Hi everyone,
We got two topics for today. The first one is, of course, about the upcoming patch status. The work is still going, our Eador programmer is doing his best day and night. He's lost his human form a long time ago, but now he seems to be gradually losing his communication skills as well — in the last few days he only talked to us with basically two phrases: "got any more Red Bull?" and "The patch is coming".
So, it's coming, but slowly. Why does it take so long for some of the updates to release? We talked about it before, but maybe it's worth delving into again.
Eador is built on the engine that takes its roots from 2004. A dozen of programmers worked on this engine, without keeping any documentation at all. For the original team this choice of engine was justified in 2010 (it's already been seven years, oh boy), when the work on Eador was just getting started. But, unfortunately, we can't just drive back in time inside DeLorean and shout "Stop! We're from the future! Just use Unity!".
This is why it takes a lot of time in some cases. Right now we want to rework the hiring system: move unique units from sites right into the castle. So that after constructing something you could have access to "winter units" right from the garrison. In the process, it turns out that the entire drag-n-drop system is literally mined with errors, that, for some unknown reason, have not blown up yet. So we put this new functional away for a bit and start working on the basic functional — that is already present in the game from the player's view. Only now it's being written anew, clean and with no errors.
The second topic is a continuation from the comments to the previous post — sales and marketing strategy. Let's take DLC, for example. For the most part, DLC in general can be dismissed at this point, it's a relic from 2009. How many people who bought your game, will also purchase DLC for it? We can't share our own numbers, but this is true for most cases — about 10-15% will buy good DLC. It makes sense to make DLC if the game sold around 1 million copies. Or at least 100 thousand. If it's less than that, then it's more about thanking the fans than a commercial project. Allied Forces DLC for original Eador. Masters of the Broken World came out in 2014, but the sales recouped its production budget only recently.
You could notice that DLC as small additions of new content is not really trendy these days. Some developers do still release them — for example, Paradox's games receive tons of DLC, as their production is cheap, and the audience is gigantic. Also, today's DLC is more about cosmetic items for successful online games like Rocket League or Rainbow Six: Siege. We're not taking into account giant expansions for games like Dark Souls or The Witcher 3, which are called DLC by default as well.
What's definitely trendy now though is lootboxes. These things are ethically ambiguous, and the psychological mechanism behind them has been known for the longest time — research on it is closer to the nature of drug addiction and gambling than narrative or strategic thinking, that much is clear. But lootboxes and their abuse in some cases did not just come out of nowhere: games are extremely expensive, income doesn't get any higher, and the attention span of players is getting shorter with each day. If you follow the industry, we suggest reading the opinion of people from inXile (Wasteland) and Daedalic (Deponia) — it's panic and horror all around, no one is sure that their company will still be alive by 2020.
However, we don't want to make people feel bad for our studio with this post — we got no plans to launch Patreon or ask for donations. No plans to add lootboxes in Eador either (only if you really, really would want that yourself). We'd just like to take this opportunity to learn more about your opinion on this topic. How do you choose your new game nowadays? How many strategy games per year do you need? Do you read gaming press at all? And how did you end up with us? :)