I knwo I’m going to sound like a total conspiracy nutjob here, but does anyone else get the impression from how this game was launched, with Crysis-like limitations for PC users leading to nigh-unplayability, versus an at least functional PS4 version (with all of the limitations of a console game, but at least playability for a hugely-hyped game) that Sony’s investment into this game might have included a push to keep the PC version deoptimized?
Given the huge numbers of players who have refunded this game on Steam, I have to imagine that at least some of them did so because of the technical problems, not because the game is sort of an empty open world survival game (which is just what it was marketed as.) It’s got to push the mindset that console makers want to put in the minds of PC gamers that one reason to switch to consoles is that the games that release on console will be playable, and not the mess that this game is on anything other than top-of-the-line rigs.
Well, it’s not that great on PS4 either. Every single review I’ve seen (with the exception of playstation Life, or whatever :rolleyes: ) Mentions numerous crashes on PS4.
I think this is just a team that needed more time to cook this baby, and given the Sony is spending all this money on marketing your game, you’re probably going to invest most of the time optimizing for that platform.
I don’t think Sony straight out said make sure the PC version is broken.
Man! Found a crashed ship but the planet it’s on apparently does not have the resources needed to get it going. Then I had a hell of a time finding my old ship.
Apparently there is some way to do it (so I discovered after extensive searching online) but it’s not at all clear and never mentioned in-game. The tutorial is not great, I have to say.
Might I suggest contacting your preferred gaming news outlet with this information and see what they say? If you’re onto something newsworthy they’re likely to be very happy to hear from you.
Now…we keep hearing “In the universe” and “In the galaxy”. And that joke clip in the beginning of the thread insinuates you can name other galaxies, but the “goal” is to get to the center of the galaxy.
If each player started off in his own galaxy, wouldn’t there be about 3 galaxies for each person on earth? So yeah…running into another player is rare. So rare I don’t care if its a con.
Hopefully its just one galaxy and i hope the uploaded info on named stuff is going into one database.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to get at. Are you suggesting I’m making things up as some sort of conspiracy theorist because the specific things I’m saying aren’t on the front page of ign? Valve won’t release the actual numbers of refunds, but the number of people playing are objective and factually true. And there are plenty of news stories about the disappointment and backlash.
No, I’m saying you’ve clearly put a lot of thought into this and if you love gaming as much as you say you do, then it’s a story that someone reputable (I hesitate to offer suggestions because everyone has their own idea of who would qualify) might actually be interested in.
Most of the stories about the backlash have been based around “angry people on Reddit” and “Crap Steam reviews” - which is not the same as “100,000 people stopped playing this game on day two”, even though that’s actually a stronger story than “NERD RAGE ON THE INTERNETS!”
It’s at the top of this list, but that’s sorted by “relevance”, which doesn’t really mean anything. It could mean that it’s sorted by sales, but it could just as easily be sorted by “things we want to sell”.
I couldn’t find a top 100 list, SenorBeef, is there a specific list you’re looking at?
The “peak today” is 127,251. There’s no real big new competition at the moment. I wonder how many players something like GTA V or Fallout 4 had at the end of their first week.
I honestly believe that the PS4 was prioritised to the point that the PC version was very much neglected. Why they didn’t delay the launch further is a good question, probably as they anticipated middling reviews for the PS4 version and so didn’t want to harm sales.
Threads on NeoGAF have been interesting. There’s people datamining the PC version and one of the first things to come out was that it was compiled at 3am on the day of release. This would explain why there was no preloading and shows that they were probably desperately trying to fix stuff at the last minute.
There is now a thread there specifically for the results of the datamining. Some very weird stuff has turned up, but the strangest of all seems to be references to Unity, the Game Engine that gets a rough deal with a lot of people. It is possible that they had source access and have forked it in some way to use elements and then base their own engine on it. Or it might just be a coincidence with naming.
You linked the correct list, it’s back to being the top seller. It fell off the list for a few hours on the second day since that’s when the bulk of the refunds would’ve happened. Now that we’re past peak refunding, new sales have put it back on the list.
