I don't have the solution but I do know what the solution isn't, and that is not spending. When you don't spend people don't get paid, games don't get made, companies fold. The idea of buying something and then expecting it to last forever is strange, without GoG all our glorious old games would be dead and gone. And console games? Better not buy them, these consoles don't have a very long lifespan before the next shows up. Games of any sorts that require an online connection? Don't get suckered in, the online requirement probably means these games will get shutdown in a couple of years. Clothing? Wear and tear. Food? It all disappears and I am STILL hungry. These hot one night stands? Wait, skip those. But toys that break, cars that wear down, NOTHING lasts forever. Most games aren't even 60 bucks a month after release, they're dirt cheap after a while and there is always a sale going on. We throw away money on disposables every day without blinking an eye.
Unless people mean they'll only play F2P games of course, no money spend is no money lost. That would be a win for the entire industry.....
/Cheers, Lahnmir
'the only way he could nail it any better is if he used a cross.'
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
Gamigo inherited the already abandoned game so no idea what a certain person is saying about them planning stuff for the game when it did not get any attention when Trion still had full control of the game.
Maybe I wasn't clear - Trion planned to have a PvE campaign and more PvP maps - but since AR didnt do well financially to pay for that- it never happened.
It had the attention- there was no money to make it happen.
Does that clear it up?
The game was doomed within 2 months post launch when it became obvious that despite all the positive reviews it just was far too niche to be financially viable
No studio is going to dump money into developing a game with poor traction
Do you work in Pr? You are great at deflecting attention away from the more important parts of what I wrote that are the real reasons this game failed and focus on the part that really doesn't mean anything cause it can't be proven. I'll bite though..
You said in another post that they spent one million dollars for the AR animation advert. With the way the payment model was set up how did they expect to recoup 1mil + development costs from initial game sales of 19.99, 49.99, 99.99? Or was it going to come from orbs that had re-color skins as their rarest prizes? Do you remember(rhetorical- of course you do) when they created their own advert for AR and in that ad said "The hottest new game in ESports" even before it was being viewed anywhere. For that brief moment they showed their hand and true intention for the game which they had hoped would be successful in ESports. When they realized that wasn't going anywhere they wrote the game off even though it had a small but loyal fan base that was willing to stick with the game if it improved. A decision was made AT THE TOP to abandon it and just keep the act going like it was still being worked on by adding a few skins and banners now and then but over time became obvious even with the season rewards that the game was forgotten.
None of the above is the player's fault, they were there and willing but they weren't being met even half way.
Saying "the game had no traction" is false and you know it is. For a turn based game on Steam it had more than enough "traction" to grow and become more than it was, even Muzzy was saying/preaching it. The game is/was fun, polished, online multiplayer, and like you said yourself the foundation was there. The dummys at the top just let it rot and that decision led us to today.
Gamigo inherited the already abandoned game so no idea what a certain person is saying about them planning stuff for the game when it did not get any attention when Trion still had full control of the game.
Maybe I wasn't clear - Trion planned to have a PvE campaign and more PvP maps - but since AR didnt do well financially to pay for that- it never happened.
It had the attention- there was no money to make it happen.
Does that clear it up?
The game was doomed within 2 months post launch when it became obvious that despite all the positive reviews it just was far too niche to be financially viable
No studio is going to dump money into developing a game with poor traction
Do you work in Pr? You are great at deflecting attention away from the more important parts of what I wrote that are the real reasons this game failed and focus on the part that really doesn't mean anything cause it can't be proven. I'll bite though..
You said in another post that they spent one million dollars for the AR animation advert. With the way the payment model was set up how did they expect to recoup 1mil + development costs from initial game sales of 19.99, 49.99, 99.99? Or was it going to come from orbs that had re-color skins as their rarest prizes? Do you remember(rhetorical- of course you do) when they created their own advert for AR and in that ad said "The hottest new game in ESports" even before it was being viewed anywhere. For that brief moment they showed their hand and true intention for the game which they had hoped would be successful in ESports. When they realized that wasn't going anywhere they wrote the game off even though it had a small but loyal fan base that was willing to stick with the game if it improved. A decision was made AT THE TOP to abandon it and just keep the act going like it was still being worked on by adding a few skins and banners now and then but over time became obvious even with the season rewards that the game was forgotten.
None of the above is the player's fault, they were there and willing but they weren't being met even half way.
Saying "the game had no traction" is false and you know it is. For a turn based game on Steam it had more than enough "traction" to grow and become more than it was, even Muzzy was saying/preaching it. The game is/was fun, polished, online multiplayer, and like you said yourself the foundation was there. The dummys at the top just let it rot and that decision led us to today.
I am telling you this as 100% info from inside staff who built Atlas Reactor
The game didn't have traction- you know how they redid the tutorial several times because the masses were not getting hooked - the main obstacle for the dev team was learning curve was reported too steep and players were not sticking.
