CoH2 vs DoW3 players comparison

Co-op, custom maps and mods are in fact similar to multiplayer - they create a stable playerbase. In every statement in my last post you can change the word "multiplayer" into "custom maps" and it will be still valid. The problem is not enough stable playerbase after 3 weeks from release.

Because the game has been released in a relatively barebones amount compared to previous games that have had a ton of content put into the game over their dev cycles. And no, ladder games are completely detached from MP in terms of both design and gameplay for the most part. Relic's biggest mistake was letting dawn of war 3 ship out with nothing else to keep the non ladder players engaged with the game which is why people finished the relatively meaty campaign and then stopped playing.

Of course 5k is a good amount for RTS. It would be amazing amount of players for B class RTS. It is also a great amount of players for over 3 years old game such as CoH2. But it is definitely not a good score for 1st or 2nd most awaited RTS in 2017. This is not a good score for any AAA game just after release.

And here we come to the most sensible conclusion - the DoW3 is a game advertised as AAA, but in fact doesn't live up to this standard. That exactly explains the player drop down and it can be seen on every corner in the game, game streams or reviews.

What metric are you judging the numbers by? DoW3 had a higher peak player number than every other dawn of war game on steam. The only other RTS game apart from coh2 that has a higher number on steam is AOE:HD which is a remaster of AoE2.

BW: remastered is coming out this year, and so is total warhammer. Those games have a far more robust modding community than dawn of war 3. And what makes Relic a AAA studio? They have released 1 new product since they were brought out by SEGA and their support team is tiny. Dawn of war 3 is for all intents and purposes developed by a B-class RTS developer and it has a standard number of players given it's small amount of Co-op content.

I have a dow3.org domain... anybody wanna buy it?

DoW3 Fast and Furious:

Forever in our heart and memories. Rest in peace.

Damn I missed that one
Show Spoiler

Because the PE is using Luftwaffe support!

Almost 2k players difference:


http://steamcharts.com/cmp/231430,285190#7d


lol

guess who announced 6 month ago that DOW3 was going to fail ?

now, don't except anything new on coh2.
In fact, the failure of DOW3 reduce even more the probability that RELIC develop new DLC for COH because now they are going to spend every men on fixing DOW3, making new content to attract again people, etc..

This failure probably made SEGA have less 'trust' in relic capacity, meaning less money in future and obviously no new game until a long time.
I wouldn't be surprised by seeing QUINN DUFFY geting fired since, from what i heard, he is not that good at all at leading relic company but we shall see in the future.

To resume, don't be happy of DOW3 failure because it won't make them work again on coh2 or even make coh3. That's the opposite

EDIT : To those who say that 4k player on DOW3, 3 weeks after its release isn't a failure, YES IT IS.

4k is good for an independant game, made by 2 guys yeah.
4k for a game company with dozens of employee, working on it for months and spending shit load of money isn't good at all.

As much as I'd love new COH2 content I'm not exactly ready for another CalliOP/Land Mattress commander that's going to be an obnoxious mainstay in the game for 6 months until they properly balance it.

As much as I'd love new COH2 content I'm not exactly ready for another CalliOP/Land Mattress commander that's going to be an obnoxious mainstay in the game for 6 months until they properly balance it.

Even op stuff is better than nothing i guess and as u said u can patch it

guess who announced 6 month ago that DOW3 was going to fail ?

now, don't except anything new on coh2.
In fact, the failure of DOW3 reduce even more the probability that RELIC develop new DLC for COH because now they are going to spend every men on fixing DOW3, making new content to attract again people, etc..

This failure probably made SEGA have less 'trust' in relic capacity, meaning less money in future and obviously no new game until a long time.
I wouldn't be surprised by seeing QUINN DUFFY geting fired since, from what i heard, he is not that good at all at leading relic company but we shall see in the future.

To resume, don't be happy of DOW3 failure because it won't make them work again on coh2 or even make coh3. That's the opposite

EDIT : To those who say that 4k player on DOW3, 3 weeks after its release isn't a failure, YES IT IS.

4k is good for an independant game, made by 2 guys yeah.
4k for a game company with dozens of employee, working on it for months and spending shit load of money isn't good at all.

Me.

