At the risk of stating the obvious, the release of Graveyard of Empires has not gone the way we wanted. Today, I want to post a mini-retrospective that explains some of what happened leading up to the release, and how we plan on acting on the results of that and on subsequent feedback and reception moving forwards.
One of the most important parts of the pre-release process we perform in Studio Gold is the Go/No-Go meeting. This is where each discipline; QA, Tech, Design, Marketing, Business et al, present their perspective on the state of the game and expectations on the likely reception thereof. We do this so we’re all on the same page, and so we can jointly arrive at a consensus on whether to launch or not. In GoE’s case, while we identified some areas of uncertainty mostly relating to dev diary feedback, we agreed that there was nothing out of the ordinary here, and that a release at this stage was acceptable. I don’t want to diminish my role here or throw anyone under the bus: as Game Director I can overrule in either direction, and I did not - I did not see what I should have seen.
Collectively, and personally, we were quite clearly wrong. As an organization we were unaware of the issues present in this release, and this represents a serious need for some inward thinking on how we arrived at this decision, and how we reorganize ourselves to prevent it occurring again. I have few answers for you right now as we’re focusing on the short-term goals for putting Graveyard of Empires right, but we have no intention of sweeping this under the rug.
From a long term perspective, this is now the second release of a Country pack which has performed worse than expected. Review score is actually a surprisingly difficult metric to evaluate. It is better to think of it as a snapshot that, on balance, gives us an idea of how much of the community considers everything surrounding a release to be a net positive or negative. This can include price, quality, scope, overall opinion of a company, and many other things. What we tend to do is aggregate the key sentiments of negative and positive reviews and work out, on balance, where the main points for and against are. The two main negatives on Trial of Allegiance were, in first place the regional price adjustments in two specific markets, followed by scope. It’s a bit early to say for Graveyard of Empires, but first impressions are content direction & quality (as we’ve acknowledged), followed by scope.
Both regional pricing and content quality are things that I would hope are relevant only to the individual releases here. They’re localized. Scope, on the other hand, represents a clearer area where we need to offer more on a fundamental level. Scope in this context, is the nature of what we’re offering: focus trees, mechanics, 3d models; the whole package. Content-only releases are popular with some HoI fans, but on balance are not enough to resonate with the majority of the community. Once again, I don’t have an answer yet here, but we’re aware of it, and will be evaluating how to make these releases more exciting to more people.
And finally, in the short term, I want to address our plans for Graveyard of Empires. Beginning this week, we have a series of patches and updates planned for GoE as well as for the base game in order to both fix and improve content that you found lacking. I sincerely appreciate all those who have reached out with constructive suggestions. We have all hands on this endeavour right now.
/Arheo
Timeline:
- 12th March - Patch (Operation HEAD)
- 20th March - Patch (Operation KNEE)
- Late March - War Effort (Operation SHOULDER)
- April - Updates & Changes to GoE content
