Crimson Desert proved everyone wrong..

Like Crimson Desert is the latest victim of not adhering to Western social standards. It's happened. I think it's happening again.

I have spent the last two weeks experiencing a crazy amount of whiplash. I went from not paying attention to negative journalist reviews for Crimson Desert to getting a little concerned when initial player reviews started sounding eerily similar to watching the Pearl Abyss stock drop 30% to then finally buying the game myself and having an absolute blast with it. But on the exact same day Crimson Desert launched, Fortnite dropped a new season and then a week later Epic fired a thousand people. Now I have witnessed two stories about ambition and gaming this week, both with

very different outcomes. And I think the difference comes down to two big things that we always talk about. Who are you actually building your game for? And when those people show up and tell you what they think, are you even listening? Before we get into all that, also one of the really good

things about it is that they made Crimson Desert for a specific player base and it sure seems like those players showed up. The game is getting like still 200,000 players. That is an insane amount by the way. That's a ridiculous amount of players for a single player game, especially more than

a week after release. less than a year, but don't worry. Sony is merciful to us poppers. If you cannot justify dropping that amount of money on a console, you can always just rent a PlayStation via a monthly subscription service if you live in the UK.

Wait, you're leasing, wait, you can lease a PlayStation?

Oh my God.

So we went from being able to buy consoles and order food to leasing consoles and then buying DoorDash Chipotle with Klarna, like, pay as you go. I'm so— like, there's something that's really wrong right now. Something is very, very wrong.

Live in the UK. It is still so early in the year. And already there have been so many layoffs. Crystal Dynamics just had their fourth round in 12 months. Battlefield Studios cut staff after their big launch last year.

Ubisoft gutted Red Storm Entertainment. Riot let 80 people go. And Sony shut down Bluepoint, which I personally will never forgive them for because the Shadow of the Colossus remake a masterpiece. And speaking of layoffs, let's go ahead and talk about the big one. We found out days ago that Epic Games was letting go of 1000 people after already letting go of 16%

of their workforce back in 2023. Their statement said Fortnite engagement has been declining since last year and that they are spending significantly more than they're making. And of course, even with a decline in players, Fortnite is obviously still one of the biggest games ever made and played, but Epic's response to all of this has been very interesting. Just earlier this month, they raised V-Bucks prices and told players that they needed to help pay the bills.

Well, apparently the kids didn't pay the bills. So now you got to fire everybody. Yep. Sammy that worked at the engineering department got fired because little Billy wouldn't spend his mom's credit card.

It's just what happens.

At least you broccoli top put down the Celsius and go help Epic pay their rent.

Yeah.

And then a week later, they cut a thousand people. Now, the gaming industry, and sadly, all of us, are unfortunately no stranger to tone deaf statements from executives. And with Tim Sweeney already on the leaderboard for this, he vied once again for the top spot

as he tried to smooth things over by making a statement on X saying,

nah, don't. I think Tim Sweeney is just too honest. He actually just tells people what happened. And that's scary. He just tells me, he's like, yeah, we weren't making a lot of money. So we fired people.

Think about it as people losing their jobs. Now employers will see a stream of resumes of once in a lifetime quality folks. I, wow, I think that easily bumps Ubisoft. Get used to not owning your own games on the leaderboard. I don't know though, Tim, could it be that instead of your overflowing charity

for the market, Epic may be overhired, put way too much focus on everything other than core Fortnite, like internal HR initiatives, massive content partnerships, spending a billion dollars fighting Apple, and publicly backing lawsuits with Valve. And then your first instinct is to get on social media and

act like you just did everyone a huge favor. Meanwhile, Gabe Newell continues.

I think it's also like, I mean, one thing that the reason why I'm never surprised when these companies do layoffs is the amount of my workday videos between the years of 2020 and 2024 of these women that would go to work and they wouldn't do anything. They would just have meetings with each other talking about not doing anything. And like, I saw so many of these and I was like, there's no way you can run a company with that many fake jobs. And

then I think again, I've said it before, I'll say it again. I think it was it was Elon firing all those people whenever he took over Twitter, and the product not really changing that that was a light bulb inside of the head of every single other tech company. And they said, You know what, let's do that.

Used to just do nothing. And with this layoff, though, they are also shutting down the three different Fortnite modes and for what it's worth, I actually was kind of surprised because their statement that they put out was fairly honest. They said they failed to build something awesome enough

to attract and retain a large player base. And all of this, I just kept wondering, how did Fortnite get here? There was a time when it seemed like-

Because they over expanded and they spread themselves too thin and their player base, like the thing is that people that play Fortnite are usually kids and younger people. And I think Fortnite tries to do what Roblox does,

but because Fortnite is too tied to a specific type of gameplay, it's harder for them to have the same type of Roblox level customization and competency in playing the game is much more tied to Fortnite than it is with Roblox, which makes it exclusionary to people that are, you know, like six years old. And I think you put all those things together and you have all these different modes, there is a market saturation point for everything.

