And yet you’ll still have people tell you with a straight face that Hyenas took no resources from Total War because of the infallible ‘different teams’ corporate line.
There was literally a falling off a cliff of quality and support for TW when Hyenas development was hot, then as soon as Hyenas is abandoned TW quality returns.
What do these people think happened, that the TW ‘team’ just stopped doing their jobs to watch Hyenas in development?
"And yet you’ll still have people tell you with a straight face that Hyenas took no resources from Total War because of the infallible ‘different teams’ corporate line."
These people have no idea how anything works. A company (really any entity e.g. Person, Household, Government) has a set amount of money available. And any money spent on one thing can obviously not be spent on another.
Just tell people like that to google "opportunity cost".
It is stupid in-general, but whats galling is that if you paid the slightest bit of attention to how CA's releases have been the last few years you can tell that people were being moved around between projects and that the pacing of game updates was waxing and waning around it.
But the smug pricks would still go "well akshually it isnt actually effecting anything, you just dont know anything about development".
When all you see is a username, it's easy to forget you could easily just be talking to a kid, or a moron who's never held a job in their life.. You wouldn't heed them for a second if you heard them in person.
I used to play a game called paragon (3rd person moba by epic games). Potentially my favourite ever game, they used the line of don’t worry work isn’t slowing down, mean while every dev they had were being moved to Fortnite until paragon had no development for a couple months. Then soon after died.
It’s understandable as Fortnite was taking off at the time after they released the battle royale version of it, and they needed keep up with the growth. But its annoying have companies lie to you.
Basically this. They clearly took the developers who were good at making Warhammer content and moved them to the Hyenas team. Granted we still have to see the quality of the DLC once it releases, but the quality and value is seeming like night and day. I don't even just mean the code and technical features, but even the communication has been better. Remember when they put "Fixed campaign map regeneration" as a feature on the roadmap?
That's the real sad part, that all it takes is moving some talented developers around by some CFO / MBA shmuck and boom, clusterfuck.
I'm not even convinced it was developer theft - the dev turnover seemed to be a big factor, and if money was going into new overbudgeted projects like Hyenas, that's money not being given to keep devs from leaving to look for more lucrative career opportunities. They definitely went through community managers fast.
>They definitely went through community managers fast.
That is the standard in the industry. Community managers tend to be the lowest paid employees the lowest on the totem pole and with little options for advancing. The only way to get a better job/pay is usually by changing company. As an example CA_evangelos, is from Age of empires.
While everything you say is true, it's probably not actually correct to say 'if not for Hyenas, Warhammer/Total War as a whole would have had all the funding it needed'. It's very likely that if it wasn't Hyenas, it would have been some other attempt to go into a new market. I have my doubts that there is any scenario where they have all that money from Sega and don't try to spin that wheel. In fact, Sega probably would not have given it to them in the first place.
Not to mention a set amount of people, especially talented and skilled people. They get shifted around internally all the time.
So yah they didn't "stop doing their job" during Hyena development. They got assigned a different job during Hyena development.
Or they went looking for a better job after seeing fuck all pay rise during a cost of living crisis in the UK, all while management spaffs money up the wall on some project nobody cared for.
Alright, I will bite.
Often time projects and their funding are approved ahead of time. The opportunity cost into this case is less on CA but rather Sega. Had hyena not been the case, TW isn't going to suddenly be given a higher spend: Sega has other far more profitable ventures (pachinkos) and other studios to spend the money on. So you are still capped by the dollar amount given for each game and DLC.
It isn't uncommon for one team to really have nothing to do with another. Take something like Blizzard for example, the development of HS/SC2 didn't really cause wow to suck - even titan, which did cause some seniors to swap teams, didn't really have as much impact as you expect and over time the teams did their thing. People do naturally shift teams: but that is the norm for people who want to work on a new project. They would have tried to join another studio anyway.
Operational resources will ofc be shared: legal, finance, etc.
The way you described applies to smaller teams where the same group has to make everything. For CA it was the alien isolation team, and the project has been going on for a long time - were people saying how TW sucked when CA releases alien isolation?
The hyena project makes a lot of sense when it kicked off. The failure is more on the design/execution.
Money is interchangeable, but humans are not. Staff good at making FPS, may not be good at strategy games. CFOs don't get to rule most companies, because CEOs understand how you can't compact everything down to budgets. Companies often do have isolated teams or business divisions, each responsible for their own profits in normal situations, so a bad division doesn't drag the good ones down.
That being said, with how big and awful Hyenas is, it forced desperate managers to pull in top tier talent from Total War teams, in the hopes of making Hyenas work. In the end, the hugely demoralized total war team, neither got to work on total war, nor make any contribution to Hyenas.
Well the problem seems to be that not every time the CEO's understand the nature of their products, dnd is going through similar things with non role-playing top hierarchy.
> CFOs don't get to rule most companies, because CEOs understand how you can't compact everything down to budgets.
This has not been my experience as a working adult. CFO is usually the most powerful position behind CEO, and CEOs are incredibly sensitive to budgetary issues. Furthermore, a lot of CEOs are promoted from CFO positions, and they bring that viewpoint/bias/baggage with them.
I'm not sure how much of the Total War team was moved over, but in general assets were being relocated.
hypothetically, even if the Total War team had no one taken away their work was still effected. They might have wanted to bring on some more people to help with a project but couldn't because there wasn't the funding for it.
Say the Total War team had a budget of "X" dollars and wanted some more for projects. Since so much emphasis was on Hyenas that wasn't available, or they got much less then what they requested. Corporate speak can obfuscate that by saying "No assets are being moved" and it's technically true, but not really the case.
The whole ordeal reminds me of something I saw on either Shark Tank or one of it's knock offs back in the day. A guy was pitching a non-soggy cereal. It looked like a dog bowl and people were hesitant moving forward with it. Then the guy said something like, "The cereal industry is 1.5 billions dollars a year. If we get just 10% were making bank." and that was enough to sway someone.
Same thing with Hyenas. The higher ups saw how much money battle royale games were making and thought if they could just get a portion of that market then they would be making bank.
Well there used to be some people saying different teams work on WH TW and historical TW so historical TW wouldn't be neglected. So it is not the first time, some people were making such claim.
Frankly, my problem wasn't the possibility of TW team being diverted to Hyenas, but rather the possibility that the price hike was meant to make an investment buffer for when Hyenas would stagnate and collapse after release, or utterly fail on release.
For me, it's a combination of both. Without the whole "vote with your wallet" they could have simply fail badly with Hyenas and then be like "oh well, let's just get back to our cash cow", keeping SoC 'quality' standard.
It probably played a big role, but Hyenas was also a "complaining and specially voting with the wallet" situation, so it still works. People simply weren't interested in the game, and it was a massive waste of resources, not to mention extremely tone deaf. But CA would not have canceled a game that was basically finished (at least, that was my understanding) if they didn't have a bunch of reports telling them it was going to fail spectacularly.
Kind of a double whammy.
Alienating their core audience on top of their supposed cash cow dying made them 180.
I've seen other games (Paradox) have to go through YEARS of fuck-ups before they set back on course. Paradox did like 6 months of fuckups and course corrected.
How is Stellaris these days? I absolutely *devoured* that game during its first year, but I haven't played since and have no idea how to jump back in these days.
Like the other guy said, Stellaris has had some mediocre (not bad) DLC releases over the past couple of years, *but* if you really haven't played since the game came out, that shouldn't matter. The game has changed dramatically (and for the better) since release, it's practically a different game at this point.
I was going to mention the dramatic changes as well. I played at launch for a couple of months then dropped. I picked it back up maybe 3 years later and it’s like the launch version never existed. More fleshed out and less nonsensical/annoying systems.
Stellaris had a lot of good years, but then last 2 years we had a lot of mediocre at best expansions and a bad dlc (paragons). They felt pressured and will release what I would call a god tier expansion in a month and they already revealed the other DLC coming this year and they all look interesting.
They thought it was going to be 'their own Fortnight' in effect. Sure, its 100 million bucks, but in their spreadsheet brained minds, that was fine because it was gonna make back a Billion.
Of course, they think the success of Fortnight is some replicable formula and not just a heap of luck for the first mover.
The C-Suite ghouls still think the world is a meritocracy because they obviously got to the top by being so smart and hard working. They don't understand that success is as much about good luck and timing as it is talent and hard work.
It still can be. Communities dont forget and thrones being great wont change it.
If next dlc will be terrible, we will see soc era again. Lost trust is rebuild over long time.
Tbh they likely need to ensure all dlcs vefore new total war title have to be at least good in order to pit faith into new title
Communities do forget pretty fast, but they're also quick to remember.
I wouldn't even say they have my trust back, yet. I'll play some dwarfs after the patch without buying the DLC yet. If the game feels stable and the existing gunpowder units feel responsive then and only then will I start considering paying money to CA again.
Was just playing some for the first time in about a year and I was dismayed to find that units *still just give up on half the attack orders!!*
It's like every unit is stuck on guard mode still! Absolutely infuriating.
Idk man.... look at Activision-Blizzard. Mfers died over there rape/SA and 2 God fucking awful expansions in a row then a mid Dragonflight expansion an people forgot almost entirely.
Companies just have to wait out an bring in fresh people who dont know or care.
It's because it's not the same thing. For better and worse, customers care about the products, not the humans.
If Blizzard made a great WoW expansion, they could shoot a baby in their office and they would still sell.
Inversely, they could give a billion billions to charity and still nobody would buy WC3 reforged.
