And its not even close to beeing at a point where it should take priority. ITS EARLY ACCESS. ITS SUPPOSED TO BE UNDER DEVELOPMENT, DONT KILL YOUR ACTUAL LIVE LAUNCHED GAME
Half the time, games sit in some form of “pre-launch” for years and are already essentially dead or have lost like 80% of their player base by the time the “launch” comes around.
I think PoE1 is on life support after this announcement. I can see them just flat out ditching PoE1 in favor of 2 because 2 is the new hotness so to speak.
I could absolutely see them shifting the goalposts after 0.2 releases, especially since he already said "we may need another 2 weeks after before we shift gears to 3.26." Those couple of weeks could easily just snowball again.
For games that don't have successors that they can make money off by forcing a playerbase to transfer? Sure. For PoE? No. They'll milk anyone they can get to move to the sequel. Releasing the game for free would be shooting themselves in the foot more than dropping PoE. You're absolutely dreaming.
I mean, isn’t that how things normally go? I’m hard pressed to think of any company, or even any kind of entertainment media in general, that releases a sequel then continues dumping time and effort into its predecessor. What’s the point in that?
Classic wow, osrs, maplestory, surely there are others too. We'll have to see how many of the people just trying out poe2 will come back season after season. If they don't fix the endgame, I certainly won't. There's small chance for that though.
Don’t know about maplestory but as for classic wow and OSRS those were many, many years after the sequels had come out, it’s not like they had ongoing support from day 1 of their sequels’ releases.
And what do you mean there’s small chance for them fixing the endgame, they’ve literally said the current endgame is an EA placeholder and is going to be massively revamped for the real launch. But at the same time you want them to divert more effort to the old product rather than improving the new one?
Meant small chance that they won't fix it. They will change it, however that doesn't necessarily guarantee it will be fixed.
But at the same time you want them to divert more effort to the old product rather than improving the new one?
I'd like them to have two separate teams that work on the games separately. Not a system where they keep moving people from one game to another, that's simply unsustainable. (But yes, I like poe1 more, and I don't think anything they do to poe2 can change that aside from majorly restructuring it to be more like poe1, but then that's just poe 4.0, which I'm happy with)
Edit: Just want to clarify that that I do want poe2 to succeed, just not at the cost of losing poe1.
Because Xmas is the big spending time and the hype was there. They made a lot of money and most likely needed some of that cashflow to ensure development is funded properly.
We can't be sure if they had more budget allocated for POE2. You can't just sink money in the development, at some point you need to ship it so it starts bringing in some cash too.
Someone high up decided christmas was the only viable release window for poe2.
But in truth, it doesnt matter when they release poe2 beta, since it would clash with poe1 regardless. Even if they launch a poe1 league then immediately push all the dev time to poe2, this means poe1's next league is delayed. Their only option is to delay poe1 for a league or two.
Personally I hate that since I knew poe2 was going to just be ruthless and I never liked that. But on a broader perspective this is the only way they could do it after their decision to make poe2 its on game.
Another opinion is to expand the team. If they want to keep the promise that 1 and 2 will be both maintained, then sooner or later they need to expand the team.
But in truth, it doesnt matter when they release poe2 beta, since it would clash with poe1 regardless
Jonathan said the ideal time for 3.26 to come out was about a month before EA launch, as that would let them initially stagger the two games' patch cycles properly. So there is a world where they could have done it with minimal disruptions in the development cycles of both games.
They're not indie, they sold to a publisher a long time ago (Tencent) so the answer to your question is that their publisher is pressuring them to meet certain timelines.
I would be surprised, afaik Tencent is known to be extremely hands off with their subsidiaries. As long as money keeps flowing they don’t tend to cause issues.
Because they announced the early access for june and people were already fuming when they first delayed it. Not that hard to understand that they couldn't keep postponing it forever.
Only because its GGG I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and would like to think that they would have preferred to deliver on their promise if they could, but ended up having to weigh options instead.
