All you know is the game is not as popular as you think it should be. Which is also a subjective claim. And I think you are being biased, harsh and hostile in your claims about the devs.
Again. I agree. I will say what and how I see it.
Is that something you do whenever you buy a Book or a ticket for a movie or a show you don’t like?
No. But here I’m discussing the topic which is interesting to me. I’m interested in topic of game development and sales of the game and what makes them successful or not so I’m giving you my input.
Im quite sure they are much more interested than you on their work being a success.
Maybe. I’m not so sure they know how to do that though.
I’ve never said it is easy. But if you have no money then doing some marketing add capaign is impossible. Cooperating with streamers and youtubers as a promotion tactic is still posibble even if you don’t have any money. It’s still not easy because there are thousands of games trying to potentially do the same and streamers and youtubers have their games so making them play your game is never easy.
But it is doable even if you do have no money. So one way to promote your game is to have some sort of streamers youturbers players relations system. You need to sill work to build that. But it’s much cheaper than traditional channels and an option with low budget. And it was presented like they can’t do anything because they don’t have any money. This is simply not true.
Maybe they don’t, but your claim only stands on information you don’t have. For example, you don’t know if a YouTube streamer campaign was viable at all, or even if they actually tried. You also don’t know how much time or resources they are using into this DLC, or how much they have available for advertisement. You dont know what are their expected sales or even how many people owns the game, all decissions that need to be considered to make advertisement.
So in summary, you don’t know what their reasons were to not have a different advertisement strategy, or how their decission making regarding ad strategy went; but you are basing your arguments on those reasons.
Regarding the quality of the game, I disagree, but is your opinion. Regarding the quality of the DLC, you know you are making a claim about a product you have not seen or tested right?
This a statement, I think is completely nonesense. Are you implying PP is casual compared to XCOM2 for example?. Because you can claim all day long that is a bad game, that is a completely subjective statement. But claiming that PP is easier, or more accessible or that requires less commitment than XCOM is wrong by all sane interpretations of the terms.
Yes I don’t know most of these. But I actually see results. Like how many people play the game on twitch. How many poeple play the game on youtube. How many play the game on steam.
This is actually the only thing I need to tell if the game is successfull or not.
No, this is logic 101, you are assuming causation when you are actually seeing correlation.
You cannot connect with a causal relation two facts just because. Causal relationship is a very hard thing to demonstrate, and you are just assuming it. Which is the wrong way to reason.
You see low number of players and you may assume the cause is PP was not very polished, or you may assume the cause is the game was not very well advertised, or may assume the cause is the game was an epic exclusive. All those are incorrect inferences, the truth is you actually dont know if it is any causal relation between those facts at all. And some of then may not be even objective facts.
No, this is logic 101, you are assuming causation when you are actually seeing correlation. You cannot connect.
I can because I’m not saying game is bad or good. Because I agree this is subjective thing. I in fact quite like it. What I’m saying here is that the game is not successful or popular. And we’re talking here why is that. Because declining player-base or player-base numbers are measure of popularity / success of the game. And is clearly not good enough. I can’t believe devs are looking right now at numbers and saying this is a success.
The Kickstarter was a success actually. But they got money from Ufo Defense 1994 poeple that remembered how good this game was back in the day. It was like masterpiece of games then. Success of KickStarter campaign has nothing to do with popularity or sales of Pheonix Point after the game was released. So the only measure of PP success are numbers after the release. And we all can check them every day.
Don’t poke the bear. I suppose that Drages may be little tired of proving his statement over and over. I can say I support his statement. Game is overall ok I guess, but it is hardly polished. And sometimes it is really underwhelming.
All previous DLCs are out. And Community Councillors (which status can be seen near the nick) were testing Festering Skies too. So he can have some opinion even if he have not tested it from beginning to the end.
I’m afraid it is not nonsense. With the power which is given to the player, real casuals can finish this game even on hard difficulties. They just need to pay attention to few details and use some skill combinations over the other. And that is all. I don’t remember how hard was vanilla FiraXCOM, but modded to Long War version was way way way… way more punishing than Phoenix Point is.
