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's 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. that. Let's catch up on a few things. Sony just announced that the PS5 is going up by another $100, meaning the PS5 Pro is now $900. Their second is this the first time that a console has gone up this much in cost? I've never even seen this happen. I don't remember this ever happening in the past. Price hike in 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 Door Dash Chipotle with CLA like pay as you go. I'm like this. 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 months. Battlefield Studios cut staff after their big launch last year. Ubisoft gutted Redtorm Entertainment. Riot let 80 people go. And Sony shut down Bluepoint which I personally will never forgive them for because the shadow of the remake was a master. 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 1,000 people after already letting go of 16% of their workforce back in 2023. This is only going to get worse. By the way, 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 at the engineering department got fired because little Billy wouldn't spend his mom's credit card. Broccoli top, put down the Celsius, and go help Epic pay the rent. And then a week later they cut a thousand people. Now the gaming industry and sadly all of us are unfortunately no stranger to tonedeaf statements from executives. And with Tim Sweeney already on the leaderboard for this vi once again for the top spot as he tried to smooth things over by making a statement on X saying I think Tim Sweeney is just too honest. He actually just tells people what happened and 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 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 New 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 live out, do nothing, and win. With this layoff though, they are also shutting down 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. People didn't play it. And with all of this, I just kept wondering, how did Fortnite get here? There was a time when it seemed like cuz they overexpanded 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 6 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 um you know 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 a 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 seven plus years of development, Pearlis scrapped pretty much their entire direction for the game. No live service, no multiplayer, although that might be coming now to be determined. Just I think they're probably going to do that. I think that would be smart. The thing that's crazy about Crimson Desert, you know, you don't really think about this a lot. There is no [ __ ] 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 that, 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 Yeah. Right now, it's not the case, and that's great. Well, single player game with all of their ambitious ideas pointed at one thing, a 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. Uh that's what I think really happened. And I think the same thing happened with Wukong. The same thing happened with Wu Chang. The same thing happened with uh Stellar Blade. The same thing happened with I think games like Weathering Waves. Like many many of these games it is the same paradigm. Kazison. 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 they these people want them to have. There's no universe where Marathon's a nine and Crimson Desert is a six. That 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. Time in myself and sitting at around 30 hours now. Were some of the initial complaints valid? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, 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. Yeah. And I am not a puzzle girl. All right. 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 listen 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, what they need to do next is they have to add in early game and midgame field bosses and uh midtier bosses and uh NPCs that roam around in the open world. Like whenever you uh 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 cuz that's the big problem is you have a handful of these in late late late late game, right? And I'm experiencing them now cuz 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-shotss 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 uh random mobs that you're killing like uh kind of like in 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 there 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 in like a few quest lines and that's it. Is the difference. While Epic was scattering Fortnite across numerous different games and directions, Pearlis 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 seaw word when I accidentally bumped them over to an old woman randomly hitting on me in the city streets. I didn't have that 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 Pearlus thought it was funny or cool or beautiful and just put it in because that is what happens when you know your audience and you want to make when you care about the audience's factors. 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, how it is. 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 life with tutorial improvements, keyboard and mouse changes, camp storage, boss nerfs, health item buffs, and then 10 days later after launch, a huge patch. Five new mounts, faster load times, a sprint toggle, reduced. And today, by the way, this video was from yesterday. today and 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 listen 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, plus instant crafting, bulk storage. They even added a prompt for using keys to unlock doors, which was something I personally was very excited about. 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 you would have missed so many negative reviews. So you 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 a problematic product, you absolutely deserve to get [ __ ] 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, like 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 would happen 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. Um, it apparently didn't happen. And when it's being released to players and people don't like it, and they are 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 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 pissed me off. It was terrible 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 is that used to be the norm. That used to just be how this worked. Either the game released polished to a tea or the developers were ready and waiting to accept and act on the players responses. And the fact that this feels so rare now says way more about the industry than it does about Pearlis. Well, I think it's also that like a lot of developers, and this is like a weird thing that I think has 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 [ __ ] 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 pianoing their flask, which means that you have five flasks in PoE1, 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, these are, 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 more that does this make the game fun. And I think that oftent times 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 Elden Ring, player obscure on the hardest difficulty and you know like many other examples, Dark Souls and anything else like Legend of Zelda uh 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 to you have to eat the [ __ ] to get to the cake. [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] Paid for this game. We showed up. And Pearlus 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. We're not a problem to manage or a community to pacify or just a revenue stream to optimize just their customer. And here's another thing too that Pearl Abyss is thinking. They're going to make DLC for this game. They're going to 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 look play Monster Under Wilds now, it's a lot better as well. It's going to be hard for them considering their IQ is lower than the average daycare scammer. Oh yeah, they want coffee. And the reason that they could move that fast is actually the whole point. 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, lashing 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 they did everything I wanted them to do. Yeah. I mean, and 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 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 road map and asked everyone to just be patient. Prus just did the thing. So, where does this leave them? 3 million copies sold in 5 days. Steam reviews going from mixed rating on launch night to very positive. And Sunday morning, a week and a half after launch, Crimson Desert just hit 276,000 concurrent players on Steam. A new alltime peak, most single player games start to lose their concurrent players in the first week. Crimson Desert is gaining them. Good games gain players leading up to the weekend after the week that they were released on. Insanely good games sometimes have a second weekend that they get even more popular in. A couple of examples of this are uh Arc Raiders, Marvel Rivals, and now Crimson Crimson Desert. Looking at both studios, Epic and Pearlis, it is clear that both of them have ambition. Everything has done is to make their game more 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 Epic's growth strategy for Fortnite was informed by people that are [ __ ] 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 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 yesmen who glazed them with nothing critical. Well, also another thing is that like for example doing a lot of like for example like the 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've previously experienced themselves. Remember the Camala Harris city on Fortnite? The signs were there. The bottom line is that Pearlus 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. 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 [ __ ] up the first time. That's the cost of [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] up. That's what you get. Hopefully you can fix it, but until you do, you [ __ ] up. This didn't launch in a broken state. They didn't lie about gay. In my opinion, it was a good game launched with some rough edges. And instead of shaking their fist 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. Pearlis 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 3 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. Uh where is it? Where the [ __ ] 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 I and and it's a matter of of priorities. It's a matter of values, and it's a matter of preference. I 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, Resident Evil, 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 cut scenes, 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 [ __ ] like mini bosses that are out in the world like [ __ ] the tree sentinel and [ __ ] like at the very beginning. Like there needs to be a guy that's like on a horse, he's got a pole arm and he's patrolling around outside of Hernand and he's really hard to kill. That's the [ __ ] that they need to put in the game now. They've got to add in mini bosses that you can farm for higher tier items or maybe like better accessories. That's what they need to do to the game, right? And that's the next step. They won't. They've done everything else I wanted. They've did everything else I wanted. They're going to do this, too. Just wait. Just wait. They're going to do it, too.