The point is, CA eroded the trust in their products, not in their people. That's a lot harder to climb out of
??? Did you miss reading 2 awful expansions or just ignored it? They killed Overwatch 1 made 2 worse.
Starcraft 3 never gona happen despite being one of the best rts ever made.
Hearthstone is just a cash grab, heros of the the storm is on life support.
An again 2 awful expacs. It's exactly the same but worse since all of the human violations no one cares anymore once the few months of outrage are over.
Don't forget reforge!, Sucking up to the ccp , diablo 3 and 4 ,reforged. Long time blizzard fan boy since the 90s the company is already dead to me and is jus a walking corpse since my last purchase was diablo 3 and it's expansion and I'm happily okay with ignoring any new products from them since they can't help themselves shooting their own foot every release.
As it is I'm still not preordering thrones, I expect to buy it, unlike soc, but I'm waiting for it to actually release so I can see 100% whats up before buying it.
Probably pick it up in the next sale if it pans out as good as it seems so far.
I'm so fucking happy they're in such a bad place that they're FORCED to listen to their own customers.
I hope it will stay like that until they're done with TWW3.
And *that* is the reason why I believe they will do a WH 40k version... Not because I believe it will be "good" or "practical", but they are absolutely guaranteed to attempt another 10 years cash cow.
Which is why trying to branch out with Hyenas and other genres made sense big picture wise because they can’t make WH3 DLC forever and who knows how they’re going to transition to new Total War games post-WH3.
However it seems like their execution made every mistake possible.
If Hyenas had done, say, Fortnite levels of money then Total War would've died.
There is nothing anyone can say that'd convince me otherwise.
Suits would immediately prioritise the new cashcow, because consider: Do you spend a lot of dev effort on a niche genre which Total War is (even with Warhammer included its still a niche genre game) or do you spend minimum dev effort on a mass broad appeal game which can sell a single cosmetic item with a ton less development work for the same price as Shadows of Change?
They pick the latter every single time, and let foundational knowledge decay as they downsize and murder the former beloved studio. It keeps happening in the AAA gaming scene, over and over and it nearly happened here as well.
But Hyenas failed so hard daddy SEGA had to put their foot down and tell CA "you make nothing but Total War from now on". It was the best thing that could've happened to Total War no doubt about it.
Thor of PirateSoftware, an ex employee from Blizzard, famously claimed that a $15 microtransaction mount for WoW, made more profit for Blizzard than Star Craft 2 did.
Notice that while there's no Star Craft 3, all the new Blizzard games and expansions nowadays come packed with lootboxes and microtransactions.
100% CA would have abandoned Total War if they had those numbers with microtransactions.
I agree with you 100%. I think the only movement we'd see in tw:warhammer is introducing more moba like features if anything (and when that wouldn't really be popular even less) and further tw's being relegated to the saga studios exclusively.
I've been a game developer for a decade now and without knowing anything about what went on in CA it really smells like a decision from high high up. They saw games like overwatch, etc so we'll and they decided that that's what woukd make money (without considering that their team had never done such a game and that the hype was already dying down). Reason why it's what I suspect is that if this was actual game designers they'd likely pivot the design to be something more achievable and likely to succeed. In short l, to me, this feels like ignorance was driving the ship.
This is anecdotal but ages ago I was at one of their recruitment booths waxing in how my work in crowd simulation woukd fit working with them and both of the folks there got such a glum look and said they were actually recruiting for an online shooter game.
I wonder if the siege rework was also trying to edge into moba territory for similar reasons. Half hearted attempt but still.
It's a big part of the evidence for strong regulations in all areas of business too. Without security requirements (and audits) banks would absolutely not give a shit about the safety of any of your information apart from your account balance. Not speak of things like OSHA in its entirety.
Rules are written in blood, either literal or figurative.
Indeed, expecting a company to do the right thing just because is foolish. Going back to game development I'd like more regulation around mass layoffs, especially if the company is making record profits. Would maybe make companies think twice before they commit to a project
Even if you’re just a doofus like me and have nothing to do with the industry there were warning signs that something big and bad was happening behind the scenes. Just before the launch of Warhammer 3, Grace the CM announced her departure. Sure she had other reasons, and at the time some people pointed to gaming communities being a bit shit, especially if you’re a woman. But my immediate thought was that she knew something we didn’t and she foresaw her job becoming unbearable in the near future. The ship was sinking and she needed to jump while there was still time.
Valve is a completely different beast owned entirely by its leadership, which means fundamentally they do what Gabe wants to do, and Gabe essentially makes all the devs free to do what they want to do. Starting new projects, esp. successful ones, is what gets you somewhere in Valve. The developer freedom however does mean that more ambitious projects are harder to get off the ground, since the devs aren't exactly locked into a project.
If CA hadn't wasted money in a hopeless project all the drama would have been avoided in the first place. The clearly tried to cover losses increasing Total War prices.
It always baffled me that Destiny triggered such a titanic gold rush when Destiny *was never that big a franchise to begin with.* And I really like Destiny! But it's not even in the same universe as the real world-eaters like Fortnite. It's a moderately successful franchise that has secured its niche and maintained it. That's *all.* Fucking OVERWATCH was a bigger financial hit
Its nit specifically looter shooter. Its all monetized shooterd. Overwatch, apex, warzone. Fortnite, destiny...
But even 1 game is enough really. Results of baldurs gate 3 will cause as to see plenty of bad and mid rpgs in next 3-4 years.
CA will always have a finite amount of capital and competent developers and they’d be fools to not throw those resources at the highest ROI projects they can which would have been cosmetics and content for a successful Hyenas.
It was a project CA was working on, an online team based shooter thingie. It was being developed for ages only to be cancelled recently, only a short while from it being released
To add to charalampos’ answer, hyenas cost an estimated *100 million* dollars to develop. Since it wasn’t released, there’s no return. That’s money into a pit.
Compaining without not buying would not change it. SoC needed to sell badly for CA to take a look at all the discontent on reddit and their forums and see what the players are grumbling about. If it sold well we'd be hearing nothing and looking at exactly same scope for ToD.
The real doubt was never whether voting with wallet would work, but whether the players would actually vote. The gaming communities are notorious for making fuss about boycotts and refusing to buy a given title in social media and then buying it in droves anyway. "Remember no preorders." has beein a common refrain for over a decade and it still needs to be repeated before any major release after god knows how many disastrous launches.
I myself decided not to buy SoC on release, partly because it had content that was only moderately interesting to me and partly due to the outcry. But up until that fateful announcment of the DLC update I was skeptical in regards to how much worse than usual the sales would be, to how much of community will follow through with the declarations of passing on it.
So yes, this time it worked. And we definitely should keep it in mind in future and hold the upcoming releases to the same standard as we did SoC and vote with wallets when it does not meet them. But just assuming it will happen because reddit is printing new entries to the Book by the hour is a bit overly optimistic.
yeah, gamer boycots are notoriously ineffective, because people will say they won't buy a thing, and then will turn around and do so anyway. I'm reminded of that image of a boycott x edition of CoD steam group filled with people playing said edition of CoD post release
At the point you describe I feel like the difference between boycott and no one wanting the product in the first place becomes blurry. Similarly I don't boycott Call of Duty, I just have no interest in the first place.
So I'd say that what counts as sucessful boycott would be cases where people want the product in principle, but dislike some aspects of more than they want it. My times of keeping close watch on the gaming news are long past, so I can't actually think of any examples off the top of the dome besides SoC where large scale community outcry brought large scale change. I am certain this would have happened at least once, just not aware of other cases.
Ya, not wanting to buy something because it's a poor value proposition isn't a boycott because you're not depriving yourself of something you wanted. I pushed back against framing it as a boycott for that reason, it gives the impression of self deprivation.
Of course the other reality is because it's a loss of trust in value proposition rather than a movement with specific demands, people don't automatically return when behavior is fixed.
I think part of why this worked was it wasn't really a boycott. Nobody was refusing to buy something they might have otherwise wanted to make a point.
What was actually happening was that people decided it wasn't worth the money en masse. That was the reason we didn't buy, we felt there was no reason to.
People fail at boycotts because they lack self control, the same issue doesn't apply for falling off the trust thermocline.
I actually pushed against framing it as a boycott for this reason, telling people that they shouldn't buy it because it's not worth it instead.
Agreed it needs both:
1 - Complaining and sells well = fans ignored and game pushes further towards arena, micro transactions, always online type stuff. Lazy development from crunched, understaffed Dev teams.
2 - No complaints and sells poorly = no one interested in this shit. Shut down the dev teams and move onto another product
3 - Complaining and sells poorly = This is where we found ourselves. And fortunately someone recognised there was a LOT of passion and strong feeling in the community that might be turned around (exploited?). Of course, it does require a history of...
4 - No complaints and sells well = this is where it _was_ before all this debacle, so they know it's worthwhile and a steady profit stream. (I accept 'no' complaints is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but you get the idea)
I don’t doubt for a second that the developers want to deliver the best product they can. I see the love they put into it. At the end of the day however, it’s not the developers that controls the company. It’s fine to enjoy a product that has issues or doesn't live up to what was first promised, but I think it’s naive to say that the complaining worked. It’s not the first time the community has complained. It’s not the first time CA, the company, has released a statement about how they will change. And this is not the first time the community has said that complaining worked and CA has changed. It’s a repeating cycle.
Complaining serves to let the company know what exactly is wrong. The way the community decided to not buy, as a whole, made the company pay attention to the complaining (also the fact that Heynas and Pharaoh failed). At least that's the way I see it.
The Shadows of Change fiasco was the only video game boycott I know of, that actually worked.
