F2P Command and Conquer Cancelled, Victory Disbanded
polycounter lvl 17
Studio closure article:
www.develop-online.net/news/ea-disbands-victory-studios/0185185
And this is what they had to say to the Alpha testers:
www.develop-online.net/news/ea-disbands-victory-studios/0185185
And this is what they had to say to the Alpha testers:
Generals,
Thank you for your participation over the last few months in the Command & Conquer closed alpha test. Its been much appreciated, and youve been instrumental in helping define what a new Command & Conquer experience should and shouldnt be.
Part of being in a creative team is the understanding that not all of your choices are going to work out. In this case, we shifted the game away from campaign mode and built an economy-based, multiplayer experience. Your feedback from the alpha trial is clear: We are not making the game you want to play. That is why, after much difficult deliberation, we have decided to cease production of this version of the game. Although we deeply respect the great work done by our talented team, ultimately its about getting you the game you expect and deserve.
Over the next 10 days we will be refunding any and all money spent in the alpha. If you have a question about your refund, please contact help.ea.com.
We believe that Command & Conquer is a powerful franchise with huge potential and a great history, and we are determined to get the best game made as soon as possible. To that end, we have already begun looking at a number of alternatives to get the game back on track. We look forward to sharing more news about the franchise as it develops. Thank you again for your participation and support.
- Victory Studios
Replies
I don't think free 2 play works with rts I hope everyone finds work soon some great artists there
Ah the fans, always there to let you know how unappreciated you are.
EA... sigh
It has nothing to do with Victory they got caught in the crossfire but that happens when funded by EA. I hope everyone lands on their feet and wish the game was cancelled long ago and EA left Victory alone, this is what EA does they walk in buy a studio and shut it down after EA makes a terrible business decision. They have been doing it for years.
You really think anyone would be happy for other people loosing jobs? You think I'm without empathy ? Why would you think that about anyone on this forum we are all of the same
It sucks that EA doesn't look at the fact that their biggest bread winners are f2p games and give the devs a chance to actually respond to feedback from the Alpha test. The Beta & Alpha as demo mentality has to end.
The game looked sweet..I think they were using Frostbyte 2 for it as well..Good luck to anyone who got their walking papers...you've got ome sweet assets to show off in your portfolio now
Now, anyone have any studio openings they can mention to help these people out?
I'm not taking it that personally, I just get peeved when people use a layoff thread to throw out barbs.
Yes, we have job openings at Kingsisle. If you guys worked at the Bioware Austin office which has pretty much turned into EA Austin, we're the building right next door.
They were handed boxes and locked out of the system simultaneously, so nobody at the entire studio has anything to show employers for the past 2+ years of work.
Fuckin' AAA man. That shit is bonkers.
Why wouldn't it work, I could write up a few designs. How about cosmetic shop & purchasable factions. "constantly adding new factions to the game would take a lot of time to develop and balance" you say? Yes, that's f2p, you are constantly in development. It's a service, not a ship & forget product.
really? whenever i finish an asset i always take pictures of it before i move onto the next one just incase something like this happens.
sucks that EA wont let them take any pictures.
This happened at Victory ?
I communicated with him through text message (yes, at Victory), and it sounds like that's what they did. Nobody got screens or video captures of any of their work.
They locked them all out as soon as they could.
They purposefully prevent you from saving work, art, or screenshots etc of any kind and taking it home.
RTS as free to play doesnt work, im part of that RTS community and I can tell you all it does is Pay 2 Win , and no one wants any part of it. I think if this game stayed a normal purchase it would have been very successful if they just sold it as generals 2. Again the reason i was happy is because I want EA to fail, I believe they are a major blight on the industry.
That is awful that they lock people out, how are they suppose to get a job and show work ?
So about 10,000 jobs gone? EA has a PR problem with gamers, they are no more or less evil than the other publishers. I've bumped into former Redstorm devs that didn't have kind words for Ubisoft. If you really want the collapse of all publishers as "evil" as EA the industry would be in shambles.