There's a market saturation point for Coca-Cola. There's a market saturation point for Halo. There's a market saturation point for Lord of the Rings where people at a certain point, everybody that's going to see it has seen it. That's just the way it is.

Everyone and their mother was playing this game, and it caused huge players in the industry to chase the live service model for years because of its massive success. Studios have been gutted. Games have been redesigned. Entire companies have pivoted to chase what Fortnite originally built.

And now even Fortnite themselves is having a difficult time. The thing that everyone was trying to emulate is now struggling itself, and it was not for lack of ambition. Epic had plenty of ambition, they have just been pointing it literally everywhere else except at the people that play their core game. So Fortnite shows us one side of the coin, but what does it look like when all of that

ambition actually has a target? Well that brings us to Crimson Desert. Originally, Crimson Desert started out as an MMO prequel to Black Desert Online, and somewhere during the 7 plus years of development, Pearl Abyss scrapped pretty much their entire direction for the game. No live service, no multiplayer, although that might be coming now to be determined.

I think they're probably going to do that. I think that'd be smart the thing that's crazy about Crimson Desert you know you don't really think about this a lot there is no fucking store in the game there's no you know 50 different cosmetic items I think there's a pre order set and that's it other than, you just simply buy the game and you play the game. Every cool badass set in the game, you just go get it.

Yet? Well, yeah, obviously yet. I mean, of course they might do something like that in the future, but it hasn't happened, so I'm talking about the way it is. Yeah, right now it's not the case and that's great.

super rich and enjoyable single player experience, and you can feel it when you play. Now I didn't get to start playing until the middle of launch weekend. And like I said, at the start, by the time I sat down, I'd already seen a lot of the discourse. Mixed reviews, controls complaints, people saying that it was too hard or too clunky. And outside of like the Paul Tassies at Forbes, I felt the critic reviews were being weirdly nitpicky. Even at this point, after the massive quality of life patches, some journalists just seem

committed to hating this game. After getting some-

Yeah, and they always will. They will always find a way to complain about Eastern games that don't adhere to Western sensibilities, which are the exact opposite of sensible. That's what I think really happened. And I think the same thing happened with Wu Kong. The same thing happened with Wu Chang.

The same thing happened with Stellar Blade. The same thing happened with, IChang, the same thing happened with, uh, Stellar Blade, the same thing happened with, I think, games like Wuthering Waves. Like, many, many of these games, it is the same paradigm. Kazan, yeah, I don't know if there's another one, but Where Wins Me? Yes, Where Wins Me is a great example. Every single one of these games gets overly criticized by these people because these games don't adhere to the ideology that these people want them to have.

There's no universe where Marathon's a 9 and Crimson Desert is a 6. It just doesn't exist. Even on release, that wasn't true. It's just so blatantly dishonest that you can't even- I don't even know what to say.

I've been spending time in myself and sitting at around 30 hours now. Were some of the initial complaints valid?

Yeah.

A little bit, yeah.

Oh, it sucked. It was awful. There is a real learning curve. The controls are not always the smoothest. Although I do think that argument has been blown out of proportion just a little bit. But I've noticed that Cliff doesn't always grab a ledge when he should. I had a whole lantern quest that fought me for 20 minutes straight because I did not realize that my weapon had to be sheathed in order to pull it out properly. And I am not a puzzle girl, alright? So some of the harder ones have made me feel pretty dumb, and I have accepted my skill issue. But even with all of that, I am still having a blast. If you only listened to the discourse at launch, you would genuinely think that this was some

type of cyberpunk all over again, like this game was utterly unplayable, and that was just not the case. Now, this is not a game for everyone, but for people who do enjoy this type of thing, it is incredibly fun. Combat, climbing, puzzles, taming animals, wrestling, crafting, companions, a genuinely massive open world full of fun things to do and everything is all working together to make the game as

fun as possible. And that right there is the game.

