Metro Rivals Development Suspended

Looks more interesting than metro rivals

 

As I mentioned earlier looking at Steam DB for Sodor that seems unlikely. Okay, you need to factor in console and non Steam PC players but the maximum ever recorded playing was only just over 1000 and now down to less than 100 playing on average. 1000 copies at (say) average of £32 given some probably bought the Deluxe version is only £32k. UK VAT will take 20% of that, no doubt Mattel took a nice cut so you're probably looking at less than £20k net from Steam sales. Even if you quadruple that to allow for the other platforms, that's still less than £100k before recouping development and manpower costs.

 

Ive been thinking a lot about it today.
MR doesn't make business sense. There wasnt any real appetite for it. Compared to Thomas, the interactions it generated was low. it got next to nothing shares, likes, or comments. It didnt take long to see it was dead in the water.

It was a testbed for UE5 too. But moving to UE5 costs a lot more to build up and it wouldn't see any real benefit to the TSW series. UE5 still has stuttering issue, struggles to animate things that simulate fast movements (like a train at 100mph) and only brings a lot of visual candy like fire sparks and all the fun stuff that suits an action game. None of those are relevant improvements for the cost for TSW.

Thomas should be a big cash cow for DTG and hopefully allow them to cover the sunk cost of the MR game. Cancelling MR now at the start of the tax year is probably a wise move. Although a flood of DLC before the end of the last tax year wasnt great for us users due to the quality on release and was a bit suss.

Im gutted for the redundancies and staff.

Big question now though:

Train Sim World 7 - Will it happen in September? Or be put back while corr issues are fixed on this franchise and/or DTG restructuring? How will cancelling the MR affect that?

Thats gonna be my question for the next Q&A session for the May Road map.

 

Id say with no Metro Rival release in FY26 then TSW7 has to be a thing and putting it off as well would make a dent in the margins that even a financially healthy company (and no on outside th company has the knowledge to say either way) would struggle not to be affected by.

 

Well well, lets say I'm not surprised at all. For who was this game meant to be anyway? If this was a metro simulator, I could get it, but an arcade metro racing game? Where they high or drunk at the moment they came up with the idea?

But suspended not means cancelled, isn't it? Or is this their way to bring it more polite?
I hope their focus will go back to TSW as this is needed very much if you look at the latest releases.
Anyway, good decision to suspend the development, it was even better when they never started with it.

 

Nooo! I was actually excited for this to come out, lol

 

Trying to recall when last year we found out TSW6 was a “thing”. Think it was fairly early on, to avoid the forums filling with endless speculation. But while we like to think TSW is still safe, nothing is certain particularly if PullUp/Focus are pulling the strings. We know that most content development is now outsourced to second or third parties and the mountain of tech debt paints a difficult picture as regards how many technical and programming staff are on board.

So while I hope TSW continues, I wouldn’t be too surprised if it didn’t succumb, ss already stated DTG don’t have a great track record with all the other IP’s they tried - Flight Sim World, abandoned when the going got tough. Fishing, pretty much dead in the water (ha!). Catan, great idea that went nowhere. Even TSC all but abandoned apart from making money off residual sales of DLC.

 

That's ridiculous maths. That's consecutive players not total sales. That number of players isn't the same players 24 hours a day. If there was 1000 players for 24 hours and each of them played for an hour, that alone is 24000 sales.

Steams consecutive players is a terrible indicator of actual sales.

Nobody here has any idea.

 

Not to mention Thomas is a kids game first and foremost and young kids at that. Most responsible parents would have steam in off line mode as there’s no need for them to be online playing and those game sessions aren’t recorded

 

I guess, games like Sodor are selling better on console, as kids often playing on console and not on PC. I don't say it sold/sell well on console, we just don't know.

 

It’s concurrent players but your point still stands. A good initial estimate for sales in the first week from the initial concurrent players on release is to multiply it by 10 to 20 times. I do have a good laugh whenever people try to quote Steam DB player numbers as absolute sales. Even comparing games is difficult because play duration affects concurrent player numbers too, and for existing games it can’t really be used to estimate how many people have bought a game over time.

 

. You're right. 16 years of living away and my English is getting worse! I should stop posting on forums when tired.

 

i think most of the team that may have

well i think some of the teams members were burn out on tsw and wanted to try something different. also maybe they could try world of subway type of railroad.

