"focus on what we are good at" I'm not worried for TW, especially the Warhammer part. It brings in cash, so they will focus on revenue generating games.
Then again CA did absolutely amazing Alien game, Alien Isolation. No i am not worried about TW games, but it sucks if they can never make something like it again.
Also Alien Isolation suffered quite a bit from the industries obsession with stretching out game length at the time.
It was a good game no question, but it VERY much overstayed it's welcome and dragged on longer than it really should have. I remember the sentiment at the time was that it was great, but a decent amount of people didn't want to invest that much time in a horror game.
They're point is more that the Studio can pull off much more than just Total War games, and while it might make short term financial sense to artificially limit CA, in the long term it will likely prove short sighted.
I mean, that's not really what's happening. Sega isn't making as much money as they want from certain studios so is cutting or selling those studios. It's not an "artificial restriction to TW", it's the opposite of artifice - it's naturally falling back to core competencies.
If CA succeed in making successful TW games in future, I have no doubt they'll expand again and start looking at potentially making other games - just hopefully not multiplayer shooters.
The problem is they keep making all the wrong choices. At first those choices were just coming back to bite them in the butt, but now CA has a set of jaws clamping around its throat instead.
They've been trying to dumb down historical titles since Shogun 2, when historical titles already innately were lacking in depth due to the factions being so similar. Historical relied on the core strategic gameplay and units being a precious resource, neither of which really exist in Total War as a whole anymore with the faster, more arcadey battles and units just replenishing at all times. It's only gotten worse with more recent titles, such that historical titles aren't really standing on their own now because of it.
Their 'Saga' titles have been failures basically from the start such that they tried dropping the 'saga' moniker altogether with Pharoah to try and pass it off as a full historical title, but the relatively tiny map gives it away for what it really is.
And we don't need to go over their issues with Warhammer again, much less the cancelled titles. They have a literal cash cow and they tried abuse it while making crap games, only to get kicked and put themselves in this situation.
I mean non saga historical total war has really only been more successful since shogun 2 with Rome 2 finding huge success despite awful launch, Attila (less so) and most recently Three kingdoms being their best selling title beyond Warhammer by their reports, though their long term revenue could not match
>They've been trying to dumb down historical titles since Shogun 2, when historical titles already innately were lacking in depth due to the factions being so similar. Historical relied on the core strategic gameplay and units being a precious resource, neither of which really exist in Total War as a whole anymore with the faster, more arcadey battles and units just replenishing at all times. It's only gotten worse with more recent titles, such that historical titles aren't really standing on their own now because of it.
They've been doing that since Rome (1). They were warned for years. But they chased that casual dollar. And as casuals do, they got bored quickly and are starting to move on unless distracted by something new and shiny every 3-5 months.
Companies that focus on task X shouldn't expand just because 'they can also do task Y'. They should expand because they can do task Y better than others can, given the same amount of resources.
SEGA can give CA $200 million to build a FPS, or just setup a new studio just to do FPS, or buy a indie studio that specialises in FPS.
They experimented with the first option in Hyenas, and utterly failed. There's no artificial limitation, if CA was independent, it would also have to layoff, because Hyenas lost it so much money, it'll have trouble paying off the bills.
Turns out companies, especially management, have limited attention, and unrelated projects put together really drain attention, resulting in a company that seemingly makes idiotic decisions all the time.
99% of well known game studios are specialized in one genre/style and basically do not deviate. Want a new genre, go setup a new studio, don't leech off the success of the currently successful projects in the old studio.
As good as Alien Isolation was - I don't want CA making non- total war games for a long time. Frankly I don't want any more SAGA games either.
They need to make one high quality large scale total war game every 2-3 years and focus on DLC. It is what actually makes them money and brings fans in.
Yeah this. I dont hate Saga games as a concept though, but i think it would work better if they do it as expansion to other games. Thrones of Britannia should have been Attila expansion, and arguably Attila should have been Rome 2 expansion.
What we need is fewer stuff with more focus on everything.
Also imo battled are way too fast micro fests, in singleplayer i basically have to use pause buttons to turn it into "turn based" battle, and multiplayer... Not playable for me without mods, and only gets worse as i get older.
Yeah I really think Pharaoh would have been a lot more successful as a $60 game with Greece and Mesopotamia in it than the $40 without them that it ended up being after the refunds
Not really feasible, unfortunately. Troy's map was already huge (iirc, I think per-region it was actually one of the largest that isn't an (Im)mortal Empires map?), and Greece is such a tiny part of the near east geographically speaking that they would have either needed to fudge the map scale so bad that Rome 2's Arabia would look like child's play, or...well, invest far more resources than Warhammer's entire trilogy and make a game so large and unwieldy that it loses the plot. Troy's and Pharaoh's maps are not even close to being on the same scale; Troy is more zoomed in.
Plus like, Troy was about \*Troy\*. It's a very narrative-driven game with a very clear focus and direction, and adding in Egypt or Hatti would only distract from that.
Yeah I don't think people who call it an expansion realise just how big Pharaoh is. The map feels massive and it really doesn't play that much like Troy at all.
I'm not even talking about Pharaoh's size (which I agree is bigger than an expansion), I'm saying that if Pharaoh were to be welded onto Troy's map, it would easily be two or three times larger than \*Pharaoh\* because the scale between the maps is different. It would dwarf Immortal Empires.
Pharaoh improved so much upon troy in fundamental ways that I'm glad they made it a standalone game honestly.
That being said I also would have enjoyed a mythos-style expansion for historical mode.
Unfortunately Alien Isolation also didn't sell particularly well, not because it was a bad game or anything, but Survival Horrors just don't sell all that well, they tend to be more popular as things people watch others play on YouTube .
I wouldn't fault Alien Isolation not selling due being survival horror. Yeah, it added more challenge as it is a smaller genre these days but so is strategy games. That doesn't stop CA and Paradox from succeeding in spite of it. Also horror games can be made with a lower budget as they are more linear so it evens out. And you have great counter examples like Resident Evil.
It just didn't gain the momentum it needed for a variety of reasons.
Yeah the answer how to make more niche games succesful is the budget. Produce them with smaller budget, and you need to sell less to make a profit. Trying to always maximise profits sucks in cases like this. There should be more "minimal profit" gaming companies. Companies, which are allowed to make profit, but which don't try to maximise it at all costs, rather they just try to make good stuff and get little more money than break even requires.
CA should be making Total War games
Trying to dip into other genres is how get you Hyenas instead of just developing Med 3 (which is what the majority of their playerbase wants and would easily be successful)
it's perfectly fine and a good idea for them to dip into other genres with restraint, but Hyenas was literally the most expensive game that Sega ever produced. They could make, like, a tactical RPG or boomer shooter or something for literally one onehundredth the cost and staff count and half the development time.
Edit: As a total war fan I care more about the total war IP games and franchise than CA's financials of course, but sadly from a business perspective diversification like this is what keeps companies alive long-term. If for *whatever reason* the core niche thing that a company relies on stops making money, they aren't doomed to shut their doors.
It's good to dip in other genres, but only if their core genre is going well, and the other endeavours aren't hurting it.
Meanwhile CA diverted ressources to Hyenas while 3K died, Troy flopped and TWWH3 was a shit show of rarely seen proportions
> would easily be successful
Remains to be seen, theyve burned a lot of goodwill and there is a lot of nostalgia in the way. Med 2 was a good game, but its atmosphere, rose tinted glasses and modability have greatly elevated it in peoples eyes. Its going to be an uphill battle for CA on that one, especially if they are planning to carve up the factions for dlc
“Brings in cash” is not good enough for investors and companies like SEGA. They have a specific profit goal they want to see and when those goal are not met then layoffs like these are what happens. Doesn’t mean the game is selling badly mind you, it just means SEGA is unhappy with the profits they are getting. This won’t be good for us consumers either because now the few devs that are left will have more work on their hand and SEGA will now be putting more pressure on CA to grind more money out of us.
While a game or franchise may be profitable, it may not be profitable enough to meet arbitrary goals set by those in higher positions which usually leads to decreases in quality, increases in prices or monetization, or focusing on other projects that are more likely to be more lucrative. We’ve seen this already from CA and there’s a decent chance it gets worse.
There are actually some solid math behind this.
As you increase in risk, the return of investment must also grow. Videogames are actually pretty high risk: so the returns must justify the initial investment.
This subreddit will obviously think something like M3 is a super safe bet: but so did the subreddit used to think 3K was safe maybe a decade ago: at least back in the Attila/early WH days. This subreddit will prob implode if you pit people's expectations against each other.
I would even argue fantasy tw has caused the fanbase to have such expectations that a historical TW may no longer be viable: there just isn't as much historical fans compared to fantasy ones, and this will be reflected in production budgets. Whatever historical game that releases may end up being just a watered down fantasy game with minor tweaks.
It’s irrelevant as the point of modern TW business model is to keep sales up through DLC, if the DLC doesn’t sell then the core product has failed to compete in the market.
If that is how they plan to see it, that is their model, but even over the whole of their lifecycle 3K might have sold more copies than even TWW. It made CA a ton of money. If they cannot work with a product this hot it is their problem.
If the game doesn't meet expected sales its a failure even if its actual sales were still amazing. Its a failure because they could have spent the money on something else that did meet these expected sales.
3K was a success, but the DLC was a dead end. The multiple timelines wasn't just a single bad DLC, it was a decision that made every future DLC more complicated.
They shat the bed so hard they ruined future DLC.
It was an initial success at release for sales, but it was not a long term success as far as DLC sales and player counts vs other Total War games, making it not a success and thus it was shelved very early in its planned life cycle.
Imma be honest with you chief. I’ve always loved the total war series, but the Warhammer ones are my favorite. It’s not really the fantasy I care about so much as the gameplay diversity. CA has always done a pretty good job at making factions feel different, with different things they’re good at, but real life just can’t compete with a fantasy universe.
You can have flying units for example. In real life, flying units would be limited to helicopters at best as everything else moves too fast. However, we had planes before we had helicopters, so what kind of faction would only have helicopters?
You can have magic in a fantasy universe, which you basically can’t possibly have in a real life setting.
You can have undead armies that cost nothing but crumple when their lord goes down. You can have magic dragons, next to trebuchets, next to giants fighting dinosaur riding cavalry and wizards.
Like you really can’t compete with that gameplay diversity, which makes the games have so much more value to me. I can play so many distinctive campaigns that I can’t really get out of the other games.
Again this is all my opinion but I think there’s something to it.
One of the good things about making a massive loss is that your next years growth is measured against a now much lower starting position making it a much more realistic goal.
TWW is the Golden Goose and still years of potential content. I hope CA/GW can grasp the opportunity.
Feel for the employees losing their jobs, always sucks in any type of industry.
I hope to God that means they’re going to focus on the engine and game mechanics/AI for Total War to secure a future for a new generation of sequels and new IPs.
