Situation assesement
These three years were a blast, it was good fun, we worked with a lot of amazing people, it was really cool. The game is officially out of Early Access. There was a lot of very positive feedback about the progress since the game’s Steam debut. But it did not exactly go as expected.
Florian and I will still be going after bugs and crashes, and we will gradually bring more modding tools to the game in order to empower all of you, in the community. We are looking for smart ways to bring the game to more people. More explanations about that in the second section below.
But first, some context: The game was officially launched over a month ago. We expected it to be the moment of truth for Divided We Fall, the moment where we can grow the community with a very high peak of activity. The activity ended up being a lot smaller than expected.
During the whole Early Access, we worked a lot on the feedback we got:
Too much grenade spam? We made a lot of improvements on the gunfight mechanics, we made guns a lot more useful, and added extra control over them (did you know you can instantly shoot if you double click on an enemy?). We also made sure that all weapons had their own special uses.
Too hardcore for new players? We added a tutorial, we improved the interface to make it more friendly, we added a proper hotkey system, we added special new player rooms.
Not enough player activity? We added bots so that veterans could hone their battle skills and new players could learn the basics while waiting for games to start. This big launch was also the opportunity to boost player activity.
Thanks to these improvements and the special free week at launch, we expected the number of players to go reach a couple of hundreds or even maybe thousands if we were going to be lucky. Florian had to spend a lot of time on making sure the authentication servers would handle the load.
But this is the game industry, it is impossible to predict anything, every decision you take is a bet. We assumed that in the worst case the activity wouldn't be much lower than the Early Access a year ago, because why would it be? The peak amount of concurrent players in game was 70, and games were played 24/7 for about two weeks. When it comes to player activity, it would have been disappointing for the official launch, but that's what we were prepared for, in our planning, these numbers were more or less our worst case scenario.
It ended up a being lot worse.
We are not sure what hit us the hardest, but a lot went wrong at the same time.
- Because we focused on getting AI in and making sure we could manage the load on our servers we neglected stability and testing. And although we tested more than the Early Access launch, the game was less stable. That was very annoying for everyone, it was our responsibility but we patched all major issues within two days.
- Then, there were some commercial problems. We expected Divided to be featured on the front page of the Steam store, because it was the case on the Early Access launch, and because we thought the free week would make it extra likely to show up there. That didn’t happen. We are not sure if there is even a real reason for that. Valve uses complex algorithms to decide how a game is brought to its user's attention. Maybe the mixed reviews complaining of the lack of activity during Early Access made it impossible for Divided to reach the front page. Also sales never skyrocketed, which might also have an influence on this algorithm.
- We know there were some technical issues at launch: the store page completely disappeared for an hour when it launched, and then the game was not listed on any "new releases" sections for over a day. We have no way of knowing what happened, that is just the way it is.
We do not know which had the biggest negative effect, but the healthiest response is to take responsibility for it: we fucked up, we made a lot of mistakes that we know of, but there are parameters completely out of our grasps. Maybe we were particularly lucky at the Early Access launch. Maybe it's something else entirely. We will probably never know for sure. If we somehow figure it out properly, I'll write about it in a later post.
Some people say that the success of a game rely on three factors: one third depends on a good product (in the sense of a product that people want), on third depends on good marketing (in the sense of reaching the people that want that game) and one third relies on luck.
- Good luck is the exact opposite of what we got.
- Our marketing was probably the best we could have had. Maybe it wasn't enough, but given our resources, it could have have hardly been much better.
- Maybe the game just isn’t good enough. This is probably the main insecurity a game developer can have, we might have made some severe design mistakes along the way. However, at this stage, there isn’t one clear big improvement that we are confident that can turn the tide. Maybe the game would have needed a lot more budget for a much higher production value and much more marketing budget.
This is disheartening because we’ve put a lot of work to make this game. A LOT! Florian and I spent most of our working time on Divided We Fall for more than three years. With no salary. And although the outcome is very disappointing for everyone, these three years were still totally worth it. We worked with amazing people, freelancers, students and volunteers helping on creating a very unique game that is true to its ancestors. And in spite of the result, we are very proud of the whole team who managed to take it this far.
Next objective
This launch was pretty much our best shot at creating a big activity boost in Divided We Fall. It's time to switch strategy.
KAVA was a very risky bet, we knew it from the beginning. It is an indie video game company built around the sole purpose of developing the new version of Call of Combat but in a more professional way. This objective has been completed. Its secondary mission was to generate enough revenue to sustain a team of game developers. That objective failed very dramatically. The current situation does not even allow us to continue with the same level of involvement. In the past three years, we spent at least three days a week on this.
KAVA will not stop. It just won’t be full time anymore. We will keep fixing bugs for Divided We Fall for as long as there are people playing. Big plans like destructible terrain, new factions and extra weapons will not make any sense unless activity grows to much higher levels than now (we still have some hope, maybe next year). When it comes to additional content, we will be releasing new modding tools. You can already create new maps, and organize tournament very easily and efficiently. You will soon be able to create your own game rules, and invite players in your custom room.
The main goal now with Divided We Fall is to make it as much like Call of Combat as possible, it was a game nurtured and maintained by the community, and Divided We Fall needs to be given back to the community as well. It will take a few steps:
In shorter term, here is what we work on:
- We will keep fixing bugs and crashes
- We will bring Call of Combat permanently in the lobby
- We will bring the first wave of new modding tools for the community, which will allow you to create special rooms where you can change a lot of rules (Ammo, capture time, gun accuracy, movements speed and a lot more). As you experiment with it, any setting that seem to create consensus in the community can become an official game mode! I will post a forum topic with the instructions.
In longer term, we want to make Divided We Fall more accessible by making it free to play. The goal is to make the game free in Steam with some limitations (rank, soldier skins, name changes, etc...), and add a dlc that unlocks everything for the same price as the current game. We will make sure that everybody who purchased the game will get this dlc automatically. Going free to play isn't that straightforward. We are investigating what are our options in Steam. All of this might take some time (probably several months), meanwhile all of you are free to come to the discord channel, who knows, maybe there will be some free keys ready to be distributed when tournaments are organized. Stay tuned!
Don’t forget that Divided has a lot of community tools already built in like the map editor, the tournament organization system, the player and the regiment leaderboards. We will stick around, we will help the community, but more than ever, the future of Call of Combat and Divided We Fall lies also in your hand!
Good luck soldiers!
