>the game flopped so hard, not even the news about it flopping make it to the headlines
paradox decided to disown it after a week, kek. they learned from imperator
did anyone play this shit?
>the game flopped so hard, not even the news about it flopping make it to the headlines
Imperator is their best game though and they still occasionally release updates for it.
No and no.
Yes and yes, these are objectively true statements.
cope samegay
inarguably the best PDX game released since 2015.
one intern spending a week of time on imperator for his training does not really mean paradox cares about it
and no, it was a shitty game
>Imperator is their best game
I'm almost certain that Hairbrained didn't make Imperator.
Semantics, Paradox publishes it and was the subject in the OP.
>Imperator is their best game
It went completely under my radar, and for good reason, by the looks of it. It's yet another Nucom ripoff, except it went for the shitty Mutant Year Zero style, which is even worse than normal Nucom. And they had the gall to charge for day 1 DLC. And it's not even a good DLC. It's a single character for $10. Wtf were they thinking.
Paradox hasn't learned yet that people have DLC fatigue and the only reason it's not really seen on their GS games is because people playing those have sunk cost.
Artstyle looked like complete cancer so i didnt even bother to pirate it
Good riddance
Good
The game was out? And it died THAT fast?
What the frick happened?
HBS are fricking hacks.
Battletech was a good game.
No.
Yes.
No
>Have the rules pre written by boomers 50 years ago
>Still frick it up cause your troony homosexual dev team is so dogshit a turn based game cooked titans at launch
>Have the dumbest story in the Battletech universe, which is saying something
>Years later it still runs like garbage and you are better of playinc MekHQ
Battletech was a terrible game that can sort of resemble a decent game with the heaviest modding I've ever seen for a strategy game
Yeah nah, all the mods are super autism territory. Vanilla is a good game.
fake
don't get me wrong, the game does suck and did flop. here's the actual press release. op is a homosexual.
https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/media/press-releases/press-release/paradox-interactive-writes-down-msek-171-of-capitalized-development-cost-for-the-lamplighters-league
No wai!
The dumbed down xcom clone with an ugly pixar goblina on the cover was bad!?
How could zis happen?
How does this crap cost $22m to make? Is that real?
25 mil.
They earned 3 back.
I was going to buy it because there's a real lack of games with that kino 1880s-1920s macho imperialism aesthetic but then they fricked up the artstyle and put that arab guy at the front of the game and it killed the vibe
Why would you think a bunch of swedes would publish a game like that? Especially now? You should know better.
Because it was made by Hairbrained and the Shadowrun Trilogy was great
Just gonna ignore how fricking trash and awful Battletech was, huh? Most of Shadowrun was shit, only one of them was any good.
>Just gonna ignore how fricking trash and awful Battletech was, huh?
Haven't play it but it has 9/10 on steam. You sound like you have personal grievances with a video game developer lol!
And you sound like a homosexual.
I'd put it at more of an 8/10 after the dlc's but generally yeah he's just being a contrarian homosexual.
>You sound like you have personal grievances with a video game developer lol!
Clash of principles
Battletech was good, period, and it gets bonus points for being a niche genre in a niche franchise. It should have been much worse.
It's unplayable without autism mods.
The autism mods are too autistic for me. I'd be happy with just a vanilla plus mod that makes background choices more interesting and expands the map.
That's just what BTA is, it has some damage options like actuator crits to make it closer to tabletop but the game is mostly the same except with more mechs
>and the Shadowrun Trilogy was vaguely acceptable.
FTFY
lol hairbrained are one of the most pozzed studios around
I have only now discovered that HBS had another game flop completely. Up until 20 minutes ago, I had never heard about Necropolis.
Vidya market is oversaturated as frick, it's impossible to find out about anything that isn't AAA other than word of mouth, what you do find is usually just asset flip trash or a woke version of a much better game, and even if a game is moderately good it is going to be milked dry within a year or two.
This is a market crash scenario. Expect layoffs at Paradox eventually. Not now, eventually. Within 3 to 5 years.
>it's impossible to find out about anything that isn't AAA other than word of mouth
Jagged Alliance 3 is a bit of a counter-example, but that was because everybody expected it to suck massively (like all the other previous attempts). So they played it in order to shit on it, but then went "wait, this is actually decent, minus some rough bits".