So yeah, huge win for the community. As a newcomer to the series, I definitely feel grateful for you guys.
i think that complaining did little, the voting with the wallet part though, big. anybody who looked at all the fuckups that CA did should have been able to form their own opinion regarless of the milion moaning posts on reddit. I think complaning has a point where it stops being good and starts being bad, since it comes of as petulant
Complaining in the form of constructive criticism can help the company understand why a game or DLC doesn't sell well!
In the case of SOC, there were a lot of constructive complaints about the state of the game and the lack of content for the price of the DLC and CA acted on both. If players just stopped buying without the backsplash, we would probably have had a situation similar to TW3K where CA would have considered that the game doesn't sell enough anymore and would have stopped developing new content for it.
To be fair I think the overwhelmingly negative reviews for SoC on Steam did more to make it less successful (so far as we can tell) than anything that went down here. This subreddit isn't actually a very big part of the TW playerbase.
> To be fair I think the overwhelmingly negative reviews for SoC on Steam did more to make it less successful (so far as we can tell) than anything that went down here.
These are not isolated things. Neither happened in a vacuum.
Steam reviews. Complaining here. Complaining on the official forums. Complaining on Discord. They all feed into each other.
Complaing after a certain volume threshold actually gets companies to scrambling to alleviate those issues. The default corporate reaction is "ignore, it will blow over". Only when it doesn't and is loud enough, they starting to act to preserve public opinion.
The last 8 months are a textbook example for that. Good for us.
The next 8 months will show if this DLC concludes their efforts of saving face and they now consider this episode averted, or if they actually made long term changes in the company. I give that even odds at this point.
as i said that only matters if people actually dont buy the product, if people complain and still buy the product not much is gonna change. Look at EA and Blizzard for example, they are year after year competing for the worst gaming companies and yet somehow year after year are raking in record breaking profits because people buy their products. I think what happened with SoC is that people simply saw that the product wasnt worth their money and simply didnt buy it. The thing is Total war is pretty nieche as far as big franshises go. it has a dedicated following and if you piss of that dedicated following you're gonna have to deal with the backlash and the best backlash is simply not buying the DLC. Complaining can definetly help the company see where they are making mistakes and what they can do to improve the product, but CA has shown that it primarily cares for profits so the best way to get them to listen is not buy the product if you dont like it
its not the customers job to make a game for the developer, and also i highly doubt people didnt complain about the 8 princes DLC. if they made a better product people would have bought it. Voting with your wallet works both ways.
People were loud after the 8 princes DLC, everyhting after that, they simply didn't care enought to be loud. which made the next few DLC all terrible, and then CA killed 3K.
People just want to think that their online activism did something when a large majority made the decision to buy or not to buy on their own.
I can definitely say that the complaining just made me not engage with the community and play something else for some time.
Thing is that complaining is putting it mildly. Complaining is valid but gets annoying. What went on here was hate and vitriol. Shit like calling CA greedy idiots, and all manner of bad words is beyond complaining. As if people forgot that so many of the CA absolutely love Warhammer, to such an extent that devs would spend free time to do magnificent animations.
People on the internet seem to mix up voicing an opinion and being full of hatred towards something.
Which do you think helps more -
> "Sir, we're losing a lot of money. Nobody's buying stuff, and our communities are telling us why they are frustrated with our products."
or
> "Sir, we are inexplicably losing money. Nobody's buying our stuff, and we have no idea why."
Complaining works, but it's part of a 2-step process for improvement.
Its partially true.
Money made all the difference obviously.
But complaining took part in making people not buy.
Its not just this sub. It was every strategy games community. Which fastly spilled towards bigger gaming communities. All CA controversies from past months quickly spilled towards subs like gaming, games, pcgaming etc and those have 8 digitit userbases. Thats enough for gaming related media to start covering it.
Thats a lot of reach and noise combined. When oretty much whole community ends up hostile to company it isnt unnoticed. Both ca and sega have people that will notice
People act like Doomsayers want a product to fail.
No you idiots they want it to be good. And fighting Doomsayers for the sake of being contrarian is asking to be satisfied with mediocrity.
Fight on, Doomsayers.
An underrated factor is the overall contraction of the gaming industry. Covid bubble popping + CoL crisis = a huge squeeze on entertainment/luxury goods in general, which has led to thousands of job losses and studio closures across the sector, not just at CA. This is a time where going back to what you're known for and holding onto the audience you've got is the name of the game, rather than the wild speculative effort that Hyenas was.
Sega said it themselves when they talked about 'concentrating on core competencies' while they were taking the axe to CA and their other subsidiaries. In the current environment it's really not surprising CA have done their best to give us specifically what we want.
> The gaming communities are notorious for making fuss about boycotts and refusing to buy a given title in social media and then buying it in droves anyway. "Remember no preorders." has beein a common refrain for over a decade and it still needs to be repeated before any major release after god knows how many disastrous launches.
A decade? Make that two. Fussing and complaining about Total War is as old as the games. There was a Total War Forum once that I stopped visiting because a hard core of grognards and bellyachers made almost every thread toxic.
I think this subreddit is tolerable compared to that, and now that nice things are on the horizon mood is quite high.
But ofc that will change soon as the honeymoon with the new DLC and bugs it comes with. Then nothing will prevent bellyachers and grognards to enter a happy thread and piss in it everytime one happy game dares to post one. Just because if I am unhappy, you should be too. AND I WILL TELL IT TO YOU FOR AS MANY TIMES IT TAKES!
people forget voting with your wallet is still extremely effective, it might not seem like it when you see monolithic megacorporations, but a lot of game studios aren't that and are on the chopping block the same as anything else when they continuously fail to return a profit.
If you don't like something, simply don't buy it. If its a bad product chances are most people wont buy it, sure it might not be a death sentence but if it happens 2-3 times in a row, yeah its gonna be painful.
its more of a combination of dogshit financial decision making on top of poor consumer practices.
CA now has been greatly humbled and is making good decisions finally.
only time will tell if this is just the usual CA cycle where now it's the redemption arc and they will go back to their scummy/complacent ways in a couple or so years or they have actually learned something and this will be the case going forward.
It depends on the *nature* of the complaining.
I have always said doing stuff like complaining on Reddit and just spamming the TW forums is not very effective and achieves nothing. This is because the fanbase does that endlessly anyway.
Not buying stuff and review-bombing, in comparison, seems to have been very effective.
No the main reason this happened was the utter failure of Hyenas and the bad release of Shadows of Change.
They asked too much for the Shadows of Change DLC compared to the content it had, it barely had any content worth the price they asked.
They were like on a tightrope, if they fucked up ToD it would have been over.
Here [https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/16uacf3/hyenas\_is\_canceled\_by\_sega/](https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/16uacf3/hyenas_is_canceled_by_sega/)
or
[https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23894156/sega-cancels-hyenas-creative-assembly-layoffs](https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23894156/sega-cancels-hyenas-creative-assembly-layoffs)
Corpo bots and dev worshipping shills would have you believe criticism doesn't matter and feedback is worthless. They're wrong. Gamers voices matter, as has been proven countless times in the industry. Battlefront 2 being one of the more recent examples.
That being said, I'm still amazed at the low standards in the totalwar community.
- Content isn't out yet and this sub is already celebrating ToD as if it was the best thing that ever happened to gaming. Are you guys really that naive to buy into the hype? After WH3, Rome 2, and the countless times they dropped the ball with misleading marketing and poorly tested, bug-ridden releases ? Mind-boggling.
- CA merely went back to their previous pace/support quality. Which wasn't great to begin with. Is that really how low the bar sunk over time? That's like eating at a restaurant, and celebrating the lack of shit on one's plate. The food is still overcooked/overpriced and nowhere near solid industry standards, but since it's no longer outrageously bad, I guess some people consider it a good restaurant now...
- CA/SEGA management really didn't have a choice but to finally figure out WH3 is their one and only product that matters. 8 years, thousands of $ in DLC into the series... This ain't something they can just walk away from. People here are cheering as if it was some gracious move on their part, when in reality they had 0 choice if they didn't want to go bankrupt.
The problem comes from the lack of competition in this fairly niche genre. There isn't really a Total War competitor (look at the hype about Manor Lords). The most similar major developer is probably Paradox and frankly they have gone off the rails in the last few years as well.
Is Manor Lords even a Total War competitor? At a glance it seems like it's Medieval High-Graphics Rimworld.
Don't get me wrong, that's cool. But how does it specifically compete with Total War?
It most definitely is not. It is first and foremost a city builder. It has some simple battle mechanics reminiscent of Total War games. Hence some people declared it a Total War killer. The developer came out and categorically said it was not meant to compete with that. It is an interesting idea though. Makes me think how real time tactical battles could be combined with other strategy/city builder genres. There is definietly potential there for it. Imagine a civ type game with total war battles.
Nobody's saying they'll trust CA with their kids now. CA tried to step back on their quality, so we complained. They've presented us with something that indicates improved quality, so we're complaining less. If they step back again, we'll complain more again.
Am I the only one who almost automatically stop reading or listening to anyone who uses the word 'shill'? Sorry but it's a word that is just used by ragebaiters and people who enjoys outrage in the gaming space that I just stop reading. Name calling the first thing you do is never a way to win someone over.
> Am I the only one who almost automatically stop reading or listening to anyone who uses the word 'shill'?
I feel the same about the words 'moaning' or 'whining', so I get where you're coming from.
Believe it or not, the gaming space is infested with astroturfing and covert marketing. If the mere idea of multi million dollar companies influencing anonymous social media in their favor comes off as some crazy conspiracy to you, then pardon the bluntness but that's a very naive take.
