Forums are very quiet....

I cannot speak to the financial success of the launch because a LOT of people claimed they refunded. Note the word 'claimed'; I get the feeling it was too much effort to refund for the majority of malcontents and they secretly wanted to hold onto their copy just in case there was some Hello Games style comeback possibility down the line. But yeah, assuming most sold copies stayed sold, Wolcen Studio pulled in at least $40m USD, given it cleared the million units sold mark (serious fucking achievement) at $40USD.

I suspect they were going for a light GAAS model: online mode has only 8 active character slots, so there was room for character slot selling (more on that in a bit); there were plans for housing in alpha; there's already been one chunky as heck update called a 'chronicle' (read: league) which would have been paid DLC had their reputation not been lower than mud; and there is room for super premium item skins and pets. But what they wouldn't have charged for is in-game storage (you expand that in game) or skin transfers or dyes (the former is free and has a dedicated system, the latter you loot).

Instead, that Bloodtrail update was released with little fanfare and, more importantly, the fact that Wolcen Studio itself changed hands last year went completely unannounced. There were rumours and untranslated French gaming articles that Gaijin (War Thunder) had bought Wolcen Studio, but that was about it. We had to actually dig through the business pages (as people did when GGG sold out to Tencent) to see that, yep, the original owner of Wolcen Studio had completely sold to the originally Russian, now Hungarian f2p developer/publisher. Not great news, but also sort of baffling. My gut says they got it for a fire sale level price and might try a Hellgate Global style f2p cash grab, BUT the development since then hasn't really shown much change. We get small updates here and there. Extra content like a tileset or more monsters. Attempts at skill balance. Controller support and UI tweak. That sort of thing.

The actual vibe is one of niche despair and hope. I am active in their discord, and it's nice to see devs interact without things getting too ugly. Even the naysayers and chronic shitstirrers get that any Wolcen staff in there is a cog in a machine just trying to do their job. But just this morning, I chatted with one of them and a moderator about the depth of the game world and just how much potential the game still has, IF they can stabilise the game itself and maybe get around to at least one more story act to fix its current cliffhanger. It's all pipe dreams and sad what-ifs, but it's nice to explore.

The game itself is perfectly playable as is. I play it every day -- it's the only PC game I play, actually. Pop on my winamp and off I go. I have my playstation and the GF's switch for more diverse, less solipsistic gaming; Wolcen is my zen time-killer. Where you guys Map, I run expeditions on the War Table. I haven't crashed in ages; my ping in Australia is 9, almost without deviation. But this could all be because I'm one of the few using its resources. Wolcen was, for the most part, a victim of its own success: there was no way it could sustain 127k players at once, and there was no way it was balanced with hardcore Exiles in mind. Any other pay to play ARPG would have been similarly fucked, including Grim Dawn or Last Epoch. The former has much more experienced devs and the latter has spent longer testing, but neither would have survived a Wolcen-level launch.

And as I said, the company itself pretty much didn't. The lead dev and main owner has washed his hands of it (although he's still working on the game a la Wilson from what I can tell), the glassdoor reviews (which I take with a large grain of salt -- GGG had a few nasty ones early on too) are scathing as hell, and no one has a clue what they're doing until their CM posts randomly about an incoming patch or update.

So it's all a mystery but they DO respond to suggestions and bug reports -- mainly because there aren't that many, heh. Things I've said have been actioned; more than once a CM or dev has contacted me for more in-depth discussion of my feedback. I only recently changed my name there to the name I used here, just as a test, and no one said a thing. So it's nice to see that if I am getting dev attention it isn't because they think I might throw $30k at them at any point.

That said, I DID ask them recently to either remove the online character limit (8 is totally inadequate unless you don't care about aesthetics or theme in which case go play PoE already) or sell more slots, although it's a certitude I'd be their only customer. They acknowledged the request/demand/begging, but that is all.

A lot of early supporters feel scammed by Wolcen and I don't blame them. The game's kickstarter when it was called Umbra made a lot of promises they never kept, stuff that was pretty obviously unrealistic but that's beside the point. The alpha was dramatically different to the beta: open world with rotatable camera to linear levels with fixed, a clear transition from some MMO/ARPG hybrid to, well, Diablo clone through and through. What was released was virtually a different game to what people supported. I'd probably be pissed off too had I been a supporter rather than an alpha EA owner -- $20USD is all I've ever put into Wolcen and I just cleared 2,500 hours of actual playtime, whereas some support packs were much more than that. So there's a lot of lingering bitterness there. But realistically, what Wolcen became is not a failure of a game. Just a failure of potential and a failure to be even vaguely satisfying for a post-PoE ARPG demographic. Last Epoch, being much more a post-PoE ARPG, has a far better chance there, if they can ever implement multiplayer and trading without the whole thing going boom.

After years of trying to be generous with PoE, financially but also in terms of understanding the devs' position, I've allowed myself to be completely selfish with Wolcen. I like the game because I like the game. I don't give a shit about the devs beyond my suggestions/feedback/bug reports. I couldn't care less how others feel about it, unless they like it too in which case we can interact. I block naysayers effortlessly. Nothing they say can affect my own enjoyment of it, or change whether or not Wolcen Studio release more content/patches. They are literally insignificant to me.

Anyway, spent enough time talking about it. Time to unpause winamp and get back to it. Just deleted a level 63 tank I worked really hard to figure out to try something new (damn fucking online 8 character limit). Sure, respecs are pretty much free but no self-respecting altaholic would use those to try an entirely different build!