Can we talk about NRS' "support"?

[xWildx]

They actually salvaged it. The current trilogy is vastly superior to the 3D era of games, and are the best entries in the franchise since the original trilogy, despite their flaws.

I would argue that they salvaged the franchise in the MK9/INJ1 era, but as time has progressed, you can literally see the corporate greed seeping into the franchise.

At this point I’d prefer to see NRS become an independent studio or be purchased by another company.

 

[Immortal]

NRS will never become an independent studio, that's just a pipe dream. ATT may sell it for crazy money to another big corporation like lets say Microsoft who has unlimited money but that's about it.

 

[Pizza]

The 3D games were hot ass. Between MK3 and MK9 every MK game that came out that wasn't Shaolin Monks was a dumpster fire. I mean most were alright as video games, but absolutely laughable as competitive fighting games.

*Between MK4 and MK9

 

[John Grizzly]

Warner Bros really tainted this franchise.

I'm gonna go ahead and draw the line here. This is an absolutely shit opinion.

WB helped resurrect the series. We went from the incredible piece of steaming cat shit that was MK vs DC to MK9. This also allowed them to make MKX and both Injustice games. MK11 to me was a miss, but I'm confident NRS will learn from whatever mistakes were made for our current game.

This is one of the dumbest posts I've ever seen on this site and I've been here for many years.

 

[Juggs]

The difference is that both Tekken and SF have comitted communities that compete actively and maintain a decently sized online playerbase. You just gotta check the tournament entries for NRS games 1 year down the line. When no new game recently came out the turnout is pityful for a game that sells more copies than SF and Tekken together.

NRS games draw in people that play the game for a month, never go online and then are done with the game. The reason why the FGC doesn't flock to those games are the shallow fighting game mechanics and the janky visuals.
I dunno if that will ever change unless NRS hires game designers that actually care about making a good fighting game first and a good video game second.

And this is exactly what I mean by NRS games being a lot different and their business model being different than other fighters because of it. They get next to no benefit from patches and updates. Someone who is only going to come back for a couple of weeks for new DLC isn’t going to really care about the “state of the game”. All they care about is playing the new character for a little bit, then dropping the game until the next DLC.

I obviously could write a book about this, but I have talked about it a lot. But y’all should get the idea, more or less.

 

[Swindle]

Why are we ignoring the fact that covid had a big part in their games longevity. I could've sworn that alot of their graphic designers, computer engineers, etc left or dropped out.

Some of them are homeless on the streets of Chicago, trying to keep their phones from taking over their minds.

 

[Swindle]

NRS will never become an independent studio, that's just a pipe dream. ATT may sell it for crazy money to another big corporation like lets say Microsoft who has unlimited money but that's about it.

Microsoft doesn’t know what to do with the properties they already own.

 

[Immortal]

Microsoft doesn’t know what to do with the properties they already own.

Doesn't matter, they just want to starve the competition, not the first time in history; one of the perks when you sleep on unlimited money like they do.

 

[just_2swift]

I will pay 60 US dollars right now for NRS to add a patch to Injustice 2 that would fix hurt reactions aka consistently jailing highs after pokes like they did for MK11

And frame data display in training mode

 

[Liquid Swordsman]

I'm gonna go ahead and draw the line here. This is an absolutely shit opinion.

WB helped resurrect the series. We went from the incredible piece of steaming cat shit that was MK vs DC to MK9. This also allowed them to make MKX and both Injustice games. MK11 to me was a miss, but I'm confident NRS will learn from whatever mistakes were made for our current game.

This is one of the dumbest posts I've ever seen on this site and I've been here for many years.

Listen to what you just said.

"WB helped resurrect the series" "I'm confident NRS will learn from whatever mistakes"

NRS knowledge won't mean jack shit if Warner Bros continues to force their influence upon whatever decisions NRS makes involving the creation of the game.

