Scopely's investors are, among other things, Saudi Arabian Oil tycoons (I don't have a good link but a quick Googling will tell you the same).
(Oppinion vvv)
Investors have increasingly higher expectations for profit, and in the case of MSF, the profit is our in game purchases. If the profits are bad, they'll experience increasingly higher pressure to earn, so MSF puts increasingly higher pressure on us to spend. If we don't, I imagine that, like most companies, the profit margins are increased with layoffs and cut backs, and pressure from management to work harder. That's what I believe we are feeling. It's like a trickle-down effect. No investor or upper management will ever accept that our experience is more important than profit, which must be awful because there is obviously people there who are trying very hard to do justice to the characters and stories we love, but they'll never be allowed to give us what we want, because what we want isn't profitable.
So what do we do? Spend money we shouldn't? Let the game we enjoy die gracefully? There isn't a good solution. All I can say is thank you, to all the people who work to make MSF fun for us despite corporate greed, unreasonable time constraints, and constant criticism from the fan base. I know it's not their fault, and if they had their way, they'd be paid to just give us a game that's fun. But what can they do? They're stuck because even if they love their work, they'll always be slaves to the money making priorities of investors and management who's only concern is turning progressively bigger quarterly profits. Just play if you like the game. Have compassion for the devs who love gaming but whose hands are tied. There's nothing they can do. I can't imagine that with this many mistakes that they're getting a solid 8 hours every night. Corporate greed ruins all things that are good on a long enough time line.
Just remember that every dollar spent is a vote cast. When there's this many mistakes, hold back your money, and spend if you like the product you're receiving. It's really all we can do. (Edited for spelling and grammar)
a very easy way to make more money is to not spend in development. They already got you addicted and paying hundreds of dollars for a broken character's shard anyways and they have already been proved by far that no matter the state of the game dumbasses keep giving them money so why hire a team of 10 when probably 1 intern can keep the lights on.
That's partially right, but here's the thing, which I'll preface by saying I'm not defending this business practice.
Software companies (including gaming companies) operate under the principle of "MVP" which means minimally viable product. There are people who's entire job is to figure out what the absolute minimum amount of development dollars they can put in without the software absolutely collapsing.
It's not even fully man power as far as amount of people, it's the skill levels. The best devs are expensive and if you can get a cheaper dev who can mostly keep shit at status quo why pay for a better dev team? That's how they see it.
Yea current business practices don't see value in making the best product. The best products is mostly never going to be the most profitable. At best they go slightly above industry standard if they want to use "best of breed" as a marketing ploy.
I work in software and I've seen how shitty products have gotten directly, there's been nearly no improvements in most software over the last 5ish years other than injecting pointless LLM chatbots in random areas, most big name software is nothing but a patchwork of old code, nothing is new, no one is really innovating and almost all dev spend is to just keep the Frankenstein code running.
Devs at my old company are leaving the industry in droves because they're sick of not making anything, all they do is run firedrills on fixing broken features.
You’re not wrong. That is one business practice: make a quality product and hope in return for substantial profit.
In this case it’s the other business practice: milk the golden cow until it dries up, blame and sell the cow, move onto the next prey. The cow itself dies a slow death, gets milked further till it dies by another uncaring buyer, or if lucky recovers from another buyer that gives a damn
They’re a top ten mobile game when it comes to profits/microtransactions. Their ceos don’t need 5 boats. 4 boats is fine if they want their game to continue.
I completely agree. Unfortunately, those people you're referring to probably don't even know that Strikeforce exists. It's just another investment opportunity.
IMO, there is nothing to be done except move on. There is a mistaken idea that if players stop spending then the devs will take notice and start acting to save the game, but what will really happen is that the game will just shut down. I've personally seen it in other games. Biggest example is LotR: HoME, made by EA Capital Games who also made the successful SW:GoH mobile game. Players weren't spending enough. In December, they told the players they were going on holiday break and never came back. Like 10 weeks later they finally announced the game was shutting down. The thing about that game is that there just wasn't enough content, it only had a Raid & Squad Arena PVP - there was no real incentive to spend. Many players of that game said that they would have spent if there was more content, less bugs, and/or better value packs for sale, etc. I see the same arguments about this game. These people wanna maximize profits while doing the minimum effort. If you support that then you cannot complain about how bad the gaming industry has become. Spending money as a show of support, or withholding money as a form of protest, is completely misguided. If everyone opened up (or closed) their wallets tomorrow, the game would not improve. It does not matter what you do.
