Like any game of this kind, sometimes all it takes is one or a few faulty card (players) and your house of cards comes crashing down, despite a solid foundation and flawless communication.
Most solid cards will leave the project fully aware of the outcome, while the defective cards will stubbornly insist on rebuilding the house of cards, blaming the foundation.
Yes, criticism—whether good or bad—is constructive as long as it stays within reasonable limits.
PS: Let’s be clear: I’m not singling anyone out here; I’m talking about what generally happens in this kind of situation.
I’d question how solid a foundation is if one person criticizing it can bring it all down.
7 Days to Die came out in 2014 had a very bad start, but dedicated devs who communicated and updated the game and still update the game. They had a lull though in updates, but still communicated and it wasn’t even a live service game. Communication goes a long way. it still has 23k players.
I can give more examples, but people criticized 7Days and still do, yet here it is very successful. Heck it has 50k such criticisms:
So while my card analogy may have not been the best analogy, the point is if you don’t communicate with your community you lose and the community loses too.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate here. Some posts on here is criticism and some posts are rude and disrespectful. I’m not a game developer or anything like that but I will say this in defense of Monumental as an example. If I ran a company and took a game over from a company that was abandoning a game and at least kept it running so people could play it and the people wanted to just be negative about my company for not doing anything with the game besides at least keeping it running for a low player base, I would have my company just let the game go and move on to something else. On the forums here at least half of the posts I see on here when I open them up is being rude or disrespectful towards the devs even though they are taking the time to at least keep the game running for those that still play and want to keep playing it. They could’ve never took over the game and just let it completely shutdown but instead they took over the ownership of the game and at least have kept it running.
To stay on topic, we don’t know what Monumental’s plans are for Boundless; all we’ve had is James’s announcement regarding the acquisition by Monumental, which at the time gave the community a glimmer of hope.
Since we don’t know what Wonderstruck’s terms and conditions of sale were for Monumental, we can only speculate.
Is this just a sale that allows Monumental to fully exploit the game but with Wonderstruck’s approval?
Is Monumental 100% owner with no say from Wonderstruck?
Was the sale concluded under certain conditions, such as adding content, a graphical upgrade, etc.?
That’s something we’ll never know.
In the meantime, what is clear is that we are all in the dark about the future of Boundless, and that’s not good.
I don’t see the point of buying a game with a small player base if it’s just to let it die and make no profit from it. If Monumental acquired Boundless and is maintaining it, it’s because there’s a profitable return on the investment; no business leader would take the risk of investing in a shaky acquisition that would put their company in a bad position. Every business leader must see a return on investment before taking the risk of investing in expansion.
On the positive side you a company that bought the game and continues to keep it running,.fix bugs, and make the game more affordable to run.
On the negative side that same company made promises to be communicative, make updates and be more involved.
I think both the positive and negative criticism is warranted. There will always be some on both sides at different extremes of positive and negative.
Everyone that still posts on here cares about the game in some way and only want it to succeed, continue on and get some form of update.
If I ran a company and took the game over and made promises to update the game and communicate that’s what I would have done because the generates trust in the community. But who knows why this happened, but not communicating why it didn’t isn’t any good either.
Fair enough and I keep gleam club up because I still enjoy it for what it is.
For me, the main problem is that it was never announced that the game is put into maintenance mode. Neither from James nor from Monumental. Both promised exciting changes and both promised them in a timely manner.
The problem is that Monumental posted on the Forums that they would stay in contact with the community and give updates as to plans or state of the game.
And then enduring 2 years of near radio silence. The past year has been a bit better since we had interaction with @jon-eric, who has been a blessing to the community.
Probably one of the things I find the funniest is that Monty contributed $500 to Host’s computer fund and then banned him several months later.
You also have to think even though they promised to to communicate, would you want to say something to someone when the first thing someone would do is jump down your throat about something and say negative stuff to you? @monty1 has already stated that they need to make a full team first dedicated to development of the game. If a company doesn’t have a full team dedicated to development for a game that will cause a small snag it updating the game. Monty has stated before what they need to do first to really start doing anything with the game. He has also stated that they are trying to come up with the means to get a team together for boundless but everyone seems to ignore the things he has said. That was a form of communication. If they still haven’t come up with the means of getting a team together for boundless, it would be pointless to constantly make a post saying they haven’t got a team together yet specifically for boundless.
To be fair as you state. Everyone was excited when the announcement was made. Monumental Boundless news! - News / Announcements - Boundless Community Monty made promises to be communicative, make updates and be more involved. He stated a lot of things in those threads. They stated it would take roughly a year to 18 months to make the Transfer then they would start in on several things. That was September 2022, we are now over 3 1/2 years with no word.
Look at when his last post was, he was last seen 3 years ago! Criticism? To be fair I don’t blame anyone for it. The only bright spot in this time has been Jon-Eric who with the time he has available has been great at working on issues for us. But Monty and his company itself earned the criticism.
For every negative person in this community, I can guarantee you there are at least 10 positive people. So yes… I’d want to say something.
