Shadows of Change feels like a pay to win DLC, that is also the most expensive DLC in the history of the series.
00:00 – Intro
04:25 – CA Statement
15:01 – Previous DLC
➜ Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/a4rBAFkqTr
Donate to Support the Channel!
➜ Youtube Membership: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnSuI6Qe57RSyIXn2Q-2Emg/join
➜ Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=EEN4KMAWNVANS
➜ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/costingaming
Special Thanks to:
Alain of Deathwatch
Alexander
Yolosapien
Fred
JKPrimative
Kurtis
RatEmperor
connor
Sean
Sinnelleos
Anton
Phillip
CB
Crix
Mederic
NL
Lina
Dan
Filip
Christopher
Whale
8GREENC
Vlad
Konda
RhadigarTV
Martin
Gabriel
KJF
Lorem
#immortalempires #totalwarwarhammer3 #warhammer3 #totalwar
source
I don't have a problem with the pricing.(Edit – Didn't realize it was that drastic compared to the previous Lord Pack, so yeah, maybe it's a bit much) Costs are up. That's not a bullshit argument. UK, where CA is based, is one of the countries that has suffered the most from the inflation of the past year. However…
TW Warhammer 3 is not a good game. Compared to game 2 the UI is fucking ugly, sieges are worse than ever, performance is bad, the game is buggy as hell, there's no FLC LLs, we didn't even get the full fucking map, and I'm pretty sure they stealth-nerfed ambush stance, 40% chance might as well be 0% now. For every good decision they made for game 3, they made 3 bad ones that made the game worse. They focused on all the wrong things.
And I'm seeing 0 effort on their part to fixing this ish. I'd have 0 qualms about supporting the game and CA if I saw it was going in the right direction. But it's not. It's becoming more and more a game that I don't enjoy playing anymore. I'm not buying this DLC. The game isn't worth putting my money into. And if they don't do my dawi right in the next one, I'm going to be done with this game once and for all.
best way to fix these problems. have release the content. as beta test. let people play early. and fix the problems as development happens. and lower the price. and the open playtesting is free and would free up resources. less screw ups found later on release.
ok hold on. CA should be burned at tge stake but ogres are great.
Rome 1 .. newbee .. here since Shogun 1 . 😉 still have it boxed.
Pharaoh will flop. Theyre going to milk WH3 for all they can. It's not rocket science
Giving us a free legendary lord or two would help placate the community. We don't give a shit about heroes
silence i better than an edict from on high
Unfortunately CA will by fine, SOC is in top sellers whole time, people buying this DLC despite its price. When spring steam sale hit they will slash price to 15$ and rest people will buy it.
I think what is most insulting about the statement, is not just what the statement says, but what it doesn't say.
It creates a straw man argument and responds, that the only issue everyone has is the pricing decision itself.
There is not a substantive response to the ground-swelling argument that a root issue of the problem is getting less for more. Rich is trotted out like a hostage, to speak as if the concept of a Lord pack with smaller changes and new content for multiple factions at once is something new. Reading between the lines, the implication is that patches to fix issues that continue to plague the game since launch, continue to be slow walked to coincide with extractions of value from the community that want to see the game succeed, and extractions of maximum revenue for each remaining piece of new content or improvements to existing content by the dev team. It is patronizing to trot Rich out, knowing the respect he has for the subject matter, lore, and quality, and that he is appreciated within the community for that.
The price and this semantic response may be the activating events for community anger, but the creeping feeling that passionate hardworking devs working for peanuts, and passionate, engaged customers are being milked for rising profits, has been going on for a long time. And it stinks. Most of us are rational and understand that these games do get made as an enterprise, not as a gift. But the sheer tone-deafness of being tricked, spoken around, and extracted of value from in these ways, is not something that CA can simply shrug off, which is how this statement came across.
This is not even a DLC. It is a mere update. They want 25 euro hahaha. For this? Hahaha. I love this game, but i will not tolerate this greedy behavior.
Funny how they cry poverty, why be in the business if you can't make money? Also worth mentioning, how much have these companies saved since moving away from making physical copies of games? That is a huge save right there.
I think the most perplexing thing about this is the… veiled threat? To Three Kingdoms' the Warhammer franchise if the fans don't comply.
What if we don't, CA? Then what? Do you think this controversy won't affect you in the future? Do you think Total War fans in general will come out in droves and buy Pharaoh because they don't see what you're doing to Warhammer, which has carried your studio for yonks? You think ANYONE is going to be hyped for Hyenas? The only place that game even gets talked about is the Total War subreddit, mostly in the form of "Oh, so THAT'S where the money for Total War DLC went!"
Sure, axe Warhammer III. Go ahead. See if you ever sell another game.
