Personally, I picked up NRFTW after the first hotfix for The Breach and I haven’t run into pretty much anything most of the negative reviews are complaining about. There were 100% tuning issues with the original Breach update and they got pummelled for it in the reviews, but in less than a week they fixed 90% of the problems.
It’s an early access game, so no, of course it’s not perfect yet, but it’s a really solid product with a ton of potential that’s fun to play right now.
The problem is that reviews are rarely updated, so right now there’s a ton of reviews that capture a tiny snapshot of the game’s life that don’t reflect where the game is merely a couple weeks after they were left. I’m sure there was a bunch riding on this…they’d been locked up in legal proceedings getting the rights to the game and getting out from under a publisher, and I’m sure part of the hype train around The Breach was to spur a renewed round of funding.
As someone newer to its community, I’m really surprised at how much complaining there is about end game longevity and a bunch of other things that make me want to ask, “You…you know the game isn’t done yet, right?”
Moon Studios took a risk going independent which means two things: (a) they have strong faith that their project can stand on its own, and (b) they are far more sensitive to cash flow now than they were under a publisher. One thing I think they’ll need to work on is their community relations, and it’s a shame because it almost always means we hear less direct communication and more stuff filtered through PR people.
I’ll leave a positive review b/c I’ve played about 10 hours and I’m really enjoying the game in front of me and look forward to the updates coming through the rest of 2025.
Yep… ARPG gamers are literally among the worst, most unpleasable types of gamers. They will bitch about everything, because they all want a very specific type of game for them and them alone. Just look at every other isometric ARPG and their communities; 90% of the time, they’re filled with negative posts and comments, constantly upset about balance, end game, leveling, loot, etc etc.
I think NRFTW is fantastic, and it’s exactly what I was expecting it to be. However, people saw it at the same “style” as Diablo or Path of Exile and expected the game to be like those… except they’re not. And for those that do realize that, you have the other idiots that refuse to accept that it’s an EA game that still has a long roadmap until completion and bitch about the lack of an “endgame.”
I think NRFTW is fantastic, and it’s exactly what I was expecting it to be. However, people saw it at the same “style” as Diablo or Path of Exile and expected the game to be like those… except they’re not. And for those that do realize that, you have the other idiots that refuse to accept that it’s an EA game that still has a long roadmap until completion and bitch about the lack of an “endgame.”
Honestly, I think trying to compete with Diablo and PoE2 is already too much, even if it’s trying to say it’s not those. Those games are huge, with long-running, dedicated fanbases, and they do enough to oversaturate the market just fighting amongst themselves.
This was the wrong type of game to be trying to dive into the first time they cut themselves off from Microsoft’s financial cushion.
I honestly don’t see much comparison at all, to be honest. This doesn’t have a web of skills to unlock nor does it have the rapid-fire pace of a Diablo game. I guess a vaguely isometric 3rd person action game is automatically Diablo?
It’s 1,000% in the Soulsborne category, but with select systems from ARPGs mixed in, and the pains of figuring out how to adapt them are showing, but the potential is huge.
And maybe that’s the thing; coming at this from “I want an alternative to a Souls game” and it lands great. If I picked this up expecting Diablo or Torchlight (ha! I’m old!) or something, I’d be WTF-ing within 8 second of the game starting.
Agreed on all points. Just spending more than a few seconds watching gameplay footage would put a lot of initial misconceptions to rest. But yeah, while the game is great (in my opinion), it definitely still has a ways to go to fully come into its own and I really hope they secure more funding to see their vision to completion.
The game is self-published. They used to be published by Private Division but went indie when that company got sold. The game had legitimately troubled development.
The article states it got review bombed (but not what for). Dishonest negative score kinda throws out legitimacy of the whole thing, making it a bit less bad. I feel for the desperate dev, but I guess I still agree with you.
Except they did not get review bombed and the article is blindly using the studio head as a source. Go look at the reviews, there actually is a ton of valuable feedback there.