Did they piss away that 1min for Blur CGI ad - you bet ya.
Was the game mismanaged- yes it was.
Was it badly monetized- yep.
But if players were staying and they managed to retain and grow the playerbase - they would have most likely overcame all the above failings.
So in the end - lack of player traction was the end, and Trion was responsible for that, no one else.
This entire fail and the company folding is their own doing.
Who really cared about the tutorial though? Wasted time, effort on something that didn't matter. Here's what mattered...
At launch get matched vs the same premade group for the entire 1 hour of play time you have. Many quests for seasons require you to "x in games you win".
Seasons/chapters required more work than I do at work and made spreadsheets seem kind of fun in comparison. You had to remember to do certain things in each match otherwise you had to join another 15-30 minute match if you forgot to do something. Turn based games for me are most of the time "chill" games, this was the opposite.
The time it took to complete each chapter could take you up to 1 week or more of your 1-2 hours per day play time. That's a lot of mandatory time if you wanted to complete chapters/seasons. Overall amount of levels in seasons were too many. That is all design concept on paper stuff. None of that should have even made it into the game without many people going "WTF is this?!" But it did and stayed that way til the end.
Depends how you look at it.To me Rift was a 5/10 but the rest were cheap cash grabs. I watched a long video while taking a nap "lol"it pointed a real good picture of what went on at Trion,the investors,employees etc etc.
Imagine as a player if you had pumped a bunch of money into this.
Yup, it's hard to justify paying for most online games today just to see them die. Mind as well throw your money away.
The older i get the more i go back to old ways. Pay for more single player games that never die, and just alternate between a few mmos i like that are still profitable.
Under Trion there was no future at all though - so any time under Gamigo is a bonus.
Knowing some of the internal projects that got cancelled when Gamigo took over - I disagree.
They had 2 particular MMO projects in early stages that IMO could have been hits, but we will never know as they will never happen now.
I was really looking forward to one of those but such is life.... disappointment and failure is something you have to learn to accept.
"If it wasn't for disappointment I wouldn't have any appointments" -TMBG
If they had been able to secure additional funding - sure. I assume they tried to obtain an influx of cash and - presumably - failed? If they didn't seek funding then same result.
And I assume they considered cutting back on staff? Maybe some steps were taken but perhaps they were worried about driving players away?
Whatever they opted to do - or not do - the end result was that they were bought, essentially, out of bankruptcy.
At the end of the day many companies (not just game companies) have gone to the wall with unfinished projects that might have saved them - if only they had the funding.
One of my favorite games. I liked the gameplay and tactics. Really sucks for people like me with 4K games played. I know someone with over 9k games played.
Once you bought the game there was no reason to spend money. Will miss this one.
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
I am a bit saddened by this. I think I play this more than anything else.
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
This is how I decided to do my mmo gaming years ago. Any game I have interest in I will be there day 1 enjoying it while I can even if its 1 year or 10 years.
The problem is that so many games are a mess on day 1. A game that could be fun after it's polished likely isn't so fun when it's a buggy mess. So in order to play the fun version of the game, you often have to wait a while.
Here's my thing with Atlas Reactor -- I found it late, but I loved it, and I had money in hand just like I do before I try out any F2P game, but as I kept playing, the game kept throwing credits or freebies at me that I had been planning to spend money on, or else making it really easy to make a few more credits in order to grab something I had my eye on.
Look, I understand F2P players can be gripey, but how the heck did Atlas Reactor actually MAKE ANY MONEY? Well, I guess they didn't.
If it sounds like I'm complaining that a game gave me too much free stuff, I absolutely am. A game like Atlas Reactor is a huge undertaking that requires a lot of talent, and talent is expensive. Talent has to go home after work and put food on the table. I liked Atlas Reactor, so OF COURSE I wanted it to be successful.
Could I have just started buying things with money instead of game credits in order to support the game? Sure, nothing wrong with that. I know some other players did just that, and I likely would have ended up doing it too (I only started playing this year).
But there's never going to be more than a handful of players who'll do that for a game, no matter how good it is or how much they love it; that's just reality. If you want a F2P game to be valuable in terms of money, you have to make it actually cost some money.
If your selling point is that players can come play the whole game for free, good luck selling anything. Because players WILL take you up on that offer.
I played this at launch and thought it was fantastic but the repetitive maps and lack of content really hurt this game early in its life cycle, In my opinion anyway. Great concept, Great execution but simply not enough variety in every aspect of the game to keep players from getting bored, and bored fast
From what the devs told me who worked on Atlas Reactor - they wanted to do a full blown PvE campaign and lots of new PvP maps.... simply didnt have the money to cover the dev cost.
But it was all in the internal roadmap.
