this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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For OP or others wondering about context:
It requires a surprising amount of digging to really try and figure out what started all this, but from my rudimentary research, it seems to me that this is a problem that's existed for a few games now and has steadily gotten worse, stemming from high DLC prices and an equally high number of, potentially game breaking, bugs, across multiple games that don't get fixed as it's very quickly on to the next one for CA.
There's rumination that it's because the studio is constantly working on multiple games at the same time and just shoves everything out without having the proper time to go back and make sure everything works like it should.
This seems like it came to a head with a recent DLC pack's price increase while containing equal or lesser content than Warhammer 2 DLC, which was cheaper on release. This prompted review bombing from the community, which prompted a response from one of the lead devs, Rob, who basically said (paraphrasing here) "Costs are up, there's no good time to do this, but we have to raise the DLC prices and challenge ourselves to make the content better to match".
Turns out the community doesn't think the content is better to match. CA doubled down on that position, and here we are.
And doubled down hard, since the boycott bans are killing off their more popular mod creators.
A surprisingly increasing number of companies seem to be making suicide sprints lately.
They know the world is ending so it's a sprint to be top of the leaderboards.
Cheap money (in the form of loans) has reduced. This means that investors are suddenly putting a lot more pressure on the top. In good companies, this is dealt with by the leadership team. Unfortunately, a lot just let the shit roll downhill.
There is also the issue of compartmentalization. In larger companies, the people dealing with the complaints have little to do with the people who actually need to change things to fix the root cause. This leads to the schizophrenic/sociopathic behaviour we see. The mouth has very little idea what the hands are doing.
Right, I can't remember the Creator's name, but apparently they supported a boycott and got banned for it, removing access to their workshop account as well, and they created one of, if not the most subscribed mod for the game. Maybe you know that, I haven't played Total War since Rome 1, so I'm way out of touch
Considering how consistent the complaint of how much SEGA is forcing CA to act like a shittier version of Paradox, that's not surprising.
Since the niche of players that buys Total War games will hardly budge upwards, the only way to maximize profits is to squeeze those suckers with endless DLC. No wonder every game since Shogun 2 has had blood as a separate DLC.
I think customers forget about the, like what, 20-25% inflation in the last few years. Either they f+ck over their employees or they have to charge more
That inflation is a large part of why consumers are sensitive to this price increase. This is fundamentally a purchase with disposable income. Inflation reduces the disposable Income of the population until (if ever) wages catch up with inflation.
Everytime there's a change in pricing that was already a set precedent there's a hurdle to overcome like this, and it becomes extremely important to handle the situation delicately since 95% of possible ways to handle it could go very wrong.
I feel like the only way to really deal with it correctly if it truly must happen because of rising costs is to just admit that, like they did, but then stick to that and only that message, and just wait for the community to come around. If it's possible to provide any sorts of even vague math around sales and cost to produce this content then that context would help people understand, but there's almost no way to change a precedent for the worse on the consumer end without some amount of backlash.
Well it's not very complex. A software company has a lot of its cost coming from wages. If the employees see their cost of living increasing by 20%, they'll expect to see their wages rise to compensate.
Consumers will bitch, but eventually accept the higher cost of the software
They pissed $100M away on a project inspired at a boozy directors lunch.
They then rushed out half assed dlc and a new game and put the price up for both.
Poor management calls that customers aren’t happy about. If the quality was there people would have been fine
Except they have been increasing the prices this whole time... Most of the prior race packs which focused on 2 factions from Total Warhammer 2 were 10 dollars per pop. Hell the last 2 dlcs were so much bang for the buck since they basically made a pair of 19$ dlc obsolete (yes, with the new pack you only get 1 lord each but having 1 lord but a whole new faction for 10 bucks is good value and that doesn't even count that you also get a number of units from a different faction as well). So Total Warhammer 3 comes out and to say it was a fucking mess at launch is an understatement. Their first new dlc is a race pack at the price of 16 USD. So we see an increase of about 60% right there for many units that simply should have been in the game at launch since the chaos roster was very light compared to the other 2/3 factions in the game as well. So come around to when we get a new faction, prior to this factions cost around 19$ and the price increases to 25$ and personally the community was angry but I was 100% fine with this since yeah prices increase and factions have been this price since 2016. So its fucking insulting they do a new race pack and give us a bullshit letter saying I quote
When this is a blatant lie, this new race pack that gives us less content than prior is now an increase of 150% from 10$ it used to be in total warhammer 2 but a ~60% increase from the last fucking price they had from a year prior. It also doesn't help when they haven't patched the fucking game when there is obviously broken shit. For instance they dropped a patch for the honorable frenchmen (Bretonnia) but some faction features were broken for nearly half a fucking year until after this whole. Hell Nakai the kroxigor (A big fuck off giant lizard alligator man who can do a death roll) lord for again half a year couldn't recruit his special units and kroxigors. This anger is coming from a place where obviously the money they earn is being misused on other projects that end up crashing and burning. Like a fucking new extraction shooter that was a money pit gets canned that was DOA (technically never got released but I know they were running beta test and I imagine it getting canned was based on how much engagement was around it, I remember seeing so many fucking ads that beta test). A reskin of Total war Troy (A newly released AAA priced game that had a peak of 5,424 user), which has failed by basically most margins. So its god damn insulting to hear a lead say basically if you don't buy this dlc expect this game won't be supported anymore even though it is literally CAs only cash cow right now. People want better support for this game, it is under horrid management. A ton of anger is strictly coming from how poor a game WH3 released as and the continued support it has seen. We need a proper custodian team who can actually patch this game more than once or twice in a span of half a fucking year.
Edit: I also want to hammer home how fucking bad TW Pharaoh did.
Peak users
TWW3: 166,519.
Shogun 2: 10k or 50k (can't get an accurate count since Steamcharts only goes back to 2012 but SG2 came out in 2011) was 10k (as long as we ignore when the game was given away for free then it was at 50k).
Rome 2: 118,240
Attila: 26,237
Rome Remastered: 18,407
Three kingdoms: 191,816
Depends on the job
Or they could lower their corporate profit margin so neither is necessary. Don't make excuses for them and act like there's not a huge amount of money being hoovered up by profit.
Inflation is fake. Money isn't backed by anything so we can demand it's worth anything we want.
The richies are mad some of us made too much money and are overcorrecting to punish us.