You had Dragonflight coming off of the heels of Shadowlands, the expansion where it caused people to leave in mass during that summer of 2021 and then you had the sexual assault lawsuit. expansion sales were lower then shadowlands.
As for subs I hear retention is high from the recent earning calls but there are no numbers publicly shared.
I hope they do step it up rather release a half baked game.
As for microtranactions… I know this is going to be hard pill to swallow for some folks…
Your not putting the genie back into the bottle.
Ever since that fabled horse armor that got released for a game that I forgot about, the genie got released and you can’t put him back in the bottle, its too late, period. As time went on, microtransactions have been normalized.
I remain neutral onto this topic and I still do, there are some that are fine, there are some that have terrible practices within those shops and there are some that should be minimized or just have no place.
There isn’t really an easy solution out there to get rid of microtransactions all together.
Uhhhhhhhh Larian didnt make the first two baldurs gate games, they spent the last 20 years making and releasing the Divinity games, so no, apples to apples
Also, just to hammer home a few points about BG3 and other developers.
Developers aren’t angry at Baldur’s Gate 3 or Larian. They’re not throwing shade on the product. This was manufactured outrage created by clickbaiters on YouTube because some devs did in fact raise a very valid point that games like BG3 are an anomaly.
BG3 was able to succeed because of how it was developed, and Larian Studios, being independent, had the freedom to make many decisions that other studios, even big ones with the backing of extremely profitable AAA publishers, might not be able to make.
On top of that, thanks to that independence, Larian doesn’t have to deal with upper management trying to force games to meet deadlines, something bigger developers that are part of the corporate machine have to face. If Larian felt like Baldur’s Gate 3 wasn’t ready for example, and they wanted to delay it by 6 months, then they could do that, they only have to answer to themselves.
But if Blizzard wanted to delay their upcoming survival game by 6 months because they felt it wasn’t ready, they’d have to get approval from Activision-Blizzard management, and if Activision-Blizzard management said no because it would impact profits? Well too bad, that game is getting released on that set date, whether its ready or not and the developers may feel like they have to crunch hard to make sure its as ready as it can be before that date.
Similarily because gamers are now swinging BG3 around like an oversized tuna, smacking devs in the face and telling them to ‘up their game’, there are some developers who feel like upper management is going to see this and force them into overdrive and burn them out. They don’t want that to be a reality. Not because they don’t want to make good games, but because they don’t want to get burned out by overbearing management forcing things on them because they want to release the next game as good as BG3.
Doesn’t matter if anyone wants to buy the studio. Vincke, the guy in charge, isn’t selling, he straight up said so himself in an interview not too long ago. Because he actually likes making great games, he’s actually passionate in what his company does, and you can visibly see enjoys it given that every event they do is basically like a big roleplaying session with them all in elaborate costumes on a large, fully decorated set. He kind of reminds me of Yoshi P a lot in a way, in that he actually cares for the games he’s working on.
So yeah. Good, I say. The longer companies like Larion are in the hands of people that wants to make a good game, and out of the hands of people that only want to make a big profit, the better.
Source? Dragonflight seems far more populated than Shadowlands did at this point in the expansion. Sure, Shadowlands had a huge launch but that was inflated by covid.
Also, Dragonflight is a serious step up from the last several expansions. Even if it’s numerically less popular for whatever reason, I’d rather they stick to this new direction. If anything, BFA and Shadowlands is to blame for people giving up on wow and not checking out Dragonflight.
I Just got into dragonflight. I left WoW before they even dropped the first content patch in shadowlands. After coming back and seeing how the main story plays and its current end game. I felt like instead of making a solid expansion. They just divided the game up entirely in hopes that atleast 1 feature will catch peoples attention.
Whether its dragonflying(Which i personally hate)
The new treadmill crafting system.
The treadmill of mythic plus.
Pvp players getting shafted with harder to get lower Ilvl gear compared to PvE players.
Currency and rep treadmills.
Some classes literally only having 1 build when it was advertised you could make your own build.
Idk. Maybe its after 16 years of play, MMOs are hitting a wall when it comes to introducing new stuff.
Im ready for a WoW 2 in a different universe, story and graphics engine.
