Fatshark may be in financial trouble

[lastarchon]

I'm a loyal and long-time player of Fatshark/Tide games, so I know how Fatshark operates. I think something is different now though and the company may be in trouble. I was hopefully waiting to see what Fatshark previewed for their games at Warhammer Skulls, and now I've accepted there is likely a bigger problem than I realized.

Fatshark had surely budgeted their current and next fiscal around projected Darktide sales and was financing the development of the game in part with debt and equity against those sales. Of course, Fatshark acknowledges Darktide had a bad launch -- an acknowledgement that means their leadership team was forced to accept this fact by seeing the game widely miss their sales targets and active player numbers, the best indicator of how well they've done as a games company.

Since launch Darktide has had what feels like just a trickle of further development, and I hoped they were directing it into a major game-saving update -- but today Warhammer Skulls showed the next update is incremental, and there doesn't seem to be plans to address the game's major issues: a lack of class/build diversity compared to V2, problematic crafting and progression, and limited environments.

Vermintide has been stuck on a pending launch of Sienna's 4th career since Darktide launched, and now Sienna's 4th is planned for "Fall 2023". Given that this career was in final testing several months ago, getting fine-tuned for release, this delay speaks to a problem somewhere: labor and technical expertise is scarce when it shouldn't be, and that means money is scarce when it shouldn't be.

I want to be wrong because I love these games, even Darktide. But the seeming lack of a health content stream across the Fatshark games is very concerning, and I think it must mean the Dev resources are all fully allocated on what Fatshark hopes will be a company-saving launch on Xbox, perhaps while the leadership also tries to raise more debt or equity capital to get development re-started and plug the gap where sales revenues never materialized.

[Ragnarok]

Turns out ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up a game for a Christmas release and watching 95% of your player base vanish like a fart in the wind has financial consequences. Who knew being absolutely incompetent would result in bad things happening?

[2D > 3D WEEB 4 LIFE]

VT2 staff has been shuffled back and forth between DT to even get the game out before work started on the console version.

[The_Gay_Agenda]

Obvious that Fatshark isn't doing so great at the moment.

[Sentient Entropy]

They were already in trouble or they wouldn't have been purchased by Tencent. Consequently this string of unforced errors stands a real chance of being fatal.

[Bovril Brigadier]

Originally posted by Ragnarok:

Turns out ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up a game for a Christmas release and watching 95% of your player base vanish like a fart in the wind has financial consequences. Who knew being absolutely incompetent would result in bad things happening?

It's actually closer to 97% of their playerbase vanish if we're being generous. Population is barely less than 3.5% of launch.

[Medicles]

Originally posted by The_Gay_Agenda:

Obvious that Fatshark isn't doing so great at the moment.

When exactly did they ever do great? Because even the War of the Roses community already knew and tried to warn us during Vermintide 1 that Fatshark is a terrible developer.

[Captain Worthy]

Originally posted by Strayed:

Originally posted by Ragnarok:

Turns out ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up a game for a Christmas release and watching 95% of your player base vanish like a fart in the wind has financial consequences. Who knew being absolutely incompetent would result in bad things happening?

It's actually closer to 97% of their playerbase vanish if we're being generous. Population is barely less than 3.5% of launch.

Same goes for Vermintide 2, since 3.4% of its players ever got all the characters to level 30 and it's all-time peak of 104 000 players happened just before Darktide launched with its peak of about 108 000 players, and has gone down to similar daily peaks as Darktide, even slightly lower than that.

The bugs and lack of content which have been supposedly issues for Darktide are not there in Vermintide 2, yet that game has almost the same exact drop as Darktide. So it's not due to lack of content & bugs at all, it's the core structure of both of these games which have an endgame grind where only about 3.4% of the playerbase EVER goes into.

Even if Darktide had four times the content and no bugs at all at launch, I guarantee you the player drop in 6 months would have been the exact same.

[Siphon2012]

Sounds like good news to me, after delivering nothing for the money I paid them. The company deserves to go out of business.

[Crayzus]

Originally posted by Ragnarok:

Turns out ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ up a game for a Christmas release and watching 95% of your player base vanish like a fart in the wind has financial consequences. Who knew being absolutely incompetent would result in bad things happening?

Doesn't take a genius to know that releasing a game unfinished then ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ off for 2 months is bad for business. Seriously hope they fire who ever is in charge over there. They should sell their IP to a competent developer. Keep the combat devs and the art team but fire every last person who came up with crafting and the release plans.

