How is GGG doing financially

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TorsteinTheFallen wrote:

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Xyel wrote:

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A: I would point out one: cash from customers was down 17% in 2021 YoY, and then further down 27% in 2022 YoY.

I need to save this for the next time someone comes around arguing that player retention has no financial impact. That's almost a 40 % revenue drop in 2 years.

Year 2020 was prob the most profitable year for gaming industry due to covid lockdowns, don't forget that.

Yeah, but I'm not sure it holds for PoE all that much. PoE's financials are done September to September. So, in terms of leagues, we are talking Heist, Ritual, Ultimatum, and Expedition, with the COVID leagues being only Ultimatum and Expedition.

Expedition was a league so successful that Chris went on a PR tour to soothe the community.

And was Ultimatum really that much of an outlier to create the revenue jump by itself?

I don't think so.

What I think is the case is that people really loved Ritual, spent a shitton of money on PoE as a result, then that goodwill carried over to Ultimatum, and the revenue dropping ever since is people falling out of love with the new vision.

If COVID was such a factor, then 2021 would have been a huge revenue jump, but it was only a 15 % increase over 2019, and a drop compared to 2020.

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AintCare wrote:

yello Charan, you forgetting that uato pickup would make things easier for bots, and on top of that would make further inflation of the in game market. with the current drop rates I think its ok if you click to pick up. if can't be bothered than filter the drops out.

-cheers

Nah mate, I didn't forget that. I just subscribe to the belief that what cheaters might do with QoL is a shitty reason not to implement it and indicates a much larger issue.

Loot filter was never the best solution, just a bandaid where more meaningful internal loot table restructuring would have been better. But since by then GGG had had more than a taste of how happy Exiles are to fix the game, player-moderated loot filters were a crashing success.

But that is purely from a design perspective. For the Exiles, stuff like loot filters and manual item pickup maintain a sense of engagement with a game that often threatens to float away on its own abstract complexity. No ARPG in history has more thoroughly embraced the notion that the gameplay itself is little more than a simulation testing the efficacy of character build. For a game that passive, any and all active engagement is a plus.

Anyway PoE for Exiles, everything else for everyone else I guess.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

No ARPG in history has more thoroughly embraced the notion that the gameplay itself is little more than a simulation testing the efficacy of character build. For a game that passive, any and all active engagement is a plus.

So, the game is not really an ARPG, but a simulated ARPG designed to encourage players to put new and old pieces together in different ways for different simulated environments? Perhaps a thought experiment simulator that encourages participants to donate tens of millions of dollars to participate. All the 3rd party aids just make the complexity easier to manage allowing GGG to continue to add more and more pieces into the "game".

GGG: How complicated can we make the experience and still induce financial and game participation in what is no longer an ARPG game, but just an experiment in problem solving?

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Nah mate, I didn't forget that. I just subscribe to the belief that what cheaters might do with QoL is a shitty reason not to implement it and indicates a much larger issue.

I do think what cheaters might do with something does matter if it has a broad impact on others; or to put it differently: measuring if the QOL feature is worth the potential collateral damage that comes from it.

A prime example for me would be a fully automated asynchronous trading system. No person will ever be able to compete with bots in sniping things off an automated system and it will just be a shootout for bots to get things and then wreck the market however they see fit.

Some people have stated bots already exist so who cares. They've mistakenly assumed it can't be much worse.

But in general, I agree with at least part of your sentiment in that cheaters should not be the lone factor in deciding whether a QOL feature should or shot not exist. I just think it should be thoughtfully considered to measure the benefit vs. the risk.

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Nubatron wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Nah mate, I didn't forget that. I just subscribe to the belief that what cheaters might do with QoL is a shitty reason not to implement it and indicates a much larger issue.

I do think what cheaters might do with something does matter if it has a broad impact on others; or to put it differently: measuring if the QOL feature is worth the potential collateral damage that comes from it.

A prime example for me would be a fully automated asynchronous trading system. No person will ever be able to compete with bots in sniping things off an automated system and it will just be a shootout for bots to get things and then wreck the market however they see fit.

Some people have stated bots already exist so who cares. They've mistakenly assumed it can't be much worse.

But in general, I agree with at least part of your sentiment in that cheaters should not be the lone factor in deciding whether a QOL feature should or shot not exist. I just think it should be thoughtfully considered to measure the benefit vs. the risk.

Try posting rare and strong chase item, gem, or jewel on trade with drastic underpricing. You will get a wall of messages several seconds after it will get indexed by trade site. Current trade system is hardly an obstacle for trade bots, they are already here.

As for combat bots, even without deep api access, item filter functionality makes it trivial to implement picking items as is. For example you can make item filter for your bot, where specific items you need have specific background color, and then set your bot code to recognize that color and act appropriately.

So I don't see why cheating concerns should matter for implementing either auto-pickup pets or automated trade system. Root of potential problems coming from these lies elsewhere.

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Echothesis wrote:

Try posting rare and strong chase item, gem, or jewel on trade with drastic underpricing. You will get a wall of messages several seconds after it will get indexed by trade site. Current trade system is hardly an obstacle for trade bots, they are already here.

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Nubatron wrote:

Some people have stated bots already exist so who cares. They've mistakenly assumed it can't be much worse.

I didn't expect someone to do it so fast....

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Nubatron wrote:

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Echothesis wrote:

Try posting rare and strong chase item, gem, or jewel on trade with drastic underpricing. You will get a wall of messages several seconds after it will get indexed by trade site. Current trade system is hardly an obstacle for trade bots, they are already here.