They kinda did. They pushed out a sizable update that fixed a bunch of issues, but also upped the difficulty. People liked the improvements, but not the difficulty change, and my understanding is that they fixed that issue quickly but not before a bunch of people complained about it.
I get where they’re coming from, but I also don’t like them sking for positive reviews.
I wouldn’t see it SO negatively. If they were paying people for reviews, then yes, that’s corruption; but every YouTuber uses phrases like “Drop a like” and it’s considered normal. When you worked hard on something, I think it’s common to ask for a positive review. People are sentient enough to choose whether to do so.
Maybe they should take the feedback from reviews and incorporate that into their updates. It’s not just that you are being review bombed by unreasonable people, it’s that people feel the game has problems that aren’t being addressed. I agree it is difficult to recover from a bad release because first impressions are everything. Companies can recover and have, take No Man’s Sky for an example.
My understanding is they had a big update that fixed a bunch of issues people complained about, but also made the game more difficult, and people didn’t like that.
I think another good example would be Cyberpunk 2077. Its release was insanely horrible but it seems they managed to solve it somehow.
Haven’t really followed the gaming news regards this game though. However, I hope they manage to find a solution. The Ori games were truly masterpieces (in my opinion).
CDPR had a massive cushion of cash from the Witcher games to bounce them back up. Ori studio obviously doesn’t. In this case, without enough sales, the solution is layoffs or selling to a bigger publisher, which will also result in layoffs.
“detrimental” was definitely not the word they should have used. What would be a better word there? Comment below. It helps me keep bringing you great comments.
Anyone play it? I generally don’t buy early access, but the Ori games were great and I’ll probably like this too.
I have a love/hate relationship with ARPGs. I love games like Ys, Zelda, and Dark Souls, but I don’t like loot based games like Diablo II, and it seems like ARPGs either go hard on loot or largely avoid it. This looks like the second case, but I’d hate to get a few hours in and realize I need to manage loot for decent progression.
I’ve played it and really enjoyed it. Despite getting advertised as an ARPG, it’s really not. It’s more like dark souls but with random loot. The gameplay is very slow and methodical, and it’s very difficult. Managing loot isn’t that bad, I just went with whatever I found and didn’t have to worry too much about finding the perfect weapons/armor.
Loot is a part of it but you can upgrade whatever to whatever item level and change stats (randomly) so finding the perfect item is not needed. Just get whatever works for you.
I’ve played it. Artwork is beautiful, but controls are wonky, hard to get used to on PC, and the gameplay unnecessarily punishing. It doesn’t feel good to play.
Hm… while I’d love to buy the game to support them, 40€ is a very high asking price for an early access title, especially if they possibly won’t be around to finish it.
Yeah. I have it wishlisted for a likely later purchase but getting this message public seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. People might be more cautious buying into it now. I know I am
I don’t see the pattern of a review bombing in Steam reviews… Looks like a game getting released very soon in early access and failing to gain traction.
It’s sitting on my wishlist and I’m waiting for it to get to 1.0, but their update cadence has been very slow. Now they are saying their studio does not have the funds to complete the game.
I do hope they turn this around, but as a consumer I am very wary when it comes to titles in early access, and even more when the studio goes radio silent for months.
Yeah, 100%. “Review bombing” suggests that people are leaving disingenuous bad reviews due to some personal or political axe to grind with the developer. This just looks like a game that got a lukewarm reception, but at least the information in the article doesn’t suggest that any review bombing is occurring.
I’m a big Ori fan, and I wish Moon Studios the best. But the games market is oversaturated right now, and it’s a tough time for all indie devs. It doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is out to get them if their game isn’t an overnight success.
A reason for lack of updates are that they had a lot of other things to do, like getting independent from their publisher and promised more rapid updates in the future.
