blundertwink

Unfortunately, NQ's CEO has been clear about where NQ's team is spending their time these last few months. They have three projects other than DU in the works, including at least one in the gaming space. Still no details about these actual projects, but NQ was at GamesCon Europe just last week...based on the screenshots shared, their booth doesn't even mention DU anymore. I don't think there's much chance that they're still devoting major resources to DU, unfortunately.

So...on one hand its an arbitrary guess, on the other its powered by a small sample size of your friends...but somehow that generalization is unlikely to be wrong...? It doesn't really matter in the end...the subs are clearly very small, to the point where NQ is no longer planning for any major update. Regardless of how many players that actually is, every fact we have says that it isn't nearly enough, such that any changes are not worth the effort and completely unrealistic and implausible. It's not me you have to convince, it's NQ, and they've made it clear for many, many months that DU isn't their priority. Here's some additional evidence from the CEO's linkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nouredine-abboud-89b3ab1/recent-activity/all/ Even in their recent trade shows, their booth has...nothing about DU at all. People that are proud of their products tend to show them off, advertise them, and talk about them at trade shows, haha! DU is very much a done deal, it's just that NQ doesn't want to stop collecting what few subs they have if they don't have to.

Yes it's long, long gone, hahah. No one is seriously developing anything related to DU anymore, including the developers, themselves.

This has been suggested a few times through the forum's history, but the challenge is that changing the billing model doesn't suddenly make the game more marketable. To say it another way...if you can't get people to play the game at $14.99/month, you won't sell them just by changing the purchase model (likely even making it more expensive to try). Even if they went free to play, it doesn't change the math around retention. There's no reason to believe that simply changing the billing model will result in a "flood" of new players...that's not a claim any reasonable company can work from without evidence. If you or your friends really wanted to play the game so badly, you'd pay a sub and try it for a month. We're not talking about an Eve-level niche game that can change billing models and have some inertia, we're talking about a game with maybe 100 concurrent players a day at peak -- so it'd basically be starting from scratch...for an MMO that's already released with no future updates on the horizon...? All that being said...there's also no reason to believe you can just throw cash shop items into the game and make enough to sustain an sandbox MMO where costs are constantly growing over time in a way that traditional MMOs don't need to deal with. That takes study and time and deliberation, and I find it really hard to believe that you'd be so willing to buy cash shop items from a game when you aren't even willing to pay for a sub to try it...how can you know that you'd be so willing? What makes you think that simply changing the subscription model will make this game better to the point where it will attract a lot of customers?

The KickStarter campaign barely raised any money at all...it raised about 560,000 euros -- less than $600,000 USD today...that's less than 3% of their total funding. With a second kickstarter very unlikely to do as well, it wouldn't be a meaningful sum. Besides...aren't some backers still waiting for stuff from the first round...? A few things, here....first, they do have funding. NQ's CEO recently discussed how they have around ~80 employees still. They obviously do have funding left to support a company at that scale. They aren't using those resources to develop DU, though. Again, the CEO has been very clear to say that the focus is on other projects! This is a matter of obvious fact considering that update 1.5 still hasn't even been announced. That aside...it's absolutely not true that more money will fix everything. It doesn't erase major design flaws, it doesn't fix their major technical flaws, it doesn't guarantee an increase in developer velocity (anyone that's worked on a complex project knows that throwing more hands at it doesn't lead to more productivity), and it certainly doesn't ensure that it would "make the game really really appealing". It also doesn't change the math around cost and profitability in trying to host a massive, sandbox world...we have no reason to believe it would ever be viable even with another $50 million in development. In essence, they'd have to start from scratch. No reasonable investor would put even a penny toward this idea today considering the history...and that includes Kickstarter backers.