Its been years, I’ve also spoken to Monty and John-Eric quite a bit in what the plans are and what the holdups were and are. There have also been MANY community members willing to help out including myself. I offered my help free of charge as have many people. Georgio could easily make new blocks for the game, but someone would have to code those into the game also. Again, if I owned the company I would have already hired Georgio to do clothing and blocks. There were numerous people willing to volunteer. I can’t speak for everyone, I never ignored what Monty or Jon-Eric has said, but the reality is hiring a team and paying that team is very difficult when the game barely breaks even. Deep pockets or not.
That was a form of communication, but that was said years ago.
Bottom line: Myself, nor the community should have to beg for communication. Monty could have easily commented on this post saying, “We will continue to keep the lights on as long as we can.” I know Dhusk probably won’t like that and may be pretty negative about it, but its warranted. A lot of other people that still play might take that as a positive. I’m on Monumental’s side on most of this, but at the same time things could just be handled better.
here’s the rub - it would have taken so very little. Once a month, didn’t even have to be Monty. Just someone from Monumental saying “hey, we can’t talk about xyz for legal reasons/there’s no news on Boundless - but we are keeping the lights on, and to that effect we are doing xyz (other game stuff)” or “Nothing new to report on status, but here is a couple of cool screenshots I took when in the game the other day.” It would have effectively promoted their other games, we’d have cheered them along, and we’d have lost far fewer players.
I’ve back/supported many failed games. One of which is done because the lead indie dev got a government job. Needless to say, development stopped. Game fell apart. I wasn’t mad, I was thrilled. They got something to pay the bills. But never once did they dangle carrots to say “We will have expanded content” They were upfront, unless they get $20k a month in revenue, they can’t operate as a full-time volunteer team. I get it when they spent more time/effort to make .01c per hour
But communication is key. Who knows what the game would still be like with some good honest open communication. I do miss boundless but there is only so much gathering/collecting/building I can do. Maybe one day boundless 2.0 in UE10 will come out
Not to mention, I play a ton of games and I am sure Monumental learned the same thing I observed: a large portion of the player base of this game have serious issues. A lot games have a portion of the PB with issues, but this game in particular, really had way more than its fair share.
The lack of communication is the communication. Seems obvious they have no plans for the game but are willing to leave the lights on as long as it doesn’t hurt their pocketbook. Is what it is
The game had serious potential at one time. Back then, You would have to wait to enter some planets because they were at max capacity. The game developed a nasty hierarchy, and if you didn’t fall in line you would be run off.
And many of the hierarchy were early backers or big monthly spenders so James was pretty much forced to take their side even when they were 100% wrong. So hundreds left.
It was surreal watching the very people that ran people off whining and asking why all the players left.
I can’t tell you the number of games I have played that has had some bad eggs, usually those bad eggs are removed, but apparently that’s not the case with Boundless.
Whose fault is that though, most any other game would ban bad eggs regardless if they backed the game or not. The owner of the game should have banned the bad eggs. I came into Boundless pretty late and missed a good bit of the bad eggs apparently, but one I do know didn’t get banned until Monumental took over and that person should have been banned long ago.
If the lack of communication is the communication, that’s a ■■■■ poor approach for a live service game. I don’t know any other live service game that has handled it like this and been successful.
The game at one point had full planets and a lot of issues which originally caused a huge player drop right after release you can see it on Steam charts.
That said combine bad eggs, no communication, no updates, a bad new player experience and it’s not hard to see why we have an average player count of about 20 now.
I find it interesting that their webpage is up and yet there’s no mention of Boundless on it. If you own an active game, wouldn’t you want to advertise it on your company page?
Seems a bit odd and counterproductive.
I also find your aggressive “White Knight” support of the company disingenuous.
I find it rude and disrespectful of people on here that don’t own a company or business on here criticizing a company of how they run their business. I run my own business of metal scrapping and have to balance out timing and customers that give me the metal to scrap so I can get the jobs done. It takes a lot of time organizing and planning things out when you have to factor in everything like cost of fuel, mileage, weight, items, how to dispose of parts that can’t be scrapped, vehicle maintenance, paying a friend or family member if they help you. Every job comes with multiple factors you have to consider. A game company has to do the same thing like, paying employees, figuring out where their biggest revenue comes from, how to prioritize which games come first, costs of running each game, how to create a team for a each game, what takes priority to keep the game running even if in just doing maintenance for it. There are many factors that the person that doesn’t see when they are not the ones working on the project or tasks for something.
Totally agree. Ran my own web design company for a couple of years and the effort to do that was pretty challenging. I also don’t know who has or hasn’t ran a company so I won’t comment on that.
But it’s pretty cut and dry though. If I didn’t communicate to my clients or employees the business would fail. I strived to communicate with my clients as often as possible. Customer service speaks for itself and helps generate business just on sheer word of mouth. Crazy I never advertised and started out with a single client, grew it into 300 clients and sold it off to another company that I went to work for so I could help my clients transfer smoothly.
Everyone runs their business differently, but if a.business treats their clients poorly or doesnt communicate with them and makes promises that aren’t kept, they lose trust and should expect to be criticized and lose clients.
