|
At this point I don't even think the capital ship/siege patch is going to bring anybody back, or at least not for long enough for it to matter. Game has dipped down below 200 peak players, and that's across two servers (PTU and live).
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2022 03:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 4, 2024 12:42 |
|
|
yeah it's a drat shame. for all of the hype it seems like that's ground to a halt now that they have our money.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2022 06:08
|
|
|
The game is just suffering the same fate as most "emergent gameplay" dependent mmo-poo poo: they refuse to put in things for players to do that are quick to get into, fun and low stakes, so nobody sticks around and nothing emergent ever happens. They all insist upon reinventing every wheel, every time, and forget or -more bafflingly- refuse to put in things that normal* people can just hop in and do to keep a population around. I don't think all that Trine money is going to get them to their desired end-state, but I'd enjoy being wrong. *not engineers who like to spend days in the ship builder
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2022 06:41
|
|
|
Its a drat shame. I absolutely loved building automatic mining contraptions with yolol, and would've loved to build factories that assembled cheap fighters for goons to fight in.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2022 11:16
|
|
|
Sachant posted:Game is dead as hell. https://forum.starbasegame.com/threads/starbase-update-news.3088/ I'm reading this announcement as RIP. Money issues?
|
|
#
?
Apr 26, 2022 14:43
|
|
|
i think this is a problem with early access too. people flood in, play your game and leave and nothing will get them back since they've moved on to the next game. kinda sucks if you need the cash injection from selling in early access but then people see like 50 people playing and wont buy y it even after whatever big patches.
|
|
#
?
Apr 26, 2022 14:54
|
|
|
Aertuun posted:https://forum.starbasegame.com/threads/starbase-update-news.3088/ that sucks. i'm someone who tricked myself into believing that they really had dev costs covered for at least a year or two more (i think they said as much somewhere), and while i guess that might be true it really seems like are taking most of their eggs out of that basket right now. as i understand it's been a passion project, so maybe they'll come back to it if the opportunity presents itself, but so far this looks like at least 1 nail in the coffin
|
|
#
?
Apr 26, 2022 15:11
|
|
|
They did get a year out of it, to be fair. It turns out it just wasn't a good year. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 26, 2022 17:02
|
|
|
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Frozenbyte-RVW63142095.htm Starbase: Absolutely Traumatic work experience
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2022 03:19
|
|
|
Kevin Bacon posted:that sucks. i'm someone who tricked myself into believing that they really had dev costs covered for at least a year or two more (i think they said as much somewhere) They definitely did say that, and the way they've been handling development either points to chronic mismanagement or a sudden change in circumstances, both of which are plausible. My impression is the team working on the game didn't know about the change until maybe a few days ago? They released a video about the new "player council" and the "upcoming station siege" features a few days ago, and now the person who has done all their Starbase videos and a lot of their external publicity has been put on indefinite, unpaid furlough (the PipFB person who voices all their features trailers etc). Speculation is that either someone higher up the chain was keeping issues bottled up and suddenly burst out the change of direction earlier in the week. Or that a large investor behind the game suddenly pulled funding: https://www.kowloonnights.com/ Or a little bit of both columns. If they had nervous investors, there were a many different areas they could have spent time on that would have built an active playerbase, rather than grand features (capital ship sieging) that have a huge number of dependencies. And who was in charge of that investor relationship. Most of the people I played with were waiting for features to be released before returning to the game.
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2022 11:30
|
|
|
Having followed the game since closed alpha (though not as much recently), they clearly fell behind their announced development schedule after Early Access release, and as a result weren't able to implement the upcoming major features that were supposed to drive player interest in a timely fashion. In retrospect, the rushed Early Access launch (e.g. Easy Build Mode, which was made a key part of new player onboarding, was never tested in closed alpha and launched broken) was also a bad sign as regards to funding.
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2022 13:53
|
|
|
Aertuun posted:Most of the people I played with were waiting for features to be released before returning to the game. same here. I played it when it came out and it was like.. cool tech demo but the ship builder too complex for me and my friends and we all gave up with some inkling of coming back under the pretenses of, "someone will be enough of a grognard to figure out cap ships and then game will be fun again  "
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2022 14:06
|
|
|
Aertuun posted:Speculation is that either someone higher up the chain was keeping issues bottled up and suddenly burst out the change of direction earlier in the week. Read any of the Glassdoor reviews and they all complain about the CEO (Lauri) being a megalomaniac who has to micromanage everything and only cares about his immediate inner circle. This tracks pretty well with his discord behavior as well (picking favorites and giving them insider info via DMs, casting shade directly on other devs about how much better Starbase will be, etc.). I remember he used to brag about being an "outsider" in the Finnish/European gamedev executive world, about how none of the others at that level wanted to associate with him. He took it as a badge of honor, but I'm pretty sure that's mainly because he's actually a huge jerk.
