You have obviously bad Community management.

Well lets look in some month, but even if the number for PA-Titanswill get 10times bigger,
it will mean über lost 50% of they customers.

How do you figure that exactly?

OKI f I do estimate.
PA : are around 800,000 Owners

PA Titan = 34,114 ± 4,998 = 40.000
Ok Titan 40.000 *10 = 400.000 this will be exactly 50%

Oh I see what you're saying.

Hmmmm, those 1300 people are only 0.16% of the ownerbase of PA according to your own numbers.

O it did get miss leaded here.
It's must not be about who is right or wrong, its obvious the image damage is done.


So how fix.

1 People think its not obvious what über is working on.
2 People think this "ADD" is not enough.
3 People think Early Access, didn't get the right treatment.


So
1 Well just say We are on fix this right and this is our to do list.
like lock for a match planet throwing.

2 Why not make a real DLC ? Like real story missions, maybe around 10 or more.
Like have a Narrator who say =
hey buddy you are back, now here is an important mission to do, its total serious or important , good luck and so on.
And than play a really difficult mission like Krogoth Encounter 3D reloaded.

3 Well apologies by early access.
And give next time equal updates for the Fan base.

They´ve revealed the reason for that several times: Costs! The budget of Supreme Commander was at ~10 Mio total and PA has got a heavier technological aim then Supreme Commander got.

There is no way to get that fixed anymore, as some folks are clearly not in the mood to accept anything. Ubers reasoning wasn´t transparent enough, BUT an official posting the reasons now at Steam Forums won´t help at all!

What does help fixing both points are good (read as: fair, which was something Vanilla didn´t received) reviews---hoping that if the majority realize "hey, it has been enhanced a lot since release" that the ragers will loose their groundings.

I have to make something clear. I am Fan of Total Annihilation.
It was OK for me that PA didn't become, what i actually expected, I do own PA.
So I thought maybe they will make it next time.


Simple, if you want money, make something that deserves money.
Who cares about bad excuses, people expect solutions.


The way über behaved last days, was for me the last drop. It seems this way:

We don't care about the community.
You have an issue , yeah whatever, who cares ? We don't. Deal with it.
We want money , for stuff that everyone else makes for free, even the worst companies like Electronic Arts or Ubisoft.
We are not interested to inform people, what we are up to. PA-Titans was released 1 day after the news , LOL.

Oh no, the next catastrophe. Planetary Annihilation basic/vanilla No longer available on steam.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/233250

Well the decisions of this company are extreme "awkward."

Oh no, they removed base PA and replaced with a copy which is base PA plus more. Disaster!

Well , by shortage of supporters, there will be for sure no more games by über.
Who still think, that after all what happened, people will still support these products ?


Anyway the game was just released and already has this massive issues storm.
Its interesting to see that a lot of bad revives are written,
by people with lot of games and not much revives, or do usually write good revives.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/386070



Actually its just sad. A lot of people did think.
Who needs Publisher like Ubisoft and Electronic Arts, I hate Electronic Arts-, lets us direct support the developers.


Well by the "development " story of PA , it went not the way most people expected.



I just have to Quote Obi-Wan style here.

“You were the chosen one! It was said that you would destroy the Sith "Publishers like Ubisoft or Electronic Arts", not join them…bring balance to the game development, not leave it in darkness! You were my brother Uber Entertainment, and I loved you.”

My brain hurts.

It could be the mental whiplash.

Or it could be the fact that I was checking out the newly-found reviews for TITANS, which include people buying the game, playing it for 0.1 hours then writing a review about how it's a cash grab.

Interestingly enough, in one case, after reviewing base PA a year ago and deciding it wasn't for him.

I wonder what made him, considering the information available about the expansion, buy it, review it, and then refund it. It couldn't possibly be intentionally gaming the review system.

Could it?

People have said the same thing on the last few shitstorms. Basically whenever something noticeable PA happens there will be hate at minimum in the steam forums for some reason or the other. There is always something that can be pulled into the negative and some people love to do it. And always they also say that there are no supporters anymore. So far they've been pretty wrong about that.

I looked over all the different threads - despite the change in tone this topic seemed the most appropriate place for me to make my one post.

