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Not having the manpower is a weird reason to drop POE1. Hire more people; all signs indicate the games can sustain them. GGG isn't a new studio and the decision to support both is also a couple years old now. At any point along the way they could've added even more manpower to fit the increased demands of running both while giving those employees time to get up to speed. If anything, this is a lack of managerial foresight, which seems to be a trend.
Even if they "finish" POE2, there's still going to be a large contingent of people who only want to play one of the games. I have a very hard time believing that something as successful as POE1 will suddenly stop being profitable. Consider that POE1 has been so successful that they've sustained a 100+ person studio for years where maybe 70%+ of their man hours aren't even spent working on POE1. Financially, I don't know why this would even be a consideration for the business.
Additionally, "finishing" POE2 is such a nebulous thing in the first place. It's a live service game that's intended to frequently get new content. There is no finished. At some point they can rebrand it 1.0, but that's mostly just the changing of a name.
I really hope the amount of backlash this has generated knocks some sense into their management and turns the ship in the right direction, but I'm a bit pessimistic right now.
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On February 05 2025 04:47 Craton wrote:
Not having the manpower is a weird reason to drop POE1. Hire more people; all signs indicate the games can sustain them. GGG isn't a new studio and the decision to support both is also a couple years old now. At any point along the way they could've added even more manpower to fit the increased demands of running both while giving those employees time to get up to speed. If anything, this is a lack of managerial foresight, which seems to be a trend.
Even if they "finish" POE2, there's still going to be a large contingent of people who only want to play one of the games. I have a very hard time believing that something as successful as POE1 will suddenly stop being profitable. Consider that POE1 has been so successful that they've sustained a 100+ person studio for years where maybe 70%+ of their man hours aren't even spent working on POE1. Financially, I don't know why this would even be a consideration for the business.
Additionally, "finishing" POE2 is such a nebulous thing in the first place. It's a live service game that's intended to frequently get new content. There is no finished. At some point they can rebrand it 1.0, but that's mostly just the changing of a name.
I really hope the amount of backlash this has generated knocks some sense into their management and turns the ship in the right direction, but I'm a bit pessimistic right now.
It would seem they can afford to do so yes but here is a small asterisk.
I don't know how many extra developers your going to find in New Zealand. At this point their location might be what is holding them back the most.
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Ah yes, hire more chefs for the kitchen. Always the right answer.
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On February 05 2025 02:17 Miragee wrote:
The fact that GGG has been churning out whole leagues with so much content more or less every 3 months is insane. Bumping the cadance to 4 month or more would actually be more healthy imho but that's a whole different story. The fact is, if you look at game development timeframes in general the PoE community has been spoiled but they don't seem to recognise this at large. To me, again, the issue is that GGG/Jonathan seem to have had the same unrealistic expectations for themselves. It's baffling and could have been avoided and communicated. Which comes back to the point in the previous paragraph that Jonathan might just not be that good of a manager for two games - a position he might have stumbled into fairly recently to be fair.
[...] Just on paper it should be doable for them to allocate 20-25 people to PoE1 once PoE2 is fully released but that's my personal guess based on no inside experience whatsoever... It won't be easy but other studios have done it before.
Yea I'm still agreeing with most of what you're saying. Like, there's a reason people made memes about how a whole paid diablo expansion is worse than a random PoE league. The amount of content that PoE1 has had over the years is pretty nuts. I think that amount of production led them to bite off more than they can chew.
Other studios have successfully ran multiple live service games, so it's possible that GGG can too. And it's not like some moral quandary they have to sacrifice for, it makes financial sense to corner the market. This whole situation is a huge misstep, yeah, but they have had those before and bounced back. Will have to see if they can restore trust
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On February 05 2025 06:59 Southlight wrote:
Ah yes, hire more chefs for the kitchen. Always the right answer.
They didn't have enough developers, so they poached them from POE1 to help out.
They now don't have developers on POE1.
This isn't too many chefs in the kitchen; it's none at all.
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https://www.grindinggear.com/?page=careers
They're hiring.