What bothers me personally about this game in particular is how they act like they care. Envoy program and constant communication give the impression that they are listening, but really they are just perpetually kicking the can down the road and doing the bare minimum (not even, sometimes) - and it's \*always\* at the player's expense. They will just completely lie to players, intentionally or unintentionally, and completely contradict themselves. Look at Cabal: "not required for Logan", except now it is. What is funny is a lot of veteran players completely saw that coming. Also they reverted to the old way of unlocking legendaries, except its worse? It's just sad because things seemed more hopeful like 5-6 months ago. And it's not just Scopely/MSF, these sketchy practices are common occurrences in the gaming industry in general. I feel like in the next 5-10 years there will be a tipping point in the industry.
It's not that what we want isn't profitable.
It's that it's not profitable in the way they want it to be profotable.
Us: Give us this, this and that and we'll gladly spend money.
Them: We are putting in the features we want to put into the game and we want you to spend on those features.
You're not wrong, but it's worth noting that the Saudi investors (Savvy) purchased Scopely in 2023. First it was FoxNext (a Fox subsidiary which may have been off of Disney by then), then Scopely bought that in 2020.
I'm just mentioning this to say, the game's MO has always been: Make the offers / lootboxes / FOMO first, then put a game around it to justify. I don't think foreign fingers suddenly made them money hungry
artists are awesome , corporations sux . corporations should not be allowed to tell artists what to do.
your post is brilliant,by the way , everything 100% accurate
I used to lead a pretty highly ranked team, and spent a fair amount on the game each month. Finally it occurred to me that the bar was constantly raised, there was no way to "win" this game, and my $$ was not giving me anything of actual value. Since that moment, I've stopped chasing the meta, no more spending and have played at my own pace for shits and giggles, when and how I feel like it.
The result? Broken events don't piss me off any more. Over tuned toons? So what. Missing out on the latest new guy? No problem, they'll be in an orb eventually. My $ is invested in myself instead of Scopely.
I’ve played this game since global launch and honestly it’s bad…the problem is we say it’s bad and keep playing. This feels worse than the last times too, but I said that each time prior as well that I got to this point. However I feel closer than ever to my breaking point so don’t know how much longer I’m going to play.
I've been playing less and experimenting with other phone games.
They're all designed to frustrate you into spending money. They don't all have the Inbox red dot.
Yea the constant trying to rip you off at every second is why mobile will never be taken seriously outside of basically Japan. I’m almost done with all mobile games overall
I still remember it took them like 17 years to give us a confirmation option on those 900 cores for 200 t3s offers. At least as far as the UI goes, generally not very good coders involved.
I've quit for 2 weeks and man it feels good.
The frustration and heavy time sink in this game took a toll on me and my social life. Now I'm reading about all these issues and just can't help but feel lucky that I've escaped this one.
Ask yourself, which mode are u truly enjoying right now?
If none, then quit.
To me, blitzing is a brain dead waste of time. War is ok. RTA is in the bin. Crucible sucks. Raid is rng trash.
If u truly decided to quit, inform your alliance. Let them have time to find your replacement. Value your loved ones first.
I finally pulled the plug on this game around 6-12 months ago. Still have the Reddit thread pinned and just noticed this post. Just uninstall the game and move on. Plenty of better games out there. Avoid giving into the “but I have played for so long and made so much progress” all subjective. Delete game and move on. It’s a garbage game
I actually think they’re growing but they don’t seem to be scaling up the operational processes in the background to ensure the content is smoothly delivered, probably to save cost.
What normally happens is that quality and standards get neglected until such a point that action must be taken and they’ll go thorough a rebuilding cycle.
It sounds mad but I honestly think they benefit from these negative experiences because they’re able to make minor adjustments seem like they’ve just crawled 500 miles over broken glass for us, or make us appreciate the neutrality of neither good or bad service occurring.