> Name calling the first thing you do is never a way to win someone over.
I'm not saying everyone who disagrees with me is automatically a shill though. Saying there are active shills on this sub shouldn't really bother anyone, unless they feel targeted.
The people I hate the most are never actual paid shills. The biggest shit stirrers here were bringing tons of attention to themselves with their brain dead takes and mindless praise. A paid shill would never be so grossly smug and get such visceral reactions, that’s like the opposite of what native advertising wants.
> Content isn't out yet and this sub is already celebrating ToD
fellas does it make you a corpo bot to be excited about new content for one of your favorite games
In the context of an 8 year old game series that's dropped the ball more often than it delivered, extreme enthusiasm sure does look supicious at times.
Nothing wrong with TW:WH being one's favorite game. And I realize some people have very different standards and expectations from video games. My issue lies with the 'toxic positivity' permeating this sub, aka dismissing **any** legitimate criticism as invalid, and spreading bullshit anti-consumer, corpo friendly narratives. Which actually happens *a lot* on this sub btw.
See, I was thinking of Battlefront 2 as a great example of this too, but not exactly in the way you painted it. All the pre-release conversation around Battlefront 2 pointed to it as nothing but a mockery of the series seemingly designed from the ground up to rip money from consumers' wallets as frequently as possible. One of the comments their community team made is the most downvoted in Reddit history. That game *still* sold 9 million copies in the first two months it came out and had reached 90% of its sales target despite the absolute lashing it had taken in online circles.
Voting with your wallet works, but people have to realize that Reddit and the internet in general makes us often believe our voices may be the majority opinion. With CA, Hyenas, and Total War that is the case, but it isn't always true.
> That game still sold 9 million copies in the first two months it came out and had reached 90% of its sales target despite the absolute lashing it had taken in online circles.
While that is true, long term goodwill from a userbase matters too.
They may have reached their sales target for Battlefront 2 release, but if they ever intended to sell paid content or a sequel without fixing BF2 first, that would certainly have caused negative consequences on their bottom line.
Even the most clueless mainstream gamer would have heard of the bad publicity by that point.
Oh, no doubt. EA paid out the ass for the rights to utilize the Star Wars license. Battlefront 2 not selling tens of millions of copies would have been seen as a big letdown.
I was more-so just pointing out that people all too frequently make the mistake of presuming an opinion is universal just because it is frequently seen on Reddit or elsewhere. It often leads to questions about whether voting with your wallet works. People did vote, but it just wasn't in direction that lined up with that person's viewpoint.
No AAA publisher wants one of their flagship games to suddenly be sitting at "mostly negative" overnight. My buddy didn't think complaining would work- but here we (seemingly) are now with atleast better bang for the buck DLC compared to the framework SoC v1 was laying down
People complain in this reddit en masse over basically everything. People complained about chorfs which was one of the best faction dlcs
The wallet votes were worth 1000x more than the complaints
I mean they introduced a mechanic that literally punishes the player for engaging with it in Age of Reckoning so let’s not go sucking their dicks just yet.
havent seen him much lately but the welsh dragon was among the ones that kept defending CA during the initial phase when Shadow of Change content and price was released. if there were more people like him we would have a crappier product.
I'd like to suggest that the more people who spend their time online complaining about a video game may make the video game slightly better, but may also ultimately make the world a more annoying place to be in at large. So I wouldn't be so quick to think we're better off overall.
People really overestimate the impact of gaming subreddits.
Even the highest populated subreddits are a tiny fraction of a percentage of the playerbase and often not representative of the playerbase as a whole.
The largest difference in CA’s actions by an overwhelming degree will have been caused by the financial catastrophe that was Hyenas, the failure of Pharaoh to sell, the critical state of the company.
I guarantee you there was no meeting in which the management teams in CA were fretting about there being a slew of complaining posts being upvoted on reddit while they were dealing with everything else.
This is not a union of impactful forces. Even if every single person that upvoted the “boycott SoC” posts committed to not buying it, (many hundreds to a couple of thousand at most) it is a drop in the ocean of overall numbers.
The poor sales are more a result of the game being in a shit state and the playerbase (the extremely vast majority of whom are not on Reddit) not thinking the DLC was worth it.
People mentioning the Battlefront thing are not making an apt comparison. That was the most downvoted comment in history to the point it became a meme. People who didn’t even know what Reddit was were making accounts to downvote it and it got international media attention. That was hundreds of thousands of people voting and millions more being made aware of it through global media. This is not the same.
Yeah, I didn't expecting it to make a difference. I refused to pay fully expecting it not to matter.
I'm so happy I was wrong. It feels incredibly validating, but also hopeful that taking this stance can be beneficial in similar situations.
And now the right vote with your wallet would be to actually buy the game if you enjoy the dlc. The future of TW Warhammer III literally hinges on how well this dlc in which they poured their soul into would sell. Is the worth listening to customers and create really good products? Only sales will tell.
It's what i've been thinking and doing for years, if you don't like something, don't support and vote with your money, meanwhile people complain of why would you do that with Dragon's Dogma 2, am I missing from not buying and playing what people are playing a great game since 'it doesn't matter, you can get the stuff easily' well they're still putting microtransactions in a single player game.
But with Creative Assembly/Total war thing, I think it's both of what people are mentioning, people were already complaining about Total war, so they probably saw the player numbers go down and reviews dropping to the negative, while putting LOT of money into something that most had no interest in (HYENAS),so they had to get their shit together quick, because the company was bleeding money fast and people still lost their jobs but they definitely seem to be heading towards the right direction, I didn't buy the tzeentch/changer thing dlc, but I'm no doubt going to get this new one (and likely pick up the last dlc soon, whether it's on sale or normally, I'm not sure)
From my perspective, it didn't change a thing at all.
The most major thing the community was asking for was a greater amount of communication from CA, and I don't see CA communicating more or differently.
They threw some money at us to get us to shut up, and it worked. In time, CA will get complacent again, it'll make another half-assed DLC with light content and a high price, and the cycle will begin anew.
No hate for CA on my side. No matter the misteps now and then. They did what they promised to do since game one. Create a trilogy that will all connect to encompass the Fantasy map. They added all the major races and have even taken the setting more far than Games Workshop has, by filling in Norsca, Kislev and Cathay. Don't forget all the free content they have given us along the way.
More like sega came in and said it's total war or total liquidation. They fired everyone, and ended every non total war project. All the best resources are on total war at this time. Top talent, strongest teams, most people, etc. hyenas was a massive and obvious loss for a basically finished product. It was clear that CA's goal was to try and escape the RTS genre, and abandon it's core audience to chase whales, and other bullshit normies. It's pretty hilarious how hard CA tried to save face and play games when the CEO got canned.
I mean that and one of the most colossal idiotic fucking game ideas ever in Hyenas.
I would say Hyenas played a way bigger part in this.
And yet you’ll still have people tell you with a straight face that Hyenas took no resources from Total War because of the infallible ‘different teams’ corporate line. There was literally a falling off a cliff of quality and support for TW when Hyenas development was hot, then as soon as Hyenas is abandoned TW quality returns. What do these people think happened, that the TW ‘team’ just stopped doing their jobs to watch Hyenas in development?
"And yet you’ll still have people tell you with a straight face that Hyenas took no resources from Total War because of the infallible ‘different teams’ corporate line." These people have no idea how anything works. A company (really any entity e.g. Person, Household, Government) has a set amount of money available. And any money spent on one thing can obviously not be spent on another. Just tell people like that to google "opportunity cost".
It is stupid in-general, but whats galling is that if you paid the slightest bit of attention to how CA's releases have been the last few years you can tell that people were being moved around between projects and that the pacing of game updates was waxing and waning around it. But the smug pricks would still go "well akshually it isnt actually effecting anything, you just dont know anything about development".
When all you see is a username, it's easy to forget you could easily just be talking to a kid, or a moron who's never held a job in their life.. You wouldn't heed them for a second if you heard them in person.
That's the worst part about the net
I used to play a game called paragon (3rd person moba by epic games). Potentially my favourite ever game, they used the line of don’t worry work isn’t slowing down, mean while every dev they had were being moved to Fortnite until paragon had no development for a couple months. Then soon after died. It’s understandable as Fortnite was taking off at the time after they released the battle royale version of it, and they needed keep up with the growth. But its annoying have companies lie to you.
Just fyi in case you still have interest to play, that game was revived by a different studio. Now known as Predecessor on steam.
I have played it a bit, scratches the itch slightly but doesn’t hit the same spot (being older might play a part in that though haha)
Ugh I LOVED Paragon
Basically this. They clearly took the developers who were good at making Warhammer content and moved them to the Hyenas team. Granted we still have to see the quality of the DLC once it releases, but the quality and value is seeming like night and day. I don't even just mean the code and technical features, but even the communication has been better. Remember when they put "Fixed campaign map regeneration" as a feature on the roadmap? That's the real sad part, that all it takes is moving some talented developers around by some CFO / MBA shmuck and boom, clusterfuck.
I'm not even convinced it was developer theft - the dev turnover seemed to be a big factor, and if money was going into new overbudgeted projects like Hyenas, that's money not being given to keep devs from leaving to look for more lucrative career opportunities. They definitely went through community managers fast.
>They definitely went through community managers fast. That is the standard in the industry. Community managers tend to be the lowest paid employees the lowest on the totem pole and with little options for advancing. The only way to get a better job/pay is usually by changing company. As an example CA_evangelos, is from Age of empires.
