Ganso
Junior Strategist
Posts: 932
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Post by Ganso on Dec 12, 2018 19:06:45 GMT
don't like it, don't buy it. Worked well for EA... Really man? that's all you got out of it? Warmachine can't be everything for everyone, no game can, and clearly PPs offering is better than their competitors in Depth, Balance and Core Rules. So they shouldn't ignore that just to try something their competitors already do better. And it's interesting you brought up EA: They took a look at the success of games like Overwatch, with their whimsical characters, diverse cast, and over the top gameplay and thought "We can totally do the same with our period focused WW2 shooter!", but instead of raking in the dough like their biggest competitors they bombed when they should just have doubled down on the authenticity and gameplay they are known for instead of following their competitor's lead.
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Post by sand20go on Dec 12, 2018 19:30:07 GMT
don't like it, don't buy it. Worked well for EA... Really man? that's all you got out of it? Warmachine can't be everything for everyone, no game can, and clearly PPs offering is better than their competitors in Depth, Balance and Core Rules. So they shouldn't ignore that just to try something their competitors already do better. And it's an interesting you brought up EA: They took a look at the success of games like Overwatch, with their whimsical characters, diverse cast, and over the top gameplay and thought "We can totally do the same with our period focused WW2 shooter!", but instead of raking in the dough like their biggest competitors they bombed when they should just have doubled down on the authenticity and gameplay they are known for instead of following their competitor's lead. PRECISELY!! In a great moment of I think the 3rd (or perhaps the 4th) Dirty Harry Movie Eastwood barks out "A man's got to know his limitations." Words to live by. If you do something well don't abandon it. DOuble down and be great at it.
(And look at idiotic bethesda. Fallout DID NOT need to be a multi-player mess. Sure you can get microtransaction revenues for years. But that isn't the underlying design of the vault dweller - which is one of the great RPG franchises of our time. At least Rockstar did it smart - build a great single player experience in RDR2 and then try to do multi-player as well....clearly an afterthought. )
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Post by Charistoph on Dec 12, 2018 21:45:04 GMT
To be fair, NO game needs to be a mess. Most of the F76 issues were ones that every MMORPG should have been aware of before launch. If this was 2002, most of them would have been understandable, but considering how many MMORPGs have been launched and flopped, while having far more to them than F76 had.
In tabletop terms, it would be like providing Battleboxes, but no scenarios and only the most bare and broken rules that have to be house ruled if you look at them too closely.
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Ganso
Junior Strategist
Posts: 932
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Post by Ganso on Dec 12, 2018 22:21:03 GMT
To be fair, NO game needs to be a mess... Well, to be fair also, those flops mostly reflect the Team's experience level in that specific context. Bethesda is already known for their buggy games and have zero experience with Online games. On the other hand Fallout New Vegas is considered the best modern Fallout game by practically everyone and it was done by Obsidian which is full of vets that "get" Fallout. Then you have cases like Mass Effect Andromeda that was outsourced to a different team and it also flopped. Or how about Blizzard, a mostly PC centric company, who were panned for outsourcing Diablo to a mobile dev and then making it the headline for their annual Keynote at a con full of mostly PC gamers. The past couple of years is full of examples of nerdy properties falling on their face because they ignored the pillars of what made them strong in the first place. When you Firetruck up that bad because you fail to see what made your property great in the first place is when idioms like "going back to basics" and "finding our roots" start ringing true.
