Internal studio comprised of Mythic/Dark Age of Camelot alum. It wasn't licensed out, but it was a different team inside Zenimax.

Quit the studio? I mean, I know what you meant, but unless there was a strong message from upper management that they understand why FO76 failed and didn't intend to repeat the mistake again, I know I might be looking for a different job. I've quit jobs over less.

I have this creeping feeling that FO76 went exactly as planned though. It was ultimately just a hacked together Fallout 4 asset flip with added multiplayer. Like, Fallout 76 is their online services prototype, a proof of concept and technical demonstration that their engine/tooling can be adapted for making them, and they only released it in order to recoup some of those development costs in the short term. Like Fallout 76 was supposed to be garbage, so there's no surprise on the business end that people think it is garbage: there's no deeper lesson to be learned here about what customers want. Full steam ahead, multiplayer-only Elder Scrolls 6.

Skyrim made so much freaking money there is guaranteed to be a VI, even if they hire someone else to make it. That is a ****load of money to leave on the table.

They would have started developing it years earlier if they hadn't been trying to convert players to the on-paper much more lucrative Elder Scrolls Online in the meantime. But, again, that isn't the kind of game Elder Scrolls fans want to play. Anecdotally, I was really into MMOs before Morrowind came out. Morrowind was the kind of game that I always wanted. I've never paid a monthly subscription since.

Jon, in your previous post I was thinking of other titles before I got to the bottom and realized you were talking about Elder Scrolls, which was off my radar. I figured you were talking about Anthem, or maybe Destiny.
I suppose it is always happening these days, and has been for a while. At large I've really given up on AAA and mostly play Indie games now, unless a AAA game does really well I'll try it 5 years after release.

Right down to firing their composer.

Huh, and all this time I thought this was the last we heard of Cliff B.

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Boy I sure wish I know the context of that PA cartoon, but they redesigned their site and dropped the news link so I have no idea what they’re talking about 100% of the time!

Here's the newspost and an archived version of the original article, I guess

https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2008/02/27/the-alien-the-mutant-the-heretic
https://web.archive.org/web/20080215095134/http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/02/13/gears-of-war-creator-update/

Btw what made Fortnite successful, if not making battle royale family friendly?

What made pogs successful when we were kids?

Does Epic Games have some kind of corporate deal going on, though?

Oh they got Disney, GG.

Living in a world of no television and adblock, I do unfortunately tend to have no idea what's being advertised to people and how.

Fortnite was popular before that tie-in.

It's not deliberate marketing either. It's a fat load of luck, basically. You can't force something to become successful. There are things Epic did that increased their odds, most of them fortuitous mistakes, but at the end of the day building a good product is neither necessary nor sufficient for success. They caught a fad on the up-swing by blind luck of having an existing flop product that was already 99% of the way there, leveraged their existing middleware business to make it cheap, accessible and portable, and then made it memey as **** to resonate with the childrens (which I'm not sure is a product of a dialogue between Epic and its fans, feels authentic, or is being embraced ironically):






Pogs didn't crack this formula and Epic hasn't either. Nobody has. I'm not saying you can time the market, but sooner or later Fortnite will fade away (just like pogs did) and sure enough you'll discover that Epic has no way of replicating its success. And depending on how well Epic understands the fact that they had no real control here, they could hurt themselves pretty badly trying to do it.

True. Releasing a competing IP right now would probably be a failure. Fortnite, I suppose, was also timed pretty well to absorb children away from Minecraft and other kid-friendly alternatives. And trying to divine exactly what clicks is basically tea leaf reading.

Should we talk about dead games? We should. Let's talk about Duelyst. Duelyst is the story of developers killing a working title through sheer incompetence.

A brief history: Duelyst went into open beta in the latter half of 2015, through Kickstarter funding and led by Keith Lee, a Blizzard alum. The premise is straightforward. Much of the game is a carbon copy of Hearthstone. You have a deck of cards. You get more cards by buying packs. You have three currencies. One is gold, the free currency you earn from playing, doing dailies or whatever. There is a premium currency, which works as expected. These both purchase packs of cards and other cosmetics. There's also Spirit, which is what you get from destroying cards and can only be used to create specific cards. So, exactly Hearthstone so far. Okay? Okay.