And I agree with the rest of your post. Sadly this can have a biggest impact than we thought on COh IP. I'm never in favor to call for dismissing people from their position but yes the lead designer should take his responsability in this failure.

Me.

And I agree with the rest of your post. Sadly this can have a biggest impact than we thought on COh IP. I'm never in favor to call for dismissing people from their position but yes the lead designer should take his responsability in this failure.

that's a good thing for him that you are not in SEGA couoncil

that's a good thing for him that you are not in SEGA couoncil

Have you seen the moving BIG with Tom Hanks, when a boy turn into an adult by magic. He is recruted on a big toy store in NY and start looking into toys in dev and start playing with the toys instead of looking at the market share graphics. He asks himself the true question a lead designer should ask himself at every stage of the game conception, is it funny to play with? Are the customers going to enjoy playing with it? Does this dev make sense in that way?.

I always have this scene in mind when seeing this kind of failure.

Now to balance this, I don't know the sale numbers for Dow3, they are maybe good and are maybe the only interesting value for Sega, they maybe don't care about having a game followed, supported and played by its community on the long run. Their strategy is maybe only base on the solo campagn + DLC that will be bought by casuals and Warhammer fans. Who knows...

DOW3 stats.

Release date: Apr 27, 2017
Price: $59.99
Score rank: 12% Userscore: 55% Old userscore: 59% Metascore: 79%
Owners: 220,241 ± 13,428
Players in the last 2 weeks: 154,040 ± 11,231 (69.94%)
Players total: 207,172 ± 13,024 (94.07%)
Peak concurrent players yesterday: 3,665
YouTube stats: 255,565 views and 2,134 comments for videos uploaded last week, 49 new videos uploaded yesterday.
Playtime in the last 2 weeks: 09:36 (average) 05:26 (median)
Playtime total: 14:21 (average) 09:36 (median)

Game looks like a steaming pile of dog shit. That said success or failure from business perspective depends on sales not multiplayer activity (Titanfall 1 great example). Relic can afford very slim profit margins on DOW3 just because COH2 made them so much money. The real threat is that their games and DLC is progressively getting shittier with each release and DOW4 or COH3 could be a flop of epic proportions.

Have you seen the moving BIG with Tom Hanks, when a boy turn into an adult by magic. He is recruted on a big toy store in NY and start looking into toys in dev and start playing with the toys instead of looking at the market share graphics. He asks himself the true question a lead designer should ask himself at every stage of the game conception, is it funny to play with? Are the customers going to enjoy playing with it? Does this dev make sense in that way?.

I always have this scene in mind when seeing this kind of failure

+1
Good analogy. I remember that movie. Here is one clip that backs up what your saying;




Even EA started to figure this out a few years ago.

How Electronic Arts stopped being the worst company in America
https://www.cnet.com/news/how-electronic-arts-stopped-being-the-worst-company-in-america/

*SNIP*Five months after taking over, on February 12, 2014, Wilson gathered 146 of the company's top leaders at EA's headquarters. Together with Gabrielle Toledano, EA's chief talent officer, Wilson hatched a plan to help them understand why so many customers were unhappy.

The group was led to the basketball court, which had been temporarily remade into a conference space with stations of computers and telephone lines. For hours, executives went through the steps of installing, troubleshooting and playing the company's games. They also listened in on customer service calls so they could hear firsthand players' frustrations.

Current Nexon CEO (big asian free-to-play publisher) about EA leadership and false dichotomy in the gaming business;
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-06-17-nexon-ceo-precious-little-good-art-coming-out-of-industry

"Back at EA, I used to get lectured by business development people about how we have to have a portfolio strategy of games, because we have no idea what's going to do well. I said, 'You have no idea what's going to do well because you're not a gamer and you don't care about games. You have no confidence in your ability to make good games.' How did we let our industry get taken over by the BD people? I was a BD person at the time, but at least I played games," he remarked.

Mahoney believes the problem escalated back in 2007, when you "had a false dichotomy in the business" between the big AAA publishers (who doubled down on graphics fidelity) and the emergence of Facebook and mobile gaming on the other side. While the AAA publishers had a hard time learning how to adjust for an increasingly online world, the other side "were on record as not giving a damn about gameplay and game quality," Mahoney said. "The founders of these companies were not game players themselves. We all know who those were."