If they at least gave us a free legendary lord with unique mechanics like they did in tww2 but no they changed free legendary lords to heroes that nobody rly cares about like the free heroes they are realising can be lords with their own mechanics but no they gonna increase the dlc prices and change the FLC into just a free hero XD
I agree with almost everything in the video, the one thing I will say is that I very strongly believe they have an unannounced project (which I would put money on being Medieval 3) which they are confident will sell well. There's no way they'd do this if Warhammer was their only lifeline. We also know their main team has been working on something for a while now. I would not be surprised if they've decided (for whatever reason) that they don't want to do Warhammer anymore, and that this is their attempt to get it cancelled without causing another Three Kingdoms debacle.
The game has clearly been under-resourced for a while, this pricing strategy is so blatantly unethical that they're not even trying to hide it, and the fact that their response to content creators and now to consumers to is basically "if you don't like it don't buy it" all kinda suggest to me that they're trying to kill the game deliberately.
It is possible that there could be corporate politics involved too, maybe somebody wants resources freed up for a different project, or just doesn't like the Warhammer team or IP, and they're trying to strangle the game. I hope it's not true, and this is all just CA being waaaay too overconfident, but as they keep consistently making the worst possible choice it's starting to look less and less like an accident…
"Our costs are up" – translation: "we made another historical flop and Total Warhammer being our only profitable game in a decade have to pay for it".
And somehow some suits at CA thinks all this pain will be gone once hyenas is released 5 years late to capitalise on the fad, after plenty of studios with way more experience failed horribly
I am fans of cathay, kislev, empire, and dwarf. I will make sure CA can't get my money unless drop the price. I can add on some money based on the price buy armour core 6 / baldur gate 3
Or.. they have no choice but do it. I guess I am in the minority here, but I really do not mind the price increase – the overall inflation since before covid was around 20% (meaning the base game is now 20% cheaper than it was before). Most importantly, however, you are completely ignoring the most important variable – amount of sold units. If you sell less than you used to, you may need to drastically increase the prices to cover the costs. Now, they are publicly traded company and their finance reports are public – go have a look at them. I did when people were pissed about chorfs being more expensive. They didn't make huge "bank" during pandemic. In fact, they probably hired a lot of new people and they also had to increase wages by at least 20% (developer's wages do not ever get real decrease with inflation) and are heading into "barely profitable" or perhaps even loss.
No, it is not "greed". I am so sick of this silly view on business "muh companies baaad". If they were particularly greedy, why didn't they do this years ago? I mean their position used to be even stronger in past and would probably get away with it. Especially if they did like +10% every year. Do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
You say it yourself – they fucked up, aren't making enough and need to compensate. And the cost of fuckup is always bore by customers. That, or the company closes shop.
Be happy, hyena is coming
Even now even when people are mad, people still are willing to cave for only a couple of dollars discount …TW's DLC were super lucrative for CA even at the price point of 5-10$ ! CA had systematically reduced the amount of work they put into their content for ages and people excepted it and are still willing to accept which is why they think what they are doing is completely ok … hack if they will release a 'FREE' content to sweeten the deal or reduce the heat and people will buy this DLC they absolutely show they justified in their actions.
CA used to create a whole mini campaign which was way way way more expansive with their earlier DLC and you know what happened after people didn't like the mini-campaigns, CA didn't shift the entire funds towards other sagnificant things like way more content or improving the core game, they just reduced the budget and created something people wanted for way less effort !
It's nice to see people waking up, but as someone who was awake for many years its not enough … with the amount CA had made in profits and how lucrative their 'games' were (WH2/3 are expansion packs sold for full price) CA could easily give the people an entire 'siege re-rework' and still not sweat, the kind we see in Pharaoh without ass ladders and even far better with good AI for 'free' but they don't feel like they need to do it, they just try to make the most for the least before abandoning WH.
If people want to see a better future for TW, they need to completely stop buying TW till CA reinvest into TW properly (as I gave in the above example), if people keep buying the 'New Games' CA are making which is just copy-paste sliced and diced versions of a complete game (CA literally using the sieges people begged for for years to have in WH as a selling point for Pharaoh – they even joined on the joke about ass ladders … shameless) then TW will stay the same, as for the fear of no more TW – that's bullshit threat, because even if the two next 'games' will completely fail, CA will either be forced to make it work, or SAGA will sell them to someone who will make them make it work , the IP is to profitable and unique for SAGA to not want to cash out on it.
There are quite a few DLC's I don't have yet (Chorfs, Beasts, few others), I had always planned to get them someday. Not anymore. Full stop. Maybe if they do a 180, we'll see.
This is such nonsense. Total rubbish don't believe it people. They're just trying to PR convince people to pay for it, they know as well as we do it's a chance.
More than 60%, +150% or 250% on the base cost of previous.
