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I'm glad to know as a Lightfall Enjoyer that I am not personally responsible for 100 people losing their jobs. I dunno how the Lightfall Haters are gonna get to sleep tonight though.
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Oct 31, 2023 21:36
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Have they considered a model where half the season isn’t completely dead?
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Oct 31, 2023 21:37
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Yeah I thought I was hearing that Lightfall sold better then Witch Queen and resulted in a huge playerbase surge? Even if the seasons are doing a bit weak, that still seems shocking. What the hell kind of revenue targets do they have?
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Oct 31, 2023 21:37
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I just decided to see Sechrist's home page and I'm probably even more bummed than when I read about Salvatori. Aside from Deep Stone Lullaby, they got rid of the guy who made this. In just one minute it easily flows from western movie tribute music to a RPG-style chanting. He also was apparently behind the tracks that used the loud angry horn leitmotif for the pyramid ships and Ol' Witty. You know, the ones that Spider-Man 2 copied for every Kraven scene. They potentially could have scuttled Salvatori and still had some bangers, but instead it is even more over than I originally realized.
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Oct 31, 2023 21:38
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Oxyclean posted:Yeah I thought I was hearing that Lightfall sold better then Witch Queen and resulted in a huge playerbase surge? Even if the seasons are doing a bit weak, that still seems shocking. What the hell kind of revenue targets do they have? I suppose that has to be in battlepass sales then. I normally play maybe a month out of a season, finish the battlepass, buy it for the toys, and jump back next season, but this year has been loaded with excellent games, so haven't spent much time with destiny and skipped them all this time. Wonder how many other people did the same.
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Oct 31, 2023 21:39
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I think it might be the effects of the Covid bubble bursting Now that people aren't stuck indoors due to lockdown they're playing the game less and spending less on the MTX Plus those months long network issues and the two week DDoS attack most certainly negatively affected player retention And yeah, I think the seasonal model finally reached the inflection point where it's become really stale and isn't a profitable model anymore
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Oct 31, 2023 21:40
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Better question might be, where is all their money going? With the Sony buyout and Lightfall selling well, I would have imagined they would have been in a pretty stable place for awhile.
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Oct 31, 2023 21:40
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Oxyclean posted:Yeah I thought I was hearing that Lightfall sold better then Witch Queen and resulted in a huge playerbase surge? Even if the seasons are doing a bit weak, that still seems shocking. What the hell kind of revenue targets do they have? anecdotally one of my destiny playing friend group came back for Lightfall for any significant length of time I didn't buy poo poo for mtx stuff for the first time in a long time I didn't preorder Final Shape (first time in the series history I think?) As far as the situation as a whole - tech is getting butchered across the board, the game industry is getting hit hard as well, many industries in general are down (again, anecdotally, many people in my social groups are losing their jobs, or their companies, or both) Which makes this outcome unsurprising but still incredibly unpleasant, as with every other wave of layoffs this year I still absolutely cannot wrap my head around letting people like Lorraine and Salvatori and Sechrist go though, that is just insane - they aren't just 'trimming the fat', they're cutting the roots and mining the foundation. Very similar vibes to Bioware firing the writers for some of their most beloved characters and stories. poo poo sucks man, seeing people I know lose their jobs across the industry all year long has just been a continuous downer.
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Oct 31, 2023 21:46
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SgtSteel91 posted:I think it might be the effects of the Covid bubble bursting Destiny in general is almost 10 years old as well, you need to basically move heaven and earth to keep people invested after all this time, the core fans will never leave but those don't pay the bills, its Joe Public who are wandering off that do.
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Oct 31, 2023 21:47
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We aren't going to know the answers to these questions unless they open their books much further than studios tend to, even ones without a parent company. But I would guess that a miss that huge can't be blamed on any one thing
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Oct 31, 2023 21:48
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Big yikes at internal reviews for Final Shape being weak. Figure they’d be swinging for the fences on the big conclusion to their beloved series but maybe not. Wonder if the team over at Naughty Dog whose game got scuppered because of Bungie’s critical feedback are feeling some sense of schadenfreude over that one (the reviews, not the layoffs).
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Oct 31, 2023 21:50
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45% seems crazy, I would love more context. Sony's fiscal year resets March 31st and Lightfall came out Feb 28th. Based on that I wouldn't expect Bungie to sell much of anything since then.
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Oct 31, 2023 21:52
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Somehow I don't think Community Managers and the music guy who's been the most consistent thing about your studio for the last two and a half decades are why you whiffed on those targets.
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Oct 31, 2023 21:53
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VanillaGorilla posted:studio management being held to account? Whoa pump the breaks there baby, that's class warfare....