Maybe. But you need to argue in the correct way. So what are posible causes of a declining number of players?
First you need to define what do you mean by success or failure and contextualize it with expected numbers, trends and player base after the kickstart.
Then you need to actually explore the posible reasons:
Is it low replayability?
Is is short lenght?
Is is too hard?
Is it too easy?
Is it lack of mod options?
Is bad writting?
Is it bad advertisement?
Are there any new games that are taking the players?
…
Then you need to test every one of these variables controlling all the others.
then you need to analyse how these variables influence each other.
And then… you may have shown a relationship or correlation and deppending on your results, you may have a well supported hipothesis that you would need still to prove is a causal relation.
The thing is. Making that kind of claims while ignoring pretty much everything you would need to know to make them is not useful. At maximum will confirm your preexisting opinions or biases.
I disagree. I have hundreds of hours in the game, and you probably have too. So it is difficult to put ourselves in the skin of a casual player. But I remember my first 100 hours on normal difficulty, and I remember my gametime with XCOM. And I think you are absolutely wrong.
I cannot imagine even for a second a non experienced player casually finishing the game on hard with no effort or meta-knowledge of the game, which is the only way to have OP ability combinations, and by definition is not compatible with being a casual player.
Yes. I’m biased. You as well in fact. And I don’t have any answer why numbers are what they are. The same as you, again. We have our opinions and we can share them in this topic.
I’m not trying to tell anyone that I have answers why that is and claim at the same time that I’m 100% percent right. This would be silly, wouldn’t it? I just tell you what I see and not expecting anyone to think I’ve proofs behind that and some scientific equations for that logic. Because it’s impossible in fact. We don’t have full information to prove any of this.
Only reason why they can have difficulty is that they don’t seek how to get better results and they try to play this game as recent XCOMs, while waiting to get next tier of weapons and armors. Well shame on them, but this is another aspect that game is not really friendly. It plays differently and it doesn’t inform casuals about that.
I just pointed to you, that the causal claims you endorsed as facts are everything but facts. And you can argue all day long about what the causes of the low number of players may be. But if you assume the causes are simple, you will be most certainly wrong.
And if someone uses those numbers to simply state they are the result of bad planing or a bad game, that is an assuption nobody should make lightly, because that would be diminishing the real work of real people based only or subjective impressions.
So you seem to agree on PP not being casual friendly. And you may probably agree too on it being less accesible, longuer, more complex and more difficult than XCOM.
So PP being bad and not succesfull enough for being too casual, is just nonsense. If anything, what prevented PP to be more succesfull is not being casual enough. Which is why I said the claim was completely false and dishonest.
because that would be diminishing the real work of real people based only or subjective impressions.
Yeah I can understand somone can get pissed off. They made sth and some weird guy slamms their work as mediocre or possibly much worse without any work. But this is the world we live in. What do you expect? That we would clap our hands for product we don’t like because someone put work to build it. This is not how world works. Nobody is clapping because you put work to make hamburger someone doesn’t like. They can slam you whatever they like. It’s just the way it is. If someone is upset about someone posting their opinion they better start doing some other job or cut Internet off.
And reality is they made hamburgers that don’t sell well. At least for now. So the numbers are crappy for some reasons. Maybe it was marketing guy, maybe pork was off. Maybe they didn’t pay their rent or were drunk the day before. Who cares. Hamburgers don’t sell for some unknown reasons, better avoid them.
Oh no, far from It. If you dislike the game critisize the game. If you dislike some dev decissions critisize them. We should argue and discuss with honesty, pointing to where we think other are wrong or being unfair. Which is what I think are both doing.