Only one thing I disagree with you is they should tell the truth instead of lie. The truth is their greedy so they can't tell that to your face. Sure, most of people know they lie but they hope for few people believe in their lie.
First time in memory I've heard a company straight up threaten it's playerbase. The overnight shift to "mostly negative" from "mostly positive" reviews though is impressive.
Im pretty sure there isnt a single good game that is worth 300£ with all the games and dlc. And pretending like Warhammer 3 is anything other than a broken game with great potential, with generic and boring "additions" that is overpriced is plain stupidity.
for the love of God can CA and Sega get some balls and actually hire more people
Unless they pull one hell of a u-turn like Fatshark is with DarkTide then I feel like my newly found passion will turn to ash. Sad to see such a great thing be crushed by blatant greed and lack of transparency with the community.
If the dlc big and change a lot of thing maybe deserve the price , but the dlc is small it’s doesn’t deserve the 25 euro , greedy developers
Also needs to be said. Its clear they dont have the resources/manpower to do good anymore. Wether its from siphoning talent to other projects (looking at you new TW game) or just downgrading the dlc team. Its obvious that they spend more time patching and fixing things. Its a real mess. And it baffles me how they are treating their number 1 prize cash cow in the warhammer franchise. This is aupposed to be the crowning achievement in CA's cap. The grandest game and scope for one of the best IP's. But honestly seems like they half ass'n it now.
How does the price compare to other total war games? I honestly don’t know. Maybe it’s in line with other titles?
I agree with the overall sentiment about this price point being poor value, but I'll push back a little.
CA haven't increased the price of the base games since the series first launched in 2015. That's 8 years of inflation, with no price increase. DLC prior to Champions of Chaos was also pretty stagnant (if there as an increase, it was very minor). To maintain profit margins without increasing the price of the base game, it means the DLC must be priced even higher to maintain the profit margin. While we think the price increase from Champions of Chaos to Shadows of Change is ridiculous (and we'd be right in terms of comparative value), that may be the price increase needed to restore the desired profit margin. If SoC sells well enough to achieve that, then CA wasn't wrong to do it. On top of that, they'd estimate many who won't pay the price, will pay the price later on with a 33-50% discount.
I think everyone needs to relax and remember that CA is owned by a massive publicly-traded company that is financially driven, and doesn't care about any of us, but about pleasing their shareholders and padding their resumes. I don't really care where CA prices its games and DLC, if it's above my threshold, I'll just move onto something else. Let them do them, and you do you. I'm sure it is more annoying as a content creator though.
Edited to add, glad you mentionted Immortal Empires – did we really think all of the development going into it was going to be free? Yes, they really should have eaten the cost as part of the screw up, but they'll pass on the costs if they can. Something something public company.
I understand the price is big, and not right but if we support game with money they will sustaine game longer and support it longer it may help for future dlc or etc🤔
you must work with the great bock of grudges toggether
I thought Nvidia mainly made profits bcz of the bitcoin mining frenzy there
They turned into legal thieves . They want so much money for so tiny content. Better studios will fill up the gap after the downfall of TW. Manorlords could be an alternative or far better ones could be develped if we stop wasting our money on this money grab.
I’ve listened to three or four other Warhammer analyses of this so far, but I think yours is my favorite. I’m not sure I’ve ever been this turned off by a game developer until now.
In my opinion the gameplay videos are so short simply because there isn't much content to show off.
There are hardly any video game companies left that don't piss me off.
Hello, Kostin! Earlier I spoke negatively about some of your guides. But now, after this video, I realized that you are a real fan of TWW3 and that you really want the community to get the most successful gaming experience from the game. This is truly an expert opinion. I totally support you bro!
If the game was good, we would pay for the games, but the game isn’t good, so nobody should pay for the game
They wont killed Warhammer, empty threats. They have deals with GW and Warhammer is the only thing netting them reliable profits. Easy to see through.
с меня лайк)
Yeah, the only thing I got from the announcement was: "Screw you. Freak off. We're upcharging and we don't care. Wait for a better discount."
Feels like CA only just realized they messed up, don't know why still, and are trying to push the costs onto the consumer base and prepare golden parachutes.
This entire situation makes me so sad. I love Total Warhammer, but this bullshit can't stand. I don't want them to stop making Warhammer content but if they do this, they will kill themselves. Corporations take too many shortcuts, never thinking of long-term gain. They think a higher price means higher gains DUH HUH. DPS always beats flat damage every time. Lower-priced, High-quality content will earn you more money in the long term.
I have pretty good solution for you all #justplayBG3 , meanwhile all other devs can think how …ckin people up is not good idea
I think I commented this before but the majority of the USA military’s budget is spent on repairs and upkeep, they spend about $181 billion on their peoples salaries and benefits
Goodbye totalwar, we had fun. Too bad your creators are idiots.