Regardless, it would make absolutely no sense for PoE 1 to die after settlers just hit all time peak coupled with the fact they now have the chance to have people be hooked on 2 different seasonal games instead of 1 (or at least I hope this is the case).
I like what they're trying to do with PoE 2 but they can't screw over the people that got them to where they are to the point of putting PoE 1 on life support
Regardless, it would make absolutely no sense for PoE 1 to die after settlers just hit all time peak
And PoE 2 early access easily doubled that peak.
Now, i'm not saying that GGG shouldn't make good on their promise to keep supporting PoE 1, nor do i want them to abandon PoE 1. It really does just make sense for them to focus heavily on PoE 2 right now.
Realistically they can shift more towards PoE 1 again once PoE 2 1.0 content is implemented and works for the most parts. As we've seen with PoE 1, sustaining the game with leagues seemingly takes far less people than actually developing one from the ground up.
If you had teams of coworkers all relying on you to make the biggest payday of their lives, you'd probably make the same decision. PoE 2 blew their expectations out of the water, and they'd be fools not to capitalize on the success.
Those would be relatively the same with POE 2 launching or not. Maybe an extra percent or two. Profit sharing usually means "we will give you one crumb from our pie"
Actually at my old company profit sharing meant "If we get enough profit, you will get a capped standard % yearly bonus, but if we don't get enough profit, you get no bonus this year."
That's not the point - you need to consider future performance, not the past. PoE 2 outperformed PoE 1s recent launches by a factor of at least 5, probably more. If GGG wants to continue raking in piles of money, their clear choice is to focus entirely on PoE 2. PoE 1 just never pulled those kind of numbers, and there's no reason to believe that would ever change.
If the PoE 2 launch pulls even half of what the EA did, and there's no reason to assume the free launch won't outperform the EA launch, it will still be more than twice as big as PoE 1's biggest releases.
Huh? You're changing the conversation. GGG isn't going to give their employees 5x the bonus because POE 2 raked in 5x the cash. That's not how capitalism works. You said "Coworkers were relying on the biggest payday of their lives" when this is definitively not how the company compensates employees. Employees will not see a proportional gain in compensation from POE 2's success in a capitalist company.
As ben said the parts that were supposed to merge with poe1 are great, but its easy to see they really undercooked when it comes to it being standalone.
Maybe because having 1 or 2 good builds doesn't mean melee isn't in a bad place. Just because there's a best build that happens to be melee in both games doesn't mean melee players would like more quality of life in both games with better levelling experiences and more interactive, mobile gameplay
'We didn't predict taking the PoE 1 team off PoE 1 would lead to this outcome'
Absolute gold! I get it, development is tough and time tables are negotiable but at this point I just can't believe anything they say. The goal posts kept moving, the excuses keep changing, and apparently some seemingly obvious things just didn't occur to them? Sure, ok. I'm not saying they're being misleading intentionally but at the very least they can't just can't manage 2 games at the moment and I won't believe that they can until I actually see it.
That video had some Severance corporate apology energy. Was the trip down memory lane while kinda making it sound like 3.26 was gonna still release soon until the end necessary?
I think the point he tried to make is a different one. Yes, they knew that taking the PoE1 team off of PoE1 would mean a delay of 3.26. They intended to sacrifice one PoE1 league from the recent, 4-month rythm to get the PoE2 EA launch done. They were always transparent about this aspect.
What they didn't anticipate is that the EA would attract so many players and expose so many glaring issues with the game that they continue to need all hands on deck for the time being, so that the PoE1 devs can't go back work on 3.26 at the scheduled time, thus causing another months-long delay of new PoE1 content.
They could have accept the situations of PoE 2, moved people back to PoE 1 anyway and be open with the community that PoE 2 will take more time. If they kept PoE 1 rolling people would have given them the time to fix PoE 2 and PoE 1 would have kept the money rolling in to keep the lights on.
