LegendTotalWar returns after 9 months to post a video of him exposing a SEGA executive leaving a positive review of the "remastered" Shogun 2 on Steam.
This is notable for a few things:
Steam prohibits developers, executives, or anybody else who might have a stake in the development from leaving reviews of any kind
Steam requires you to disclose if you received the game for free, or if your review is early access.
I guess we're lucky Rome Remastered came out as half decently as it did. It wasn't perfect, but it got the job done. This has been a total abortion and no game THIS GREAT has suffered a more disasterous re-edition. This is the greatest letdown in video game history.
This game should've been treated like gold, but CA is not going to give a shit unless they can put out a TW that they know can be backed up with 50 dlc packs. I have no fucking hope for Medieval III at this point
Gotta love CA, the sheer hubris and idiocy on is display is staggering.
They know their customers are either hostile, or actually hate them currently. Hyenas put them so deep in the hole they had to come crawling back to the fans on their hands and knees, blubbering like an emotionally incontinent woman and begging for another chance.
And what do they do? They release this abortion, after strongly hinting that Medieval 3 is going to be parceled up into DLCs even more aggressively than any of their previous games, and after the reception for 40k was a collective meh.
I am curious to see how they'll fuck up Isolation 2. The protagonist will probably be one of those gaming girlbosses, with a lesbian lover and with both a mental and physical disability.
I guess we're lucky Rome Remastered came out as half decently as it did. It wasn't perfect, but it got the job done. This has been a total abortion and no game THIS GREAT has suffered a more disasterous re-edition. This is the greatest letdown in video game history.
This game should've been treated like gold, but CA is not going to give a shit unless they can put out a TW that they know can be backed up with 50 dlc packs. I have no fucking hope for Medieval III at this point
LegendTotalWar returns after 9 months to post a video of him exposing a SEGA executive leaving a positive review of the "remastered" Shogun 2 on Steam.
This is notable for a few things:
Steam prohibits developers, executives, or anybody else who might have a stake in the development from leaving reviews of any kind
Steam requires you to disclose if you received the game for free, or if your review is early access.
LegendTotalWar returns after 9 months to post a video of him exposing a SEGA executive leaving a positive review of the "remastered" Shogun 2 on Steam.
This is notable for a few things:
Steam prohibits developers, executives, or anybody else who might have a stake in the development from leaving reviews of any kind
Steam requires you to disclose if you received the game for free, or if your review is early access.
Wow, the company that abused the DMCA over a decade ago to increase search ranking for their upcoming game is breaking TOS rules on Steam for their upcoming game.
I think CA fucked up immensely by choosing them, unless SEGA both demanded a remaster + choose the partner for production.
This feels AI generated. And not even with something more modern.
From looking at their portfolio, they look like an Indie to AA-dev collaborator who were given a project that was way beyond their capabilities, likely believing AI could essentially lift them to AAA quality (which Shogun 2 was by the way even at release given it's a publisher-backed game with a relatively large budget) but fell massively short of the mark.
They notable shit they worked on:
1) Suicide Squad (co-developed—lmao)
2) The Medium—Blooper Team's worse game but it wasn't like Layers of Fear 1 & 2 were all that special. They developed on this, did optimisation, and porting.
3) Gotham Knights (co-developed—double lmao)
4) Stalker: Legends of the Zone—to be fair they only did the ports to console, so they can't be blamed here completely. I only bring this up because it's comparable to Shogun 2 in that they lessened the atmosphere, "enhanced" textures (subjective), added some quality of life, but touched none of the old bugs and added new ones on top.
Side note: Game development is so much cheaper in Eastern Europe over the USA (or outside the US in general) that companies can afford to keep devs on until they actually become what you'd actually call "talented." For comparison, the median game dev wage in the USA of a mid-to-senior game dev is $115,000 per year, in Poland it's $40000 per year.
(20k PLN = $5152.10 a month -> $61825.2 a year)
This company almost feels like a way for a larger dev studio to launder a game through a company that makes great use of AI without using it themselves. Given their projects include indie and AA titles, it's likely they're very cheap to partner with if you want a port your PC game to consoles. What's bizarre is they haven't only worked on stinkers given their most recent work includes Blood of the Dawnwalker—something they co-developed—so I can only surmise that they accepted the opportunity to work on the remaster because it A) adds further to their portfolio making them look more appetising to foreign publishers and B) they believed AI would make developing a remaster a piece of piss.
Maybe we can blame all of this on MATABOO's one Indian.
Though this guy looks like he's up to something nefarious.
And I don't know what child labour laws are like in Poland, but I doubt the capability of 2 little girls in game dev.
All that being said, I think blame still largely rests with CA and SEGA.
Entirely speculative, but I think MATABOO were given a task they couldn't reasonably carry out but I think CA pretty much contributed nothing to the project given the presence of old bugs and SEGA must've chosen or consented to these guys being the partner on this.
If CA did next to no work on this themselves, I'm guessing SEGA just proposed the project as a quick cash grab and put it entirely in the hands of MATABOO without adding to CA's workload (40K total war, Warhammer 3, Alien Isolation 2, Medieval 3).
MATABOO have 70 employees so this must've cost SEGA pennies, whilst MATABOO are looking at a return no matter what assuming they were commissioned for this or something.
Operating off the idea that all the MATABOO team were getting paid 62k a year, one full year of development would cost $4,327,764. But realistically, it might not even be that high, or even half that amount.
I'm guessing SEGA were expecting the remaster to, at bare minimum, generate more than a million dollars in revenue—which might sound too high or too low depending on your perspective. For me it's too high a target given how old and relatively niche the game is in the wider gaming community.
Even assuming every single sale was from a buyer paying the full price, you're seeing a sales revenue of $263014.
If I had to hazard a guess, the actual cost of this remaster must've fallen below the expected return given they were probably hoping to convert Shogun 2's respectable 4k+ daily players into a cash injection with an influx of new players on top, so the only reliable figure you could guess they were expecting at minimum was $45k (4.5k players taking the upgrade given it's relatively cheap).
6,577 - 4,845 = 1732 new players.
1732 x 39.99 - $69262
69k + 45k = 114k.
Every facet of this decision feels like a product of retardation. They might've been hoping to replicate the relative success of Rome: Total War Remastered which did reasonably well all things considered.
A game with around 2k daily players' remaster getting a peak of 18k players?
Assuming the same exact result, you're looking at a 4k daily players translating to a sevenfold increase i.e. 28k sales.
Sounds like a retarded outcome to estimate but companies genuinely think like this.
It's crazy to think they went with MATABOO because they're technically more experienced in game development and would create a better quality remaster, but they wanted their cake and eat it too since it was probably cheaper to hire MATABOO (70 devs based out of Poland) versus Feral Interactive (100-150 based out the UK).