The problem is it's never as quick and simple as simply "hire more devs." There's onboarding, there's ramp-up, there's inserting into the right teams, I mean you can start hiring now and realistically the pay-off is probably next year. And I'm sure it's also not as simple as hiring more developers, but hiring project managers, testers, the whole shebang. If team leads are all stuck on POE2 because of all those questions and issues they addressed during the Q&A there's going to be a ginormous expertise and knowledge gap from the top and you can't simply hire more game developers off the street to work on POE1. And prior to POE2 EA I imagine they didn't have much of a greenlight from above (ie. Tencent) to simply upscale staff by like 20%.
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I'd be really surprised if Tencent has little to anything to do with their day to day work or staffing. That's not really their MO.
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Tencent has to do with their budgeting and it costs a metric fuckton of money to hire and train what essentially amounts to an entirely new project team, or teams even.
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On February 05 2025 14:53 Southlight wrote:
Tencent has to do with their budgeting and it costs a metric fuckton of money to hire and train what essentially amounts to an entirely new project team, or teams even.
I was under the impression while owned by Tencent they still operate fully independent
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No one is ever fully independent once they're owned.
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i have a running bet of 100E that nothing will happen in poe1 'till late november/early december but even then, it'll be some krangled stuff in what i'll call 'a holyday money grab run'.
plus, what i don't see talked about in here, is how shit a vocal poe1 community was towards some GGG devs/staff; people even retired/took a back seat at the company because of it.
why would GGG care now about those people?; 'cause they're whining? ...
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On February 05 2025 14:53 Southlight wrote:
Tencent has to do with their budgeting and it costs a metric fuckton of money to hire and train what essentially amounts to an entirely new project team, or teams even.
Cite your source.
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On February 06 2025 03:11 Craton wrote:Show nested quote +On February 05 2025 14:53 Southlight wrote:
Tencent has to do with their budgeting and it costs a metric fuckton of money to hire and train what essentially amounts to an entirely new project team, or teams even. Cite your source.
There are no BoD announcements from 10c about GGG, but we know in 2018 before 10c invested in them they had 115 employees and they upscaled to 130 between 2018 and 2019 (https://mmos.com/news/tencent-buys-majority-stake-path-exile-developer-grinding-gear-games). Five years later they are said to be around 160 employees (https://rocketreach.co/grinding-gear-games-profile_b44354b6fdfb2bb6) which implies 10c isn't simply feeding them money to become a ginormous studio. Financial statements from 2024 indicate that POE1's profitability more-or-less halved in 2023 (https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/profit-nearly-halves-at-nzs-largest-video-game-firm-grinding-gear-games/KNAMW6SP7BD7FEKGWDSBIYCG7A/) though we haven't seen 2024 statements just yet to see if it ticked upward. None of this would point to 10c simply splurging money to increase staff size at GGG significantly enough to simply add more sprint teams to support POE1 especially if it's not exactly growing profits (again, caveat that we don't see 2024 numbers yet). And if 10c isn't going to bankroll them with a blank check, I would not expect a medium-size company like this to go hogwild and risk losses in order to increase staff just because they're releasing a new game in EA.
Again, none of this isn't to say they aren't seriously considering increasing their staff size now especially if POE2 EA sales can be used to persuade 10c BoD (remember that Wilson and co. seem to be out now so they almost certainly report to and need permission from 10c to increase annual budget). But that means they would have started hiring in earnest and restructuring potential additional staff beginning around December or January. Given personal experience with onboarding developers and putting together new teams without necessarily having the luxury of simply sliding over a program-level manager/leader over, as said, it could be next year that anyone sees benefits of new hires.
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On February 06 2025 02:29 xM(Z wrote:
plus, what i don't see talked about in here, is how shit a vocal poe1 community was towards some GGG devs/staff; people even retired/took a back seat at the company because of it.
why would GGG care now about those people?; 'cause they're whining? ...
I mean, the community is not entirely consisting of this vocally abusive minority.