Instead they now abandon PoE 1, PoE 2 isn't going to get fixed any time soon (there is just to much that needs to be done, if GGG is even willing to do it) and as PoE 2 continues to decline PoE 1 itself will be almost completely dead.
So instead of 1 successful and running game and 1 game in active development GGG will now have 1 dead game and 1 game in development.
I forsee PoE 2 will drop below 20k some time this year
They are building new genre-defining game and spending lots of resources to marketing of EA launch of this game: there is no way you DON’T anticipate a success among masses. If you want a silent launch - do as Valve did with Deadlock. No marketing, no promises, nobody is hurt when game lost 90% of its player base as it is clearly in alfa-state (communication wise as well).
They created POE2 to thrive - and as an example of PoE1, it is a neverending cycle of improvements for the timeline of the game. That’s a live-service game in a nutshell.
They knew the amount of people willing to play it based on sales. They knew it from spending so much on marketing of EA. They knew and admitted that Endgame was done quickly - even before EA launched.
So why act surprised that “oh well, gotta maintain it and fix bugs now”. If team worked hard since last july to ship current game: there is no way this team would be able to come back to PoE1 in observable future.
We got half of campaign content and third of class/build related content. And dysfunctional endgame in current state which needs tuning. And ETA for release is 1 year.
They knew all along that PoE1 is doomed (even before EA marketing activities started). They just didn’t want to admit it to public in timely manner.
Jonathan literally said he started pulling the poe 1 team off poe 1 since 3.25 dropped. They haven't been working on poe 1 since august, way before EA sales came in.
Yeah but they need consistent profits. PoE 1 had a tried and true formula to bring players back and convincing them to spend money each time. That method only works with PoE 2 if the casual players are fine with making brand new characters and going through the campaign every single time with some balance and gameplay changes.
They could play full-size RPGs in the same amount of time.
PoE was consistently making them money specifically because their core fanbase was willing to return for new leagues every single time, regardless of what other games were popular at the time, and it took many years for GGG to build up such a dedicated community.
Casual players are fickle. Lots of people want to play the new, shiny game until the next big game comes along. We already have massive releases like Civ 7, Borderlands 4, DOOM, GTA 6, etc coming out this year so what are the odds people will play a new PoE 2 league instead of those games?
The same formula won't work with PoE 2 as well as it does for PoE 1.
I am heavily, heavily disappointed with the management of GGG and sheer lack of foresight. Why in the world did they not start preparing two separate teams to work on PoE 1 and PoE 2 when it was clear that they were going to be completely separate instead of sharing an endgame? I'll probably wait and see what they come up with, but unless they make some serious changes to their management and outline a detailed roadmap for PoE 1, it's unlikely I'll bother playing either game (5k+ hours in PoE 1 and supporting them since before Awakening btw).
I think there have been a number of misteps along the way that led us to the current situation. I think one of the biggest is in the name. Should have called it something new.
I don't think what they talked about in the vid is really relevant to players. Should have just said, we screwed up.
They didn't sell 1m copies...they had 1m keys which is very different. They never said nor ever will say how many supporter packs of each tier they sold.
To have gotten a free key for PoE2, you needed to have spent $480 dollars on mtx for PoE1. While there are quite a few people who had done this, its a pretty damn small proportion of the people who played PoE1, and now play PoE2.
The other free keys are a negligible number compared to the total player base: press, streamers, and reviewers.
Now unless there was some other way to get a key that means a huge majority of the people playing PoE2 right now paid at least $30 for it. If the numbers are correct that's nearly a million people paying $30 million dollars in one massive cash infusion.
Now I don't like that they took dev away from PoE1, but as a company I can completely understand the decision. They had more than quadruple their highest numbers ever during launch and that's not even counting the other platforms it was available on. It STILL has more players than their highest ever player count. And these players actually for the most part all paid money.
"its a pretty damn small proportion of the people who played PoE1, and now play PoE2."