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Post by mcdermott on Dec 12, 2018 22:21:28 GMT
To be fair, NO game needs to be a mess. Most of the F76 issues were ones that every MMORPG should have been aware of before launch. If this was 2002, most of them would have been understandable, but considering how many MMORPGs have been launched and flopped, while having far more to them than F76 had. In tabletop terms, it would be like providing Battleboxes, but no scenarios and only the most bare and broken rules that have to be house ruled if you look at them too closely. So like AoS
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Post by Charistoph on Dec 12, 2018 22:39:45 GMT
To be fair, NO game needs to be a mess... Well, to be fair also, those flops mostly reflect the Team's experience level in that specific context. Bethesda is already known for their buggy games and have zero experience with Online games. On the other hand Fallout New Vegas is considered the best modern Fallout game by practically everyone and it was done by Obsidian which is full of vets that "get" Fallout. Then you have cases like Mass Effect Andromeda that was outsourced to a different team and it also flopped. Or how about Blizzard, a mostly PC centric company, who were panned for outsourcing Diablo to a mobile dev and then making it the headline for their annual Keynote at a con full of mostly PC gamers. The past couple of years is full of examples of nerdy properties falling on their face because they ignored the pillars of what made them strong in the first place. World of Warcraft was in the same position when it launched. The crew had zero experience in building a MMORPG. The only networking code they had before then was for an RTS whose player numbers could be counted on Count Rogan's fingers. WoW was launched in 2004, and the problems that F76 are facing are ones that are very well known in the industry. You can't pull crap like that in 2018 and expect to get a pass no matter the producer. I think we're seeing corporatism creep back in to markets again where people who are high up are making decisions on things they know little about and over-riding people on the low end making the decisions. I quit a job in the last year for that same reason (though it wasn't in gaming).
Diablo Immortal wasn't a bad idea, it was just presented at the wrong time to the wrong people (so far, at least, game has to be launched in some form first). Might as well announce a PS Halo game at the next Xbox convention for a rough equivalent. I almost felt the same disappointment for Level 7, actually. I was hoping for a Warmachine version of X-Com, not a board game. That seriously makes me not care about the game at all.
To be fair, NO game needs to be a mess. Most of the F76 issues were ones that every MMORPG should have been aware of before launch. If this was 2002, most of them would have been understandable, but considering how many MMORPGs have been launched and flopped, while having far more to them than F76 had. In tabletop terms, it would be like providing Battleboxes, but no scenarios and only the most bare and broken rules that have to be house ruled if you look at them too closely. So like AoS Indeed. It's why AoS completely nose-dived in America when it launched and was deemed irrecoverable until the GHB came out. Heck, AoS didn't even have points to operate a "fair" game with.
Edit: There seems to be a huge thing that happens every so often where a generation of people take the hard-learned lessons of yester-year, toss it out out the window, execute it with a shotgun, burn it with napalm, and then dump it in the ocean to forget it. Then after they try their "new" ideas (not really new, they just didn't bother learning history), they scramble to try and rebuild exactly what was working before they threw it out the window. Okay, rant off.
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Post by marxlives on Dec 13, 2018 16:04:59 GMT
Honestly, the most conventional answer is, it's complicated. Seattle-Bellevue area has a bunch of ANTIFA nonsense going on right now and the local government already announced huge taxes for businesses. Heck, Amazon is building another headquarters near D.C. just in case they need to close shop. I don't know if WM is growing but it is stable and MP IS growing.
The most honest answer is that PP has a bunch of great devs who polished their resumes and need a raise, but due to Seattle becoming less business friendly (I wish PP was in Texas because the tech business is booming here as more business flee the West Coast - Pacific Northwest) Matt Wilson and his wife cannot afford to give them a raise.
This can be looked as a negative however, through their hard work with CID the game is in a stable state right now and CID is not a pressing matter to overhaul the system. It is just maintenance at this point. Just like when video games are done being produced the staff will be reduced to cut unnecessary human resources, I have a feeling PP had the same thing. But it looks like it was voluntary rather than a layoff, which is a good sign.
PP is a private company and not a publicly traded company but even companies like GW, FFG, CMoN don't look kindly at waste. And if you think about it PP is the biggest privately owned miniature wargame company in the market so their margins are VERY tight.
I don't know how many of you will take this but in the end I really hope PP sells to a company with facilities in a more business friendly climate or moves there. Of course the former would be easier than the latter.
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Post by Charistoph on Dec 13, 2018 16:20:17 GMT
It takes a lot of residual capital to move the lock, stock, and pair of steaming barrels to a distant location. To say nothing of moving all the equipment that you can't spare (i.e. molds, computers with unreleased information, etc), the cost of moving the people who you need to move and hiring people to replace the ones who won't is considerable.
I worked for FedEx Office for a while and considered moving to the headquarters area a couple of times (especially when I was facing lay off if I didn't move to Dallas or Las Vegas). As big as they are, one would have to be getting a position the equivalent of a District Manager or better before they would pay for moving you, and my job wasn't. That was a company that had significant resources at hand, with a parent company with even more.
