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Bethesda and id Software are celebrating with news that Doom: The Dark Ages has officially engaged over 3 million players.
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Single-Player Gaming Is Back as DOOM: The Dark Ages Hits a Major Milestone to Become Id Software’s Biggest Launch Ever
- Thread starter Peter_Brosdahl
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MadMummy76
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Corporate spin, it's their first doom game to be on games pass. Players tried it does not equal players who paid for it.
It produces a third of the players on steam compared to eternal. If their plan was to cut into their own profits by a desperate attempt at promoting their subscription, then it worked. They think piracy cuts into their revenue? Games pass definitely does.
I think subscriptions are a plague, they reduce games to content churned out, and fomo makes players rush through them reducing enjoyment even if it is a good game.
But I think they are doomed as a business strategy, EA and Ubisoft learned it the hard way, I guess MS didn't get the memo yet, or they still think "we will be the exception to the rule"
It produces a third of the players on steam compared to eternal. If their plan was to cut into their own profits by a desperate attempt at promoting their subscription, then it worked. They think piracy cuts into their revenue? Games pass definitely does.
I think subscriptions are a plague, they reduce games to content churned out, and fomo makes players rush through them reducing enjoyment even if it is a good game.
But I think they are doomed as a business strategy, EA and Ubisoft learned it the hard way, I guess MS didn't get the memo yet, or they still think "we will be the exception to the rule"
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This is 100% PR spin. Player engagement numbers are being used to cover up poor sales and mislead people into thinking the game is a huge success. The fact is, it isn't. I know people are going to talk about Game Pass cutting into sales and I absolutely agree that it does. However, successful games still show higher concurrent player counts on Steam. We saw other Game Pass titles do far better than Doom The Dark Ages on Steam.
Doom The Dark Ages is a flop. Why is it a flop? That's the more interesting question. The usual suspects that are responsible for the failure of many recent AA and AAA titles aren't present here. It's not woke. Its not brimming with DEI garbage or left-wing talking points. You'll find no trans ideology stuff, political commentary or anything like that. There is no obvious AI voice work, sloppy coding or game breaking bugs. It doesn't crash all the time or end up being the subject of memes due to its poor quality control, dumb AI or anything like that. Again, none of the usual suspects that plague games like Assassin's Creed Shadows, Dustborn, South of Midnight, Star Wars Outlaws Awakening: Unknown 9, or Concord are present here.
Personally, I don't think its any one thing. I think it comes down to a number of problems. Game Pass is certainly one of them. People can get their fill of the game for $10-$15, so why pay $70 for it? Single player games like this rarely have much replay value and therefore, $70 is a hard pill to swallow. Like it or not, some 60 or 70% of all gaming revenue comes from a handful of live service games. As gross as it is, there is the reality of current market conditions. Perceived value goes even lower given that Doom only takes around 20 hours to fully complete if memory serves.
While Doom 2016 is almost universally praised, Doom Eternal was a bit of a mixed bag for fans of the series. Some people loved the changes to the formula while others (myself included) hated it. I hated the limited chainsaw fuel. I hated the survival horror style ammunition economy. I hated the general map traversal with climbing and platform sections. It just didn't feel like Doom to me. It's the only game up to that point I hadn't finished and even played through multiple times.
While I don't consider anecdotes evidence, many people on various forums talked about their kids knowing little about the franchise and having zero interest in it. Part of this comes down to player tastes, market trends and things like that. The other part of it comes down to a potential lack of marketing. There really wasn't enough advertising or hype built up for the game. Compare this to the hype train of Cyberpunk 2077 or even Assassin's Creed Shadows. Those games had a lot of advertising, merchandising tie-ins and that kind of thing. No, not every game needs that to succeed, but it certainly doesn't hurt. I don't think id and Bethesda did enough to support the game from a marketing perspective.
Then there are other factors like Bethesda's general reputation and id's own reputation for how it treated the Doom 2016 and Eternal composer. I won't get into all that drama and my take on it is probably a bit different than some, but the fact is that it wasn't a good look for id at the end of the day. It looked like they simply didn't pay the composer who brought a much loved sound to the game that had a lot to do with creating the atmosphere of the earlier installments.