The hook to keep it distinct was interesting, though. You didn't just plop down cards into an unsorted row. Instead, you had a 5x9 grid to place minions on:



There was an added layer of having to place your minions and move everyone into strategic positions. Pretty cool, yeah? I and friends picked this game up some time in 2016, and we all enjoyed it. It seemed to do pretty well, too.

Now take a peak at the sullygnome data for streaming, my favorite "interest proxy":



See it? Hmph, nope. Let's add a bit of information about the game's major set releases:



A-ha, now it looks like we're getting somewhere. So the game had a solid release, and for nearly a year seems to have had a consistent fanbase. Then..



Or, more accurately, the second set was released. Now I wasn't playing at this time, so I had to track down people who were and find out: why did the game take a massive hit after the second set?

Turns out, there are two ways the developers took a working game and threw it straight into the garbage.

First, purchasing options for packs changed:



This also fails to mention that these cards specifically could not be crafted by spirit. So all of those long-term players who saved up? Well, **** them. You also spend 3x as much for less than 2/3rds the amount of cards. From what people have said, most people who played competitively just bought enough packs to complete the entire set, as daily grinding to unlock what you needed could take a month if you were unlucky.

Second, you have terrible, awful game balancing choices. Turns out the new cards ended up making a few decks massively better than others, and what's worse those decks weren't even fun to play against.

These two made people feel coerced into paying to win in a game that had diverted from what made it fun to begin with. According to a developer, in this period the game hemorrhaged over half of its active player base. At this point there was zero advertisement whatsoever. As a result, no new players joined to replace anyone. The fate of the game was practically sealed then.

So TL;DR, if you're going to make a game don't randomly change your monetization scheme. Also don't fail to playtest your game. Doing so will make sure you aren't adding crap which players will hate.

man dat JK and Dork Farces yo

Also, I remember Duelyst only from (obv.) a PA strip https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2017/02/17/gtfooh

reminds me, I'd been meaning to go to the mall to go get some more pogs

The first time I played pogs it was with neighbor kids who only played for keeps. They were teaching me how to play as they were winning all of the pogs I'd gotten for my birthday. They cleaned me out and even got my slammer. I'm pretty sure it is the reason I avoided Pokemon like the plague when it became a thing a few years later.

H U S T L E D



Did JK sell well? I wonder how many copies were sold before it was added to digital services.

That one hit too close to home:

what the **** did i just watch

A clip from a bad Sony comedy movie making fun of cringy product tie-ins despite itself being a tie in.

a rare bad movie from Happy Madison Productions

Penny Arcade still exists?

[why?]

It is the will of FastGamerr and GBK.

because, y'know, gamer, uh

It's true.

Like, I genuinely can't remember it ever being funny and the whole "gamer" discourse is the ****ing pits.

https://www.christcenteredgamer.com/index.php/reviews/pc-mac/5810-huniepop-pc

Don't ask questions.

Wow, that was a really well-written and objective review. I'm pretty impressed.

I haven't read the full review, but I find it extremely offensive to spell "money" like that with a 'u'. >:-(

Yeah, well, though on the one hand she is all for promoting "divine games", she is married to an anime character.

Is it like that in other reviews? I thought maybe it was just this weird game in particular that spelled it "munie."

Yeah, pretty sure the spelling is part of the game. The dialog also uses bad grammar ("how's things?") >:|

Have you guys heard of the "Intimacy Mode" of some 2018 game called Senran Kagura Burst Re:Newal? It's censored in the Western version of the game. In the original, apparently you get a pair of virtual hands that you use to grope some bikini idol, and you "win" when she finally gives into your advances. :wtf:

Seriously the best Christian review of an anime dating porn game ever. I go to Christ Centered Gaming for all of my top notch anime porn reviews.

No joke though it was a surprisingly in depth and comprehensive review. For someone married to an anime husband too, apparently.

I love discovering new kinds of people. So interesting and bizarre.

I just watched a clip of some of the dialog of this game. If only I had known the trick to getting laid was to ask women

a) their cup size

b) their last name

If you're physically attractive enough

.

I lost it at "young love"

While I'm a fan of anime, I don't watch "those" kind.

Uh huh.
Just be you, sab