I’m waiting for their multiplayer patch to play the game in full but I enjoyed the combat in the first 10 minutes and an excited to play it. ARPGs need to evolve past the idle games most of the current popular ones devolve into.
I guess I haven’t heard Souls-Like or games like Zelda or Witcher 3 (what I’d call Action Adventure I guess or RPG) called an ARPG although they fit the name well enough that maybe I have and today I’m falling on the other side of a fuzzy line.
Yes, I was referring to Diablo, PoE, Last Epoch, and the rest of the “looter” ARPG’s or what I’d just call ARPG’s. Maybe this is why the Diablo-like meme came up? To further drill in to the genre.
I think Zelda is right at the boundary of Action-Adventure and ARPG, and some games fall on the RPG side (TLoZ, Zelda 2) and many on the action-adventure side. But many are right at that limit, using equipment and heart containers as progression.
Dark Souls is absolutely an ARPG. You have leveling mechanics, different builds with impactful player choice, and other forms of progression. Likewise for Witcher 3.
And yeah, what frustrates me a lot is that many people seem to mean “Diablo-like” when they say “ARPG,” which it is, but the genre is much larger than that.
Diablo’s effect on the market was significant, inspiring many imitators. Its impact was such that the term “action RPG” has come to be more commonly used for Diablo-style games, with The Legend of Zelda itself slowly recategorized as an action-adventure.
To me, ARPG means any game with strong RPG mechanics and a focus on the action instead of stats for determining player success.
Unfortunately, the snippet from the Wikipedia article you quoted exactly exemplifies my understanding of the genre tags and how I’ve seen them used since I was old enough to get on the Internet and read such things.
Zelda has, for me, always been an action adventure game. I don’t think I’d called Zelda breath of the wild an RPG game or an ARPG game but that’s because the item portion of the game felt incomparable to a game like Witcher or Diablo where every piece of your character is an item that can be upgraded.
That being said, I’m not exactly the biggest Zelda fan and BotW was like 10 years ago for me.
Yeah, Zelda was originally what I thought of when I heard “ARPG” because I grew up on the NES games. If I started w/ something later, I might consider the series “action-adventure” instead, because the definition of what an ARPG has changed somewhat. And yeah, I’d consider BotW “action-adventure” as well using today’s definition, but it would’ve been an ARPG using the earlier definition.
There are plenty of other somewhat similar games that do qualify as ARPG today that are very different from Diablo games, like the Ys series, Gurumin, and Cross Code. The Ys series is fairly diverse, but generally speaking, gear upgrades are plot-based (find in a chest in the dungeon you’re exploring) and there’s not a ton of diversity, and leveling your character is very important (1-2 level difference can be the difference between a nearly impossible boss fight and a manageable one). In Gurumin, there is a fixed set of upgrades, and you combine these to get effects. CrossCode has stats, unlockable abilities, and action-oriented combat. Loot isn’t really a major part of any of those games, they’re too action-oriented to be an RPG, and they have too much emphasis on progression to really be action-adventure.
Those are the sorts of ARPGs I absolutely love, yet everyone seems to focus on the Diablo-like dungeon crawlers where loot is a defining factor.
It’s always lack of advertising. The unfortunate fact of life is that 99.99% of indie studios have no clue how to market their game. They think they just have to make a good game, and boom, people will flock to it.
Steam is there to make sure users have a platform to download their game. It’s not there to market it. Marketing is just an occasional side effect.
Steam is a marketing machine. The developers just need to do the leg work first. Steam will heavily promote games that have high wishlists and sales momentum. All those personalized recommendations you see on Steam is Valve doing marketing.
It’s not one you should rely on. People don’t stare at their Steam page every day.
This should have been promoted through the usual YouTube and Twitch channels. Find all of the YouTubers that review indie games and start sending emails.
