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Vault Dweller: Age of Decadence needs to sell 45,000 copies to be successful

AngryKobold

Arcane
Joined
Aug 12, 2012
Messages
534
What's the fuss about?

Development time longer than ten years. Time and resources wasted on a product suffering from terrible design decisions. Whatever purpose developers had in mind, it was certainly NOT the financial profit. Now weeping about poor sale prospects? GOOD! The man had it coming.

Great job, Vault Dweller / Mitsoda! Keep going! Poor sales I wish you not, for it obviously was not the priority; rather AoD turning out to be a soul crushing failure. You had your part in fucking up such a promising project!
 

likaq

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2009
Messages
1,198
What's the fuss about?

Development time longer than ten years. Time and resources wasted on a product suffering from terrible design decisions. Whatever purpose developers had in mind, it was certainly NOT the financial profit. Now weeping about poor sale prospects? GOOD! The man had it coming.

Great job, Vault Dweller / Mitsoda! Keep going! Poor sales I wish you not, for it obviously was not the priority; rather AoD turning out to be a soul crushing failure. You had your part in fucking up such a promising project!

:butthurt:
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
What's the fuss about?

Development time longer than ten years. Time and resources wasted on a product suffering from terrible design decisions. Whatever purpose developers had in mind, it was certainly NOT the financial profit. Now weeping about poor sale prospects? GOOD! The man had it coming.

Great job, Vault Dweller / Mitsoda! Keep going! Poor sales I wish you not, for it obviously was not the priority; rather AoD turning out to be a soul crushing failure. You had your part in fucking up such a promising project!
Reading is teh hard?
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
It's weird when people accuse a guy who launches a project of "fucking it up", as if he'd intruded on somebody else's turf and ruined their vision.

I suppose projects like these attain a kind of platonic form independent of their creators. Vault Dweller spaketh "Fallout in Ancient Rome", and it was good!
 

mindx2

Codex Roaming East Coast Reporter
Patron
Joined
Feb 22, 2006
Messages
4,389
Location
Perusing his PC Museum shelves.
Codex 2012 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire RPG Wokedex Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Congrats Vault Dweller on this great milestone. You sir are a cRPG scholar and gentleman :salute: and I look forward to starting my first play-through after pre-ordering this years ago (need to dig through my old emails and find my receipt!!) even though no boxed edition is forthcoming. Perhaps you can do what Heroine's Quest and Serpent in the Staglands developers did and send me a box and CD cover template and I'll get some made and mail one to you? A boxed version would look great next to all my other classic games... ;)
 

AngryKobold

Arcane
Joined
Aug 12, 2012
Messages
534
It's weird when people accuse a guy who launches a project of "fucking it up", as if he'd intruded on somebody else's turf and ruined their vision.

I suppose projects like these attain a kind of platonic form independent of their creators. Vault Dweller spaketh "Fallout in Ancient Rome", and it was good!

It's weird when somebody discards a self- evident fact.

As if it was a rare thing in the business: authors fucking up their own projects all by themselves. A project with evident potential crippled by wrong decisions. Valuable resources wasted by poor management. Feedback on critical issues ignored.

Not the first project to meet this fate and certainly not the last. But not everyday it's the "urban intrigue simulator pretending to be Fallout in Ancient Rome".
 

mindx2

Codex Roaming East Coast Reporter
Patron
Joined
Feb 22, 2006
Messages
4,389
Location
Perusing his PC Museum shelves.
Codex 2012 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire RPG Wokedex Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Shouldn't you... you know, actually wait until it's released to call it a failure? And even then wait another few months to see how word of mouth sales go...?
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
Kobold's been proclaiming it from day one. If anything, he's consistent in his beliefs.
 

AngryKobold

Arcane
Joined
Aug 12, 2012
Messages
534
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
6,207
Location
The island of misfit mascots
Shouldn't you... you know, actually wait until it's released to call it a failure? And even then wait another few months to see how word of mouth sales go...?

Or longer, perhaps. Crpgs generally, even AAA ones, have notoriously long tails. That's a real problem (discussed by MCA and Cain on many occasions) where they're reliant on a publisher, and it results in insanity like where Troika made a profit on every game, with a mammoth success in the game that sent them under (V:tMB, still selling to this day), but none other than Arcanum made big sales in the first month, closing because they couldn't get a publishing deal (where those same publishers continued to rake in the royalties for a decade after the company went under). You might argue that a large contributor to the crpg decline was publisher sale modelling (i.e. the algorithms they use for calculating the likely total sales of a game using the purchase data gathered from the 1st 3 weeks of release) not accounting for long-sellers, and so drastically under-calculating the life sales of crpgs compared to CoD style shooters.

But with the developer owning their IP, a much lower early figure might be feasible if the game becomes a sleeper hit and provides a steady stream of income over the life of their next project. It's how Vogel made bank during the darkest years of the decline - I recall him releasing the stats at one point, and it was his strong and consistent back catalogue sales that kept him in business.

Kickstarter is a pretty shitty business model from a consumer perspective - give $$$ for a game that doesn't exist, where you're utterly reliant on trusting a developer who doesn't even have a proof of concept and may lack the skills to produce what they're promising, often betting on striking gold on things that can't be mechanically produced just because you have the desire and talent (how can you plan to write another Torment? It needs more than good designs and talent because it isn't systems based and 'competence' isn't sufficient - it needs the kind of spark that a great developer might pull off a couple of times in a career, because they're decent at the rest of the design and just happen to hit creative gold on occasion (Lennon/McCartney aside, how many immensely talented songwriters have ever have been able to say - 'we're going to write a brilliant pop song' and just do it, rather than managing a few brilliant ones scattered amongst a ton of decent-competent songs, despite aiming for brilliance every time?).

