this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Lol no, not for this one. This was scammy from the start. The weird thing is they had decent games out before this. Why would they intentionally screw up so badly idk.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
They probably started with an overambitious design, took some ill-advised short-cuts, and pivoted the to the "extraction" format after they'd already marketed it as a different concept, and made a bad gamble or two. Normal gamedev stuff. Same as every Molyneux game.
A few years back this could've been another No Man's Sky story where they fix it after launch... but that means going deeper and deeper into debt while you salvage the mess you've made. Post-COVID interest rates make that impossible. So now they're broke and the project they spent the last years on is a stinker and they don't have enough runway to fix it.
So they're done.
They claimed a 5 year development time, and what they shipped was a tutorial that lasts 2 hours (to cover the refund window) and a completely empty game afterwards, that consists of you wandering around a map they bought as an asset pack.
They used the hype about the game to make "behind the scenes" videos which were actually ads for an app they made on the side.
The last 2 games they released were abandoned in similar circumstances shortly after launch.
There's enough evidence of malice here.
I mostly agree with you, but I'm pretty sure NMS took home about $15M in the first month ($78M sales in first month). If they hadn't, they might have closed shop, too. Now, we have a small group of millionaires who can make whatever they want.
Fuck, I totally forgot about that dingus.
Touché