Yes of course you have to market outside of Steam. But actually most traffic to the game page will come from people discovering it through Steam. Especially for an indie who can’t afford a traditional marketing campaign. A feature on the front page will blow the traffic you’d get from a Tuber or Twitch play out of the water. But you’d only get featured if you have high sales momentum or high wishlists before launch. That’s what the pre launch marketing campaign is for. Getting on YouTube and Twitch channels is just to get the snowball rolling. The rest comes from the Steam algorithm and word of mouth.
That’s what the pre launch marketing campaign is for. Getting on YouTube and Twitch channels is just to get the snowball rolling.
Right, and that’s what this game didn’t have. You have a trailer and some people who happened to discover this game and decided to play it. No real marketing campaign push to get indie streamers to play it. And the ones who do happen to play it are PoE2 players, which doesn’t do a good job of shaking off this looter ARPG image it’s trying not to make.
The name makes it even worse because it’s not a unique phrase.
I think, the problem is rather that they have no budget for marketing. If they become visible on Steam, that’s significantly more visibility than they can hope for from a few social media posts…
I mean I imagine that comes down to the fact that Ori was published by Microsoft while this game was self published. Someone like Microsoft is gonna have a lot more resources for advertising a game versus trying to self publish it.
How is the game coming along? I bought it a while ago to support the team, but don’t really want to jam it until it is at least close to complete. Can’t really leave a review for something I haven’t played.
They’re sitting at 71% (mostly positive) for a game they released as early access. If your studio can’t survive that kind of response, you don’t get to blame the fans, you’re not managing your company well.
Yeah I’m sort of interested in the game but I wanted to wait for full release. I get that a lot of indie games are helped tremendously by the money and player feedback they get out of early access, but if if the whole bottom falls out because not enough people bought the game you’ve very openly told people “this isn’t finished, don’t buy into this if you aren’t willing to be a part of the testing process,” then something is very wrong. Early access income should help bridge the gap, but you shouldn’t be entirely reliant on it.
Not only that, but using the typical back of the napkin math based on the number of reviews (you can usually multiply the number of reviews by 55 to find the number of copies sold, and I omitted the reviews they’ve gotten in the past 48 hours that they asked for), they’ve brought in over $30M for their unfinished game.
According to Wikipedia they have at least 80 employees. Ball park cost per employee is around $10k a month (this includes more than just salary). So around $800k per month to run the studio. $9.6 million per year. So they probably spend more than a third of their earnings since launch. And Take Two got their cut (usually half of net revenue, so revenue after the store cut) before Moon Studios went independent, they only became fully independent in March of this year. So they have even less money left. So yeah they saying that they are in financial trouble is probably not exaggerated.
There’s a correlation to how many reviews a thing gets in a given marketplace compared to how many of it were sold. This was a mostly unscientific number shared among devs once the user privacy settings changed for Steam and we could no longer count on SteamSpy for copies sold metrics. At one point years ago, the multiple passed around was as high as 77. Here’s a slightly more scientific accounting of it.
I hope this works out for them. Ori is an awesome game and I’m interested in the new project. I wishlisted it because the videos of it look great but I usually don’t buy early access games. Was planning to get it when it officially launches.
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Personally, I picked up NRFTW after the first hotfix for The Breach and I haven’t run into pretty much anything most of the negative reviews are complaining about. There were 100% tuning issues with the original Breach update and they got pummelled for it in the reviews, but in less than a week they fixed 90% of the problems.
It’s an early access game, so no, of course it’s not perfect yet, but it’s a really solid product with a ton of potential that’s fun to play right now.
The problem is that reviews are rarely updated, so right now there’s a ton of reviews that capture a tiny snapshot of the game’s life that don’t reflect where the game is merely a couple weeks after they were left. I’m sure there was a bunch riding on this…they’d been locked up in legal proceedings getting the rights to the game and getting out from under a publisher, and I’m sure part of the hype train around The Breach was to spur a renewed round of funding.
As someone newer to its community, I’m really surprised at how much complaining there is about end game longevity and a bunch of other things that make me want to ask, “You…you know the game isn’t done yet, right?”