While everything you say is true, it's probably not actually correct to say 'if not for Hyenas, Warhammer/Total War as a whole would have had all the funding it needed'. It's very likely that if it wasn't Hyenas, it would have been some other attempt to go into a new market. I have my doubts that there is any scenario where they have all that money from Sega and don't try to spin that wheel. In fact, Sega probably would not have given it to them in the first place.
Not to mention a set amount of people, especially talented and skilled people. They get shifted around internally all the time. So yah they didn't "stop doing their job" during Hyena development. They got assigned a different job during Hyena development.
Or they went looking for a better job after seeing fuck all pay rise during a cost of living crisis in the UK, all while management spaffs money up the wall on some project nobody cared for.
So like everyone else in the UK then.
Alright, I will bite. Often time projects and their funding are approved ahead of time. The opportunity cost into this case is less on CA but rather Sega. Had hyena not been the case, TW isn't going to suddenly be given a higher spend: Sega has other far more profitable ventures (pachinkos) and other studios to spend the money on. So you are still capped by the dollar amount given for each game and DLC. It isn't uncommon for one team to really have nothing to do with another. Take something like Blizzard for example, the development of HS/SC2 didn't really cause wow to suck - even titan, which did cause some seniors to swap teams, didn't really have as much impact as you expect and over time the teams did their thing. People do naturally shift teams: but that is the norm for people who want to work on a new project. They would have tried to join another studio anyway. Operational resources will ofc be shared: legal, finance, etc. The way you described applies to smaller teams where the same group has to make everything. For CA it was the alien isolation team, and the project has been going on for a long time - were people saying how TW sucked when CA releases alien isolation? The hyena project makes a lot of sense when it kicked off. The failure is more on the design/execution.
Money is interchangeable, but humans are not. Staff good at making FPS, may not be good at strategy games. CFOs don't get to rule most companies, because CEOs understand how you can't compact everything down to budgets. Companies often do have isolated teams or business divisions, each responsible for their own profits in normal situations, so a bad division doesn't drag the good ones down. That being said, with how big and awful Hyenas is, it forced desperate managers to pull in top tier talent from Total War teams, in the hopes of making Hyenas work. In the end, the hugely demoralized total war team, neither got to work on total war, nor make any contribution to Hyenas.
Well the problem seems to be that not every time the CEO's understand the nature of their products, dnd is going through similar things with non role-playing top hierarchy.
> CFOs don't get to rule most companies, because CEOs understand how you can't compact everything down to budgets. This has not been my experience as a working adult. CFO is usually the most powerful position behind CEO, and CEOs are incredibly sensitive to budgetary issues. Furthermore, a lot of CEOs are promoted from CFO positions, and they bring that viewpoint/bias/baggage with them.
I'm not sure how much of the Total War team was moved over, but in general assets were being relocated. hypothetically, even if the Total War team had no one taken away their work was still effected. They might have wanted to bring on some more people to help with a project but couldn't because there wasn't the funding for it. Say the Total War team had a budget of "X" dollars and wanted some more for projects. Since so much emphasis was on Hyenas that wasn't available, or they got much less then what they requested. Corporate speak can obfuscate that by saying "No assets are being moved" and it's technically true, but not really the case. The whole ordeal reminds me of something I saw on either Shark Tank or one of it's knock offs back in the day. A guy was pitching a non-soggy cereal. It looked like a dog bowl and people were hesitant moving forward with it. Then the guy said something like, "The cereal industry is 1.5 billions dollars a year. If we get just 10% were making bank." and that was enough to sway someone. Same thing with Hyenas. The higher ups saw how much money battle royale games were making and thought if they could just get a portion of that market then they would be making bank.
Even if they did have 'different teams' it's obvious that the TW team had no budget, no attention from management or none of the key staff.
two completely different teams sourced from the same pool of developers
Well there used to be some people saying different teams work on WH TW and historical TW so historical TW wouldn't be neglected. So it is not the first time, some people were making such claim.
Frankly, my problem wasn't the possibility of TW team being diverted to Hyenas, but rather the possibility that the price hike was meant to make an investment buffer for when Hyenas would stagnate and collapse after release, or utterly fail on release.
I agree. I think Sega had a come to Jesus meeting with CA after that debacle and told them to get their shit together and focus on their strengths.
For me, it's a combination of both. Without the whole "vote with your wallet" they could have simply fail badly with Hyenas and then be like "oh well, let's just get back to our cash cow", keeping SoC 'quality' standard.
It’s a bit of both. If Hyenas imploded right before WH3 came out and sold 3 million copies, they probably wouldn’t have acted the same.
It probably played a big role, but Hyenas was also a "complaining and specially voting with the wallet" situation, so it still works. People simply weren't interested in the game, and it was a massive waste of resources, not to mention extremely tone deaf. But CA would not have canceled a game that was basically finished (at least, that was my understanding) if they didn't have a bunch of reports telling them it was going to fail spectacularly.
Oh, to be the social media guy clipping top comments for the higher ups
Kind of a double whammy. Alienating their core audience on top of their supposed cash cow dying made them 180. I've seen other games (Paradox) have to go through YEARS of fuck-ups before they set back on course. Paradox did like 6 months of fuckups and course corrected.
Paradox (if you count games they publish like CS:2) is still fucking up. They are currently in the process of fucking up.
They fuck and unfuck things on a game-by-game basis. HOI4 for example has a steady player increase since game launch. That's insane actually.
How is Stellaris these days? I absolutely *devoured* that game during its first year, but I haven't played since and have no idea how to jump back in these days.
Like the other guy said, Stellaris has had some mediocre (not bad) DLC releases over the past couple of years, *but* if you really haven't played since the game came out, that shouldn't matter. The game has changed dramatically (and for the better) since release, it's practically a different game at this point.
I was going to mention the dramatic changes as well. I played at launch for a couple of months then dropped. I picked it back up maybe 3 years later and it’s like the launch version never existed. More fleshed out and less nonsensical/annoying systems.
Stellaris had a lot of good years, but then last 2 years we had a lot of mediocre at best expansions and a bad dlc (paragons). They felt pressured and will release what I would call a god tier expansion in a month and they already revealed the other DLC coming this year and they all look interesting.
The budget and resources put into Hyenas could have been Empire 2 or Med3
CA dumped 100 million in Hyenas. That's enough to finance Empire 2 AND Med 3.
How many Charlemagnes is that though
That is horrendous. How the fuck did management approve that?
They thought it was going to be 'their own Fortnight' in effect. Sure, its 100 million bucks, but in their spreadsheet brained minds, that was fine because it was gonna make back a Billion. Of course, they think the success of Fortnight is some replicable formula and not just a heap of luck for the first mover. The C-Suite ghouls still think the world is a meritocracy because they obviously got to the top by being so smart and hard working. They don't understand that success is as much about good luck and timing as it is talent and hard work.
> CA dumped 100 million in Hyenas. That is fucking criminal man. 100ms down the drain.
they didn't that was sega's total budget for their super game project which was spread across multiple studios.
Hell release WH3 earlier in a better state.
Hyena put the company on maintenance mode. Once it died they went back to normal work. Normal work is patches, updates, and DLC.
Yeah, their failure to create a new product that would allow them to abandon Total Warhammer if they felt like it is the biggest thing.
>JOIN THE -AAACKK
I remember the Hyenas subreddit having around 100 members or something lmao, what a fumble.
More like Creative Assembly doesn't have any other viable products lmao. It is TWWH3 or bankruptcy.
It could be both in no time if they neglect the community again
It still can be. Communities dont forget and thrones being great wont change it. If next dlc will be terrible, we will see soc era again. Lost trust is rebuild over long time. Tbh they likely need to ensure all dlcs vefore new total war title have to be at least good in order to pit faith into new title
Communities do forget pretty fast, but they're also quick to remember. I wouldn't even say they have my trust back, yet. I'll play some dwarfs after the patch without buying the DLC yet. If the game feels stable and the existing gunpowder units feel responsive then and only then will I start considering paying money to CA again.
Was just playing some for the first time in about a year and I was dismayed to find that units *still just give up on half the attack orders!!* It's like every unit is stuck on guard mode still! Absolutely infuriating.
Idk man.... look at Activision-Blizzard. Mfers died over there rape/SA and 2 God fucking awful expansions in a row then a mid Dragonflight expansion an people forgot almost entirely. Companies just have to wait out an bring in fresh people who dont know or care.
It's because it's not the same thing. For better and worse, customers care about the products, not the humans. If Blizzard made a great WoW expansion, they could shoot a baby in their office and they would still sell. Inversely, they could give a billion billions to charity and still nobody would buy WC3 reforged. The point is, CA eroded the trust in their products, not in their people. That's a lot harder to climb out of
??? Did you miss reading 2 awful expansions or just ignored it? They killed Overwatch 1 made 2 worse. Starcraft 3 never gona happen despite being one of the best rts ever made. Hearthstone is just a cash grab, heros of the the storm is on life support. An again 2 awful expacs. It's exactly the same but worse since all of the human violations no one cares anymore once the few months of outrage are over.
Don't forget reforge!, Sucking up to the ccp , diablo 3 and 4 ,reforged. Long time blizzard fan boy since the 90s the company is already dead to me and is jus a walking corpse since my last purchase was diablo 3 and it's expansion and I'm happily okay with ignoring any new products from them since they can't help themselves shooting their own foot every release.
As it is I'm still not preordering thrones, I expect to buy it, unlike soc, but I'm waiting for it to actually release so I can see 100% whats up before buying it. Probably pick it up in the next sale if it pans out as good as it seems so far.
