Third round of layoffs?

[RiverCat]

!

[CursedXistence]

50 million dollars is a shoestring of a shoestring budget for an MMO to begin with and their tech blog is a masterclass in what NOT to use/do when developing a game (especially your first game).

I'd guess they blew through their budget, highly overestimated the appeal of their game and their transaction business model and now they're in complete survival life support mode.

[ZeroGiven]

Neither surprised nor saddened by the news. They have zero community managers, after firing Asherelle. The Discord was useless before. Now, it will be chaotic and useless.

Leung and Karabaich seem to be aiming to dethrone Smedley from the ruining games leaderboard.

[Asfridur]

Am I worried? Absolutely, all the layouts are not encouraging.
At the same time other gaming companies are struggling lately as well.

There has been a lot of hearsay rumors on social media platforms etc, other rumors turned out to be legit sources.
I want this game to succeed blown budget or not. So I'm trying to stay optimistic. Nothing we can do but wait.

[MadDawg2552]

Originally posted by CursedXistence:

their tech blog is a masterclass in what NOT to use/do when developing a game (especially your first game).

It is extremely over-engineered for what it is.

Originally posted by Asfridur:

At the same time other gaming companies are struggling lately as well.

Game companies are trying to please their shareholders with "infinite gains". The fastest way to show growth is to eliminate your most expensive employees. However, when you do that, you are getting rid of all the talent and the games start falling apart. You also lose the trust of your paying audience and they are more reluctant to make future purchases. Since people stop buying, your stock drops again, so you let go of more employees, even more customers stop buying your product... it's a death spiral.

This is the best thing to happen to the gaming industry:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/ftc-announces-rule-banning-noncompetes

Now all these employees that these companies are letting go can go work for another company, or even start their own.

[Somebunny]

Originally posted by MadDawg2552:

Now all these employees that these companies are letting go can go work for another company, or even start their own.

Weren't this already people that came from other companies and made their own?

[EnForceR]

Originally posted by Somebunny:

Weren't this already people that came from other companies and made their own?

When you come to another company (S6) you must quit your previous company, you know? Are you seriously thinking that people fired from S6 gonna be automatically accepted back to their previous companies? Devs left their previous companies to work on the game of the dream, palia def has those dreams implemented but in a very "unfinished" way. Now they are fired from S6 & eating noodles, seeking for a new job. They can start their own company if they have a normal leader, but who's the hell gonna listen to leaders on the F*'ed times liki those when everyone cares only about themselves & their own pockets, trying to find a most secure solution like a permanent job with not much effort to put on & not a kickstarter with a lot of work to do in the beginning (without guarantee of end up like palia). I've said it earlier, one who opens a kickstarter for a better version of palia immediately gets at least 5 million dollars collected, but no one of 150 fired people hasn't done it till now, that means no one has leadership RL skill trained (no guarantee that a new leader not gonna do the same after job is done & release dates coming). palia is a great example of broken relations between playerbase & devs, between financial monsters & devs, between financial monsters & playerbase. You blind?

[W0RTHL3SS]

If this gets turned into a singleplayer I would be fine with it too

[MadDawg2552]

Originally posted by PopPopPopCat:

Originally posted by Somebunny:

Weren't this already people that came from other companies and made their own?

Yes, they boasted about being experienced devs from Blizzard, Riot, etc.
and I say boasted because they really put it out there, they wanted the hype from that.

The noncompete clause stated they couldn't work on similar games they worked on before. So no real-time strategy, MMO, first person shooter, action adventure, etc etc. They were pretty much forced to make a "cozy" game, since that's all they had left.

[MadDawg2552]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3248068527

[MISO4EVER]

Originally posted by W0RTHL3SS:

If this gets turned into a singleplayer I would be fine with it too

It should have been one form the start. I tried it on the switch and it’s “mmo” aspect is far from a real mmo. It’s a single player game with 25 people running around in the world you can hardly interact with.

[SmokedHalibut]

Horrible for the people who lost their jobs, especially as most aren't the ones with poor judgement I imagine.

At this point, I'm out. Haven't seen an update worth looking at since they launched on Steam. I thought it had promise, and in a way it did but I joined the beta late and sadly nothing has really happened and they've had two hug rounds of layoffs. Oh well.

I've been playing The Planet Crafter - and they pushed out a better game with fewer devs.

[Ghrim]

Originally posted by W0RTHL3SS:

If this gets turned into a singleplayer I would be fine with it too

I just started playing this a few days ago and it basically already is single player. Theres no real "group" content. Everything you can do alone it seems. I haven't been incentivized to work with other players at all in my playthrough thus far. I started out wanting to play with friends and build up on a lot together with our houses in different spots but you can't do that. Not even through the community feature. I don't get why this game is marketed as some big community driven social MMO