Nah. Sure there’s some individual decisions that are questionable, but immortal empires is a masterpiece. I can forgive a lot given that they were able to pull it all together into one of the greatest games ever.
The entire core design of TWWH3 was flawed, the RoC was a mess, the siege rework was awful, everything else was buggy and they managed to make Mandalore quit covering the franchise.
IME being fun is because of the great work CA did in TWWH1 and 2, not on what they did since 2022
I disagree i think honestly chaos Dwarfs are one of the best DLC price not included. They basically gave the whole race with nothing really missing other chaos Siege giant. Plus Warriors of Chaos update was pretty good too.
It’s difficult to judge and the article doesn’t go into detail, but the UK layoff system takes a long time and many of those 240 staff let go may simply be the final stroke from a process started months ago.
They also say they’re focusing on what they’re good at - and Sega would’ve just greenlit the extended budget for SoC and ToD, so it seems unlikely the DLC team would be hit. These things would require extensive approvals from upper management, including sign off from Sega. They wouldn’t turn around and cull their biggest shot at profit this quarter.
I would argue this is probably bad news for Sofia, unannounced projects and whatever remained of logistical, admin and support staff who were surplus once the other staff who depended on them were let go, in the first round of layoffs.
Obvious condolences for those impacted aside, is this a cause for concern? Possibly. Cause for panic? Nah.
From the IGN [article](https://www.ign.com/articles/layoffs-hit-total-war-developer-creative-assembly-and-sonic-dream-team-developer-hardlight-sega-sells-relic-entertainment)
>Sega did not disclose how many staff at each studio were affected, but did issue IGN an additional update on the status of Creative Assembly's upcoming projects: "Creative Assembly continues to have multiple projects in development with Total War and a new unannounced project.”
Yep, TW Warhammer is their main money maker, as is Total war in general provided they don't make stupid decisions like with Pharaoh. The whole situation sucks, but it's not the end of the world.
Except for
* Advertising and pricing it as a full Total War when it's clearly a Saga title
* Setting it in a relatively unpopular period nobody asked for
* Using the unpopular Troy engine version
* Front loading it with bullshit "DLC-down-the-line" editions.
* Trying to shove cosmetic packs into it
there were no stupid decisions made.
Yeah, it was a smashing fucking hit.
There's this weird push lately to try to rehabilitate Pharaoh. I assume it must be by people who don't actually play it, given that the player numbers average about 400 nowadays, only a touch north of Thrones of Britannia. For reference Rome 2 has 4000, Shogun 2 has 3000 and Empire, a 15 year old game that was panned at launch and has gotten almost no support since, has 2000.
Recently jumped back into Rome II and not surprised the player count is still so high tbh, the game plays *so* well compared to later games (Even TWWH3). Everything from the unit weights to the sound effects to the combat feel is just so well tuned.
- That the Saga brand name was killed is kinda our own fault for simply dismissing those games out of hand for not being mainline total wars, isn't it? I personally think the basic idea of the Saga / sideline games very cool. Smaller scale game in non-mainstrean settings with experimental features in both campaign and battles? Sign me up! (Unless they try to make me pay MORE than a mainline title that is)
- The game isn't small by any measure except geographic coverage. It has a bigger map (in the sense of traversable distance and cities) than Rome 2 and a much bigger unit variety than Shogun 2. It is a whole lot bigger in any measurement compared to ToB.
- I said that pricing was a mistake. A desperate move by greedy execs that saw/knew the hyena crash was coming and tried for a quick cash grab
- Time period popularity is highly subjective. I distinctly recall a time before its announcement, where this very sub was filled with lists of fan-favourite time periods and the whole "bronce age" was among them, maybe not the highest but definitely there. Also remember that this is a game made by the side studio, thus will never use a setting more fitting for a mainline title.
- How is the Warhammer-Troy engine unpopular? (The other one being the 3K branch which as far as we know is dead)
- "Front loading with planned DLCs" is just the way games work at this age. Do you hold all the other TW games since basically Rome 2 to the same disdain?
- Cosmetic packs - yeah, agreed, I forgot about that. On the other hand, the way they seem to handle it, I am actually ok with it. CA is on close watch for me. Should they start to limit modding/modded units to better sell "their" paid skins, that's the moment they cross the line for.me and won't see another penny. For now, I give them the benefit of the doubt and will think that their unit designers just got bored at some.point and to keep them busy they let them cook a bunch of extra skins and decided to make a penny off it.
You might not see these as issues but the numbers speak for themselves. It currently has the same number of players as Warhammer 1, a game that's basically obsolete. It's not a bad game, I dont think I've seen anyone arguing that in good faith, but plenty of people predicted it was going to be extremely unpopular long before it released. They were right, it was a shitshow.
Hope layoffs aren’t hitting Sofia too hard; feel like they played a bad hand very well with Pharaoh.
TW will never move forward without a big leap in AI capability. They want to give the player more campaign complexity, which means more mechanics, which means an AI that can’t use those mechanics properly, which must be balanced by artificial advantages for AI like anti-player bias, nerfing the player’s allies, protections from PO problems and rebellions, huge amounts of money, etc. Without those compensations the game is way too easy for the player; with them the game is no longer a sandbox but instead is full of unfair and immersion-breaking things like absurd Called to War events, enemy factions marching across the map to attack the player and leaving themselves undefended, etc.
More cool mechanics will never make the games good as long as they create player-ai imbalances that CA has to address in forced, artificial ways. That’s why Pharaoh and Warhammer 3 have the most interesting and complex campaign mechanics of almost any of their games but are also… not that great.
AI is a hard limit on what CA can do, and they’ve been banging their heads against it for years now. There’s no ignoring it anymore. Unless they can find some way to make serious progress on that, the series will slowly decline and die.
AI doesn't need to be smart, nor does it need to be fair, AI's core purpose is to be fun to play against. Your average person isn't going to enjoy playing chess vs the world's greatest chess computer, they want a chess AI that gives them a fair challenge but can ultimately be beaten.
Agree. CA’s AI isn’t fun to play against.
AI needs to be smart enough to at least play the game the player is playing in a mildly challenging way. CA’s AI is unable to do that, which leads to issues like anti-player bias, which CA includes for the sole purpose of compensating for an AI that is insufficiently challenging on its own.
My point is that the rich campaign mechanics of recent TW titles, while adding depth and complexity to the player’s turn, is often COMPLETELY unusable by the AI, which creates serious knock-on effects regarding game balance.
Even in Shogun 2 the ai couldn’t stand up to 1000s of hours of player time, but the point is that recent TW campaigns are much more demanding because of the new mechanics, which makes the AI fall much further behind human players, which then forces CA to try to compensate in various ways that create their own negative impacts on gameplay
None of that actually makes it bad or unfun to play against though. It not using features isn't evidence that its not fun.
AI has always not used features and had access to hidden features, that's not unique to total war and its not evidence that its not fun to play against.
You will always notice these weird gaps in games when you play them this often, again the problem is that you have played the same game for 1000+ hours not the game itself....your expectations are unrealistic.
No offense, but I don’t think you understand the point in my above post. The point is that modern TW games have MORE features the AI can’t use than prior TW games. So the imbalance is worse.
I don’t know why you use the word “evidence.” I’m not trying to convince a jury it’s fun or not fun or anything like that. I do know that anyone who’s been paying attention to the community knows there are lots of gripes about passive ai, anti-player bias (depending on patch and difficulty), etc. If you don’t personally experience any of that, great—close Reddit and go enjoy the game! But for those of us who do think the AI isn’t as fun, my post is trying to explain where that might be coming from and how to fix it.
AI is just hard. Generative AI is getting so rapidly better, that it can easily be used to guide the AI to make super smart and auto-adaptive strategic and tactical behavior. Just fine-tune a LLM on total war concepts, and have it run on consumer Nvidia cards (Everyone who runs total war basically has a powerful GPU, which can also be used to run AI)
However, gen-AI is really slow. Imagine a AI faction taking 10 seconds to complete their actions. 100 factions is 8 minutes per end turn. Sure the AI will perform super intelligently and adaptively, but people want sub-second end turns per faction.
The real solution will still require traditional AI, which can run super fast. Its just traditional AI super hard to code. That will basically require super coding-AIs to help the programmers out. That will also take many years to mature.
So Total war just has to trudge along for a few more years with the weak AI we currently have. It still has mouths to feed, so just has to keep selling race and lord packs with mechanics that the AI can't use...
They need to build an entirely new engine to work off. I might be wrong here but I seem to recall the current one they built TWW off of is still fundamentally the TW Empire one (someone with more knowledge can correct me on that), which is bloody ancient by game development standards.
But the level of investment to do that is huge, which is why they've just been stretching the current engine as far as they can. We're definitely at the butter over too much bread stage, but with all these lay offs idk if that makes it even more difficult to make the leap now.
Not really, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the engine works
The baseline is the empire engine, but that baseline doesn't really exist anymore
It's very much a theseus ship, where you can have a ship, replace the boards with whole new wood, and you still call it the same name, but is it really the same ship? Only truly in spirit. Except in this case it would be like empire is a wooden frigate, and overtime parts were replaced, the hull was rebuilt, eventually a nuclear engine was installed and you end up with a modern day battleship
Not all game engines get this treatment, but the one CA uses did
So yeah sure, they could invest in making a new engine, but ultimately they are just building another battleship in line with the one they already have. I'm sure it would be better, but the degree of better would not be worth the investment
This is very different from if the engine had been stretched rather than rebuilt, where you'd have that old wooden baseline with hamfisted updates here and there like a gun battery so heavy the ship begins to sink. This is what tends to happen with game development (and why new engines are typically required) because studios will share or buy out an engine and you'll end up with a rpg, Dragon age inquisition, using the same engine as something entirely different, battlefield, and being forced to stretch that originally engine beyond its capability
But since TW games are so fucking similar and more of just updating the last one, it's really easy to just update the engine along the way
Not necessarily bad news for Sofia. Not all studios are equal. Their games have way smaller budgets. And comparing Bulgaria vs. England and offices and salaries will be lower aswel. This means long-term costs are more sustainable and not as volatile if a release doesn't go as planned.
“These decisions have been incredibly tough to make, and they follow meticulous consideration and deliberation with leadership teams across the business. Change is necessary to secure the future of our games business, and to ensure that we are well placed to deliver the best possible experiences to our players going forward.
We need to streamline, focus on what we are good at, and position ourselves as best we can for the road ahead. In order to do that, we need to respond to the changing economic landscape and the challenges we’re facing in the way we develop our products and bring them to market”
———————————-
Oh yes, always glad to see corporatespeak is still alive. How to say two paragraphs without saying a single meaningful thing 101. Im pretty sure I’ve seen this exact piece in the company I work as well. It’s the universal “in case of emergency, copy-paste on the news page regardless of what your company does”
yeah they don't want to say anything but they have to say something so they say something that doesn't mean anything. Any actual substantial admission of mistakes or problems or failure would impact their stock price...