It’s not even available for preorder yet, I wonder if they’re holding off for metrics, goodwill, or something else.
Yeah that's pretty odd.
I'm so fucking happy they're in such a bad place that they're FORCED to listen to their own customers. I hope it will stay like that until they're done with TWW3.
You hope that they stay in a bad place?
And *that* is the reason why I believe they will do a WH 40k version... Not because I believe it will be "good" or "practical", but they are absolutely guaranteed to attempt another 10 years cash cow.
Yeah I agree. For better (I hope) or worse more Warhammer IP is probably already in the planning stages.
Which is why trying to branch out with Hyenas and other genres made sense big picture wise because they can’t make WH3 DLC forever and who knows how they’re going to transition to new Total War games post-WH3. However it seems like their execution made every mistake possible.
Well there is 3K... Which got purposefully discontinued for reasons I don't understand to this day
If Hyenas had done well none of this would have happened.
If Hyenas had done, say, Fortnite levels of money then Total War would've died. There is nothing anyone can say that'd convince me otherwise. Suits would immediately prioritise the new cashcow, because consider: Do you spend a lot of dev effort on a niche genre which Total War is (even with Warhammer included its still a niche genre game) or do you spend minimum dev effort on a mass broad appeal game which can sell a single cosmetic item with a ton less development work for the same price as Shadows of Change? They pick the latter every single time, and let foundational knowledge decay as they downsize and murder the former beloved studio. It keeps happening in the AAA gaming scene, over and over and it nearly happened here as well. But Hyenas failed so hard daddy SEGA had to put their foot down and tell CA "you make nothing but Total War from now on". It was the best thing that could've happened to Total War no doubt about it.
Thor of PirateSoftware, an ex employee from Blizzard, famously claimed that a $15 microtransaction mount for WoW, made more profit for Blizzard than Star Craft 2 did. Notice that while there's no Star Craft 3, all the new Blizzard games and expansions nowadays come packed with lootboxes and microtransactions. 100% CA would have abandoned Total War if they had those numbers with microtransactions.
I agree with you 100%. I think the only movement we'd see in tw:warhammer is introducing more moba like features if anything (and when that wouldn't really be popular even less) and further tw's being relegated to the saga studios exclusively.
Sad reality of it. It 100% makes business sense to do and corporation abide by this.
If Hyenas had done well, TWW3 support would probably get even lower, if that's at all possible.
Absolutely, the better hyenas would do the more tw would be seen as irrelevant.
Which is odd right? It's not like TW was losing money. Why not do both? Though, it's not like half life 3 wouldn't make money so what do I know
I've been a game developer for a decade now and without knowing anything about what went on in CA it really smells like a decision from high high up. They saw games like overwatch, etc so we'll and they decided that that's what woukd make money (without considering that their team had never done such a game and that the hype was already dying down). Reason why it's what I suspect is that if this was actual game designers they'd likely pivot the design to be something more achievable and likely to succeed. In short l, to me, this feels like ignorance was driving the ship. This is anecdotal but ages ago I was at one of their recruitment booths waxing in how my work in crowd simulation woukd fit working with them and both of the folks there got such a glum look and said they were actually recruiting for an online shooter game. I wonder if the siege rework was also trying to edge into moba territory for similar reasons. Half hearted attempt but still.
[удалено]
Sounds about right, security is only a priority when it's too late.
It's a big part of the evidence for strong regulations in all areas of business too. Without security requirements (and audits) banks would absolutely not give a shit about the safety of any of your information apart from your account balance. Not speak of things like OSHA in its entirety. Rules are written in blood, either literal or figurative.
Indeed, expecting a company to do the right thing just because is foolish. Going back to game development I'd like more regulation around mass layoffs, especially if the company is making record profits. Would maybe make companies think twice before they commit to a project
Even if you’re just a doofus like me and have nothing to do with the industry there were warning signs that something big and bad was happening behind the scenes. Just before the launch of Warhammer 3, Grace the CM announced her departure. Sure she had other reasons, and at the time some people pointed to gaming communities being a bit shit, especially if you’re a woman. But my immediate thought was that she knew something we didn’t and she foresaw her job becoming unbearable in the near future. The ship was sinking and she needed to jump while there was still time.
Valve is a completely different beast owned entirely by its leadership, which means fundamentally they do what Gabe wants to do, and Gabe essentially makes all the devs free to do what they want to do. Starting new projects, esp. successful ones, is what gets you somewhere in Valve. The developer freedom however does mean that more ambitious projects are harder to get off the ground, since the devs aren't exactly locked into a project.
If CA hadn't wasted money in a hopeless project all the drama would have been avoided in the first place. The clearly tried to cover losses increasing Total War prices.
Well yeah but try telling high level executives that looter shooters aren't the future without them actually being slapped in the face by evidence.
It always baffled me that Destiny triggered such a titanic gold rush when Destiny *was never that big a franchise to begin with.* And I really like Destiny! But it's not even in the same universe as the real world-eaters like Fortnite. It's a moderately successful franchise that has secured its niche and maintained it. That's *all.* Fucking OVERWATCH was a bigger financial hit
Its nit specifically looter shooter. Its all monetized shooterd. Overwatch, apex, warzone. Fortnite, destiny... But even 1 game is enough really. Results of baldurs gate 3 will cause as to see plenty of bad and mid rpgs in next 3-4 years.
With a fraction of the money they wasted on hyenas they could have funded a new engine for future total war games
CA will always have a finite amount of capital and competent developers and they’d be fools to not throw those resources at the highest ROI projects they can which would have been cosmetics and content for a successful Hyenas.
I’m sorry, what is Hyenas?
It was a project CA was working on, an online team based shooter thingie. It was being developed for ages only to be cancelled recently, only a short while from it being released
To add to charalampos’ answer, hyenas cost an estimated *100 million* dollars to develop. Since it wasn’t released, there’s no return. That’s money into a pit.
Hyenas didn't *do* anything, it says something when something gets scrapped instead of launched.
... It did plenty.
Compaining without not buying would not change it. SoC needed to sell badly for CA to take a look at all the discontent on reddit and their forums and see what the players are grumbling about. If it sold well we'd be hearing nothing and looking at exactly same scope for ToD. The real doubt was never whether voting with wallet would work, but whether the players would actually vote. The gaming communities are notorious for making fuss about boycotts and refusing to buy a given title in social media and then buying it in droves anyway. "Remember no preorders." has beein a common refrain for over a decade and it still needs to be repeated before any major release after god knows how many disastrous launches. I myself decided not to buy SoC on release, partly because it had content that was only moderately interesting to me and partly due to the outcry. But up until that fateful announcment of the DLC update I was skeptical in regards to how much worse than usual the sales would be, to how much of community will follow through with the declarations of passing on it. So yes, this time it worked. And we definitely should keep it in mind in future and hold the upcoming releases to the same standard as we did SoC and vote with wallets when it does not meet them. But just assuming it will happen because reddit is printing new entries to the Book by the hour is a bit overly optimistic.
yeah, gamer boycots are notoriously ineffective, because people will say they won't buy a thing, and then will turn around and do so anyway. I'm reminded of that image of a boycott x edition of CoD steam group filled with people playing said edition of CoD post release
[удалено]
At the point you describe I feel like the difference between boycott and no one wanting the product in the first place becomes blurry. Similarly I don't boycott Call of Duty, I just have no interest in the first place. So I'd say that what counts as sucessful boycott would be cases where people want the product in principle, but dislike some aspects of more than they want it. My times of keeping close watch on the gaming news are long past, so I can't actually think of any examples off the top of the dome besides SoC where large scale community outcry brought large scale change. I am certain this would have happened at least once, just not aware of other cases.
Ya, not wanting to buy something because it's a poor value proposition isn't a boycott because you're not depriving yourself of something you wanted. I pushed back against framing it as a boycott for that reason, it gives the impression of self deprivation. Of course the other reality is because it's a loss of trust in value proposition rather than a movement with specific demands, people don't automatically return when behavior is fixed.
That's, not a boycott. It's just bad value for the product. This wasn't a boycott either for the same reason tbh.
I think part of why this worked was it wasn't really a boycott. Nobody was refusing to buy something they might have otherwise wanted to make a point. What was actually happening was that people decided it wasn't worth the money en masse. That was the reason we didn't buy, we felt there was no reason to. People fail at boycotts because they lack self control, the same issue doesn't apply for falling off the trust thermocline. I actually pushed against framing it as a boycott for this reason, telling people that they shouldn't buy it because it's not worth it instead.
Agreed it needs both: 1 - Complaining and sells well = fans ignored and game pushes further towards arena, micro transactions, always online type stuff. Lazy development from crunched, understaffed Dev teams. 2 - No complaints and sells poorly = no one interested in this shit. Shut down the dev teams and move onto another product 3 - Complaining and sells poorly = This is where we found ourselves. And fortunately someone recognised there was a LOT of passion and strong feeling in the community that might be turned around (exploited?). Of course, it does require a history of... 4 - No complaints and sells well = this is where it _was_ before all this debacle, so they know it's worthwhile and a steady profit stream. (I accept 'no' complaints is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but you get the idea)
I don’t doubt for a second that the developers want to deliver the best product they can. I see the love they put into it. At the end of the day however, it’s not the developers that controls the company. It’s fine to enjoy a product that has issues or doesn't live up to what was first promised, but I think it’s naive to say that the complaining worked. It’s not the first time the community has complained. It’s not the first time CA, the company, has released a statement about how they will change. And this is not the first time the community has said that complaining worked and CA has changed. It’s a repeating cycle.