Moon Studios took a risk going independent which means two things: (a) they have strong faith that their project can stand on its own, and (b) they are far more sensitive to cash flow now than they were under a publisher. One thing I think they’ll need to work on is their community relations, and it’s a shame because it almost always means we hear less direct communication and more stuff filtered through PR people.
I’ll leave a positive review b/c I’ve played about 10 hours and I’m really enjoying the game in front of me and look forward to the updates coming through the rest of 2025.
Yep… ARPG gamers are literally among the worst, most unpleasable types of gamers. They will bitch about everything, because they all want a very specific type of game for them and them alone. Just look at every other isometric ARPG and their communities; 90% of the time, they’re filled with negative posts and comments, constantly upset about balance, end game, leveling, loot, etc etc.
I think NRFTW is fantastic, and it’s exactly what I was expecting it to be. However, people saw it at the same “style” as Diablo or Path of Exile and expected the game to be like those… except they’re not. And for those that do realize that, you have the other idiots that refuse to accept that it’s an EA game that still has a long roadmap until completion and bitch about the lack of an “endgame.”
Honestly, I think trying to compete with Diablo and PoE2 is already too much, even if it’s trying to say it’s not those. Those games are huge, with long-running, dedicated fanbases, and they do enough to oversaturate the market just fighting amongst themselves.
This was the wrong type of game to be trying to dive into the first time they cut themselves off from Microsoft’s financial cushion.
I honestly don’t see much comparison at all, to be honest. This doesn’t have a web of skills to unlock nor does it have the rapid-fire pace of a Diablo game. I guess a vaguely isometric 3rd person action game is automatically Diablo?
It’s 1,000% in the Soulsborne category, but with select systems from ARPGs mixed in, and the pains of figuring out how to adapt them are showing, but the potential is huge.
And maybe that’s the thing; coming at this from “I want an alternative to a Souls game” and it lands great. If I picked this up expecting Diablo or Torchlight (ha! I’m old!) or something, I’d be WTF-ing within 8 second of the game starting.
Agreed on all points. Just spending more than a few seconds watching gameplay footage would put a lot of initial misconceptions to rest. But yeah, while the game is great (in my opinion), it definitely still has a ways to go to fully come into its own and I really hope they secure more funding to see their vision to completion.
This is advertising manipulation at it’s finest. Publishers are parasites, and should never be negotiated with.
The game is self-published. They used to be published by Private Division but went indie when that company got sold. The game had legitimately troubled development.
Still doesn’t legitimize demands for positive reviews. Take honest feedback, or don’t.
The article states it got review bombed (but not what for). Dishonest negative score kinda throws out legitimacy of the whole thing, making it a bit less bad. I feel for the desperate dev, but I guess I still agree with you.
Except they did not get review bombed and the article is blindly using the studio head as a source. Go look at the reviews, there actually is a ton of valuable feedback there.
They kinda did. They pushed out a sizable update that fixed a bunch of issues, but also upped the difficulty. People liked the improvements, but not the difficulty change, and my understanding is that they fixed that issue quickly but not before a bunch of people complained about it.
I get where they’re coming from, but I also don’t like them sking for positive reviews.
Depends the heuristics used. Bombing reviews most times do not cite their contentions, which can be dismissed.
Review bombing requires
Sometimes bad reviews are just bad reviews.
But the Studio wants 🌈positive reviews🌈 bombing.
I wouldn’t see it SO negatively. If they were paying people for reviews, then yes, that’s corruption; but every YouTuber uses phrases like “Drop a like” and it’s considered normal. When you worked hard on something, I think it’s common to ask for a positive review. People are sentient enough to choose whether to do so.
“Drop honest feedback please!” is a much better response than “positive bomb this game please!”