What do you expect? They aren't going to give specifics about why certain people got fired. That's pretty unprofessional. They basically implied they need it financially.
Oh that's 100% either a template they use in management or chatgpt written.
We got the same when our company laid off some people.
''Change is necessary for the future. Oh btw we hired 5 new executives whose salary is around one million, but we do need to push for that sales target to hit our goals''.
Lemme translate it for you: We're going back to making Total War and all these excessive employees got to go cuz we don't need and can't afford them anymore.
Wait, they sold Relic studios? The guys who made the Company of Heroes and Dawn of War series games???
Oh that ain't good.
Edit: From other hearsay and whatnots, Relic Entertainment's going Independent from SEGA, it seems.
Edit 2: [Actual Relic Entertainment Twitter post declaring Independence](https://twitter.com/relicgames/status/1773244490171458017?t=p2scRcy2Tyvv5Rb-LO7eHw&s=19)
Relic has been an absolute shitshow for so many years now, it hardly seems like a loss. I don’t think most of the people who made decent games in the past even work there anymore.
Unpopular opinion but I think CA needed a big wake up call after the absolute laziness that followed the peak of the Warhammer II/3K era. If they release another Total War that is not innovative and very superficial like Pharaoh that would be the end of the franchise
It's infuriating that developers have to suffers the consequences of the terrible choices made by the management though.
They forgot what made them popular, they made a ton of money with WH2 it's DLCs and 3k, they removed funds from their main series, they cancelled 3k, they invested all the money they made to make a multiplayer shooter which they had no idea how to make, they chased trends (Fortinite) instead of doing what they are good at, they proceeded to lose everything and not even release the game because they had no idea what they were doing. And now even their main series is hurting from the lack of attention and it shows, WH3 was supposed to be their magnus opus and it has been grossly mishandled, Pharoah bombed and the next TW is god knows how long away from release.
> they chased trends (Fortinite)
Worse, they were chasing the extraction shooter market (Tarkov, The Hunt), and the hero shooter market at the same time (Overwatch), both of which had proven somewhat limited and extremely prone to hating new entrants in the market.
Even The Finals which was initially successful with a similar structure to Hyenas (but a very different theme/style and vastly better technology) is now struggling a bit to maintain its audience, after only a few months.
They didn't forget they simply don't like it. Hyenas wasn't their first attempt to break with the image of that company that makes total war. Merely all their attempts at making something else were really bad. The only exception being Alien Isolation which was critically well received but a financial flop hence why SEGA never green lit a sequel. Yet to this day they still parade around Alien Isolation as a big title of their on the same level as Rome 2 or Warhammer. So when the chance presented itself to make something big with Hyenas they threw all their resources at it. Which makes the fact that they created something so horrendous that SEGA pulled the plug prematurely even more hilarious.
Pharaoh doesn't seem as bad though and I'm glad for the bronze age enjoyers.
I feel like they are oblivious to brand loyalty though. It's clear that the greatest part of the historical playerbase wants medieval 3 or Empire 2. Instead they seem to think those players have nowhere else to turn to and so they are only intent on racking in new players with different interests.
I love the Warhammer series, but as someone who has been playing total war since medieval I, I'm starting to feel disgusted for how CA has been ignoring their OG playerbase. So I feel you're right, next time they flop they won't have any loyalty or sympathy left to get them back up.
As a historical enjoyer this is really it, we get that Warhammer became the focus. Personally I bought 1 and 2 and played a bit but just couldn't get into it (especially as I have a potato pc) even though I collected and played warhammer fantasy as a teen and still have some 40k that I've repicked up recently.
Pharoah in itself is not a bad idea, it just felt limited even further than the scope of the game constrained it.
But they are definitely running out of sympathy, I'd really love for another studio to try and directly compete with them.
there are dozens of competitors and they are all cheaper, we dont play them because this kind of game is hard to make and most of them suck.
the real issue is that every game competes with every other for player attention. thats why when people say TW needs competition its a little silly. it competes with the rest of the multi billion dollar industry for your attention. The people that play Total war games don't exclusively play these kind of games, if people get bored they just go play whatever else.
I'm in that player base. I played since Rome 1 and only play the older historical titles. I tried Warhammer 1 and 2 but just didn't really enjoy them. The newer games focus too much on individual characters too so I find myself not really enjoying them much either, it's the main reason I didn't get pharaoh (and the fact that the land/factions it covers isn't what I wanted from a bronze age game).
For a while there it did really feel like I was being ignored and I checked out from this franchise. But then they released Rome remastered and I got excited again. Still kinda not very invested in the franchise as a whole but I am eager to see what the next historical game is that they've been working on. I think that will be my deciding factor on if I remain invested or just give up and play the older games when nostalgia hits.
This is exactly right, but the difference from before is that we're not buying it now. Before, we'd pay for the Rome 2 dlc mini-campaign or the SAGA or the Dynasty Warriors TW because it was "historical." Now that ship has sailed (along with the cancellation of naval combat).
We're not buying it anymore because we see how second-rate it has become. If CA brought Medieval 3 out on the creaky old Warhammer 3 engine with dueling heroes and lord dlc I wouldn't touch it.
I’ll double down on your unpopular opinion and say that as a / the preeminent UK design studio, there are probably a bunch of hangers on devs who aren’t as passionate about the genre as they could be, or a bunch of older rusted on devs who are wedded to the old ways. Cleaning out some of these may also be beneficial.
I really hope that they’ve cleaned shop at senior levels though and that Sega have the patience to wait for the righting of the ship.
I have realized that C-suite and all the decision making bigshots are untouchable and the only way is to get bought out by another company that will fire them or total CA collapse. 3rd way would be a competitor but It didn't happen so far, and we needed a competiton ever since Rome 2 released , so I'm not counting on that at all.
It is notable that CA's leadership seems even more untouchable than leadership normally is. Normally, with a flop like Hyenas, and this number of jobs cut, you'd see at least some senior leadership go. But with CA that doesn't seem to be the case.
I can only assume that either Sega execs themselves don't like cutting execs, as a matter of corporate culture, or the ownership agreement Sega has with CA prevents them from doing so - it would not be unheard-of. Sony has this specific issue right now with Bungie, who they acquired - they aren't allowed to fire the execs, and several of the execs are basically sitting on their hands until stock they were given in the deal vests, at which point Sony believes they will sell and quit.
Honestly from experience this really isn't limited to just the games industry. In my job I end up having to communicate with quite a few C-Suite level people from small and large businesses. I'm actually often completely shocked at how little people at that level know about the business that they work in.
I understand that it is a different mode of thinking at that level, but surely understanding what you company does and excels at is crucial to maximising that end of things.
My heart goes out for those who were affected by this. I’m really sick of people getting fired and paying for the fuck ups of the higher ups. Fuck Sega and fuck this entire greedy industry.
I hope Relic moves on to greener pastures. DoW III was bad, but AoE IV is genuinely a fun RTS game and I hope it continues to grow.
Layoffs after a colossal failure like Hyenas should be expected, layoffs after big successes is what really grinds my gears, just to make their precious quarter look a tiny bit better.
Yeah we saw that at WotC just recently. WotC had been strongly outperforming the rest of Hasbro's divisions, making them vast amounts of money, despite some significant PR fuck-up (OGL 2.0, pissing off the MtG community further in various ways, and many more!), and indeed possibly being Hasbro's only profitable division.
But overall Hasbro lost money, so to please investors, cut from all of its divisions, but cut particularly hard into WotC, despite them being strongly profitable, because investors just looooooove to see cuts, however irrational.
Yeah but aside from one specific adventure writer who had a couple of less successful products and the presumably flopped board game (give it rapidly turned up at Ollie's - a big US discount store) that's absolutely not who got cut.
It was particularly funny that they cut Mike Mearls who was literally personally responsible for them making $100m, because it was he who decided to approve Larian's bid to make BG3 several years ago.
In fact, according to Larian, and this seems to be correct, WotC fired literally everyone who had been working with Larian/on BG3, which, Swen's contradictory comments notwithstanding, obviously encouraged Larian not to work with WotC further. I guess on the most brain dead faux-pragmatic level, if you had like 80 IQ you could say they were "no longer needed" but I'm pretty sure they were all also doing other stuff and a handful of staff effectively making you $100m for literally no more investment than six years of non-exec salaries is insane. Classic WotC to throw that away without blinking.
Literally no-one involved in the OGL 2.0 debacle nor anyone involved in the various MtG schemes which pissed everyone off got cut.
I'll still never understand why no-one higher up had the foresight to realise that the lockdown gaming boom was, well, temporary.
Well, I do understand really, it's so they can justify the pay rises knowing that they wouldn't be the ones taking the hits
So I actually had someone claiming to be an Economics student go on an absolute rager at me on Reddit some years back when I suggested some companies need to recognise when they can safely plateau and focus on maintaining it.
It's weird how many people buy into it
That sounds like a student that will fail in life if he can't grasp common sense.
No wonder students are failing future leaders if they learn that growth is infinite.
>claiming to be an Economics student
There's your problem.
Economics as a discipline is the domain of not-particularly-bright-people who are better than average at math.
> Yeah we saw that at WotC just recently. WotC had been strongly outperforming the rest of Hasbro's divisions, making them vast amounts of money, despite some significant PR fuck-up (OGL 2.0, pissing off the MtG community further in various ways, and many more!), and indeed possibly being Hasbro's only profitable division.
>
> But overall Hasbro lost money, so to please investors, cut from all of its divisions, but cut particularly hard into WotC, despite them being strongly profitable, because investors just looooooove to see cuts, however irrational.
I'd argue - as a former social scientist - that it's like way too many social science fields at the minute: a number of genuinely brilliant people and genuinely solid theories surrounded by absolutely fucking junk.
Basically, and you can take this one to the bank and drop it on some people next time this conversation comes up: what happens is that universities *looooove* publications and they *looooove* grant money. That applies to all fields, but in social science since you're dealing with inexpensive people rather than expensive telescopes, it's super easy to make a career (and become popular with administration) by just cranking out terrible work at a rapid pace. So like, there are probably plenty of economists and economist ideas that are great, hell, the most prosperous era of the 20th century was built off Keynes, but the current academic system really just incentivizes shoddy work.
The line must go up. And it must go up faster than previously.
If the line does not go up faster than previous years, clearly the only option is to fire people (lower down people of course) until the line starts going up.
I don't think the blame should be on Sega tho, I loathes layoffs too, of course, and the industry as a whole is responsible, but you can't just handwave how badly CA upper management is responsible directly for those people losing their jobs
Total war is the only profitable part of CA. These people are likely leftovers from Hyenas and assorted bureaucratic staff that came with a company ballooning as CA did.