Compared to them, Privateer Press is quite small. While moving one town over might be possible, moving to another state would be quite expensive. Though, I wouldn't blame them for wanting to move to Texas at all (at least until all the CA and WA transplants vote in all the measures which caused them to leave CA and WA in the first place, they're already destroying my home state of AZ).
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Post by anderfreak on Dec 13, 2018 17:42:13 GMT
they're already destroying my home state of AZ). I would argue that Arizona was destroyed long before it was a state.
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eathotlead
Junior Strategist
PP forumite since 2004
Posts: 259
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Post by eathotlead on Dec 14, 2018 17:09:15 GMT
First, in response to the OP, I also feel key players leaving is a bad sign. As far as the rest...
After reading most - but admittedly not every page - of this long thread, I agree with a lot of the observations. The one thing I think was under-emphasized was PP's destruction (for the most part) of their own forum community. The resulting diaspora and reliance on scattered social media has been depressing. With the apparently necessary dissolution of the Press Gang (which weakened local communities), it seems to me that co-removal of their online community was a double whammy that hurt. A lot. I've used the metaphor* before, but when you have customers in your store, your chance of making a sale is just plain better. You don't drive them elsewhere, then wonder why sales are down.
Further, the atrophy of fluff down to a trickle gives guys like me far less to get excited about. I'd definitely pay a reasonable subscription fee to access regular online fluff. I'll happily read other faction or IK stuff if I know I'll see my beloved Khador or Merc stories on a rotation. The once-reliable fiction drove my excitement to buy new dude-manz. "Oh my God, Gorten took down the Deathjack?! Puh-lease put his epic iteration on the horizon, boxed with new Rhulfolk! I'll take the lot!" Painting, converting, discussing, and occasionally playing was like participating in a novel as it unfolded.
And this may be even more specific to me, but shifting to Lock-n-Load on the distant West Coast as the premier PP event (when it was once drive-able GenCon) cut me out of the loop further. On the old forums, I used to eagerly post pics of new releases in the glass cases and see others doing the same. Very exciting! But spending hundreds on a flight before even reaching the events and products made it all a non-starter for me. Again, YMMV.
...You can see how the developments above intersect, as well. Local community shrunk, active central online community not really an alternative, fiction at a trickle, premier event inaccessible. Not good for ol' eathotlead. Obviously, the above is just a personal history and my own observations. I honestly don't know whether I represent a significant demographic. I only play rarely (at charity events) but I don't even want to count how much money I've dumped into PP purely as someone seeking immersion, community, and hobby opportunities.
(*Actually it's almost literal here.)
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Post by Charistoph on Dec 14, 2018 19:33:51 GMT
they're already destroying my home state of AZ). I would argue that Arizona was destroyed long before it was a state. Nah, we just never had much of what California, New York, and DC valued to begin with (except international trespassers, we have always had a lot of those). We've been building up, but since California started stabbing itself to death we're getting a lot of the people who can't flee to Texas. Unfortunately, they wonder why we don't have California-style laws in place, even though that's one of the reasons they move here . But enough about local politics .
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Post by Big Fat Troll on Dec 14, 2018 22:35:44 GMT
Or maybe California always has more people leaving because it has more people period.
Anyway...
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Post by mcdermott on Dec 14, 2018 23:09:50 GMT
Oregon and washington are both growing faster than texas
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Post by sand20go on Dec 15, 2018 21:21:35 GMT
Yeah - I seriously doubt Washington's business climate is a critical factor. While there are definately labor costs involved with a company like PP it wouldn't seem to be the key issue. Again, what I understand is that Wilson is in California.
I think they are in a hard spot - a mature company with a mature product. Yes, it is Number 2 and 3. But that probably is a pretty small gross. They REALLY need a home run.
And not to derail the threat further but I wonder (speaking of hits) how KeyForge has done cause in the end cardboard crack is simply ridiculously higher margin than minature games. (sadly looks over at his High Command set and wonders about what could have been ;-)
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Post by mcdermott on Dec 16, 2018 0:29:41 GMT
Keyforge is gonna be a flash in the pan. Big for maybe a year or two then tank
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