Mysterious uptick in sales since Nov 2nd...

:wink:

Now I’m watching Rhykker’s Blizzcon reaction…

//youtu.be/JKFgpkKEK14

…dude is seriously bent out of shape. Almost feel sorry for him. First world probs are rough indeed.

He can always stream GD now! Ha.

***hard listening to him. He’s virtually grovelling, you can tell he feels like his whole career is going down the tube. Something to consider if you want to be a streamer… maybe branch out a lil.

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Hm, Im only halfway through the video, but it is pretty hilarious. Not for him of course, but like you said, streaming ONE game only is not very clever.
And he can´t even swear on YT, or he looses money?! Whoa. :rolleyes:
He seems so a bit traumatized, which is insane. It´s not like he survived a mass shooting or something…

Hahah yeah, but the D2 people were still happy playing D2 :wink: Yes, D3 killed much loyalty with the RMAH money grab, and then I don’t think the laziness of GRifts and subsequently abandoning the game altogether has rekindled any of the love lost…

Blizzard has been sitting on their “You’ll like it because we know best, and tell you it’s something you like…” bullshit far too long. And it’s starting to bite them in the ass.

don’t you have a mobile phone

i can understand why he’s disappointed but to be honest he hasn’t helped the situation putting out multiple pieces of content hyping up ‘leaks’ and over analysing the smallest things that could point to Diablo 2 remaster/ Diablo 4. the same i’m sure can be said for other content creators.

I consider Rhis something of a partner in spirit but if you mean legally speaking, then yes, I’m the “sole big cheese”. I’ve avoided giving out actual ownership shares because there are various legal and tax implications and I like simplicity of it. Other long-time team members are a bigger part of the company than just being employees as well. So far though, I’m stuck handling all the operational type stuff, much to my chagrin. At the same time, I’ve worked at other studios that ended up in paralysis for periods because multiple owners couldn’t reach agreement on things. So, I listen to people careful and always questions my own position but, ultimately, I have the final say, if it comes to that, although it very rarely does.

To answer your other question about us become a bloated mega-corp - probably not anytime soon haha. The other benefit of being a single-owner company is that I’m pretty happy with how things are and I don’t feel like I need anymore money, beyond us just continuing to make profits like we are.
So there isn’t much attraction to “blowing up big” for me. I feel like the detraction of having to manage a larger company would greatly outweigh any benefit of moar money at this point.

We’ve gotten inquiries by potential investors looking to dump some money on us for some bigger project but that just seems like a headache to me, dealing with investors and suddenly having to schedule milestones and report what we’re doing, convince outside people to let us do this or that… no thanks!

That said, I wouldn’t mind growing a bit more, as I do have an interest in working on different games and it’s fun to see things progressing and taking shape - ideally at a somewhat faster rate than often is the case with us haha. Currently we have just enough people to work on our “new game” plus a GD expansion. I think we’ll be stretched thin if we start another totally new project. We’re actually in a weird spot currently where it would be great to hire another artist to wrap up FG but after that is finished, there would then be a lull before we get the next thing rolling, where we might not have enough work to go around… so it’s better to just try to grind through with the team we have for now, then hire later, once future things are in production.

As to the question someone asked about the “new project” - well, part of why we haven’t shown much of it is due to team size restraints. When you announce / begin to show a game, you want to have some marketing art, a website or whatever set up so people interested can start following the game after that initial buzz… We have none of that yet. So far it’s just seemed too painful try to take someone off development to put in the time for that peripheral stuff - yet, until we do that, it doesn’t really make sense to announce / show the game.

We do need to get to it pretty soon though as it’s nigh time we announced it.

In terms of early community involvement / showing development, there is also some hesitation since, now that we’re more known as a company and more eyes are watching, there is some fear that if we show early, really rough-looking stuff like we did in the past, the wider audience may not get it. Early on with GD, it was a pretty small group of mostly TQ fans, so I think people were more accepting of where things were at, although we did get shit on to an increasing degree as word got out, until after the KS, when the current artists managed to redo a lot of the cruder early art.

The new project is looking pretty good now though imo - so currently it’s just about getting our act together with the marketing side.

Omg the damn story… it’s going to drive me insane. Basically, I thought when GD released, I’d somehow have all this time because the pressure would be off and I could sit back and write the story for a while.

Of course, that’s never happened - while we’re not under as much pressure to get a game out and financially things are good, I now have to keep a team of people busy, I’ve still got my own development work that other people need me to finish so they can do their stuff, etc. Plus I have to handle the surprising amount of BS tasks that come up just in maintaining the business and employees. It’s insane all the stuff you have to do to be a “legit” business and comply with various state and gov reporting regulations, not to mention keeping up with taxes. There’s always some new thing every week.

So that said, I’ve been chipping away at it. I keep saying I’m going to just sit down and finish it and I worked on it for a day or two but inevitably things come up and it gets put on hold again. Then of course, more time goes by, so there’s more interesting things I feel like I should include…

Suffice to say, I really need to wrap it up.