Maybe they should take the feedback from reviews and incorporate that into their updates. It’s not just that you are being review bombed by unreasonable people, it’s that people feel the game has problems that aren’t being addressed. I agree it is difficult to recover from a bad release because first impressions are everything. Companies can recover and have, take No Man’s Sky for an example.
My understanding is they had a big update that fixed a bunch of issues people complained about, but also made the game more difficult, and people didn’t like that.
I think another good example would be Cyberpunk 2077. Its release was insanely horrible but it seems they managed to solve it somehow.
Haven’t really followed the gaming news regards this game though. However, I hope they manage to find a solution. The Ori games were truly masterpieces (in my opinion).
CDPR had a massive cushion of cash from the Witcher games to bounce them back up. Ori studio obviously doesn’t. In this case, without enough sales, the solution is layoffs or selling to a bigger publisher, which will also result in layoffs.
“detrimental” was definitely not the word they should have used. What would be a better word there? Comment below. It helps me keep bringing you great comments.
Necessary or any of its synonyms should convey what he’s actually trying to say. No idea how he came up with detrimental there.
I don’t know much about the studio but I’m guessing they are not based in an English speaking country.
Austrian
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Critical, essential, imperative
Maybe he can get some help from his friends in AfD.
Going to need a source for a bombshell like that.
Anyone play it? I generally don’t buy early access, but the Ori games were great and I’ll probably like this too.
I have a love/hate relationship with ARPGs. I love games like Ys, Zelda, and Dark Souls, but I don’t like loot based games like Diablo II, and it seems like ARPGs either go hard on loot or largely avoid it. This looks like the second case, but I’d hate to get a few hours in and realize I need to manage loot for decent progression.
I’ve played it and really enjoyed it. Despite getting advertised as an ARPG, it’s really not. It’s more like dark souls but with random loot. The gameplay is very slow and methodical, and it’s very difficult. Managing loot isn’t that bad, I just went with whatever I found and didn’t have to worry too much about finding the perfect weapons/armor.
Awesome. If it’s more combat focused than stats focused, I’ll probably like it.
I really don’t understand the ARPG genre, it’s almost less helpful than having no genre marker at all.
Loot is a part of it but you can upgrade whatever to whatever item level and change stats (randomly) so finding the perfect item is not needed. Just get whatever works for you.
I’ve played it. Artwork is beautiful, but controls are wonky, hard to get used to on PC, and the gameplay unnecessarily punishing. It doesn’t feel good to play.
Do you think it would feel better w/ controller? I’d probably play on the Steam Deck.
It does feel better on the SteamDeck.
Hm… while I’d love to buy the game to support them, 40€ is a very high asking price for an early access title, especially if they possibly won’t be around to finish it.
Yeah. I have it wishlisted for a likely later purchase but getting this message public seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. People might be more cautious buying into it now. I know I am
28 eur right now
Fair, though still more than I’m willing to pay if the future is uncertain.
Why did they get review bombed?
deleted by creator
Idk as far as i can tell it didn’t. At least not on steam
Its sitting at mostly positive 73% all time and 70% for recent reviews.
I don’t have any plans to get it bc it’s not a genre im interested in though the visuals from the screen shots look beautiful as I’d expect from them
I love the Ori games! I haven’t played this game though so I guess I’m part of the problem lol
I don’t see the pattern of a review bombing in Steam reviews… Looks like a game getting released very soon in early access and failing to gain traction.
It’s sitting on my wishlist and I’m waiting for it to get to 1.0, but their update cadence has been very slow. Now they are saying their studio does not have the funds to complete the game.
I do hope they turn this around, but as a consumer I am very wary when it comes to titles in early access, and even more when the studio goes radio silent for months.
Yeah, 100%. “Review bombing” suggests that people are leaving disingenuous bad reviews due to some personal or political axe to grind with the developer. This just looks like a game that got a lukewarm reception, but at least the information in the article doesn’t suggest that any review bombing is occurring.