Okay, but be realistic....hundreds of subs is really nothing. Even if there were hundreds of people advertising to hundreds of subs, you're talking about impressions in the 10s of thousands scale. Community-driven advertisement doesn't really work without a major influencer that has scale. That aside, advertising makes very little difference to an MMO in general if churn rate is poor -- because the effort expended to "get them in the doors" doesn't keep them there. If DU suddenly got 10,000 players tomorrow, that'd be great for funding the other projects that NQ has stated they are prioritizing...but it doesn't change the long-term prospects of the game at all. Churn will still narrow the funnel into the same plateau of players it has now. Why do you think NQ hasn't advertised the game, themselves....? They know the math and have known the math for a long time now. That's why there's not even an announcement of new updates since 1.4 dropped. Given that the game isn't getting updates, no amount of advertisement would actually help. NQ is really clear that the focus for their ~80 employees is new projects, not DU...that's why it seems like the game dropped off the face of the earth in the media and why it hasn't received major updates since then. It's likely that some of NQ's more-dedicated-than-we-deserve devs are doing minor patches and new events on their own free time...but otherwise, the game's best days are behind it.

I see what you mean, but I am not so sure that the game's high cost are purely driven by the infra living on the cloud. Having worked with AWS for so many years, there's so many ways to skin that cat. We don't know what the breakdown is between running the game on EC2, their now-reversed choice to leverage DynamoDB (very expensive), etc., but it's entirely plausible to suggest that DU wouldn't still be online without AWS. In theory, the cloud is a great choice for small scale MMOs that don't need the cost savings from standing your own hardware. Yes, you'll always be less efficient (especially when they also didn't craft a custom engine), but you would also be far more flexible and cost-effective with smaller player counts...like DU has always had. I think 99% of the problems with scale and cost are due to poor software design: layers upon layers of bad tech that were built because the company never had technical nor design leadership. We see this with the constant, never-fixable bugs, the slow development pace, and sluggish performance, and way too many major features refactored radically just before release. All that points to bad software and bad software design; I think there's great potential to host MMOs on the cloud if it is done right, especially niche products that truly benefit from some level of dynamic scale. I hope indie studios considering AWS or Azure do their homework better than NQ did, because the math suggests it can absolutely work...personally, I don't think DU would be any more effective living in its own metal. Their bad software would not run any more effectively on self-hosted servers, and it wouldn't be any cheaper with so few players...probably more expensive, even. NQ needed more technical expertise early on in general -- AWS is near the bottom of the list in terms of their technical sins in my opinion.

The problem here is that the numbers on Steam are actual numbers, whereas 400-800 concurrent players is completely arbitrary. For other MMOs, they actually market their native clients, so you might be able to make this claim, but you'll never be able to have an objective window into native stats without internal data. In other words, you're pulling this idea out of nowhere with no evidence...what makes you think that the numbers are this high? That the native client attracts oh-so-many people when DU hasn't marketed or updated this game in MONTHS...? Where is this claim coming from? Have you ever seen 400-800 people online at once in the last few months? There are plenty of MMOs on Steam we can use for comparison -- the reality is that DU has very very few players even compared to OLD games like EQ as @Wyndle pointed out. Even NQ has given up on this game and has no plans for a next major update. Does THAT sound like a product that's doing "better than people think"...? Even the CEO doesn't post about the game anymore...they have been very, very clear that DU is NOT the company's main focus anymore. They've moved on. It's fine if other people don't want to move on; spend your time and money how you want...but let's not delude would-be players into thinking that the population in this game is healthy or that the game has a future. The studio itself doesn't have any updates planned this soon after going live. Development is done. Player counts aren't near enough to make this a viable product, and you don't have to believe random claims from some stranger, just look at the CEO's recent posts and the fact that there is no version 1.5 announced, planned, or even rumored.

Those numbers are per Steam charts by the way, not just random stuff I'm making up. It's likely there's several hundred people left, but rarely more than 50-60 online at the same time....in other words, at any given time, there's not even enough people in this "MMO" to do a round of Fortnite. At this point it's basically fact that they aren't developing the game...the leadership is still very focused on UGC/web3 concepts and that's where they are investing their time and money. I do think there's some very committed devs that still do some patches/fixes based on the patch notes, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were a few devs doing these patches in their free time because they are that dedicated -- just as some of the devs have (thanklessly) created events for whatever community is left using their own free time. That said, it's unfortunate that many new people still find the game through Steam and pay money for a sub assuming this is a live game...1.4 is very likely the final update. Subscription-based games live or die by updates and the lack of even an announcement since June cements the reality that this game is done. I just wish that NQ would be more open about this so that trusting customers don't waste their time and money on a product that they have decided to shelve. A sizable part of those daily active users are new users booting the game for the first and last time.

