Upcoming Release Tsw5 First Look - West Coast Main Line

I have to say i'm not liking the total silence on this from dtg.. even an acknowledgement of the timetable issues would be welcome, even if there aren't actually any plans to improve and enhance it

 

It’s really annoying. So many community managers and no communication. Does DTG want my money, or not?

 

Last time they said 'no plans' it was not well received. No point breaking the thunderous annoying deafening silence if everyone's going to be upset anyway.

 

Oh wtf. Yh has to be busy. Just laziness.

 

My first times using the forums pre-release. Is it usually this quiet?

 

Yep every year, and then usually quiet for a few weeks after release when all the bugs are found by players who want better for the money they have paid.

 

Unfortunately that is my experience. Especially since DTG Protagonist (Sam) left. He was seemingly way more proactive at engaging with the community. I honestly don’t know what DTG’s current community managers do with their working days.

 

Putting it simply i think its coming as is,then it'll be the usual patch and mend and then a year or more down the road after lots of complaints about the timetable Joe will step in to amend it

 

I miss Sam, he was always active. Held DTG to account especially during live streams. And was never afraid to give us information even if it was information we didn't want to hear.

 

DTG makes on average $2.8m per game yet cant get stuff right.

 

Is that all? Blimey.

 

Don’t forget, TSW is a niche product for a niche audience, which is why DTG ignoring its players and putting out subpar work puzzles me. They don’t have an awful lot of players to lose.

 

Flixtrain is pretty much the same vectron that's already in game with small changes so would be cheaper the class 390 pendolino is new to the game a lot more work needed so would obviously be more expensive than the Flixtrain

 

The Flixtrain also comes with new coaches I think.

 

I think they were pointing out the discrepancy on the exchange rate rather than questioning why the 390 costs more than the Flixtrain

If £12.99 = $16.99 then £14.99 should probably = $19.99, not $22.99

 

Exactly. Even if I were disposed to buy the 390, I would demur because US customers are being exploited by these inflated and inconsistent exchange rates. This isn't the first time I and others have raised this issue in the forums.

It may seem a small amount but repeated over the years it adds up to a sizeable premium.

We don't all have three car garages and back yard swimming pools over here, ya know.

It behooves DTG to explain this taking advantage of US customers.

 

And yet it is the "Americans" that are labeled as crying fowl "chicken 2 tasty" when/as the US content has been lacking/nonexistent other than the Ant line that is now getting the extension in TSW5 that should have been in TSW4, but I digress.
I may be the Hungry Jew from Romania who just happens to be a US citizen, but yes the prices for the US are much higher, now it just may be the exchange rate and the inflation in the U.S., yes it would be nice to see DTG put a little more on the plate before serving it up.

"Question Everything, For even God would rather Honest Questiong than blind Folded Fear"
Or the Great Octopus in the Sky

 

And when the prices go up, less people in the US buy it and they can justify that as the reason to give peanuts to the US market. It stinks.

 

Exactly, I'm seeing it here with some new forum members clearly stating they are re-thinking the purchase options, where they are from I have no clue, nevertheless, they are.

 

It is niche...but not sure it's that "small"...depends on your definition I guess.
There's maybe 5,000 people playing at any one time (1,000ish on Steam and maybe 4,000 on console), and estimated about 100,000 people have the game installed.
Have many touched it in a year? Probably not... but still that's fairly large for a "normal" business by a team that small.
Figure a grocery store could have as many employees as DTG, and they probably have a similar number of regular customers.
Now if 10 customers complain about something, do you immediately drop everything?
If 20 customers... 50 customers?
And if those changes aren't selling more product, but are just costing more?
You prioritize the cost/benefit ratio.
It's still a business even if it's making imaginary trains.
Has anyone run a business of that scope and had those experiences for perspective?

 

Wal Mart tends to do about $125 million per store per year.
A McDonald's store about $2-3 million.
So.... over 10 years in business that's about right for the size company they have.
They're roughly at 2 McDonald's stores worth of employees and revenue.
About a similar sized customer base too roughly.
People thinking it's a "huge corporation" are quite off the mark.

