This game is dead. It flatlined about 6 months ago, and here's why.

EDIT: It flatlined alot longer than 6 months ago at the time of updating. The reasons as to why this game failed are multi-faceted and complex, and simply deriving it into a few bullet points is honestly absurd. That said, lets do so anyway.

The developer for this game was, let's face it, somewhat lazy. He patched this game about 5 times, and then just sorta gave up. He was never in the forums, never released news about the game or its updates, and never really promoted the game. The only people who really promoted the game were youtubers, and our fellow gamers on Steam.

EDIT: Calling the developer lazy is incredibly unfair. Having had some more experience with indie games and game development, gamemaking is an incredible challenge and, for all intents and purposes, the developer did what was necessary to nurture a game to fruition.

I'd argue that the biggest problems that this game faced in its life cycle is its incredible lack of depth, but that isn't a technical challenge to overcome. The issues faced here are not of technical skill or update frequency, but conceptual. Omegalodon could have been built into a much larger game than it turned out to be with content additions and patches, but I can 100% see how the developer thought that it wasn't worth it, an issue that we'll cover a little later.

The other massive cause of the inevitable death of this game was piracy. Over half of the copies of this game were pirated, therefore the developer didn't get his money. This caused things (Mainly updates) to get delayed and even canceled. More than 75% of the servers today (about 5 tops) are actually running off of the pirated versions of the game. The developer couldn't, can't, and won't be able to do anything about this in the future, so we will have to live with it. That is what has mainly killed this game.

No, no, no, no, no, but still kind of?

My main issue with this section is that here I blamed piracy inherently for the end of this game's life, but did not understand that piracy is a motivated act. Likely, the cause of an increased rate in piracy is due to the game's relatively high price for the value that the customer wages it to be.

In the previous section we briefly talked about a lack of depth. That, alongside the higher price, is what likely caused people to pirate, and if piracy weren't possible, it's unlikely that those people would have bought copies of the game. Piracy does not inherently equal lost sales, but should tell you about your audience's assessment of your product.

And, quite honestly, with piracy being the main form of servers active at the few time's I've launched the game since, one could even make the argument that piracy is what's keeping the game going currently, but that's a different argument for a different day.


HOWEVER:

Regardless of the reason that piracy existed at a higher rate with this title, the lack of sales initially is what may have caused NoE to give up on this game. In the previous section I said that it might not have been worth it to keep expanding, and the amount of piracy *may* have contributed to what's essentially a Chicken-and-Egg problem.

That problem being, "I can't afford to continue development on this product that people aren't buying." alongside the consumer's view of "The developer hasn't put enough into this for it to be worth buying."

"What comes first, the supply or the demand?"

So, no, I wouldn't inherently blame piracy for the game's lack of a playerbase, BUT I would say that the discrepancy between sale price and the value that the consumer assessed the game to have would definitely increase piracy, and decrease the developer's want to continue development.

So, due to this declaration of death, I'd like to take a moment to look over the beauty, and innovation that this game put on the table. It's also the beauty and innovation that the dogs ripped off of the table, chewed it up, spit out, and barked at the game as if it were the game's fault it didn't like it.

Cringe, ik, but lets move past that and get to what I actually said here and how I was wrong.

The dogs in this metaphor were I guess the pirates? Not actually too sure where I was going with this in the first place. Either way, the game itself (or rather the lack thereof) is the problem.

The artstyle of the game is great, don't get me wrong, but this game doesn't really innovate, and that's the issue. This is a team based, destroy-em-up type game that has one map and one gamestyle that repeats ad nauseum. This style had been done before and I'm sure will be done again.

This game did not fail because the developer abandoned it, or because piracy inherently ran it into the ground, it failed because it didn't resonate with the playerbase in a meaningful way. It's the definition of a fun ♥♥♥♥-around game that you play a couple times and walk away from. It's great as a quick video for an up-and-coming letsplayer who has a moderate sized fanbase, but not as a game you revisit constantly. and, as its a multiplayer only game, revisiting the game constantly is the only hope one has for keeping that playerbase up.

This could be fixed if some variation on the original style was developed, but as mentioned previously, why bother?

As it is, the game's an interesting case study for how indie development can nail a concept but not expand enough on it to resonate with a playerbase.