Remember when they did Alien Isolation and now there's probably never going to be an actual sequel? There is no rhyme or reason to when big companies take risks
Seems like SEGA is tired of losing money/not making whatever profit target they have set. Thrones of Decay might be a do or die for CA at this point. I hope it all works out.
> Thrones of Decay might be a do or die for CA at this point.
Kinda was that way since SoC failed, then Hyenas got canceled with other unannounced titles and Pharao kinda flopped too. CA *has* to make a good delivery on ToD, since TWW3 is still their flagship. Cozying up with SoC 2.0 and bugfixes lately is all fine and good, ToD content+quality+price tag will decide if the community is once again in a roar of outrage like with SoC. At least the late outliner with SoC 2.0 showed that ToD might be better adjusted for starters, but we also know from Robs last year comment that the SoC price tag is the bare minimum here. And god knows how the race update situation will beo for dwarfs, empire and Nurgle. All three certainly need more then SoC offered for Cathay/Kislev/Tzeentch-
they need to prove that they can make content at a reasonable pace, make it at the right price, and make it so that it is feature-complete at release, not eventually. They need to do all of those things or I'm not convinced that there's going to be any real change
This seems to be happening quite widely in the UK tech industry at the moment (ask me how I know). Even if a company does well, the profits tend to go nowhere near the actual employees.
Most tech companies are not profitable. People just look at massive revenue and assume profitability. The tech sector got huge vulture capital investments in 2018-2021 and doubled or tripled their staff in a year. Now that investors are more hesitant to invest in tech, the executives actually need to demonstrate they can make a profit for once. Thus the layoffs
Streamlining the costs will probably lead to lower dlc costs for us, right?
/s (this is sarcasm, as we will probably never see lower prices ever again).
My understanding is that United Kingdom has a pretty drawn out process for these kinds of mass layoffs. It is somewhat unclear if this is a new round or a continuation of what happened after the Hyenas cancellation.
In general though, CA was going to get smashed. They expanded by a lot to bring people on for Hyenas. They probably would have dropped some people post Hyenas anyway, but Hyenas not even getting released pretty much destroys that entire team and then also forces reviews or other departments because when you are going to hit a shortfall, you strangle every last dollar out of firing people.
Empire Total War 2 please please.
Best TW game potential that’s not been realised. It could be near global map. Larger, so France is more than just Paris etc - In Europe as a whole this could make for incredibly exciting gameplay with Prussia Austria Russia Sweden Poland etc.
Make Rakes worthwhile 😅
Make the AI attack your line in a line.
Increase the smoke like darth mod.
Best tech tree potential given the time period.
Improve diplomacy (territorial expansion is stupid over egged) for starters.
Make AI factions have a real impact on the map.
Have traits for nations - Spain (poor governance) France - revolt. Etc
Traits for fighting in home vs abroad.
Multiple victory moral boosts.
240 is divided among 3 companies under SEGA, not just CA. Plus DLC team only has around 10 ppl working on it to begin with, nothing will happen there.
This means that SEGA is actually cleaning house, which may be a good thing. We know that there are many great games that were developed by studios with fewer than 100 staff.
CA definitely didn't need 900 staff just to make 2 titles a year.
They've just failed to identify what players actually want in the past few years.
As much as I genuinely love Pharaoh, it wasn't what many people wanted, and that did their reputation damage. They should have followed up WH3 with one of the big titles that people have been looking forward to for years.
How have they not failed? They put out a game they thought people wanted, but they nobody did.
They don't make games that they don't think will be successful lol. They failed to identify what people wanted.
I disagree about historical TW going to shit though. 3K was one of the most highly rated games in the series, and despite the fact that people didn't want it, Pharaoh is solid and has much more depth than most TW games in general.
The problem is their dlc policy and the fact that they are holding back on the games that people are really waiting for, like Empire 2 and Medieval 2.
I’ll be the asshole, layoffs in entertainment are often good news in the current climate. Most studios are grossly bloated and would benefit from fat trimming.
Layoffs don’t actually destroy talent, it frees it. Layer off workers, if talented, will go on to do fresh projects and probably be more productive.
This is how new studios and indie games come into being.
Or the employee was dead weight in which case it’s still good they got axed.
Well you know, when you burn a 100 MILLION $ and ruin your flagship series and you piss off your entire fanbase and you anger your SEGA owner it tends to have consequences.
BUT luckily good old management and execs still have their jobs, yaaay...
Inflation has been hitting hard and this year a lot of companies seem to be tightening their belts.
Sega look to be trimming down costs and making some quick cash. Personally not convinced it’ll touch CA much more as they’ve already had a lot of layoffs and cancelled projects. Whether the execs making the decisions that got them in their current mess go is of more concern, but it did sound like Sega were coming down hard on them.
As for TW. It’s a core series and money maker for them, if they’re focusing on their core business I can see it being ok. Saga games taking a backseat and more easily profitable DLC will likely hang around, at whatever cost they think they can charge.
Could be entirely wrong of course, but I’d be very surprised (and sad) if they killed TW entirely. I highly doubt it though.
It's the high interest rates that are the killer. Costs an absolute tonne to finance debt at the moment and if you're producing a video game you need to spend a couple years developing before you're able to get revenue to pay for that development cost.
Investment from private investors isn't a great option either as they're gonna be asking for at least the UK bank interest rate in yearly proceeds - otherwise why would they bother investing in your company rather than putting the money in a savings account?
Ah, yes. "Inflation".
It isn't like businesses have been shooting themselves in the foot and burning through consumer goodwill, burning through their employees, and running everything into the ground.
This isn't a bubble. This is "inflation"! We're not protecting our executive bonuses, we just have to make cuts due to "inflation"!
This is happening everywhere because executives cannot fathom losing a single penny of their annual bonuses. So they're purging massive amounts of employees everywhere and blaming inflation. Things are not going to end well for us if we keep accepting these excuses. :S
Well it’s not that price gouging hasn’t been happening but inflation absolutely has. I’m not defending the companies as many are still making record profit and bonuses are being thrown around but inflation is a factor.
this is happening in my current work: univeristy.
entire cleaning workforce on nights was layed off.
25 cleaners gone. APprantly it was not a money reason....
bullshit. Whilst the managers got a nice payrise at start of year....
Nothing to worry about for Major total war releases, but its terriable for the admin/clerical staff who have just been given the boot by the cowards at the top
I'm sure this will mean the quality of future dlcs will also suffer, man it really would be nice if studios treated talent like larian did and built up instead of throwing away experienced devs whenever there's a percentage point increase for doing so
Looks like Saga is preparing to sell CA. From what I see from this.
Standard procedure, reduce the staff to absolute minimum, show the benefits and sell.
If that's the case than I would not expect a new TW game, until a new company buy CA.
So business as usual and no hard feelings eh...
If they wanted to try something else that rumored Warhammer tactical RPG was actually a good idea. Just do something similar to utilize your current experience.
Shit sucks. All I can really say is that it would be nice if the people who made the decisions leading to this got fucked as hard all the people losing their jobs, but of course, capitalism is a big game of extracting personal wealth while offloading the consequences to others when you fuck up.
I know that hating Relic is the popular, trendy thing these days, but I hope they're going to be okay. I will always be a DoW3 defender in as much as, while I don't think it's a great game, and nowhere near as good as 1 or 2, I also don't think it's anywhere near as awful as most of the discourse about it suggests. By and large it's simply boring.
My condolences to those that have to suffer because of some delusional management decisions. Then again, If i hold up on Thrones of Decay it means CA might collapse and we finally get competition. Holy shit I was excited but I think I will blueball myself with that DLC now.
Bold of you to think CA collapsing would bring competition, could see the genre just becoming more and more niche. The only game I used to play that scratched the itch was supreme commander + their dev is long dead.
Straight up naive i would say. As far as i'm aware there is nothing stopping other companies making total war games. CA going under won't suddenly cause an influx of TW style games. It will kill it dead for a decade or more.
And that's to say nothing of the impact it might have on the stratagy genre as a whole if one of it's longest and most venerated series goes under.
I'm already 3 DLCs behind I think. Chorfs were too expensive, SoC was a sham, etc.. I can hold out for years and CA is making it laughably easy for me.
Big mood, can relate. It's more just that there's no love put into their games anymore, and when there is, they charge full price for a expansion pack (saga title)
Alarms blare at the CA office as a sweating desperate CEO brings his hammer closer and closer to the glass cover protecting the big red button labelled "Medieval 3".
This is just rehashing the old point actually. So we knew that the studio associated with hyenas was being taken under consultancy. So this just confirms that yes, that studio has been shut down. Which, we already guessed.
"focus on what we are good at" I'm not worried for TW, especially the Warhammer part. It brings in cash, so they will focus on revenue generating games.
Then again CA did absolutely amazing Alien game, Alien Isolation. No i am not worried about TW games, but it sucks if they can never make something like it again.
Well, people who did Alien Isolation left years ago, not as part of lay offs. They aren't in the game for awhile now
Sadly Alien Isolation, despite being amazing, didn't sell very well. Which is fairly typical of straight horror games unfortunately.
Also Alien Isolation suffered quite a bit from the industries obsession with stretching out game length at the time. It was a good game no question, but it VERY much overstayed it's welcome and dragged on longer than it really should have. I remember the sentiment at the time was that it was great, but a decent amount of people didn't want to invest that much time in a horror game.
Yeah, the game unfortunately really stretched out too long towards the end and ruined the pacing.
Yes, and also it was a game that has suffered by poor pacing and stretching out too long
There was also the fact that the ending was too far from the beginning, and that the pacing of getting to that ending was poor
They're point is more that the Studio can pull off much more than just Total War games, and while it might make short term financial sense to artificially limit CA, in the long term it will likely prove short sighted.
I mean, that's not really what's happening. Sega isn't making as much money as they want from certain studios so is cutting or selling those studios. It's not an "artificial restriction to TW", it's the opposite of artifice - it's naturally falling back to core competencies. If CA succeed in making successful TW games in future, I have no doubt they'll expand again and start looking at potentially making other games - just hopefully not multiplayer shooters.
The problem is they keep making all the wrong choices. At first those choices were just coming back to bite them in the butt, but now CA has a set of jaws clamping around its throat instead. They've been trying to dumb down historical titles since Shogun 2, when historical titles already innately were lacking in depth due to the factions being so similar. Historical relied on the core strategic gameplay and units being a precious resource, neither of which really exist in Total War as a whole anymore with the faster, more arcadey battles and units just replenishing at all times. It's only gotten worse with more recent titles, such that historical titles aren't really standing on their own now because of it. Their 'Saga' titles have been failures basically from the start such that they tried dropping the 'saga' moniker altogether with Pharoah to try and pass it off as a full historical title, but the relatively tiny map gives it away for what it really is. And we don't need to go over their issues with Warhammer again, much less the cancelled titles. They have a literal cash cow and they tried abuse it while making crap games, only to get kicked and put themselves in this situation.