Of course, I'm going off this based on what I hear from the community or some random employee posting a tweet about their product once a month. The communication with the fans has been shit in case you weren't aware of. Or were you too busy having your head up your ass those many years too?

Also, big companies/creators bringing a franchise back from despair usually doesn't up end doing well in the end anyways. If anything taught me that, it's the game of thrones finale and new star wars trilogy.

Of course I want nothing more for their next game to turn things around for the better, but the finishing touches of MK 11 along with Warner Bros handling of the product and their consumers left a bade taste in my mouth. My frustration makes my opinion reasonable and understandable, fucking moron.

 

[JGillette]

Thing is the pandemic is still not over and doesnt seem to be so for a long while at least. I dont intend to sound like an harbinger but I am afraid that this situation may impact the gaming industry in the long run and games in the future may have shorter lifespan in terms of content and updates than intended as a result

 

[Juxtapose]

Thing is the pandemic is still not over and doesnt seem to be so for a long while at least. I dont intend to sound like an harbinger but I am afraid that this situation may impact the gaming industry in the long run and games in the future may have shorter lifespan in terms of content and updates than intended as a result

Even when the pandemic does end, there are economic repercussions that we'll be paying for a long time to come.

 

[Kiss the Missile]

My issue has nothing to do with support in terms of dlc. I feel like the devs ignored community complaints about the game in general. Between meter, breakaway, fatal blow, variety, combos etc. You don't need to fly out voice actors to fix that shit. NRS in the past made drastic changes to MKX for the better, but MK11's meta from the beta is the exact same as it is now. Stagger, throw, stagger, throw repeat

 

[spidey300]

I would gladly trade in that story dlc for more frequent patches.

 

[NaughtySenpai]

This chart is hella funny:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kappa/comments/oh1kff
"Much longer" support from NRS

 

[Juxtapose]

This chart is hella funny:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Kappa/comments/oh1kff
"Much longer" support from NRS

This is the chart Max talks about in his video.

 

[NaughtySenpai]

Not a Max fan tbh. Only thing I like about him is Benny.

I like how all these "poverty" games from ArcSys manage to get support for years, yet make a fraction of the money MK brings in.

 

[molambo]

I like how all these "poverty" games from ArcSys manage to get support for years, yet make a fraction of the money MK brings in.

because its cheaper and more lucrative to create dlc chars (one season pass 6 chars half the price of a fullprice game) then to create a whole new game with new models, moves and content.
people should look into what they actually got , content wise and let that flow into these kind of comparisons instead to just look at how long a company "milked" theire game.

 

[Deleted member 5032]

I am fully ignorant about the process of designing and releasing fighting games, so take this entire post with a big grain of salt. But, to me, it seems like it would be in the company's best interested to release a single core product and then continue to release paid content for that product, rather than trying to reinvent and release a completely new product every couple of years.

Now, instead of just releasing new characters and balance patches, NRS has to create an entire cast worth of new models, animations, sounds, mechanics, and vocals, they have to create an entire new series of stages, they need entirely new music, and they have to start their marketing campaign from scratch. Maybe @Immortal can shed some light on it, but I can't see a reason why any company would ever go with a 2-year model over a paid-dlc model.

 

[M2Dave]

I am fully ignorant about the process for designing and releasing fighting games, so take this entire post with a high grain of salt. But, to me, it seems like it would be in the company's best interested to release a single core product and then continue to release paid content for that product, rather than trying to reinvent and release a completely new product every couple of years.

Well, I assume when you are a small company whose fighting game is going to sell three to five million copies, supporting one product for a long period of time is logical and more cost-efficient. However, when you are a big fighting game company whose fighting game is going to sell 12 to 15 million copies, investing time and money into a new product every two years is more profitable. Obviously, NRS under the umbrella of Warner Brothers follows the latter business model, which seems to be turning profits for them.

