I know how games that keep a consistent level of players work. They work by releasing continual updates, even very small updates, every few weeks at the lowest possible rate. Games that take 6-12 months for moderate size updates do not compete with those games over the long term. They lose vastly more players over that time period, get a small spike of returning players, which tapers off quickly when they see that all the issues that made them stop playing are still there, then they quit.
…and? So? Therefore? Does that then mean this glacial pace of updates is okay for the people who are still playing their game? I’ll spare you the time for troublesome thinking on that answer.
No.
It does not excuse that rate. Usually well maintained games keep a vastly larger proportion of their userbase than Darktide did, which slipped down to a low of I think less than 2,000, just a few months ago, and that low before each of the major patches over the last 18 months from finally finishing the stupid skill trees that nerfed the Veteran, to actually finishing crafting to a release-worthy state two years after the game was out and 90% of the community that still played no longer needed the system, to their first new class…which is a paid for DLC.
All while they maintain the obscenely expensive, often neglected skin shop with skins that clip into other pieces of other armor, or cloth physics that don’t exist that have the cowls and hoods fabric float over the armor in a really jarring fashion. It costs like, $50 to buy all of the new items in the skin shop. And they’re not even releasing skins that anyone really actually want, and they do that stupid FOMO rotation. Even Helldivers 2 figured out that in order to not be predatory, they should update their special super armor shop to have all armor and items released through it from the start of the game that players can scroll through and buy at will, but Fatshark probably realizes that’d show off just HOW MANY of these “premium” skins with floaty cloth bits that look awful, are just recolors and effort-free re-releases.
At least with SM2, even though you can’t play the class you want, unlike in Darktide, their first update what, six weeks into the game, added a new sidearm. They just added a horde mode. They added more multiplayer missions, and more PVP maps. There’s issues with how they’ve done multiplayer, like how upgrading your guns is impossible unless you play on a difficulty that requires you to be carried, but besides that, it is a much better updated game because of one thing; they are adding the popular things from Warhammer, and you don’t have to pay extra for them, nor are they drip feeding the content with four to six month cavernously empty gaps between each update.
Two and a half years. Two and a half years. That’s how long it took them to add a new class.
Mass Effect 3 went from twenty six classes in its tacked on, finished in a year multiplayer that still has people playing all the time at start, to sixty seven at the end of a year. Do I expect the same for Darktide? No. Darktide is a much more development intensive game. I did expect we’d be on our fifth or sixth, maybe even optimistically seventh new character by now, though.
If the updates were literally days slower, I’d consider this to be a dead game in maintenance mode held up only by the most dedicated players who are still wishing that this game got the attention and prioritization it deserved from the jump and that it would have tried to compete with other games, but…well. Fatshark is Fatshark. Clearly maintaining a game with a high average daily userbase, even if it is down from release, is not a priority. At all.
and i dont need to waste my time.