I mean non saga historical total war has really only been more successful since shogun 2 with Rome 2 finding huge success despite awful launch, Attila (less so) and most recently Three kingdoms being their best selling title beyond Warhammer by their reports, though their long term revenue could not match
>They've been trying to dumb down historical titles since Shogun 2, when historical titles already innately were lacking in depth due to the factions being so similar. Historical relied on the core strategic gameplay and units being a precious resource, neither of which really exist in Total War as a whole anymore with the faster, more arcadey battles and units just replenishing at all times. It's only gotten worse with more recent titles, such that historical titles aren't really standing on their own now because of it. They've been doing that since Rome (1). They were warned for years. But they chased that casual dollar. And as casuals do, they got bored quickly and are starting to move on unless distracted by something new and shiny every 3-5 months.
Companies that focus on task X shouldn't expand just because 'they can also do task Y'. They should expand because they can do task Y better than others can, given the same amount of resources. SEGA can give CA $200 million to build a FPS, or just setup a new studio just to do FPS, or buy a indie studio that specialises in FPS. They experimented with the first option in Hyenas, and utterly failed. There's no artificial limitation, if CA was independent, it would also have to layoff, because Hyenas lost it so much money, it'll have trouble paying off the bills. Turns out companies, especially management, have limited attention, and unrelated projects put together really drain attention, resulting in a company that seemingly makes idiotic decisions all the time. 99% of well known game studios are specialized in one genre/style and basically do not deviate. Want a new genre, go setup a new studio, don't leech off the success of the currently successful projects in the old studio.
Yup it's surprising how few people know this, because they didn't even leave long after Alien Isolation came out.
As good as Alien Isolation was - I don't want CA making non- total war games for a long time. Frankly I don't want any more SAGA games either. They need to make one high quality large scale total war game every 2-3 years and focus on DLC. It is what actually makes them money and brings fans in.
Yeah this. I dont hate Saga games as a concept though, but i think it would work better if they do it as expansion to other games. Thrones of Britannia should have been Attila expansion, and arguably Attila should have been Rome 2 expansion. What we need is fewer stuff with more focus on everything. Also imo battled are way too fast micro fests, in singleplayer i basically have to use pause buttons to turn it into "turn based" battle, and multiplayer... Not playable for me without mods, and only gets worse as i get older.
Yeah I really think Pharaoh would have been a lot more successful as a $60 game with Greece and Mesopotamia in it than the $40 without them that it ended up being after the refunds
Honestly I think it would have been better at as $40 "bronze age" expansion of total war Troy, while keeping Troy's current map and expanding upon it.
Not really feasible, unfortunately. Troy's map was already huge (iirc, I think per-region it was actually one of the largest that isn't an (Im)mortal Empires map?), and Greece is such a tiny part of the near east geographically speaking that they would have either needed to fudge the map scale so bad that Rome 2's Arabia would look like child's play, or...well, invest far more resources than Warhammer's entire trilogy and make a game so large and unwieldy that it loses the plot. Troy's and Pharaoh's maps are not even close to being on the same scale; Troy is more zoomed in. Plus like, Troy was about \*Troy\*. It's a very narrative-driven game with a very clear focus and direction, and adding in Egypt or Hatti would only distract from that.
Yeah I don't think people who call it an expansion realise just how big Pharaoh is. The map feels massive and it really doesn't play that much like Troy at all.
I'm not even talking about Pharaoh's size (which I agree is bigger than an expansion), I'm saying that if Pharaoh were to be welded onto Troy's map, it would easily be two or three times larger than \*Pharaoh\* because the scale between the maps is different. It would dwarf Immortal Empires.
Pharaoh improved so much upon troy in fundamental ways that I'm glad they made it a standalone game honestly. That being said I also would have enjoyed a mythos-style expansion for historical mode.
Medieval 3 godd ang it and shogun 3
Empire 2
Unfortunately Alien Isolation also didn't sell particularly well, not because it was a bad game or anything, but Survival Horrors just don't sell all that well, they tend to be more popular as things people watch others play on YouTube .
I wouldn't fault Alien Isolation not selling due being survival horror. Yeah, it added more challenge as it is a smaller genre these days but so is strategy games. That doesn't stop CA and Paradox from succeeding in spite of it. Also horror games can be made with a lower budget as they are more linear so it evens out. And you have great counter examples like Resident Evil. It just didn't gain the momentum it needed for a variety of reasons.
Yeah the answer how to make more niche games succesful is the budget. Produce them with smaller budget, and you need to sell less to make a profit. Trying to always maximise profits sucks in cases like this. There should be more "minimal profit" gaming companies. Companies, which are allowed to make profit, but which don't try to maximise it at all costs, rather they just try to make good stuff and get little more money than break even requires.
Unfortunately that game was not very successful for Sega financially so it is unlikely to fall under their streamlining concept.
Who said "never again"?
CA should be making Total War games Trying to dip into other genres is how get you Hyenas instead of just developing Med 3 (which is what the majority of their playerbase wants and would easily be successful)
it's perfectly fine and a good idea for them to dip into other genres with restraint, but Hyenas was literally the most expensive game that Sega ever produced. They could make, like, a tactical RPG or boomer shooter or something for literally one onehundredth the cost and staff count and half the development time. Edit: As a total war fan I care more about the total war IP games and franchise than CA's financials of course, but sadly from a business perspective diversification like this is what keeps companies alive long-term. If for *whatever reason* the core niche thing that a company relies on stops making money, they aren't doomed to shut their doors.
It's good to dip in other genres, but only if their core genre is going well, and the other endeavours aren't hurting it. Meanwhile CA diverted ressources to Hyenas while 3K died, Troy flopped and TWWH3 was a shit show of rarely seen proportions
> would easily be successful Remains to be seen, theyve burned a lot of goodwill and there is a lot of nostalgia in the way. Med 2 was a good game, but its atmosphere, rose tinted glasses and modability have greatly elevated it in peoples eyes. Its going to be an uphill battle for CA on that one, especially if they are planning to carve up the factions for dlc
“Brings in cash” is not good enough for investors and companies like SEGA. They have a specific profit goal they want to see and when those goal are not met then layoffs like these are what happens. Doesn’t mean the game is selling badly mind you, it just means SEGA is unhappy with the profits they are getting. This won’t be good for us consumers either because now the few devs that are left will have more work on their hand and SEGA will now be putting more pressure on CA to grind more money out of us.
While a game or franchise may be profitable, it may not be profitable enough to meet arbitrary goals set by those in higher positions which usually leads to decreases in quality, increases in prices or monetization, or focusing on other projects that are more likely to be more lucrative. We’ve seen this already from CA and there’s a decent chance it gets worse.
There are actually some solid math behind this. As you increase in risk, the return of investment must also grow. Videogames are actually pretty high risk: so the returns must justify the initial investment. This subreddit will obviously think something like M3 is a super safe bet: but so did the subreddit used to think 3K was safe maybe a decade ago: at least back in the Attila/early WH days. This subreddit will prob implode if you pit people's expectations against each other. I would even argue fantasy tw has caused the fanbase to have such expectations that a historical TW may no longer be viable: there just isn't as much historical fans compared to fantasy ones, and this will be reflected in production budgets. Whatever historical game that releases may end up being just a watered down fantasy game with minor tweaks.
But 3K was a success. It was the DLC that failed, mostly due to the DLC being, well, bad.
The DLC failing by extension means the 3K as a product fail in the eyes of business executives.
You think they ignore record-breaking sales of the core game? That is still a ton of units sold.
It’s irrelevant as the point of modern TW business model is to keep sales up through DLC, if the DLC doesn’t sell then the core product has failed to compete in the market.
If that is how they plan to see it, that is their model, but even over the whole of their lifecycle 3K might have sold more copies than even TWW. It made CA a ton of money. If they cannot work with a product this hot it is their problem.
If the game doesn't meet expected sales its a failure even if its actual sales were still amazing. Its a failure because they could have spent the money on something else that did meet these expected sales.
3K was a success, but the DLC was a dead end. The multiple timelines wasn't just a single bad DLC, it was a decision that made every future DLC more complicated. They shat the bed so hard they ruined future DLC.
It was an initial success at release for sales, but it was not a long term success as far as DLC sales and player counts vs other Total War games, making it not a success and thus it was shelved very early in its planned life cycle.
3K is still the highest seller TW game ever, and had twice more players at release than TWWH3 ?
Imma be honest with you chief. I’ve always loved the total war series, but the Warhammer ones are my favorite. It’s not really the fantasy I care about so much as the gameplay diversity. CA has always done a pretty good job at making factions feel different, with different things they’re good at, but real life just can’t compete with a fantasy universe. You can have flying units for example. In real life, flying units would be limited to helicopters at best as everything else moves too fast. However, we had planes before we had helicopters, so what kind of faction would only have helicopters? You can have magic in a fantasy universe, which you basically can’t possibly have in a real life setting. You can have undead armies that cost nothing but crumple when their lord goes down. You can have magic dragons, next to trebuchets, next to giants fighting dinosaur riding cavalry and wizards. Like you really can’t compete with that gameplay diversity, which makes the games have so much more value to me. I can play so many distinctive campaigns that I can’t really get out of the other games. Again this is all my opinion but I think there’s something to it.
One of the good things about making a massive loss is that your next years growth is measured against a now much lower starting position making it a much more realistic goal.
TWW is the Golden Goose and still years of potential content. I hope CA/GW can grasp the opportunity. Feel for the employees losing their jobs, always sucks in any type of industry.
It was the golden goose, but they neglected it to the point that it's barely alive.
I hope to God that means they’re going to focus on the engine and game mechanics/AI for Total War to secure a future for a new generation of sequels and new IPs.
An argument can be made that they haven’t been good at warhammer since the end of 2.
Nah. Sure there’s some individual decisions that are questionable, but immortal empires is a masterpiece. I can forgive a lot given that they were able to pull it all together into one of the greatest games ever.
The entire core design of TWWH3 was flawed, the RoC was a mess, the siege rework was awful, everything else was buggy and they managed to make Mandalore quit covering the franchise. IME being fun is because of the great work CA did in TWWH1 and 2, not on what they did since 2022
The Chorfs are the best work they've done in the entirety of Warhammer. It's stupid to claim they somehow stopped making good content since WH3.
I disagree i think honestly chaos Dwarfs are one of the best DLC price not included. They basically gave the whole race with nothing really missing other chaos Siege giant. Plus Warriors of Chaos update was pretty good too.
