This is not going to be pretty, and maybe not that profitable in the short-term. I am going to sound harsh, but I do want this to succeed, as I see the potential. This is not intended as a slam on you guys- I hopee you know what I post here well enough, that you know this isn't just me begging or slagging.
Right now: the perception of this game is that it's unplayable, and that buying a Stardock game isn't worth it until at least a year out. That's not good for business.
Solution:
a) Next week, throw some mods on the site. There have been some decent mods made already that help the game out. The mod section needs to be more then just maps.
Get custom MP servers up ASAP after getting MP online. MP will help with the balance, since people will make MP mods to fix balance issues. That might be able to save you some manhours on balancing. If possible, allow for mods to be used on SD servers (work with the mod community on this)
c) Keep up the good work on support overall. I trust you guys fully on that, otherwwise I would be raging at you guys right now.
d) This is the part you might not like. You're going to have to eat short-term profitability on this, in order to help in the long-term.
You'll need to be aggressive on discounting once you can. (I understand you can't right now)
That said, the expansion. It needs to be a stand-alone game, with a bug-free, very generous demo out a month before release. Maybe even full game esque. The burden of proof is right now, (fairly or not), on you guys to prove you can have a solid launch. Showing the world what a year of your support can do for a game will restore your reputation (which is tarnished outside of here right now)
The downside is the fans who stuck it out will feel screwed over a bit, (I'm one of those fans) , but I think most of us would be ok with that , given the circumstances. Maybe give us the expansion at a discount based on when we pre-ordered elemental, or a loyalty bonus on Impulse when we get it? (not DLC, but a credit to use on other things)
e) Learn from your mistakes and don't rush future titles, even if it seems to make business sense at the time. It bites you back tenfold.
I never thought I'd be trying to tell a millionare how to run his business, but I'm trying to look at things from a cold, business side, not my gamer side. As a gamer, I'd be willing to hand over my money- I know I won't regret this ride. However, I know I got a minority opinion, and the Joe Average gamer right now- he's writing you guys off. I'm worried about the long-term damage that could happen, and how it would mean lower budgets for SD titles in the future, and less ambitious future projects- such as GC3. (I am motivated by self-interest here)
fixed
And the games market is notoriously forgetful. Just look at Demigod - launch was a complete failure. It's done well enough there's talk of a sequel. Sometimes I think games companies could start shipping turd in boxes at release and it wouldn't make any difference whatsoever ...
I don't know how that myth started because it has never been the case. Yes, the gold version was in rough shape for a release product, but outright unplayable? Not at all. I'm not sure what a company can to do combat a falsity that so many people appear to have unquestioningly accepted as fact.
The perception of fact in this case is as bad as being fact.
It's not fair, but it is what it is. With Stardock's ability to improve things over time, a re-release or stand-alone XP would gain that goodwill back.
I'm going to disagree with this. If you discount a week after release, what you're going to do is annoy people who bought the game in the first week. That just reinforces the "don't buy Stardock games at launch" perception.
Look at what happened to Star Trek Online when they pulled that stunt. They still haven't lived down the negative reaction. Everybody knows game discounts happen, but they don't happen this fast.
What they *could* do is offer up a DLC coupon to people who bought already or some such. You want to give the perception of increasing value rather then decreasing it.
This, I agree with. In the past Brad had said that making games is 95% engine and 5% game. We've seen now what happens with 5% game.
What it needs to be is more like 85% engine, 5% game, 10% game polish & tweaking. We really needed a public beta 5 that didn't happen, where the full game was assembled and it was just "how does it play in the late game?" type questions.
Stardock's reputation for supporting games after release is good, and they deserve it. But they're also building a reputation for not polishing games BEFORE release, and that really can't happen again.
(On the upside for GC3, if they use Elemental's engine they'll no doubt have the kinks worked out by then and it'll save an awful lot of grief.)
I can agree with a), b ) (I'm hoping for it going well because if it doesn't, I foresee the sky falling) and c)
Not sure about d). In the end, if it really benefits Elemental, Stardock could do it but maybe it's not necesary. Right now it's not the moment for such kind of decissions but after some weeks when water isn't so... agitated. Surely I prefer them focusing right now in fixing the issues that some users have. Also, bug-free? Not possible. Ever. Even Starcraft 2 had bugs at release and Blizzard spent an eternity with it. (I'm talking about bug-free release, not number of bugs on release)
About e), unless I'm given more data about it, I must consider it a bit unfair. How can be judge when we don't know enough about it? I'm sure that some time in the (not close) future, Frogboy will tell the tale and give us some much needed perspective. I will agree about taking care of the relationship with John Average though.