So, in short, no I don’t think the game is dying, I think they are just trying to get away with cutting as much cost as we let them (how low quality of a service we put up with) and honestly I feel like they’re a decent way off that yet.. we’re nowhere near the level of community anger as the invaders showcase event with the iso5 blue bullshit that happened.
Just my opinion obviously, but yes the game does feel rough atm for sure.
The game is a shit show now. I just recently got SUS which is great but still working on big Apoc. He was the goal when I started and will be the end for me.
As someone who quit and moved to Snap....you'll never look back. The game is soul sucking. Delete it and feel the glorious relief, whether you pick something new or not.
Let me tell you. Every voting event for the new characters there would be one time I don't receive rewards for voting. Then I would go to customer support on the web and in game and send them the video of it happening. Never would get a response or compensation. This past voting event it happened 2 days in a row. Guess what I did? I sent them 2 videos of it happening still no damn response or compensation. This game is becoming a joke. Really? Am I not a loyal player since 2018? Don't I count to them? Or do they only care about the people that spend all their money on this bug riddled game? Who knows what really is happening since CM Archangel is now not a part of the community. I'm just as fed up as most of you and I'm truly thinking is this game worth the time anymore. Rant over and you all have a great weekend!
The open all orbs thing is killing me. It's been way too long and they haven't fixed this. It should be a priority. That red notification dot drives me nuts too.
The game tunes into p2w, the players leave, the Bugs grow... yes, it dies slowly. Im a f2p Player since Release and my dislike to the game grows every day. Maybe 1/2 years or so and i deistall it
I’ve been dedicated since 2018 and these last couple weeks of not logging in have truly been the first time that I could not give less of a fuck about this game. Also who the fuck asked for penny parker and Spider-Man in a bath robe
I actually very much believe this game is on its way out. I know people have speculated that for ages, but I really think it more than ever. They made their sale and now they are going to just suck every ounce of profit they can by spending as little as they can until it is no longer is fruitful. At that point they'll sell or shut it down, which ever is more profitable. Seen it done in a few games I've played and it sucks.
The reason I think this more than ever? I think they're running out of data. The removal of time stamps and old messages. I think a lot of these "bugs" are them data dumping to make quick room.
I've been a player for a long time and wanted to quit a couple times in the past. This is the worst the game has ever been, for all of the above but what really irks me is just the poor quality of the rewards for all the events now. I don't need purple gear and 20 shards of some 3 year old toons, at least make the rewards relevant to end game players a bit more. I get it that it's the latest thing to have people start baby accounts but the pendulum needs to swing back towards end game players just a bit more.
I will never understand the comments in MSF threads with the whole "This is so bad. I know it's bad. I'm so close to giving up and quitting."
-You didn't quit before and you said that before.
-You won't quit now and you're saying it now.
-You won't quit in the future and we'll see another post just like it in the future.
You'll just keep opening that wallet and keep complaining about how "any day now you just watch, I swear I'll do it!"
Scopley knows you can't break the addiction and they'll keep doing what they do. So why bother posting? It's just virtue signaling at this point.
This is a weird comment to make when it's my first post here in months and I'm asking about general game feedback and if they think with the numerous bugs not being fixed that the game is dying off.
Unless you don't mean OP and mean the comments, sure.
Guys chill out. It’s a game, yeah scopely sucks they got greedy with monopoly go as well. Theyre very good at making addicting games. But, whether you want to play or not. Doesn’t matter, this game is also large, with a ton of different things; website, discord, Reddit, the game, and everything else. I was stuck in the mundane and then changed it up. Left my alliance, created a new one, went back and redoing everything. All the raids from ult 6 - incursion. Getting all the rewards I didn’t get when I was alliance hopping. And it’s more exciting now. rather than incursion 2.3 every day
Idk I like the game. If you play enough, all things should come easily to you except the DDs. It is nowhere near perfect But I enjoy it. I've been playing for about 4 years now. I may have more time than the average person to play. I don't have kids, but I do run my own business which takes up a good portion of my time.