 

Maybe someone at the very top (parent company) looked at the degradation of TSW it's bug ridden core and ongoing botched releases of DLC and the potential money to be made keeping Mattel on side and decided to enact a "back to basics" approach.

 

DTG cancel Metro Rivals to focus on other games

 

I for one will not miss metro rivals , I seriously doubt if I would have bought it

 

Now we just need 99.9% of the "Community Managers" at DTG replaced with more devs to stop "marketing" the game, and start "fixing" the game (TSW).

 

How about instead of TSW 7 they do what they done with TSW2 with the rush hour type content they did. Give it another year of support before moving on to 7.

 

UE5 offers a number of improvements over UE4 that doesnt need extra engineering skills and could solve some inherent problems.

 

Maybe they'll now spend time fixing the problems with products people have already paid for which don't work rather than yet another product no-one asked for?

 

The Rush Hour content was rushed and didn't live up to the marketing hype. It took another 18months after release to fix the bugs and add layers to make the routes what they promised and took gen 9 to achieve alot of that.

 

A complete guess here but I think all the requests to see the NYC Subway get made for TSW is what maybe drove DTG to make Metro Rivals. They might have thought it was going to be a good idea since we can’t get it for TSW and that Metro Rivals will make up for it. The game looked pretty from what was shown but it’s not the type of gameplay most people are wanting to see. It’s pretty clear nobody wants a Need For Speed game but with subway trains… I do feel bad for DTG since they put time and effort into what they were trying to do with the game. Quite sad when it had to end like this but atleast they aren’t wasting anymore time now. I guess we will just have to wait and see what happens in the near future. I think TSW will be fine though. I don’t see this being a threat to TSW’s future.

 

You miss the point I'm making. There are many bugs in the TSW UE4 that have existed for multiple versions of the game that DTG can't fix. So moving to UE5 doesn't fill me with much hope they can make a decent go at things.

 

I got your point but my point was that some of the bugs you say that have existed in UE4 have been ironed out by EPIC’s engineers at source and therefore should not cause DTG’s software engineers any problem going forward.
It should also be borne in mind that the version of Unreal that DTG use is a highly modified bespoke version too.

 

Obviously the expected sales for MR just didn't look like they would hit expectations but my guess is this has more to do with TSW

Reality is TSW is a very large part of DTG's income, their bread and butter money. However, I just cannot see sales of DLC for TSW going anywheres but down due to all the issues on the console versions of the game, as It has been getting harder for console players to justify premium price for DLC for what is clearly a sub standard product

I don't know what DTG were expecting but did they really think £30 for DLC where performance is all over the place and blurred texture are common was going to be continually accepted?

TSW7 is coming but if it comes with all the same issues and same DTG excuses then it could possibly be the end of the line for the franchise.

Logic would state that something has to give and it looks like MR could be the sacrifice. Staff with TSW experience will get pulled back in to help with the game and the those without TSW experience, now looking for new employment

 

While you might be right, a lot of the issues we are seeing in TSW, are only specific to TSW, other UE4 powered games don't suffer issues with draw distance pop in etc. Other UE4 powered games have had FSR/DLSS intergrated. This technology would greatly help low end PC's and FSR would really help the console builds, but DTG says it's "not needed", to me thats more of "we can't understand how to intergrate the plugin".

 

I feel for anyone impacted by this cancellation, that is never fun

Since this was announced, I was really skeptical of it's potential. Though I get the attempt to trial UE5, the concept was a fever dream to me, and there seems to be a lot of investment to sell the vibe with the trailer, art, and supporting content. It wasn't until now that it appears someone took a step back and thought about what this game really was going to be.

The announcement trailer gave me no great impression on content, and the showcase made this look like a glorified TSW with manufactured edginess and economy. There is no hype, no "wow, this looks cool" feeling. I didn't see the replay-ability of this long term unless you want to leaderboard chase, but how long until that's overran by hacks? Also, I would personally rather see investment in actual quality game content instead of over-produced video content.

This isn't going to make DTG content any better either for TSW either, I'm believing DTG with the teams being separate, and DTG isn't incentivized to make content quality better. We've seen this cycle so many times before, DTG quality dips, community complains enough, DTG makes some changes improving the quality line, and eventually walks back the quality line until enough slips through the cracks that require change.

Not sad this is done, but this isn't going to change anything either.