[QUOTE=The Vman;48487834]I've got an inside source at Uber and this is pretty much the situation. They didn't release PA with all the features they wanted, and Titans is a chance to try to give PA new life. Right now PA's review scores are based largely off of how it was at launch, and they've made a boatload of updates since. With Titans being a standalone release they hope they can get fresh reviews that take into account all the new features they've been adding over the past year. That's why they're also closing sales on the original PA, because they acknowledge that it wasn't the product it should have been, and Titans is what PA was meant to be.
As for charging for it, the other problem Uber's faced with is that they are running out of money, and Titans is pretty much their last chance to save the company.[/QUOTE]
It's that bad over at Uber? Jesus
[QUOTE=joshuadim;48487900]It's that bad over at Uber? Jesus[/QUOTE]
I mean, if you've enjoyed their games since MNC, it shouldn't look good for them. MNC was a ton of fun but it felt like it was thrown out there and left as is. SMNC was jumping on the "MOBA" train and trying to monetize something that people didn't want monetized, just better supported. Then support went away for SMNC. I know people were pissed about it, I was feeling a little jipped because this series I enjoyed was getting tossed into the trash bin. They weren't making money, but as a player I don't like it. Then PA comes out and basically the only thing I've heard about it since it hit early access and when it hit 1.0 was that it was missing a lot of things. I've almost bought it like three times because it was so cheap but then I'd get dissuaded by the reviews. While PA was floundering they tried another Kickstarter and it [I]tanked[/I] because, at this point, Uber doesn't look like a company that can be trusted.
This is how the game should have launched, and now they want more money for it? Fuck off.
[QUOTE=Furnost;48486704]so just, what now? are these two PAs gonna be different versions that are unplayable with each, and you cant even fucking buy the old one anymore? gee thanks for wanting to kill the online of the PA that i bought, thats real thoughtful of you.[/QUOTE]
There is an option in TITANS to switch between it and Classic.
[QUOTE=Mislum;48488005]There is an option in TITANS to switch between it and Classic.[/QUOTE]
why would you ever bother to switch back?
What awful way to treat existing customers, PA was a crime to be released with the quality of content it had and how buggy the game was in general. Even when I play it now I still feel it is a pile of horseshit. They have just re-badged a shit product in the hopes of jipping more people off.
[QUOTE=Jonathan1321;48488084]What awful way to treat existing customers, PA was a crime to be released with the quality of content it had and how buggy the game was in general. Even when I play it now I still feel it is a pile of horseshit. They have just re-badged a shit product in the hopes of jipping more people off.[/QUOTE]
I love the slap in the face that the 66% off they give to people who already own the game too.
[QUOTE=Naught;48488058]why would you ever bother to switch back?[/QUOTE]
To play with people who doesn't own or wants to buy TITANS I guess?
[QUOTE=duckmaster;48488116]I love the slap in the face that the 66% off they give to people who already own the game too.[/QUOTE]
The best part is it's not even the difference between the normal price of the "old" game and TITANS ($10)
[QUOTE=Jonathan1321;48488084]What awful way to treat existing customers, PA was a crime to be released with the quality of content it had and how buggy the game was in general. Even when I play it now I still feel it is a pile of horseshit. They have just re-badged a shit product in the hopes of jipping more people off.[/QUOTE]
"waaaah where's the game i kickstarted"
"here it is it's not done yet guys"
"whY THE FUCK IS IT SO BAD I'M LEAVING A NEGATIVE REVIEW"
"guys please it's unfinished and you asked for it"
then game reviewers say "it's so bad and you shouldn't buy it"
"guys please it's unfinished"
this was realistically their only way to save PA as a franchise
and seeing how it's their only game (and according to above, their last shot), companies are not generally in the business of going out of business
You can say that this "should have been in the base game" but really they did what they could with the budget they had. They failed to meet people's expectations but what are they supposed to do at this point? Develop things for free and bankrupt their company? PA wasn't all that successful, and Human Resources didn't get the funding, so they're not exactly rolling in cash.
And they're giving it for free to backers, which is pretty fair. I guess you kinda get the short end of the stick if you bought it during alpha though.
As someone who hasn't played PA but thought it looked fun and considered buying it, what does Titans add that wasn't in the base game? I didn't really follow the game much after it came out.
