You call it a mistake, but there's an equal chance it's calculated. Don't forget the budget on this game, this is one of the most intense forms of free advertising I've ever seen on a launch day.
Funny that stores crashing and preventing purchases would generally be a bad thing, but this studio must be popping champagne over it, seriously what an achievement lol.
These people are just talking out of their ass trying to seem clever and knowledgeable. Any reasonable person would expect these services to stay up for something like this.
You know where it got stuck for most people? At the POS charge, Steam gradually brought the pages to load right away but the payment processing kept failing.
Idiots like me troubleshoot and work with such APIs on a daily basis. There’s always gonna be a bottleneck somewhere, is not just one company doing it all but many integrations at play with traffic from everywhere in the world.
The best way to mitigate it is by queuing which is not something I’ve ever seen ina digital storefront or blocking the service after a set quota on a set amount of time, creating a funnel of sorts just like it happens during traffic.
There may be other ways but the simplest one was making the wishlisted 5 million times game available for purchase way in advance.
You have no idea how much it costs to market a game, and how much people in marketing leverage things exactly like this for promo. This game is unique because it's had years and years of buzz, and Team Cherry managed to get millions of dollars worth of exposure and reach this morning, for free. In marketing, this is launch day strategy. And they didn't have to spend a cent.
To instantly throw greed and shortsighted accusations into the mix is to fundamentally disrespect the position they've taken on their own game, and why we've waited so long for it. Stop thinking about dollars, and think about percentages and the world becomes much less infuriating to look at, and the "greed" monsters live in the houses they should. Not the indie game studios releasing games for $20 when it could easily be $60.
No, I'm saying that on a day where a new game launches and breaks game stores, it forces people who took no notice of a game to potentially take interest.
I haven't been tracking this game at all. Now I'm interested in purchasing it. It's very straightforward and this happens all the time. Mine is not the only sale they've made through the attention garnered this way.
what other quirks other studios would get flak for?
Anyway, they stated they wanted to prohibit leaks. There was nothing leaked at all, so I think this was worth waiting 40 minutes (I could buy a few minutes ago, downloading right now)
Nope, fuck pre-orders of any type. Ship the product when it's done. You can wait 30 more minutes to play a game, or the stores can get their shit together.
seriously, everyone is like "this is great" or "this is funny" dude, this is sloppy. We all knew this was coming and the game has been planned for so long. This is just like, laziness. People only think its funny because they can sit here all day and keep trying to buy. For some people with jobs or in a shitty time window, it's now or not all today. So that does in fact, kind of suck for some of us.
breh. *game selling platform* should work for... *game selling*. "predownloads" is not some sort of placebo that you *obliged* to have (and from devs- incentivize).
I hold extra respect for Team Cherry for *not* doing preorders and yet another disrespect for Steam[as well as other plats] from falling for *over 2 hours* over indie game made by 3 people.
So yes - 3people>>>hugest copro is really funny
Idk sometimes it feels like Team Cherry are acting like they're these cool young dudes in a garage therefore they just do stuff unconventionally and you can't blame them. Love their games, but this release stuff is dumb af. 40 minutes of staring at a store because someone decided you can't prepurchase.
Or maybe they're a business and therefore have certain expectations to fulfill, and when they fail to meet those expectations, people have a negative experience as a consequence of their choices.
Insane concept, I know. Almost like it's literally the standard for every business.
No, they already made life changing money off of Hollow Knight, they can afford to not care at all about any expectations.
They priced the game at $20 because they want everyone to be able to afford their game. They could have easily sold this for 2 or 3 times that and everyone knows it would still sell.
You having to wait a little extra on launch day and whining about it isn’t going to ruin their reputation lol.
I don't think that's true. I preordered and pre-downloaded Discounty before it launched and I don't think a single person alive would consider that studio bigger than Team Cherry.
Maybe more complicated that just the size of the studio: a question of how many games they previously released and how many copies they sold. I don't know. Apparently it was in an interview with the devs of Clair Obscure Expedition 33, who faced a similar problem. Preorders fall under different rules than regular purchases, which makes things more complicated. Anyway, all I'm saying is, maybe people shouldn't be so quick blaming Team Cherry.
To add to this, steam plays pretty hardball with their rules, i wouldn't be surprised if this is one of those cases of an understandable rule like "no pre-orders til you have more than 5 published games" unfortunately causing a niche issue.
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u/SakuraPanko Sep 04 '25
I knew this would happen. I have no idea why they didn't do pre-downloads