What makes you think that? The only person who has that knowledge is the scrum master 
Experience since BB5 from now. Basic bugs persisted.
https://feedback.phoenixpoint.info/feedback/p/call-for-strike-in-60-days
True dat. That is why I believe āplayers strikeā is needed to pressure the company to decide what are priorities. If they were smart enough, they would do it already.
This does not change the fact, result. If the result is bad, nothing else matters.
So they are doing a bad job and no, it does not work. Someone needs to tell this too.
They started with the promise of ultimate Xcom from the developer and we got something āmehā with worse and worse non-stop DLCās and fix patches which do not fix anything (even labeled as fixed) after a very successful KS campaign and an extra Epic deal addition to game sales and more resources.
Am I wrong about this result? Am I the guilty one because of their poor work? Should I create and think over the possible excuses for them?
Why do you try to create those excuses? Isnāt there any SG crew member, developer, PR guy who can answer those at their own forum?
Is there any SG guy who cares what we talk here?
- Got forums, discords, canny to talk with player base about game and bugs,
- There is a system to send the bugs in the game
- Question mails about the gameā¦
Result: - If the game is just working, no fix.
- If you donāt one shot whole map in one turn, no balance (even you can)
- Ideas and suggestions, who readsā¦
- DLC rush worse then Paradox games.
- Worse and worse quality drop at new contentā¦
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False statement. FS was pre-tested prior to release.
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The final patch send to CC was few days ago before launch. Even someone got time to finish that game in that timeline, it did not change anything for released version.
but if you say soā¦
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Great, I suppose it was the first time ever?
https://feedback.phoenixpoint.info/feedback/p/call-for-strike-in-60-days
False again. You donāt know what happened. The devs changed things after each test build. And there were a lot of test builds. A full campaign was not needed to test FS.
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I know test builds. I donāt talk about them. They were already with full of bugs and the reasons were to get the bugs and fix them. I talk about testing the release version with full gameplay.
How can you say that?
How donāt you not need a full campaign progress/balance test? How can you know how the dlc will change the whole game experience? How can you know possible bugs with new dlcs and behemoth patch?
As you say that, you already prove that itās not tested fully before release.
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False again. You can say whatever you want. But, you were not part of the process. While Iām under an NDA, I feel it safe to say that the testers were not just bug testing. Speaking about what happened, or not, from a vacuum - your view has little weight from my perceptive.
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Saw this recently on another forum:
So that would be $11+ million from Epic, plus $700k from fig. Thereās also that Microsoft deal and whatever that was worth. There was something a while ago about Tencent even investing directly in the studio. Add on all of the pre-orders and Steam sales, plus DLC (I wouldnāt count anything sold on Epic as that would likely be included in the minimum guarantee). Then thereās whatever the recent buyout by Embracer Group. I would think itās safe to say that SG has received over $15 million in revenue since the fig campaign launched.
That figure sounds quite weird. I have actually seen a lot of figures in internet. But after taken a look, the issue seems much more complex. And what I thought I knew about the issue seems to be quite inacurate as well.
In an early 2019 letter to investors, SG reported that the game made a 191% return in investment, includding the Epic Deal. This number would be the gross profit, including 2018 early sales and the Epic Deal.
Many media published then their Epic Value estimations, based precisely on this letter speculating about how much the deal would have been. SG made a declaration regarding these publications.
None of the attempts weāve seen to reverse engineer the details of our deal have been even remotely accurate.
But what exactly a 190% return in investment means? Well SG used Fig for funding. Fig uses a mixed aproach based on regular kickstarter funds, and investors funds. These would be people that invest in the game and expects to be paid back with profits.
These seems to be one of the most legit sources I found on the matter:
So, what does this mean?
According to these figures. In the end, Phoenix Point raised $484,000 from investment funding and $454,077 from kickstarters funds. That was the initial budget for the game.
We also know (if we believe the graphs) that $1.2M, were raised from pre-purchases, to that we must add the epic deal to get to get the return of $919.600 for the investors (This would be the cut for the investors), which is presummed to be 50% of the gross income. The cuts being 41% for Fig investors, 41% for SG and the 18% for Epic. (An important part of the deal is that SG+Fig investors would get the 88% of the income from the game, a number much higher that the one steam offers).
That would mean $1.839.200 of gross profit, discounting the sales $1.200.000. Would mean $639.200 from the epic deal. Or if preorders had a cut for epic not includded in the figures $783.200:
So are those the numbers? Unfortunately is also not that easy. What is the problem? first we dont know if this is exactly the way the numbers were made, is mostly specultation. But the most important variable here is the nature itself of the epic deal.
So epic does pay the money upfront does not? Yes and no. Epic pays money upfront does not just give money. A part of the epic deal is likely to be a cash advance against royalties made through sales on the Epic Games Store. Which means SG likely needs to pay a part of that money back, from the sales in EPIC.
That number could be from 0% of the deal to the 100%, so it can be argued that $300,000-$500,000 could be a fairly plausible number. Thought anything from $0 to $783.200 is possible. But we dont know.