The base game was solid - just needed more
The monetization is where they completely failed. Started out as B2P, then switched to F2P but there was nothing worth spending money on. There was no P2W but also no reason to spend any money - complete fail.
You can make a good game and still fail - player traction far outweighs everything else
Btw, DAAAAAAAAAMN. A PvE campaign, co-op or single-player, would have been so much fun with AR.
I have no idea how anyone could think the game looked good or played good. My first 2 seconds in the game i thought WTF is this trash.Immediately i thought,man this game took them one month to make,they must really be hurting for some fast cash flow.
We need money NOW,hurry up and make some game,you got one month.
The Trion business was a bust ,a poorly run operation.The writing was on the wall seeing them go from an ambitious developer with Rift and the military game and Defiance with the TV series all looked like they were aiming for AAA.Then in comes Trove and AR,it looked like a different business.So to me it looked VERY obvious,they were struggling to stay afloat and were trying CHEAP and EASY methods to generate revenue.
You are NEVER going to save your business with cheap lazy effort.We don't know Gamigo's reasoning,it looks liek a dumb decision similar to DBG buying SOE gaming.I noticed one You Tuber who seems to enjoy spending money on loot boxes thinks it was more to get a hold of the Gazillion assets than it was to get an interest in Trion.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Well the day I saw the gameplay of this game, in my mind I already sort of deem it as a lost. The existence of RTS a few years back already won over turn base so therefore, were pretty much dying out or at least way way down in popularity. Thanks to success of RTS, the turn base was all time low, then this game Atlas Reactor came along and try something new or attempted on a lesser competing genera real-time active turn base? if i were to describe what Atlas Reactor seemingly to be for me.
So I look into this game but I question the character design and skills set, then it hit me its feels more of a phone like game than a normal game. Probably might better off as a phone game in my opinion, but then, phone game is the lowest of the low for anyone to go. That space are fill with just time/money wasting slot machine that goes nowhere. AR is a very niche sub genera to start with, its impress for what it is that it stay alive until now.
As for Trion themselves have no talent or what business they were running to start with, if they did but did not invest more into a games, how are they going to sell a product if it was half baked more/less. For most games these days it really show how incomplete and half ass game and trying hard to sell you the other half for more than its worth is how we are now in the gaming industry. Bad planing and management will put most games in a half bake state where no one want to buy, so they opt to lie and sell you a concept instead and have the balls to ask why did it all failed?
Games of old were more complete for the most part and far less buggy than what we have now, as if those dev didn't learn anything from pass dev's failure to not to do those things. Yet most dev of today continue to do the same old bad practice as if they worship the snake oil salesmen like gods. For those thinking AR didn't have anything to sell is a slimy P2W whales, the fact might be Trion DIDN'T want to even investing in content in the bloody cash shop thats to show how much its worth in Trion's eye. Lets hope there will be a light after all this darkness we are in.
Imagine as a player if you had pumped a bunch of money into this.
This is actually the reason why I dont try out more games and invest into them, specially for small game companies.
And funnily enough it is the main reason those games fail due to lack of players / cash investment.
So if you did actually invest in these games they wouldn’t fail because they would have the player numbers and cash investment. Sounds like a selffulfilling prophecy to me. Especially since its a pretty good game.
/Cheers, Lahnmir
I didnt, thats the thing. I saw straight away that game was going to be very niche, very small population and will inevitably close sooner than expected.
Trion worlds really did 100% kill off all there games
Because they "mortgaged" Rift and sunk (literally) their money into other projects that failed. Rift could have continued for much longer as a Sub only game if TW had listened to the old song "Dance with the one that brung ya"
Comments
Unless people mean they'll only play F2P games of course, no money spend is no money lost. That would be a win for the entire industry.....
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
Joined - July 2004
Do you work in Pr? You are great at deflecting attention away from the more important parts of what I wrote that are the real reasons this game failed and focus on the part that really doesn't mean anything cause it can't be proven. I'll bite though..
You said in another post that they spent one million dollars for the AR animation advert. With the way the payment model was set up how did they expect to recoup 1mil + development costs from initial game sales of 19.99, 49.99, 99.99? Or was it going to come from orbs that had re-color skins as their rarest prizes? Do you remember(rhetorical- of course you do) when they created their own advert for AR and in that ad said "The hottest new game in ESports" even before it was being viewed anywhere. For that brief moment they showed their hand and true intention for the game which they had hoped would be successful in ESports. When they realized that wasn't going anywhere they wrote the game off even though it had a small but loyal fan base that was willing to stick with the game if it improved. A decision was made AT THE TOP to abandon it and just keep the act going like it was still being worked on by adding a few skins and banners now and then but over time became obvious even with the season rewards that the game was forgotten.
None of the above is the player's fault, they were there and willing but they weren't being met even half way.