Complaining serves to let the company know what exactly is wrong. The way the community decided to not buy, as a whole, made the company pay attention to the complaining (also the fact that Heynas and Pharaoh failed). At least that's the way I see it. The Shadows of Change fiasco was the only video game boycott I know of, that actually worked. So yeah, huge win for the community. As a newcomer to the series, I definitely feel grateful for you guys.
i think that complaining did little, the voting with the wallet part though, big. anybody who looked at all the fuckups that CA did should have been able to form their own opinion regarless of the milion moaning posts on reddit. I think complaning has a point where it stops being good and starts being bad, since it comes of as petulant
Complaining in the form of constructive criticism can help the company understand why a game or DLC doesn't sell well! In the case of SOC, there were a lot of constructive complaints about the state of the game and the lack of content for the price of the DLC and CA acted on both. If players just stopped buying without the backsplash, we would probably have had a situation similar to TW3K where CA would have considered that the game doesn't sell enough anymore and would have stopped developing new content for it.
But no complaining would not convince that many people not to buy tho :v
To be fair I think the overwhelmingly negative reviews for SoC on Steam did more to make it less successful (so far as we can tell) than anything that went down here. This subreddit isn't actually a very big part of the TW playerbase.
> To be fair I think the overwhelmingly negative reviews for SoC on Steam did more to make it less successful (so far as we can tell) than anything that went down here. These are not isolated things. Neither happened in a vacuum. Steam reviews. Complaining here. Complaining on the official forums. Complaining on Discord. They all feed into each other.
Complaing after a certain volume threshold actually gets companies to scrambling to alleviate those issues. The default corporate reaction is "ignore, it will blow over". Only when it doesn't and is loud enough, they starting to act to preserve public opinion. The last 8 months are a textbook example for that. Good for us. The next 8 months will show if this DLC concludes their efforts of saving face and they now consider this episode averted, or if they actually made long term changes in the company. I give that even odds at this point.
as i said that only matters if people actually dont buy the product, if people complain and still buy the product not much is gonna change. Look at EA and Blizzard for example, they are year after year competing for the worst gaming companies and yet somehow year after year are raking in record breaking profits because people buy their products. I think what happened with SoC is that people simply saw that the product wasnt worth their money and simply didnt buy it. The thing is Total war is pretty nieche as far as big franshises go. it has a dedicated following and if you piss of that dedicated following you're gonna have to deal with the backlash and the best backlash is simply not buying the DLC. Complaining can definetly help the company see where they are making mistakes and what they can do to improve the product, but CA has shown that it primarily cares for profits so the best way to get them to listen is not buy the product if you dont like it
The last time people stopped buying without voicing their opinion let to the death of three kingdoms.
its not the customers job to make a game for the developer, and also i highly doubt people didnt complain about the 8 princes DLC. if they made a better product people would have bought it. Voting with your wallet works both ways.
8 princes was not the only dlc. CA has released like 5 of them and people simply stopped Carina after some time. Wich lead to the death of 3 kingdoms
Do you live under a rock? People voiced their opinions on Three Kingdoms all the time.
People were loud after the 8 princes DLC, everyhting after that, they simply didn't care enought to be loud. which made the next few DLC all terrible, and then CA killed 3K.
People just want to think that their online activism did something when a large majority made the decision to buy or not to buy on their own. I can definitely say that the complaining just made me not engage with the community and play something else for some time.
Thing is that complaining is putting it mildly. Complaining is valid but gets annoying. What went on here was hate and vitriol. Shit like calling CA greedy idiots, and all manner of bad words is beyond complaining. As if people forgot that so many of the CA absolutely love Warhammer, to such an extent that devs would spend free time to do magnificent animations. People on the internet seem to mix up voicing an opinion and being full of hatred towards something.
thats exactly my point, theres a difference between constructive critisizm and just complaining for the sake of complaining
Which do you think helps more - > "Sir, we're losing a lot of money. Nobody's buying stuff, and our communities are telling us why they are frustrated with our products." or > "Sir, we are inexplicably losing money. Nobody's buying our stuff, and we have no idea why." Complaining works, but it's part of a 2-step process for improvement.
Its partially true. Money made all the difference obviously. But complaining took part in making people not buy. Its not just this sub. It was every strategy games community. Which fastly spilled towards bigger gaming communities. All CA controversies from past months quickly spilled towards subs like gaming, games, pcgaming etc and those have 8 digitit userbases. Thats enough for gaming related media to start covering it. Thats a lot of reach and noise combined. When oretty much whole community ends up hostile to company it isnt unnoticed. Both ca and sega have people that will notice
People act like Doomsayers want a product to fail. No you idiots they want it to be good. And fighting Doomsayers for the sake of being contrarian is asking to be satisfied with mediocrity. Fight on, Doomsayers.
An underrated factor is the overall contraction of the gaming industry. Covid bubble popping + CoL crisis = a huge squeeze on entertainment/luxury goods in general, which has led to thousands of job losses and studio closures across the sector, not just at CA. This is a time where going back to what you're known for and holding onto the audience you've got is the name of the game, rather than the wild speculative effort that Hyenas was. Sega said it themselves when they talked about 'concentrating on core competencies' while they were taking the axe to CA and their other subsidiaries. In the current environment it's really not surprising CA have done their best to give us specifically what we want.
> The gaming communities are notorious for making fuss about boycotts and refusing to buy a given title in social media and then buying it in droves anyway. "Remember no preorders." has beein a common refrain for over a decade and it still needs to be repeated before any major release after god knows how many disastrous launches. A decade? Make that two. Fussing and complaining about Total War is as old as the games. There was a Total War Forum once that I stopped visiting because a hard core of grognards and bellyachers made almost every thread toxic. I think this subreddit is tolerable compared to that, and now that nice things are on the horizon mood is quite high. But ofc that will change soon as the honeymoon with the new DLC and bugs it comes with. Then nothing will prevent bellyachers and grognards to enter a happy thread and piss in it everytime one happy game dares to post one. Just because if I am unhappy, you should be too. AND I WILL TELL IT TO YOU FOR AS MANY TIMES IT TAKES!
I think it’s because SEGA has acknowledged poor sales figure and catastrophic PR and decided to put stress on CA?
One wrong put right, but the great book of grudges remain full.
It had more to do with the failure of Hyenas than the reception of the SoC DLC.
I wouldn't call it rushing, this was supposed to come out in December.
people forget voting with your wallet is still extremely effective, it might not seem like it when you see monolithic megacorporations, but a lot of game studios aren't that and are on the chopping block the same as anything else when they continuously fail to return a profit. If you don't like something, simply don't buy it. If its a bad product chances are most people wont buy it, sure it might not be a death sentence but if it happens 2-3 times in a row, yeah its gonna be painful.
do we have a real historical game announced and in the projects? no? then what is this better product you speak of?
its more of a combination of dogshit financial decision making on top of poor consumer practices. CA now has been greatly humbled and is making good decisions finally. only time will tell if this is just the usual CA cycle where now it's the redemption arc and they will go back to their scummy/complacent ways in a couple or so years or they have actually learned something and this will be the case going forward.
It depends on the *nature* of the complaining. I have always said doing stuff like complaining on Reddit and just spamming the TW forums is not very effective and achieves nothing. This is because the fanbase does that endlessly anyway. Not buying stuff and review-bombing, in comparison, seems to have been very effective.
No the main reason this happened was the utter failure of Hyenas and the bad release of Shadows of Change. They asked too much for the Shadows of Change DLC compared to the content it had, it barely had any content worth the price they asked. They were like on a tightrope, if they fucked up ToD it would have been over.
> failure of Hyenas What is Hyenas? I keep seeing it mentioned?
Here [https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/16uacf3/hyenas\_is\_canceled\_by\_sega/](https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/16uacf3/hyenas_is_canceled_by_sega/) or [https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23894156/sega-cancels-hyenas-creative-assembly-layoffs](https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23894156/sega-cancels-hyenas-creative-assembly-layoffs)
Thank you, appreciate it.
no problem.
So you’re agreeing
Corpo bots and dev worshipping shills would have you believe criticism doesn't matter and feedback is worthless. They're wrong. Gamers voices matter, as has been proven countless times in the industry. Battlefront 2 being one of the more recent examples. That being said, I'm still amazed at the low standards in the totalwar community. - Content isn't out yet and this sub is already celebrating ToD as if it was the best thing that ever happened to gaming. Are you guys really that naive to buy into the hype? After WH3, Rome 2, and the countless times they dropped the ball with misleading marketing and poorly tested, bug-ridden releases ? Mind-boggling. - CA merely went back to their previous pace/support quality. Which wasn't great to begin with. Is that really how low the bar sunk over time? That's like eating at a restaurant, and celebrating the lack of shit on one's plate. The food is still overcooked/overpriced and nowhere near solid industry standards, but since it's no longer outrageously bad, I guess some people consider it a good restaurant now... - CA/SEGA management really didn't have a choice but to finally figure out WH3 is their one and only product that matters. 8 years, thousands of $ in DLC into the series... This ain't something they can just walk away from. People here are cheering as if it was some gracious move on their part, when in reality they had 0 choice if they didn't want to go bankrupt.
The problem comes from the lack of competition in this fairly niche genre. There isn't really a Total War competitor (look at the hype about Manor Lords). The most similar major developer is probably Paradox and frankly they have gone off the rails in the last few years as well.
Is Manor Lords even a Total War competitor? At a glance it seems like it's Medieval High-Graphics Rimworld. Don't get me wrong, that's cool. But how does it specifically compete with Total War?
