22cans not hiding where they are headed: Godus Wars Mobile

Some of the GUI in Godus Wars feels mobile-oriented, but that might be because 22Cans doesn't know any better. It doesn't feel like it's optimised to use with a mouse.

I am sure it will end up on mobile sooner or later.

They have a fairly captive mobile market. I seems fairly obvious that they want to reuse the art as much as possible and also changing styles now means extra design costs. Don't forget that peter has outsourced a number of his designers now. Any new art styles are going to cost them most than just saying "give us more in the same style as last time".

Also money. Milking mobile more is obviously what's going to happen withe china market. I've just suprised they stopped updating generic godus so much since they got the china deal going.

All I can say is I don't manage my studio like this in Game Dev Tycoon! You make sure a product is finished and release as many sequals as you can!

I have a feeling it may have gone horribly wrong. Otherwise there would be much, much, much more progress going on with the mobile app.

Mandarin or Cantonese? I'm assuming the Godus China release is Mandarin, since that's a larger population.

I think if they wanted to release Wars on mobile, they'd have started on that platform. After the first release of Godus on Steam it's pretty risky for them to release anything on Steam now, who's user-base is ready to tear them a new one. And I think Wars's lack of players and review ratings shows that. It's almost financially suicidal to try Wars on PC. Makes me wonder why they tried at all.

Come to think of it, Godus already uses up most of the available memory on mobile devices. They probably couldn't add Wars to mobile if they wanted to.

Mandarin.

After the first release of Godus on Steam it was simply 22cans showing their arses to VALVe and their customers by chucking Godus again through the Eternally Alpha program; after that point everything else seems like supporting evidence. There really is no other explanation for 22cans obviously trying to compete with Citadels as worst RTS on Steam, as everyone who has reviewed the damn thing has come to the same conclusions.

Since 22cans only really cares about mobile, then it would make sense to have a better impression for the audience 22cans expects to continually hand over money to them. Considering that there are STILL problems for Godus on mobile that annoys the hell out of their users (iOS especially), then it would make sense to put Godus Wars through a public playtesting phase before the real moneymaker. The whole controversy about PC microtransaction in a game they already paid for wouldn't really register with the mobile crowd, who are often used to paying more for a game after they've already bought it - mobile would just be receiving something "new"; if it were F2P they wouldn't generally care in what state it arrived aside from crashing as the audience's standards in general have been sufficiently crushed under an entire marketload of crap.

If 22cans were intentionally looking for bad PR, because they don't intend to take one platform seriously while using the controversy as publicity, then can you think of a better what to acquire that and still look halfway legitimate to further abuse the EA program for free/paying testing?

22cans aren't being stupid about this, just evil, using the "It's shit!" marketing scheme - relying on those warning the industry about bad products/business practices for a bit of advertising. If Citadels and Godus Wars weren't so bad then the titles would have just existed as one of the multitude of mediocre people wouldn't have noticed.

All that is left is for the meltdown Uwe Boll style when the house of cards (with stickers) collapses:
www.salon.com/2015/06/09/kickstarters_greatest_triumph_making_uwe_boll_the_worlds_worst_director_disappear/



Because PC simply doesn't matter to 22cans and never has - they've all been about chasing money, Fabs' blog post illustrated that along with Konrad's honesty that got him in trouble with Peter because the press exposed the dishonesty behind the company. They pointed out how Godus wasn't really intended to be anything but bait for mobile microtransactions - the big moneymaker that PM was so enamored with in dev speeches but somehow the company's financials don't reflect this.

Anyways, financial suicide was long ago attempted for when 22cans had folks there drawing salary who appeared to have little to no use to the studio* while the studio churns out sub-par efforts for even a studio a fraction of the size. From what I've seen it looks like they might have about a year or so at best left to the company, so are trying for a Christmas Godus Wars release for mobile.

"Godus Wars - now with more gameplay and less asinine pay-to-wait design than Godus!"

* - Mostly in Production - why has Godus/Godus Wars needed TWO Producers when it looks like they didn't have any at all? Also, will The Trail ever be finished before the company faces insolvency, which in itself represents a significant chunk of studio manpower over the last year?



That reason is probably why the combat maps are so small and simple, along with the AI that appears to not be remotely threatening in any way.

Presumably the same people who were paying 22cans to hide the development on Godus Wars for about the last year while the rest of the studio worked on The Trail.



Who were strung along about the whole "update coming to Godus" that turned out to be something 22cans can't even clearly identify as a sequel or spin-off or a completely different game; the story changes depending upon who from 22cans you ask.

Free testing base while using those who might see what their friends are doing might be lured into buying the game, as per the social media aspect of Steam.



Again:

With mobile as the "moneymaker" then Steam Early Access was used as a paying testing ground to refine Godus for the real market.

That was what 22cans did already with Godus and reaching "2.0" (somehow without having first reached an actual release candidate).

So how is a repeat of what happened before that much of a surprise?