More Layoffs

[kyleblane]

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/mmo/cozy-mmo-palia-seemingly-on-the-rocks-after-studio-goes-through-a-third-round-of-layoffs-this-time-affecting-40-of-staff/

I really do feel bad for so many of the hardworking employees. It seems apparent that every misstep came from poor management.

I think it's time they unpin this tweet. lol
https://x.com/Singularity6/status/1532440663702355969

[ZeroGiven]

How will they meet their quota of new bugs, now?

[kyleblane]

I got a good chuckle seeing fans coping claiming “60 devs is enough considering WoW currently has 100-300 devs.”

After many spent the last 8 months defending/describing S6 as being a “small dev team” while having a team size comparable to WoW 🤣🤣🤣

[EnForceR]

Pff... Then why does this game have less content than WoW & broken as WoW pirate server?

[Batabii • Suikoden I&II HD]

At this rate, the game will be canceled before it even leaves beta

[POMPOKO]

I really like the game but this is a bad sign. They were already super slow with everything so now I think we can't expect much in the future.

[CursedXistence]

If you read the tech blog they posted about all the open source tools, new programming language, etc. that they used to make the game it's all a masterclass on how NOT to make a game, especially an MMO game.

Honestly from the sounds of it they blew a good chunk of the 50 million investment on finding people that even knew the RUST programming language well enough, not to mention RUST programmers get paid more because it's gaining in popularity, but it's not a well learned language yet. The problem is it works well for web, software, etc., but not so much for games, especially MMO type games.

People could argue forever on the which is better Unity or Unreal for a game engine, both have their pros and cons. For the graphical style, etc. of this game they really should have used Unity and not Unreal, Unity simply gives you better control, etc. whereas Unreal is more easy to use tools. Unity and other programming languages are also more forgiving with errors, which can be really important in an mmo style game. A perfect example of this is the Temple Of Waves crash a couple of weeks ago.

trying to push something still relatively new / unused and all that is great, but that's something you do down the road when you're financially able to take the hit, not with your first game.

One stupid little thing that stands out to me is with the flowers update they placed several rose bushes going across the walkway to the homestead from Kilima Valley. An experienced environmental artist would never do that, they literally get payed to think of why should you or should you put something like this in the environment.

Why do proudhorns and pretty much every animal for that reason glitch into rocks, cliffs, etc. or blink in and out graphically even though they're well within visual rage of the player. Why do they have so many different smaller servers setup for the different areas on the map. Why will various parts of the environment not load (plenty of times bridges, the entire floor terrain in Hassian's cove, etc. don't even load. Why is climbing and ladders so glitchy? None of these things are anything new in games, yet why can't this one handle these things which all the glitches?

All of this is before even starting to think about the lack of content for a game that's been in development for a few years now. Ignore the massive grind and time sinks and you can easily go from new player to completing everything in a week, two weeks max. for how long this has been in development it should have months worth of content before even counting the end-game grind and time sinks that are common to give devs time to create more content.

There's a lot of good things about the game, the storyline, etc. is great and actually interesting, but the overall decisions and execution are going to end up killing it.

[kaworu83]

This game is so cozy that even the devs got laid off!! lol

[kyleblane]

Originally posted by CursedXistence:

Why do proudhorns and pretty much every animal for that reason glitch into rocks, cliffs, etc. or blink in and out graphically even though they're well within visual rage of the player. Why do they have so many different smaller servers setup for the different areas on the map. Why will various parts of the environment not load (plenty of times bridges, the entire floor terrain in Hassian's cove, etc. don't even load. Why is climbing and ladders so glitchy? None of these things are anything new in games, yet why can't this one handle these things which all the glitches?

This is my biggest problem. There are so many basic things lacking in the game and so many basic features that don't work properly, but they've spent countless dev hours on seasonal events that exist for a month or two out of the year. Terrible management.

[Roan]

Man when I gave the game a year to live after they went public I didn't expect we'd be this ahead of schedule!

[ZeroGiven]

Who would have thought that focusing on the Switch release to the exclusion of game breaking bugs that affected more players every day would cost them so many willing to pay players that they couldn't afford employees. Oh, most of the players, that is who.

Dunning-Kruger strikes, again. I hope Karabaich and Leung have Palia follow them for the rest of their careers. Arrogance seldom ends well.

[W0RTHL3SS]

I mean if they turned it into a singleplayer with this style, I'm in.

[MadDawg2552]

They also overestimated how many people would actually be interested in a "cozy" game, and how many of those people would be paying customers. They saw the success of Stardew Valley and wanted a piece of it.

There's no way a game like this could sustain 50 full-time employees, let alone 200. They'd need to pull in at least 10 million per year.

Games-as-a-service and "free" to play is a failed experiment. This game would have done a lot better as a subscription based game with guaranteed income.

[Traltwin]

Originally posted by PopPopPopCat:

Originally posted by MadDawg2552:

They also overestimated how many people would actually be interested in a "cozy" game, and how many of those people would be paying customers. They saw the success of Stardew Valley and wanted a piece of it.

There's no way a game like this could sustain 50 full-time employees, let alone 200. They'd need to pull in at least 10 million per year.

Games-as-a-service and "free" to play is a failed experiment. This game would have done a lot better as a subscription based game with guaranteed income.

Thing is they had a huge hype and following for 1-3 months after beta opened up.
They did not use that well AT ALL.
Instead we got slow updates, tons of premium outfits, and blogs and amas where they showed us that they simply do not care and "trust me bro we know what we're doing" was literally the end of so many of their snarky blogs and amas at the start.
Nerf after nerf while the game was still lacking content started the first waves of people leaving.
Then comes their 2 week -> 4 week patch schedule change, this game will not survive 3 weeks of nothing to do between patches because nowadays each patch can be played in a day or two.
Add to that community outrage of all sorts, we tried showing them with our reviews that we've had enough, the game is doing poorly, instead we got droves of positive review brigading.
Now new players see the positive score, try to play, 10% of them can't launch the game, another 40% gets glitches that require you to reopen the game. That's not going to grow their numbers much.

Truly if they stop being so stubborn they can turn this around.

So yeah, when's the next AMA so we can ask once again if we're getting free pets?

Literally play any other Farming Sim .... this one is sadly dying... makes me sad.

[Karen the Jim Slayer]

Originally posted by PopPopPopCat:

So yeah, when's the next AMA so we can ask once again if we're getting free pets?

You mean when is the next paid "thank you gift"?

If/when S6 closes its doors, is there a possibility that they might sell Palia to another company to carry on or is it doomed to die off and fade away?

[CursedXistence]

Originally posted by Karen the Jim Slayer:

Originally posted by PopPopPopCat:

So yeah, when's the next AMA so we can ask once again if we're getting free pets?

You mean when is the next paid "thank you gift"?

If/when S6 closes its doors, is there a possibility that they might sell Palia to another company to carry on or is it doomed to die off and fade away?

Tencent are pretty much the only ones that would be crazy enough to possibly pick this up, but I doubt even they would. The Steam numbers aren't impressive so it would depend on the numbers from Switch and Epic Games Store, but even they'd have to dump a huge amount of resources into fixing the game, adding content, building player base / player trust.