I don't know why anyone believes that they "want to" -- the CEO has made it clear that DU isn't a priority. NQ still has nearly 80 employees (per a recent post) and have been hiring for a different game project (clearly advertised in their job posts) while DU's dev is permanently on ice. The game is already dead; no judgement for those that still play, but think about the reality. It's still a somewhat new MMO with less than 2 years on the market, but there's no news about a major patch since 1.4 released months ago. This for a game with weekend peaks of maybe 50-60 concurrent players. There's no evidence to suggest that major development is ongoing...and like a dead language, an MMO that doesn't get updates is a dead game no matter if some few people still play.

The game isn't even "coasting" at this point. At launch a year ago, it hit its spike of ~800 concurrent players. Several months ago, it was down to under 100 concurrent players in a 24 hour period. Now, it's down to ~30-40 concurrent players -- weekend peaks aren't even topping 50 players. There's a huge number of not-very-good single player games that are even older than DU with stronger stats than these. By comparison, "New World" is largely considered an MMO flop, but still has over 1000 concurrent players per day. So...from a stats perspective, the game hasn't even hit a plateau and is still bleeding players month-over-month. From an all-time high that wasn't very strong to begin with. It's fairly clear they don't plan anymore big changes to the game and have focused their ~80 employees (that number is per a recent comment by the CEO) onto other things. I wish companies like NQ would just be honest. It's fine to leave the game running for those that still enjoy, but stop pretending that it's an active MMO under development when it clearly, clearly isn't! Nothing will get fixed because they won't devote their limited resources to a failed project. I feel sorry for those new players joining that expect they are paying every month for a live game with a future; there's no indication that the game will ever see another major patch, nor does NQ have any interest in respecting their customers enough to be honest about the game's state. It's rare that companies are able to create negative brand value, but considering their history and their plans for the future...NQ just isn't trustworthy to me. Three projects other than DU, but you're still pretending that people are working on it? I can't wait to see what inane web3/NFT crap they will try to peddle in the months and years to come and won't be sad when those efforts implode like every other scam in that space.

They've said many, many times that there are three projects in the works other than DU. Just a few weeks ago the CEO mentioned that NQ still has just under 80 employees. If you look at the CEO's most recent posts, it's really clear they have already pivoted and are focusing on new pitches, publishers, and investors. There's just no evidence that DU's dev is ongoing in any real way; I'd be surprised if there were even a dozen people still working on DU out of those 80. Based on the last few months of no real activity, it is likely even less than that. DU's dev is effectively dead...which is not a surprise as they have only managed to bleed players since launch (per the only stats we have).

As I was one of the annoying people in the original thread, I won't comment more on the food idea than to say I hope you are doing well, too. I will reiterate (to everyone's annoyance lol) that DU is effectively done (unfortunately) -- they haven't even announced that there will be a new patch. The last announcement about changes to the game in general was back in May. NQ's CEO recently (in the last few weeks) said that they have just under 80 employees. If even half were still working on DU, there'd be an announcement of a new patch sometime after 1.4 dropped...considering the last 8 months or so of velocity, it seems clear (to me) that the vast, vast, vast majority of NQ's staff are not working on DU. It's a bit like a dead language. A dead language doesn't mean no one speaks it -- plenty of people still speak latin. It means that it's no longer evolving. DU might continue as a game for a long time for all we know, but will it continue to evolve? I don't believe so. Not in any substantial way. I don't believe even NQ considers it is a worthwhile venture at this point, and they shouldn't feel any shame about that. This project was always a moonshot. It was always very ambitious for their (relatively) tiny resources. I don't really wish them much luck with their blockchain/web3/crypto nonsense, but I do admire them for trying something new in a genre that so rarely innovates.

There's still no news about a new update....the game is basically abandoned, as all evidence has pointed to for a while now. Let's put this in context with some of the CEO's latest posts on LinkedIn. Consider this gem: This is from a post about 3 weeks ago. If anyone still believes that NQ is devoting resources to DU, please explain what those 80 people are doing day-to-day considering the last 8+ months of development velocity. The answer is very clear: they aren't working on DU, which we already knew because they've said their focus is on other projects and have said that for a while now. Anyone that believes DU still has a real future is not interested in reality -- there's not one single piece of evidence to suggest that development is still going on at any real scale. There's not one piece of evidence to show player counts are doing anything other than plateauing at <100 players online concurrently. You can keep pretending that the game is growing and that constant churns of new players is somehow a good thing, but all objective evidence says that even NQ is not interesting in furthering this moonshot.