A good portion of the staff at Uber helped make games within a niche genre that I have enjoyed immensely the past 20 odd years. Unfortunately, I am passionate enough about it that I am compelled to post against my better judgment because of that, since it looks like civil discourse is possible here. If you're going to TLDR me, do so. Consider this your mini letter-essay warning - I would hide it behind a cut but I don't know how to do so on these forums.

Much of this was avoidable through communication and community management which did not occur. The trolls and angry consumer justice crusaders only sensed weakness and gained so much momentum targeting UBER over Titans precisely because there is an image problem. Quite a few UBER supporters are almost as vitriolic in repeatedly shouting that UBER is awesome and all the complainers just want freebies - that just feeds the trolls and makes the community look as bad to any outsider (like me, I am primarily an offline compstomper) or potential new customers trying to decide if they want to buy into PA.

I intellectually understand the risk of splitting the online community to the game's success as well as the attempt to use backward compatibility to manage it, but I don't emotionally feel it as an offline compstomper. I intellectually understand the early access people being disappointed with not also getting a free copy given how much some of them paid to support UBER, and how they could get furious at being dismissed by UBER supporters out of hand in favor of kickstarters. Personally, I don't emotionally feel that either - I bought in once it reached $30 because while I support the genre and took a chance on PA, that is all I could afford. Either way, I would end up paying for Titans and that dispute doesn't apply to me.

Here's where I get selfish, in a big picture sort of way: Total Annihilation style macroRTS is a niche genre. Most gamedev companies don't like to take risks with it. Cavedog and the GPG we knew are long dead, which isn't an encouragement. The SupCom IP went from THQ to Nordic, the TA IP went to Wargaming.net. No word if they will do anything with them, any time soon, or in the style fans of the genre expect. Then you have freeware SpringTA, PA with UBER, and Ashes of the Singularity coming up from Stardock. As far as I am aware of, that is it. If UBER's issues with communication and community management disadvantage PA and sales suffer, that impacts the prospects of the genre as a whole. Same if UBER goes under. So, as a gamer that likes this genre and selfishly wants it to have a future with more products from any developer, the community mismanagement bothers me a great deal. That doesn't mean I can afford to just throw money at UBER without question or have any obligation to do so, though.

I personally was looking for Forged Alliance 3, on a larger scale. PA was a spiritual relative but by its quirks it did not manage to achieve that for me - a personal quibble as opposed to a criticism. Ashes of the Singularity looks more promising to me in that regard. With that in mind, I am still undecided about whether or not I will buy Titan. It is being presented as an expandalone on the level of Forged Alliance, when I personally perceive that is it somewhere between SupCom2DLC and Core Contingency in the value it actually offers. I don't expect new content for free, but I do expect a bit more overall content at the listed price point. I'm not complaining in saying this. UBER as a company has to do what it has to do and has every right to set the price as it sees fit. On the other hand, I am a consumer with limited funds that has to make careful choices in my purchases. That is just how it is.

But please, for the love of puppies and rainbows, get a handle on your marketing, community management, and press releases. The only way you could make it worse would be by taking Peter Molyneux as your PR spokesperson. I'm sorry if it calls out an employee at UBER with these responsibilities, but you really need to reconsider how it has been dealt with so far. There should have been some lead up to the Titans release, with explanations on what was being done, why it was being done, and the kickstarter backer bonus - you would have had time to manage the negativity, reduce the ability of trolls to acquire any semblance of legitimacy, and possibly change course in a way your company would find acceptable. You should have had a FAQ up with bullet points to slay every accusation of leaving vanilla PA unfinished with a list of promised and checked off implemented features. Instead, almost same day announcement, release, the backer rewards 'scandal', upset customers confused on whether or not the vanilla release is being abandoned, excuses for toxic trolling being let out of Pandora's Box with no way to stuff it all back in, and then the storm of negative review spam risking future sales. To the outsider looking in, much of this seems unforced and avoidable. Please, take steps. Many of you worked on games I love, and even if I didn't get exactly what I wanted in PA I'd prefer to have UBER around. There isn't much I can personally do but write a 'concerned citizen' plea at you about this, though. My personal $13 or $40 isn't going to be the difference for your company's survival at a policy management level.

LOL. If kickstarter had failed, all backers had been refund! EA and Backers taook same risks!