[Archbishop Desmond Calorie]

Originally posted by Captain Worthy:

The bugs and lack of content which have been supposedly issues for Darktide are not there in Vermintide 2, yet that game has almost the same exact drop as Darktide.

Its almost like one of these two games was free which resulted in the big spike of users, plenty of which tried it once for whatever, just to never touch it again when they realized its not for them.
While the other had to be bought full price on launch by people who are interested in it, many of which came from VT2, many of which have been hyped by marketing, a game based on a much bigger and more popular franchise and which still couldn't keep a higher playerbase than this 5yo game had.

It's almost like because its in a terrible state and people are incredibly disappointed with it. It's almost like it was at 27% positive score at its worst point....
It's almost like you have no idea what you're talking about and just make random connections.

Originally posted by Captain Worthy:

Even if Darktide had four times the content and no bugs at all at launch, I guarantee you the player drop in 6 months would have been the exact same.

Absolute nonsense. Games like PD2 and DRG show that perfectly. Coincidentally two games with regular content drops and way better management.

Any more coping you wanna get out of the way buddy?

[Archbishop Desmond Calorie]

I hope they are.

After DT they deserve that Tencent takes them over fully and just lets them toil away on some mobile games.

[pRaX]

I really don't care anymore. There need to be consequences.

The only bad part is that the businesses in this industry are usually punishing the wrong people the hardest for these failures.

[Archbishop Desmond Calorie]

Originally posted by pRaX:

I really don't care anymore. There need to be consequences.

The only bad part is that the businesses in this industry are usually punishing the wrong people the hardest for these failures.

I'm with you on this. There's probably a texture artist working at FS who really cares. But he's not in a position to do anything about anything that matters. All he can do is just make more textures.

[Bovril Brigadier]

Originally posted by pRaX:

I really don't care anymore. There need to be consequences.

The only bad part is that the businesses in this industry are usually punishing the wrong people the hardest for these failures.

Nudist march through Stockholm, only way to be sure.

[Captain Worthy]

Originally posted by Calorie Mate:

Originally posted by Captain Worthy:

The bugs and lack of content which have been supposedly issues for Darktide are not there in Vermintide 2, yet that game has almost the same exact drop as Darktide.

Its almost like one of these two games was free which resulted in the big spike of users, plenty of which tried it once for whatever, just to never touch it again when they realized its not for them.
While the other had to be bought full price on launch by people who are interested in it, many of which came from VT2, many of which have been hyped by marketing, a game based on a much bigger and more popular franchise and which still couldn't keep a higher playerbase than this 5yo game had.

It's almost like because its in a terrible state and people are incredibly disappointed with it. It's almost like it was at 27% positive score at its worst point....
It's almost like you have no idea what you're talking about and just make random connections.

Originally posted by Captain Worthy:

Even if Darktide had four times the content and no bugs at all at launch, I guarantee you the player drop in 6 months would have been the exact same.

Absolute nonsense. Games like PD2 and DRG show that perfectly. Coincidentally two games with regular content drops and way better management.

Any more coping you wanna get out of the way buddy?

Yes, Vermintide 2 was in a free giveaway just before the launch of Darktide, and got that all-time peak of about 104 000 players. These players were real players, it's odd that you are trying to deny reality here. At launch, Vermintide 2 had a peak of 73 316 players so Darktide sold better, which is to be expected since 40k is more popular than Warhammer Fantasy.

We can do the math from Vermintide 2's launch peak of 73 316 too if you so wish; 6,4% of that remains if we look at the most current 24 hour player peak. Not far from the 4,4% if we look at the all-time peak of 104 323.

But the fact is, that peak of 104 000 players is a lot more relevant number because it happened right before Darktide released and Darktide had a very similar amount of players, about 108 000 as I've said, and a similar amount of time has passed since for both games.

Vermintide 2 is polished, has years worth of more content than Darktide and yet in the same amount of time has lost the same amount of players. The Steam achievement of getting all characters to level 30 is a lifetime tracker for the game, so it's extremely relevant as well and indeed says a lot when it's the same 3.4% as Darktide has.

No matter how much you deny reality and objective facts, this statistic shows that the player retention is pretty much identical for both games, if the bugs and lack of content have an effect on player retention it's only a fraction of one percentage.