BG3 is an anomaly, but it’s a good anomaly that should be seen as a goal to strive towards. We, as comsumers of these products, should be wanting the overall quality of games to go up. We shouldn’t be so accepting of the slop they sell us at ever increasing prices, charging $20 more for sprinkles. And that is what the AAA devs are trying to protect. They have the workforce and the funding to do exactly what Larion did, there is absolutely no reason why they can’t. Which is why people are calling BS on the reasons why they can’t. All of the reasons the AAA companies are saying BG3 is an anomaly are purely bad excuses. These big AAA devs have everything they need to do the exact same thing - except for one thing, the mindset.
They only care about immediate short term profits. The only goodwill they care about is maintaining just enough to cash in on with future scummy cash grabs. They don’t think about what would keep the players having fun and being invested, no, that’s much too difficult, better to just design more grinds for them to be stuck doing, more battlepasses drip feeding mass produced cheap skins to keep the player in longer, more mind games to loosen the players grips on their wallets and go to the cash store.
They lack the passion that Larion has. I’m sure many of the workforce devs have that passion, but their bosses in charge of the product do not, they don’t want to make a good game, they want to make a profitable game.
This is all true, yes, but it all goes right back to what I said before: They have everything they need to make a game like BG3, and such a game would be massively profitable as proven by BG3 (800k+ concurrent players on steam, which is not including GoG edition owners or people playing BG3 without launching steam which is something you can do, and despite the fact that it has absolutely no anti-piracy measures and isn’t even released on consoles yet…), but they can’t and won’t because the people in charge are looking for immediate profits, they want all the money now and are willing to sacrifice all the quality, ethics and good will to do so.
First, good, players should be expecting more. Prices are going up, even despite being riddled with expensive "micro"transactions, yet quality is going down. Video games are the only market where it’s expected for the product to be low quality and full of bugs and errors on launch. Would you buy a car if the steering was lopsided, the wheels unaligned, and the brakes only sometimes worked, but the manufacturor might maybe come around and fix it a couple months down the line? Then why do you buy a game that is as full of errors, crashes and gamebreaking bugs as most AAA games have? We absolutely should be demanding higher quality products. And if the AAA game industry can’t do that without instigating forced crunch times and overworking their employees to the point of collapse, then those AAA companies do not deserve our money and should bleed out until they can either make drastic changes in how they operate, or they collapse and make room for better companies.
Quite frankly, I’m leaning towards the latter. I’ve long been of the opinion that we need another video game stock crash, like what ET did decades ago.
Didn’t Tears of the Kingdom sell 3 million copies in the first 3 days and is now sitting at over 18 million? Unheard of…it happens like every few months. Hogwart’s, Elden Ring, God of War: Ragnarok, FF16…Spider-Man 2 will probably join that group.
8 months prior… they havent fixed bugs from Vanilla or previous expansions. decades even.
How anyone has any room at all to defend Blizzard in any capacity other then. Shareholder rights… we can thank that famous Dodge Harrison Ford case for that one arguably the worst injustice to employees an businesses world wide.
I’m not confusing anything, unless you’re trying to claim that widely popular single player games lose more than 50% of their players in the first two weeks, despite continuing to sell tens of millions of copies. Switch and other consoles don’t typically report or have a way for us to track how many players are online at once. The best indicator is how many copies were sold.
Sorry, you’re not going to convince me that it’s unusual for a single player game to have lots of players.
Baldurs Gate 3, as good as the game is, had 7 years of development time. Most games get 2-3 years of development at most.
If people want their games to be on par with BG3 standards, then I hope they’re prepared to wait almost a decade for it. I’m willing to wager they aren’t prepared to do that tho.
ill cut the sentence at that point. i want the games to be polished and completely workable day 1 of the release.
an example of doing it wrong : fallout 76
an example of it done right : borderlands 3.
im okay with micro transactions that are strictly cosmetic, that being said if the in-game option looks bad and unpolished compared to the inshop ill be mad.
that fine balance must be maintained for me to tolerate ingame shops.
an example of it done well : League of legends.
an example of it being done horribly : EA battlefront.
how did blizzard respond or get attacked? im outta the loop.