The corporate ding-dongs don't seem to understand (Gaming)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Friday, March 13, 2026, 11:02 (1 day, 5 hours, 28 min. ago) @ Cody Miller

You can't force fun, or community or engagement.

You don't just build Halo 2 and a rabid player base. It just happens. It's a lightning strike. It happens organically.

Make your game fun first. Keep the price reasonable. People will play, they'll get their friends to play. That's the best you can do.

I wish Marathon the best of luck, because that is what it mostly comes down to.

This statement makes me think about Helldivers. The first game was extremely fun, it was free for all PS+ subscribers, and it came out on PS3, PS4, and Vita simultaneously... And it was still a niche game. A commited playerbase sure, but even now, you don't hear too much chatter about it online.

Then Helldivers 2 launched at $40, and was so popular that successfully getting into a server was a whole thing for nearly a month, and people happily stood in the digital rain for hours to get in. What changed?

It may really just come down to luck and timing.

RIP Titanfall 2.

This must be a nightmare for people making games. When it takes over 6 years to make a game like Marathon, it seems like the 'timing' aspect becomes impossible since you have no idea at all how things will change in that amount of time.

Especially in the last four years, with GTA6 Looming like Melancholia in the sky, there's been immense pressure to release stuff before it consumes the marketplace entire.
Might be why so much Early Access Friendslop has poured out nonstop.

Like, the early 90s and the late 90s almost feel like totally different decades. That's the future you release a game into unless you can make it quickly.

There's something to be said about that old three-year dev cycle putting out banger after banger only two console generations ago. I think about Gears 3, Halo Reach, Dead Space 2. Games with so much more to offer than the one that came right before them... And now we get unfinished games that have been cooking for what used to be a console's entire lifespan.

But man… there were some bad choices here let's be honest. Having your story be told with ARG puzzles and talking heads between PvP matches is just so conceptually bad.

The first Titanfall should have been a huge red flag for devs. Players don't care about radio dramas being your only narrative in shooters, and they especially don't work for the target audience of extraction shooters, because they're trying to listen for footsteps at all times, and looting as quickly as possible (reading walls of text in an extraction shooter? lol). Save The World in Fortnite does the "Narrative between matches" thing, but I think it being a comedy with a focused narrative helps it go a long way in encouraging players to not just jump into the next match right away; There is actually something to head towards on the horizon.

Respawn applied the radio-drama lesson immediately in Titanfall 2 (again, RIP), and the campaign is one of the most praised FPS campaigns ever, and it was so good that it haunts Apex Legends to this day. Meanwhile, the multiplayer is so locked-in at all times, I can't imagine heads popping in on the corner with people narrating how much of an important adventure they are having.

RIP Titanfall 2.