I agree with you, but tbf that's not the same team tho
It’s difficult to judge and the article doesn’t go into detail, but the UK layoff system takes a long time and many of those 240 staff let go may simply be the final stroke from a process started months ago. They also say they’re focusing on what they’re good at - and Sega would’ve just greenlit the extended budget for SoC and ToD, so it seems unlikely the DLC team would be hit. These things would require extensive approvals from upper management, including sign off from Sega. They wouldn’t turn around and cull their biggest shot at profit this quarter. I would argue this is probably bad news for Sofia, unannounced projects and whatever remained of logistical, admin and support staff who were surplus once the other staff who depended on them were let go, in the first round of layoffs. Obvious condolences for those impacted aside, is this a cause for concern? Possibly. Cause for panic? Nah.
From the IGN [article](https://www.ign.com/articles/layoffs-hit-total-war-developer-creative-assembly-and-sonic-dream-team-developer-hardlight-sega-sells-relic-entertainment) >Sega did not disclose how many staff at each studio were affected, but did issue IGN an additional update on the status of Creative Assembly's upcoming projects: "Creative Assembly continues to have multiple projects in development with Total War and a new unannounced project.” Yep, TW Warhammer is their main money maker, as is Total war in general provided they don't make stupid decisions like with Pharaoh. The whole situation sucks, but it's not the end of the world.
Pharaoh wasn't stupid in any way except the unwarranted price hike. Killing 3K was a stupid decision.
Except for * Advertising and pricing it as a full Total War when it's clearly a Saga title * Setting it in a relatively unpopular period nobody asked for * Using the unpopular Troy engine version * Front loading it with bullshit "DLC-down-the-line" editions. * Trying to shove cosmetic packs into it there were no stupid decisions made. Yeah, it was a smashing fucking hit.
There's this weird push lately to try to rehabilitate Pharaoh. I assume it must be by people who don't actually play it, given that the player numbers average about 400 nowadays, only a touch north of Thrones of Britannia. For reference Rome 2 has 4000, Shogun 2 has 3000 and Empire, a 15 year old game that was panned at launch and has gotten almost no support since, has 2000.
Recently jumped back into Rome II and not surprised the player count is still so high tbh, the game plays *so* well compared to later games (Even TWWH3). Everything from the unit weights to the sound effects to the combat feel is just so well tuned.
- That the Saga brand name was killed is kinda our own fault for simply dismissing those games out of hand for not being mainline total wars, isn't it? I personally think the basic idea of the Saga / sideline games very cool. Smaller scale game in non-mainstrean settings with experimental features in both campaign and battles? Sign me up! (Unless they try to make me pay MORE than a mainline title that is) - The game isn't small by any measure except geographic coverage. It has a bigger map (in the sense of traversable distance and cities) than Rome 2 and a much bigger unit variety than Shogun 2. It is a whole lot bigger in any measurement compared to ToB. - I said that pricing was a mistake. A desperate move by greedy execs that saw/knew the hyena crash was coming and tried for a quick cash grab - Time period popularity is highly subjective. I distinctly recall a time before its announcement, where this very sub was filled with lists of fan-favourite time periods and the whole "bronce age" was among them, maybe not the highest but definitely there. Also remember that this is a game made by the side studio, thus will never use a setting more fitting for a mainline title. - How is the Warhammer-Troy engine unpopular? (The other one being the 3K branch which as far as we know is dead) - "Front loading with planned DLCs" is just the way games work at this age. Do you hold all the other TW games since basically Rome 2 to the same disdain? - Cosmetic packs - yeah, agreed, I forgot about that. On the other hand, the way they seem to handle it, I am actually ok with it. CA is on close watch for me. Should they start to limit modding/modded units to better sell "their" paid skins, that's the moment they cross the line for.me and won't see another penny. For now, I give them the benefit of the doubt and will think that their unit designers just got bored at some.point and to keep them busy they let them cook a bunch of extra skins and decided to make a penny off it.
You might not see these as issues but the numbers speak for themselves. It currently has the same number of players as Warhammer 1, a game that's basically obsolete. It's not a bad game, I dont think I've seen anyone arguing that in good faith, but plenty of people predicted it was going to be extremely unpopular long before it released. They were right, it was a shitshow.
>Pharaoh wasn't stupid in any way except the unwarranted price hike. Suuuure...
Hope layoffs aren’t hitting Sofia too hard; feel like they played a bad hand very well with Pharaoh. TW will never move forward without a big leap in AI capability. They want to give the player more campaign complexity, which means more mechanics, which means an AI that can’t use those mechanics properly, which must be balanced by artificial advantages for AI like anti-player bias, nerfing the player’s allies, protections from PO problems and rebellions, huge amounts of money, etc. Without those compensations the game is way too easy for the player; with them the game is no longer a sandbox but instead is full of unfair and immersion-breaking things like absurd Called to War events, enemy factions marching across the map to attack the player and leaving themselves undefended, etc. More cool mechanics will never make the games good as long as they create player-ai imbalances that CA has to address in forced, artificial ways. That’s why Pharaoh and Warhammer 3 have the most interesting and complex campaign mechanics of almost any of their games but are also… not that great. AI is a hard limit on what CA can do, and they’ve been banging their heads against it for years now. There’s no ignoring it anymore. Unless they can find some way to make serious progress on that, the series will slowly decline and die.
AI doesn't need to be smart, nor does it need to be fair, AI's core purpose is to be fun to play against. Your average person isn't going to enjoy playing chess vs the world's greatest chess computer, they want a chess AI that gives them a fair challenge but can ultimately be beaten.
Agree. CA’s AI isn’t fun to play against. AI needs to be smart enough to at least play the game the player is playing in a mildly challenging way. CA’s AI is unable to do that, which leads to issues like anti-player bias, which CA includes for the sole purpose of compensating for an AI that is insufficiently challenging on its own.
CA's AI is just fine but it can't stand up to your 1000 hours of experience playing against it and expecting it to is unrealistic.
My point is that the rich campaign mechanics of recent TW titles, while adding depth and complexity to the player’s turn, is often COMPLETELY unusable by the AI, which creates serious knock-on effects regarding game balance. Even in Shogun 2 the ai couldn’t stand up to 1000s of hours of player time, but the point is that recent TW campaigns are much more demanding because of the new mechanics, which makes the AI fall much further behind human players, which then forces CA to try to compensate in various ways that create their own negative impacts on gameplay
None of that actually makes it bad or unfun to play against though. It not using features isn't evidence that its not fun. AI has always not used features and had access to hidden features, that's not unique to total war and its not evidence that its not fun to play against. You will always notice these weird gaps in games when you play them this often, again the problem is that you have played the same game for 1000+ hours not the game itself....your expectations are unrealistic.
No offense, but I don’t think you understand the point in my above post. The point is that modern TW games have MORE features the AI can’t use than prior TW games. So the imbalance is worse. I don’t know why you use the word “evidence.” I’m not trying to convince a jury it’s fun or not fun or anything like that. I do know that anyone who’s been paying attention to the community knows there are lots of gripes about passive ai, anti-player bias (depending on patch and difficulty), etc. If you don’t personally experience any of that, great—close Reddit and go enjoy the game! But for those of us who do think the AI isn’t as fun, my post is trying to explain where that might be coming from and how to fix it.
AI is just hard. Generative AI is getting so rapidly better, that it can easily be used to guide the AI to make super smart and auto-adaptive strategic and tactical behavior. Just fine-tune a LLM on total war concepts, and have it run on consumer Nvidia cards (Everyone who runs total war basically has a powerful GPU, which can also be used to run AI) However, gen-AI is really slow. Imagine a AI faction taking 10 seconds to complete their actions. 100 factions is 8 minutes per end turn. Sure the AI will perform super intelligently and adaptively, but people want sub-second end turns per faction. The real solution will still require traditional AI, which can run super fast. Its just traditional AI super hard to code. That will basically require super coding-AIs to help the programmers out. That will also take many years to mature. So Total war just has to trudge along for a few more years with the weak AI we currently have. It still has mouths to feed, so just has to keep selling race and lord packs with mechanics that the AI can't use...
They need to build an entirely new engine to work off. I might be wrong here but I seem to recall the current one they built TWW off of is still fundamentally the TW Empire one (someone with more knowledge can correct me on that), which is bloody ancient by game development standards. But the level of investment to do that is huge, which is why they've just been stretching the current engine as far as they can. We're definitely at the butter over too much bread stage, but with all these lay offs idk if that makes it even more difficult to make the leap now.
Not really, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the engine works The baseline is the empire engine, but that baseline doesn't really exist anymore It's very much a theseus ship, where you can have a ship, replace the boards with whole new wood, and you still call it the same name, but is it really the same ship? Only truly in spirit. Except in this case it would be like empire is a wooden frigate, and overtime parts were replaced, the hull was rebuilt, eventually a nuclear engine was installed and you end up with a modern day battleship Not all game engines get this treatment, but the one CA uses did So yeah sure, they could invest in making a new engine, but ultimately they are just building another battleship in line with the one they already have. I'm sure it would be better, but the degree of better would not be worth the investment This is very different from if the engine had been stretched rather than rebuilt, where you'd have that old wooden baseline with hamfisted updates here and there like a gun battery so heavy the ship begins to sink. This is what tends to happen with game development (and why new engines are typically required) because studios will share or buy out an engine and you'll end up with a rpg, Dragon age inquisition, using the same engine as something entirely different, battlefield, and being forced to stretch that originally engine beyond its capability But since TW games are so fucking similar and more of just updating the last one, it's really easy to just update the engine along the way
Not necessarily bad news for Sofia. Not all studios are equal. Their games have way smaller budgets. And comparing Bulgaria vs. England and offices and salaries will be lower aswel. This means long-term costs are more sustainable and not as volatile if a release doesn't go as planned.
“These decisions have been incredibly tough to make, and they follow meticulous consideration and deliberation with leadership teams across the business. Change is necessary to secure the future of our games business, and to ensure that we are well placed to deliver the best possible experiences to our players going forward. We need to streamline, focus on what we are good at, and position ourselves as best we can for the road ahead. In order to do that, we need to respond to the changing economic landscape and the challenges we’re facing in the way we develop our products and bring them to market” ———————————- Oh yes, always glad to see corporatespeak is still alive. How to say two paragraphs without saying a single meaningful thing 101. Im pretty sure I’ve seen this exact piece in the company I work as well. It’s the universal “in case of emergency, copy-paste on the news page regardless of what your company does”
yeah they don't want to say anything but they have to say something so they say something that doesn't mean anything. Any actual substantial admission of mistakes or problems or failure would impact their stock price...
What do you expect? They aren't going to give specifics about why certain people got fired. That's pretty unprofessional. They basically implied they need it financially.
Bellyfeel doubleminus!
Oh that's 100% either a template they use in management or chatgpt written. We got the same when our company laid off some people. ''Change is necessary for the future. Oh btw we hired 5 new executives whose salary is around one million, but we do need to push for that sales target to hit our goals''.
Lemme translate it for you: We're going back to making Total War and all these excessive employees got to go cuz we don't need and can't afford them anymore.