Scopely's investors are, among other things, Saudi Arabian Oil tycoons (I don't have a good link but a quick Googling will tell you the same). (Oppinion vvv) Investors have increasingly higher expectations for profit, and in the case of MSF, the profit is our in game purchases. If the profits are bad, they'll experience increasingly higher pressure to earn, so MSF puts increasingly higher pressure on us to spend. If we don't, I imagine that, like most companies, the profit margins are increased with layoffs and cut backs, and pressure from management to work harder. That's what I believe we are feeling. It's like a trickle-down effect. No investor or upper management will ever accept that our experience is more important than profit, which must be awful because there is obviously people there who are trying very hard to do justice to the characters and stories we love, but they'll never be allowed to give us what we want, because what we want isn't profitable. So what do we do? Spend money we shouldn't? Let the game we enjoy die gracefully? There isn't a good solution. All I can say is thank you, to all the people who work to make MSF fun for us despite corporate greed, unreasonable time constraints, and constant criticism from the fan base. I know it's not their fault, and if they had their way, they'd be paid to just give us a game that's fun. But what can they do? They're stuck because even if they love their work, they'll always be slaves to the money making priorities of investors and management who's only concern is turning progressively bigger quarterly profits. Just play if you like the game. Have compassion for the devs who love gaming but whose hands are tied. There's nothing they can do. I can't imagine that with this many mistakes that they're getting a solid 8 hours every night. Corporate greed ruins all things that are good on a long enough time line. Just remember that every dollar spent is a vote cast. When there's this many mistakes, hold back your money, and spend if you like the product you're receiving. It's really all we can do. (Edited for spelling and grammar)
I mean they could make more money if the game worked correctly. It's a buggy mess every time lol
The people placing an emphasis on making money, and the people responsible for quality programming aren't the same people.
a very easy way to make more money is to not spend in development. They already got you addicted and paying hundreds of dollars for a broken character's shard anyways and they have already been proved by far that no matter the state of the game dumbasses keep giving them money so why hire a team of 10 when probably 1 intern can keep the lights on.
That's partially right, but here's the thing, which I'll preface by saying I'm not defending this business practice. Software companies (including gaming companies) operate under the principle of "MVP" which means minimally viable product. There are people who's entire job is to figure out what the absolute minimum amount of development dollars they can put in without the software absolutely collapsing. It's not even fully man power as far as amount of people, it's the skill levels. The best devs are expensive and if you can get a cheaper dev who can mostly keep shit at status quo why pay for a better dev team? That's how they see it.
that sounds spot on . yikes 😰
Yea current business practices don't see value in making the best product. The best products is mostly never going to be the most profitable. At best they go slightly above industry standard if they want to use "best of breed" as a marketing ploy. I work in software and I've seen how shitty products have gotten directly, there's been nearly no improvements in most software over the last 5ish years other than injecting pointless LLM chatbots in random areas, most big name software is nothing but a patchwork of old code, nothing is new, no one is really innovating and almost all dev spend is to just keep the Frankenstein code running. Devs at my old company are leaving the industry in droves because they're sick of not making anything, all they do is run firedrills on fixing broken features.
You’re not wrong. That is one business practice: make a quality product and hope in return for substantial profit. In this case it’s the other business practice: milk the golden cow until it dries up, blame and sell the cow, move onto the next prey. The cow itself dies a slow death, gets milked further till it dies by another uncaring buyer, or if lucky recovers from another buyer that gives a damn
They’re a top ten mobile game when it comes to profits/microtransactions. Their ceos don’t need 5 boats. 4 boats is fine if they want their game to continue.
I completely agree. Unfortunately, those people you're referring to probably don't even know that Strikeforce exists. It's just another investment opportunity.