The last patch announced was 1.4 back in...May? That the game is still online doesn't mean it has an actual future as an MMO...a dead MMO doesn't mean that it vanishes offline, it means there's no realistic hope for scaling it to be a real product. It could stay online for another decade, that doesn't mean it will ever be scaled out. Let's also be real about just who is "ignoring 99% of feedback" -- that's how NQ has worked since the start. Maybe if they'd been more engaged years ago it would be different. This has been their reputation for nearly a decade now. That I'm reminding people not to bother isn't me being mean, it's pragmatic. They've yet to even announce another patch afaik...the idea that they'd make huge sweeping changes at this point is not grounded on anything other than weirdly placed hope in the ~50-100 people that play in a given day. 🤷‍♂️ NQ has been clear that their focus is other projects, I just don't understand why people don't understand this and keep thinking they can magically turn this around. I think people vastly, vastly, vastly underestimate how much retooling would be needing to make any of these suggestions practical, and that requires money that no sane company would spend for a product that hasn't scaled.

All these ideas depend on the game doing much better than it is. Moving the game to FTP, optimizing, fixing bugs...these are expensive ideas that only increase the scale of DU as a liability for NQ. Unfortunately, the chance of any of this actually turning this product around is too small to justify the effort. The scale issues should be made clear by NQ's own post about the PvE numbers they've seen -- these aren't very good metrics even for single player games; for an MMO, it means that the product doesn't work. We're long past suggesting changes for DU at this point, the product will not evolve or scale and NQ has moved on a long time ago.

I wouldn't say it's as bad as politician-level...that's just too mean. Making games is hard...even though I think NQ managed their comms, PR, and design approach very poorly, I can't say it's malice...just "difficulty". But it's true that feedback for this game goes into a black hole, and honestly...if I were NQ, I wouldn't read feedback, either. We're talking about the most major update since release (paired with a 20% off sale) spiking DAUs from around 50 to around 70. That's so minor it isn't even close to material. If you're going to offer feedback on how to improve the game, great...but context matters. In the context of this game's performance and completeness, no suggestion or improvement can change anything, period. That's even if NQ were listening. Literally every facet of the game requires massive retooling to scale both technically and in terms of design. This idea that it's bad to "give up as if there's nothing we can do" is silly to me -- there is nothing players can do and any belief that they can "help" comes from hubris, not reality. NQ has decided to refocus on three new projects...if you want to support them, that's great, honestly....but don't for one second expect that your money is going to improve DU as if they still believe in the game enough to dedicate 100% of their resources to its success.

The community on Discord isn't that busy, either, compared to actual MMOs with players...or many single player games, being honest. This idea that it's "too hard" for anyone to read the forum because there's negative perspectives is not realistic -- there's no activity here because there's no activity. It's really that stupidly simple. Similarly, there's very little activity on Reddit, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube...or any other social channel where people would talk about actual MMOs. 🤷‍♂️ You can declare something is wrong (without any elaboration or evidence) if you want...but it strikes me as arrogant to suggest they just ban people you don't like. You don't like reading my opinions...that's fair...but you aren't entitled to block them out or delete them just because you don't have the means or energy to engage with the ample evidence showing the game's state in terms of dev and player counts. It takes no effort or time to just not read something you don't feel like engaging with. Ultimately, I think it is helpful to point out the state of the game based on the facts we have...NQ is still selling 12 month subs and there's plenty of reason to doubt that the game will remain online for that long based on actual fact...not just a vague desire to ban anyone that has an opinion they don't like.

