Profile of Fantomasas

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Thread: Relic leaves Dawn of War 3 behind10 Feb 2018, 21:38 PM Jump back to quoted post10 Feb 2018, 17:23 PMKatitof Which 40k game does good and aren't dead again? Its not Eternal crusade. Its not Space Hulk Deathwing. Its not Battlefleet Gothic Armada. Its not that other Space Hulk game. Its not Sanctus Reach. Not Space wolf. Not Armageddon. Not Rigicide. Not Deathwatch Killteam. While Inquisitor Martyr is not out yet, its going to be a MASSIVE surprise if it won't die within 2-3 months given what it offers and how massively bugged and content lacking it is(they want to release it before end of March). So, you say relics 40k is only dead? The quality control from GW side is lacking to say the least, all about cashing in using lowest budget developers and reskinning popular games with Warhammer characters. At some point they will realize that even Warhammer fans aren't interested in playing a lower-budget L4D or Diablo, because those W40k don't bother with telling a story or providing a better experience than original games. Total Warhammer is the best-licensed game, but that is largely because the original developers of Total War reskinned their own game as opposed to having lower-tier developers clone and adapt it to Warhammer. Space Hulk remains a cruel joke, taunting players by the promises of definitive patch more than a year after release. In: Lobby
Thread: Relic close to shutting down - not profitable7 Feb 2018, 01:48 AM Jump back to quoted post6 Feb 2018, 22:44 PMBasilone This nitpicking over the certain types of RTS games is stupid, its like watching a bunch of hardcore libertarians argue over the legitimacy of drivers licenses. A:"No man COH isn't a real RTS, there's no resource harvesting." B: "Oh yeah it is man you just have to fight for them, but you know what's not an RTS...that Wargame series. It doesn't even have base building ffs" C: "No bro its totally a RTS, but those world domination games aren't because you control armies instead of soldiers" D: "But they are RTS because the clock advances in real time. Everything strategy game is RTS except for those MOBA games because....reasons" Why do you care what the market share is like? COH2 came out after your golden age of RTS games and it has a playerbase close in size to COH1 even though it really came up short on expectations. More people play PC now because its more accessible and they want to play CSGO, PUBG, Battlefield, open world survival, tactical shooters, etc. Those are people that never had an interest in RTS to begin with, its not like the RTS core fanbase disappeared. There hasn't been any great broad appeal strategy games that fit your narrow definition of what strategy games should be, so they found the strategy elsewhere. If AoE4 is actually really good, it will sell accordingly. I'm not saying it will take PC gaming by storm and win over new converts to the genre, but it won't flop either (assuming the windows store requirement doesn't kill sales). Nobody is nitpicking, you are just flat out being wrong about game genres. It isn't about base-building vs call-ins, your strawman collapses right there. Using strategy-games is a really stupid way to describe what you mean, because MTG, CSGO and LOL are strategy games. The only way to discuss strategy games is to break them into smaller categories. There is no strategy games playerbase, you will never sell Starcraft to 4X players. Civilization playerbase does not give a shit about RTS games. Civilization BE is a completely different game from Starcraft as far as game mechanics go. In: Lobby
Thread: Relic close to shutting down - not profitable27 Jan 2018, 16:32 PM Jump back to quoted post27 Jan 2018, 11:58 AMNoun The only real evidence in this thread either way is that moving to a new studio is expensive and time consuming. If SEGA had plans to shut down Relic at this point, they'd probably just do their best to keep them where they are. Moving likely means they see a long term future with the studio in Vancouver. We have more information to discuss and speculate than that. • We have the news about lead employees leaving the studio. • We have the total number of Relic employees • We have full statistics of DoW3 sales/playerbase The CoH2's 5-year plan got cut short, the game isn't even 5 years old, but the