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Oct 31, 2023 21:54
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Mesadoram posted:Better question might be, where is all their money going? With the Sony buyout and Lightfall selling well, I would have imagined they would have been in a pretty stable place for awhile. An expansion is a one-time purchase. They rely on season passes, event tickets, and silver as their bread and butter.
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Oct 31, 2023 21:55
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Mesadoram posted:Better question might be, where is all their money going? With the Sony buyout and Lightfall selling well, I would have imagined they would have been in a pretty stable place for awhile. They're actively pumping up multiple games. Destiny, Marathon they're betting big on and throwing tremendous amounts of money into. Then they have Matter and...a Gummy Bear MOBA? Management has nobody but themselves to blame for taking investment away from the only thing making money.
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Oct 31, 2023 22:02
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FlapYoJacks posted:An expansion is a one-time purchase. They rely on season passes, event tickets, and silver as their bread and butter. Very true. Can't shake the feeling that getting bought out by Sony was more out of necessity than anything else. Feels like their coffers were empty and had no choice. But, that is just a feeling and not based on anything. Regardless, this story just keeps getting worse somehow  .
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Oct 31, 2023 22:04
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SgtSteel91 posted:And yeah, I think the seasonal model finally reached the inflection point where it's become really stale and isn't a profitable model anymore FlapYoJacks posted:An expansion is a one-time purchase. They rely on season passes, event tickets, and silver as their bread and butter. Square doesn't like to talk about the money side of FF14, but from interviews and whatnot they've been clear that cash shop stuff like mounts and goofy costumes directly go toward improving the game, buying expansions basically funds the next expansion, while the subscription monthly fees are passed to the Square mothership to be blown irresponsibly on undercooked AAA fodder like Babylon's Fall or Forspoken. Bungie won't ever tell anyone that much. It's basically "buy an ever larger checklist of purchases to support the game, or else we might not make it anymore." Which is just weird. Destiny is like WoW where it's the one success that didn't start an industry because everyone who wanted a piece of it's pie totally failed. We'll know they must be really bleeding players if they're packing it in and going to maintenance mode where we get to enjoy a rotation carousel of unvaulted things we already once paid for. Craptacular! fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 22:07
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FlapYoJacks posted:An expansion is a one-time purchase. They rely on season passes, event tickets, and silver as their bread and butter. MJeff posted:Somehow I don't think Community Managers and the music guy who's been the most consistent thing about your studio for the last two and a half decades are why you whiffed on those targets. But yeah, it's laughable that the management who gets paid so much to make important decisions never seems to take much of a hit when things go poorly.
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Oct 31, 2023 22:09
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The real lightfall was their revenue. 
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Oct 31, 2023 22:11
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I mean at the end of the day for all of WoW’s problems, they made good on the concept of the game that never stops growing. The amount of content in WoW that you can play at any given time absolutely dwarfs Destiny 2, and the value prop for the sub fee is pretty high. And unlike Bungie they’ve actually managed to pull out of their tailspin and get on a pretty consistent schedule for new content (which is only going to get better with MS chasing Gamepass benefits). My beef with Destiny at this point is that Bungie constantly tells me that there’s going to be something new to do but then I log in and it all just feels the same - particularly if I’m not one of the small percentage of players that does stuff like dungeons or raids/other non-matchmade activities.
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Oct 31, 2023 22:12
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MJeff posted:Finally getting around to reading Unveiling and uhhhhh. Or did it???????
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Oct 31, 2023 22:14
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Oxyclean posted:That feels surprising because I feel like people falling off the game and coming back for expansions is probably fairly typical. It is. There's a reason they missed revenue projections by 45% 
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Oct 31, 2023 22:20
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In a way it's nice to see their monetization scheme fuckery is NOT working. Lightfall is unambiguously a failure though. It's a shame that the normal people who are doing the best jobs they can are the ones punished than the idiots causing the problems.
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Oct 31, 2023 22:21
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General Battuta posted:Or did it??????? Our asses got winnowed. 
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Oct 31, 2023 22:22
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This really feels like the idea to make an expansion in between The Final Shape backfired completely.
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Oct 31, 2023 22:23
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General Battuta posted:How do we make video games we love and care about and enjoy when the metric for a game's success is how well it sells and how many hours of engagement it generates? What happens when 'fun' and 'meaning' begin to decouple from 'sales' and 'engagement'?