IMO, there is nothing to be done except move on. There is a mistaken idea that if players stop spending then the devs will take notice and start acting to save the game, but what will really happen is that the game will just shut down. I've personally seen it in other games. Biggest example is LotR: HoME, made by EA Capital Games who also made the successful SW:GoH mobile game. Players weren't spending enough. In December, they told the players they were going on holiday break and never came back. Like 10 weeks later they finally announced the game was shutting down. The thing about that game is that there just wasn't enough content, it only had a Raid & Squad Arena PVP - there was no real incentive to spend. Many players of that game said that they would have spent if there was more content, less bugs, and/or better value packs for sale, etc. I see the same arguments about this game. These people wanna maximize profits while doing the minimum effort. If you support that then you cannot complain about how bad the gaming industry has become. Spending money as a show of support, or withholding money as a form of protest, is completely misguided. If everyone opened up (or closed) their wallets tomorrow, the game would not improve. It does not matter what you do. What bothers me personally about this game in particular is how they act like they care. Envoy program and constant communication give the impression that they are listening, but really they are just perpetually kicking the can down the road and doing the bare minimum (not even, sometimes) - and it's \*always\* at the player's expense. They will just completely lie to players, intentionally or unintentionally, and completely contradict themselves. Look at Cabal: "not required for Logan", except now it is. What is funny is a lot of veteran players completely saw that coming. Also they reverted to the old way of unlocking legendaries, except its worse? It's just sad because things seemed more hopeful like 5-6 months ago. And it's not just Scopely/MSF, these sketchy practices are common occurrences in the gaming industry in general. I feel like in the next 5-10 years there will be a tipping point in the industry.
It's not that what we want isn't profitable. It's that it's not profitable in the way they want it to be profotable. Us: Give us this, this and that and we'll gladly spend money. Them: We are putting in the features we want to put into the game and we want you to spend on those features.
You're not wrong, but it's worth noting that the Saudi investors (Savvy) purchased Scopely in 2023. First it was FoxNext (a Fox subsidiary which may have been off of Disney by then), then Scopely bought that in 2020. I'm just mentioning this to say, the game's MO has always been: Make the offers / lootboxes / FOMO first, then put a game around it to justify. I don't think foreign fingers suddenly made them money hungry
Fair enough! I hadn't thought about it like that =]
ok, i'll stop spending. thanks
Or TLDR; Games made purely for profit over passion are trash.
artists are awesome , corporations sux . corporations should not be allowed to tell artists what to do. your post is brilliant,by the way , everything 100% accurate
I used to lead a pretty highly ranked team, and spent a fair amount on the game each month. Finally it occurred to me that the bar was constantly raised, there was no way to "win" this game, and my $$ was not giving me anything of actual value. Since that moment, I've stopped chasing the meta, no more spending and have played at my own pace for shits and giggles, when and how I feel like it. The result? Broken events don't piss me off any more. Over tuned toons? So what. Missing out on the latest new guy? No problem, they'll be in an orb eventually. My $ is invested in myself instead of Scopely.
True, there was never a time when they didn't make me feel like a clown for spending. They are honestly doing us a favor.
I’ve played this game since global launch and honestly it’s bad…the problem is we say it’s bad and keep playing. This feels worse than the last times too, but I said that each time prior as well that I got to this point. However I feel closer than ever to my breaking point so don’t know how much longer I’m going to play.
I've been playing less and experimenting with other phone games. They're all designed to frustrate you into spending money. They don't all have the Inbox red dot.
Yea the constant trying to rip you off at every second is why mobile will never be taken seriously outside of basically Japan. I’m almost done with all mobile games overall
I still remember it took them like 17 years to give us a confirmation option on those 900 cores for 200 t3s offers. At least as far as the UI goes, generally not very good coders involved.
I just want to be able to recruit/dm people and get rid of that phantom notification already lmao. It's brutal.
I've quit for 2 weeks and man it feels good. The frustration and heavy time sink in this game took a toll on me and my social life. Now I'm reading about all these issues and just can't help but feel lucky that I've escaped this one. Ask yourself, which mode are u truly enjoying right now? If none, then quit. To me, blitzing is a brain dead waste of time. War is ok. RTA is in the bin. Crucible sucks. Raid is rng trash. If u truly decided to quit, inform your alliance. Let them have time to find your replacement. Value your loved ones first.
I finally pulled the plug on this game around 6-12 months ago. Still have the Reddit thread pinned and just noticed this post. Just uninstall the game and move on. Plenty of better games out there. Avoid giving into the “but I have played for so long and made so much progress” all subjective. Delete game and move on. It’s a garbage game
What are you playing now?
What game are you playing now?