Saying "the game had no traction" is false and you know it is. For a turn based game on Steam it had more than enough "traction" to grow and become more than it was, even Muzzy was saying/preaching it. The game is/was fun, polished, online multiplayer, and like you said yourself the foundation was there. The dummys at the top just let it rot and that decision led us to today.
Who really cared about the tutorial though? Wasted time, effort on something that didn't matter. Here's what mattered...
At launch get matched vs the same premade group for the entire 1 hour of play time you have. Many quests for seasons require you to "x in games you win".
Seasons/chapters required more work than I do at work and made spreadsheets seem kind of fun in comparison. You had to remember to do certain things in each match otherwise you had to join another 15-30 minute match if you forgot to do something. Turn based games for me are most of the time "chill" games, this was the opposite.
The time it took to complete each chapter could take you up to 1 week or more of your 1-2 hours per day play time. That's a lot of mandatory time if you wanted to complete chapters/seasons. Overall amount of levels in seasons were too many. That is all design concept on paper stuff. None of that should have even made it into the game without many people going "WTF is this?!" But it did and stayed that way til the end.
Under Trion there was no future at all though - so any time under Gamigo is a bonus.
I watched a long video while taking a nap "lol"it pointed a real good picture of what went on at Trion,the investors,employees etc etc.
I think this is the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2ZfoL10PXg
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
And I assume they considered cutting back on staff? Maybe some steps were taken but perhaps they were worried about driving players away?
Whatever they opted to do - or not do - the end result was that they were bought, essentially, out of bankruptcy.
At the end of the day many companies (not just game companies) have gone to the wall with unfinished projects that might have saved them - if only they had the funding.
Once you bought the game there was no reason to spend money. Will miss this one.
--John Ruskin
--John Ruskin
That's how marvel heroes did me.
Look, I understand F2P players can be gripey, but how the heck did Atlas Reactor actually MAKE ANY MONEY? Well, I guess they didn't.
If it sounds like I'm complaining that a game gave me too much free stuff, I absolutely am. A game like Atlas Reactor is a huge undertaking that requires a lot of talent, and talent is expensive. Talent has to go home after work and put food on the table. I liked Atlas Reactor, so OF COURSE I wanted it to be successful.
Could I have just started buying things with money instead of game credits in order to support the game? Sure, nothing wrong with that. I know some other players did just that, and I likely would have ended up doing it too (I only started playing this year).
But there's never going to be more than a handful of players who'll do that for a game, no matter how good it is or how much they love it; that's just reality. If you want a F2P game to be valuable in terms of money, you have to make it actually cost some money.
If your selling point is that players can come play the whole game for free, good luck selling anything. Because players WILL take you up on that offer.
Btw, DAAAAAAAAAMN. A PvE campaign, co-op or single-player, would have been so much fun with AR.
My first 2 seconds in the game i thought WTF is this trash.Immediately i thought,man this game took them one month to make,they must really be hurting for some fast cash flow.
We need money NOW,hurry up and make some game,you got one month.
The Trion business was a bust ,a poorly run operation.The writing was on the wall seeing them go from an ambitious developer with Rift and the military game and Defiance with the TV series all looked like they were aiming for AAA.Then in comes Trove and AR,it looked like a different business.So to me it looked VERY obvious,they were struggling to stay afloat and were trying CHEAP and EASY methods to generate revenue.
You are NEVER going to save your business with cheap lazy effort.We don't know Gamigo's reasoning,it looks liek a dumb decision similar to DBG buying SOE gaming.I noticed one You Tuber who seems to enjoy spending money on loot boxes thinks it was more to get a hold of the Gazillion assets than it was to get an interest in Trion.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
So I look into this game but I question the character design and skills set, then it hit me its feels more of a phone like game than a normal game. Probably might better off as a phone game in my opinion, but then, phone game is the lowest of the low for anyone to go. That space are fill with just time/money wasting slot machine that goes nowhere. AR is a very niche sub genera to start with, its impress for what it is that it stay alive until now.
As for Trion themselves have no talent or what business they were running to start with, if they did but did not invest more into a games, how are they going to sell a product if it was half baked more/less. For most games these days it really show how incomplete and half ass game and trying hard to sell you the other half for more than its worth is how we are now in the gaming industry. Bad planing and management will put most games in a half bake state where no one want to buy, so they opt to lie and sell you a concept instead and have the balls to ask why did it all failed?
Games of old were more complete for the most part and far less buggy than what we have now, as if those dev didn't learn anything from pass dev's failure to not to do those things. Yet most dev of today continue to do the same old bad practice as if they worship the snake oil salesmen like gods. For those thinking AR didn't have anything to sell is a slimy P2W whales, the fact might be Trion DIDN'T want to even investing in content in the bloody cash shop thats to show how much its worth in Trion's eye. Lets hope there will be a light after all this darkness we are in.
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