It's why I can ever work in the videogame industry, a fickle and unsympathetic user base who often has no comprehension or respect for the scale of the product they are using.
I think PGI could have saved themselves a lot of grief by:
- Getting private matchmaking out much earlier than May this year. It's been requested since day one, and would have kept the hardcore folks busy until community warfare.
- Learn the art of tweaking game balance. They drop patches every two weeks. Instead of making huge, sometimes game wrecking, balance changes every three months they could have nudged the balance slightly each patch. "Missiles seem slightly too easy to avoid - making them 3% faster" doesn't make anyone blow a gasket. "Bumping missile speed 75%" will.
Except this is an example of features being added that the community didnot want.
There are quite a number of features or promised features that have elicited rage from the community and I think the way these have been handled continues to fuel that rage.
The game model is based on the wildly successful world of tanks, and the core fan base is older with deep pockets. Everyone I know who plays has put in at least $50-100, and some I know have spent as much as $700(!).
If the studio is on the brink of disaster, sure, I could see hail-mary moves being made. What doesn't seem to make sense is not making those moves be crowd pleasers.
It seems like the lead designer really is both disconnected with the fans and loves to troll parts of the community. And the community managers that have been put in place compound the problems.
If the game isn't making money it's a shame - but it's probably a mismanagement issue.
A failing game is always a shitty situation. Shitty for the players. Shitty for the devs. Shitty for the studio stakeholders. No one wins. :(
It may be that the existing game is great as is, they just need to find players who want to spend money on that game but don't know it existing. User acquisition is a big deal these days. It's very difficult to do well. That assumes it can be done. If a game is too niche then the potential audience just may not be big enough.
So they went with the next option, change the game to try to increase the size of the potential audience. This has a high risk of alienating your current base, which is what happened here.
Like I said in another reply, it's a shitty situation all around. Shitty for players. Shitty for devs. Shitty for company owners.
This comment just took me back to my time in The Matrix Online, and the perpetual anger the community had with Sony and their lack of development/interest/activity etc. Of course it turned out they had a few hundred subscribers that simply didn't cover costs of keeping the game online let alone improving it.
Mistakes were certainly made by Monolith and subsequently Sony, but that's not the point. It's hard when you're emotionally invested in a game to accept poor communication and seemingly inevitable wind down, especially when the game is purely online.
By higher profit they probably mean any profit at all. Gamers have zero ability to read between the lines. This isn't a bunch of greedy devs driving Ferraris that want more money to buy a Lambo. This reeks of a desperate hail mary to save the studio and avoid shutting down. The game is probably a total failure and they are doing anything and everything they can to not lay the whole team off.
Gamers have a right to be angry I suppose. Go ahead. Be angry. If a company can't make payroll it doesn't matter of it's community is angry or happy.