AA and AAAs can go die in a ditch. They are overloaded with diversity hires and nepotism. Indies will carry the vidya industry when they die, so everything will be fine.
>Diversity hires
Not a real issue
>Nepotism
The corporate executives that benefit the most from nepotism are the last people to get fired.
>Not a real issue
Yeah, dumb Ind**n devs and pink haired feminists have no impact in the end result
>Nepotism
Nepotism is GOOD
nepotism just means hiring a known quantity instead of whatever genderqueer poc manages to punch HR's box
>Being this fricking delusional and out of touch
Black person, this game literally had ZERO marketing. I've only accidentally found its release trailer, simply because my friend is avid follower of a specific game releases aggregator.
And we both decided that it looks like an X-Com rip-off that's already about 5 years too late. Nowhere else I ever saw any material for this game.
You'd think that if they put 25 million into production, at least one of those would go into online marketing and astroturfing. It's cheap, it's reliable and there are people easy to target with it.
Nope. They've just put a stack of 25 mil and set it ablaze.
>I had never heard about Necropolis.
And i'm still mad about it because it was promising little gem that got its life support plug pulled the moment they were offered to make a battletech game and they haven't come back to it since.
Where's my fricking arcanists you hacks.
lol I hadn't heard of this game in forever, I didn't even know it was still in development or released
I never heard of it.
just fricking go back and make more shadowrun
I've literally never even heard of it, that's how much of a flop it was.
>Make great Shadowrun games and a good Battletech game
>Excited to see an improved sequel of either of these
>They make a game that appeals to no one instead and will most likely be gutted or shut down
Absolute nonsenses. God I wanted a Battletech 2.
I heard it borrowed from xcom so I thought about buying it, had a look at the game and it seemed total shit.
>game us out Oct 3
>declared dead Oct 11
Wow, can't think of a similar case
Steam peak is 690 people.
They didn't got even 1k players on release.
These morons don't understand that sexism, racism and orientalism are core components of the "pulp" aesthetic. Remove it and it's just bland and has-been.
It's like how that gender-equal multiracial Victorian Steampunk citybuilder Clockwork Empires flopped so hard it destroyed the studio making it
artstyle looks like shit
would have to be a pretty good game to me just get over that
>Game with no marketing flops
Literally last time I've heard about this game was when it was announced. No marketing of any kind, not even cheapo shilling for it. Nothing
>Yet another shitty release hits my chances of successful crowdfund to publish the translation of Hollow Earth Expedition
First horrible Indiana Jones, now this
This game is pretty much the same shit as Strange Brigade, except squad management, than co-op: an overpriced pile of shit, sold entirely on the concept of pulp, yet failing miserably to evoke that in the first place.
>This game is pretty much the same shit as Strange Brigade,
I chuckled, but then I realised that you are right on it:
>poorly made indie
>overpriced as frick
>zero marketing
>even pirates find it lacking
Even the theme and general aesthetics match. Literally the only difference is in genre, but otherwise, it could easily be called Strange Brigade 2: Electric Boogaloo
Strange Brigade was fun and had the nice feature of being a CO-OP where you don't just kill zombies.
It was still a half-baked game with extreme pricetag vs. its content. And to have fun with it, you HAVE to get 2-3 other friends to play, making the pricetag even harsher.
>j-just pirate
It's a co-op that requires connection to official server, can't do LAN. That game is designed to rob people out of money. Which would get a pass if it was 20-30 bucks... it's 50. 5 years after premiere
>Paradox takes over HBS
>They cease to make anything ever since
>Their first release after that is a monumental flop and a bland game on top of that
Swedish EA strikes again.
The really hilarious part is reading all those pre-release reviews, praising this game as the best shit ever... and two weeks later PDX is already cutting support
First time I have even heard about it.
That said, why anyone would want to go to paradox to have them publish their games is a mystery to me. 99% of the non-PDX games they publish get no marketing, and 99.9% of those end up flopping hard.
Anon, when your company is going down the drain, you face a simple choice:
Find a willing publisher to prop you up OR go down the drain and end up jobless.
HBS chose to keep their jobs
I would rather have gone to semi-competent devils like EA/2K/10c/Acti then go to Swedish value store EA, or even Calypso/THQ Nordic.
There is such saying in my country: a drowning man would clinge to a straight razor (to save himself).
I guess it doesn't translate particularly well into English.
