Why BeamNG is dying?

Not dying afa most of us are concerned since we've been here for a long time and have seen it steam along with update after update after update, with continous communications with and input listened to from the community.

 

I really think the opposition to DLC is mostly because AAA titles have gotten use to predatory DLC and now that's what people have come to expect. Nowadays most DLC feels like "pay more money to get the rest of the game" instead of "here is some extra content which is completely optional". Getting DLC right is difficult, but if it is done right I don't see it affecting sales.
Considering threads like "IRC vs Discord", it seems like anything controversial usually ends up with a couple of members escalating things, so it's probably best for the devs to play it safe anyway. Regardless, the base game needs so much more content still that it should be a very long time before we need to think of "extra content".

Nowaday's, merchandise infastructure is usually easy to set up. However, this isn't the sort of game that people would be buying clothing for. So that leaves collectors editions (which for many people have the same bad conotations from AAA titles as DLC does) and diecast cars (which I assume have a fairly low return on investment compared to putting more recources into what the company actually does). Besides, they do advertise themselves as a tech company, not a videogame company. So merchandise might be a bit weird.

The biggest factor in upcoming sales IMO will be PR. The devs really need to hire a PR person because they historically haven't been much for that sorta stuff. This project is so old that most people interested in it's current state who have a sufficient computer probably have already bought it, so the sales from full release will be from people who know about it but thought it didn't have enough gameplay. Without a PR person, that won't happen.

An alternative to hiring a PR person would be start a community contributor program. Organize a group of content creators to play the game a lot when full release is near, allow them to give away some copies of the game (and merchandise if they do go that route).

Maybe even give players who buy the game early some exclusive content like Wreckfest did. Preferably something less important than an entire unique car though.

 

It's really only dying for the ones who's inpatient, it has happily carried on for everyone else and still is.

 

Some interesting data i just regrouped to look more obvious, many info's are taken from @1185323118 's post on Update Speculation Thread, it's not very usefull but still interesting to know that the game got a good update schedule and a major update coming soon

 

Given the whole BeamNG and Automation crossover, I'm personally not convinced that this game is "dead". I know some people cringe at the very mention of Automation (given all the crappy, half-done mods in the repository), but that's okay. I love coming up with ideas for vehicles to build, test drive, run through time trials, etc., and then going back to refining it, making it look and perform as best as possible. Long story short, playing around with Automation cars is pretty filling between the big updates, and I'm rather content with that, in my opinion.

 

BeamNG is a mammoth development project its gonna take time to build it, as the Italians would say "Rome wasnt built in a day" and the same goes here for Beam, sometimes as pointed out above in post #24 with the time between versions, is that sometimes the development for say a really light weight update may be like 50 days but that is also factoring in "DevTest" periods as well while a bigger update is like 135 days when new cars and vehicles and levels are added into the game.

Its the content that takes the most amount of time to create for the game, the big ones from the 0.8 updates through to now are the LeGran in version 0.8 and also the Hopper in 0.9 and the DT40L bus in 0.12 of the game, development time is vital for the vehicles so that they all work and dont come out as bug ridden vehicles in the game, as for the maps, you have had since 0.11 (not much happened from 0.8 - 0.10) with West Coast USA, along with later in 0.13 the Automation Test track and after that Glow City in 0.14 and then finally leading into Italy in 0.15, maps are generally the hardest to build and take the most amount of effort to create.

I know how long it takes to create a program that you can use, there are all sorts of bugs linked to code and weird behaviour that cannot easily be predicted and stuff and also research into things, its all a big mess but if you put the time and effort in, you can create a lot of amazing things out of it

 

Three months is not a long time, but its not short either. The reason why i said that is because the amount of content in the game VS how long it takes to keep the game fresh with new things. So three months is kinda long right now for the amount of stuff you can do in the game.

 

When i said "basic psychology skills" i mean that i understand how some people think and that i can relate to them a little bit. As for DLC i did not say that its the ONLY way the devs can make money, but that its a reasonable option they can choose to make money fast and easy. Any other option would probably take longer and would require the devs to think of something to make that people will buy

 

Why is this turning into yet another bashing of Automation content?

To be honest, this whole attitude toward certain types of mods that apparently require no "effort" is kinda stupid. Nowhere in the game description is ever stated you need to be a professional 3D artist and a no-life dedicated modder to truly enjoy the game or even just registering to these forums... If that was the case, a good 95% of the content currently available on the repository should never have seen the light of day...

