Miguel Doherty 🏳️‍🌈’s Post

I'm fascinated an perplexed by the whole "Early Access" concept on Steam. Look at it from the developer's point of view. Your small team releases a $40 financially successful game which many people buy and enjoy. The smart thing for the team would be to take this newly acquired fortune and invest it into another product (either a new game, or a paid expansion of Manor Lords). There is absolutely no financial benefit for the team to continue creating free updates or content for Manor Lords at this point. Except that "Early Access" label carries certain responsibilities, does it not? Are they contractually obligated to keep updating the game and eventually try to full launch it? Can they say - "Oops, we didn't mean to call it "Early Access", we meant to say it is now fully launched. "Thanks for your money, we are off to work on something else now"? Is "Early Access" label on Steam just a way for developers to save money and time on testing and release a game with bugs and with less features, or does it actually carry some meaning beyond that?

This is exactly the kind of distorted endless growth/burden of expectations/line must go up perspective that causes so much trouble in the games industry. Manor Lords just sold 250,000 copies in the last month — after selling over 2 million copies in its first 3 weeks — and has a Very Positive review rating of 88% with a median playtime of 8 hours 48 minutes per player (very long for any game, especially a recently released one). Players are happy, the developer is happy, and we as publisher are thrilled beyond belief. And yet here we are — Manor Lords is apparently a “case-study in the pitfalls of Early Access” because the "game has been out for 2.5 months and there have been three fairly small patches" (one of the patch notes being called 'small' here runs over 3,000 words and over 10 single-spaced pages) leading to "CCUs have plummeted since launch" (yes, we didn't maintain the 173,000 concurrent player peak) and the apparently dark reality that some people, after enjoying their purchase of a premium, single-player title, might decide to go on and play another game (The horror! The horror!). Before the release, I had a chat with Manor Lords’ dev. I told him that after release, he was going to hear from all sorts of commenters talking about missed opportunities because he failed to grow as fast as they wanted, and judging the game a failure by some kind of expectation they formed. I told him to ignore all that — to focus on his core vision for the game, and to keep in mind that the Early Access road is long and that he should not feel any sense of pressure from the expectations of others — for both his own health and stress levels over the coming years and for preserving the state of calm and peaceful mind that supports his creative vision. If this industry is to find a more sustainable path forward, we need to move away from takes like the below. Success should not create an ever raising bar of new growth expectations. Not every game should be aimed at becoming some live-service boom or bust. And a release should not begin an ever-accelerating treadmill on which devs are forced to run until their mental or physical health breaks down.

Edit: To be clear, not every game aims at sustained activity (Manor Lords clearly doesn’t). For those, just enjoy the hype whenever it comes. For the others: It strikes me that this (Lack of content/ ability to ramp up in EA) is just one of at least three other launch patterns where a great start is increasingly not a guarantee of long-term success. The two other being: - F2P releases with limited content and slow updates (similar case, notably with Apex in 2019) and - Launching with a ultra-accessible gameplay to appeal to the masses, but with too little depth to hook more engaged audiences long term (Knockout City is the prime example, Fall Guys to some extent) Crazy how tight the window is to see if a game sticks and ramp up accordingly and the flexibility it requires from devs, especially smaller ones.

An addiction to growth has been something that's been rife in the gaming industry (and most public companies for that matter) Its great to see both the maker and publisher of Manor Lords are taking a sustainable approach. In the end as a player I would want the teams behind the games I love to have a great life and not have to sacrifice their physical or mental well-being in the pursuit of endless growth, rat races and treadmills I understand that some game makers have a huge passion for a project to keep it going for years even decades, to grow their teams to 1000s of people while others might want to move onto the next project and not create huge organizations they need to manage In the end knowing that a happy person realizing their vision has brought me endless hours of gaming is something I want to associate with my gaming habits This is why I've always been against crunch or hitting some specific launch window to please investors Games should launch when they are ready, end when their creator decides - gamers are fickle infact according to some estimates by https://lnkd.in/dwip3nQk Only 20% of games that reach the market will return a significant profit. The market, despite its size and incredible growth, is becoming more difficult to profitably compete in, and video game budgets, as well as development team sizes, are growing Manor Lords already returned a great result for both the creator and publisher, and I'm really glad they are have managed something that only 20% of games manage. No doubt a very high number of players are putting in hundred of hours into the game already and loving it Future updates will no doubt allow steady growth for years to come at the speed the developer wants