I'm sorry your taking this so defensively but i really cant explain it much better. It has nothing to do with morality it has to do with business practices and i think alot of the mega corporations are doing more harm to our industry then good. Does that mean they are evil of course not but this F2P is a prime example, i bet none of the CEO or head management who made the choice to go F2P got laid off
I'm done with this conversation, I'm mad enough to punch a cute bunny in the face
The trend so far is nobody takes their place, power is just consolidated resulting in less competition. I think your tune will change once you get some development experience under your belt.
I dont know if your trolling Justin or have no clue how game development works.
10,000k is a lot of jobs.
You're not the first person I've had this conversation with, nor the first to make these suggestions
These aren't good approaches and I'll explain why;
Shape recognition is important in almost any game - it's why character artists spend so long concentrating on the silhouettes of various characters. In a real time strategy game like Command and Conquer, shape recognition is even more important to the player as they need to rapidly ascertain which units are where, and in what kinds of quantity - ergo identifying threats or desirable targets, which may be spread across a fairly broad area requiring the camera to travel great distances and not giving much time to linger and observe. Due to the scale of the game, many of these objects will be numerous, fairly varied and will only occupy a very small proportion of the screen - if you allow players to alter the visible makeup of these objects, you're damaging player's ability to make informed decisions whilst playing the game. If we're talking just minor texture changes, you're going to have a hard time selling these to players, because most of the time it's not going to be very visible after you've applied team overlay colours anyway.
Adding new factions also does not work. It is expensive, but the real cusp of the issue is that people won't buy them in a large enough quantities to justify the expense. Most players will settle with a given RTS faction or two and stick with it when playing online - there's no reason for them to invest in the others because they've already got what they want to play the game with. In some cases, like in Age of Empires: Online, the $20 barrier to entry for each faction caused resentment, as access to the entire game quickly ran up into the hundreds of dollars, and gave far less content than was previously available in a normal retail $60 game. The argument that you only need to buy the factions you want doesn't hold water; if people wanted to play with them before, just on a whim every so often rather than regularly, previously they could.
Free to play games are somewhat more expensive to develop and far more expensive to maintain than 'premium games'. Server and infrastructure costs can run into the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, annually (a reasonable estimate I've been given is to assume $1 per player per month to run your infrastructure). The data you track with regard to the game itself requires statistical analysis and understanding it requires good knowledge of player psychology. 'MMOG' Database programmers, Analysts and Market Spend Psychologists are the three most expensive people you can be paying for.
An RTS like C&C does not have anything in it's archetype that you can monetise that gives enough of an incentive to get people to buy it. Generals: Zero Hour had three factions with four different variations and had a $30 RRP. If you were to take the same approach with Generals 2, you were unlikely to sell more than one or two Generals to each player as a best case scenario. Pricing them at $5 a piece makes the product twice as expensive for the player as before and probably doesn't include all the features of the previous nor the singl eplayer campaigns and challenge modes (cue resentment). Getting each player to spend $10 means you can only afford to run your game for 10 months before you run out of money (and you never recouped your development costs). Whole factions for maybe $20 introduces even more development costs, and if one in every twenty players buys it, you're only getting one month of server running costs out of it. Both scenarios are a financial disaster.
What can you incentivise to get players to buy things? The answer is clearly where Victory were going. In-game currency, which must be exchanged to obtain in-game goods, which must have a gameplay value. In an RTS, you're now heading firmly down the route of 'Pay-for-Advantage' (cost is time or money), and whilst you can get away with it in a shooter or MOBA, that was never going to end well for a strategy game.
I strongly think that we should be able to critize and express our opinions about games and buisniess models on this forum without being afraid of offending someone.
i can honestly say that i didnt want transformers 2 to be successfull or even exist, and im sure there was tons of jobs tied up to that movie. we will make this forum kind of pointless if you only can express hype over games and studios and not what you dislike about them or what you think they are doing wrong. no meaningfull discussion can come from trying to get along with everybody.
+1. If you are not Valve, you are not able to pull off viable F2P model for RTS game.
Valve would open Workshop, allow players to make custom skins for units, and make unimaginable amounts of money on that.
