Evolve Dev: "I Don't Like People Thinking We're Doing Dirty, Underhanded S***"

elvor0

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Jadak said:
If that is not happening, then shut the fuck up, voice your opinion on the value of their offerings with your wallet.
And what's wrong with voicing your opinion....with your voice? Just not buying a game doesn't exactly communicate /why/ you're not buying it does it? It's called feedback.
 

Nazulu

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Jun 5, 2008
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bdcjacko said:
Jandau said:
bdcjacko said:
How dare anyone put a price on luxury goods. They should be given away for free.
How dare people disagree with pricing of luxury goods and voice their disagreement on a public forum intended for voicing opinions regarding said luxury goods. They should just shut up and pay, season pass and preorder both...
I never said you should just buy it. I am saying don't yell at the sun for rising.
It's not some unchangeable force. It's dick-heads doing dick-headed things. That's all there is to it.
 

Jandau

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Dec 19, 2008
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bdcjacko said:
Jandau said:
bdcjacko said:
How dare anyone put a price on luxury goods. They should be given away for free.
How dare people disagree with pricing of luxury goods and voice their disagreement on a public forum intended for voicing opinions regarding said luxury goods. They should just shut up and pay, season pass and preorder both...
I never said you should just buy it. I am saying don't yell at the sun for rising.
And that's something I disagree with. Voicing opinions is important here, because if enough people object to something, it tends to get changed simply to avoid a PR nightmare. This has happened a number of times, particularly over the past few years.

Next, the argument that we shouldn't object to a business practice because it's the "norm" is also silly - the only reason it became the norm is because people didn't object enough when it was first introduced. And it has zero chances of changing for the better if everyone silently accepts it.

Finally, I don't see why people shouldn't discuss it. It's a game. It's being discussed on a gaming forum. People aren't happy about some aspect of the game and are voicing their opinion. Sure, vote with your wallet, but just because you do that doesn't mean you can't do anything else. And if you object to people talking about video games, you sure did pick the wrong forum... ;)
 

L. Declis

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bdcjacko said:
Jandau said:
bdcjacko said:
How dare anyone put a price on luxury goods. They should be given away for free.
How dare people disagree with pricing of luxury goods and voice their disagreement on a public forum intended for voicing opinions regarding said luxury goods. They should just shut up and pay, season pass and preorder both...
I never said you should just buy it. I am saying don't yell at the sun for rising.
Yelling at the sun, as you put it, changed Xbone's entire online debacle.

Yelling at the sun, as you put it, took down SOPA and PIPA.

Yelling at the sun, as you put it, has brought many dead franchises back to life.

It seems to work.
 

Prankman

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Kajin said:
That right there confirms every single one of the suspicions I've had, in that all of this is outrage is the direct result of horribly mismanaged marketing. Thanks, Prankman. I doubt anyone else here will listen to you, but thanks.
Whatever bonehead at 2K thought it was a good idea to announce pre-order DLC before any game footage was released needs to be "released" from their job.

In all honesty, and I know people will disagree with me on this, I don't mind if DLC is pre-planned. Its good to have a plan in place to keep your product/service/whatever afloat for the long term, and the devs clearly want to keep Evolve alive for an extended period rather than pushing out a sequel in a year's time. And with so many possibilities for big, destructive aliens and cool hunters with unique gear, it goes without saying that ideas will have to be left out of the final product and revisited.

Does everybody remember Pokemon Gold and Silver? You know, the supposed peak of the franchise to many? A huge chunk of the Pokemon in GSC were already around, and were cut from Red/Blue/Yellow for time. That's why the Pokemon anime had so many Johto mons running around, like Togepi, and Donphan, and even Ho-Oh in the very first episode! They all already existed. That's also why 2nd Gen was so remarkably similar to 1st Gen, and the only entire generation of Pokemon built on the same engine as its predecessor. A lot of the Johto stuff was already around, they just needed to redesign the region layout, fill up the remaining roster slots with a few truly new Mons, and there you go.

Now, GSC definitely had a lot of work put into it, and earned its place as one of the best games in the franchise. The improvements made to the system, as well as the re-balancing of types helped mold Pokemon into the competitive juggernaut is today. My point is less to make a direct comparison between Evolve and Pokemon (heh...evolving Pokemon), and more to make the point that it is absolutely nothing new for ideas in video games to be removed from the game (sometimes even in very late stages) and then re-used later on, either in a sequel, in an update, or whatever. This isn't some new, scummy practice that's only started with the emergence of the "big, bad DLC, ooooo", this is something that's been around for years, since the industry's infancy.