Yeah, most PDX published were obscure at best and absolute flops at worst. They pick up garbage and never even promote it properly. Even if you are a die-hard paracuck follower you'd probably miss half of it.
The only good ones are the ones that were a thing before PDX picked them up and they are always late to the party and drive them into the ground by shitty DLC long after everyone stopped caring about the thing.
I mean that's just wrong. PDX had a pretty good publishing record from the last decade and they are pretty good at marketing and building hype. I mean look at the hype that they built for Millenia even though it ended up just being a small indie 4x. They made it seem like it was the next Civ competitor until we actually saw it.
But some of the other games they've published:
>Battletech
>Cities skylines
>pillars of eternity/Tyranny
>Steel Division
Like these are all good games. You can even go further back when they were nobodies and they were publishing shit like Magicka, Mount and Blade, Gal Civ 2 and the neocore king arthur games. Like some good shit.
>from the last decade
Key words
Yeah that means the last 10 years, include this and other years.
>Battletech
Got Kickstarter money and PDX was late on the bandwagon.
>Cities skylines
fair
>pillars of eternity/Tyranny
Dead end, nobody cares anymore
>Steel Division
Flop. PDX had the opportunity to market it to their existing wehraboo audience who'd take it even if it was only an average game but did jack shit about it and cut relations with eugen after that.
Pillars was like battletech entirely funded by kickstarter. Tyranny was a paradox project to try and latch on to the crpg resurgence. It was by all accounts good but too short.
>Tyranny
I heard it was an okay game by all accounts but also mired in controversy. PDX made a big deal about obsidian making it and some big famous guy making it but he quit the company and I think there have been some other conflicts between them, don't remember the details, and they split on bad terms. Apparently PoE2 exists and was published by someone else so it checks out.
So there, for a game where they were wholly the publisher from the start they fricked it up and alienated the developer. PDX track record as a publisher really isn't good.
more like Battletech had pronouns and I ignore it.
>He said, while bumping dead thread from page 10
I had no idea Steel Division was at any point ever under Paradox wtf, how did those frenchmen escape so easily?
See that's the issue, they published the SD44, the first one, but did such a shitty job at it nobody even noticed. Eugen ended up pretty much bankrupt and seems PDX let them keep the franchise rights. They managed to self-publish SD2 eventually, but lost most of people and weren't paying whoever was left.
>Being published by PDX
Truly the death throes of any indie game
>Being published
>Indie game
Do you even know what indie or publisher means?
It's like you completely missed the point he's making, just to regurgitate it anyway
It's like you regurgitate my wiener.
>50 bucks for half-baked X-Com clone
Never heard about it, but that's three different reasons already why a game can flop
The game is not that bad, I enjoyed it. But, of course, I’ve pirated it, so I might be biased. Imagine giving paracucks your money lol.
it's passable indie game. somewhat shallow rts and tactical stealth hybrid very similar to the mutant year zero kind of game (and the other 2 games the studio made). it doesn't stand out in any way really.
technically pretty poor, controls seem focused around gamepad and it has some big frame drops despite not looking great.
however, even me as a pirate can't fathom how can they ask for fricking 50eur + 8eur for shitty day1dlc character and expect anyone to buy it. if anything at that point i have to question what kind of person you have to be to look at that price proposition and go "yeah i'll buy this over... literally any other game"
I swear to god that anything Weissman makes turns to shit eventually. It would not surprise me if he embezzled a good bit of the supposed development cost this game has. I mean, they spent 5 years on making this?
shit title for a game. shit marketing. over saturated market, reduced discretionary spending available to the population
Really feels like we're gonna get some news soon that developers are bailing on Paradox, or Paradox is just failing, shutting down studios and the developers are restarting elsewhere independently.
With a frickton of 'we're sick of their bullshit and complete lack of support/demands' stories coming out.
Paradox's vibe just stinks of it lately.
How does a single paradox game cost 22 million dollars to make? What the frick is so complex about them? They are strategy games mostly. It's like board game makers. A few guys develop those but they don't cost millions of dollars to do so. Secondly, why would they ever put that much money into their budget? I feel like few people actually play paradox games relative to most normies. These are not AAA studios. we are talking here. How the frick do they make their money back? I've never even heard of this game but I know paradox does a lot of obscure shit. I love to play games published by Slitherine. People who buy are a minority of gamers. I see paradox in the same light.
they have gazillion employees who do nothing, indie will do fine its but AAA/AA unironically needs another video game market crash to clean all those unprofitable shitty businesses.