What they need to do next is they have to add in early game and mid game field bosses and mid tier bosses and NPCs that roam around in the open world. Like, whenever you start, you need to see a dragon flying around. Whenever you start, you need to see a version of the Tree Sentinel. Whenever you start, like, cause that's the big problem, is you have a handful of these in late, late, late game, right? And I'm experiencing them now because I'm playing them. But early on, you don't have those things for you to go up against

and think that you own the world, and you hit it, and you don't do any damage, and then it one-shots you. Like, that's the type of stuff that creates a scope for the game. And I think that they also need to have things that are in between like the super hard bosses and like the random mobs that you're killing like kind of like a black desert you have things like the ogres for example and those are pretty hard to kill that you kill for the ogre ring and you need to have

more monsters like that inside of crimson desert we don't really have a lot of that and like those mid-tier yeah basically elites are bro. Not really like not really dude. Not really at all. Like there's like three of them that are like the generals that you fight and like a few quest lines and that's

it.

There is the difference. While Epic was scattering fortnight across numerous different games and directions, Pearl Abyss was pouring everything into making one specific thing as good as it could possibly be. And you can tell because it pops up in all of the little stuff. The background NPCs in this game have genuinely made me laugh out loud. From cussing at me and calling me the c-word when I accidentally bumped them over to an old woman randomly hitting on me in the city streets, the music of the game I used to Irish dance as a kid

and that one merchant theme makes me yearn for the jig. That stuff is in there because somebody at Pearl Abyss thought it was funny or cool or beautiful and it just put it in because that is what happens when you know your audience and you want to make something.

Or you care about the audience. There's another factor too.

And at $70, it is understandable people are going to be less patient with any type of launch jank so even if I personally was not as bothered by some of it, it makes sense that Crimson Desert's initial quirks pushed away certain people. But for the people who decided to stick with it, this is a game built for them and Pearl Abyss proved that almost immediately. Within 4 days of launch, Pearl Abyss had their first big patch live with tutorial improvements,

keyboard and mouse changes, camp storage, boss nerfs, health item buffs, and then 10 days later after launch, a huge patch.

5 new mounts, faster load times I guess last night, maybe the day before, I don't know when, but they did another patch where they increased the amount of storage that you have in the game. So they have just continuously, time after time, listened to what players want and then made accommodations accordingly. I think that's been amazing. I'm not used to Pearl Abyss taking a W like this. Yeah, it's been really good.

Lighting stamina, thank you. Plus 100, it's been really good. Lighting stamina plus 100. It's more than a thousand bulk storage. They even added a prompt for using keys to unlock doors, which was something I personally was very excited about. Yeah, two major patches in 10 days. They are moving wickedly fast.

And yes, it would have been nice if all of this was just there at launch.

And I am glad that people have spoken up, but I think that it really goes to show how important it is to do play testing and to have good, uh, good QA because if you could have made all of these changes in less than two weeks after release, the odds are your game would have been better off that if you had just released it two weeks later with the changes. That's the truth. And you would have missed so many negative reviews. So you basically took a bunch of completely unnecessary L's.

And this is the way that I feel about it. Completely deserved. When you release an incomplete or a problematic product, you absolutely deserve to get shit on in the reviews because these are people that now effectively have to beta test because you didn't do good enough QA.

So again, I'm happy that they made the changes, but at the same time, I think that this really should go to show that a culture of what I think what happened with Crimson Desert, which is toxic positivity, that suppressed any degree of people, you know, providing feedback for, hey, this should be changed, this shouldn't happen this way. It apparently didn't happen. And when it's being released to players and people don't like it, and they're the ones

that have the internal data for like when players quit the game, when players stop doing certain things. And when they see that so many people just get to a certain point in the game and they quit because of how frustrating it is or how annoying it is, then that's not good for you as a developer to have that happen, especially when it's happening because the game is not working the way that the player thinks it should be.

Like it's one thing to quit the game whenever you get to a really hard boss. Well, that's one thing to quit the game whenever you get to a really hard boss, well that's what happens. But if it's a function of the game, or playability of the game, that definitely shouldn't happen.

It feels really good to be heard, you know? Like I genuinely feel like I am a paying customer again. I bought a game, told them what was frustrating, and they fixed it. Flying Boss pissed me off, it was terrible. and they fixed it in days, not months, not years. And that is sadly not something that should feel like an anomaly. But after years of notably Western AAA, studios treating player feedback like an Avengers level threat

instead of just useful and helpful information. It kind of it's that used to be the norm that used to just be how this worked. Either the game released polished to a T or the developers were ready and waiting to accept and act on the player's responses. And the fact that this feels so rare now says way more about the industry than it does about Pearl Abyss.

Well, I think it's also that like a lot of developers, and this is like a weird thing that I think is kind of manifested over the years, is that developers almost feel like they're working against the players. Like it's the developers versus the players. That's the way it felt like with World of Warcraft for a really long time. And I thought it was super weird and I didn't understand it.

