Imagine I’m the CEO of Fatshark and you’re writing a letter to me.
What would your letter say?
Rules:
- Keep it clean.
- Keep it civil.
- Keep it constructive.
- Avoid pissing contests with each other.
Go!
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Personally I wouldn’t know what to say. I’m sure it depends on the company, but I feel like the CEO is a bit divorced from the games they make. Just making sure it remains profitable, keeping shareholders up to date and happy, and securing investments for future projects.
Second I don’t think any CEO of any company would really care what any of us have to say.
You could try and make the point of “Darktide could’ve been so much bigger if you let it,” but again for the reasons above I don’t think that would do much. You could say “management needs to be shaken up to make a better game,” but I don’t work at Fatshark or have insider information so I don’t know if that’s what needs to happen.
Same goes for “make content faster.” I don’t know why FS produces content slowly, and it doesn’t seem to bother them.
Ok maybe one thing I’d say is get better marketing. Seriously Fatshark’s marketing for DT was awful. An upgrade on that front could be beneficial in the future.
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looks at rules
reluctantly puts down pitchfork
Dear Fatshark Suit Man,
Look. Your corporate structure isn’t working and your cost-cutting is making the nerds angry. I understand Tencent owns you body and soul at this point but you need to either step down or be willing to get rid of the things dragging your studio down. Arrowhead can and will eat your lunch at this point.
Get your people producing content and patches, get them organized, and stop gouging your players. Fire whoever came up with the itemization system you launched with. If that’s yourself, so much the better.
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Hi,
You may not know me, but I am Lucifer, and I am writing to tell you that I have the spot ready for your soul in hell, after selling it through one our subsidiary companies TenCent.
You will be pleased know, that care and attention has been at the forefront of our research in order to pander to your every need as you spend the rest of eternity in hell. Activities such as, listening to Rebecca Black’s Friday 24 hours a day, is just one of the many thousands of activities that you will be subjected to during your time here.
We look forward to your arrival i the near future, until then, stay safe and enjoy what time you have left.
Kind regards
Lucifer
Ruler of Hell
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well i dunno about that, sah, but i don´t need lot of words to ask :
honest, it´s the one contemplating question that pops up with my buddy and me in voice chat between rounds, WHY ??
it could be so much more with feasible effort or simple redirecting of ressources.
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helo 
Dear Gabe Newell,
Dear CEO,
Darktide is a game with tremendous potential that is still yet to be realized. Darktide has strong favorable market positioning, but also a few things holding it back from realizing much greater success.
Strengths & Opportunities:
The Warhammer 40K IP in Darktide is some of the best realized in terms of atmosphere and aesthetics and there is a growing market of people interested in this IP. With rumors of an Amazon produced Warhammer 40k live action series, this will grow even more. The environmental design, visuals, music and subtly unfolding story are all strengths of Darktide to build upon.
From a core combat gameplay standpoint ( ie everything experienced during a mission) combat is exceptionally well done in Darktide. This is what fans and current players love about the game. There is an excellent skill curve to climb and ways to challenge yourself. The combat mechanics offer great variety and tactical depth, and the enemies are generally varied and challenging. The balance of melee and ranged combat is excellent, and the melee mechanics are simply the best in the market. This “feeling” is often the hardest part to get right in making games, and Darktide nailed it.
More broadly in terms of gameplay, cooperative horde shooter FPS games are continuing to grow in popularity in the market. Payday 2, Deep Rock Galactic, and Left 4 Dead 2 are all examples of games in this space that have seen their core player base GROW overtime (in many cases 10+ years), achieve high sustained player counts, and yield sustained financial support for continued development of the product and the studio. Darktide is poised to garner this same success.
Weaknesses & Threats:
Two weaknesses are holding back Darktide from a better market position. One is design related and the other is development pipeline related.
From the design standpoint, the biggest issue is itemization progression (ie crafting system). Despite adjustments to the system since release, it still does not deliver on the promise of giving players agency in how they advance and progress their gear, relying instead of a high degree of randomness (RNG) at nearly every level.
While the high levels of are RNG may help drive player engagement for some highly dedicated players (by always giving players something better to reach for), the reality is that for most players it is a large source of frustration. The item upgrade process often leads to “bricked” items, which is an actively negative gameplay experience and makes players feel like their time is being wasted. This is a negative point raised frequently in user reviews. This system also makes it very time consuming and frustrating to onboard new players.
Crafting and progression systems in peer games (mentioned earlier) are much more deterministic in nature and offer a positive sense of reward and progress. They can still encourage “grind” and boost player time/engagement, but they do so in a manner that lets players predictably work towards a certain reward/item. This gives players agency to experiment with different builds and playstyles, thereby encouraging even more engagement. Much of the community is holding their breath for substantive improvements to the crafting system in an upcoming update. Much hinges on the delivery of these improvements.
From a pipeline standpoint, Darktide suffers from a slow pace of content development and release, which makes it difficult to sustain and build momentum and thus grow the player base. Content releases do see players come back to the game in decent numbers, but these “spikes” in rising player counts fall off quickly down to a low level when it takes months for the next content release. Ideally, the next content drop happens right as player counts start to drop, letting the “waves” build on each other.
Content wise, more original base weapons, new biomes/environments for missions that offer greater visual variety, new enemies and bosses, and ways to add variety to the mission layouts and/or variable objectives or extra challenges to take on during the mission are needed to add variety to the gameplay experience. Special events, tied to holidays for example, would also be ways to entice players to jump into the game on a more frequent basis. Warhammer 40K is a huge IP with so many possibilities to explore. Players want to see more of it and on a quicker time table.