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2022 15:55
|
|
|
Sachant posted:https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Frozenbyte-RVW63142095.htm
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2022 19:19
|
|
|
zxqv8 posted:They did get a year out of it, to be fair. I mean, when you send crowds of incredibly engaged fans to poop on anyone who says "hey this game isn't all that fun" instead of actually making the game fun... you kind of just lose people and they never come back.
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2022 19:22
|
|
|
RocketRaygun posted:I mean, when you send crowds of incredibly engaged fans to poop on anyone who says "hey this game isn't all that fun" instead of actually making the game fun... you kind of just lose people and they never come back. It's honestly frightening how much blind goodwill you can generate by just having production devs in a discord chatting about their game. Even if the game is a dumpster fire, (mostly young) people will defend it to the death because "but the CEO talked to me once!".
|
|
#
?
Apr 27, 2022 23:23
|
|
|
Sachant posted:Starbase: Absolutely Traumatic work experience Interesting comment from Kenetor, a community person who released a lot of Starbase videos (which I haven't watched, but he seems to be popular): "this is not a break because they planed to, they are not owning their mistakes at all, something has gone seriously gone wrong at FB, its not like its just Pip either, quite a few are now at home most likely worrying if they will have a job to come back to and not about the game nor community, there is no telling how many people if any at all will be kept back to bug hunt, every dev I've spoken to in the past has been sent home."
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2022 00:20
|
|
|
Aertuun posted:"this is not a break because they planed to, they are not owning their mistakes at all, something has gone seriously gone wrong at FB, its not like its just Pip either, quite a few are now at home most likely worrying if they will have a job to come back to and not about the game nor community, there is no telling how many people if any at all will be kept back to bug hunt, every dev I've spoken to in the past has been sent home."
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2022 16:21
|
|
|
Sachant posted:It's honestly frightening how much blind goodwill you can generate by just having production devs in a discord chatting about their game. Even if the game is a dumpster fire, (mostly young) people will defend it to the death because "but the CEO talked to me once!". We're all lucky that FB never offered a cryptocurrency.
|
|
#
?
Apr 29, 2022 23:17
|
|
|
anyone mess around with the new patch? i hear good things but i don't know if i care about getting into it if that's all she wrote
|
|
#
?
May 12, 2022 15:11
|
|
|
Kevin Bacon posted:anyone mess around with the new patch? i hear good things but i don't know if i care about getting into it if that's all she wrote I actually forgot about this game till today... Last time i played i was stranded in space somehow and just floating around...
|
|
#
?
May 12, 2022 18:44
|
|
|
zxqv8 posted:The game is just suffering the same fate as most "emergent gameplay" dependent mmo-poo poo: they refuse to put in things for players to do that are quick to get into, fun and low stakes, so nobody sticks around and nothing emergent ever happens. My impression when I played was more that the devs were actually actively trying to squash any and all emergent gameplay that didn't fit with their vision of the game. PvP was repeatedly nerfed until it was pointless, and even when successful scavenging wrecks was difficult, time consuming, and just generally not worth. You could mine almost anything you needed including some of the most valuable minerals in fully safe space so there was zero reason for risk anyways. Building ships was fun but also super time consuming, expensive, and difficult and no matter how sturdy your ship you could still render it un-usable by running into a single asteroid. Basically instead of a free-for-all space sandbox the devs only wanted carebear space mining and heavily curated RP "have-at-thee-mine-honourable-foe" PvP, and that gets loving boring real fast when there's no content to back it up.
|
|
#
?
May 12, 2022 19:04
|
|
|
Lauri lost my entire circle and any hope of the wider survival pvp community getting into starbase when he called pvp feedback "griefers agenda" man is unhinged and shot his own game in the foot.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2022 15:47
|
|
|
Simon Numbers posted:Lauri lost my entire circle and any hope of the wider survival pvp community getting into starbase when he called pvp feedback "griefers agenda" man is unhinged and shot his own game in the foot. What the gently caress? He's the guy in charge right? Well poo poo, I had high hopes for the game
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2022 16:00
|
|
|
I knew it was going to be one THOSE games when they made "computer" a bannable offense.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2022 16:34
|
|
|
Simon Numbers posted:Lauri lost my entire circle and any hope of the wider survival pvp community getting into starbase when he called pvp feedback "griefers agenda" man is unhinged and shot his own game in the foot. What? They put guns in a game without NPCs. What did they expect people to do with them?
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2022 18:32
|
|
|
Pavlov posted:What? They put guns in a game without NPCs. What did they expect people to do with them? Honorable combat between two or more consenting adults, probably.
|
|
#
?
May 30, 2022 18:54
|
|
|
https://forum.starbasegame.com/threads/i-am-just-going-to-say-this-once-fb.2646/#post-20238 Guy is delusional
|
|
#
?