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Woah, big Medierra post. Always fun to read.
Also I think I found the real reason for the uptick in sales @Medierra:

//youtu.be/rlSAYdo8QkI

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Hey thanks for replying and sating my curiosity. It’s good to hear that you have it in ya to resist investors trying to throw money at ya. Keep fighting the good fight! :smiley:

And no worries on the Crate Story thing. I trust that it will show up one way or the other.

Dude. That’s fucking awesome. RNGesus, is that you? That’s crazy!

Lol, RNGesus… That’s pretty badass

Def going to post that on release day

I’m humbled and flattered, once again.
When that day comes hit me up so I can transfer ownership of the video (that’s also why I left it unlisted on my channel) so it can get more views on your channel if you’re comfortable posting it there.

After all, it’s important to get the “good word” of RNGesus out :wink:

Pope powbam endorses you! Welcome to the Grim Dawn Church of RNGesus!

**if ya get some free time and extra creativity I wouldn’t be adverse to seeing some RNGesus skits of ya sitting around shaking the Holy Dice. A short sermon or blessing for your followers would go a long way to getting the donation coffers filling up!

You’d think it would be cheap stalking Zantai and hiding out in his zentai wardrobe closet on his yacht all day but you’d be wrong. Frikkin’ Hasselhoff figured out I was in there awhile back and he keeps making me play Texas Hold’em, sometimes 3 times a day! And he plays for money! And he keeps winning! Worse, he’ll only play with his cards and every single one has his face plastered on 'em! HALP ME RNGesus!

It’s nice to hear medierra again and his thoughts about the future of Crate. Not to make Crate a to big company and not be persuaded by potential investors.

And about the Crate story it can certainly wait. After all the story isn’t finished with a new game in the making it will just add another chapter :wink:

This official trailer for FG looks stunning.

The reason is because diablo mobile, the main reason. The other reason because diablo mobile is between diablo 2 and 3.

Been thinking over what you said Medierra. I totally see your point re team time constraints. Re the early developement yes, the initial followers of the game were mostly TQ fans and tolerant of progress. The community’s grown since the Kickstarter, but they’ve also come to know how Crate works (at least for this game) in communicating with the fan base.

So it could work both ways. Yes, you got flack as development went on for GD, but there’ll probably be some flack anyway when the new game is revealed. Few people here on the forum seem to know about the new project, never mind the greater potential audience out there and when it hits some will be saying “Wtf why are Crate making this instead of another ARPG?” because that’s what your reputation’s been built on so far. Maybe if they’d been in on the development earlier it could have generated interest and got people hyped. We’ll never know.

Whenever I tell people who’ve just bought the game or are thinking of buying it that Crate communicate regularly with the fan base via the GM’s and live dev streams the reaction is always positive. They like the fact that Crate does tell people what’s going on. To nick a comment from Zantai (mistress of quotations that I am ;)), it’s working well for you. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard aren’t kinda wishing they’d done the same.

And if you’re still in a question answering mood Medierra still using this hack?

"Without a doubt the hackiest thing I remember from Titan Quest is how we managed the event scripting. The quest / event tech had a major weakness in that there was no way to delay an action once it was triggered. So if you wanted something to happen 5 seconds after a player ran through some bounding volume, there was no way to set a delay. It would always be instant.

We were nearing the end of production, so it was hard to request additional features, as engineers were slammed just trying to meet their milestone deliverables. One of the QA testers had started helping out with scripting work, and figured out that there was in fact a way to delay an action from triggering based on the length of an animation.

He ended up using these squirrels we had as ambient creatures as the animation timer, and they became the default timing mechanism. He created an invisible version of the squirrel, which he would place in the levels where he needed them, then would time everything based on the duration of their idle animation. Because of his creative problem solving, he was promoted to designer on the next project."

Can’t say I’ve noticed any squirrels lurking in GD, but then again being invisible you never know. Or maybe you’ve stepped it up a bit and it’s now an invisible Zantai in his zentai suit that is the trigger. :smiley:

TIL that invisible squirrels helped improving Titan Quest.

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I didn’t think zentai suits could get any creepier but I think you managed to figure out how to do it.

I first discovered Crate and GD at about the same time as The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing Final Cut was supposed to come out. I bought VH on GOG where the game wasn’t actually released until eight months later. Neocore Games was largely silent during this and the few of us who bought it on GOG were left wondering when (or even if) we were going to get it. I’m sharing this because I’m trying to show how much it means to me to know that every two weeks I can at least get confirmation that you’re still here and that we haven’t been left to twist in the wind. So yeah, sometimes we get a little bitchy but we really do appreciate being kept in the loop.

100 percent agree with that sentiment. I think that if Crate just keeps following that methodology they’ll have no problem keeping on making us games, no matter if its another GD or a city-builder. It has worked out exceptionally well for them to this point and I see no good reason to change that aspect and sincerely hope they never do no matter what comes down the line.

Can’t wait to see them begin the city-builder’s version of Grim Misadventures.