Man, things are definitely not looking good for Piranha Games. Yesterday, the company revealed its latest title; a sci-fi flight-based MMORPG that looks way too similar to Star Citizen. And as it was to be expected, the fanbase backlash was huge. In fact, it was so huge that the launch of Transverse’s crowd-funding campaign is now considered a complete failure.
Piranha Games has managed to raise 6,260$ which equals to 0$ of Transverse’s first goal (which is 1$ million). Currently there are only 71 backers, and it’s pretty unclear whether this new title will meets its initial goal.
Not only that, but Piranha Games went ahead and disabled all comments on the game’s YouTube channel. The first initial trailer comes with almost a six-to-one ratio of downvotes to upvotes, while an extended trailer that was released afterwards comes with a 20-to-one ratio of downvotes to upvotes.
Moreover, Piranha Games’ employees were shadow-banned from Reddit as Reddit deemed that the channel was breaking their guidelines.
All in all, it’s pretty obvious that the announcement of Piranha Games’ new IP may be catastrophic to the company. It remains to be seen whether Piranha Games will find the strength to turn the tides and win back fans’ trust.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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According to this article Piranha Games owns the Wing Commander license, and Transverse was originally going to be Wing Commander Online:
http://themittani.com/content/traffic-control-transreversal
Damn, this thing stinks bad!
Why are they being scrutinized for wanting to work on another game other than MWO?
I dont know much about this story but what im getting from it is that MWO fans are buthurt because the dev team want to move on and make something new? If this is the case, whats the problem with that?
Probably because MWO was raised by the community and its money, and they still need to do a lot of things that they promised. Instead, they decided to took all these money to make a new project, without alerting the fans, who thought that they still funding MWO.
Basically Piranha just took the famous BattleTech license to raise some cash to make their own game.
You also need to remember that Mechwarrior Living Legends was closed because of them. As far as I know MWLL developers moved to Star Citizen because of their experience with CryEngine.
So MWLL devs make a sci fi MMO and the very people who shat on MWLL now attempt to compete once more by making a sci fi MMO? What is going on there? Personal grudges or something?
But you say “closed” – isn’t MWLL still alive? So I assume they stopped developing it but you can still play it as is…
I’m not sure what happened with MWLL after Gamespy’s shutdown, but technically you right. You still can play MWLL. PG just asked them to stop the development.
I wasnt aware that MWO had a funding campaign. I thought people just pay to play on servers or buy things though microtransactions in order to feel special and have a different paint job to everyone else?
This is a tricky situation. 2 years ago they started a founder program, which isn’t exactly a Kickstarter campaign, but I think it still can be called as crowdfunding. I’m sure they raised a lot of cash with it.
But this is not about how it can be called officially, it’s about how it looked like. Kickstarter or not, PBI still got a backlash. People gave them money so they can develop MWO, but in truth it looks like they abandoned it a long time ago.
I mean judging from this trailer it’s obvious that Transverse is in development for quite some time.
lol I didn’t know this were the creators of Mechwarrior, this looks a hundred miles better than that game.
If they’re going to bounce back from this they need to make the most perfect game ever. If you piss off the people that are most likely to fund your project – your core audience – it’s going to be really hard to garner excitement. This core audience are people with money that want futuristic sim games on PC – lots of people from Mechwarrior Online are huge contributors to Star Citizen and Elite, for example. These are exactly the people they need to win over, and it looks like they broke their trust completely.
It’s a shame, really. I want to see any game succeed. Games are great. Piranha Games artists and programmers have families to feed and have put a lot of work into this new game already. It’s not their fault the higher-ups messed up, but they’ll take the brunt of the consequences when or if the hammer falls 🙁
Maybe it’s not as bad as we think, though. Many of the Mechwarrior Online clansmen have abandoned the game or have gotten bored of it. The downvotes on the Youtube channel could just be dumbass Reddit drones that just go with what’s popular and like a good riot.
There’s not much in the way of the new crowdfunding campaign, but that’s not absolutely necessary to make their game – that’s just to add more features. The core game should be doable without it, and if successful then updated accordingly. I think they haven’t made much money because people would rather just put their money into Star Citizen. Piranha is going to need to add a ton more polish if they want to earn those sim-enthusiast moneybags!
I backed MWO in every possible way and it is still my most played game out of a thousand games. But this BS they announced was disheartening to say the least. Jumping on the bandwagon at this point really makes them look desperate.
If they would just work only on MWO and give us more to do, they wouldn’t need to try to fund another game. I got all their packages and Hero mechs. That’s more money than most gamers spend in 2 years, hell 4 years.
At this point, they won’t see anything from me any longer financially. MWO to me is a fantastic game that fills my need to rip limbs from an opponent. No one else has captured that bloodlust so well. I will continue to play what I enjoy regardless of the decisions they make but only until it breaks the game for me. They haven’t broken it yet, promises sure.
….Meanwhile over at Star Citizen, We are going to get Arena Commander 0.9 some time tomorrow, which will bring leaderboards, co-op Vanduul Swarm, new hangars, the racing game mode, and tons of new fixes and tweaks.
Also, SC is about to, or already has hit 53 Million.
Ball is in your court Transverse… oh who am i kidding, you aren’t even playing the same sport, let alone in the same league…
“looks way too similar to Star Citizen”
Why would you say that?
Freelancer 2014? Piranha? Pass.