Although I've been looking for it I can't say whther it would be good or not. There are so few good RTS nowdays that I would at least give it a try ;p.
If everyone could support the Victory developers rather than using this thread to criticize all of their hard work.
I can't criticize their work, because I didn't get to see it. I can criticize what is publicly known about their monetisation approach however.
If you think my analysis is wrong, then I'd love to hear why. I've approached this kind of genre in the F2P space before, and deliberately not taken that route for reasons that are included above. Any magic bullets would certainly be welcome.
holy fucking LOL at wanting ea to be gone. I always hear that shit from people who have no actual game dev experience or know how most studios work. guess what, most studios operate pretty much the exact same as EA on most levels and having worked at about 6 different studios, including EA montreal, I can say that EA is usually more organized and have their shit together far better than the little startups ive worked at. most people who have worked at EA vancouver/montreal thought it was one of the better studios they worked at.
why is polycount slowly becoming the comments section of kotaku with people with zero industry experience spouting off on things they know nothing about?
Didn't follow the game too much, but atleast the art seems to look quite awesome to me, so it's a shame atleast from art-perspective....
PixelMasher,
I think with such comments, people tend to complain because of the way publishers sometimes treat their customers. I can't say i sometimes strongly disagree with them either.
Like, putting very important parts of the game into day 1 DLC, or making DRM that limits you how many times you can install game and such. You don't have to be in this industry, to hate that kind of attitude with good reason.
Like, CD project just announced that witcher 3 will not use any form of DRM, and they are doing their best to make sure everyone understands that.
So, at the end, it's just that some companies give you impression that they value their customer, and some don't really give that impression. Of course that's very subjective, and i'm not really going to debate here which is right or wrong here.
But, it's to be expected difference in how players sees you, if you say "look, i see, you players don't like DRM, we'll see what we can do about it (like CD project here), or "look, we have problem with piracy, so we need drm, either take it or leave it".
I mean, to the later, of course people will rebel.
It's still a long way to say that EA should die or any such publisher, since we would all benefit if they would exist, but if some people don't like publisher for their behaviour like some of the example i gave, i don't personally see something wrong with voicing their negative oppinion about it.
Though, it is true that this kind of threads really isn't the best place to talk about these things, as some suggested, it would probably be better to make separate topic for it....
Worked at EA in Burnaby for a bit was one of the best experiences i have had in game dev.
I hope the guys working on this project can get new jobs as well, I'm sure with their skill level it shouldn't be too hard to get more work but it still sucks.
Personally I'm going to go ahead and blame the fans on this one. There are too many people with the "F2P SUCKS ASS LULZ" mentality that will not compromise with devs. These same people don't understand the difficulty of developing a AAA project and they sure as hell don't understand the benefits of F2P on the development side of things.
Oh well, what can you do I suppose.
EA wanna be the next Riot and no matter how good this game could have been, it still wouldn't have pulled in the same figures has LoL.
Hope something comes out of this project in the end. Going by the tone of announcement it looks like they're looking for ways to ressurrect this project or the c&c brand in some way.
Something to consider is the dollar value of not having 2+ years of work in your portfolio. If it adds six months to your next job search, let's say $30,000 - $50,000? I would definitely bring it up in a contract negotiation.
Yes they retain all the rights. I Have a lot of friends who have left Rockstar and have nothing to show publicly because they won't allow you. Concept Artists, Characters Artists, everything. I know some studios that won't even allow you to plug in a USB flash drive. Also, f2p is the way of the future. It is never going away. Ever ever ever. We should just accept it and find good balances that doesn't seem scummy and keeps fans happy. So my hats off to you, dudes. Your art looked really good. It's a shame.
Furthermore a NDA breech of contract can be grounds for instant termination and litigation which is the reason a lot of artist refrain from backing their stuff up, even though they should.
This is true but unfortunately very very time consuming, when you compare how productive you are with 40 hours a week of focused work with the 9hrs a week you probably have free to make game art for your portfolio. It can easily take 2 months or more to do something that at work only takes 3 weeks.