And now it's not that much like that. It's just that they're all in agreeance of being retarded together and doing what they're doing with WoW. But what the big problem is now is that, like, I'll give you a great example of a Western developer that made a great decision. So in Path of Exile 1, there was a problem with people piano-ing their flask, which means that you have five flasks in PoE 1, and everybody would just hit all five of the flasks all the time, constantly, all at the same time.

So this was technically against the rules because you'd be doing it with a macro, but what the people in grinding your games, this is the way the people that made Path of Exile, what they did instead of just deciding, ah well you know what we're going to just ban people for cheating, what they did is they added a function that makes the flasks activate automatically. So now, instead of having to worry about, you know, oh well, you know, like players are cheating, why don't we implement, if everybody's doing this, maybe the gameplay that we have

planned out for people isn't very good gameplay. And I think that's the main question that developers need to ask themselves. It's not that does this make the game harder, it's not that does this make the game harder? It's more that does this make the game fun? And I think that oftentimes you have developers and players, too, that fall into the trap of trying to make the game harder

through introducing mechanics, functionality and gameplay loops that aren't enjoyable. And I think that whenever you have a really good game, that's also very challenging, like Elven Ring, Claire Obscure on the hardest difficulty, and you know, like many other examples, Dark Souls and anything else, like Legend of Zelda back in the day used to be

pretty hard, is that you didn't force players into gameplay loops that were not enjoyable. I think that too many developers now have this mindset that you have to eat the shit to get to the cake.

Fuck that.

I just want to eat the cake. There should not be a level of annoying, repetitive, unfun game design that I have to trudge through in order to actually enjoy the game. There's no reason for that. It's unnecessary. And I think that we're starting to see developers be able to move away from that now, which

is great. You should not have to ever eat shit.

We paid for this game, we showed up, and Pearl Abyss is treating us like that actually means something and is important. Like we are people who bought their game and deserve to have a good experience, but not a problem to manage or a community to pacify or just a revenue stream to optimize just their costumers.

And here's another thing too that Pearl Abyss is thinking, they're gonna make DLC for this game. They're gonna make an expansion probably for this game. And if they want people to buy that expansion and they want people to buy that DLC, it had better fucking be good.

And the thing is that, look at Capcom and the way that they provided after launch support for Monster Hunter World. When I played Monster Hunter World, I had such an insanely good fucking experience, like I still think back on how fun it was. And the reason why is I was stepping into a game that was a

Pseudo live service game, but it had had at that point years of support updates and improvements Same thing with cyberpunk as well. And if you go and play monster under wilds now, it's a lot better as well It's me harfman concern IQ is lower than the average daycare scammer. Oh yeah.

Lower than 68.

Who they want to make happy. And the reason that they could move that fast is actually the whole point.

No man's sky too.

They were laser focused on their game and their audience, so when players showed up with feedback, there was nothing else competing for that attention. And instead of getting defensive about it, blaming their audience, flashing out over the critical reviews, they just listened. They went down the list of complaints and started fixing things and actually thanked people for the feedback.

You're welcome. You're welcome. Uh, they've just done everything I wanted. They did everything I wanted them to do. Yeah. I mean, and for you guys that are still playing the game,

still playing through it, also, you're welcome. I'm glad to have made it better and improved it for you guys. You know, it's... Really, it's just what I do. It's just what I do.

Instead of getting weird about it, most studios would have put out some type of big roadmap and asked everyone to just be patient. Perlibus just did the thing. So where does this leave them? Three million copies sold in five days.

Wow.

Steam reviews going from mixed rating on launch night. Very positive. And Sunday morning, a week and a half after launch, Crimson Desert just hit two hundred and seventy six thousand concurrent players on Steam. A new all time peak. Most single player games start to lose their concurrent players

in the first week, Crimson Desert.

Looking at both studios, Epic and Pearl Abyss, it is clear that both of them have ambition. But everything Pearl Abyss has done is to make their game more enjoyable for the people playing it. And everything Epic has been doing

for the past few years or more is to, I'm honestly not even sure.

Epic's growth strategy for Fortnite was informed by people that are retarded. They were informed by focus groups, by consultancy firms, and by people that don't really have an intrinsic understanding about Fortnite and why people play Fortnite.

That's the big problem they have. And I can tell in a lot of these cases where which groups of these people, instead of actually listening to their players, listen to a consultancy firm, a focus group, or some sort of thing that is not actually your player base. Karen jobs. Yeah, basically you listen to the Karens instead of listening to the players.