Skipping QA is going to be the norm -- it's not just that they are a small team with a small budget, it's that they are a small team with a small budget that's also working on three projects other than DU right now. All their hiring is focused on those other projects while DU gets fewer and fewer resources. Of course they are going to skip things... 🤷‍♂️ That's if the game keeps getting updates, which isn't certain. Every piece of data available about the game shows that this ship has already sailed....a long time ago. They're far, far, far beyond needing to "retain" players. DU would need triple-digit percentage growth for months just to attain "moderate" success. We're talking about an average of 50 or so DAUs recently, with the patch yesterday pushing it to around 80. That's worse metrics than many old single player games, never mind an MMO that's <1 year out of release. So we're far beyond needing a few changes to mechanics to "retain appeal", they'd need to do something spectacular to achieve that sort of growth. One boring PvE mission isn't going to be that even if combat was actually engaging in this game!

Yet somehow people around here still insist that NQ's "tech" is worth money and that DU has always been a vehicle to test, develop, and "sell the tech". When I ask "what tech exactly are you talking about...?" there's only shrugs and vagueness, because no one can point to one single concept in this game that actually works properly and works properly at scale. Issues like this are why NQ has effectively (IMO) put DU on the shelf to focus on other projects. There's very little interest in today's planned update and there's no real chance that the "addition of PvE" does anything other than amuse people.

They certainly don't mention it in their latest "roadmap". Considering how long it's taken to deploy perhaps the most basic/niche implementation of PvE available in any subscription MMO (even skipping major QA steps like deploying to the PTS)....I kind of doubt we'd see it anytime soon even if it was mentioned. Yeah, it makes it really hard to be positive about ideas in general because there's so much stuff that NQ needs to finish to make the game whole. Which...is kind of my point when I am negative so often: the game is what it is. It isn't going to grow, there's way too much to do and too few resources to do it. Enjoy it or don't, but let's not pretend that there's a way for NQ to really fix anything at this point, especially with their focus on other things. People should know what they're getting with their subscription money, and IMO it isn't a growing/sustainable game.

And to be real...something as basic as "how booleans work" is not something that should need to be touched post-release. This excuse of "putting it off for so long to not break things" seems weird to me -- surely beta would have exactly been the time to break things to mitigate the need to do this post-release? Not sure I really buy the "necessity" of this change unless they've calculated that the improved performance will save them money (which seems like a motivator). This is an issue with sandbox persistent multiplayer games in general...Any change that fundamentally changes constructs or in-game scripting means effectively erasing a lot of work. It's a similar issue when they change how PvP components are balanced. There will always need to be a balance between stability and breakages; I don't think NQ has found that balance yet. I don't think they've really patched this game any different on "release" than they did in beta...maybe even more carelessly with the lack of PTS. Granted it doesn't much matter with player counts this low, but hopefully they learn to find that balance with their other projects. 🤷‍♂️

I don't know what information you're seeking specifically...you might have better luck asking as a follow up to this thread: But don't hold your breath. There's zero chance they will open it on the PTS -- that itself should be telling about how little it will really matter. I wouldn't bother with the PTS when there's so few players either.

Unfortunately, NQ's leadership is 100% aligned about the crypto crap...Andurance Ventures is big on web3/crpto, which is probably why they picked Abboud to take over after Granatino's stint as CEO (he's still President btw). Granatino is from Andurance if that wasn't clear. Andurance likely owns the company (they are the largest investor by far and that's how these things work), so their crypto BS is therefore NQ's crypto BS. NQ as an independent entity that only cares about making games doesn't really exist...it never really did, though...that's how VCs work. So unfortunately you've got things backwards...NQ's leadership (AKA the investors) decided to put him in charge because of his web3 "ideas", not in spite of them. Web3 people are rather infamous for doubling down on their "vision" of the future no matter what. No matter how much it fails, they insist that the solution is "more web3".

I highly, highly doubt that NQ is involved to be honest. I'm also not sure about the persistent rumor that Xsolla is a "partner" for NQ or that someone from Xsolla is an investor -- no one has ever presented any actual evidence about that. We know plenty about actual investors and partners, I don't even know where that rumor came from. Regardless, here's why I don't think NQ is involved: Why bother with NQ's tech, which has been proven not to scale, when you have about 4 times the funding to develop it yourself...? It would make very little sense...especially when this "partnership" between Xsolla and NQ might not be a real thing beyond a typical relationship. The description of the tech or its abilities doesn't make me think NQ had anything to do with it. It's UE-based, where DU isn't. It's entirely web3 based (ugh), DU isn't. Why else are you "almost sure" about NQ's involvement...? Seems like totally different tech from a much better funded group to me.