For one, start fostering a competitive community. Doesnt need hundreds of thousands of euro prize pools, start slow and see if theres any interest. Considering we've had over 10 years of competitive for Warband, and viewer wise Battle of Bucharest did pretty well, considering the tournament was pretty rushed, with little advertisement and build up. It'd be worth looking into seing what could happen. Start slow, with a few tournaments with a couple hundred euro for the winning team, maybe not even that much. Do some research on what people enjoy, maybe its 2v2s. It'd also make the game more appealing to sponsors, and players from other games.
Someone who knows Chiv and Mordhau better can correct me if I'm wrong here, but those games have had a few prize pooled tournaments right?
For the more casual side, skins are a given, sure. But why just armor? Give me a cooler looking killfeed, even if its just MY kill that shows up fancy, any way to stand out is good. Change the look of the team hud border (which doesnt even exist yet but reeeally should,) scoreboard, theres alot you can do with things like this, and you bet people would buy it.
Other than that, give us back the top left "you were killed by player using x weapon" and let us name our weapons. (have it cost like, a euro or something per weapon. Abit crap with the class system I know but it is what it is)
Give us stat track for the weapons we want, so we can see how many we've killed with our crappy little Hatchet. Hell go the extra mile and instead of having the empty screen at the end of the map, showcase the peoples weapons to give them some bragging rights.
Theres more obviously, but no point listing things that'll never be. Although thats more or less the purpose of this forum.
Competitive scenes are rarely profitable for the game studio, except for the branding and publicity. Even the most lucrative esports scenes hemorrhage money. League loses millions even with big boy sponsors, but they make it up by selling Seraphine skins.
Smaller studios mostly do it out of support for their community. I’m extremely doubtful that Chiv and Mordhau studios make money off of tournaments, and if their studio tried to control everything it would probably be even worse.
I tangentially agree that in order to have a player base, you need to keep the core of dedicated players happy, whether that means keeping an updated and compelling competitive scene (even if it’s speedruns) or a fantastic creator mode with plenty of depth (such as Geometry Dash, GMOD, Minecraft, etc, which are not competitive but have extremely dedicated communities). Bannerlord can be both, which makes it intruiging, if not for the extremely slow development.
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I thought your ideas for paid addons in the game are decent, but I think the game needs an UI overhaul for stuff like that to work. At least personally, it feels too indie to justify buying flex stuff like that.
From your suggestions I’m envisioning something like the Apex cards, which I thought worked pretty well and looked good. (I haven’t played in a while so idk what their current state is.)
If siege became popular as it was in Warband, I could see farmer skins or crowns or other RP stuff selling.
Make a good video game, and you will turn a profit.
Took the words out of my mouth
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And it saddens me that people think that having battle passes, microtransactions , live services and other BS are enought to make a good game
In response to the other comments:
Since we live in the real world, Taleworlds knows that most of their prospective MP players have already bought the game, so they’ve gotten nearly all potential income for MP.
You can argue that they promised certain things under the price tag, but if memory serves, MP was a couple lines long and basically just stated that there would be MP.
Slinging “Good games sell!” at them when they’ve already sold the game is not effective. What new market are they selling it to? How are they making money? Your response was just to circle back to this one substanceless statement as if that answered any problems.
It doesn’t even work standalone: there’s hundreds if not thousands of “good” games that didn’t sell. No company is insane enough to have zero plans for advertisement or income with this stapled above their board room.
TW is not a non-profit, and it’s blatantly obvious why MP has received so little attention thus far.
Our response to this can either be to throw meaningless feels-good slogans at them and attempt to convince a company that money doesn’t matter, or to accept reality and look for ways to grow MP based on how other games have grown.