[QUOTE=GHOST!!!!;48486698]Turns I already have it, I went onto the store expecting to have to buy it but I instead was greeted with being able to straight up download it.[/QUOTE]
How do you buy a $40 game and forget about it?
[editline]18th August 2015[/editline]
Oh wait, I'm dumb.
i havent even got my kickstarter physical stuff yet
[QUOTE=Kljunas;48488381]You can say that this "should have been in the base game" but really they did what they could with the budget they had. They failed to meet people's expectations but what are they supposed to do at this point? Develop things for free and bankrupt their company? PA wasn't all that successful, and Human Resources didn't get the funding, so they're not exactly rolling in cash.
And they're giving it for free to backers, which is pretty fair. I guess you kinda get the short end of the stick if you bought it during alpha though.[/QUOTE]
Let me get this straight, the game was going to be even worse then if it had only reached it's original goal of 900,000?
jesus
[QUOTE=DONUT KING;48488681]As someone who hasn't played PA but thought it looked fun and considered buying it, what does Titans add that wasn't in the base game? I didn't really follow the game much after it came out.[/QUOTE]
Its more of dealing with Late game situations. Most of the time during late games, especially with multiple planets, it slowly turns into a grind into trying to get onto other planets. But with this update, it basically fixes that problems with Mega units or "experimentals", or in their terms, titans. They are basically created for end game use.
Also cool features, we now have space ships and satellites that can actually fire a laser and produce a portal onto the planet's surface, so you can literally attack with a death laser. And have ships fire each other in orbit. So in other words, this expansion is literally a breath of fresh air, and they have done a lot to improve the game.
[QUOTE=Te Great Skeeve;48489301]Let me get this straight, the game was going to be even worse then if it had only reached it's original goal of 900,000?
jesus[/QUOTE]
Well duh, with less money they wouldn't have been able to do as much work.
A lot of kickstarters have goals that are a bit under-budget. The idea is that if you meet that goal, you'll be able to create the bare minimum of the game possible. Since kickstarter only gives you money if you meet your goal, it makes sense to set the goal lower to ensure you get the money, rather than set too high of a goal and come up short. A lot of kickstarters rely more on money they make past the goal, with stretch goals and such, in order to build the game they want to make.
It's pretty clear that even with the huge amount of money PA raked in from it's kickstarter, it still wasn't enough to build the game they wanted to make in the time they had to make it. Believe it or not, 2.2 million dollars is not a massive budget for a video game nowadays.
[QUOTE=The Vman;48489379]... It's pretty clear that even with the huge amount of money PA raked in from it's kickstarter, it still wasn't enough to build the game they wanted to make in the time they had to make it. Believe it or not, 2.2 million dollars is not a massive budget for a video game nowadays.[/QUOTE]
Plus, it'd be more like 70%-80% of that went directly to the game. They've got bills just like the rest of us.
[QUOTE=The Vman;48489379]Well duh, with less money they wouldn't have been able to do as much work.
A lot of kickstarters have goals that are a bit under-budget. The idea is that if you meet that goal, you'll be able to create the bare minimum of the game possible. Since kickstarter only gives you money if you meet your goal, it makes sense to set the goal lower to ensure you get the money, rather than set too high of a goal and come up short. A lot of kickstarters rely more on money they make past the goal, with stretch goals and such, in order to build the game they want to make.
It's pretty clear that even with the huge amount of money PA raked in from it's kickstarter, it still wasn't enough to build the game they wanted to make in the time they had to make it. Believe it or not, 2.2 million dollars is not a massive budget for a video game nowadays.[/QUOTE]
At least with titans they can reboot PA and have all the features they've wanted in the first place I assume
God dammit, I spent so long defending them and their actions. Please, Uber, don't make a mistake that can't be defended...
Somebody's started a petition for them to give the "expansion" to everybody who owned the game for free: [url]https://www.change.org/p/uber-entertainment-planetary-annihilation-titans-stop-making-us-pay-for-what-we-already-paid-for[/url]
Honestly they've made a lot of bad business decisions over the years, this is one of them.
People are only ever going to see this as a spit in the face.
How does PA today compare to the when it first came out? I backed it on Kickstarter (lower tiers) and was pretty disgusted with it when it came out; it felt like a shitty knockoff of SupCom with no soul behind it.
I remember when this game was something like 90$ at its cheapest when it first came to early access. The concept looked good, but not that amount of money. After a long time it was either dirt cheap in a steam sale, or tacked onto a humble bundle, I am still yet to play it (as no one I know has it, and AI is usually poorly done).
