I wholeheartedly endorse the apparently radical idea of selling games, for money, as products.
Still gonna be a fuckin’ miracle if this works. A multiplayer-centric shooter, focused on teamwork? That’s a gamble no matter who you are. Nostalgia gets your foot in the door. But there are no “slow burn” arena shooters. There is no long tail for multiplayer-only games. You succeed wildly, right off the bat, or you die.
There is no long tail for multiplayer-only games. You succeed wildly, right off the bat, or you die.
Now and then a game seems to buck this trend (Among us blew up after 2 years, Goose Goose Duck after 1 year). So there are exceptions to this rule, but I imagine it’s increasingly hard to pull off the larger the studio’s costs are.
Those got lucky because COVID made social-ish gaming popular. I played a lot of both with coworkers when WFH, and haven’t touched it since returning to the office.
Goose Goose Duck released in 2021 and nonetheless didn’t blow up until 2022. Among Us’ explosion also happened only in the second half of the year, when most games experienced “lockdown growth” earlier during March-ish (see TF2, CS:GO, Rocket League).
I’m sure circumstances helped, but imo it seems difficult to attribute the delayed growth of those two titles solely to that. There are surely also other multiplayer-only titles that similarly weren’t runaway hits on release that later became more played – these are just the first two that I could confirm information for quickly.
I didn’t see a single hitscan weapon in the entire trailer. Even the sniper was leading shots. Chaingun seems to be back for all weight classes instead of a dozen different ‘assault rifle’ weapons with short mags. Maybe they actually learned their lesson on how to make a tribes game this time.
Still wish they wouldn’t do the sniper rifle at all, snipers are impossible to balance and destructive to gameplay in nearly every game that has them. The whole reason the laser rifle wasn’t a balance mess in Tribes 1 was because it used up all your energy when you fired. Mobility is life and giving it up for 1 shot is dangerous in the extreme.
The real mistake was abandoning it
It was severely mismanaged as early as the closed beta. I think they failed the execution so heavily that honestly the best option was to sunset it. The big blue update or whatever was actually a pretty pro-consumer move all things considered.
I might be ready to forgive them if they can execute this time. No f2p seems a little too reactionary especially in the current climate of fortnite, Apex, overwatch 2, Valorant, cs2, etc, but I’m cautiously optimistic for now.
Shazzbot!
They used to release new weapons putting them on sale in their cash shop for the first week and during this time they would be extremely overpowered ruining gameplay and incentivising everyone to use the new meme gun. The moment the sale ended they released a balance patch nerfing it into obscurity. That was their business model right up until they just abandoned the project entirely to hop on the MOBA bandwagon.
Do not trust this company to do anything beyond what’s best for them especially at the cost of you.
Funny this was also the league model when they were releasing champions practically every month