last content patch was 2 years ago. Dawn of War 3 was build to allow Elite Unit and Faction expansions, but it barely got any extra content because there are no players left, freaking Soulstorm has more players... Game studios don't just burst out of nowhere. If the studio releases profitable products - it is going to survive. Some studios have extra-buffers to survive one or two commercial failures, others bankrupt/close after one. In 2017 we had: • Gigantic killing Motiga • Hob killing Runic Games • Eve Valkyrie killing CCP VR studios • Rigs killing Sony Cambridge • ME:A forcing Bioware Montreal to restructure We might never know exactly why Visceral was closed: differences in the market trends, EA wanting a different game, Visceral being behind the schedule, San-Francisco being too expensive to operate in etc. But there has to be a reason, no company would fund a project just to randomly cancel it halfway through. I would like to hear studios which were profitable and successful closing abruptly. My favorite all-time game is Battleforge, but I can accept the fact it was unsuccessful commercially and therefore prompted the studio's shutdown eventually. Relic is working on AoE4 and CoH3, the latter being in the planning or early stages of production. It doesn't feel like AoE4 is going to launch this year, it should be a 2019 game. We got surveys about CoH3's direction last year, how far in development can it be? My question is what happens if AOE4 fails commercially? Can Sega justify operating Relic after two failures in the row? In: Lobby
Thread: Relic close to shutting down - not profitable26 Jan 2018, 13:57 PM Jump back to quoted post25 Jan 2018, 22:25 PMSturmtigerCobra +1 "There is an additional cost for marketing and promotion for Sega. Yes, user acquisition are important to keep in mind but I think Sega wanted to put a lot of this on the shoulders of Relic as they have done with CA that has internal marketing/branding teams. In old COH2.ORG interview game director talked about this; Fortunately for CoH fans, Sega today is a stronger publisher than they were when CoH2 was released. Games like Persona 5 which is owned by Sega/Sammy right now is a flagship for The costs I was talking about were more like trade-shows, promotional materials (Cinematic trailer was made by Axis), website ad-space, youtube air-time, sponsoring/organizing online events. For CoH2, that would include live-action commercials or paying ESL for the token-esports season. I don't think that Sega is interested in running Relic if they cannot be profitable working on the biggest RTS IPs in the world. Relic isn't the type of studio which can work on Sega's IPs: it is primarily a PC RTS developer, they have already ruined the DoW IP financially, it remains to be seen how AoE performs. Relic has no options to sell to the console market which is where AAA money is. The PC sales for Wolfenstein II are similar to DoW3, yet the game is much more financially viable because it is released on PS4 and XBO to triple the total number of sales, the Switch port is also a possibility. Depending on the publishing agreement, if AoE fails to deliver on expectations, I don't think that there will be a Sega-published CoH3. It is very likely that Sega would either close or allow the studio to go independent (like Square Enix did with IO Interactive, allowing them to keep the IP). DoW3 has been bundled with the hardware (Anything Asus including routers, then another Intel processor promotion). So you can add one more bullet point to the reasons why the total number of copies activated isn't a good indication of the financial success. In: Lobby
Thread: Relic close to shutting down - not profitable25 Jan 2018, 15:48 PM Jump back to quoted post24 Jan 2018, 22:55 PMvasa1719 Is it small or big numbers for DOW3 ? The total sales is not a good number to judge the financial performance. There are 3 reasons why we cannot calculate the potential revenue: • Games had $30-$40 copies for pre-order on cdkeys/g2a/kinguin. • Game had multiple sales, including 50% offs. • Game was in the monthly bundle, where developers of 6 games get share no more than $9 among per bundle. It is very likely that the revenue from those copies was no more than $3 for Sega. The game bombed. It took 5 years to build, in my previous post I explain how it is reasonable to assume that Relic's