Quarterly Teasers: Statement from SimGuruKate

"Archieonic;c-16950525" wrote:

"luthienrising;c-16950431" wrote:

"Archieonic;c-16949391" wrote:

"luthienrising;c-16949297" wrote:

"keekee53;c-16948950" wrote:

"Archieonic;c-16948387" wrote:
More PR talk that shows nothing but a total disconnect with the community. Hell, I've played many games where developers constantly say what their plans are, what they are working on, even show some pictures of raw design. But nope, none of that here. Because things can change? Sure, the first and only development team that may completely change what pack they are working on at any minute...

What pack are you working on? Nope.
Is X feature in the plans? Nope
What about X bug? Nope
Will you revamp X? Nope
Do you thin- Nope
Nope.

Great communication skills!

Yep because I still believe they can announce the pack without the when and be safe from the SEC rule. I feel like the SEC rule is just being used as an excuse not to share information. EA is the one who does not want them to share, that is my opinion on it.

SEC stuff has not been given as a reason for not announcing packs earlier. That has only ever been about patched content. I would think that not announcing packs earlier means that they don't have to deal with managing the community every time they have to change or drop content that's already been discussed, and they don't have to deal with answering an added influx of community questions.

I'm curious about these games that are apparently discussing development all the time - I don't play a lot of games, but my family does and I've not heard them mention very many that do this to any degree at all. What are they? What are their communities like in terms of how they discuss things with the house? How big is the house? Are these games in open betas?

Ark Survival Evolved during and after beta, Warframe (F2P) does weekly dev streams showcasing what they work on including models, raw unfinished footage, etc (concurrent playerbase of 50,000-80,000) Those 2 are my prime examples when it comes to relatively huge games with a lot of following. There are a lot of smaller ones of course, but I feel these can be compared more since they also share the burden of managing a large playerbase amd one of them (Ark) was bought by a publisher (Snail Games). Most often than not the community provides feedback on things being worked on to help shape it, which is rather important for any game that uses a live service style with patches or a stream of DLCs.

Ark Survival Evolved is made by Studio Wildcard, which is not publicly traded, so SEC accounting regulations don't apply. Same with warframe - it's made by Digital Extremes, a Canadian company that is not publicly traded. Neither of these games have to deal with SEC regulations. There's no financial impact on them if they fail to release something that alters the base game within a particular time frame.

My examples were not directed at them publicly commiting to a time frame, but about the openness and communication about what they are working on. You do not have to tell the playerbase when something will be released to show them or talk to them about what they are working on. Most companies that do that always have the disclaimer that things can change since what is being shown is in development.

If anything made by EA is shown that will change a base game, it has to be delivered within the quarter it's shown, regardless of whether that is promised or not. That's bound to affect a lot of what can be shown about development.

Showing what's happening in a paid add-on isn't affected by that, so that would come down to decisions about how much they want to allocate to managing community expectations and disappointments -- the more you show in advance, the more of that you'll have to do, and companies will make different choices in that way.

I do think that Maxis could do a lot more after something is announced or firm in terms of showing us how those things were created -- taking us through the process. To some extent, they do do that now ... mostly in answering to fan disappointment in not getting features they want... which inevitably seems to lead to people calling those explanations "excuses" etc. Maxis Monthly has sometimes talked about things that are upcoming and people here complain if those aren't for PC or aren't an announcement. I'm not convinced they can "win" at this because of how community reaction seems to go with what they've done so far. Look at the Laundry pack -- we all got to be *part* of the process and see the inner working of quite a lot of it, and still there was a loud group of people who complained that it wasn't what *they* wanted.