@TheRagebeard wrote:Also casual players make up most of the sales for any given game. They aren't going to be miffed that they're wheel doesn't work because they're playing on a pad. They're not going to be upset that ranked is all out of whack because they're playing career. They won't notice the bugs etc.
That's an important point to bear in mind, we're 30-40 people how really loves these games and the sport, margin won't ever comes from us but from the casuals and they just want to play some 30-40 minutes and move on to another stuff.
Is that an excuse to release the game as it has been released since 2021? Not at all but shed some light as where the priorities are in an yearly installment with a tight pipeline of work.
As far as I know, based on the last Codemasters Annual Shareholders Reports prior to the bidding jostle between Take-Two and EA for Codies acquisition, EA's letter of intent and cash offer to the FCC and stock markets, and EA's Annual Reports since the deal went through:
Seems clear enough to me that their goal is to profit on player engagement. One of the main reasons it's so off-putting to see the community hostile against EA for F1 World and other FOMO shenanigans stems from that first point, by the way: those were in Codemasters' cards way, way back EA had anything to do with the franchise, but that's a tangent.
Anyway, their target audience is players who engage with these games very much like a live service. Season passes, time-limited events, microtransactions and the like. And their goal is to grow that user group and drive engagement up. Sales figures are less of a concern; active players or recurring players are more of a pressing metric*.
I have no idea what you guys would call that sort of player. One that logs hour of play time week in and week out. Does it matter if they're on a pad or on a wheel to determine if they're a "hardcore" or a "casual"? I think that duality, at least in this framing, is not on par with how the games industry think their business anymore.
Edit: *just to make sure, no company is ever going to snub and scoff at sales figures. Just wanted to emphasize that those (player engagement and monetization) seem to be their focus under the current model.
Loyal F1 players that come back year after year and have enough of a disposable income to bite these games out of shelf under full MSRP are always on their sights. But there's a reason single player modes have been neglected so much in the past years, and the "all new" career seems to be such a lackluster facelift.
@mariohomoh I think that's a fair point regarding player engagement driving profit. The snag they hit is that unlike say FIF... EAFC, EA's monetization strategy doesn't resonate with either casual/hardcore players here because no one really wants a virtual couch. I think they were hoping that F1 World would solve that problem by being the equivalent of FUT to drive MTX but F1 World ended up resonating with the casual fans who don't play for as long or spend as much money.
The "hardcore" fans mostly brushed F1 world aside because all they want is a close to true to life sim as possible. They don't want to be disassembling their rare Guenther Steiner to replace him with a Legendary Mike Krack.
