Creative Assembly had a pretty major community crisis a short while ago and is dealing with the aftermath. Long story short, they released Total War: Pharaoh and comparatively few people played it (slightly more than 5k peak users on Steam), and it doesn’t look great for them. After that, chaos ensued, people were (allegedly) unrightfully banned on their Steam forums, and interested influencers started providing info that would’ve deteriorated the company’s public image. This all was well documented on Youtube and everyone talks about what has happened. I’ll take a different approach and will talk about what could be done to mend the relationship with their players and restore the Total War series to its former glory in terms of future product management.
Before Pharaoh
Total War franchise has loads of titles that combine 4X strategy gameplay with massive, real-time battles. It has been present on the market for quite a long while now and it’s managed to build a dedicated playerbase over time. These people have been history buffs for quite a long while – not a massive surprise, considering most of their games take place in the Middle Ages or ancient times. They also tried expanding their operations in new directions over the last few years. Their Warhammer series were the best in terms of sales in the history of the series and Three Kingdoms was a breakaway hit on the Chinese market. The Warhammer games (3 of them, not including DLCs), also leaned into the direction of fantasy and featured single, massively overpowered characters, which could make a massive change on battlefields. Three Kingdoms were also a part of something called Saga games – a subseries that featured a smaller scope, featured fewer factions, were quicker to make etc.
These all were more or less decent endeavours. However, the mainline titles were left on the side and their core audience started raising their concerns. CA then decided to make Total War: Pharaoh.
Problems with Pharaoh
The community expected this to be a mainline game, as it was marketed as one. A historical setting, an earlier Saga game (despite not being a commercial success) released in a very similar timeframe (bronze age, more or less) and an interesting area of activities, as the game was to mostly focus on ancient Egypt and other empires and kingdoms of yonder. It didn’t exactly come to fruition, as the game came out to a somewhat decent response, but it lacked content and seemed like another Saga title. Players didn’t take kindly to it and did the most brutal thing possible from a customer-business perspective relationship point of view. They ignored it and didn’t buy it.
On a side note, Creative Assembly also cancelled Hyeans, a multiplayer shooter worth approximately $100 million, so they needed money more than ever and Sega, their owner, wasn’t exactly happy with how things turned out.
As I mentioned before, the entire community management crisis went down and was documented on YouTube by biased but thorough commentators. This is the first video that Volound, a TW Youtuber made, the few following ones show what happened. Normally, I wouldn’t provide biased commentary, but it’s quite possible that many players felt the same as he did. They seemed to repeat the same points regarding product management and the state of Pharaoh, so this is my reason for providing the material here.
Problems and 3 possible solutions
The three biggest problems that the TW franchise seems to have at the moment seem to be:
- the lack of (what the community considers to be) new full-fledged mainline titles,
- lacking multiplayer modes,
- price increases and (according to a big part of the community) some predatory DLC policies.
On the other hand, CA deals with:
- the ever-shortening lifespan of modern AAA titles,
- the technology debt (they use their proprietary engine which is considered by many to be obsolete and hard to work with),
- the pressure to provide more sales and rebound from the Hyenas fiasco.
So, what could they do to mend most of these issues? There are 3 things that could be done. Two of them seem like quite a gamble, but they make sense.
The first one would be a huge undertaking for the company, but would likely pay off in the future. Switching to either UE5 or creating a new proprietary engine would erase (at least partly) the technology debt they have. Using UE5 would probably be harder in the beginning, but R&D costs of creating a new engine would probably make it financially feasible for them – a part of the expected development costs could be allocated to hiring UE developers and consulting to help them with displaying hundreds if not thousands of units on a battlefield at once. This would mend the issues with the tech debt and could improve the workflow, speeding up the delivery of new products to the market.
The other idea is to create a proper mainline game with a sufficient amount of content and without the overpowered mythical units – focusing on history like their old titles did. People have been asking for Medieval 3 for years now – some are practically begging for it. CA, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to do that, even though their market research is more or less done. This would satiate the need for a proper mainline game and would likely sell quite well.
The third one is the most risky and outlandish one. People often complain about the multiplayer modes being either absent or lacklustre. Why not make a F2P multiplayer-only game with just battles and no campaign or a huge map? This idea is out there, but hear me out:
- it could make for a decent testing ground for UE5 development,
- it could provide tons of feedback and expertise regarding online play (which could be later implemented in mainline and Saga titles),
- they already have heaps of info regarding balancing,
- they have assets, like maps which could be reused, maybe slightly reworked to fit the new environment,
- with a decent monetisation model, they could have a long-seller on their hands, which would definitely help them with creating a proper revenue stream.
It’d tackle at least half of the issues listed above.
Sure – they have never released a F2P game (to my knowledge), but they tried making an online hero shooter – which one sounds like a more volatile project? And which one was given a green light?
Frankly, I could write about their possible future steps now, but it would be less or more educated guesses. So I’ll just say that I hope they’ll get back to their former glory – or that a proper competitor arises in the market.
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