I’m a big Ori fan, and I wish Moon Studios the best. But the games market is oversaturated right now, and it’s a tough time for all indie devs. It doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is out to get them if their game isn’t an overnight success.
They’re not getting review bombed. Head of the studio is being hyperbolic to get people who like the game to leave positive reviews.
Being disingenuous while asking for help is a great way to make the people who would have helped you a little too miffed =/
A reason for lack of updates are that they had a lot of other things to do, like getting independent from their publisher and promised more rapid updates in the future.
I’m waiting for their multiplayer patch to play the game in full but I enjoyed the combat in the first 10 minutes and an excited to play it. ARPGs need to evolve past the idle games most of the current popular ones devolve into.
There are a few different types of ARPGs, such as:
I really like the last two, not the first one.
I guess I haven’t heard Souls-Like or games like Zelda or Witcher 3 (what I’d call Action Adventure I guess or RPG) called an ARPG although they fit the name well enough that maybe I have and today I’m falling on the other side of a fuzzy line.
Yes, I was referring to Diablo, PoE, Last Epoch, and the rest of the “looter” ARPG’s or what I’d just call ARPG’s. Maybe this is why the Diablo-like meme came up? To further drill in to the genre.
I think Zelda is right at the boundary of Action-Adventure and ARPG, and some games fall on the RPG side (TLoZ, Zelda 2) and many on the action-adventure side. But many are right at that limit, using equipment and heart containers as progression.
Dark Souls is absolutely an ARPG. You have leveling mechanics, different builds with impactful player choice, and other forms of progression. Likewise for Witcher 3.
And yeah, what frustrates me a lot is that many people seem to mean “Diablo-like” when they say “ARPG,” which it is, but the genre is much larger than that.
Here’s an interesting part from the ARPG Wikipedia article:
To me, ARPG means any game with strong RPG mechanics and a focus on the action instead of stats for determining player success.
Unfortunately, the snippet from the Wikipedia article you quoted exactly exemplifies my understanding of the genre tags and how I’ve seen them used since I was old enough to get on the Internet and read such things.
Zelda has, for me, always been an action adventure game. I don’t think I’d called Zelda breath of the wild an RPG game or an ARPG game but that’s because the item portion of the game felt incomparable to a game like Witcher or Diablo where every piece of your character is an item that can be upgraded.
That being said, I’m not exactly the biggest Zelda fan and BotW was like 10 years ago for me.
Yeah, Zelda was originally what I thought of when I heard “ARPG” because I grew up on the NES games. If I started w/ something later, I might consider the series “action-adventure” instead, because the definition of what an ARPG has changed somewhat. And yeah, I’d consider BotW “action-adventure” as well using today’s definition, but it would’ve been an ARPG using the earlier definition.
There are plenty of other somewhat similar games that do qualify as ARPG today that are very different from Diablo games, like the Ys series, Gurumin, and Cross Code. The Ys series is fairly diverse, but generally speaking, gear upgrades are plot-based (find in a chest in the dungeon you’re exploring) and there’s not a ton of diversity, and leveling your character is very important (1-2 level difference can be the difference between a nearly impossible boss fight and a manageable one). In Gurumin, there is a fixed set of upgrades, and you combine these to get effects. CrossCode has stats, unlockable abilities, and action-oriented combat. Loot isn’t really a major part of any of those games, they’re too action-oriented to be an RPG, and they have too much emphasis on progression to really be action-adventure.
Those are the sorts of ARPGs I absolutely love, yet everyone seems to focus on the Diablo-like dungeon crawlers where loot is a defining factor.
Yeah, the problem might not be review bombing, but rather lack of advertising.
Until now I’ve honestly never heard of No Rest for the Wicked. I didn’t even know Moon Studios was busy on anything after Ori 2.
It’s always lack of advertising. The unfortunate fact of life is that 99.99% of indie studios have no clue how to market their game. They think they just have to make a good game, and boom, people will flock to it.