I also feel like the forcing of ray tracing on all the time was a mistake. Not just because it hurts performance, but because its a big middle finger to anyone not running a 30-series card or better. Heaven forbid you are at 4K on anything other than a 4080 or better. People running mid-range or low end cards from older series of GPU's are boned on this one and end up getting shafted performance wise without much of an upside graphically as compensation. The game doesn't look much better than Doom Eternal despite that requirement. At least when you tank your performance with Ray Tracing and what not in Cyberpunk 2077, you get a great deal of visual fidelity for it.
Finally, we turn to Doom The Dark Ages itself. The game is better than Eternal in my opinion, but its not amazing. It's decent, but I don't think its worth $70 unless you just want to scratch that nostalgic itch. (Which I did.) The mech and dragon sections have received particularly negative reception from some people, though these are pretty minimal at most. They do feel somewhat half-assed given the overly simplified combat, lack of take down animations and that kind of thing for it. The mechs are slow and clunky and only have a couple of attacks so the combat isn't all that varied or satisfying. It's like the normal combat on foot but more limited and much slower. The dragon flying stuff is decent, though the combat with it is pretty awful. The dragon feels weak and the scenes are mechanically more annoying than anything.
Combat wise, the ammunition economy is better than its predecessor. Enemies are a bit spongy though and a lot of your weapons get depleted often. It doesn't force as much weapon switching as Eternal does but that mechanic is still very much there. You just alternate between guns and the shield for the same thing. The game forces you to use the shield throw and parry mechanics to massive degree. It gets old really fast. It's novelty wears off quickly. You also have enemies that have to be dispatched a certain way and parry's are ultimately how you get through most of the combat. Glory kills are reduced to almost being non-existent. While I thought they were over done in previous games, this game doesn't allow them to happen enough.
The game also spends a great deal of time trying to communicate its story. It has a fair amount of cut scenes, but its really hard to get invested in what is essentially fan-fiction level writing skills applied to the ludicrous story of the original game from the 1990's. It was preposterous in the 1990's but we didn't care. Games weren't taken seriously as a medium at the time so the stories were mostly some loose excuse for the game play to happen. Doom for a lack of a better way to put it takes itself too seriously trying to get you invested in its absurd narrative. Something it never manages to do very well in my opinion.
At the end of the day you have a single-player narrative driven story based FPS game that isn't the best at combat or movement and fails on the story front. The game is pretty, but its not ground breaking on that front. It's steep PC requirements don't feel justified and aren't worth the price of admission.
Doom The Dark Ages is a pure semi-story driven shooter and I think that's refreshing in a way, but I'm not surprised that people aren't really wanting to spend the money on it. Fact is, most shooters these days are either multiplayer affairs, extraction shooter slop fests, or some type of hybrid RPG. We aren't in the early 2000's where shooter/RPG hybrids were awful shooters and mediocre RPGs. These days the technology exists to do both and I just don't think the appetite is there anymore for something as mindless and simplistic as Doom The Dark Ages is. Especially given the relatively complex mechanics for dealing with enemies. Those sabotage player agency as it forces you to use specific methods for dealing with enemies that often makes the game feel more repetitive than it probably is.
Doom The Dark Ages is a flop. Why is it a flop? That's the more interesting question. The usual suspects that are responsible for the failure of many recent AA and AAA titles aren't present here. It's not woke. Its not brimming with DEI garbage or left-wing talking points. You'll find no trans ideology stuff, political commentary or anything like that. There is no obvious AI voice work, sloppy coding or game breaking bugs. It doesn't crash all the time or end up being the subject of memes due to its poor quality control, dumb AI or anything like that. Again, none of the usual suspects that plague games like Assassin's Creed Shadows, Dustborn, South of Midnight, Star Wars Outlaws Awakening: Unknown 9, or Concord are present here.
Personally, I don't think its any one thing. I think it comes down to a number of problems. Game Pass is certainly one of them. People can get their fill of the game for $10-$15, so why pay $70 for it? Single player games like this rarely have much replay value and therefore, $70 is a hard pill to swallow. Like it or not, some 60 or 70% of all gaming revenue comes from a handful of live service games. As gross as it is, there is the reality of current market conditions. Perceived value goes even lower given that Doom only takes around 20 hours to fully complete if memory serves.
While Doom 2016 is almost universally praised, Doom Eternal was a bit of a mixed bag for fans of the series. Some people loved the changes to the formula while others (myself included) hated it. I hated the limited chainsaw fuel. I hated the survival horror style ammunition economy. I hated the general map traversal with climbing and platform sections. It just didn't feel like Doom to me. It's the only game up to that point I hadn't finished and even played through multiple times.