May 31, 2022 07:15
|
|
|
lmao "so the game is good" The game was not good.
|
|
#
?
May 31, 2022 14:22
|
|
|
 Starbase: The Poorly Veiled Griefer Agenda
|
|
#
?
May 31, 2022 17:08
|
|
|
66% off on Steam now. That's telling, yikes.
|
|
#
?
May 31, 2022 17:31
|
|
|
dont know if anyone cares anymore, but here's a frozenbyte dev on the steam community forums speculating on what went wrong https://steamcommunity.com/app/454120/discussions/0/5019836142085985074/?ctp=6#c3419934814478276202
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 13:39
|
|
|
Sounds like they were expecting EA sales (and cosmetics that they never bothered to implement) to fund game development to release at an unknown time in the future, while leaning back on it being an alpha as an excuse why there was no content. It's really no surprise it ended up how it did.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 14:03
|
|
|
Kevin Bacon posted:dont know if anyone cares anymore, but here's a frozenbyte dev on the steam community forums speculating on what went wrong There's also a few posts by the same poster which shed some light over the current state of the development team. The developer himself is only working eight hours per week, and there are server issues that can't be fixed because the head of QA was put on furlough and no-one remaining knows how to fix them. This confirms other reports which said that many people were not simply moved to other projects; they were put on indefinite furlough. "Unfortunately people (well, it's mostly one person) who might know how to reset the servers are on furlough. We (mostly me) attempted the reset last week, but were unsuccessful. I'm only working eight hours a week (writing here is a hobby, so not counted), so things tend to progress slowly. My attempts to do that didn't succeed, likely because I either don't understand how certain internal tools work, or the tools are buggy. Don't know yet which is the case."
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 14:58
|
|
|
Wait so they have one guy remaining to sling code for the game? Yyyeaaah it's well and truly not going to work out, time to bury all hope. Shame, I really, really loved YOLOL and the prospect of those factories. I hope some developer in the future tries to tackle this type of game and takes care to avoid making the same mistakes. (The ~griefer agenda~ for example.) A lot of things were genuinely exhilarating and super fresh. Good god how many hours I spent doing trigonometry calculations to get a mining laser to converge on a roid... I also remember designing a prototype for a "trawler" type ship, that had several tractor beams "angling" for spacerocks, and then reeling them into a spot where a single laser would mine them out. Would've been really super afk mining. Really bummed out that it's on its last legs.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 16:01
|
|
|
Keisari posted:Wait so they have one guy remaining to sling code for the game? Yyyeaaah it's well and truly not going to work out, time to bury all hope. Shame, I really, really loved YOLOL and the prospect of those factories. It's hard to know exactly how big the team is, but it's definitely on a skeleton crew. It sounds as if the developer who was making those posts was basically time sharing between Starbase and other games (the reference to eight hours a week on Starbase, combined with other posts that suggest he's working on other Frozenbyte projects). There were a lot of very strange management decisions made. I can understand the push to make ship building "easier", but the complex ship building and destruction was one of the main draws of the game. My experience was the same people drawn to easy build were just as happy simply buying upgrades via the ships other people had made. There are plenty of other games that offer "ship design by module" approaches. Easy build was a u-turn in terms of development direction, consumed a significant amount of development time, and didn't play well with the engine they had developed. It caused endless problems. People did need a way to easily repair their ships, which eventually came a year later. There were other indications that whoever was making decisions didn't really "get" the appeal of the game they were making. On the one side you have the fun implementation of player ships, which explode in unexpected and exciting ways. Whereas both stations and "capital ships" are essentially just cube-based objects without physics. Meanwhile, up until their panic patch a few weeks ago, it wasn't possible to build a starbase in a game called Starbase.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2022 16:32
|
|
|
i don't have anything interesting to say, i mostly wanted to bump this thread to make fun of this dead game. i guess there are moons now? content seems like its slowed to an absolute dribble aside from periodic "cargo shipments" which.. I guess are NPC ships they set up for people to dismantle and sell for money? not sure whatever happened to capital ships. weekly progress reports and blog posts stopped in April. player base seems to have stabilized around 100-200 online at any given time. is anyone still playing it, or was it strangled in the crib? steamspy seems to think it sold 200K copies .. a tidy profit? I guess.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2022 22:03
|
|
|
Strangled. It has only a skeleton crew barely starting to realize they need events but no one is there now. It won't launch, I'd guess.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2022 23:11
|
|
|
last i heard there was literally 1 guy maintaining it, and from what i understood it is extremely limited what he can even do since no one that wrote the original code is around for him to consult
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2022 01:38
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 4, 2024 12:42 |
|
|
question is, did they pull in enough preorder bux to consider this a success, financially?
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2022 03:11
|
|