Bear with me a moment and let’s juggle some random numbers I made up:
60 mil in sales
42 mil after 30% store cuts
Let’s subtract 12 mil randomly for Games Workshop
Leaves 30 mil
Now lets assume the studio has roughly 200 employes with an average salary of 50k (sensible, given the glasdoor reviews about low salaries)
That’d be 200*50k = 10 mil in salaries per year
Let’s add a lofty 5 mil to that for servers, and general studio costs
Leaves you with 15 mil
So even if they had no other source of revenue, they already financed to full hears within the first month. That is not taking into account MTX sales from V2 and Darktide.
Now add up the Tencent money they got, roughly 56 mil
And however much they’re getting out of Gamepass as well as console sales (once they finish it in 6 months) and you can clearly see that from their point of view the game is a financial success.
They don’t need to give a F about any of your negative feedback, suggestions, or negative reviews, which is why they’re patting themselves on the back on sites like LinkedIn.
Ok, but why would they then not fix all the crafting issues?
The solutions have already been given to them.
If they spend 20k or so on wages, implementing these solutions to bring the crafting system into a good state, a lot of people (who otherwise would not) will buy store cosmetics.
There are actually quite a lot of people who would want to buy store cosmetics and financially support the game/studio (additionally to buying the game), but do not do so, because of the bad state that the game is in.
A lot of people simply left the game because of the crafting system.
Not only would those 20k be earned back within a short time and make additional money after that, but a crafting change would also make the company look much better, after the community has been asking for it since release (especially when considering the original announcement of what crafting was going to be like).
I am also sure that pretty much everyone involved in this game’s development would live a happier life, if they got predominantly positive feedback for their product.
A good crafting update would likely cause a massive, positive shift in the mood of the playerbase.
This means a far more positive reception of any type of news and even a temporary lack of news, as well as a healthier atmosphere for community discourse on all related platforms (Forum, Discord, Reddit…).
I don’t think that is a faire assomption. Sur we are having big different with FS on many point but they have clearly shown a will to correct other remark on game balance and some frustrating aspect (simplifying melk contract, bringing the psyker back from oblivion, adding more free skins).
They might be far too slow and have problem thinking like the players. But they want to make a good game based on soome of our returns.
There are clearly several teams at Fatshark. The ones that works on the combat does praiseworthy work. The artists are excellent. But there is one pig-headed b*****d responsible for the “crafting system” that just won’t admit he is wrong.
I think that your numbers are a bit off. $50k seems really low (even for Fatshark paying “low” salaries). More over, actual employee costs to the company can usually be double actual salaries when you factor in the costs of benefits. Probably safer to assume more like $150k per employee in actual costs - even that might be low.
Your numbers also don’t account for corporate taxes - which I’m sure are pretty steep in Sweden.
Next, Tencent may have injected a bunch of money into the studio, but they did so as an investment and likely expect to make money on that investment. A large portion of the profit is probably getting siphoned out by Tencent.
Last, the sales of the game are likely needed to finance multiple years of past development. Obviously some of the profit from past games (eg Vermintide 2) goes into financing future games, but you’d hope your game generates enough sales to cover the true development costs, otherwise you’re actually in the red with respect to that project.
$150k in costs per employee times 150 employees (assuming most of the company was working on DT up to release) times 3 years is a total project cost of $67.5M. And that’s just the employee costs, not taxes, or overhead, or investment earnings, or on-going server costs.
$60M is a big number. But it’s entirely possible the game is dramatically under-performing financially.
Not in a million effin years. Check their glassdoor. Almost every single one complains about comparatively low salaries. According to their may 2023 estimates the average salary for a backend dev is $47790 per year in Sweden.
Also keep in mind that generally there’s a lot of junior devs earning way less. Which balances out the team leads and other heads that earn more. They’re also not at 200 people. As I said rough numbers, but they should be in the right ball park.
They probably just disagree with the 300 or so on here about what’s best for the game.
If you assume that those here are the most ardent players, maybe mostly t5 players with hundreds of hours, then what these players ask for might be at odds with the other 4,500
Take locks for example. No I don’t like the grind. But unlocking everything? Does that not just make it a single brunt 380 buy and a few trips to Melks and then you’ve an end game weapon? I dunno. I’m not sure I want to argue against 200 forumites, or even have a good argument, which is maybe where fatshark are too.
But I do believe that for the proportion of players whod genuinely experiment with builds, there’s a lot that’d just slot fomo, get bored quick, and then leave.
Anyway. If I were them, I’d bite my tongue too until I’d worked out a strong general solution.
What’s frequently lost in this conversation, I feel, is that even if you remove locks, you still have quite a lot of potential grind just to build the weapon you want. You still need to find a weapon with a good base rating and spends materials to upgrade it to orange. You still need to grind (via upgrading items or camping Melk’s shop and doing weeklies) to get the top level blessings you want.
