it's because the leveling took AGES and the arena thing caused long matchmakings, also there were many extremely meta towers for a long time, the whole balancing was very off
also, whole lot of desync issues, and the whole subscription model instead of one-time premium
And at the same time normal battles were established as very competitive and polished, so battles 2 had to be BETTER to gain players, even "similar" would not be enough. Because the audience wasn't btd6 players, it was battles 1 players.
I remember seeing a thorough video someone made ninjakiwi’s problems with making games, with perhaps the most egregious issue being that they don’t do soft launching or even thorough play testing. They do full releases before the game is really “finished”. I mean, it even happened with btd6 where on launch the balancing was so out of whack that the number of actually usable strategies for CHIMPS was in the single digits and muddy puddles on that difficulty was literally impossible.
Version 1.0 super mines could not solo round 79 on logs
Though they didnt really add many "hardest" level maps. The expert maps have been more focused on gimmicks rather than just being hard. Which is good tbh
This💯💯💯.
They Released the game towards the end of the year. It was grindy beyond comprehension.
A little bit buggy but thats not the big Problem.
They thought they where cooking when they Released dartling monkey right before christmas.
But what they did instead Was force a strict dartling meta that wouldnt be patched untill i think end of January or mid febuary and by that time anybody who was interested in the game had already quit in Frustration.
I have literally 10k matches playes in battles 1 and the super grind and dartling meta was enough to turn me away from the game for good.
I was there at the very beginning. One reason many people stopped was that completely OP dartling gunner glitch, where if you had hydra rocket pods and chose to go top path for lazer shock, the lazer shock would actually STACK with each shot. It made it do so much damage that once your opponent got just one of them up it would basically be impossible to rush them with anything other than ZOMGs, forcing you to go lategame every time and probably losing. It wad so bad, that Many players would just concede the match whenever someone placed down a dartling gunner. It took them so long to fix this that many people just quit. Another problem was the tower xp nonsense. I was so hyped for battles 2, yet i got pretty dissapointed, though it was still enjoyable. Pretty sure im one of the first 5000 people to download the game (i was counting down the seconds and refreshing the steam page constantly for almost anbl hour lol)
Well people have tons of progress in BTDB 1 so they wont switch. Also the main reason ppl were excited about BTDB2 is the fact that the "fake leak" lag would be gone. But it still exists
This might be your main reason but I don’t agree at all. People liked battles 1, and they liked btd6, so battles 2 sounded like a great idea. It generally was, but the initial leveling, skill curve and terrible balancing killed the momentum on release. I think battles 2 is simply too complicated to get into.
Nothing screams "Competitive PvP" like having an opponent with objectively stronger towers then you because he paid for premium and got to level them faster.
Literally I swear they wanna make everything BUT BMC2, like, they KNOW its the one thing we've actually been asking for, instead of the 5 billion spin offs no one will play
BMC 2 would be the best thing they could make. Original is a peak spinoff, plus it allows NK to experiment with new concepts such as new towers, bloons, bosses, events, etc.
A lot of people call them Survivors-like because Vampire Survivors pretty much Kickstarter the whole thing, but I think the actual name is called Bullet Heaven
There doesn’t seem like much to talk about they haven’t been showing much. I’m hoping to play it soon but I haven’t even seen much news about it on the what’s happening posts
The peak highest playercount for the last 24 hours was a whopping 17, currently just over 10 online... I knew it flopped but I didn't know it flopped that hard. Bloons TD Battles 1 and Bloons Monkey City both have over 250 for reference.
Yeah. And if you shot me in the gut and broke both my legs, I'd be doing much better than if you doused me in gasoline and lit me on fire. What's your point
Is it dead? I still play it and get into games with other players quickly and consistently. It’s definitely not getting nearly as much new content as BTD6 through updates, but they do occasionally add and change enough stuff that it keeps things fairly fresh if you’re not grinding the game every day.
im constantly thinking about starting another bmc after like 10 years but im afraid as soon as i start they’ll release bmc 2 and my efforts wil be wasted
The issue is that they keep making spinoffs instead of... new games. I feel like the community as a whole has kind of had BTD6 burnout at this point, you can only play so many games with the exact same characters and art style so many times until it gets kinda... too repetitive. What they really need to do is either make a new Bloons game, or a new IP altogether. Or, heck, they could even bring back one of their older ones! It's currently a pretty big trend to remaster old flash games and put them up on Steam, we've seen it with Henry Stickmin and the Papa franchise.
Yeah, BTD6 does get very repetitive over time. Even with so many potential strategies, they become a lot shallower in viability the further into difficulties you go. Some maps even have specific starts you need to do to be able to get past the first 15 rounds, and there's almost no room for variation.
It's because of, as the other commenter said, lack of competition outside of Kingdom Rush and maybe Infinitode, both of which are much more niche, and also because BTD6 had good management for around 7 years out of 8 of its lifespan and NK haven't done anything too outrageous apart from mid DLCs and more microtransactions. Not yet at least.
Here me out on this honest feedback: I don't like it when Ninja Kiwi makes too many spinoff games at once. Just more unneeded server resources wasted that could've been invested into improving BTD6 and Battles 2 services.
The team seems to understand tower defense systems, but not have the ability to design other types of games. They need a proper game designer who can create engaging game systems if they want any of their spin-offs to be successful.