So, let's look at the options they've got. They could either not add any more characters at all, which will allow the game to eventually stagnate, and the time gone into previously concepted characters goes to waste. They could release those characters for free, and then risk losing their budget really quickly because new copies will no longer be able to sustain the cost of creating brand new content. This isn't a run of the mill shooter, its a very niche genre that isn't going to appeal to as wide of an audience as something like Call of Duty, and creating and balancing new characters in a competitive PvP environment is tough work even before factoring in the asymmetrical nature of the game. The last option they really have is to charge for the characters to ensure that that they get a return back on their new content.

I'd imagine that they settled on the latter fairly early on, realistically recognizing that they could not feasibly work in every single idea that they had into the base game, and somebody at 2K decided to market this aspect first and foremost, before anything else was even ready for public view.

I will admit, its a lot of conjecture on my part, assuming that TRS is as fair as they claim to be, and that my assumptions about the process of planning DLC is anywhere near how it actually happens. I could be wrong. I am only saying that it need not be automatically a scenario of "us poor, downtrodden gamers versus " theman", yo". Its more complicated than that.

...All of that being said, even factoring out the terribad marketing, the prices are too steep. Like, way too steep. I would've expected $5 for a Hunter and $10 for a Monster, maximum. I will not try and defend the pricing, only the model itself. Their DLC model is fine, and will prevent a community split, which is great, because it means nobody will be forced to buy the really overpriced characters until they go on sale. It's not quite as bad as Activision trying to sell Fall of Cybertron skin packs for $10* (pretty much all of which were skins pre-existing in the single player game, no less!), but its still way too high.

*No hate towards that awesome game, or towards its awesome devs, High Moon Studios, R.I.P.. Damn Activision liquidations...
 

hermes

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I can understand the disheartening of the developers in terms to public reaction, but it sounds insincere. If they claim to be so in favor of only using the best practices of DLC, they should not have promoted it as some of the worst practices of DLC, i.e.: selling it as preorders for a game that is not even out, and making mutually exclusive editions to be retailer exclusives...
 

MrJoyless

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"There are way too many ideas we cannot fit into the box, Budget-wise, time-wise, there's too much cool shit for us to leave it laying there and never do anything with it. But we wanted to be good about it as consumers."

Is that why your DLC was being sold before you even announced the goddamn game?
 

sniddy_v1legacy

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I think that's the thing you can be either F2P with all the DLC in the land

OR

You can be retail and any DLC best be adding a LOT of content and not been snipped off at the start to sell to me later
 

Fursnake

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Meh, I was moderately interested in Evolve, but now I am not interested enough to spend money on it. Played the betas a bit and there just wasn't enough game there for me the price. Add to that the Day 1 DLC and I will just spend my gaming money elsewhere.
 

Evil Smurf

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Boo hoo, corporate drone just wants to be loved.

The free market has chosen, and it's not chosen you!
 

KingDragonlord

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sniddy said:
I think that's the thing you can be either F2P with all the DLC in the land

OR

You can be retail and any DLC best be adding a LOT of content and not been snipped off at the start to sell to me later
I don't even understand how the two are comparable. Play an F2P and either get a hollow toothgrinding experience or spend with no upper limit

VS

Buying a game for a one time transaction and then you have a complete game thats not designed around getting you to buy potions with real cash. And if you like the game you can buy the expansions for one time transactions and get more of the game you like.

F2P is pure bilking. Why does it get a free pass so often when DLC gets so much heat when its clearly superior?
 

Ohlookit'sMatty

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Dear fellow ESCAPISTS COMMENTERS, I am a normal human male gamer "Go local Sports Team" and I think this PHIL ROBB is trustworthy with his words on the subject of DLC. We should all believe him and ask no further questions on the subject.

Now let us all go down to GAMESTOP and preorder ***Insert Game Name Here***.

-notaBOT2000
 

Asuka Soryu

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After all the years of DLC abuse and content locked on the disc with the key to said content being the DLC, how is it shocking that the name of 'DLC' is ruined?
 

Signa

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Every time I read the title of this article/thread, I just think "Obviously you don't want people thinking about it!" That says nothing about whether they are doing shady shit, they just don't want people thinking they are. DOUBLE SHADY!
 