Steam is there to make sure users have a platform to download their game. It’s not there to market it. Marketing is just an occasional side effect.
Steam is a marketing machine. The developers just need to do the leg work first. Steam will heavily promote games that have high wishlists and sales momentum. All those personalized recommendations you see on Steam is Valve doing marketing.
It’s not one you should rely on. People don’t stare at their Steam page every day.
This should have been promoted through the usual YouTube and Twitch channels. Find all of the YouTubers that review indie games and start sending emails.
Yes of course you have to market outside of Steam. But actually most traffic to the game page will come from people discovering it through Steam. Especially for an indie who can’t afford a traditional marketing campaign. A feature on the front page will blow the traffic you’d get from a Tuber or Twitch play out of the water. But you’d only get featured if you have high sales momentum or high wishlists before launch. That’s what the pre launch marketing campaign is for. Getting on YouTube and Twitch channels is just to get the snowball rolling. The rest comes from the Steam algorithm and word of mouth.
Right, and that’s what this game didn’t have. You have a trailer and some people who happened to discover this game and decided to play it. No real marketing campaign push to get indie streamers to play it. And the ones who do happen to play it are PoE2 players, which doesn’t do a good job of shaking off this looter ARPG image it’s trying not to make.
The name makes it even worse because it’s not a unique phrase.
I think, the problem is rather that they have no budget for marketing. If they become visible on Steam, that’s significantly more visibility than they can hope for from a few social media posts…
To be fair, I was served this game on steam. I was about to buy it but the negative reviews turned me off from it.
I mean I imagine that comes down to the fact that Ori was published by Microsoft while this game was self published. Someone like Microsoft is gonna have a lot more resources for advertising a game versus trying to self publish it.
Microsoft got ori on the gotdamn cereal boxes.
How is the game coming along? I bought it a while ago to support the team, but don’t really want to jam it until it is at least close to complete. Can’t really leave a review for something I haven’t played.
They’re sitting at 71% (mostly positive) for a game they released as early access. If your studio can’t survive that kind of response, you don’t get to blame the fans, you’re not managing your company well.
Yeah I’m sort of interested in the game but I wanted to wait for full release. I get that a lot of indie games are helped tremendously by the money and player feedback they get out of early access, but if if the whole bottom falls out because not enough people bought the game you’ve very openly told people “this isn’t finished, don’t buy into this if you aren’t willing to be a part of the testing process,” then something is very wrong. Early access income should help bridge the gap, but you shouldn’t be entirely reliant on it.
Not only that, but using the typical back of the napkin math based on the number of reviews (you can usually multiply the number of reviews by 55 to find the number of copies sold, and I omitted the reviews they’ve gotten in the past 48 hours that they asked for), they’ve brought in over $30M for their unfinished game.
Yep Around $26 million according to https://games-stats.com/steam/game/no-rest-for-the-wicked/
According to Wikipedia they have at least 80 employees. Ball park cost per employee is around $10k a month (this includes more than just salary). So around $800k per month to run the studio. $9.6 million per year. So they probably spend more than a third of their earnings since launch. And Take Two got their cut (usually half of net revenue, so revenue after the store cut) before Moon Studios went independent, they only became fully independent in March of this year. So they have even less money left. So yeah they saying that they are in financial trouble is probably not exaggerated.
Where did you get the “multiply by 55” part from?
There’s a correlation to how many reviews a thing gets in a given marketplace compared to how many of it were sold. This was a mostly unscientific number shared among devs once the user privacy settings changed for Steam and we could no longer count on SteamSpy for copies sold metrics. At one point years ago, the multiple passed around was as high as 77. Here’s a slightly more scientific accounting of it.
I am always amazed and baffled at how statistics work
I hope this works out for them. Ori is an awesome game and I’m interested in the new project. I wishlisted it because the videos of it look great but I usually don’t buy early access games. Was planning to get it when it officially launches.