While I don't consider anecdotes evidence, many people on various forums talked about their kids knowing little about the franchise and having zero interest in it. Part of this comes down to player tastes, market trends and things like that. The other part of it comes down to a potential lack of marketing. There really wasn't enough advertising or hype built up for the game. Compare this to the hype train of Cyberpunk 2077 or even Assassin's Creed Shadows. Those games had a lot of advertising, merchandising tie-ins and that kind of thing. No, not every game needs that to succeed, but it certainly doesn't hurt. I don't think id and Bethesda did enough to support the game from a marketing perspective.
Then there are other factors like Bethesda's general reputation and id's own reputation for how it treated the Doom 2016 and Eternal composer. I won't get into all that drama and my take on it is probably a bit different than some, but the fact is that it wasn't a good look for id at the end of the day. It looked like they simply didn't pay the composer who brought a much loved sound to the game that had a lot to do with creating the atmosphere of the earlier installments.
I also feel like the forcing of ray tracing on all the time was a mistake. Not just because it hurts performance, but because its a big middle finger to anyone not running a 30-series card or better. Heaven forbid you are at 4K on anything other than a 4080 or better. People running mid-range or low end cards from older series of GPU's are boned on this one and end up getting shafted performance wise without much of an upside graphically as compensation. The game doesn't look much better than Doom Eternal despite that requirement. At least when you tank your performance with Ray Tracing and what not in Cyberpunk 2077, you get a great deal of visual fidelity for it.
Finally, we turn to Doom The Dark Ages itself. The game is better than Eternal in my opinion, but its not amazing. It's decent, but I don't think its worth $70 unless you just want to scratch that nostalgic itch. (Which I did.) The mech and dragon sections have received particularly negative reception from some people, though these are pretty minimal at most. They do feel somewhat half-assed given the overly simplified combat, lack of take down animations and that kind of thing for it. The mechs are slow and clunky and only have a couple of attacks so the combat isn't all that varied or satisfying. It's like the normal combat on foot but more limited and much slower. The dragon flying stuff is decent, though the combat with it is pretty awful. The dragon feels weak and the scenes are mechanically more annoying than anything.
Combat wise, the ammunition economy is better than its predecessor. Enemies are a bit spongy though and a lot of your weapons get depleted often. It doesn't force as much weapon switching as Eternal does but that mechanic is still very much there. You just alternate between guns and the shield for the same thing. The game forces you to use the shield throw and parry mechanics to massive degree. It gets old really fast. It's novelty wears off quickly. You also have enemies that have to be dispatched a certain way and parry's are ultimately how you get through most of the combat. Glory kills are reduced to almost being non-existent. While I thought they were over done in previous games, this game doesn't allow them to happen enough.
The game also spends a great deal of time trying to communicate its story. It has a fair amount of cut scenes, but its really hard to get invested in what is essentially fan-fiction level writing skills applied to the ludicrous story of the original game from the 1990's. It was preposterous in the 1990's but we didn't care. Games weren't taken seriously as a medium at the time so the stories were mostly some loose excuse for the game play to happen. Doom for a lack of a better way to put it takes itself too seriously trying to get you invested in its absurd narrative. Something it never manages to do very well in my opinion.
At the end of the day you have a single-player narrative driven story based FPS game that isn't the best at combat or movement and fails on the story front. The game is pretty, but its not ground breaking on that front. It's steep PC requirements don't feel justified and aren't worth the price of admission.
Doom The Dark Ages is a pure semi-story driven shooter and I think that's refreshing in a way, but I'm not surprised that people aren't really wanting to spend the money on it. Fact is, most shooters these days are either multiplayer affairs, extraction shooter slop fests, or some type of hybrid RPG. We aren't in the early 2000's where shooter/RPG hybrids were awful shooters and mediocre RPGs. These days the technology exists to do both and I just don't think the appetite is there anymore for something as mindless and simplistic as Doom The Dark Ages is. Especially given the relatively complex mechanics for dealing with enemies. Those sabotage player agency as it forces you to use specific methods for dealing with enemies that often makes the game feel more repetitive than it probably is.
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Niner51
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I'm old school as well and I enjoy DOOM the Dark Ages probably more than the new generation of gamers just because it tried to go back to its roots which I think it has done pretty well IMO. I can't get into the online stuff with most newer games as they keep driving that down our throats lately. I enjoy the more SP experience any more.These days the technology exists to do both and I just don't think the appetite is there anymore for something as mindless and simplistic as Doom The Dark Ages is.
