Our Reasoning Behind the 3.13 Launch Delay

Chris,
We love you. You deliver to us the best game that we've had in decades. Even if you stopped development on PoE completely, Heist league would still be the best game on the market for years to come. If you want to delay your launch, thats fine, and anyone who can't accept that isn't a dedicated fan, or even a part of the spending playerbase. I personally, and I feel a great many other players, would rather see a great league start with maximum polish late, than to see you guys tear your hair out trying to cram what ever the fuck into whenever the fuck. Enjoy your vacation GGG!

Path of Exile as a game has provided more content than dozens of AAA titles combined.

There will always be more people inclined to post negative reactions and comments than positive ones so for you and your team, never forget the people who love the game, community, and each one of you passively. For every negative person lashing out, there's a dozen more who appreciate things like this.

Although, I do believe this explanation was necessary since the delay post was quite vague. Personally, I greatly appreciate the transparency and the willingness to make this post and voice your thoughts, concerns, agenda, some business aspects, and overall be straight forward with us. It's truly a breath of fresh air to read a post and not feel like it was a micromanaged PR statement handed down from the corporate office.

I will continue to play and support Path of Exile. It's one of the very few games I had high hopes for when I first saw it several years ago that has lived up to and maintained my expectations from day 1 to now.

Nearly 8 years of positive experiences and there's only more to come.

Thank you.

"

SirSmiles11 wrote:

Still a cowardly response, Shows me you don't have faith in your own game and content to try to compete with other companies.

This is like trying to open your mom and pop chain right next to a Chilis / Applebees / McDonalds. Yeah, you'll probably sell stuff and get loyal customers but WHY? There's ZERO benefits and only hinders your sales and growth when you could easily open it on the other side of town and not compete with them nearly as much or almost at all?

It's called a business strategy and this makes absolute and perfect sense. You can literally see the HUGE decline in other games being played when big titles drop. If you don't believe them go look up the streaming analytics. Download averages. Steam statistics. Google analytics. Etc. Etc. when big games drop and look at how that impacts more niche communities like this one.

All I want to say is that I whole heartedly support your decision. There may be a lot of negative people but I am not one of them and I hope they dont dissuade you from making hard decisions like this in the future.

"

SerChivalry wrote:

PoE has really been on a downward spiral the last few years.


Edit:

"

Action RPGs are all about finding items, levelling up characters and accomplishing difficult challenges, all while comparing your progress to your friends and feeling that you found better stuff earlier than they did.

I just wanted to say that reading this disgusted me.

Gaming isnt about flexing on your friends its about enjoying your time with them. What the $%@# is wrong with you? This game has one of the most deplorably toxic community states in online gaming especially considering ARPG games were never meant to be competitions. There's a reason I quit DotA after 10 years of playing competitively and its embarrassing that this mentality has crept into RPG fans who, by their very nature, never wanted to compete with anyone in the first place before their value became based on likes and views and external validation rather than their own personal success and achievements in game.

This made me regret every badge or whatever you call them that I have under my icon.

Im not trying to trash on you but who are you to assume what gaming is for everyone. You may not view it as a competitive experience but PoE grew on its racing scene which was an inherently competitive feature. I for one love showing my friends when I get an exalt or manage to roll a 6l. It feels good to show someone the progress you make or show off something they don't have. If my friend gets something amazing I want to see it and attempt to acquire something similar. Showing off to friends doesn't have to be inherently toxic. While you may not think the same way, that's fine and everyone different. No one experiences things the exact same way. The way Chris described it might just be how he views ARPG's from his personal experiences and it in no way negatively impacts you. Just my 2 cents.

While game delays are unfortunate I love that you're making a decision not only based on market realities but also the desire to take care of your employees. I can't help but feel that so many companies just don't do or even consider that - or worse (lookin' at you Ubisoft).

Thanks for taking the time to explain the logic and reasons behind your decision and for taking care of your employees. I would much rather a game be delayed a couple months than to have a company's staff endure crunch or their employees unable to enjoy a well deserved vacation.

I loved this post. XD Woke my wife up laughing my ass off when I read the phrase "we would be fucked."

I think brand loyalty is moronic. Everybody's just doing their best to make it. That said, I always feel good when I'm able to give you guys my money. I have gotten more enjoyment from your game and community than I have from any other, and I'm confident I will continue to for as long as you all are still fired up to make this game fun for us. Enjoy your break. Endless delve sounds fucking great. Always have a ball in flashback. I've always wanted unlimited currency void league, but I'm sure you guys will keep me entertained.

"

Chris wrote:

However, in late 2019, we released the Blight league less than two weeks after WoW Classic's launch.

I might also describe it as somewhat of a pincer attack; it was predated by WoW Classic by 11 days, and then a few weeks later by the Free-2-play release of Destiny 2, which had drawn some new players in during the runup to that as well.

Though yeah, it's pretty stark how the launch of Blight league stands apart from every other 3.x-era league, as the only one to fail to peak at 120k+ players.

"

Chris wrote:

But the commercial reality is that if we kept our original release date, we would be f***ed.

I'm just taking a moment to appreciate how frank one is to be using the F-word in such a situation. I mean, it really does mean it's serious.

"

Chris wrote:

we are trying very hard to prepare interesting events for everyone to play. I'd much rather try to underpromise and overdeliver here, but we are kicking around some ideas. Bex is campaigning very hard for us to work out how to do Endless Delve, for example.

To be honest, this should've been done all along; I sorely miss 30-day races in particular, and I think that having races (which required very little extra work to put on) was a significant

As you'd mentioned, a fresh economy is a big draw, but without races, that occurs only once every 91 days. Allowing longer races (e.g, 10, 14, and 30-day) that are long enough to merit trading have often shown to bring new spikes in playercount even in the tail end of a league.

And yes, I think I speak for far more than myself to say that we're interested in seeing new ideas for races & leagues beyond a whole huge content expansion. To be frank, I think the "whole new expansion of content" every league is actually causing fatigue among many players. GGG should consider some experiments with trying new twists on familiar content. And Endless Delve is definitely a good place to start.

"

Chris wrote:

While I have been mentally feeling a lot better after committing to this decision yesterday, I still can't get over the thought that we have let you guys down.

If I may be blunt, in the end the userbase actually isn't appreciably affected. The only real hit here is... GGG is simply deferring their finances by about a month. Certainly there will be those unaware of the situation (perhaps including at Tencent) who don't immediately see the long-term reasoning, but either way, last we knew GGG was financially healthy enough it can easily smooth out waiting an extra month for that launch-weekend surge in MTX sales... Certainly better than instead suffering a collapse in sales altogether for a cycle. (also the unspoken part is that even their time off is paid, having fewer people in the office around the summer holidays still means a reduction in other costs)

As a leader, it's one's lot to be required to make decisions that feel painful.

But hey, perhaps a silver lining is that seeing how much smoother it goes this next launch could well solidify the argument that the current level of development & launch cadence for the past 3 years wasn't ideal, and a better paradigm will come of it.

Look at it this way: the threat of being creamed by Cyberpunk 2077 wasn't just a danger, but also an opportunity, and perhaps the health of the game in the long run will benefit from this.

The more dev time you guys can squeeze out of this, the better. Each league launch has been getting more progressively broken/unfinished in one way or another.

When all the devs are refreshed from vacation, hammer out the best game/league possible to all of us that finished CP2077 and come back to PoE.

Good post, Chris.

Bring back the April Fool's POE BG. I didnt get to play but from what i heard it was an amazing amount of fun.