 

[Immortal]

I am fully ignorant about the process of designing and releasing fighting games, so take this entire post with a big grain of salt. But, to me, it seems like it would be in the company's best interested to release a single core product and then continue to release paid content for that product, rather than trying to reinvent and release a completely new product every couple of years.

Now, instead of just releasing new characters and balance patches, NRS has to create an entire cast worth of new models, animations, sounds, mechanics, and vocals, they have to create an entire new series of stages, they need entirely new music, and they have to start their marketing campaign from scratch. Maybe @Immortal can shed some light on it, but I can't see a reason why any company would ever go with a 2-year model over a paid-dlc model.

There are 2 major factors here to consider:

1. Time vs profit is always the most important

Long time support with DLC gives you dimishing returns and those decline pretty fast as time passes. In our market research based on our own games - DLC released within 3 months from game premiere is bought by 55-60% players who bought the base game but once you hit 1 year it drops to like 20-25%. Now to make a DLC of lets say 4 characters + some stages, costumes it roughly takes a big studio 5 months in total and on the flip side youre charging for DLC like 1/3rd of the base game price. So you "wasted" 5 months of studio time which is roughly 20% of total time you need to make whole new game to gain around (less) 8-10% profits which base game provided and that's only for the 1st DLC, its significantly lower for the next one and so on. So while your profits are getting lower over time your labor (people) cost is constant (or even getting higher) and we're talking here about paying around 350 people in our studio (NRS has probably less), so it gets pretty crazy, pretty quickly. This is also a reason why you think/plan and sometimes do your DLC even before the game is released (but it gets crazy extremely fast with crunch time, the multitasking is insane).

Making new game every 2 years in MUCH more profitable than long time (DLC) support, there is no contest here.

2. Supporting your eco-system

This is another big thing if your game is succesful enough to get TV/Film/Anime/Books etc adaptations and it goes even deeper when you make those (like WB did) and on top of that you make cross game/movies/tv appearences outside of that. This is always a consideration thou for us less so, since Tv series of our game is done by another company and books are done by another person but for WB it's probably a big factor since they do all of that and more by themself.

There is also like billion of smaller reasons which im not gonna get into here, now since you can write a master thesis about it and still it wouldn't cover everything.

 

[theotherguy]

"Much longer" support from NRS

In comparison to other NRS titles, it is, at almost twice as long.

Just because people had this idea that "much longer" meant 3-4-5-10 years in their head is irrelevant when there was nothing explicitly indicated, and NRS has no history in doing so. Sure Boon might be partly at fault for that comment, but it's also his job to promote and market the game. Customers also aren't free of blame; they're wrongly assuming a timeframe that was never implied and now getting angry because that never happened.

And things can change. "Much longer" back in early 2019, may have been intended to be the end of 2021, then everything happened and plans had to change.

 

[Wigy]

In comparison to other NRS titles, it is, at almost twice as long.

Just because people had this idea that "much longer" meant 3-4-5-10 years in their head is irrelevant when there was nothing explicitly indicated, and NRS has no history in doing so. Sure Boon might be partly at fault for that comment, but it's also his job to promote and market the game. Customers also aren't free of blame; they're wrongly assuming a timeframe that was never implied and now getting angry because that never happened.

And things can change. "Much longer" back in early 2019, may have been intended to be the end of 2021, then everything happened and plans had to change.

Id disagree. The patch support was the worst since mk9. Only thing they provided better was paid dlc

 

[Juxtapose]

Id disagree. The patch support was the worst since mk9. Only thing they provided better was paid dlc

Perhaps, but also keep in mind, at least during the time of Mortal Kombat XL, people were pushing for slower patches to let the game and the meta settle. Seems they did so this time.

 

[Wigy]

Perhaps, but also keep in mind, at least during the time of Mortal Kombat XL, people were pushing for slower patches to let the game and the meta settle. Seems they did so this time.

Yep. And they failed a company to find a middleground. They did tiny breadcrumb patches with giant gaps.