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Dude lasted what? 6 months?
Dude lasted what? 6 months?
About 3.5 years all told. For about a year I was the only active programmer on the team.
I'm happy they have more resources on PS2 post-PS:A, but I'm sad at how much potential was lost due to lack of resources.
no, that was Drew. Paul got laid off but from talking to him he saw the writing on the wall and was already looking for the exit.
Can confirm. I had just come back from a 2 week vacation to discover that I hated my job and realized nothing was going to change. That and I saw how PS:A's launch was handled and knew I had to move on. A week later we got laid off.
Fortunately I had reached out to David Mendelsohn and am now working with him and Ben Jones at ZeniMax Online. Drew Matte works here too, though he is on a different project.
Can you give us the REAL tale of PS:A’s development?
We all have our theories of mismanagement, but what actually happened?
Near as I can tell it was pretty much what I said in my tweet:
game designs were dictated from on high and we were forced to work on a BR clone that had literally zero marketing.
It was never a dialogue. It was always "we're doing Feature X now" despite there being significant dissent from the team.
As an illustration of the mentality we were dealing with: After the second round of layoffs we asked them what they learned from H1Z1 and the answer from Ji was something to the effect of "If we have a BattlePass at $10 players won't spend more than that". Like that's what he learned. Nothing about Production structure, feature targeting, contracting external companies, communication, or understanding what players want/need... it was "our battlepass had too much value".
You think some day we will understand how much money it actually takes to run this game? I have spent thousands of dollars and I realize that it barely funds a coder for a week or two.
Live games die when they can't cover their overhead. So many companies will shortsightedly have small or skeleton teams to maintain the game while still trying to develop new features to grow or at least attenuate player loss. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy since they will never invest in a team that will actually grow the game . At least that's been my experience with Garena / Heroes of Newerth and Daybreak / PlanetSide 2.
PlanetSide 2 was UNCONTESTED in it's market. It's a F2P PVP FPS with Massive Scale. No one else does it. The game's potential is so high. I wish the current team the best of luck, but they're playing against a stacked deck until they can get a publisher to actually fund them.