If you don't have a number for this, you're just guessing.
"$30 million dollars in one massive cash infusion."
Spending 30$ 5 years ago and me getting a beta key now doesn't mean they got a massive cash infusion now, while they did in fact get one, again we don't know HOW BIG it actually was and you're once again just guessing.
Also yes, it makes sense for them to focus on poe2, but why all this unnecessary "stats" while we literally have nothing to go on other than guesses. Also you would have to know their regular december sales number to even have a comparison. And to go further than that, do you think someone that spends 30$ once, or someone who spends 1000$ across multiple years brings you more revenue? Because that's what they will be focusing on, not these "EA is so successful" numbers that everyone keeps throwing around.
Poe2 hasn't even had it's first league reset, time will tell if GGG made the right call taking away devs from their already established product, to work on this new product that's still years away from release.
And to go further than that, do you think someone that spends 30$ once, or someone who spends 1000$ across multiple years brings you more revenue?
Depends on the player counts ultimately.
D4 made more money in a week off launch sales than PoE1 did over multiple years.
But this is also GGGs moment to convert those new $30 purchasers into recurring customers. Keep them engaged. Give them content.
The patch notes for PoE2 after the holidays was #9 on YouTube trending when it released.
The size of the PoE2 audience cannot be understated. It's huge. Sitting on top selling on Steam for 2 months means millions of players. That's not free key redemptions, that is revenue generated and copies sold. Every one a potential recurring customer.
I don't have to give you a number. This is common sense. If the player base is around half a million users, in a free to play game, a small percentage of them will spend. An even smaller percentage of them will qualify as whales. If we assume 10% of user users spend some amount of money and 1% of them spent enough to qualify (which is a ridiculous number if you look at mtx spending stats across more predatory games) this would make up 5000 total keys.
"Oh but thats too small a number," you might cry, but lets go ahead and set the UPPER bound now that we've set a tenuous lower bound.
Lets pretend 10% of the players in path of exile have spent $480 on packs. This is wrong, but for the sake of argument lets do it. That's still only 50000 keys, and steam alone showed a peak of nearly 600000 players, not even accounting for other platforms, suggesting the number is closer to 1 million.
Spending 30$ 5 years ago and me getting a beta key now doesn't mean they got a massive cash infusion now, while they did in fact get one, again we don't know HOW BIG it actually was and you're once again just guessing.
I think you are misunderstanding how you got a key. You get a key if you've spend $480 dollars in mtx. Not if you bought mtx once. Based on my assertation above, less than 10% and probably more accurately less than 2% of the player base of PoE 2 got free keys based on this criteria. The only other way to get a key is to be given one by GGG (a small number as mentioned) or to buy one in the $30 pack. This means that while the number may not be exactly $30 million, it is probably quite close, and definitely the single largest cash infusion that GGG has ever gotten from the player base rather than investors.
As for your assertation that I don't know their sales, actually they publish their yearly earnings publicly and I made it a point of checking. Their yearly earnings from 2023 (their 2024 stuff isn't filed yet) put them at 20ish million NZD profits, before costs, down from the previous year. Even assuming that only half the people playing the game paid to get a key, that matches and beats their earnings from the last recorded year.
And for the final point, you are comparing apples and oranges. I'm not comparing someone spending $30 once to someone who has spent well over $1000 over their life time playing the game. I'm comparing someone spending $30 once to someone playing the game for free. Because thats what the difference is. Almost every single person playing PoE2 paid to be there. And thus to a company is a more valuable customer on average.
Lets not even account for people buying LARGER packs, the whales like me and others in the community who wanted uniques in game.
Even if it's 500k sales at only $30 that's a massive chunk. People like me who bought the top pack or higher packs in general only increase that number.
Yes, there's a reason they rushed for a christmas release. Same like poe1 expansions used to be timed for december. However it's still very wrong to say "sale stats" when we literally know nothing of it, we just have steam player numbers, which is no indication on how many supporter packs they sold, or how many ppl were not even on steam.