operating costs are no less than $10m/year. There is an additional cost for marketing and promotion for Sega. Also, Games Workshop either charges a massive flat fee or some kind of royalties per copy sold. Even if you give the insanely generous and unrealistic $30 revenue per copy (it is unlikely more than $18 in my estimate), Relic has made less than $17m from the Dawn of War 3 so far. Relic has no additional tools to monetize DoW3. The community has abandoned the game, the game is kind of mediocre, the sequel to DoW3 is financially suicidal. In conclusion, Sega lost a lot of money funding Relic to build DoW3, because DoW3 was a bomb both financially and killed the franchise. In: Lobby
Thread: Make War Not Love 520 Jan 2018, 12:33 PM Jump back to quoted post20 Jan 2018, 12:25 PMSturmpanther For real? LUL^^ I don't know, but come on, does anyone seriously expect Relic to make something new? Two years since the last new commander... Even MWNL3 had no new content, just free British commanders. The realistic scenario is a small mix of Supply/Commanders/Skins. In: Lobby
Thread: Make War Not Love 520 Jan 2018, 12:18 PM Jump back to quoted post20 Jan 2018, 11:10 AMSturmpanther I got an email already for some days about that BUt i'm wondering what is the price, in the case coh2 wins 1000 supply coins + old commanders. Warhammer is going to win, we should be happy that someone is going to get new content for the game because CA has staff working on it. In: Lobby
Thread: Relic close to shutting down - not profitable17 Jan 2018, 20:01 PM Jump back to quoted post17 Jan 2018, 18:54 PMMajorBloodnok This is where we may disagree. I suspect that Relic have made a return...the question is (for me) : how greedy are SEGA? It is close to 200 employees at this point, 180 x $41k (average developer salary in Canada in USD) brings the cost of operation to $7.38m in the employee salaries alone. Bolt all the taxes, rent, software and hardware costs and it should go above $10m/year to fund Relic. Relic is a net loss for Sega so far. Dawn of War 3 wasn't supposed to sell this poorly, it was around 300k copies sold before autumn. Factor in the marketing and royalties to GW, it is a total bomb. This is why you have all the survey's and future of CoH dialogue: the Dawn of War is a money-sink (No dlc, no expansions and definitely no sequel anytime soon), where CoH franchise still has the potential to be profitable, or at the very least, cover the development costs. In: Lobby
Thread: Relic close to shutting down - not profitable16 Jan 2018, 21:51 PM Jump back to quoted post16 Jan 2018, 17:41 PMwuff COH2 has an average of roughly around 120,000 unique players every two weeks. That is not a good figure to gauge how profitable CoH2 is. It doesn't say how many of them buy anything, nor how interested they are in new DLC/Expansions/CoH3. Since Relic isn't making new DLC/Expansions for Coh2, we can assume it isn't profitable/worthwhile to make them. CoH2 base game has been on deep sale/bundles/even free, the base game is peanuts as far as generating additional revenue is concerned. Did Sega even get the pre-order money from Coh2, because I cannot find whether they won the lawsuit? If AoE4 is a windows store exclusive (looks like the case), Relic is in a big trouble. Windows Store is a joke for PC exclusives, it is going to sell worse than DoW3. In: Lobby
Thread: New CoH Community Manager?11 Jan 2018, 20:29 PM Jump back to quoted post11 Jan 2018, 06:26 AMSturmtigerCobra It's highly unusual that the CoH community has been without an official CM for 3+ months now. Despite its flaws, CoH2 has a higher player retention/average playtime than any other steam RTS game which is important when Sega calculate potential market profit from CoH2/CoH3 DLC. That curve is due to the game being free... The base game sold 2.3m in 5 years backed by at least 3 bundles and multiple sub-$10 sales. It is important that Sega calculated how much shit their playerbase has swallowed over those 5 years when making CoH3. Dawn of War 3 has shown that the audience has no patience for bullshit, even if the IP is famous/beloved. People are not in the mood of another Full price + Expansions + Paid DLC cocktail, or the 4vs4 optimization with the permanent delays compared to how smooth other games run these days, or the Relic's trademark balance of random armor/fuel values. In: Lobby