Truth is, we’re at a point where players are making threads like this one, asking questions like “are the devs actually working?!”. Like @Wablamo said, there are some bad rumors running around. Not sure if it’s just trolls spreading them, or if they’re somewhat based in reality.
I’ve also seen the rumor that Wonderstruck was working on another game, that they had plans to close down Boundless. Also heard that some of the devs are not efficient compared to the others, which would be creating tensions and slowing their workflow (that one somewhat makes sense to me, though).
You cannot think that this is healthy for the game when that kind of rumor is running around about its devs.
Something that is also true for all games of the genre (like Creativerse or Portal Knight, and maybe even Minecraft) is that when the competition rises, they might get crushed. The game I’m thinking about would be Hytale.
At this point, it’s a race.
Now you might say “meh, Hytale isn’t an MMO”, but everybody doesn’t play Boundless because it’s an MMO. I have 0 doubt that a vast majority of the playerbase is here to build more than they’re here for the economic or PvE aspect. If Wonderstruck doesn’t step-up their game, they’ll lose a lot of players.
Then again, such is how things work. ‘No king rules forever, my son’ and all that jazz.
In any case, as far as I’m concerned, when Hytale gets released, if it holds its promises (and I have no doubt that it will) I won’t spend one more penny in Boundless unless they also add some form of creation toolkit for us to make our own blocks and furnitures.
I was talking about this with someone else recently, and yeah, adding some form of Steam Workshop powered block/item creation toolkit for the game would multiply by 10 the life-span of Boundless.
I would say a post needs to list out the rumors so that all have visibility and the devs are given an ability to respond directly. That is the easiest way to clear things up.
Hello Games and Wonderstruck are two separate beasts though. Hello Games was over-hyped from an E3 showing. They had more resources. They had way more initial sales.
Something like that could work though. I still feel the best course is to just communicate a little more. Even if there isn’t anything to say, a small non-info post goes a long way.
Interestingly quite similar to the HG situation - though it always retained a core base of us, the % drop off it had was pretty well insane, from 212k peak to around 1k peak when it bottomed out. Much the same rumors were flying - that it would shut down, they were working on something else, someone even hacked the main HG Twitter and put out “No Man’s Sky was a mistake.” It was pretty well nuts. But once they clarified what they were doing, we settled down, and as the updates kept dropping, a very healthy recovery was made.
I firmly believe Boundless’ numbers can bounce back just as well, perhaps %-wise even stronger, as updates roll out and they do an ad blitz after that happens. Perhaps then, it might be the better strategy and make sense all around to not spend hours involved in communications that might result in keeping or gaining a few of us right now and invest that instead towards the bigger picture of developing the future vision. I’ve seen where people who have left have said they’ll come back with the right updates. So perhaps the focus should be there.
… Just my own opinion here of course, I know I could have it all wrong!
It’s just a bummer to me to be sitting here six years after I started following this game to be talking about a lack of communication, recovery, etc. A large part of why I started following so long ago (aside from the ideas behind the game of course) was the dev interaction with the community.
It is what it is though, and we’ll see how the cookie crumbles eventually.
What I don’t understand is how the simple ask “please communicate frequently, clearly, and honestly to your customers.” is a big ask.
What concerns me more, though, is since the loss of their person dedicated to community management, they haven’t found the time to hire a replacement.
Communication can be active and passive. A lack of communication, or a lack of prioritizing communication, demonstrates that it is not important to the organization.
If I look at a forty hour work week for each employee, and I cannot find a single one with two hours to do an office walk-around and write a roadmap update, then we have substantially bigger issues.
Don’t get lost in the weeds of “feeling bad for the devs” or “they will share when they have something to report”. That is hogwash and allows a lack of accountability for a delightful, but very small game. We all have the best intentions and want the game to succeed, communication does not hurt that.
As a final note: it literally does no harm if players are given full information of feature changes in upcoming patches. Many developers have gone down the silly road of denying their players information, including obfuscation of game mechanics, denying alt-tab functionality, and even banning for “spoilers”. The mystery wears out and all that is left is the game - is it fun? If a few people get some extra e-points or whatsits, who, ever, cares?
Guys, I haven’t read all this… but chill. Game making is hard. And I mean hard. I’m working on a game myself, and taking a premade 1 party member vs 1 enemy RPG battle system and modifying it to be multiple members in both. Easy right? lolno.
These guys are making their own thing and adding onto it, from scratch. What they’re doing is WAY harder. Yes, they could use a community manager. But that is usually a paid job. Perhaps they don’t have the budget.
with how long its been i dont think its so much lack of time but more lack of funds or not careing…the spot has been open for months and in the day and age where it takes less then 5 min to post a job opening for free on multiple sites they may feel constant comms that a CM offers is not needed and may be cost cutting by just doing the bare bones part of the job them selfs
They were having interviews for a replacement at one point. So they did look. I don’t know what happened or why it hasn’t been completed.
Personally I can agree with this on some level and disagree on others. I think it is the context. We saw clearly how people took the information on the stone XP nerf to use it as much as possible before it happened. But other times the info caused no harm. I think it comes down to the information and its context in the game.
No offense, but I don’t think you can really compare what you’re doing with a team of professionals working with Square Enix, who have a game at about 40$ to 60$, AND with a store to sell cosmetics AND a subscription system (BTW, usually, that’s not cool to have even the first two at once). They also had a crowd-funding period where they raised a quite a lot of money, from what I remember.
I’d be surprised to learn that they have budget issues, honestly…