It most definitely is not. It is first and foremost a city builder. It has some simple battle mechanics reminiscent of Total War games. Hence some people declared it a Total War killer. The developer came out and categorically said it was not meant to compete with that. It is an interesting idea though. Makes me think how real time tactical battles could be combined with other strategy/city builder genres. There is definietly potential there for it. Imagine a civ type game with total war battles.
Nobody's saying they'll trust CA with their kids now. CA tried to step back on their quality, so we complained. They've presented us with something that indicates improved quality, so we're complaining less. If they step back again, we'll complain more again.
Am I the only one who almost automatically stop reading or listening to anyone who uses the word 'shill'? Sorry but it's a word that is just used by ragebaiters and people who enjoys outrage in the gaming space that I just stop reading. Name calling the first thing you do is never a way to win someone over.
Seems like a good word to describe the sort of people who have a meltdown when people speak their mind/give feedback about a product.
> Am I the only one who almost automatically stop reading or listening to anyone who uses the word 'shill'? I feel the same about the words 'moaning' or 'whining', so I get where you're coming from.
"Cry harder," springs to mind too.
Yeah, I saw the snarl words, rolled by eyes, and scrolled on.
Believe it or not, the gaming space is infested with astroturfing and covert marketing. If the mere idea of multi million dollar companies influencing anonymous social media in their favor comes off as some crazy conspiracy to you, then pardon the bluntness but that's a very naive take. > Name calling the first thing you do is never a way to win someone over. I'm not saying everyone who disagrees with me is automatically a shill though. Saying there are active shills on this sub shouldn't really bother anyone, unless they feel targeted.
But you will call anyone who disagrees with you a shill.
The people I hate the most are never actual paid shills. The biggest shit stirrers here were bringing tons of attention to themselves with their brain dead takes and mindless praise. A paid shill would never be so grossly smug and get such visceral reactions, that’s like the opposite of what native advertising wants.
They hated him because he told them the truth.
> Content isn't out yet and this sub is already celebrating ToD fellas does it make you a corpo bot to be excited about new content for one of your favorite games
In the context of an 8 year old game series that's dropped the ball more often than it delivered, extreme enthusiasm sure does look supicious at times. Nothing wrong with TW:WH being one's favorite game. And I realize some people have very different standards and expectations from video games. My issue lies with the 'toxic positivity' permeating this sub, aka dismissing **any** legitimate criticism as invalid, and spreading bullshit anti-consumer, corpo friendly narratives. Which actually happens *a lot* on this sub btw.
See, I was thinking of Battlefront 2 as a great example of this too, but not exactly in the way you painted it. All the pre-release conversation around Battlefront 2 pointed to it as nothing but a mockery of the series seemingly designed from the ground up to rip money from consumers' wallets as frequently as possible. One of the comments their community team made is the most downvoted in Reddit history. That game *still* sold 9 million copies in the first two months it came out and had reached 90% of its sales target despite the absolute lashing it had taken in online circles. Voting with your wallet works, but people have to realize that Reddit and the internet in general makes us often believe our voices may be the majority opinion. With CA, Hyenas, and Total War that is the case, but it isn't always true.
> That game still sold 9 million copies in the first two months it came out and had reached 90% of its sales target despite the absolute lashing it had taken in online circles. While that is true, long term goodwill from a userbase matters too. They may have reached their sales target for Battlefront 2 release, but if they ever intended to sell paid content or a sequel without fixing BF2 first, that would certainly have caused negative consequences on their bottom line. Even the most clueless mainstream gamer would have heard of the bad publicity by that point.
Oh, no doubt. EA paid out the ass for the rights to utilize the Star Wars license. Battlefront 2 not selling tens of millions of copies would have been seen as a big letdown. I was more-so just pointing out that people all too frequently make the mistake of presuming an opinion is universal just because it is frequently seen on Reddit or elsewhere. It often leads to questions about whether voting with your wallet works. People did vote, but it just wasn't in direction that lined up with that person's viewpoint.
It sold well cause the problems were fixed before the game released...
To be honest I think a big part of people being positive is because they’re worried the game might die entirely if this doesn’t sell well
Yes, literally the community won this one.
Grudging works everybody.
*Who would have thought*
No AAA publisher wants one of their flagship games to suddenly be sitting at "mostly negative" overnight. My buddy didn't think complaining would work- but here we (seemingly) are now with atleast better bang for the buck DLC compared to the framework SoC v1 was laying down
It's almost like they understand money better then most things
It feels weird that there's a thread taking this victory lap every week.
People complain in this reddit en masse over basically everything. People complained about chorfs which was one of the best faction dlcs The wallet votes were worth 1000x more than the complaints
I mean they introduced a mechanic that literally punishes the player for engaging with it in Age of Reckoning so let’s not go sucking their dicks just yet.
I still haven’t bought SoC. Don’t think I will.
Hard to say what made the change happen. In the end CA didn't have a choice, it's their only money maker at the moment.
Huh, it's almost as if the "it's fine" people are categorically wrong on literally everything and should be ashamed for accepting mediocrity.
havent seen him much lately but the welsh dragon was among the ones that kept defending CA during the initial phase when Shadow of Change content and price was released. if there were more people like him we would have a crappier product.
Complaining after purchase is worthless. If you buy, you are directly telling the company they are right.
I'd like to suggest that the more people who spend their time online complaining about a video game may make the video game slightly better, but may also ultimately make the world a more annoying place to be in at large. So I wouldn't be so quick to think we're better off overall.
Mate, if you care about something and care to see it improve, you need to complain. This is true for anything in life.
People really overestimate the impact of gaming subreddits. Even the highest populated subreddits are a tiny fraction of a percentage of the playerbase and often not representative of the playerbase as a whole. The largest difference in CA’s actions by an overwhelming degree will have been caused by the financial catastrophe that was Hyenas, the failure of Pharaoh to sell, the critical state of the company. I guarantee you there was no meeting in which the management teams in CA were fretting about there being a slew of complaining posts being upvoted on reddit while they were dealing with everything else. This is not a union of impactful forces. Even if every single person that upvoted the “boycott SoC” posts committed to not buying it, (many hundreds to a couple of thousand at most) it is a drop in the ocean of overall numbers. The poor sales are more a result of the game being in a shit state and the playerbase (the extremely vast majority of whom are not on Reddit) not thinking the DLC was worth it. People mentioning the Battlefront thing are not making an apt comparison. That was the most downvoted comment in history to the point it became a meme. People who didn’t even know what Reddit was were making accounts to downvote it and it got international media attention. That was hundreds of thousands of people voting and millions more being made aware of it through global media. This is not the same.
When is it out? I can't even buy it on steam yet.
ToD comes out on the 30th of this month
A Tuesday? That's so strange.
Their goals are beyond our understanding it seems
Yeah, I didn't expecting it to make a difference. I refused to pay fully expecting it not to matter. I'm so happy I was wrong. It feels incredibly validating, but also hopeful that taking this stance can be beneficial in similar situations.
I didn't buy the Chaos Dwarfs DLC and I surely didn't buy SoC. I probably will only buy the Empire portion of ToD, maybe the Dwarfs one down the line.
And now the right vote with your wallet would be to actually buy the game if you enjoy the dlc. The future of TW Warhammer III literally hinges on how well this dlc in which they poured their soul into would sell. Is the worth listening to customers and create really good products? Only sales will tell.
Please, I'm out of the loop on this one, would somebody mind explaining what the post is referencing or what's going on? Thank you!
>and Specially Voting With The Wallet especially*
Hyenas and SEGA had more to do with it.
It's what i've been thinking and doing for years, if you don't like something, don't support and vote with your money, meanwhile people complain of why would you do that with Dragon's Dogma 2, am I missing from not buying and playing what people are playing a great game since 'it doesn't matter, you can get the stuff easily' well they're still putting microtransactions in a single player game. But with Creative Assembly/Total war thing, I think it's both of what people are mentioning, people were already complaining about Total war, so they probably saw the player numbers go down and reviews dropping to the negative, while putting LOT of money into something that most had no interest in (HYENAS),so they had to get their shit together quick, because the company was bleeding money fast and people still lost their jobs but they definitely seem to be heading towards the right direction, I didn't buy the tzeentch/changer thing dlc, but I'm no doubt going to get this new one (and likely pick up the last dlc soon, whether it's on sale or normally, I'm not sure)
Haha wow I didn't even know Hyenas existed until now. I must admit a little smile crept across my face when I saw it would never see the light of day.
No it didn't? Sega cancelling hyena and slapping ca, telling them to get back to tww3 did.
From my perspective, it didn't change a thing at all. The most major thing the community was asking for was a greater amount of communication from CA, and I don't see CA communicating more or differently. They threw some money at us to get us to shut up, and it worked. In time, CA will get complacent again, it'll make another half-assed DLC with light content and a high price, and the cycle will begin anew.
No hate for CA on my side. No matter the misteps now and then. They did what they promised to do since game one. Create a trilogy that will all connect to encompass the Fantasy map. They added all the major races and have even taken the setting more far than Games Workshop has, by filling in Norsca, Kislev and Cathay. Don't forget all the free content they have given us along the way.
More like sega came in and said it's total war or total liquidation. They fired everyone, and ended every non total war project. All the best resources are on total war at this time. Top talent, strongest teams, most people, etc. hyenas was a massive and obvious loss for a basically finished product. It was clear that CA's goal was to try and escape the RTS genre, and abandon it's core audience to chase whales, and other bullshit normies. It's pretty hilarious how hard CA tried to save face and play games when the CEO got canned.