This is a thread going into more detail on a post I made last month
here.
I will avoid the usage of the word "scam" as that could be seen as disingenuous and possibly libelous, even though as I will outline below, the figures are roughly correct, and it isn't libel if its true. Nevertheless, I'm going to lay forth a claim that Bannerlord, at least in its current state (And, as far as we know, the past few years) was simply a grift. Here's why:
Part 1. The Financial Breakdown
There will be bold in statements which are amendments to my previous post, or things needed to be added.
The average game developer in Istanbul (similar to Ankara) makes about 60 Turkish Lira an hour, which equates to about 7.05 USD, with an average pay of 125,000 Lira per year (about 14,500 USD). There are 131 employees at Taleworlds as of 2020. Therefore, the employee pay would be roughly 1,899,500 USD, probably a little less or more based on currency exchanges.
I am not sure about Turkish tax law, but assuming their payroll taxes are roughly the same as the US, lets say 10%, rounding up lets say 2,200,000 for payroll and payroll taxes per year. Overhead is somewhat difficult to calculate, but I would put their facility costs (With electricity, which is cheap in Turkey) is probably around 5,000 a month, that is just a rough estimate based on how many employees they have and how much square footage they would need. So, overhead would be roughly 60,000 USD a year.
To be conservative and account for accidents/miscellaneous expenses, lets put their expenses aside from marketing at roughly 2.5 million USD.
Bannerlord has sold between 3-5 million copies, according to steamdb and steamspy. At an average price of $45 (it depends on region, some places sell for less, some like pound and euro sell for more), after Steam's 30% cut, this leaves Taleworlds with roughly $31.50 for each sale.
To be conservative, let's put it down to $30. With roughly 4 million sales, Taleworlds has made roughly $120 million in revenue from Bannerlord. Bannerlord has been in development since 2012 as far as we know, lets give them 2 years pre-announcement of development, which equals 11 years. Assuming 100% of their time at Taleworlds was devoted to Bannerlord (which it wasn't, warband was still in development well during this time period), this means that 27.5 million dollars was spent in expenses, lets double that for marketing. This expense of 55 million yielded them 120,000,000, which, with much wiggle room, cushions and conservative estimates, 65 million dollars (likely more because I doubt taleworlds spent that much in marketing, and salaries are probably less than I calculated, could be as much as 100 million USD). I may have gotten some calculations wrong along the way, and I may have estimated poorly, but no matter what, that is a lot of profit for the garbage can/excuse for a game that we got.
Part 2. Gameplay Features, or lack thereof
The gameplay of this "game" is, to put it lightly, lacking. There are more than enough threads to complain about the bare-bones, hollowness of the game. I am not a singleplayer player, I like multiplayer. The lack of multiplayer support for this game is at this point astounding and legendary. The fact that modders for various projects are simply waiting on Taleworlds to just let them get their hands on it so they can improve the game for everyone's enjoyment is beyond me. It is so snail-brained and what few "Explanations" taleworlds has given are vague and meaningless. They use a lot of words to say nothing.
The recent patches to the game have improved almost nothing, and the dev diaries show us no hope. With feature after feature being cancelled or postponed, it seems like Taleworlds is just doing nothing while goading us to trust them, holding a carrot in front of our eyes. Not even heraldry can be fixed.
Part 3. Bannerlord Online
The lack of support for the Bannerlord Online mod, made by one random Russian guy in a basement, an absolutely gorgeous mod with so much ambition and potential, but most importantly
what the fans wanted. The ambivalence towards it by Taleworlds shows, after years of people begging for co-op campaign somewhat proves that Taleworlds doesn't give a damn what their fans want or think. This is the most egregious example, but there are more. Gone are the days of improving upon mods like Mount and Musket, in with the days of "WE KNOW BEST **** OFF MODDERS!"
Part 4. Time
Bannerlord took forever to release and it is still in early access. You would think that a game with more time being tacked on to development would be better, not worse. But here we are, 11 years later, with nothing to show for it. What were they doing all that time? Twiddling their thumbs?
Conclusion: Bannerlord was a Grift
With all this being said, I think it is safe to include that, while perhaps Taleworlds intentions when they first developed Bannerlord wanted to make a better game, the idea of grandeur and money probably got the best of them. It's hard to exactly pinpoint when Taleworlds decided that money was more important than keeping fans happy, but I would wager around 2015-2016 was when the idea of an excellent game was thrown out the window in favor of cash. Do you agree?