On February 06 2025 03:58 Southlight wrote:Show nested quote +On February 06 2025 03:11 Craton wrote:On February 05 2025 14:53 Southlight wrote:
Tencent has to do with their budgeting and it costs a metric fuckton of money to hire and train what essentially amounts to an entirely new project team, or teams even. Cite your source. There are no BoD announcements from 10c about GGG, but we know in 2018 before 10c invested in them they had 115 employees and they upscaled to 130 between 2018 and 2019 (https://mmos.com/news/tencent-buys-majority-stake-path-exile-developer-grinding-gear-games). Five years later they are said to be around 160 employees (https://rocketreach.co/grinding-gear-games-profile_b44354b6fdfb2bb6) which implies 10c isn't simply feeding them money to become a ginormous studio. Financial statements from 2024 indicate that POE1's profitability more-or-less halved in 2023 (https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/profit-nearly-halves-at-nzs-largest-video-game-firm-grinding-gear-games/KNAMW6SP7BD7FEKGWDSBIYCG7A/) though we haven't seen 2024 statements just yet to see if it ticked upward. None of this would point to 10c simply splurging money to increase staff size at GGG significantly enough to simply add more sprint teams to support POE1 especially if it's not exactly growing profits (again, caveat that we don't see 2024 numbers yet). And if 10c isn't going to bankroll them with a blank check, I would not expect a medium-size company like this to go hogwild and risk losses in order to increase staff just because they're releasing a new game in EA. Again, none of this isn't to say they aren't seriously considering increasing their staff size now especially if POE2 EA sales can be used to persuade 10c BoD (remember that Wilson and co. seem to be out now so they almost certainly report to and need permission from 10c to increase annual budget). But that means they would have started hiring in earnest and restructuring potential additional staff beginning around December or January. Given personal experience with onboarding developers and putting together new teams without necessarily having the luxury of simply sliding over a program-level manager/leader over, as said, it could be next year that anyone sees benefits of new hires.
Here's my completely speculative take on the information you posted: Most of this was during Covid when it was insanely hard to hire, especially overseas and especially in New Zealand, which had some of the hardest Covid lockdowns, shutting down almost all inbound flights. Profitability likely almost halved in 2023 because they were finally able to hire again, increasing their employee count by a significant amount. New employees at GGG were almost certainly allocated towards PoE2 these past few years, which would of course hurt the profitability of PoE. It's a longterm investment.
I'm completely unsure about Tencent "forking money" to GGG outside of their initial buyout. I was under the assumption that GGG would have to work with their own finances and are making investment calls (i.e. hiring) dependent upon income (i.e. PoE1 shop sales). They would have to justify stuff in shareholder meetings I'm sure but I kinda doubt Tencent governs all of GGG's finances.
Regarding your second paragraph, I currently don't have any thoughts to add.
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Your article is paywalled, but I don't see anything which points to Tencent micromanaging GGG at the financial level. This all sounds like pure speculation.
There are some weird financial NZ laws that Chris once talked about in an interview way back (probably circa Expedition) where they've had to carry all the years of POE2 related things forward because it hadn't been released yet. I have no idea how that's been tying into their financial statements, especially as they got closer to its release. Presumably there are a lot of additional costs incurred that went with aggressively testing everything, though its hard to say how early that would've started.
Per their interviews, their income has always been tightly tied to the league schedule and 2023 saw the number of leagues drop from 4 to 3, so it's no surprise to see them lose a large chunk of income.
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Imma play KC:D2 anyway for the forseeable future. When I'm done I hope GGG have sorted this all out and PoE 2 has some new content
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On February 07 2025 18:41 Harris1st wrote:
Imma play KC:D2 anyway for the forseeable future. When I'm done I hope GGG have sorted this all out and PoE 2 has some new content
Dynasty Warriors Origins and Monster Hunter Wilds for me. Playing the beta for MHW atm.
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On February 08 2025 01:44 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 07 2025 18:41 Harris1st wrote:
Imma play KC:D2 anyway for the forseeable future. When I'm done I hope GGG have sorted this all out and PoE 2 has some new content Dynasty Warriors Origins and Monster Hunter Wilds for me. Playing the beta for MHW atm.
i'm on FF VII for me. So far, the new event doesn't really inspired me, the new ascendency doesn't seem that fun... will see
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k, now with the idols for "atlas tree" and all of those new ascendency (didn't knew there would be that many)... I'm hype !!
still don't know which one 'ill go first (probably Scion-Scavenger) but for sure I'm gonna go Puppeteer second.
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EPT