Personal Opinion Soapbox Post: Dave the Diver is not an indie game just like Baldur's Gate 3 is not an indie game. Defining indie by publisher or not is being needlessly pedantic. Defining it by budget or team size feels like it's going to get caught up in exceptions all the time. Defining it by art style is absurdly reductive. The definition is and should be more nuanced than that but that doesn't make it more complicated. When you're indie you make decisions for two reasons, you're either so motivated by your idea that it's going to be made even if it's not profitable or you're motivated by the ability to survive in this industry and make design decisions around your ability to execute. There are no budgeted superfluous decisions in an indie game and the exceptional releases are often created through unsustainable creative means. Including a game like Dave the Diver, which is a fantastic game, in the indie game awards feels a bit like including Blue Moon or Lagunitas at a craft beer festival (Owned by Coors and Heineken respectively), or letting Rockstar participate in a game jam. The point of the award should be to draw attention and praise to developers and games that don't have 30 core devs and 70 additional credited resources as a subsidiary of a company that has made over $1.8 billion in revenue in recent years. I can't imagine what type of marketing power that company has at their disposal. Anyway soapbox over, the game awards are meant to be fun and celebrate gaming, this is just a small, trivial growing pain for the industry. There are a lot more pressing things to address like 7800 employees being laid off in the gaming industry in 2023.

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This month's update of the "US Top 200 newcomers by grossing revenue" would be unusually short. I found only two games in top 200 that entered the top chart but I would rather call it 1.5 games (I'll explain why in description below). Early spring looks always a cooling down period and I'm pretty sure that we will see some new games later next months. This month in the charts: 1. Sea War: Raid is yet another 4X Strategy from Tap4Fun developer. Introductory misleading gameplay this time is taken from hypercasual action submarine games, that after a short time appear to be a variation of Kiss of War game (all the assets, characters and design taken from Kiss of War). Players in the comments complaining that by that reason it's hard to call a game new, and gave a game 3 stars on Google Play and 2 stars on iTunes. 2. Hexa sort. Playtika's studio Lion games experimenting with new arcade mechanics. Despite the casual orientation, the mechanics is not yet very popular to receive enough organic traffic, the share of of users coming from advertising is about 80% Aside of that it is worth to mention that * Match Factory! game that appeared in 180th places last month grew up to 55th position. * Seaside Escape that got into iTunes top 200 last weeks of 2023 now in the top 200 on Google Play. * Matching story that got into Google Play's top 200 last weeks of 2023 now in the top 200 on iTunes. * Same as with Matching story happened also with Puzzles & Chaos: Frozen Castle (appeared on Google Play during the period of weeks 44-47) and Alice's Dream: Merge Island (appeared on Google Play during the period of weeks 30-35).

📢 "The Game Pass Dilemma: Exposure vs. Commitment An analysis revealed a difference in game completion rates between Game Pass and Steam. Only 14% of Game Pass players finished Hellblade 2, while 35% of Steam players saw it through. This trend extends across titles like Hi-Fi Rush and Psychonauts 2, showcasing the platform's impact. 🎮 Join My Telegram: https://t.me/gamesna 🎮 The crux lies in financial commitment. Purchasing a game fosters determination to experience it fully, while subscriptions lack that psychological investment, potentially affecting completion rates. 🎮 This dynamic presents a double-edged sword for game developers. On one hand, subscription services offer exposure and introduce games to players who might not have otherwise considered them, which is a powerful tool for smaller studios seeking visibility. However, the flip side is the potential weakening of player commitment as they do not have the financial investment to commit to finishing the game. This is why mobile games often prompt for a small payment at the start to encourage commitment. 🎮 This is where Game Pass games could learn from Free 2 Play games and make the first few minutes of the game engaging and exciting, creating an interest to carry it forward." Cheers Avihay 🕹 🎮 📱

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