To my eyes, there seems to be some serious structural/managerial issues with the studio they cannot or are unwilling to really address.
In isolation, that’s a thing that happens, usually they improve over time. The kicker in Fatshark’s case is that it hasn’t improved, they are retreading the exact same issues they’ve had with development and content delivery that they’ve had with their previous games, the same schedule slips, the same communication issues (internally and externally), the same issues in not testing systems together or testing at all, the same thing happening in their versioning where bugs, fixes and changes are randomly rolled back in subsequent patches. Their design decisions are at times baffling because they’re usually insulated from the consequences of their designs because of their dev environment.
None of this is malicious in a “We want to screw our audience” kind of way (at least until you got to the deliberately cash shop centric design choices they made for Darktide which did include the implementation of a bunch of dark patterns), but it makes you wonder what is happening there where it seems none of the lessons learnt from their previous games are remembered and they’d rather cut off their nose to spite their face to fulfil whatever design intent they are pushing.
The issue I have with that is that I don’t visit those sites as they’re malignant tumours of gaming. So information given through there barely reaches me through extreme amount of hearsay.
I really do think is the salient, unifying factor across all of this.
FS method of delivery and product management feels outdated because it IS outdated. Fatshark hasn’t really figured out how to use a faster, more nimble patching and news/comms cycle to sustain interest among the current player base (aka DRG and other games). In order to achieve this they’d have to revise their internal development processes, and that clearly is a big hurdle for them.
I agree on this.
But. maybe I am wrong but Mayson says the same, just with different words. when I read his post I read “FS applies methods that were applied in gaming industry before 2010”. Or did I miss something? (it could)
The thing is, those sites have viewership that is very likely to be significantly greater than the forums and subreddit. The subreddit has 100k subscribed users (of which how many are still active visitors, IDK), I’m not sure if there are public numbers for forum users.
Looking at similarweb, PCG had 32 million visits in August. Even if only 1% of those visits landed on the Darktide post, that’s still 320k visits (not necessarily unique visitors, but that info doesn’t appear to be available). Additionally, that viewership likely isn’t already invested in the game, so it’s an opportunity to get more players.
It’s anyone’s guess as to why there wasn’t anything official posted by FS within their own communities, but I’m not going to speculate.
It’s not the easiest problem to deal with
Technically, it’s a lot of time and work to build the systems and processes to achieve this
“Politically”, you need buy-in. From the outside looking in, it’s easy to say “that’s a no-brainer”, but internal stakeholders may not easily be sold on “We need X amount of time to build this thing that doesn’t add any customer features”.
Ofc, many businesses have solved the problem, but it’s a long road.
Look, I entirely agree with you. But at this point, It isn’t going to happen. They are determined to have some type of RNG system to inflate game time and player-base as much as possible. They’ll tweak it, make a few adjustments. Maybe it’s Tencent’s doing, I dunno. But it will never go away.
And as a result I doubt the players who had a terrible experience with the game - such as myself - will be coming back. I don’t know. It’s weird. So many people have issues with it so why wouldn’t you fix it and get players back. Ah well I’m not the person in charge of sinking the ship. All I do know is that players on here have been trying their best to “save” the metaphorical ship by throwing water overboard with hands as cups, while the captain at helm sits there doing nothing all the while exclaiming his “Design Intent” as he mandates terrible repair jobs by punching further holes onto the ship.
One thing that might help with money is to put everything they have in the store at once instead of changing every two weeks; also, higher quality sets are needed, and no more recolors, dyeable sets, if Fatshark wants me to keep buying 2100 space dollars for a complete cosmetic set.
I am not saying rotating stores do not work for FOMO, because it does in many live service games, but I think you need to have a huge library of cosmetics available for this to work, so something new and interesting always pops up.
Most other games spit out cosmetics every week, so people are constantly getting that dopamine hit of the latest flashy set in the MTX store that they want so they can style their superiority on the poorer plebs in the player hubs.
I want to throw money at good stuf in the MTX store because I love the game.
There are a piece of forehead goggles for Ogryn that looks abit of the Veteran penance set goggles without the hat for example that i really want for my bestest boi.
Fatshark need to increase their workload a bit and I still think that the rotating store was a mistake because most of the sets are not 2100 space dollars worth of money.
Rotating stores are 50/50 to me. I don’t care enough for FOMO to be a thing. If I miss a cosmetic, it doesn’t bother me - if I spot it when it cycles around again, I can get it then.
One good thing about the rotating store is that there’s a manageable selection to browse through*. There’s a lot to scroll through for opportunistic purchases i.e I feel like something new, let’s see what’s on offer.
More advanced searching and filtering capabilities may help
*That’s not to say you couldn’t have a Promoted section with the curated items for the fortnight, and a separate section of the store to rummage through ALL items
The problem of browsing the store pages is simply solved by placing the cosmetics on a grid instead. Which numerous other games do.
Outside of their rotating items, no one complains about Guild Wars 2 having too many options, and that store is built in a list format, sorted in categories, unless you want to look at the featured things, which is designed as a splash screen.
I don’t care about FOMO and don’t like it, but since it’s used in all live-service games, it most definitely brings in more money than not using it.
I want to support Fatshark because Darktide is my main game, but their store offerings as well as price leave a lot to be desired.
Because of Fatshark’s obsession with camo patterns and the lack of a dying (not as in die, but coloring) system, you can barely mix and match different cosmetic items because the bulk of them don’t function well together.