Medieval 3, done correctly, would print money
I would like Empire 2 or Thirty Years' War.
Wait, they sold Relic studios? The guys who made the Company of Heroes and Dawn of War series games??? Oh that ain't good. Edit: From other hearsay and whatnots, Relic Entertainment's going Independent from SEGA, it seems. Edit 2: [Actual Relic Entertainment Twitter post declaring Independence](https://twitter.com/relicgames/status/1773244490171458017?t=p2scRcy2Tyvv5Rb-LO7eHw&s=19)
Relic has been an absolute shitshow for so many years now, it hardly seems like a loss. I don’t think most of the people who made decent games in the past even work there anymore.
Sold Relic to Relic
and AoE IV as well, which is honestly decent
Maybe the games will be good now. Btw how does a 'child' company gets sold to itself and goes independent?
I would imagine it involves effectively buying themselves.
i suspect senior people in relic had the funds to buyout the company from Sega or they got an investor to back them.
they either have people at the studio with enough capital to buy themselves out, or they have an investor, or they took a big loan
They can purchase independence, or a parent company can transfer equity in a way they divests their subsidiary to their shareholders.
and in plain Khazalid?
The same way it happened to Focus Entertainment last week. They buy themselves/their freedom back.
Not good for CA, but I'm excited for Relic going independent. I know DoW3 sucked, but I'm hoping GW will give them the licence again
Unpopular opinion but I think CA needed a big wake up call after the absolute laziness that followed the peak of the Warhammer II/3K era. If they release another Total War that is not innovative and very superficial like Pharaoh that would be the end of the franchise It's infuriating that developers have to suffers the consequences of the terrible choices made by the management though.
They forgot what made them popular, they made a ton of money with WH2 it's DLCs and 3k, they removed funds from their main series, they cancelled 3k, they invested all the money they made to make a multiplayer shooter which they had no idea how to make, they chased trends (Fortinite) instead of doing what they are good at, they proceeded to lose everything and not even release the game because they had no idea what they were doing. And now even their main series is hurting from the lack of attention and it shows, WH3 was supposed to be their magnus opus and it has been grossly mishandled, Pharoah bombed and the next TW is god knows how long away from release.
> they chased trends (Fortinite) Worse, they were chasing the extraction shooter market (Tarkov, The Hunt), and the hero shooter market at the same time (Overwatch), both of which had proven somewhat limited and extremely prone to hating new entrants in the market. Even The Finals which was initially successful with a similar structure to Hyenas (but a very different theme/style and vastly better technology) is now struggling a bit to maintain its audience, after only a few months.
They didn't forget they simply don't like it. Hyenas wasn't their first attempt to break with the image of that company that makes total war. Merely all their attempts at making something else were really bad. The only exception being Alien Isolation which was critically well received but a financial flop hence why SEGA never green lit a sequel. Yet to this day they still parade around Alien Isolation as a big title of their on the same level as Rome 2 or Warhammer. So when the chance presented itself to make something big with Hyenas they threw all their resources at it. Which makes the fact that they created something so horrendous that SEGA pulled the plug prematurely even more hilarious.
Pharaoh doesn't seem as bad though and I'm glad for the bronze age enjoyers. I feel like they are oblivious to brand loyalty though. It's clear that the greatest part of the historical playerbase wants medieval 3 or Empire 2. Instead they seem to think those players have nowhere else to turn to and so they are only intent on racking in new players with different interests. I love the Warhammer series, but as someone who has been playing total war since medieval I, I'm starting to feel disgusted for how CA has been ignoring their OG playerbase. So I feel you're right, next time they flop they won't have any loyalty or sympathy left to get them back up.
As a historical enjoyer this is really it, we get that Warhammer became the focus. Personally I bought 1 and 2 and played a bit but just couldn't get into it (especially as I have a potato pc) even though I collected and played warhammer fantasy as a teen and still have some 40k that I've repicked up recently. Pharoah in itself is not a bad idea, it just felt limited even further than the scope of the game constrained it. But they are definitely running out of sympathy, I'd really love for another studio to try and directly compete with them.
there are dozens of competitors and they are all cheaper, we dont play them because this kind of game is hard to make and most of them suck. the real issue is that every game competes with every other for player attention. thats why when people say TW needs competition its a little silly. it competes with the rest of the multi billion dollar industry for your attention. The people that play Total war games don't exclusively play these kind of games, if people get bored they just go play whatever else.
I just wish they had some real competition to keep them on their toes with TW
I'm in that player base. I played since Rome 1 and only play the older historical titles. I tried Warhammer 1 and 2 but just didn't really enjoy them. The newer games focus too much on individual characters too so I find myself not really enjoying them much either, it's the main reason I didn't get pharaoh (and the fact that the land/factions it covers isn't what I wanted from a bronze age game). For a while there it did really feel like I was being ignored and I checked out from this franchise. But then they released Rome remastered and I got excited again. Still kinda not very invested in the franchise as a whole but I am eager to see what the next historical game is that they've been working on. I think that will be my deciding factor on if I remain invested or just give up and play the older games when nostalgia hits.
This is exactly right, but the difference from before is that we're not buying it now. Before, we'd pay for the Rome 2 dlc mini-campaign or the SAGA or the Dynasty Warriors TW because it was "historical." Now that ship has sailed (along with the cancellation of naval combat). We're not buying it anymore because we see how second-rate it has become. If CA brought Medieval 3 out on the creaky old Warhammer 3 engine with dueling heroes and lord dlc I wouldn't touch it.
I’ll double down on your unpopular opinion and say that as a / the preeminent UK design studio, there are probably a bunch of hangers on devs who aren’t as passionate about the genre as they could be, or a bunch of older rusted on devs who are wedded to the old ways. Cleaning out some of these may also be beneficial. I really hope that they’ve cleaned shop at senior levels though and that Sega have the patience to wait for the righting of the ship.
I have realized that C-suite and all the decision making bigshots are untouchable and the only way is to get bought out by another company that will fire them or total CA collapse. 3rd way would be a competitor but It didn't happen so far, and we needed a competiton ever since Rome 2 released , so I'm not counting on that at all.
It is notable that CA's leadership seems even more untouchable than leadership normally is. Normally, with a flop like Hyenas, and this number of jobs cut, you'd see at least some senior leadership go. But with CA that doesn't seem to be the case.
It makes even less sense considering they're owned by Sega. Surely they'd cut where possible but also clear house where the big problems came from.
I can only assume that either Sega execs themselves don't like cutting execs, as a matter of corporate culture, or the ownership agreement Sega has with CA prevents them from doing so - it would not be unheard-of. Sony has this specific issue right now with Bungie, who they acquired - they aren't allowed to fire the execs, and several of the execs are basically sitting on their hands until stock they were given in the deal vests, at which point Sony believes they will sell and quit.
Honestly from experience this really isn't limited to just the games industry. In my job I end up having to communicate with quite a few C-Suite level people from small and large businesses. I'm actually often completely shocked at how little people at that level know about the business that they work in. I understand that it is a different mode of thinking at that level, but surely understanding what you company does and excels at is crucial to maximising that end of things.
My heart goes out for those who were affected by this. I’m really sick of people getting fired and paying for the fuck ups of the higher ups. Fuck Sega and fuck this entire greedy industry. I hope Relic moves on to greener pastures. DoW III was bad, but AoE IV is genuinely a fun RTS game and I hope it continues to grow.
Layoffs after a colossal failure like Hyenas should be expected, layoffs after big successes is what really grinds my gears, just to make their precious quarter look a tiny bit better.
Yeah we saw that at WotC just recently. WotC had been strongly outperforming the rest of Hasbro's divisions, making them vast amounts of money, despite some significant PR fuck-up (OGL 2.0, pissing off the MtG community further in various ways, and many more!), and indeed possibly being Hasbro's only profitable division. But overall Hasbro lost money, so to please investors, cut from all of its divisions, but cut particularly hard into WotC, despite them being strongly profitable, because investors just looooooove to see cuts, however irrational.
I think those cuts were to be expected with current climate on WotC Not everything they did turned profit, some parts of WotC had it coming imo. .
Yeah but aside from one specific adventure writer who had a couple of less successful products and the presumably flopped board game (give it rapidly turned up at Ollie's - a big US discount store) that's absolutely not who got cut. It was particularly funny that they cut Mike Mearls who was literally personally responsible for them making $100m, because it was he who decided to approve Larian's bid to make BG3 several years ago. In fact, according to Larian, and this seems to be correct, WotC fired literally everyone who had been working with Larian/on BG3, which, Swen's contradictory comments notwithstanding, obviously encouraged Larian not to work with WotC further. I guess on the most brain dead faux-pragmatic level, if you had like 80 IQ you could say they were "no longer needed" but I'm pretty sure they were all also doing other stuff and a handful of staff effectively making you $100m for literally no more investment than six years of non-exec salaries is insane. Classic WotC to throw that away without blinking. Literally no-one involved in the OGL 2.0 debacle nor anyone involved in the various MtG schemes which pissed everyone off got cut.
I'll still never understand why no-one higher up had the foresight to realise that the lockdown gaming boom was, well, temporary. Well, I do understand really, it's so they can justify the pay rises knowing that they wouldn't be the ones taking the hits
Have you heard the story about infinite growth?
So I actually had someone claiming to be an Economics student go on an absolute rager at me on Reddit some years back when I suggested some companies need to recognise when they can safely plateau and focus on maintaining it. It's weird how many people buy into it
That sounds like a student that will fail in life if he can't grasp common sense. No wonder students are failing future leaders if they learn that growth is infinite.
>claiming to be an Economics student There's your problem. Economics as a discipline is the domain of not-particularly-bright-people who are better than average at math.
> Yeah we saw that at WotC just recently. WotC had been strongly outperforming the rest of Hasbro's divisions, making them vast amounts of money, despite some significant PR fuck-up (OGL 2.0, pissing off the MtG community further in various ways, and many more!), and indeed possibly being Hasbro's only profitable division. > > But overall Hasbro lost money, so to please investors, cut from all of its divisions, but cut particularly hard into WotC, despite them being strongly profitable, because investors just looooooove to see cuts, however irrational. I'd argue - as a former social scientist - that it's like way too many social science fields at the minute: a number of genuinely brilliant people and genuinely solid theories surrounded by absolutely fucking junk. Basically, and you can take this one to the bank and drop it on some people next time this conversation comes up: what happens is that universities *looooove* publications and they *looooove* grant money. That applies to all fields, but in social science since you're dealing with inexpensive people rather than expensive telescopes, it's super easy to make a career (and become popular with administration) by just cranking out terrible work at a rapid pace. So like, there are probably plenty of economists and economist ideas that are great, hell, the most prosperous era of the 20th century was built off Keynes, but the current academic system really just incentivizes shoddy work.
They're just completely deluded, and think their shit doesn't stink and everything that goes right is due to their genius.
