Divided We Fall: time for change

Situation assesement

These three years were a blast, it was good fun, we worked with a lot of amazing people, it was really cool. The game is officially out of Early Access. There was a lot of very positive feedback about the progress since the game’s Steam debut. But it did not exactly go as expected. Florian and I will still be going after bugs and crashes, and we will gradually bring more modding tools to the game in order to empower all of you, in the community. We are looking for smart ways to bring the game to more people. More explanations about that in the second section below. But first, some context: The game was officially launched over a month ago. We expected it to be the moment of truth for Divided We Fall, the moment where we can grow the community with a very high peak of activity. The activity ended up being a lot smaller than expected. During the whole Early Access, we worked a lot on the feedback we got: Too much grenade spam? We made a lot of improvements on the gunfight mechanics, we made guns a lot more useful, and added extra control over them (did you know you can instantly shoot if you double click on an enemy?). We also made sure that all weapons had their own special uses. Too hardcore for new players? We added a tutorial, we improved the interface to make it more friendly, we added a proper hotkey system, we added special new player rooms. Not enough player activity? We added bots so that veterans could hone their battle skills and new players could learn the basics while waiting for games to start. This big launch was also the opportunity to boost player activity. Thanks to these improvements and the special free week at launch, we expected the number of players to go reach a couple of hundreds or even maybe thousands if we were going to be lucky. Florian had to spend a lot of time on making sure the authentication servers would handle the load. But this is the game industry, it is impossible to predict anything, every decision you take is a bet. We assumed that in the worst case the activity wouldn't be much lower than the Early Access a year ago, because why would it be? The peak amount of concurrent players in game was 70, and games were played 24/7 for about two weeks. When it comes to player activity, it would have been disappointing for the official launch, but that's what we were prepared for, in our planning, these numbers were more or less our worst case scenario. It ended up a being lot worse. We are not sure what hit us the hardest, but a lot went wrong at the same time.

• Because we focused on getting AI in and making sure we could manage the load on our servers we neglected stability and testing. And although we tested more than the Early Access launch, the game was less stable. That was very annoying for everyone, it was our responsibility but we patched all major issues within two days.

• Then, there were some commercial problems. We expected Divided to be featured on the front page of the Steam store, because it was the case on the Early Access launch, and because we thought the free week would make it extra likely to show up there.