The Firefall population has been dropping steadily since week 2 except for a brief steadying a few weeks ago. Here's the steam population log, go to the 2nd graph, "Year Averages", and select 3 months.
Don't close this thread. Steven, you're more disrespectful than OP for trying to muzzle free speech. Get over yourself
-Steven, best disrespectful troll NA
I found the troll! https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenna
More info here:
Red 5's CEO's share, Zhu, who is also CEO of The9, worth 45M. Other employees confirming stuff and Red 5's e-mail response to employees:
"Hi Team, I regret to inform you that Red5 currently does not have the funds necessary to meet our payroll scheduled for today Friday, December 25. Due to this, there will not be payroll paid this week. Red5 and The9, our parent company, is currently working to resolve this, during the holidays, as soon as possible. We are hopeful we'll be able to resolve this and will update the team immediately."
> As a side note, your comment does nothing but undermine your own position, as it is a fallacy.
Except it doesn't... Firefall was advertised as a pvp arena shooter in closed beta. They bought a 3 million dollar bus to back up that fact (for tournaments at LANs and expos), and advertised a 1 million dollar tournament season.....
Why would someone not expect an arena shooter when that's how Firefall was advertised up until release? Shooter first, mmo second. If I had more time I'd dig it up for you, but it shouldn't be hard to google many of the advertising they used, or better yet, the 15-page 3-part series on all of firefall's history and how red5 fucked it all up.
Here's a link to a GameSpot article and video that gives a tad bit more information.
Like how the launch gameworld is going to quadrouple in size compared to current beta, and have fifteen times the content.
Edit: Fixed link
Well, it's clearly not dead (yet).
I do have some quite serious doubts about its future though...
https://steamdb.info/app/227700/graphs/
...looking at trends there, and making the two (reasonable?) assumptions that steam population trends are, one, representative, and two, at least 10% of the total player population, things look pretty grim. Only 15-20K active players is probably not enough to keep the lights on...remembering that this is a F2P game, and not all those players are payers.
Piling on assumptions here, assume 20K active players, with an average spend of $50/year, which yields an income for Red5 of $1M/year. Which seems like a lot, until you consider that will only pay for 10-15 developers' salaries. And R5 has a much larger staff than that, and many additional operating costs for infrastructure and servers. Meaning, (again, assuming my 3 assumptions here are reasonable, and these numbers are not horrifically off), R5 is currently operating at a loss. Which is a trend that no business (or investor) can tolerate for very long.
In light of that, I'm largely playing it now, "while I can"...still holding out some hope that R5 and Firefall can attract a larger active (and paying!) player base, and become profitable before the plug is pulled.
But as for today...
The game's still here, and the greatest things about it are still the same: it's an MMO with a real shooter feel, with jumpjet combat.
Certainly, if there's another game competing for your attention, you might be better off focusing it there. But if not, you might as well enjoy Firefall while you can!
Holy shit! Steven Na just deleted his linked in profile that was in that thread! This is gone: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenna
I was going to link it here because he claimed on his profile that he brought in 1 million new customers to Firefall since he started. Pretty bold claim for a game that took 4 years to reach 1.5M registered forum members and he's only been there a little over a year AFTER that.
Plus, Steam numbers peaked at what, 20k concurrent at launch before declining rapidly? I'm told by ex-Red 5'ers that they had an equal number of non-Steam logins and the ratio was nearly 50/50. So even at 40k concurrent users, there is NO WAY this Steven Na marketing guy is telling the truth about single-highhandedly bringing in 1,000,000 new Firefall players.
He deleted his Linked In page and took his "trojan horse spying FB" page down. Sounds like he's running! Wish someone had archived it. His claims on his linked in page were hilariously overblown.
I don't think it will be as heavy on the microtransactions after the BF2 debacle, but I suspect the extreme backlash against EA will certainly make its sales suffer.
One one hand, screw EA. They consistently show how little they care for the players and their staff. I have no desire to support them either.
One the other hand, Anthem is developed by Bioware, and I hate to see Bioware suffer due to EA's greed.
https://kotaku.com/bioware-doubles-down-on-anthem-as-pressure-mounts-1822380989
If this article is correct EA is pushing for an early 2019 release regardless of whether the game is ready. This creates enormous pressure on Bioware to deathmarth their devs to complete the game. It sucks for Bioware, and it sucks for the players that want to support them.
did a bit of diggin-and found this:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mscottburgess
Ive been very pleased with the current ingame missions and chapter story-hoping more develops in the coming months!
It's not 40% but 40 people that have been laid off actually, so that's more like 20/25% according to one of the former employees.
Not sure if anyone cares, but the price is now up to €9.99 which is a lot more than normal. I was going to buy it when it was at $6.99 but I wasn't quick enough. I instead bought it from https://www.g2a.com/firefall-amd-operator-bundle-cd-key-global.html which was about ~$12 which may or may not be cheaper for you but the option is there.