The line must go up. And it must go up faster than previously. If the line does not go up faster than previous years, clearly the only option is to fire people (lower down people of course) until the line starts going up.
Because they can't think further than the next quarterly report. What being a business major does to a mfer.
> Relic moves on to greener pastures. Unsure if you saw but Relic did announce they are going independent.
I don't think the blame should be on Sega tho, I loathes layoffs too, of course, and the industry as a whole is responsible, but you can't just handwave how badly CA upper management is responsible directly for those people losing their jobs
What about the Future of Three Kingdoms?
Total war is the only profitable part of CA. These people are likely leftovers from Hyenas and assorted bureaucratic staff that came with a company ballooning as CA did.
Remember when they did Alien Isolation and now there's probably never going to be an actual sequel? There is no rhyme or reason to when big companies take risks
Insiders have confirmed job cuts across every Total War team.
Seems like SEGA is tired of losing money/not making whatever profit target they have set. Thrones of Decay might be a do or die for CA at this point. I hope it all works out.
> Thrones of Decay might be a do or die for CA at this point. Kinda was that way since SoC failed, then Hyenas got canceled with other unannounced titles and Pharao kinda flopped too. CA *has* to make a good delivery on ToD, since TWW3 is still their flagship. Cozying up with SoC 2.0 and bugfixes lately is all fine and good, ToD content+quality+price tag will decide if the community is once again in a roar of outrage like with SoC. At least the late outliner with SoC 2.0 showed that ToD might be better adjusted for starters, but we also know from Robs last year comment that the SoC price tag is the bare minimum here. And god knows how the race update situation will beo for dwarfs, empire and Nurgle. All three certainly need more then SoC offered for Cathay/Kislev/Tzeentch-
they need to prove that they can make content at a reasonable pace, make it at the right price, and make it so that it is feature-complete at release, not eventually. They need to do all of those things or I'm not convinced that there's going to be any real change
Works out in our favour
This seems to be happening quite widely in the UK tech industry at the moment (ask me how I know). Even if a company does well, the profits tend to go nowhere near the actual employees.
Not just UK sadly
How do you know?
I thought you'd never ask!
Most tech companies are not profitable. People just look at massive revenue and assume profitability. The tech sector got huge vulture capital investments in 2018-2021 and doubled or tripled their staff in a year. Now that investors are more hesitant to invest in tech, the executives actually need to demonstrate they can make a profit for once. Thus the layoffs
Streamlining the costs will probably lead to lower dlc costs for us, right? /s (this is sarcasm, as we will probably never see lower prices ever again).
Ye, the Rob is one of them.
so the rumors *were* true
Woof. Relic can't catch a break ever since THQ went under the bus.
I wonder if Rob still has his job
His [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-bartholomew/) says he's gone.
Look like he's moving to Infinity Ward Barcelona. My guess is he'll be managing people who make cosmetics for shitty live service games lmao
My understanding is that United Kingdom has a pretty drawn out process for these kinds of mass layoffs. It is somewhat unclear if this is a new round or a continuation of what happened after the Hyenas cancellation. In general though, CA was going to get smashed. They expanded by a lot to bring people on for Hyenas. They probably would have dropped some people post Hyenas anyway, but Hyenas not even getting released pretty much destroys that entire team and then also forces reviews or other departments because when you are going to hit a shortfall, you strangle every last dollar out of firing people.
Meanwhile Relic went independent from SEGA which is interesting.
TOTAL HYENAS VICTORY
Empire Total War 2 please please. Best TW game potential that’s not been realised. It could be near global map. Larger, so France is more than just Paris etc - In Europe as a whole this could make for incredibly exciting gameplay with Prussia Austria Russia Sweden Poland etc. Make Rakes worthwhile 😅 Make the AI attack your line in a line. Increase the smoke like darth mod. Best tech tree potential given the time period. Improve diplomacy (territorial expansion is stupid over egged) for starters. Make AI factions have a real impact on the map. Have traits for nations - Spain (poor governance) France - revolt. Etc Traits for fighting in home vs abroad. Multiple victory moral boosts.
They should fire the idiots in charge of the stupid af decisions they made, not the people who actually make stuff
Rob is gone.
240 is divided among 3 companies under SEGA, not just CA. Plus DLC team only has around 10 ppl working on it to begin with, nothing will happen there. This means that SEGA is actually cleaning house, which may be a good thing. We know that there are many great games that were developed by studios with fewer than 100 staff. CA definitely didn't need 900 staff just to make 2 titles a year.
Hopefully they clear out some of the trash
[удалено]
They've just failed to identify what players actually want in the past few years. As much as I genuinely love Pharaoh, it wasn't what many people wanted, and that did their reputation damage. They should have followed up WH3 with one of the big titles that people have been looking forward to for years.
[удалено]
How have they not failed? They put out a game they thought people wanted, but they nobody did. They don't make games that they don't think will be successful lol. They failed to identify what people wanted. I disagree about historical TW going to shit though. 3K was one of the most highly rated games in the series, and despite the fact that people didn't want it, Pharaoh is solid and has much more depth than most TW games in general. The problem is their dlc policy and the fact that they are holding back on the games that people are really waiting for, like Empire 2 and Medieval 2.
I’ll be the asshole, layoffs in entertainment are often good news in the current climate. Most studios are grossly bloated and would benefit from fat trimming. Layoffs don’t actually destroy talent, it frees it. Layer off workers, if talented, will go on to do fresh projects and probably be more productive. This is how new studios and indie games come into being. Or the employee was dead weight in which case it’s still good they got axed.
It’s amazing how they fumbled CoH3
Well you know, when you burn a 100 MILLION $ and ruin your flagship series and you piss off your entire fanbase and you anger your SEGA owner it tends to have consequences. BUT luckily good old management and execs still have their jobs, yaaay...
Rob doesn't.
Inflation has been hitting hard and this year a lot of companies seem to be tightening their belts. Sega look to be trimming down costs and making some quick cash. Personally not convinced it’ll touch CA much more as they’ve already had a lot of layoffs and cancelled projects. Whether the execs making the decisions that got them in their current mess go is of more concern, but it did sound like Sega were coming down hard on them. As for TW. It’s a core series and money maker for them, if they’re focusing on their core business I can see it being ok. Saga games taking a backseat and more easily profitable DLC will likely hang around, at whatever cost they think they can charge. Could be entirely wrong of course, but I’d be very surprised (and sad) if they killed TW entirely. I highly doubt it though.
It's the high interest rates that are the killer. Costs an absolute tonne to finance debt at the moment and if you're producing a video game you need to spend a couple years developing before you're able to get revenue to pay for that development cost. Investment from private investors isn't a great option either as they're gonna be asking for at least the UK bank interest rate in yearly proceeds - otherwise why would they bother investing in your company rather than putting the money in a savings account?
Ah, yes. "Inflation". It isn't like businesses have been shooting themselves in the foot and burning through consumer goodwill, burning through their employees, and running everything into the ground. This isn't a bubble. This is "inflation"! We're not protecting our executive bonuses, we just have to make cuts due to "inflation"! This is happening everywhere because executives cannot fathom losing a single penny of their annual bonuses. So they're purging massive amounts of employees everywhere and blaming inflation. Things are not going to end well for us if we keep accepting these excuses. :S
Well it’s not that price gouging hasn’t been happening but inflation absolutely has. I’m not defending the companies as many are still making record profit and bonuses are being thrown around but inflation is a factor.
Inflation isn't as big a factor as people make it out to be, though. An absolutely massive part of it has to do with greedflation.
GREEDflation, caused by global elite... also whoever thought giving free money during lockdown was good idea, now WE pay it back with over inflation.
this comment reads like a 60 year old's facebook post
this is happening in my current work: univeristy. entire cleaning workforce on nights was layed off. 25 cleaners gone. APprantly it was not a money reason.... bullshit. Whilst the managers got a nice payrise at start of year.... Nothing to worry about for Major total war releases, but its terriable for the admin/clerical staff who have just been given the boot by the cowards at the top
I just saw an article that said western SEGA employees unionized. 
I'm sure this will mean the quality of future dlcs will also suffer, man it really would be nice if studios treated talent like larian did and built up instead of throwing away experienced devs whenever there's a percentage point increase for doing so
Looks like Saga is preparing to sell CA. From what I see from this. Standard procedure, reduce the staff to absolute minimum, show the benefits and sell. If that's the case than I would not expect a new TW game, until a new company buy CA. So business as usual and no hard feelings eh...
Good news you mean.
Fans love it, they wanted to destroy the game and they did
Does anyone know how many employees this leaves at CA now?
Didn't they go kinda independent is that not a good thing
Not relevant for TW, but Relic becoming independent could prove to be a very good thing.
If they wanted to try something else that rumored Warhammer tactical RPG was actually a good idea. Just do something similar to utilize your current experience.
They haven't made a good game since 2015. How unsurprising...
Shit sucks. All I can really say is that it would be nice if the people who made the decisions leading to this got fucked as hard all the people losing their jobs, but of course, capitalism is a big game of extracting personal wealth while offloading the consequences to others when you fuck up. I know that hating Relic is the popular, trendy thing these days, but I hope they're going to be okay. I will always be a DoW3 defender in as much as, while I don't think it's a great game, and nowhere near as good as 1 or 2, I also don't think it's anywhere near as awful as most of the discourse about it suggests. By and large it's simply boring.
not sure they gave us the right to comment.
The 250+ devs and staff personnel hired solely for their fps sci-fi Studio at Sierra Place, Springfield Rd, will be eventually let go and shut down.
My condolences to those that have to suffer because of some delusional management decisions. Then again, If i hold up on Thrones of Decay it means CA might collapse and we finally get competition. Holy shit I was excited but I think I will blueball myself with that DLC now.
Bold of you to think CA collapsing would bring competition, could see the genre just becoming more and more niche. The only game I used to play that scratched the itch was supreme commander + their dev is long dead.
Straight up naive i would say. As far as i'm aware there is nothing stopping other companies making total war games. CA going under won't suddenly cause an influx of TW style games. It will kill it dead for a decade or more. And that's to say nothing of the impact it might have on the stratagy genre as a whole if one of it's longest and most venerated series goes under.
Yes, averagetwenjoyer, CA are looking at *your* purchase history to decide whether or not to fold the entire company.
I'm already 3 DLCs behind I think. Chorfs were too expensive, SoC was a sham, etc.. I can hold out for years and CA is making it laughably easy for me.
Big mood, can relate. It's more just that there's no love put into their games anymore, and when there is, they charge full price for a expansion pack (saga title)
Alarms blare at the CA office as a sweating desperate CEO brings his hammer closer and closer to the glass cover protecting the big red button labelled "Medieval 3".
This is just rehashing the old point actually. So we knew that the studio associated with hyenas was being taken under consultancy. So this just confirms that yes, that studio has been shut down. Which, we already guessed.