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Bannerlord was a grift
- 主题发起人 Roy1012
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I had the foresight to understand that it wasn't going to be true, but of course, my idiot friends roped me into it with Bannerlord Online, and there goes my hard eared 50 bucks. Sad.
That's a fair point, although, you have to keep in mind, "we are not just any company. We are taleworlds entertainment. We do things our own way." Understatement of the year.
Memes aside, as you mention EA can be a very helpful tool if the company is well-intentioned and works hard to utilize it properly. Unfortunately for us, though...
lmao exactly
I played Viking Conquest. I saw "sequel!" and thought "oh man, those guys! I better give them some money so they can finish their game one day!"
We are currently in the final stages of my bargain ?
Hardly the behaviour of scammers - putting in even more wage costs etc. for the same income. TW are committed to delivering their vision for BL whether it matches ours or not. Don't you ever consider your posts ironic?
There is no definition of EA.
That "real" definition, the "intended" use? That's part of the marketing and why devs won't stop using it as a label.
Are there devs that do it differently? Sure. But the last few games I've bought EA have been (more or less) glorified stress tests on their servers and final balancing/bug fixing. It is way more common for devs to use EA for that, or because they ran out of money, than opening up a platform for fans to directly influence development.
From a cursory point of view that does make sense. However, when thinking about this for a few minutes this argument falls apart. The main thing is that dragging development on keeps people buying the game. When they fully release the game, there will be a huge influx of buyers, and a small few after that. Most sales are done within the first 90 days. TW is going to have employees at their company until they shut down and from what we can see they won’t just close up shop after Bannerlord is released, so this doesn’t really add up. I never said they are scammers, but they are grifting us, or at least pinching every single penny they can out of their fan base.
Most sales are done on whatever release is granted. In money terms, the start of EA is the real release and the official release looks more like a major content addition, such as DLC.
It loses money to draw out development any way you slice it.
grift
1. ways of getting money dishonestly that involve tricking someone: 2. ways of…
dictionary.cambridge.org
Personally I’d say a grift is dishonestly fishing for unearned cash simply for money’s sake. Often used in the political sphere, grifters being people who don’t actually believe what they say, they’re just in it for the money. I’d say a scam is different as it banks on illegality in my view, or something that ought to be illegal. I wouldn’t say TW has done anything illegal (aside from possibly false advertising), so it’s not a scam, though the words are indeed similar.You'll also find scam listed as a synonym for grift in a thesaurus.grift
1. ways of getting money dishonestly that involve tricking someone: 2. ways of…
I will agree that EA was a release date for sales purposes. They definitely got a huge influx then, the real release likely won’t be as big, but it will be giving them more in total than if they just did a single release, thus the grift. I don’t agree that drawing out development loses them money, refer to the original post where I lay out how much money they’ve made with this tactic, and how much they have yet to gain from release only buyers.
Do you think they stopped paying their employees?
Do you think they plan to just close up shop after bannerlord is complete? As I mentioned they are paying their employees until the company closes/ all the time they exist, so the whole bannerlords dragged out development makes them pay their employees more is a weak meme. You could then say “well, their employees could work on other projects”, TW could have been doing this all this time and chose not to. Now they’re working on a space game, but I’m pretty sure that’s a separate team.
I like your theory that dragging out development, but releasing regular updates, gets them a captive audience, but I don't think they are doing it intentionally.
You don't seem to have a firm grasp on company finances though. The monthly wage bill is a huge and fixed expense, and likely not worth the few extra sales. The rational decision is to finish Bannerlord development quickly and move people to other projects (DLC or Space Game), in a gradual way. They can't do this quickly because they are slow. and there's some kind of commitment that Bannerlord will be supported by adding odd features even after it's released (basically for free, as a gesture of good will).
Assume they are moving Bannerlord developers to Space Game for several months now, and more will be moved as they finish their Bannerlord tasks and become available. There's no reason for a company with two projects to keep completely separate project teams - people will be moved mostly in one direction and several will have shared responsibilities in both projects.
Pushing back the release is both the right thing to do from a production point of view and a moral point of view. Bannerlord isn't ready - not by a long margin; and Taleworlds clearly have accepted this. They could have chucked it out next week and called it done; got a new influx of cash and left it.
Frankly the longer TW push it back - the better to my mind. That's another year of development they have effectively 'promised' free of charge.
Frankly the longer TW push it back - the better to my mind. That's another year of development they have effectively 'promised' free of charge.
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I can guarantee you that there won't. It's practically impossible for a big anticipated game to re-generate even a fraction of the attention as it did initially. If Bannerlord was a small game made by a tiny studio I would be less adamant, but bannerlord was one of the best selling games of 2020, and one of the best selling indie games of all time. They have already reached their potential audience for this title, and they did so over 10 years of development and drama.
The early access release of a game *is* the release. Leaving early access usually results in almost no uptick in sales. A lot of indie companies have gone out of business because they didn't realise that.
If they were just looking to get money? Yes. It is also a somewhat normal practice in the game industry to take on extra employees (not necessarily new interns either) as contractors who make up the majority of the development team then fire most of them when a project is complete.
Either one of those is preferable to paying out 21 months worth of salaries if they are actually just bilking us for money.
It is also a game released in 2021 with zero post-sale monetization, that's why I believe mexxico when he says it wasn't any kind of scam or grift.
Someone on a game dev reddit called it a "suicide start" because you get your game exposed when it isn't ready, content is sparse and balance is screwed and it is almost-impossible to ever get the same interest in your title, even through Steam's second look system.
Certainly, it hasn't been great for PR. However, I doubt you could balance, optimise and debug a sandbox game of this complexity without exposing it to the player base and their array of different pc architectures.
Clearly, TW were overwhelmed by player feedback as they are still currently replying to April 2020 bug reports https://forums.taleworlds.com/index...te-on-sieges-unspent-gold.417847/post-9734295
If TW were just in it for the money, they would have published in some form in 2016/2017 rather than scrapping their plans and going back to the drawing board.
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That's not true - at least not in all cases.
Rimworld is an early access game that started low but has since exploded. Leaving EA more then doubled their playerbase (and retained it).
I know of plenty of people holding off on Bannerlord until full release. I certainly believe Bannerlords release will see a massive influx of returning and new players - it's up to TW if they retain them.
And one thing they have got right in this strategy: Multiplayer.
With a full release there'll most likely be a couple of high profile streamers going back into multiplayer, generating hype. Or TW will sponsor a couple of high profile streamers.
So? Pretty much every Paradox game has a rising playerbase post-release, and none of them call themselves Early Access. Europa Universalis has been getting major updates since the Obama era. This nothing to do with some metaphysical set-in-stone definition of Early Acces, and has everything to do with optics and PR, of which the term Early Access is a part.
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