If the Kickstarter had failed, it never would have come to Steam.

That isn't what I've been talking about, though.

If the Kickstarter succeeded, Uber still could've taken peoples' money and not done stuff with it. That is where the risk is. There was a good 6 - 12 months where Uber had taken the KS backers' money and not produced a product yet. For the Steam buyers, there was no such delay. There was no such risk.

There are people who did give out 90 till 50 Euros by Early Access,
wouldn't it be fair at least give for this people PA-Titans ?

That's a funding failure, Kickstarter failures happen long after people's money has been taken. Have you not seen the scams? The projects that never deliver? The ones where the creators end up bankrupting themselves?

There's a reason every project has a risks section.

I cannot wait for Early Access go back into the depths of Hell from which it emerged, and developer transparency to stop at the PR manager. I have seen game, after game, after game with developer interaction and real transparency, or at least translucency, have some of the most negative communities around. Games with Early Access are almost always given terrible stigmas, often referred to as being "scams." The sense of entitlement with these just burns me.

That said, we get it. Most of us understand the frustration of not getting the expansion for free, after buying into alpha/beta/gamma, devoting dozens of hours of time on the forums, and thousands of posts with our ideas. We get that it's a kick in the gut when we put so much effort into supporting PA, but you know what? The Kickstarter backers were almost universally more important (I say almost because spending as much as a high level backer, or missing out by a few days puts you as important as them) than the Early Access backers, so they're getting rewarded for taking the largest portion of the risk by trusting Uber to develop anything. Uber had to pick a line that said "these people get it for free for their support, and these people get it at a significantly reduced rate since they already own it." Using the Kickstarter end was probably the most reasonable line, and it's not a massive portion of their owners, which makes sense financially. They really could've said that all owners need to pay $20 in order to buy PA: Titans, and Kickstarter backers still get it for free, but then we'd be in an even more unhappy place; were they to say that even the Kickstarter backers had to pay, I actually wonder if people would be so unhappy at all.

Most importantly out of all of this unhappiness: stop harassing the game as if it's the company. A game represents the work that they are capable of, but it does not represent their business ethic. If EA and DICE made the best Battlefront 3 ever, I'd like the game, while retaining my dislike of the companies; I would not let my dislike of the companies taint my opinion of the game, nor would I dissuade people from enjoying the game simply because of my anger towards its creators. I really think that PA: Titans is better than base PA, whether or not it's twice as good isn't something I care to express, but I think that because it's better, the negative reviews of the game through Steam that aren't about the game hurt the game itself, Uber as a company and, perhaps surprisingly, the player that posted a negative review. They clearly care enough about the game to be distraught, but what they end up doing is chasing away future players of a legitimately good game, and thus hurt their own experience.

You say they lost a fan with you, but why? Do you not like the game? If so, that's fine, leave. There's no issue if it's just not something you enjoy. But if you don't like the company... well, learn to keep things separate. PA is not Uber Entertainment.

Edit: If I had money when I say the KS trailer, I'd have spent all of it right then and there. Since I couldn't, I bought into beta, for $60. I had planned to buy Cosmic Limited Edition for $250, but missed it by just a few days since it took me too long to save up the money as a <18 year old without a job. I even bought the game again just to have access to 3 more commanders! I do feel hurt that I didn't get the game for free, just look at how much time I've spent around here! 1000+ posts, 300+ hours in-game and some KS backer that spend $20 and probably never even downloaded it gets it for free. That sucks, but I'm willing to understand the reasoning behind such a decision, the complexities avoided by choosing it, and I'm willing to make sure that I don't impact the game with my bias towards Uber Entertainment as much as I can, because I care about PA.

Look at the past of Uber, MNC was abandoned (surely becaus it dont make money) SMNC was launched, and abandoned with so many nerfs that make it not really fun. And then, comes Planetary Anihilation. I had no money to buy it on ks, so i was keeping money to buy it after, with all DLCs. And, PA:TITANS apeared. DO YOU SEE THE PATTERN? They make a game, and when it dont make money anymore, they do another game in the same core!

I have de Complete Edition of PA, i paid 90$, and played 400h with HUGES lags, 5m to start a game... And uber fixed nothing, and its worse now!