>Muh game crash
Why are zoomers this fricking stupid?
All crash is going to achieve is killing all the small and medium sized companies, while the juggernauts are given even more space to take over. Simply because they have financial security to weather through it.
Which is precisely what happened during the meme American crash in the 80s - all the big companies reinforced their positions, and everyone else died.
you are witnessing blizzard collapse, CA about to go down, bethesda, cdr firing people left and right and say it hurts small game dev teams? its literally other way around
>literally bought by microsoft
>"collapse"
Based moron.
yes their corpse got bought up by microsoft and now they will replace all of their employees with poojets and never release a good game again, as is tradition.
>implying blizzard released a good game in ages and several of their recent projects bombed.
So... other than the ownership change, same shit as for past... 10 years? 11? When did SC2 came out anyway? Because that's the last time they did a strategy game.
You are pretty much talking about forming of a yet another "Big Five" in yet another industry as a collapse of it. I mean... it IS a collapse, but for completely different reasons than your fricked up mind thinks, and not one that makes anyone already on their way to being Big Five any less money.
Black, go touch grass, there is still time before first snow.
not the point
schizo morons
>Sees non-existent industry collapse
>Calls anyone a schizo
nowhere i did say theres collaps but that it needs to happen for healthy market reset you disingenuous inbred homosexual.
that not a single company released a good game after Microsoft buyout
>Delusiona homosexual Is Delusional 2: Electric Boogaloo
We get it, you are a zoomer and just read the Simple English article on the American crash from the 80s
Seems that you are suffering from the sever Dunning-Kruger, consider suicide low iq Black person
>Zoom zoom zoom-zoo!
Careful, or your perm is gonna get wet from all that excitement
not only you are schizo making shit up you are also projecting.
... you have a point?
>bought up by a company that will last at least another century and replayed the californians for pajeets
So a Blizzard renaissance?
>All those companies are doing perfectly fine, raking crazy amount of money
>"Any minute now, ANY MINUTE!"
10 actual developers, 10 HR, 10 communists on sinecures, plus taxes for another 30 communists on sinecures
>10 HR, 10 communists on sinecures,
but i repeat myself
>How does a single paradox game cost 22 million dollars to make? What the frick is so complex about them
Have a game being produced for 5 years is a perfect way to reap up the overhead into absurd value
Rest of your post is confusing actual PDX in-house game with them being a mere publisher, so here you are.
The real problem is as follow:
Why would you spend 25 milion on producing a X-Com clone and yet not spend a single red cent on marketing? This game had a tiny banner on PDX forum in May for like 2 weeks, and a sham pre-release campaign that consisted of handful of youtubers giving early access to say how awesome the game is. It's like they wanted this to fail.
AoW had mediocre marketing, but it had an actual campaign: ads, previews, more or less insight where this was going. And that was a 4th game in an established franchise.
This? This looks like either engineered disaster to take a knack on HBS OR yet another case of PDX corporate bullshit in tune of "I'm a new board member and I need to torpedo whatever my precedessor was involved in to make myself look better".
But mostly I just sense it's the case of non-malicious incompetence.
Black folk
>New IP
>Made on a budget, but not an indie game
>Without any meaningful marketing whatsoever
The real surprise is that they expected any OTHER outcome than a flop
>PDX published game flops instantly, is written off and utterly forgotten month ater
... first time?
That one at least had an ongoing marketing campaign, since they were genuiney expecting Surviving Mars numbers despite being a reskin. In fact, it generated enough buzz to spawn few copy-cats.
Lamplighter has absolutely nothing going for it. And never did. So I don't realy think this is comparable. The end result is similar, but process to get there wasn't.
I strongly suspect that PDX just wanted to either kill HBS due to upper management frick up (maliciously acting up) or wanted to take over the company fully, but overdid that and now HBS is for closure. It is impossible to mishandle a game release and marketing this badly, not at such budget and by people who are in game publishing for 25+ years.
that went for a while though, even released some DLCs
although it was probably still considered a likely day 1 flop by parafox since they scammed epic into buying exclusive release.
>ebic exclusive
It's not a flop then. That cash is usually more than enough to turn game profitable, even it nobody plays it and reviews are bad. Especially when it's not an AAA title.