[QUOTE=Bradyns;48493155]I remember when this game was something like 90$ at its cheapest when it first came to early access. The concept looked good, but not that amount of money. After a long time it was either dirt cheap in a steam sale, or tacked onto a humble bundle, I am still yet to play it (as no one I know has it, and AI is usually poorly done).[/QUOTE]
I don't know about you but the AI is pretty brutal sometimes.
[editline]19th August 2015[/editline]
[QUOTE=Saber15;48493072]How does PA today compare to the when it first came out? I backed it on Kickstarter (lower tiers) and was pretty disgusted with it when it came out; it felt like a shitty knockoff of SupCom with no soul behind it.[/QUOTE]
So far, they basically have everything now that they promised, but the problem was it came out too early. If Titans was added when the game fully released, it would've had a larger score with the community.
[QUOTE=Kljunas;48488381]You can say that this "should have been in the base game" but really they did what they could with the budget they had. They failed to meet people's expectations but what are they supposed to do at this point? Develop things for free and bankrupt their company? PA wasn't all that successful, and Human Resources didn't get the funding, so they're not exactly rolling in cash.
And they're giving it for free to backers, which is pretty fair. I guess you kinda get the short end of the stick if you bought it during alpha though.[/QUOTE]
They should have made it free for those that paid $90 in EA too. Can't be that many people and they probably would have gotten at least marginally better PR because of it.
Having followed the development of the game it was very obvious when they ran out of money. They launched into EA much earlier than they wanted because they had used up their KS funds (developing games is expensive, who'd have thought?). They had the choice between pissing of backers (making the EA version cheaper than the equivalent reward tier from their KS) and pissing of non-backers (making the EA version cost $90). They decided to not piss off their backers.
A few months later the sales of the EA version slowed down and they ran out of money again. I'm 99% sure they realized that a lot of features they promised were still missing (like offline mode), but they probably couldn't afford paying their own developers anymore so they had to fix what they could and release """1.0""".
That apparently got them reasonable sales again and they could afford paying some of their developers again. They got right on adding the features they promised in the Kickstarter (like offline mode, the unit cannon, water worlds, etc...), but the community was already pretty pissed about them releasing 1.0 without these features.
At the same time they had to reduce the number of developers in the PA team because most of the work was done (adding a few units and offline mode is not comparable to building the whole game from scratch) and in order to keep these developers they had to find a new project for them. That's how the Human Resources KS was born. As we all know the Kickstarter failed and they had to let a bunch of employees go, but continued working on the missing features to actually deliver what they promised in the KS.
A few weeks ago Jon Mavor [url=https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts/posts/1317661?ref=backer_project_update]addressed the community[/url] and basically told them that he considers the game to be in a state where they delivered what the promised in the Kickstarter. In the background they secretly worked on PA: Titans, but sales were slowing down again ([url]http://steamspy.com/app/233250[/url]) and they knew they couldn't afford continued development much further. So they decided to sell the expansion as a new game to 1. get some more money and 2. get rid of all the review left from the botched """1.0""" launch.
i'd like to point out this little number
[img]http://i.imgur.com/P6swInR.png[/img]
[QUOTE=LordCrypto;48494418]i'd like to point out this little number
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/P6swInR.png[/IMG][/QUOTE]
you can still buy Wings of Liberty though.
actually nevermind, considering people who get Titans can switch to classic mode, so people with only the original game aren't completely cut off.
[QUOTE=Oblivion Knight;48494656]you can still buy Wings of Liberty though.
actually nevermind, considering people who get Titans can switch to classic mode, so people with only the original game aren't completely cut off.[/QUOTE]
that's the point
bitching about the price is pointless, because all the SC2 expansions are 40 dollars at launch
and titans can play with OG PA
Having to pay an extra $15 for experimental units is bullshit. It's sad to hear that the developers are strapped for cash, but that doesn't make this okay.
This game is supposed to be a spiritual successor to TA and Supreme Commander. How could they think its a good idea to put experimentals behind a paywall? Experimentals are game enders. They are what you use at the end of the game to finally crack through the other turtle's shell. They are super units meant to have as much destructive power as a nuke.
To sell experimentals separately from the original game is like to sell the queen separately from the original chess-piece set.
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