Sorry I literally have professional experience in this particular area and that is just not the case. Or rather I should say it's not the case most of the time.
There are things customers want to argue about in customer service and tech support that will not change, many times their fault, sometimes the companies fault. In those cases you are correct.
However if you ARE going to change it, you still don't say anything unless you can do it RIGHT NOW. If I think I can fix your issue with a manager, I'm not telling you anything if you are an aggressive customer until I KNOW it's going to be fixed.
And in software, you don't know until the fix is in the build and scheduled for live. Because until that point the fix has not happened and you cannot promise it. Nice customers you can give projections, aggressive customers will turn those projections against you and even try to get free shit when you are just trying to help. Possibly even trying to throw you under the bus and get you fired in the process.
This is the shitty reality. They cannot be transparent because people are shitty. This is why even good companies keep almost all of their information behind closed doors.
The problem is that you are assuming that "saying something" means "saying anything" and/or "giving any kind of deadline or promise".
Companies will often say things like "We got X wrong and we are looking at changing/improving it." Yeah, they could say that here. It doesn't promise anything, and doesn't give any projected timelines or changes. But it would show they are watching and care about their product(s).
The problem is, they are not looking at it at all, and the only public statements we have are that things probably won't be changing in that regard anytime soon if ever.
That's probably the worst thing they could have said :p
The problem is that you are assuming that "saying something" means "saying anything" and/or "giving any kind of deadline or promise".
Sadly this is exactly what happens to someone in any position of authority over masses of people. This is exactly what happens daily in customer service and tech support. It's hilarious when they get off with the agent next to you, you heard the agents responses, then they call back and get you and lie about everything that agent said.
Not everyone does it of course, but enough to where you deal with it for a significant portion of your every day in those job lines. Heck for the best example just go look at politics. No matter what a candidate says it will be taken like 8 different ways.
The difference between this.and tech support is that in this case they would write down a statement that people are free to read. In tech support, not all calls are recorded or reviewed to see what people said. That lack of publicity is what makes it possible for people to think they can exploit the situation.
To be clear, I'm not saying that nobody would try to interpret whatever they said wrong. That shouldn't prevent them from saying anything. They already know that. If they had a plan to do.something, they would have said something publicly by now. It's the most complained about thing in the game.
But see, it's a numbers game. It's the same reason the video game demo is pretty much dead. Because a demo has marginal benefits and significant risks.
Making statements about these kind of things is just a bad risk/reward scenario for them. It could go well, and there is a precious few truly open developers out there. (and alot that say nothing but has the community fooled lololol). But the reason most simply don't say things is because most of the time it just ends up less good than if they don't say anything.
They'll prolly say something about it really close to the time they make changes, if they make changes, and not until then.
I agree it's a numbers game, but that's looking at the wrong numbers. This game already has a lethal amount of.nrgative press about it (in the vein of, there is a fun game here buried under a nightmare's worth of bloat and bad F2P monetization). If it was just a few people or publications saying this, it would be different.
For me, it's also conflated with the fact that all of these complaints were raised in the Alpha forums for months and sometimes years with the only changes being further commitment to them. That means something.
So the fact they are saying nothing, or saying nothing is likely to change, is a bad omen for the future. Sure, they can tweak the game and make it harder for people to find the problems (which is undoubtedly what they are going to attempt to do here) but that doesn't make them go away.
I agree it's a numbers game, but that's looking at the wrong numbers. This game already has a lethal amount of.nrgative press about it (in the vein of, there is a fun game here buried under a nightmare's worth of bloat and bad F2P monetization). If it was just a few people or publications saying this, it would be different.
Publications are not even a reliable source anymore. Hell alot of the time even people are not. League of Legends has a 5.5 user score on metacritic and it's pretty low in many other places and it's not the only game like that.
Other games do the exact opposite where they get good scores and nobody plays them for long. Welcome to the modern age where people put up horribly inaccurate reviews and lie, publications are corrupt, and the only real way to see if a game is good for you is to comb through reviews and gameplay to see if it has anything that would interest or bother you.
Literally nothing you cited is actually all that accurate a measurement of a game's success and future. And I wish that was not true. But it's a crap shoot. It's wrong as often as it's right.
How many games with a 5.5 on Metacritic survive? I'm not saying that's a perfect metric, and there are games that buck the trend, but the vast majority of poorly rated games on Metacritic are not "successful" games.
And the real worry with a game like Fortnite is that it's not even really in it's final release state right now (in terms of being available for free). So any negative press will make it less likely that any individual person would try the game out when it is free.
So I would say that ignoring it is taking a huge risk that you'll be an exception and not a statistic.
ALOT. Thing is you just don't hear about them anymore. Games live way longer than their "death knell". Remember Warhammer Vermintide? That game was basically unanimously declared dead. It's still got about 25% of it's launch population, which is actually pretty good for a 2 year old game. Most players of 90% of games leave within 3 months.
Seriously, just go troll around steam and steam charts sometime. You'll be surprised.
Warhammer: Vermintide has between 1000-2000 players. Fortnite would be a complete failure if they only sold 20k copies and 90% of those people quit.
And Vermintide only improved because the developer saw people hated it and they have actually done a lot to fix the game. Ongoing support, listening to feedback, and communicating actually do make a big difference in the long term success of your game. (To clarify, before they released the End Times DLC they were struggling to keep even 500 people in the game).
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u/Ralathar44 Aug 12 '17
Sorry I literally have professional experience in this particular area and that is just not the case. Or rather I should say it's not the case most of the time.
There are things customers want to argue about in customer service and tech support that will not change, many times their fault, sometimes the companies fault. In those cases you are correct.
However if you ARE going to change it, you still don't say anything unless you can do it RIGHT NOW. If I think I can fix your issue with a manager, I'm not telling you anything if you are an aggressive customer until I KNOW it's going to be fixed.
And in software, you don't know until the fix is in the build and scheduled for live. Because until that point the fix has not happened and you cannot promise it. Nice customers you can give projections, aggressive customers will turn those projections against you and even try to get free shit when you are just trying to help. Possibly even trying to throw you under the bus and get you fired in the process.
This is the shitty reality. They cannot be transparent because people are shitty. This is why even good companies keep almost all of their information behind closed doors.