They were informed by Yes Men who glazed them with nothing critical. Well, also another thing is that like, for example, doing a lot of, like for example, like the Simpsons or the Star Wars collab that happened with Fortnite the odds are that the people that they have that they pay to analyze their product were not able to accurately understand why those products were so good and so then they port it over and they have the rock in there and they think that they're going to have the same experience. But it's really emergent player behavior and how the design encourages that that really

makes these products very good. But because they don't have people that have that level of insight, they get misled into thinking that more brand deals, more partnerships, more collabs are the solution. But that's actually not the solution. The solution is creating content like that that allows players to have their own experience while simultaneously enjoying things that they previously

experienced themselves. Remember the Kamala Harris city on Fortnite? The signs were there.

The bottom line is that Paralibus is focused on us, the players. They filled their game with passion, love, and so much charm and all kinds of weird, funny details that are only in there because somebody at the studio cared and thought it would make for a more fun and enjoyable experience. Not increase their brand presence or optimize revenue streams. That's the huge difference. enjoyable experience, not increase their brand presence or optimize revenue streams.

That's the huge difference. And what is funny is that it's not like Crimson Desert even launched broken or technically unfinished. We have seen what actual broken launches and promises broken look like. No Man's Sky, Final Fantasy 14, Cyberpunk, and those studios earned their second chances because they listened to their players.

And it took them a long time too. And think about how much harder it was for each of these development teams because they fucked up the first time. That's the cost of fucking up. And I never feel bad for developers for this, by the way, I never do. Because people gave you $70 they gave you $50 and you

fucked up that's what you get hopefully you can fix it but until you do you

fucked up.

It didn't launch in a broken state they didn't lie about what the game included. In my opinion it was a good game that launched with some rough edges and and instead of shaking their fists at players and accepting critics' reviews, they just started making improvements because their players told them what they wanted and they were smart enough to actually listen. Now, I've said this before, but do you like the game you're making? And do you like who you're making it for?

Because when you like your audience, they are not your enemy, and listening to them isn't a chore. The right thing to do usually is pretty obvious. Ambition is cheap. Any studio can have ambition, but ambition only means something when you aim it at the correct target, the people who will actually show up for you.

Pearl Abyss had a stupid amount of ambition and a very clear picture of exactly who it was all for, quirks and all. And that's why three million people bought it and that's why the reviews flipped and it's also that

like I mean the game like for me would I recommend Crimson Desert? Absolutely. I think it's one of the best games that's been released this year. If somebody tells me that Crimson Desert is their game of the year, I totally understand why they say that. I think that Resident Evil is going to win, but I will compare something. And I don't think this is a good comparison, but I think that it is worth mentioning.

Where is it? Where the fuck did it go?

Where's Steam?

There it is. So if I look at Crimson Desert, I have not beaten the game, and some of this is AFK. So let's say I've spent 200 hours playing the game. I've left it on overnight a couple of times. So 200 hours playing this game, okay? And then Resident Evil, where is it?

14 hours. That's a really big difference. Now I think that the 14 hours that I played Resident Evil were probably better than the best 14 hours that I played Crimson Desert, but 200 hours is a lot more than 14. It is. So I mean again, like I and I and and it's a matter of priorities. It's a matter of values and it's a matter of preference.

I might finish Crimson Desert and decide that it's my game of the year. I might. I'm not sure. It's possible.

A 30% stock crash turned into recovery in under two weeks. And if you're Epic, if you are the company that built Fortnite, a game that genuinely changed the industry, and you can't even remember who you built it for, that is not a layoffs or a V-Bucks problem, it is a who is this even for anymore problem, and sadly, your audience figured that out long before you did. If you made it to the end of this video, thank you so much for watching.

I would love to know your thoughts on everything. Are you playing Crimson Desert? If so, what do you think? And Pearl Abyss, if you are somehow listening, well, apparently you might be because you've literally just added the key prompt I was about to ask you for. Please allow me to skip NPC dialogue and cutscenes and my life is yours. Thanks again for being here and I'll see you in the next one.

What they need to do is they need to add like ogres and shit like mini bosses that are out in the world like fucking the tree sentinel and shit like at the very beginning like there needs to be a guy that's like on a horse he's got a polearm and he's patrolling around outside of Hernand and he's really hard to kill That's the shit that they need to put in the game now They've got to add in many bosses that you can farm for higher tier items or maybe like better

Accessories, that's what they need to do through the game, right? And that's the next step they won't They've done everything else I wanted. They did everything else I wanted, they're gonna do this too. Just wait. Just wait. They did everything else I wanted, they're gonna do this too. Just wait. Just wait. They're gonna do it too.