Denpepe
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Given the amount of boomer shooters that are around there is a market for these kind of games, but id's execution has been lacking, the addition of glory kills in DOOM 2016 was more for the fun of it then a necessity, nut they overdid it with eternal, I'll get this one eventually but they shoot focus on what they do best, and that is aking fps games and stop trying to add trends, as this one to me seems like some half assed souls like added gameplay for no good reason.These days the technology exists to do both and I just don't think the appetite is there anymore for something as mindless and simplistic as Doom The Dark Ages is.
MadMummy76
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Games pass is the eternal excuse to those who refuse to accept that a game is a flop. If I had a tin foil hat I'd say the only reason they keep around games pass is so they can spin flops as successes to investors. And I hate it that people are fooled by this tactic.This is 100% PR spin. Player engagement numbers are being used to cover up poor sales and mislead people into thinking the game is a huge success. The fact is, it isn't. I know people are going to talk about Game Pass cutting into sales and I absolutely agree that it does. However, successful games still show higher concurrent player counts on Steam. We saw other Game Pass titles do far better than Doom The Dark Ages on Steam.
However I don't believe that people refuse to pay full price for single player games. It's just that this particular game is not that exciting.
I feel like most studios forgot how to make a good game, I can't even remember the time when I last saw a game trailer that was exciting. It must have been before 2020. I fear GTA VI will be no exception. It will be safe, lobotomized, inoffensive, handholding. And I hope I'm wrong on this.
DrezKill
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Yeah, cuz it sure seems like Baldur's Gate 3 sold pretty well. I mean yeah it has multiplayer in it, but it is not a multiplayer game per se, just a single-player experience that can also be played in co-op. And another example of a game that is available DRM-free selling well.However I don't believe that people refuse to pay full price for single player games. It's just that this particular game is not that exciting.
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Stoly
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Corporate spin, it's their first doom game to be on games pass. Players tried it does not equal players who paid for it.
It produces a third of the players on steam compared to eternal. If their plan was to cut into their own profits by a desperate attempt at promoting their subscription, then it worked. They think piracy cuts into their revenue? Games pass definitely does.
I think subscriptions are a plague, they reduce games to content churned out, and fomo makes players rush through them reducing enjoyment even if it is a good game.
But I think they are doomed as a business strategy, EA and Ubisoft learned it the hard way, I guess MS didn't get the memo yet, or they still think "we will be the exception to the rule"
While I won't says subscriptions are a blessing, they are pretty good IMO, particularly gamepass. We get to choose from hundreds of games for a price lower than a single game. The best thing is I don't even have to pay every month.
My kid gets hooked on a steam or Epic game? No gamepass for a couple of months, I've saved mucho dinero that way.
And if I really like a game that is no longer on GP, I can always buy it at a much lower price elsewhere.
Brian_B
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I think it's the combination of two things here
One is, $70 is steep. Two is, a plain single player FPS today is ... stale? old fashioned?.
All it would take is one influencer saying "OMG BEST GAME EVER" and it would take off like crazy though. I think today's crowd, either it's Flavor of the Month, or Mashup of various genres, or Retro Flavor of the Month (which right now is probably turned-based combat thanks to BG3)
One is, $70 is steep. Two is, a plain single player FPS today is ... stale? old fashioned?.
All it would take is one influencer saying "OMG BEST GAME EVER" and it would take off like crazy though. I think today's crowd, either it's Flavor of the Month, or Mashup of various genres, or Retro Flavor of the Month (which right now is probably turned-based combat thanks to BG3)
Brian_B
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Agree - I've subscribed a few times to GP, usually because there's some new game that I'm on the fence about, and $15 to play is a lot cheaper than $50/60/70/80/wtf. A lot fewer regretful purchases that way, but the GP library isn't strong enough to keep me subscribed for any length of time.While I won't says subscriptions are a blessing, they are pretty good IMO, particularly gamepass. We get to choose from hundreds of games for a price lower than a single game. The best thing is I don't even have to pay every month.
My kid gets hooked on a steam or Epic game? No gamepass for a couple of months, I've saved mucho dinero that way.
And if I really like a game that is no longer on GP, I can always buy it at a much lower price elsewhere.
Which does play into the "cuts sales" argument - but at the same time, it boosts GP Subscription count, so I don't know that MS minds one way or the other.