Very sound advice. The last piece of advice is the most important of all--- don't rush your product--- is the most important of all and to it I'd add just one more piece. ADMIT that you rushed your product and that it is unfinished. As of now, all I've been seeing from the devs and from Frog is dodginess in that regard. If they don't admit to us, and themselves, that the game was rushed and unfinished, then there's going to be a good chance that their next game is rushed and unfinished too (hey, if nothing is "wrong," why fix it??) Once that happens, Stardock will have permanently lost it's good reputation.
I agree 100% Being too forgiving with mistakes is bad. Exagerating them is also bad.
It's funny to see how everybody seems to know what needs to be done to "fix" the game. If it was so easy, there would be thousands of successful game devolepers. But I think that's not the case.
The truth is that we all would probably have made the same mistakes that Stardock did. Even if Stardock is a company that has existed for several years, that situation is new for them. Mainly, they have all the focus over them, so many people waiting for day 0, while it was not the same for GalCiv2. What worked for GalCiv2 may not work for Elemental because situations are different.
Now, the game is not unplayable. The game has not big desgin flaws. What happens is that the game failed to fulfill expectations, which is a very different thing. We were waiting for an A+++ game and when we just got a B+, we got disapointed. Expectations have not been properly managed, and this creates the false feeling that the game is "broken" while it is just not "as good as we expected".
I think everybody has right to make mistakes, as long as they learn from them. I agree that developers need to be a lot more careful next time, especially for the expansion. If they do, they will have learned the lesson and this will have made them stronger and wiser. And no, I don't think I am having too high expectations
yeah my patient is on one now. I havn't had a crash since 1.06 came out.
I agree with this completely...
I don't actually agree. I'm a software developer and I run a software company rather smaller than Stardock.We're pretty efficient at development by all accounts (ie customer feedback) and our development team size (ie the entire company) is probably not dissimilar in size to the core team which worked on Elemental (excluding the artists, we don't need them for commercial software .
I was astounded at how quickly Stardock wanted to go from making major gameplay changes in the beta to going gold and releasing just a few weeks later. We had conversations about it in the office, all trying to work out how and when they were going to polish it. We just couldn't see how it would work - they were only starting to work seriously on the AI what 6 weeks or so before release? The data files were in huge flux, the engine was still receiving massive numbers of changes and bugs were all over the place. Did they have some secret trick to software development that we didn't know about?
We have our answer now. They weren't going to polish it. They were just going to release it and be damned.
This frustrates me. I feel sorry that I didn't post my concerns a couple of months ago when they were talking about an August release date. I even feel slightly guilty about it, maybe if I and enough other people had said something early enough they would have delayed by 3 months (the minimum time we thought proper polishing and balancing would take) and fixed the game?
Anyway, Arstal has some good ideas. I'm not sure exactly what the best plan is but they all deserve considering.
I like Stardock, they are amongst my top 3 favourite game developers, it just disappoints me that they dropped the ball so badly on Elemental (and yes I own it and have been playing it) and even seem in denial that it has gone wrong. I just hope they manage to glue it all back together again and reveal the enormous promise which I think lies underneath all the unbalanced and inconsistent mechanics.
There's some serious reality distortion field action going on. I pre-ordered Demigod, bought GalCiv II and pre-ordered Elemental, Collector's ed (paid rather a ton of OS shipping, too).
I'm pretty disappointed with what Stardock pulled here. The initial reaction coming out of the company wasn't exactly stellar, either. Brad messed up on the PR, that much is pretty simple. I'd imagine they simply didn't have the funds to keep the game in development for another 5 months to last 'till feb next year. All the same, this wasn't handled well.
Most annoying was the misinformation around this game. It wasn't ready, it wasn't playtested and I am just not getting why Stardock was so hellbent on telling paying customers otherwise. You already had our money, why not just be straight?
I won't be pre-ordering the next Stardock game. I probably won't even buy it full price. I had no trouble pre-ordering for full price because I like supporting companies I like. I'm pretty sure Stardock will pull this out of the fire eventually, but sadly, they're off that list as of this launch.
My copy of EWoM isn't unplayable because of crashes or bugs, its not being played because it isn't fun. Its like 4x on rails, no difference of the choices I make from one sandbox game to the next. No uniqueness of resource spawning from one random map to the next. Basically each and every game plays remarkably similar to its predecessors.
Indie games should not command AAA $, especially when they aren't greatness.
According to Metacritic, you got an 'F' ... 44/100 based on 2 professional reviewers
How to get the people back:Get the game more polish. Have longer build queues. More options, more technologies. Make more magic... magical. Fix the AI.
The most important thing to do is....
Fire people at Stardock and hire gamers that like to MOD and know what they are doing.