People are free to choose how they want to play the game, and if that includes Automation content, so be it. To each their own, it doesn't affect anybody else so nobody should have the rights to filter out content on this ridiculous "effort required" basis...

 

Three months is a pretty average, if not slightly fast update schedule for a game like this. Beam has a small dev team, and although they didn't release vehicles for a while because of their main artist being injured, they still did lots of other stuff, like torsion beams and Italy, and are getting back on track for multiple vehicles a year. Plus, they are working on campaign mode and improved UI. The updates for Beam are plenty fast enough.

 

I know that they are a small team (i said that in a previous post), that's why the updates take a little long sometimes, but three months is not exactly great either. that's why i said one month is a good time for updates to come out

 

One month is absolutely not reasonable for updates. I believe nadeox said that bug fixing for updates alone could take over a week. Add on research time, and you could end up with basically a week of work per update, which is not enough time to achieve much at all. What would you expect put of such updates anyway? You would still get vehicles every 6 months or so. The updates would probably just be fixing bugs introduced by previous updates and adding one or two parts or slightly updating maps.

 

I think it was 1-2 weeks of bug fixing.

 

[Deleted]

 

You are not seeing the point. Because they're such a small team the updates are gonna take like 3 months or so, yes 3 months is not really a long time, but its not short either. If the devs had more people (and maybe money) they could bring that time down to a more reasonable "1" month.

 

Okay. Get six of your buddies together and develop Beam for a while, then we'll see what's "reasonable".

 

That's not what he said at all...

He said if they have more people. The team currently is around 40-something members, with 1.5 working on the Audi contract. Which still leaves 40-something people. 6 is not more than 40-something...

Now, the team does not have the money to hire significantly more people, nor the infastructure to take advantage of significantly more people. Once full release comes out updates should focus on content and the fixed minumum time to push an update will decrease. Now, 1 month for an update would probably be very inefficient and generally a bad idea, but as Raceboy said, if they hypothetically had more recources it would at least be possible.

 

Even if they had more people, they wouldn't do monthly updates. The only way they could do monthly updates is if they were a small team again, dedicated to making one or two things happening and not worried about bugs too much. More people, ironically, only slows projects down after a certain point, even if it improves the quality significantly. If they had more people working on content, then they would need more people researching, more people bugfixing, etc. It would still take over a week of bugfixing and tuning and close to that of researching. Add on the fact it is really hard for one person to put down an artistic project like a 3D model and for someone else to pick it up (hence why vehicle creation came to an almost complete halt when Gabester was injured, until they found a new artist and started different vehicles), and you end up with 1 month updates still being very inefficient.

Even games with much larger development teams usually stick to 3 month+ update cycles because it is inefficient to have your employees switching projects almost weekly. If BeamNG suddenly got a 200 person dev team, I would expect them to stick to a 3 month update schedule, but we would see career mode a lot sooner, multiple vehicles most updates, and one or two maps a year. 1 month update schedules simply aren't feasible.

 

I definitely agree with you there, "to each their own!". My apologies if my comment about the Automation cars seemed "bashful", I just don't really like most the cars posted there, lol. But getting back on topic, I still believe this was a very nice addition to the game to keep up the replay value along with the different modes, track builder, etc.

 

If beamng is dying, then why do so many people post mods and follow the dev team still? Gameplay is still very high for a game of this genre and is still very fun once you muck around with the repository. I'm never bored of this game. And the three month update cycle is perfect. The only company i can think of that can pull a one month update and add significant things is Turn 10. The team they have is absolutely gigantic plus they have god knows how many vehicle artists working for them with the some of the best modelling computers in the industry. Turn 10 also have experience from 9 other games and the basic Arcade and Simulation physics they have made. Rock star has god knows how many industry's that all work together and separate from projects. A new Grand Theft Auto comes out every 4 to 5 years and Beamng has a 20th of the size of their team but still get updates every 3 months, when Rock star gets the updates for Grand Theft Auto 5 every three or so months, and 40 something people have the same schedule? That's pretty bloody good.

Think about the size of the team, resources they have available, funding they have and the TIME it takes to model, mesh, a Jbeam and make audio for a vehicle whilst making sure the car doesn't go super spikey mode on you from a collision. All of this takes time and Beam's team has to be one of the best for time management.


EDIT: fixing way too many grammar issues.