"They thought that they could reskin the same gameplay into five different games. They thought they could copy someone else's game and bring a large audience to it. They found that their revenues skyrocketed, but they were hitting the afterburner the whole time. They fell to earth when people got sick of dumbed-down games," he continued.

While Mahoney sees the "light at the end of the tunnel" and the industry finally emerging from this mess, the unfortunate effect is that many consumers were caught in the middle between the two camps, and creativity in the industry suffered.

"The core of our business is a creative business. We make our money by making art. You have to ask yourself, in this industry, are you making good art? When I say five bad years, I think there was precious little good art coming out of the industry. Not across the board. There was some awesome stuff. But that's not where the majority of the people you would see in these halls were focusing their time and attention," Mahoney said, referencing E3.

I was very surprised when I saw people streaming DoW III and it looked, imo, uglier than DoW II. It's visually a mess, and it sounds like gameplay wise its a bit of a mess too. Just from first glance, I would have been very surprised to see the game get popular.

Just go to a stream and try to look at it as if you're unfamiliar to the game. Then go look at CS:GO or League of Legends or even CoH 2. DoW III stands out not only in that it's pretty hideous, but also in how it is pretty incomprehensible what is going on, even compared to other complex games.

to be honest, the worst part for me is hotkey discrepancies lol

it is so confusing going back and forth from DoW3 to CoH2 where the former has "a" as attack move and latter "q" as attack move.

if you are not gonna give rebindable keys, at least keep it consistent....dawnfoabfj

Relic is totally incompitent, all the good people who worked there are gone.. those who made vanilla coh1. Reason why coh2 is decent is its almost a copy paste from the original.. all new features just made the game worse but it got fixed with community input.

Problem with Relic is they are fucking obsessed with innovating, even if it means removing the best features of a game JUST BECAUSE then they get to innovate... brits to coh1 is a good example... an army that put the rules of the game upside down just because "we get to innovate and thats good".

Take DOW3... it doesnt play or feel ANYTHING like DOW1 and everyone wanted a new DOW1... and what did we get? An dawn of war game thats innovated to fucking retarded levels. I will never buy that travesty.

It's sad. I was rooting for DOW3 because successes for relic increase the chance of more COH support, but it's already plummeted to a 2k player deficit. It's really just a boring, uninspired game with most of the tactics completely gutted.

I don't know if I see relic actually supporting COH2 much more, but tbh I can't see how they expect revenue from a game with 3k players during primetime.

This also makes me way less excited for a COH3, considering how much they screwed up DOW.

Have you seen the moving BIG with Tom Hanks, when a boy turn into an adult by magic. He is recruted on a big toy store in NY and start looking into toys in dev and start playing with the toys instead of looking at the market share graphics. He asks himself the true question a lead designer should ask himself at every stage of the game conception, is it funny to play with? Are the customers going to enjoy playing with it? Does this dev make sense in that way?.

I always have this scene in mind when seeing this kind of failure.

Now to balance this, I don't know the sale numbers for Dow3, they are maybe good and are maybe the only interesting value for Sega, they maybe don't care about having a game followed, supported and played by its community on the long run. Their strategy is maybe only base on the solo campagn + DLC that will be bought by casuals and Warhammer fans. Who knows...

capitalism ....

promising company like relic get bought by bigger fish, like SEGA, and everything change.
Priorities are no more to make good game but to make the most cash from the little investment as possible..

they could make the worst game ever in the world, as long as it brings them money then it's all good.
And i'm affraid that it's what happened with DOW3, they use an old & cheap engine (so old that you can't even rebind key) so that the investment are reduced to minimum, Sell the game 60$ so that even with 100k game sold, they sill earnt money.

capitalism -> less risk as possible, bigger income as possible.
That's not how you make good game, but at least that's how you make SEGA bank happy.


the only issue is that a long term, people will make the link "SEGA (& RELIC) = SHIT" and it will be over, just like it did for EA before they get their shit back.


at least they didn't get my money for this crap.

Bump.

http://steamcharts.com/cmp/231430,285190#7d

The difference reach 2,5k players.