasn't alienating the "real" gamers, but ever trying to appeal to them in the first place. But yeah, they won't get your money.... Next time? They don't care, and probably will still get a lot of our money anyhow.

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Adding onto this 1m box sales is fucking dogshit.

Rockstar Games dropped Max Payne from it's franchise roster because of it's 4.3m box sales on the 3rd game. Citing terrible sales performance. Indie studio would blood sacrifice people to sell even just 2-3m boxes. Yeah, terrible is relative. Amazon and Rockstar consider themselves on that level. "Hey we don't give a fuck guys, sorry".

If you aren't doing CoD numbers, they won't follow up. New World was a little experiment demo, nothing more. Amazon doesn't care about 1m boxes sold. They want to compete with GTA 5.

mkopec said:

I might believe all this if they werent surprised by the sheer numbers themselves when it launched. Then they scrambled to open up more servers. They were probably planning for a few hundred thousand top. And sure any game studio would love to push COD numbers but that shit is just unobtanium. Especially in the mmorpg genre. Sub or not what game ever achieved COD numbers? 1 got close for a few years?

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PUBG sold 70m boxes. You better believe it pal.

They want the numbers any MOBA/MMO/Survival game can potentially pull. They aren't looking to compete in MMOs in the traditional sense. This was just proof of concept.

They did initially chase the sweet survival money. New World was all in on survival arena PUBG money. For whatever reason they hacked the game to ribbons and produced an excuse for an "MMO".

Why that is will be explained only by the future actions AGS takes. Like New World itself though, don't expect to make any sense of it. This company is run by some headless chickens.