It probably isn't a flop when you add the money from epic.
my point was paradox probably assumed it would flop if it was released like a normal paradox game on steam, they didn't see any long term value in that game. so they just cashed in everything by selling it as an epic exclusive and kill the little chances it had
they probably felt the same for this game, since they invested pretty much nothing in marketing. I guess epic got wiser this time (is it still doing exclusives?)
>they probably felt the same for this game, since they invested pretty much nothing in marketing
They've invested 18 millions into making it, thou. Remaining 7 millions were on HBS part of running costs of their company.
As for Epic - their bread and butter is getting excusives and random games handled out for free, since both of those drive people to even use their platform at all.
All in all, it looks like PDX wanted LL to flop, and the real question is why, rather than if. This is such monumental frick-up, you can't just assume they've reached new high of mismanagement, as wasting 25 million bucks on a game that you release without any marketing whatsoever isn't normal or even most random frick-up
Maybe they knew it wasn't a flop and didn't want to spend an additional 5 mil in marketing to get maybe 100,000 sales at best.
From a purely commercial stand point the game was dead in the water before it even got made. An XCOM clone in a market sector chock full of XCOM clones is already a bad idea. An XCOM clone with a niche theme that has competition in the same sectors is a waste of money.
Considering how they treated Battletech and it's pre existing fanbase I wouldn't be surprised if this was like a pet/passion project of HBS and they wouldn't listen to anyone calling them moronic.
Consider the following:
Spend 100k on MINIMAL marketing (that's literally million clicks, that's enough to get shit going), sell to Epic and you turn a monumental loss into manageable one, with minimal effort put into it. And Epic would gladly take it.
The fact that this game costs 50 fricking dollars is meanwhile a complete joke and I suspect HBS is on a commission here, hence trying to sell utter crap for so much.
The only other alternative was that the game wasn't initially meant to be published by Paradox and it just fell in their laps like Steel Division, which most of the marketing was done by Eugen.
Tbf, Surviving the Aftermath was a dogshit game that they abandoned Surviving Mars to produce. It isn't the worst post-apocalyptic city builder out there, but it's certainly the blandest. And the world map was chock full of bad ideas and mechanics. Everything they tried to do was done better by Endzone a year later.
That doesn't make Endzone good, however.
I was observing StA development with fascination. The sort of fascination you get from observing a dung beetle rolling up his poop sphere. It was one bad decision after another, leading to half-baked game... but treated with sincerity of a genius project made by some crack team developers, rather than random interns changing every 2-3 dev diaries. The fact this shitpile managed to spawn a subgenre of colony sims is a sight to behold.
Endzone is perfectly serviceable. I wouldn't call it amazing, but I had fun playing it through a couple times, with my second run being on the hardest difficulty. There certainly isn't anything egregiously bad about it, unlike StA. With the DLC, the endgame is honestly decent fun.
>Endzone is perfectly serviceable
Again - that doesn't make it good.
I miss times when people knew the distinction between "game works and isn't overly bugged" and "game is good"
I had fun playing it, and I'm glad I experienced it. That's good enough for me.
I guess we are just talking about two different things in the end. Never mind, no point dwelling on it.
That's funny considering StA is better than Endzone. Endzone is not only preachy as frick but it's also less mechanically able and less fun.
>this is your brain on PDX
>this is your brain on contrarianism
Ironic, given all you did was acting contrarian
wait, mutant year zero is bad?
Yes. They made a Nucom ripoff where every change they made from the original formula made the game worse. It's been years since I tried it, so I only remember the broad strokes. But I do remember that hit percentages were only in 25% increments. So if you go one tile too far away, your 100% chance to hit will suddenly be 75%, or your 75% would be 50%. And then the real time stealth was really bad too. It was a stupid thing to add to a game primarily about turn-based combat. And it wasn't even good stealth gameplay either. And you were forced to rely on a very limited roster of characters with bad gimmicks. If you didn't like the gimmicks of the characters you were stuck with, frick you.
i actually tried the demo from a next fest and i liked it a lot. i bought it on sale for like $5 and havent really touched it. surely it cant be too bad for $5.
Game would've done a lot better if it was 4 gas mask dudes, mowing down femnisits and libtards instead.
PDX and HBS have split ways.
bloodlines will be either the start of the end for paradox.
i am shocked