Game's direction starting to feel like ARK and Wildcard.

It's also worth pointing out that people have been begging for some new store content for a while.

There were a whole bunch of weapon types that had zero good patterns for them until this release or last.

A lot of players were at a point where they wanted to continue supporting the game, but because nothing had been added to the store in ages, they didn't have anything they were interested in buying.

It comes in waves, it'll be a bunch of other stuff soon, every system gets its day.

 

I think the whole survival genre is having issues. I have t played ARK, my kids have sporadically. I have never been one for PvP centric games. But at $250 mill as you say, that blows what this game has made out of the budget. That much is close to what AAA games have for budgets. I think our kickstarter goal was what $200,000? The budget does make a difference. Of course proper management of that budget matter just as much. I am not saying that SoTA has that particular problem though on the management end. My husband, who has been in the industry a long time, feels it is a clear direction issue. Bigger studio overlords, lightheartedly said, are very good about time management and direction. Regardless of the too fast and incomplete production; the game always has a clear direction and timeline. Then you can look at cost over time of development. If a group of 50 can get it done in 2 years, it will still be cheaper than a group of 25 over 5 or more years. So yes, SoTA needs to keep selling fluff and such to keep development going. It is just more cost efficient to produce and creates new stuff to sell fir the longer term goals.

 

If thats the case, they really should invest some advertisement to the RP communities, theres really alot on that side with the housing system this game has. I feel they kinda tied there hands behind there back on that one, and its really under utilized. Coulda been like the RPG/Second Life, and have homes (row/village/town) very easily attainable. Multiple instanced versions of towns/cities to accomidate everyone to a degree, let people enjoy one of the best systems. Also advertise licence deals for Mod'ers where they can sell their, submitted, assets with a % going to port. I think they were kinda leaning towards this at one point but didnt really push forward or be very publicly vocal about it, and i think it was a prime oppertunity missed, or perhaps could still be used. Instead of modeling advertisement after other MMOs, they really need to nail down their key words to boost the systems that are working really well currently. If the rest comes in time, so will those fans. Just my 2 cents.

 

Survival games are king right now, that's true. What I mean is ARK was made for $1.5mil, about 1/10th of Ports budget. They have AAA sort of money now but they are focusing on the wrong parts of their game now (like new things, not fixing old) so while there's 40,000 steam players right now, that's down from their old 100,000 average two years ago.

I think this is my overall meaning;

There's plenty of games built for much less than Port had and some are amazing and doing really well (Hell, look at Bard's Tale IV, FULL voice acting on a $1.5mil budget), others like Rust was a cluster and was going to die, but they remade it and now it's averaging 30,000 steam users online. ESO is a AAA game, but it sucked, they redid it and now it's amazing, same with FFXIV.

So Port having $10+ mil was more than enough to deliver what they wanted to. Their main issue, IMHO is that they are watching their numbers decline, but staying the course with their current plan. It's not too late to scrap the game and remake it. Since they already have framework and a ton of built systems, a relaunch wouldn't take nearly as long and Garriott could literally fund it 100% himself. So I'm just confused on why they watch their numbers decline each and every week, falling 49,900 players short of what they said they need to be in the black. Yet they are not thinking of doing what's been proven to work with other DOA games, like SotA is.

 

I've paid 55 bucks for this game, and I've enjoyed it for years. Since like 2014. I am proof you can love SOTA and not give anymore than the basic buy in. I don't understand the growling about money grabs - just don't give them money. Even without funding, I have seen release after release polish old systems, release new content, fix things, make things easier. I've seen a major flood of tweaks and fixes of things in the last 6 months... Doing little more than playing the game.

So if the livestream annoys you, stream yourself punching Upper Tears. Sota Store looks like a millionaire standing in the food stamp line? Switch to the game and join a party.

There's a lot of other things to focus on if something bothers you, I've observed over the years that all these systems and skill tweaks get dealt with pretty quickly.

THE HENDOMAN