What often happens is people jumping from I dont like the game to directly insulting the people that put the work on it.
probalby you have mis-clicked some edit. But I see a reply there for me. You learn meta playing the game. All these skills are there, not hidden anywhere. All weapons are available at some point. It is just connecting those two things, and then you can kill anything in the game with ease. I don’t see it as meta-knowledge. Meta-knowledge is needed to complete Legendary play without using skills from level 4 and above, without ancient weapons, without bionics augmentations, without raising attributes for soldiers and without abusing vehicles.
So, you think PP on normal is easier than XCOM on normal? And that is a problem that played against the success of PP?
First that is hard to believe for me, because all succesful franchises make their gameplay casual to get a wider audience, includding strategy ones, and that actually seems to se how it works. Second because XCOM was pretty much imposible to lose on normal, once you passed the first couple of missions.
I may be biased, but I don’t think I am. I have hundreds of hours on XCOM, Long War, XCom2, Xenonauts and PP each. I use hundreds of Mods on XCOM2, and most of them make the game harder. My experience is that PP is probably not as hard as Long War, but certainly far harder than XCom and XCom2 and when I’m say far harder I mean those games can be frustratingly easy and require no thought at all even on the first playtrough, while PP is frustratingly difficult on normal until you have hundreds of hours of gameplay.
So either you and me have completely different experiences with the game, or you are missremembering XCom… a lot.
Also I think you are wrong, the OP abilities are not so easy to find if you dont research on the forums (absolutely not for casuals), and certainly only available for some styles and factions. And furthermore, require the player to exploit them on purpose to undercut their own experience while all classes and weapons are OP in Xcom and all game styles are easy once you start upgrading your weapons and armors and soldiers.
Like I said. I don’t remember vanilla XCOM really well. So ok, maybe XCOM is easier and casual on normal. But I remember that I had real difficulty completing it on higher level without mods. In Phoenix Point difficulty is not so relevant.
If I don’t think that ‘being easy’ or ‘being difficult’ is the critical part of the failure, I surely do think that youtubers found there too many exploits and they lost interest in the game as not really challenging. These exploits are not logical, they don’t make game easy - they make game trivial at some point and quite boring taking into account how long gameplay is. When youtubers were gone, there was no audience. There is also lack of mod support which could drive people to replay game with something new each time. These two things I find as having most impact on the playerbase view on the game.
I think XCOM has broader range of difficulties. It gives something to casual players as well for long-term players. Like on normal player gets aim bonuses and pod limitations where they can’t activate pods if they already fight one and aiming scripts that protects you from missing. And at the same time super hardcore mods like Long War for players with hundreds or thousands of hours in the game.
Phoenix Point is more limited in scope of difficulty. It is harder maybe for new players. But if you know the game it lacks for more experienced players. The difficulty curve is flattened. The dynamic difficulty, in the past, was sort of answer to address that but it didn’t work as intended and was reworked because it had its own problems.
I think this is more broader problem of linearity in the game. Not only in difficulty aspect but other areas of the game. It looks like it has variaty but this is actualy only on the surface. The player is asked to made their own rules to introduce these variaties. This is mostly RPG type playstyles where player is expected to make those choices or limitations to make the game more diverse. But strategy players play for optimalization and most of the time don’t understand the need for those self-limitations. So some part of the player-base, which in fact the game is actually aimed at , feel very quickly off. And have nowhere really to go. Because there is no Long War or War of the Chosen equivalent. Add to that strange teleportation things, low diversity of missions, maps or enemies and other things and you have recipe for low player retention. And you actually have to be better than the other guys. Maybe in vacuum that would be good enough. But you actually compete for players.
I suppose that Drages may be little tired of proving his statement over and over. 
I can say I support his statement. Game is overall ok I guess, but it is hardly polished. And sometimes it is really underwhelming.
You learn meta playing the game. All these skills are there, not hidden anywhere. All weapons are available at some point. It is just connecting those two things, and then you can kill anything in the game with ease. I don’t see it as meta-knowledge. Meta-knowledge is needed to complete Legendary play without using skills from level 4 and above, without ancient weapons, without bionics augmentations, without raising attributes for soldiers and without abusing vehicles.