The risk of not addressing Darktide’s weaknesses is that eventually other titles and studios will start erode customer satisfaction in Fatshark and Darktide as a product line. The lack of frequent communication with the community already leads to speculation that Darktide is “dead”, which is detrimental to the 'Tide brand overall and will cause players to invest their time in other products. Communication strategies need to be revised alongside faster content releases and fixing core design (i.e. itemization) issues. But if these concerns are addressed, Darktide strengths and current market position set it up well for a long and profitable development lifespan.
Thank you for listening.
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Fatshark CEO
Your title Darktide has major problems, mainly that the game launched in a clearly unfinished state, the playerbase collapsed fast, collapsed hard, and has never really recovered. There are features players have long been clear they hated since launch that have gone unaddressed, your studio’s communication is practically nonexistent, and your studio releases less content in 6 months than a studio across the river from you making a similar game on a similar engine does every couple of weeks. This is reflected clearly in play rates.
The reviews have remained starkly mixed and mediocre, with consistent messages around crafting, timeliness, cosmetic QA issues, and content.
Next to each of the major pre-existing person coop shooter competitors (Deep Rock Galactic, Payday 2, and L4D2), your title is demonstrably performing worse in terms of average online players and player retention.
(Darktide in green)
Next to the new kid on the block, Helldivers 2 (a game made by a studio literally 20 minutes walking distance from your front door on the same basic engine) it’s even worse. That green line at the bottom isn’t the X-axis, that’s Darktide’s player traffic!
Despite some significant climbdown since its’ launch hype, HD2 still averaging an order of magnitude more players, on its worst day sporting more people than Darktide has seen since its best day.
Your title Darktide has a credited Chief Marketing Officer, Marketing Communications Director, Digital Marketing Manager, Public Relations Manager, two different Marketing Managers, and a Creative Marketing Lead.
What do these people do?
These are all people with titles of responsibility (seemingly above the Community Managers), and appear to be flat out absent from their roles.
These people aren’t out there running or sponsoring gameplay streams showing off the game, they’re not out trying to entice new players, they’re not hyping up future features and content, they’re not acknowledging or addressing longstanding consistent review issues, they’re not out trying to generate or maintain player interest in the game, they’re not out visibly seeking feedback, they’re not interacting or communicating on any major platform (here, Reddit, Discord, Steam, etc), they’re not even attempting to feature Darktide in anything except copy-paste renders of stock characters for Displate.
As far as I can tell your PR Manager’s sole Darktide related online act anywhere within recent memory was posting a picture of a physical boxed copy of the game they found at a retail store. They don’t appear to be working on the public perception of Darktide as a mediorce-reviewed title with a collapsed playerbase.
So I ask, is this an OK state of affairs for you and Fatshark? From a player perspective, it appears that Fatshark largely just hoovered up pre-order cash and moved on, leaving Darktide on a slow-drip maintenance support after launching in a clearly hurried and unfinished state, relying on poorly QA’d 3rd party outsourced cosmetics sales for a trickle of revenue. Is this how Fatshark wants to be known in the industry? Are there any plans or intentions to address these issues?
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I love that DT vs HD2 charts comparison.
While HD2 looks like a really unhealthy heartbeat, it’s at least a heartbeat. DT is an actual flatline of a heartbeat.
I love the Tide games, they are some of my fave games eva! None of my friends play because they suck and cant handle the pure Tide awesomeness.
Please give me a melta gun and a power fist.
Please remove the locks.
Much Love
AnaLoGMunKy 
I’ll just print out and put this picture in an envelope and then mail it.
It’ll be signed “With Love from Cadia.”
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Lets look at Darktide’s Content Creators Program.
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No regular news blog posts to introduce who they are and their channels or platform
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Maybe can do that so they can promote the game
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More subscribers for them, more free marketing
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Once they finish providing content surrounding the maps, spawn points, enemies etc
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They’re are going to need ability to showcase a strong feature of Darktide by experimenting with different builds and getting them in reasonable time frame. They are going to need to upload more than 1 video per month to get subscribers. They will need ability to put together ideal builds per month in timely manner to showcase effectiveness as content.
They can start strong as Darktide content creator. Lots of content. Few months later…Only so much they run same missions, same builds and will need diversity to maintain their subscribers. Some of the ones I did subscribe to, switched to HD2 now.
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Dear CEO,
I wish your company took fan feedback more seriously.
Regards,
Asuka’s Aborted Paraplegic Fan
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dear fatshark ceo,
please just pay the modding community to update, fix, and… well, essentially make this game for you moving forward.
sincerely,
literally everyone that plays the game.
p.s. your pricing for premium items is bogus.
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Dear Mr. CEO-Man IV,
You suck.
Love,
-Me
[yes, I know it’s not constructive, but I’m feeling rather bitter, so allow me the moment of catharsis]
Dear whoever reading this,
since i’m following your escapades (some may call it development) for quite some time now, even from before Vermintide 1, yes ancient, ancient times and yes, laughs on your side for this, i must say, you holding on to this type of management is one of the best examples of … looks at the rules… resilience i’ve come across. Remarkable
I posted about this elsewhere but they don’t give a singular damn about the content creators. One of the official darktide partners is clearly just a viewbotting scam restream of someone elses gameplay at 140p with sound recorded through speakers. It’s pretty hilarious but it does make you realize they don’t even click the streams they just look at view numbers to decide. Meanwhile some great and knowledgable players I’ve seen stream don’t even get looked at.
Whoever is getting paid to deal with Darktides content creator program is absolutely just getting paid for not doing their job.
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