One of my best friends works at Bethesda (which is a fair sized developer) on games like Fallout 3. He said pretty much the same thing when he tried the Elemental beta. In fact, he flat out told me "this isn't a beta" about every version until beta 4. That was when the real game beta started, and it ended far too quickly.
It seems like it was just a combination of underestimating how hard making a polished game really is, how much more attention they'd get at release this time as compared to last time (in that a Stardock release actually gets some attention now), and the shelf-space issue making it hard for them to delay due to the sheer size of the delay.
Hopefully they learn from this for next time. Beta's 1-4 did their job, but we need a beta 5 where everything is assembled and it's nothing but gameplay testing & polish.
Worst advise yet. The last bit that is.
I agree but I don't think they could spend any more time on beta. I don't know all the detail and I don't think any of us know all the details. I think that there is too much assumptions and misinterpretations going on. I would say give them the benefit of the doubt, but that's me. I also don't see a big deal about the money I spent, knowing the game will only get better. There are tons of games I have wasted money on in the past, I don't complain about it just more careful when I make decisions on what I want to buy. I see how hard SD is working and I can appreciate that. It really makes no difference that I paid now and have to wait a bit or if I waited and paid later. I'm glad to have something to play, I just consider it more beta testing.
Well, we do know that the only delay available was until February 2011, due to shelf space at retail. They told us that. So I can understand why August got chosen, because Feburary would result in a ridiculously long gameplay beta, to the point where it'd start sapping momentum away from the game.
Had a 1-2 month delay been an option, it probably would have been a different story. But it wasn't. At this point it's really more important that they move forward, and I'm pretty happy with the support thus far (including the plans to look at how magic damage works).
From an executive-level point of view, I think there's merit to this different approach of releasing a game when it's still not quite polished. You make most of your top-line money up front. When it's released--that's when most of the top-line revenues pour in. OTOH most of the profit comes later on--after it's been out 9 months to a year or so and it's getting discounted. If you release it earlier than later, your up-front investment goes down, and once a game is deemed profitable you are better able to invest in it further. Plus when you release it you've got data. Reviews are pouring in, users like us are giving our feedback, money numbers are coming in. You don't want to keep betting on a dead horse. Also, time-to-market is CRITICAL. You have to beat your competitors out the door. Being first and not very good is probably not a wise move, but.... Contrast with the traditional approach: large up-front investment, you have no idea how it's going to do once you release it, very few beta testers, and you end up patching it anyway.
I don't think this approach is necessarily better, just trying something different. Sometimes when you try something new, you're wrong. That doesn't automatically mean you go back to what everybody else is doing--it could mean you try another different thing instead. In this case I think you need your PR working on all cylinders well after the release, where normally almost all of your PR happens right around the release. That means begging all the gaming sites to revisit you, which they also don't normally do.
SD is doing a good job post release, that has always been their very best focus area. Great ideas in the article as well arstal.
For those that refuse to see any criticism as other than heresy:
Here is the thing, when someone with an ID number as low as Dethedrus has concerns it is best to take them very seriously. Folks like him are key core customers who do a lot of leg work, heavy lifting, and opinion shifting. He isn't just whistling dixie and he knows of what he speaks (has been here for nearly a freaking decade).
The poll that Brad put up here backs him up (I can't seem to find the poll thread anymore). When 43% of the people who come and register on your forums are disappointed it isn't just perception.
The SD folks have said as much as well. They *want* genuine unvarnished opinions of their products. I applaud that.
Poll is here. Here's the forum thread that goes with it.
I will give SD credit for not giving up. However, why am I paying for a beta? Why was the game released this early. I have heard reports that SD rushed the release of the game by.... um... 2 days... because retailers broke the street date. So, it has been 4 complete days (counting Tuesday as day 0) and the start of the 5th. Right now, this is the game it would have been at release. Which is... not a finished or polished game. When StarCraft 2 released was the game in this state?When Mass Effect 2 released was the game in this state?When Dawn of War 2 released was the game in this state?Why is the game in this state? Is SD some small company that can not meet dates asked of them (put by them) months in advanced? Did someone honestly believe this game was finished a year ago? Do you believe that the game is finished as is now? Honestly.
While I agree entirely and SD is getting a lot of slack from review sites due to their wealth of built of cred on these issues I think we probably got this point across to SD already.
Sorry but this just sounds like more whining and your just reiterating what has already been said. SD is a small company actually and obviously they couldn't meet their release date sufficiently for reasons which are somewhat known to us. Also, the way PC gaming seems to be now, we are always basically paying for betas and your comparing SD to much larger and more well financed companies The game should have been more balanced, if they had the time to do it, but they didn't so get over it. Either stick with it and try to help mold the further development so that the game is great or just move on to something else, no need to go crazy.
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