The 127k peak was from Sunday afternoon/evening. The weekend bump (Sunday is the biggest gaming day) kept the game from slipping too far from day 2 to 3, but I expect the numbers to drop significantly today. Peak time for games popular in both the U.S. and Europe tends to be around noon pacific, 3 eastern, 8-10pm in most of Europe. Obviously it’s not the prime time for each region, but that’s the time the most people combined tend to be playing worldwide. Games that are more regional - soccer manager games for example - will have a different peak time.
Right. Same with movies. When you know you have a bad product, or at least one that won’t meet expectations, your goal is to hype it up so much that people will unthinkingly consume it before they wait a moment to see if it’s any good.
That’s why I don’t understand the preorder mentality. If a game is good, great, you can still get it after reading some reviews and not lose anything, but if a game is bad then you’re playing into their exact gambit of trying to make you buy their product before you can find out its bad. Why anyone volunteers to buy into that gambit I honesty have no idea. It’s not like you have to wait long - you waited months or years for the game, but you can’t wait a few hours to see if the game is a disappointment before committing your money to it?
Reviews are up soon (they should be up before release except when game companies embargo them, which should be a huge fucking red flag to everyone but rarely is), people will have twitch streams, there are user reviews, there’s word of mouth - it’s so easy and so quick to get information about the worth of the game, and yet people voluntarily rush to make sure they get their money in blind. And for no benefit. And it allows companies to keep releasing bad games and bad movies because no one ever learns and just keeps blindly committing their money in an all risk no reward poor impulse decision.
This is the fiftieth time a new video game’s server demands have overwhelmed the company that made it. It’s very old news. They always cheap out on the post-release resources and it always bites them in the ass.
[QUOTE=SenorBeef]
That’s why I don’t understand the preorder mentality.
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My best friend preordered No Man’s Sky for PC. I told him straight up he was an idiot. I don’t for the life of me understand why he lent Steam $60 interest-free dollars for a product he didn’t know the quality of. It’s mystifying - one of the most flatly, unquestionably irrational consumer decisions I can think of, really. I don’t even think he got a discount.
Maybe it’s a holdover from the days when you had to buy the product in a store and they might not have any left on the date of release? I’m not sure. But if the reviews had been like “omfg this game is everything you’d dreamed of” I’d have bought it from Steam on August 12 and had it every bit as much as Mister Pre-Order, except I never ran the risk of it being… well, what it is.
Well as I said earlier I pre-ordered for convenience and the reviews weren’t going to change my mind. For what it’s worth I bought a game called Fallout 4 that you may have heard of. It had good reviews, I didn’t like it. So am I a dunce for pre-ordering a game with no reviews and liking it? Or am I a dunce for post-ordering a game with good reviews and not liking it, I don’t know what I should do SenorBeef!
I preordered NMS because I knew it was going to be big, and likely to not live up to expectations. I wanted to be part of the conversation online about why it succeeded or failed while it was happening, and to do that in earnest I needed to play the game instead of just reading about it.
Yep. I haven’t encountered most of the problems folks are complaining about; I’ve been playing it (on PC) all weekend and having fun. There are some points that are a little tedious, and the UI is the usual broken-by-consolization, but the overall experience has been positive.
As I prediccted, after the Sunday boost we had a big drop. 210, 140’ 125, 85 at peak times over the first four days. Almost losing 2/3rds of the players.
As I said, steamcharts only keeps daily data for so long before it starts tracking just weekly and then monthly averages, so I can’t compare those to fallout 4 / gta 5 specifically, but I track things like this because I find it interesting - losing 60% of your players in 4 days is extremely unusual. That usually takes a few weeks. And not all games follow that pattern. Some stay steady, some grow. Usually games with a short campaign will drop more quickly as people beat it, open ended games will tend to drop slower.
…I’m seeing a big price difference between the GOG and Steam. Are there any differences between what they are selling? (GOG is $62 AUD, Steam is $90 NZD)