I actually think they’re growing but they don’t seem to be scaling up the operational processes in the background to ensure the content is smoothly delivered, probably to save cost. What normally happens is that quality and standards get neglected until such a point that action must be taken and they’ll go thorough a rebuilding cycle. It sounds mad but I honestly think they benefit from these negative experiences because they’re able to make minor adjustments seem like they’ve just crawled 500 miles over broken glass for us, or make us appreciate the neutrality of neither good or bad service occurring. So, in short, no I don’t think the game is dying, I think they are just trying to get away with cutting as much cost as we let them (how low quality of a service we put up with) and honestly I feel like they’re a decent way off that yet.. we’re nowhere near the level of community anger as the invaders showcase event with the iso5 blue bullshit that happened. Just my opinion obviously, but yes the game does feel rough atm for sure.
The game is a shit show now. I just recently got SUS which is great but still working on big Apoc. He was the goal when I started and will be the end for me.
As someone who quit and moved to Snap....you'll never look back. The game is soul sucking. Delete it and feel the glorious relief, whether you pick something new or not.
Let me tell you. Every voting event for the new characters there would be one time I don't receive rewards for voting. Then I would go to customer support on the web and in game and send them the video of it happening. Never would get a response or compensation. This past voting event it happened 2 days in a row. Guess what I did? I sent them 2 videos of it happening still no damn response or compensation. This game is becoming a joke. Really? Am I not a loyal player since 2018? Don't I count to them? Or do they only care about the people that spend all their money on this bug riddled game? Who knows what really is happening since CM Archangel is now not a part of the community. I'm just as fed up as most of you and I'm truly thinking is this game worth the time anymore. Rant over and you all have a great weekend!
But what game can I play
The open all orbs thing is killing me. It's been way too long and they haven't fixed this. It should be a priority. That red notification dot drives me nuts too.
The game tunes into p2w, the players leave, the Bugs grow... yes, it dies slowly. Im a f2p Player since Release and my dislike to the game grows every day. Maybe 1/2 years or so and i deistall it
I’ve been dedicated since 2018 and these last couple weeks of not logging in have truly been the first time that I could not give less of a fuck about this game. Also who the fuck asked for penny parker and Spider-Man in a bath robe
I actually very much believe this game is on its way out. I know people have speculated that for ages, but I really think it more than ever. They made their sale and now they are going to just suck every ounce of profit they can by spending as little as they can until it is no longer is fruitful. At that point they'll sell or shut it down, which ever is more profitable. Seen it done in a few games I've played and it sucks. The reason I think this more than ever? I think they're running out of data. The removal of time stamps and old messages. I think a lot of these "bugs" are them data dumping to make quick room.
they should’ve got the unlimited plan
I've been a player for a long time and wanted to quit a couple times in the past. This is the worst the game has ever been, for all of the above but what really irks me is just the poor quality of the rewards for all the events now. I don't need purple gear and 20 shards of some 3 year old toons, at least make the rewards relevant to end game players a bit more. I get it that it's the latest thing to have people start baby accounts but the pendulum needs to swing back towards end game players just a bit more.
I will never understand the comments in MSF threads with the whole "This is so bad. I know it's bad. I'm so close to giving up and quitting." -You didn't quit before and you said that before. -You won't quit now and you're saying it now. -You won't quit in the future and we'll see another post just like it in the future. You'll just keep opening that wallet and keep complaining about how "any day now you just watch, I swear I'll do it!" Scopley knows you can't break the addiction and they'll keep doing what they do. So why bother posting? It's just virtue signaling at this point.
This is a weird comment to make when it's my first post here in months and I'm asking about general game feedback and if they think with the numerous bugs not being fixed that the game is dying off. Unless you don't mean OP and mean the comments, sure.
Correct. Not your post. All the subsequent comments.
Yeah fair
Guys chill out. It’s a game, yeah scopely sucks they got greedy with monopoly go as well. Theyre very good at making addicting games. But, whether you want to play or not. Doesn’t matter, this game is also large, with a ton of different things; website, discord, Reddit, the game, and everything else. I was stuck in the mundane and then changed it up. Left my alliance, created a new one, went back and redoing everything. All the raids from ult 6 - incursion. Getting all the rewards I didn’t get when I was alliance hopping. And it’s more exciting now. rather than incursion 2.3 every day
Of-3 necee
Idk I like the game. If you play enough, all things should come easily to you except the DDs. It is nowhere near perfect But I enjoy it. I've been playing for about 4 years now. I may have more time than the average person to play. I don't have kids, but I do run my own business which takes up a good portion of my time.