this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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For OP or others wondering about context:
It requires a surprising amount of digging to really try and figure out what started all this, but from my rudimentary research, it seems to me that this is a problem that's existed for a few games now and has steadily gotten worse, stemming from high DLC prices and an equally high number of, potentially game breaking, bugs, across multiple games that don't get fixed as it's very quickly on to the next one for CA.
There's rumination that it's because the studio is constantly working on multiple games at the same time and just shoves everything out without having the proper time to go back and make sure everything works like it should.
This seems like it came to a head with a recent DLC pack's price increase while containing equal or lesser content than Warhammer 2 DLC, which was cheaper on release. This prompted review bombing from the community, which prompted a response from one of the lead devs, Rob, who basically said (paraphrasing here) "Costs are up, there's no good time to do this, but we have to raise the DLC prices and challenge ourselves to make the content better to match".
Turns out the community doesn't think the content is better to match. CA doubled down on that position, and here we are.
And doubled down hard, since the boycott bans are killing off their more popular mod creators.
Right, I can't remember the Creator's name, but apparently they supported a boycott and got banned for it, removing access to their workshop account as well, and they created one of, if not the most subscribed mod for the game. Maybe you know that, I haven't played Total War since Rome 1, so I'm way out of touch
Considering how consistent the complaint of how much SEGA is forcing CA to act like a shittier version of Paradox, that's not surprising.
Since the niche of players that buys Total War games will hardly budge upwards, the only way to maximize profits is to squeeze those suckers with endless DLC. No wonder every game since Shogun 2 has had blood as a separate DLC.
I think customers forget about the, like what, 20-25% inflation in the last few years. Either they f+ck over their employees or they have to charge more
That inflation is a large part of why consumers are sensitive to this price increase. This is fundamentally a purchase with disposable income. Inflation reduces the disposable Income of the population until (if ever) wages catch up with inflation.
Everytime there's a change in pricing that was already a set precedent there's a hurdle to overcome like this, and it becomes extremely important to handle the situation delicately since 95% of possible ways to handle it could go very wrong.
I feel like the only way to really deal with it correctly if it truly must happen because of rising costs is to just admit that, like they did, but then stick to that and only that message, and just wait for the community to come around. If it's possible to provide any sorts of even vague math around sales and cost to produce this content then that context would help people understand, but there's almost no way to change a precedent for the worse on the consumer end without some amount of backlash.
Well it's not very complex. A software company has a lot of its cost coming from wages. If the employees see their cost of living increasing by 20%, they'll expect to see their wages rise to compensate.
Consumers will bitch, but eventually accept the higher cost of the software
They pissed $100M away on a project inspired at a boozy directors lunch.
They then rushed out half assed dlc and a new game and put the price up for both.
Poor management calls that customers aren’t happy about. If the quality was there people would have been fine
Depends on the job
Or they could lower their corporate profit margin so neither is necessary. Don't make excuses for them and act like there's not a huge amount of money being hoovered up by profit.
Inflation is fake. Money isn't backed by anything so we can demand it's worth anything we want.
The richies are mad some of us made too much money and are overcorrecting to punish us.