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Oct 31, 2023 22:24
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VanillaGorilla posted:My beef with Destiny at this point is that Bungie constantly tells me that there’s going to be something new to do but then I log in and it all just feels the same - particularly if I’m not one of the small percentage of players that does stuff like dungeons or raids/other non-matchmade activities. They launched an expansion with the most easily cheesed raid they've made in a while, and have stated that the raid everybody liked most from the first game will not be given the Remix treatment so you'll take Crota and like it. It wasn't surprising that the ensuing year was not great for the raiding scene.
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Oct 31, 2023 22:26
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Whirling posted:This really feels like the idea to make an expansion in between The Final Shape backfired completely. I don't think it was a bad idea necessarily. I think the execution of the expansion in-between the Final Shape backfired spectacularly. This easily could have been our "Infinity War" to Final Shape's "Endgame" but I guess we had to have a boring city with lame characters that had a completely tenuous grasp connected to the narrative up until then?
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Oct 31, 2023 22:28
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If we lived in a just world, management would have eaten poo poo for the 45% revenue miss instead of the rank and file people. The fact that the people who led that get to stick around and keep their huge paychecks while outsourcing QA and Art and poo poo is a joke.
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Oct 31, 2023 22:29
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Lightfall sold better than Witch Queen, but they missed their goal by 45%. Player retention was low which mean season pass purchases were down, sure, but it's gonna be loving stupid when we find out those event cards, the extra dungeon keys, etc, were all assumed that 100% of the player base or some poo poo would but them. Like management going "$20 for some cosmetics four times a year? Everyone is gonna buy that. Calculate max players times $20 and add it to the projection!"
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Oct 31, 2023 22:31
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Number 1 is that 2023 has been a decent year for games. Like back to back big/good games are hitting. Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield, Spider-Man 2, Super Mario Bros Wonder all close to each other. Other games have turned up the competition and left Destiny in the dust in regards to events and microtransactions. Ghost shells, ships, and sparrows are old and boring and the only one people MIGHT pay attention to is your ship. The skins aren't worth the money over the skins other games are getting. Why legendary guns stopped getting skins I have no idea. The whirlwind of bad PR mixed with downtime and the crafting weekend didn't help either.
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Oct 31, 2023 22:33
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SgtSteel91 posted:And yeah, I think the seasonal model finally reached the inflection point where it's become really stale and isn't a profitable model anymore I mean if they want my 'good not great' feedback the gameplay is good but the new version of lifht and dark and the witness race is not great. At least not as great as the original.
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Oct 31, 2023 22:34
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The whole model where there is a month of dead time is bizarre. A whole month off for a huge chunk of the player base has to be just enough time to go, "ya know what? I don't have to play D2 every day."
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Oct 31, 2023 22:38
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I like it personally because it gives me time off to play other things. Playing this game every day for more than a month would not be healthy, and I wish the Bungie higher ups would accept that but they seem to have a tragic case of MMO brain.
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Oct 31, 2023 22:41
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It’s hard to tell if missing their revenue target by 45% means like “can barely make payroll” or “made a billion dollars but the target was two billion”.
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Oct 31, 2023 22:45
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Doubt this would be an issue if they didn’t piss off a bunch of players by continuing to bolt on to their windows NT architecture or whatever. If content never had to be vaulted and so much money spent on milking EoL hardware for every additional day of semi stable up time then they’d be fine. But a full stack refactor was too much to impact the micro transaction engine so now you lost 45% of your revenue (which I am sure was stupidly inflated beyond practicality anyway)
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Oct 31, 2023 22:46
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Basic Poster posted:so now you lost 45% of your revenue (which I am sure was stupidly inflated beyond practicality anyway) It is literally impossible to square the circle of "everything costs more and you have less customers but you have to make more profit than you did last year;" but if they don't, then vanguard moves all their investment money over to whichever company will give them a slightly higher rate of return. As was already observed by other posters it's your standard 'we assume that the rate of profit will continue to increase exponentially forever and will build a business model around this" error. Ironically, the stock boom a lot of gaming companies saw over lockdown may be the thing that fucks them now it's over. E: but you can triangle the circle, as we have observed 
Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 22:59
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When I bumped into Pete Parsons at Marymoor dog park back in 2022, he told me, and I quote, “We are going to release the most dog-poo poo expansion you’ve ever seen, and in connection with that we are going to totally rework difficulty game-wide to make everything really tedious and boring.” I was immediately like “Bro I don’t think you should do that, that sounds like something that might cause you to miss revenue targets by 45%,” but he would not be deterred. Given everything was done at his direction and on top of that, he was specifically warned, it’s unfair that everyone else has to suffer because of his vision. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 31, 2023 23:01
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| # ? May 26, 2024 08:49 |
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https://twitter.com/MartyTheElder/status/1719428584618774555?s=20
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Oct 31, 2023 23:07
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