If locks were removed, I’d guestimate that any given weapon is probably going to take at least 10 hours of game of grind to get the right blessings and a good base rating copy to combine it all (ultimately this actual time can be much longer if RNG isn’t favorable giving you a blessing you want) with. Multiply that by ~70 weapons and you’re talking at least 500+ hours to get everything, probably even more.
Here’s the kicker to your point: the casual audience isn’t going to play this game for 500 hours regardless of what the crafting system is. So the “end game” crafting system, such as it is, is already setup for people that are interested in putting 500+ hours into the game, except of course its implemented in a way that runs counter to the motivations of people wanting to put 500+ hours into the game in the first place.
In effect, the crafting system isn’t really serving anyone well, except for people hooked on the “gambling” aspect of it. And this is why, sadly, I think it won’t change - because the intent of this system is to hook people and ultimately compel them to spend more money on the game through DLC and MTX. Fatshark/Tencent went all in on dark patterns and harpooning whales, rather than building a broader community base with good will translating into more donation-driven MTX purchases (i.e. what DRG does).
Yes. I appreciate that and don’t disagree with it. But does a casual player need to have every weapon as top tier? Or even necessarily want?
Are we all not managing fairly well with 525s and 140 curios?
I personally don’t think that big an audience really is craving 550 items with access to every unlock.
I appreciate some players are. That’s fine by me and they have the right to ask. But are they not likely the ones here?
I also appreciate that casuals probably want to try out meta builds and can’t, so I see that argument. But give them those and I bet that’d do them for their 100 hour lifespan. They’d just stick with them. That’s plenty to enjoy the game for a bit of zombie bashing.
Anyway. I think the developers care. Why wouldn’t they? Game Devs aren’t paid that highly. Good programmers can head off to a finance company and milk it if they didn’t care. I just think there’s a disconnect between whats being asked for and maybe what the best solution is, hence the delay from Dec’s on comments.
You underestimate the greed of the cooperate machine. They want all the money not just some of it. Expand or die etc etc and the money men moved into the gaming industry some time ago now.
Don’t presume to understand what happens to the money its most likely far more convoluted than that. If only life was that simple hm? lol.
I had seen this sales data recently and it’s very interesting. I find it hard to believe they had sold 2 million copies but only had 108k players at maximum, I wonder if that’s normal for so many units and so few players in comparison.
I actually think this isn’t it. I think its just them being overwhelmed and having terrible community management skills.
They probably want to fix it but the developer to other staff ratio is too small to achive too much too fast. I base this on the types of content releases we’ve been getting. Far too small, usually full of bugs, but always made with a lot of of love and attention to detail within the content itself. They really need someone over there who knows how to and has the authority to talk to people. They seem like they’re hiding at this point out of embarressment more than malice.
But your numbers suggest that Darktide is capable of surviving the playerbase destruction they wrought upon themselves. So they actually have space to dig themselves out of this hole they are in.
But if it doesn’t matter to the people who don’t care about crafting locks because the game is “easy enough” how is their experience ruined by allowing casual players or players who DO want the ease of experimentation and perfect weapons ruined?
My point is that for casual players it probably doesn’t matter what the crafting system is. If they can play for 100 or 200 hours and get a handful of top tier weapons, that’s fine and I don’t see that as a problem. Getting a handful of top weapons might encourage them to play a bit more even.
For the non-casual players, it’s less about having a “perfect” weapon and more that the crafting system doesn’t let you experiment freely with builds. Sure, people will craft the meta builds and weapons. But people that are going to stick around for 500+ hours will eventually get bored of those, and want to tinker and experiment with off-meta builds to keep the gameplay fresh. You can’t really share builds in this game, because it’s practically impossible to make the same set of equipment as another player.
I mean as a point of comparison, Payday 2 has an entire, still active, sub-reddit dedicated to nothing but sharing/requesting/discussing different builds. For many people, this is a huge part of the appeal of these games (Payday 2, DRG, VT2) but in Darktide this is unrealized.
Of the 2million units sold, what’s your memorial board count up to now? And 90k of the 100k peak rolling players after all didn’t even get past the crashing every 5 minutes experience of launch so crafting probably wasn’t even a consideration.
But yes, I admit of 5000 actives now, likely some do want to “complete” the game. And why not. And it’s currently not possible. And the memorial is a reminder of those people.
I also shouldn’t assume the other 4500 odd players not on forums don’t want to be able to slot everything, any time. Not totally convinced it’d be make or break for them mind you - and it’d strip any progress concept out of their game. I’m for crafting changes. I’m unsure on breaking the locks. I assume that’s where FS are too.