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Nubatron wrote:

Some people have stated bots already exist so who cares. They've mistakenly assumed it can't be much worse.

I didn't expect someone to do it so fast....

It could have been much worse, before GGG have gated trade access behind login. Flip side of automated trade system is that they could gather telemetry on actual transactions, not just intention of transactions as it is now. Accounts attempting to operate like actual stock market bots will be in plain sight, and likely won't last long.

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ChanBalam wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

No ARPG in history has more thoroughly embraced the notion that the gameplay itself is little more than a simulation testing the efficacy of character build. For a game that passive, any and all active engagement is a plus.

So, the game is not really an ARPG, but a simulated ARPG designed to encourage players to put new and old pieces together in different ways for different simulated environments? Perhaps a thought experiment simulator that encourages participants to donate tens of millions of dollars to participate. All the 3rd party aids just make the complexity easier to manage allowing GGG to continue to add more and more pieces into the "game".

GGG: How complicated can we make the experience and still induce financial and game participation in what is no longer an ARPG game, but just an experiment in problem solving?

As your resident Ruler, I am clearly too optimistic to embrace such a stance but bless you for laying it out like that. Warms my heart to know I totally wasn't bamboozled. ^_^

Snark aside, yes. I tried to engage with PoE as a tactical experience for years to varying success -- but never enough that I didn't feel like I was just wasting time.

Game in my sig otoh does allow me to rely on gear to augment my tactical approach but eventually it comes down to genuine gameplay skill, knowledge of enemy patterns, and reflexes. So I can farm certain high end missions, get amazing gear...and still get wrecked by much lower level content if it's a boss with tricky moves. PoE kinda had that but that get wrecked thing started at precisely the wrong time for me: right after the ten act campaign, which even GGG know to be far too long and numbing hence the incoming seven act "alternative". The difficulty pacing of PoE is one of the most glaring indicators of GGG's amateur nature as the developers of precisely one game.

And it is a pacing you can easily overcome with gear, which is a whole other problem with the game -- it is likely no coincidence that my favourite action rpgs do not have a tumescent trading scene. I love to mule gear to raise less minmaxxy characters but am typically okay with running a metabuilt char to get that ball rolling. That is why leagues initially appealed to me -- until GGG realised they had to calibrate difficulty even of the early game with the assumption that people will trade.

Stack that with the joke that is SSF and you've lost me. Which is fine -- PoE is such a claustrophobic experience on every level that this...this little dark olive text box...is more than enough of a reminder for me. :)

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The bottom line of this thread to me is how a company is doing when it relies so overtly on customer "support" will always be secondary from that customer's perspective to how supporting makes them feel. GGG could be on the ropes and I strongly doubt support patterns would change significantly. Equally the opposite, as seems to be the case here.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

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AintCare wrote:

yello Charan, you forgetting that uato pickup would make things easier for bots, and on top of that would make further inflation of the in game market. with the current drop rates I think its ok if you click to pick up. if can't be bothered than filter the drops out.

-cheers

Nah mate, I didn't forget that. I just subscribe to the belief that what cheaters might do with QoL is a shitty reason not to implement it and indicates a much larger issue.

Loot filter was never the best solution, just a bandaid where more meaningful internal loot table restructuring would have been better. But since by then GGG had had more than a taste of how happy Exiles are to fix the game, player-moderated loot filters were a crashing success.

But that is purely from a design perspective. For the Exiles, stuff like loot filters and manual item pickup maintain a sense of engagement with a game that often threatens to float away on its own abstract complexity. No ARPG in history has more thoroughly embraced the notion that the gameplay itself is little more than a simulation testing the efficacy of character build. For a game that passive, any and all active engagement is a plus.

Anyway PoE for Exiles, everything else for everyone else I guess.

Well I was just touching on the subject of autopickup, I guess I mentioned the loot filter, but I agree with you on reducing the drop rates and redoing the drop table, however I would still go against the auto pickup.
Im currently having the most fun since 2012 and thats because I play Ruthless. Every drop is worth IDing, had to actually learn the boss mechanics and sometimes I would re-run campaign zones. it brings me way back, and I love it. Normally after campaign you have to ID thausands of rares for even slight improvement, and its gets really old really quick. Also the screen is not trashed with loot to the point that the item names glitch so that's a nice QOL.

Edit:
Regarding your last response, I think you forgot the old days. The campaign is still very easy compared to how it was before, even if you don't trade. Vaal was scary, big rabbit was almost impossible for some builds. Now the only challenge was Innocence, even Kitava was not too difficult. Every other boss in campaign just melts, Arakaali gave me a problem because I mistook her attacks to be chaos based, very weird deign choice to make this a lighting dmg. I'm playing an attack build so that heavily gear dependant, so its not just power creep of skills.
I agree that this game is basically a sim test of you excel sheet. Looking at the direction this game is taking its just gonna get worse, but that's only if you expect to beat everything in the game. I play my crappy builds with crappy items and just have fun, I don't care how inefficient is my gaming experience when compared to 3min t16 map runners. Considering how RNG heavy is the uber drop table there is very little incentive to actually beat them when you play this way anyway.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

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The bottom line of this thread to me is how a company is doing when it relies so overtly on customer "support" will always be secondary from that customer's perspective to how supporting makes them feel. GGG could be on the ropes and I strongly doubt support patterns would change significantly. Equally the opposite, as seems to be the case here.

Bingo!

A significant contributing factor to this behavior is how intangible the "support" can be for most people, which is what I tried to address in my post. It is very easy for donations of any kind to become a habit, when one is only aware of their own financial constraints, and has no clear visibility onto how much their aid would move the needle on the receiving end :)