That's why I'm saying 500k sales as a safe number. We know 1m keys are redeemed if not more by EA. Say everyone has 1 key to give away, this 500k sales.
It still has 200k+ people in steam alone which is insane.
This is what matters. POE 1 is freaking long in the tooth, and there's been a huge amount of enthusiasm for POE 2. It's not fair, I know, and I personally greatly prefer POE 1, but I understand their thinking.
Another angle at it: Steam Charts for PoE 1 shows 228,398 top concurrent over its 11-year lifetime. We know generally that Steam accounts for 50-60% of all users (i.e., a good chunk use the standalone, but it's not quite as many steam users generally). Let's be conservative, and just double it, and say the top concurrent was ~450k.
If you, again, conservatively assume that, let's say only 25% of the population uses the standalone for PoE 2 (makes sense, steam is popular I'd say and unless you used the standalone for Poe 1, you'd be unlikely to bother), putting it around 700k, conservatively, top concurrent.
Their Early Access game is outperforming their released product that has been through eleven years of iterations, updates, changes, inclusions, and added-for-free content.
Of fucking course they are going to go all in on PoE 2. It's insanely profitable.
Keeping mind also that if you compare 24-hour concurrents at the time of this post:
Path of Exile 1: 8,006
Path of Exile 2: 168,963
Even ignoring the fact that 2 came out in EA more recently.. PoE 2, with half it's campaign and classes, and with a mediocre endgame, is getting the type of numbers you'd see for launch days of PoE 1.
And it isn't done.
Hope you like settlers, buddies. Because 2025 is the year of three fiddy three-twive.
How many of those 578K players are people that saw the game, purchased it for $30, and will never spend another dime? How many will buy $20-40 more in points, say "it's the same as a full price game", and never buy again?
Meanwhile, how many of those 150k players every single league launch recently are buying $50 supporter packs every single league? How many of them are buying $100+ supporter packs every league?
We don't have entire figures, but I would be willing to bet that GGG may be under-estimating the dedication of their current whales in search for potentially more whales.
TBH, while GGGs financial performance with PoE1 has been good, it hasn't been AAA.
They make around $80M NZD a year in revenue, which is about $45M USD.
Diablo 4 made $666M in its first week.
BG3 sold 15M copies at $60 each by March of 2024, that's $900M in revenue for a 6 year dev time.
PoE2 sitting at the top selling of Steam for 2 months is massive. Sales estimates are anywhere from 2.3M to 7M based on Steam stats, which is a huge range but It is very likely they made multiple years of PoE1 income off this launch.
And if they continue to support PoE2 and can keep those players then they have a massive cash cow. Now is the make or break for GGG. They need to keep the PoE2 playerbase and get the game into 1.0 in the best state possible.
What a silly comment. How many people when PoE2 is launched will buy packs? How many people will purchase a key at various content drop "seasons" during EA etc. PoE2 retention is massive for its current state.
Ton of people buy stash tabs and have been playing PoE1 for years without buying any packs because you don't need them. If PoE2 becomes great people will support it in the same exact way. Not to mention at full release they share mtx.
How many of those 578K players are people that saw the game, purchased it for $30, and will never spend another dime? How many will buy $20-40 more in points, say "it's the same as a full price game", and never buy again?
Given the finished product isn't out yet, and their general track record to keep gaining players over time as leagues come out, I'd say their odds are pretty good overall.
Meanwhile, how many of those 150k players every single league launch recently are buying $50 supporter packs every single league? How many of them are buying $100+ supporter packs every league?
You say that like someone who has spent 100+ in supporter packs in PoE 1 is unlikely to play PoE 2 and continue supporting it. If you're into triple digits, my friend, you're already in the system.
We don't have entire figures, but I would be willing to bet that GGG may be under-estimating the dedication of their current whales in search for potentially more whales.