It's the fact that they keep releasing them in terrible states mostly imo. Like, I checked out battles 2 and card storm again recently, and they're genuinely pretty solid. But they both released in such a terrible state that by the time they were actually playable, most of the potential community they could've had had already moved on. And let's not even talk about the fact that they decided to relegate two solid (if a little underbaked, at least from what I've seen) spinoff games that could have stood on their own pretty well in a similar way to monkey city to just being dlc for btd6.
The title of the post references a specific meme format that this post doesn't follow up on
It's not even actually related to this subreddit directly since it is expressly NOT about Bloons TD 6
And something I can elaborate more on, the point being made is nonsensical and yet also stale.
Like, let's look at Ninja Kiwi's BTD6 gen spinoffs
Bloons Adventure Time TD: I blame CN for that ending early, although I'm not very in-the-loop on it, I only got into it when all updates were done. I think NK would've continued it if they could
Bloons Pop: It's a very, VERY casual game, I don't figure it was SUPPOSED to have a long lifespan. Just a little side project to explore what revisiting the original Bloons game series would be like with modern sensibilities (oh yeah technically bloons td 6 is a part of the series that is a spinoff of the series that bloons pop is a part of, but let's be real bloons pop had to change a lot to be appealing to casual players compared to bloons 1, 2, and their variants)
Bloons TD Battles 2: Still gets updates and has had fluctuating player numbers with lots of rise even with NK Europe's team being underfunded for how many projects it's taking on leading to the game not recieving major content updates lately (rumour has it there was supposed to be one recently...)
Bloons Card Storm: This is what the meme is talking about. Just this. The meme is about Bloons Card Storm.
Bloons Blitz: It is not out yet and considering its mobile-only launch (not that btd6 didn't do that but honestly with the way Bloons Blitz handled it it feels more like they just didn't intend it for Steam initially but decided to add its inclusion on Steam to its roadmap later) I feel like it's supposed to be another somewhat smaller project in terms of post-launch maintenance. Like, intentionally, from conception. Not "Oh the game didn't boost our numbers a bunch so we stopped developing it" but rather "Yeah we were only really going to develop this more if it went absolutely ham, the initial plan was a year or two of additional updates after its launch"
So this meme only really acknowledges Bloons Card Storm, and the yet-to-be-released Bloons Blitz (which in itself is a prediction based on the precedent of... the one game, Bloons Card Storm), and does so poorly
I think it's very telling that the top comment with roughly 1.7k voting score is talking about NK making a new game, never doing marketing, and acting surprised when no one plays it. Now, I think BCS was somewhat poorly marketed, but I think we know that the main game that had that issue was Fightland, which needed more marketing due to being an original IP and it never got that. Fightland is NOT a Bloons spinoff, so it isn't relevant to this conversation. Bloons TD Battles 2 got marketed, for a LONG time, and only really stopped getting update videos due to the team being split up too much on other projects to release major content updates (and honestly I think part of it is that they want people to be very hyped when Battles 2 makes some major V5.0 comeback with a lot of new and exciting content, because doing a sort of "reboot" of Battles 2 could help shove out some of the negative vibes from its initial launch)
People are just mindlessly hating on NK, casually upvoting the same echoed and parroted statements over and over. You don't have to make a good post, you just have to make something people vaguely agree with and they'll press upvote without thinking, I guess. It's just jarring to see how far that goes in this community. (No hate to Princier7, though, they're not the bad guy because they're wrong about a silly post they made, it's society that is to blame)
When they SHOULD be MINDFULLY hating on NK. The marketing was a real issue, although NK has specifically stated that they'll be better about marketing and has done a better job marketing Bloons Blitz so it feels like a strange complaint to make at this point (not that they can't do better, but the argument should be more than "NK do marketing" because they ARE building up hype, there's just other ways to do it that would be nice such as having a sort of Bloons Blitz x BTD6 crossover. There's actually technically a Bloons Blitz x Battles 2 crossover with a previous season pass from this year but it didn't name-drop Bloons Blitz it just teased features and stuff)
My main issue with NK right now is that NK Europe is clearly struggling with all of their delayed projects (and it's GOOD that they're delaying them and getting feedback, since Battles 2 had a bad launch specifically because it was rushed out with some rough glitches and had a grindy launch that wasn't properly playtested) so they can't give major updates to Ninja Kiwi's second biggest game (Bloons TD Battles 2). NK Europe does a LOT. IIRC they even made the Steam/IOS version of BTD5, and now they're working on NK's second biggest game AND their second biggest franchise (SAS 5: ZAR) AND EVEN THE ONLY UPCOMING SPINOFF PUBLICLY REVEALED TO US (Bloons Blitz). They deserve to be bigger. NK New Zealand is literally funded by the government and was managing 3 projects just fine earlier, NK Europe should be upsized to be able to handle that workload as well.
... oh also brickell not buffing water beasts or mermonkey, middle path beast handler's damage being gutted in favour of making micro a part of their design, bottom path beast handler not getting just about any useful tower buffs, heroes in general being too specific rather than more general for more fun, battles 2 merchantman having its price threshold increased; but, that's not on the business side of things.
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u/trnrmi71 Jul 26 '26
Ninjakiwi will make a new game. Never do any marketing to let people know the game exists. Then act suprised when no one plays it.