You are assuming that whatever funds were paid from Epic to SG were paid in a single lump-sum. Itās possible that at the time of the fig ROI, there was only a partial payment (maybe just the first 3 months). I think fig investment returns also had a cap. So any money over a certain amount wouldnāt increase the ROI
Yes there is a lot of uncertainty here. the only real thing, is that nobody really knows the numbers and every published figure was playing with the same kind of speculation. And the published numbers were confirmed wrong by SG.
It is true that some declarations from SG in the letter seem to suggest an up-front payment, and I think partial payment is less likely than a one time one. But I admit that is just an assumption.
I find however, the 2M dollars figure published by game media simply wrong because they do not seem to have taken preorders into account. So the actual number could be anywhere up to 1M. And that could be 100% royalities or 100% paid as ācost freeā money.
Regardless the $11+ million from Epic is no doubt a wrong number. I could believe $500k ācost freeā no problem (max, the minimum would be $0). Anything above seems overplaying it from Epic. Certainly claiming a revenue of $15M is just not true I think.
PS:
Also worth nothing the early refunds from the epic controversy are probably not includded on the numbers, that would made the profit numbers lower.
If that is true (and Iām not convinced that it is, but that doesnāt matter for the purposes of this conversation), then that should tell you something about how expensive it is to run a games company.
We can assume that JG took a fair chunk of whatever change he got for his retirement fund, because thatās how it works in the media industry and I donāt see any reason why it would be any different here. We can also assume that a percentage was paid to investors - both Fig Investors and the Angel Investors who provided initial seed funding.
So letās say for the sake of argument that what was left was anything between $3m to $10m. The figure doesnāt really matter here: what matters is that according to their PR officer at the time, that was enough to keep the company afloat for 2 years. So depending on which figure you want to believe, it costs anything between $1.5m and $5m to run a game like this for a year,
But the only important fact in all of this noise is that it was enough to keep the company afloat for 2 years. Nothing else matters.
Now @rasvoja has a point: theyāve had 2 years to fix the bugs, and they havenāt done so yet. That is bad, nobody is saying it isnāt. I can point to reasons for that - like too much emphasis on the DLC they promised, constant rebuilds breaking the bugfixes already in place, not enough personnel to manage this sprawling monster of a game, Arthron gremlins running amok in the system. And itās up to you what you think or do about that; but I for one believe that calling for a player strike is both misguided and counter-productive - it aināt gonna get the bugs fixed any quicker than they are already.
All I can say is that from what I know, the devs are working constantly to fix the bugs in the constantly growing queue, but like painting the Forth Bridge, the job never ends.
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No, the result isnāt bad.
If it was bad, all of us here wouldnāt still be playing the game 2 years after its release.
The result is flawed. The result is buggy. The result is unbalanced. The result isnāt the perfect X-com-like that we all dreamed about when we subscribed to the Fig campaign - and thatās the real reason why we are all whingeing on these forums (myself included).
But itās still good enough to get me to shelve XCOM (which I used to play obsessively) and not touch it for the last 2 years.
And I second everything @mcarver2000 has said on this thread. I know for a fact that at least 3 members of the CC did multiple full playthroughs of FS during our feedback period (how they had the time I have no idea); and we were also told that there was a testing team that fed back during the development process before the game even got to us. So claiming that it was released untested is simply false.
Doesnāt mean I like what was released - I donāt. I wish theyād acted on our feedback a little more: then people wouldnāt be complaining about lack of information in key areas or the way the interception system works. But while I canāt go into details because of the NDA, I can tell you that they made some pretty significant changes based on what we were telling them that they believe improved the DLC.
Look, this is a deeply flawed game - itās why Iām on the Council, to try to iron out some of the more egregious errors. But itās also a very good game that has kept many of us here absorbed and engaged for more hours than I care to count.
If it was bad, weād have simply walked away.
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It could, and it should not happen, if they could focus within next 59 days.
I am sorry to mention such unusal and drastic measure at all, but I am really fed up that I poured even more money and cant really expect when basic bugs will be fixed, just because there is one more DLC. I already said I am all OK with DLC delay if bugs were fixed up to certain date as opssed to uncertainty.
There is still factor of hope. Development process has not ended yet, and so we still return to the game once a while and every DLC release to check if the game changed in way we could enjoy it more. And we did hoped for proper mod support.
For some of us this is definition of bad. We canāt say for sure is the game objectively bad, there are no tools to measure that (we can only rely on counting opinions, which is flaw on its own). It is nothing more but opinion, but is game good enough is also nothing else but opniion and personal taste. It didnāt make me quit playing OpenXCom X-Com Files.
But long story short, just because it is bad for some of us it doesnāt mean it canāt get good. Itās just not there yet and, unfortunately, the hope for it is getting weaker and weaker.
I feel the same. We were always like that. But as your memory is getting weaker, I was there few days before fs release.
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Thanks for the analyse of my memory. Perhaps we saw things differently. Your view does not sync with others in the CC. Youāre welcome to that view. But, my memory is just fine, thank you.
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C mon I am sure we can establish dates, board remembers