The fact that Kickstarter took off in gaming is because the publisher model was so utterly broken that a bunch of profitable markets had been so grossly ignored that masses of fans were willing to risk being ripped off, simply because there was no alternative. If there's one thing that I hope these games will achieve, it's to wake up the publishers to the fact that there are market segments ripe for the milking if they allow even a small portion of their budget to make games aimed specifically at that market, without compromising them for half-way crap that pleases nobody and cannibalises their existing mainstream IP sales. Fuck, if they love Hollywood so much, let them use that as an example. Set up pseudo-indie wholly owned subsidiaries where they can send their young/talented designers to get lead experience, play around with concepts that are too risky for the bigtime, spending a pittance compared to their big-sellers except also letting their 'indie division' borrow their big corporate brothers' distribution, marketing and technology to do more than what a genuine indie can afford (just giving them their engine, plus lending them some programmers and artists who need a break from the mass-production grind so they don't burn out, would be a big bonus). Allow 'special talents' to make risky projects with a free hand, in return for them using their 'prestige' to promote the mother label (like they do with Tarantino today, and with Kubrick in his time - the latter, in particular, even had to be reminded by the studio sometimes that they weren't going to put sales pressure on him, because they knew they'd be using his name to boost the image of their company for decades to come).
 

Kilus

Educated
Joined
Mar 18, 2012
Messages
40
Promote as fallout 1 meets dark souls

Don't promote as AoD as anything to do with Fallout 1(or 2) except as an inspiration. AoD plays and feels very very different to Fallout 1 and selling it as Fallout 1 is only selling disappointment. AoD annoyed me for a long time because it was sold to me as Fallout meets ancient Rome and when I played the demo I really didn't see much that I liked in Fallout in there. AoD has many strengths and should be sold on them and not on incorrect comparisons to Fallout.
 

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
Don't promote as AoD as anything to do with Fallout 1(or 2) except as an inspiration. AoD plays and feels very very different to Fallout 1 and selling it as Fallout 1 is only selling disappointment. AoD annoyed me for a long time because it was sold to me as Fallout meets ancient Rome and when I played the demo I really didn't see much that I liked in Fallout in there. AoD has many strengths and should be sold on them and not on incorrect comparisons to Fallout.
We've never promoted AoD as anything but its own game, very different from what people are used to. I've never said that it's going to be like Fallout in ancient Rome.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
We've never promoted AoD as anything but its own game, very different from what people are used to. I've never said that it's going to be like Fallout in ancient Rome.

The Fallout-cloned UI seen in early screenshots gave people ideas. That and the fact that you're supposed to be a Fallout champion, all the way down to your user name.
 
Self-Ejected

Lurker King

Self-Ejected
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Jan 21, 2015
Messages
1,865,419
For AoD this means: No Kickstarter (a mistake for me).

Had they used the kickstarter, the game would be released years ago with one fourth of its content, one tenth of its polishing and a broken and obscure combat system. It would be a lot of easier for them on a personal level, that is true, but the game would suffer. On the other hand, they should do a Codex Fundraiser now that the game is almost finished. They have nothing to lose, they are entitled to ask for more and the players like to do this kind of stuff.
 
Self-Ejected

Lurker King

Self-Ejected
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Jan 21, 2015
Messages
1,865,419
Development time longer than ten years. Time and resources wasted on a product suffering from terrible design decisions. Whatever purpose developers had in mind, it was certainly NOT the financial profit. Now weeping about poor sale prospects? GOOD! The man had it coming.

The development time and resources on AoD were well spent, and they implement a lot of feedback. Other games came after AoD and took less time, earned more money, but sucked. It is so funny that players talk about games as if they were publishers.

Then point is that AngryKobold is a shithead.

Pay him no mind. Some light buttwounds from retards here and there is good to keep threads alive. The real problem is the deeper resentment from people who hate VD so much that they remain silent about this game when they love to blab about everything else. Is almost as if they made a pact to avoid this game. Or maybe is butthurt caused by the tough design itself. When I start reading the Codex I just assumed that everyone here would love the game. I didn’t know that politics is more important.
 

Kilus

Educated
Joined
Mar 18, 2012
Messages
40
We've never promoted AoD as anything but its own game, very different from what people are used to. I've never said that it's going to be like Fallout in ancient Rome.

Unfortunately you didn't have to, your fans did it for you. And it's not really their fault either, they are passionate and a general thing in game recommendation, both amateur and professional, is to say a new game is X meets Y or is X-like. But the X meets Y form of game recommendation is ultimately flawed and vacuous as fans of X can and quite often do resent any design decisions that differ from X.
 

Elhoim

Iron Tower Studio
Developer
Joined
Oct 27, 2006
Messages
2,878
Location
San Isidro, Argentina
On the other hand, they should do a Codex Fundraiser now that the game is almost finished. They have nothing to lose, they are entitled to ask for more and the players like to do this kind of stuff.

Too late for that, we don't have time to add something new to the game as a reward.
 

AngryKobold

Arcane
Joined
Aug 12, 2012
Messages
534
Unfortunately you didn't have to, your fans did it for you. And it's not really their fault either, they are passionate and a general thing in game recommendation, both amateur and professional, is to say a new game is X meets Y or is X-like. But the X meets Y form of game recommendation is ultimately flawed and vacuous as fans of X can and quite often do resent any design decisions that differ from X.
Or maybe it's just objectively bad idea to use two mutually exclusive gameplay modes: "fallout- like" isometric exploration - text- based CYOA. SURPRISE.
 

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