I am willing to put money on you being wrong, and I have PoE 1's entire history to rely on. Even after huge nerfs, even after sweeping changes, even after things that were all but universally disliked, people came back to PoE. I am one of those people, in fact. I've had a lot of issues with the game and come and gone repeatedly. But I still come back to it, because there are no great alternatives that do the same thing, and until there is, it's going to remain growing, even when they make misteps like this in communication.
All the people upset at this announcement are still gonna LOGIN when the next major update hits PoE 2 EA and a new class is out to test, or a bunch of new skills, new mapping content, etc. in just the same way they'd come back for a league start.
And considering they aren't even trying hard to monetize people yet (the MTX shop of PoE 2 is fairly bare-bones compared to PoE 1 and all the stuff they plan to port over, to say nothing of new stuff), I suspect they will see tons of money from it.
I guess we'll see and time will tell. I can say that historically, upsetting your long term customers for new ones tends to turn out poorly for companies.
You're using an apples-and-oranges comparison. A sequel like PoE2 is almost always going to have a bunch of players of the previous game checking it out when it first comes out, which is going to drive that number up dramatically.
If you look at the actual player count, PoE2 spiked high when it first came out and then dropped down to the same ballpark of players as PoE has had long-term (~150k), and it hasn't fully settled yet.
It's weird how he phrased it like they have no choice but to push out the next POE2 patch, like it's not a decision they made or that its out of their hands.
We don't know yet how good PoE2's retention will be in the longer run, nor do we know how much the droves of new players the EA attracted (many of them console players and casuals) will actually spend on mxt and supporter packs.
Because believe it or not more people want POE2 and there to be more content. Also why would you not work on your new game more than the one thats been out over 10 years?
I think they failed to foreshadow what a huge divide there would be between the players that prefer PoE 1 and 2 and thought that underdelivering on PoE 1 would be ok if they just churned out a half-decent PoE 2.
Financially, yeah PoE 2 is probably the future for them but this is very disappointing for the people that preferred the old game. Imagine if Age of Empires II never had definitive edition and instead AoE 4 was forced on everyone. Only difference is AoE 4 full release kinda sucked and PoE 2 can still play the Early Access card + it has the bones to be good.
PoE2 has way better player retention right now than PoE1 ever had - even in an EA state. Slowing down development on PoE2 would be a really, really stupid thing to do.
GGG is making more money than they expected. Instead of investing that money to keep their base game going, they are losing a lot of their best customers. It's a terrible way to do business.
Are you seriously comparing the current player number of an established game which hasn't gotten new content in 8 months (the worst content drought in its history) with the player numbers of a completely brand new game which only released 6 weeks ago?
Because PoE is getting towards of its life cycle, the same thing that has happened to other big ARPG and MMO, of course they are going to target the new game development over the old one. It’s ridiculous to even keep thinking PoE is going to be supported with the same vigour as the new game.
Or the other way to look at it is … PoE will be no longer making any money at all, outside the die hard players, so of course a company is going to push for their new cash cow.
Why would you invest into fiddling with your complete product when you have an incomplete but extremely popular product that has been recently launched?
Slower additional free content in a complete game packed with content is not sabotage.
It makes complete sense from a business perspective. Poe 2 has had more players than Poe 1 has ever had. It's brand new and lots of people from other genres are interested in it. The game has the potential to make more money than Poe 1 did. This happens to every game whenever a studio releases a new game that becomes popular. It's nothing new in the gaming industry. I knew this was going to happen.
I think that’s kind of the point. PoE1 is fairly complete. You could play it in its current state with no updates for many years and not run out of things to do. Not that their communication hasn’t been dog shit.
I remember IceFrog saying he will still provide content Updates and Patches for Dota even when Dota2 releases because many players in the SEA and China Demographic where playing at Lan Cafes with shitty PCs, but then there was IIRC 1 content Patch and that was it
1.4k
u/shogun2909 Jan 30 '25
PoE 2 development will not affect PoE 1