AstaresPanda

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Nov 5, 2009
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Just they were talking about DLC and pre-orders a year ago and the game is still not out. Game gets delayed and we have MORE DLC. So yeh if the glove fits....
And this entire building it for DLC crap well thats crap i dont remember any game being built for support expansion packs, tell me that DLC they had planned for like a year now being skins and monsters is taking longer then that time to be complete and cant be added into the base game ? No matter how they try to spin it thats what it is.
 

Britisheagle

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Probably doesn't help with CD Projekt Red announcing that DLC should be free for consumers who have paid full price for a game...

Also, this is a company that offered pre-order material before we had even seen any of the actual game. Then they locked out one of the monsters as pre-order only. The whole company is dirty and, much like Watch_Dogs, I straight out refuse to pre-order a damn game that requires the use of a spreadsheet to understand what I am getting.

Hopefully it'll bomb and then we, the average consumers who perhaps does not have loads of disposable income, can pick up the "Ultimate" or "GoTY" edition bundled with all DLC later on down the line.
 

AstaresPanda

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Britisheagle said:
Probably doesn't help with CD Projekt Red announcing that DLC should be free for consumers who have paid full price for a game...
well most of the content is cosmetic or maps and thats the kinda stuff i remember getting for free. But these days
 

Prankman

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Britisheagle said:
Probably doesn't help with CD Projekt Red announcing that DLC should be free for consumers who have paid full price for a game...

Also, this is a company that offered pre-order material before we had even seen any of the actual game. Then they locked out one of the monsters as pre-order only. The whole company is dirty and, much like Watch_Dogs, I straight out refuse to pre-order a damn game that requires the use of a spreadsheet to understand what I am getting.

Hopefully it'll bomb and then we, the average consumers who perhaps does not have loads of disposable income, can pick up the "Ultimate" or "GoTY" edition bundled with all DLC later on down the line.
The fourth Monster is not "locked out", it's incomplete and being released at the same time for everybody post-launch. Those who preordered get it for free, those who didn't pay.

The digital deluxe is the base game bundled with the hunter season pass, and the PC Monster Race includes all of that, two more hunters and a fifth Monster, essentially covering all of the currently planned DLC.

Not sure what's confusing about that. None of the stuff is done yet, all you're getting past the base game is passes for upcoming DLC early.
 

Geekeric

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It reminds me of Company of Heroes 1 and 2. The first one was a great game and when the new expansions came out, I had no problem wanting to buy them. When I boot up the second one, the main home screen is an ad for the latest DLC I haven't bought yet. Why are games just turning into a big commercial? I think I started playing video games to get away from that TV advertising shit. The truth is, every good thing in life will be ruined by jerks just trying to make a buck. The thing gamers need to do is make a big public stink about developers and publishers doing greedy shit you don't like, and for God's sake, don't buy their games!
 

JennAnge

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"Job opportunity in video game development. Game studio looking for a sharp and game-savvy individual to manage their public relations. Must have a good understanding of current game trends and market. Will be in charge of marketing packages, website and communications. Position currently unoccupied, start time is immediate. Contact Turtle Rock Game Studios with CV via email with subject "Oh god you need help". Only potential candidates for interviews will be contacted."


So gaming is their business - and their hobby and passion too, according to them, but unless they want to eat love and pay their employees in funtime, it is a business which exists alongside other business in a market.

They are, according to this article, aware that DLC has, many times, been used by other companies as 'dirty underhanded shit' tactics.

What do they do? They talk about the DLC they're going to release before the game is even out, yada yada.

I quickly checked their website, and didn't see anything that looked outrageous in what they offered, so fair enough, but they have to be aware that it SOUNDS close enough to the 'dirty underhand shit' practices that other companies have used.

Gamers, burned by past experiences, grouse. Through the magic of the internet soundbox (as anyone in PR these days would know), the grousing sounds like mobs with pitchforks, though most people are just annoyed that they can't just get a single game upfront anymore, and DLC only mentioned a few months down the line when it's actually wanted.

Company is amazed that their DLC could possibly be viewed in the same negative light that other dirty underhanded shit DLC has earned. They take the time to detail why their DLC is different...while chastising their future consumers for their 'knee-jerk, disheartening response' that made the dev feel very disappointed in us all, and so probably are our mums.

Gamers react negatively to being hectored.

Company will probably continue to be amazed...