 

The links here will be updated more on how they are performing in the markets.
PULLUP ENTERTAINMENT Euronext
https://live.euronext.com/en/product/equities/FR0012419307-ALXP
Dovetail Games Overview
https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/167838-40#overview
Focus Entertainment (France) 614
https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/109030-33#overview
Pullup Entertainment S.A. marketwatch.com
https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/ALPUL?CountryCode=FR

Pullup Entertainment Société anonyme (0HF.F) Stock Price, News, Quote & History - Yahoo Finance
The screenshots are a bit outdated over the past month, with the exception of the number of employees. Again, who knows if this has changed? As this may not reflect correctly.

--Train Sim World® 4 – Steam Stats
and Train Sim World® 4 Price history · SteamDB
But when looking at Train Sim World® 4 Steam stats – Video Game Insights (vginsights.com)
08 August was the highest peak of 1,537 and 03 September of 1,031 as shown in the Free version of the graph.
and with
Aligned to release:
Historical Data: Days since release
Day 1. 1,307 Day 30, 552

I suspect the other products like War Hammer, the newest off-road buggy game, and the Fishing Sim along with TSC are keeping things afloat to a degree.

 

Interesting stuff, the vginsights website refers to Steam but no other platforms, do you know if that means the $2.8m per game is Steam sales only?

It's funny how some people think $2.8m is a lot of money, if DTG has 200 staff then that's $14,000 per employee.

 

I am taking it as just Steam info and stats are used. No 2.8 Mil is not a lot in the grand scheme of things.

 

Not as funny as people thinking that figure is correct. It appears to come from a wildly off the mark set of figures from some website, the source of which has not been cited.

 

Yeah, I've seen VGInsights quoted in various gaming news articles, they base everything off the number of concurrent users. Presumably they had some 'actuals' from willing game devs and then built a predictive model from the numbers that fit those actuals and then applied it to the rest of the gaming market. The big problem being that TSW isn't exactly your 'normal' game.

I'm willing to believe that, maybe, possibly, 102k people bought TSW4 on Steam, and that overall they paid $3.1m for the base game. Checking a couple of free to play titles on that site, they apparently don't generate any revenue at all, so we know the $3.1m doesn't include DLCs.

My working life has been spent in data analytics, and I have extensive experience of higher ups wanting numbers pulled from thin air in order to get something approved by the bean counters, so lets try some SWAG analysis.

Base game on Steam $3.1m
DTG spend 4 months per year on the base game routes, the other 8 months on DLC, so let's just assume that's bringing in another $6.2m, making a total from Steam of $9.3m
Back in the days of Xbox having a clue what they were doing, assorted game devs have claimed an equalish split between PC/PlayStation/Xbox, so lets assume console accounts for 2/3rd of the revenue and call that an additional $18.6m
So we are now at a completely made up figure of $27.9m
I forgot Epic and the Microsoft store, lets assume their combined revenue is one third that of Steam, no idea if that's true but it makes the end result a nice number, so that's another $3.1m
We are now at an overall total of $31m, which - entirely coincidentally is exactly 10x the number VGInsights came up with.

So yeah, I think we should agree that in future we'll take the wildly off the mark set of figures from one website and just multiply them by 10 - that must be accurate, right?


*for those not in the know, SWAG analysis in this context is Scientific Wild Arse Guess

 

If correct, £2.8 million is the average revenue over all of their games. That's not profit and won't include salaries, development costs, taxation etc etc.

Also worth noting that the median revenue is £951 million, meaning something(s) in their portfolio is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

 

I have just seen this Q&A that has been released. Did they make up them questions themselves? Why are they ignoring the serious concerns? No body has even asked them questions and most of them are from the stream

 

One of the questions related to 710 services. They answered the question “Will the 710 be driveable from Euston to Watford Junction?”, which I don’t recall anybody asking but did not answer the question about the completeness of the timetable, which many people have. Also, there was no mention of the 72 stock, which I understand is drivable from Queens Park to H&W, and the frequency of services available for that.

TBH, it seems to be a case of DTG making up a series of questions they would like to answer rather than ones that have actually been asked. There talent is wasted at DTG. They should be working for Keir Starmer (or whoever the encumbent PM is) at Prime Minister’s Questions.

 

Their, not there. For some reason it won’t let me edit the post.

 

They avoid more questions that Kier Starmer but they are creating more issues by not discussing the major issues. Why dont they just say if it will or wont be fixed. Half finished game worth no more than £20.

 

Most likely because then all they'll get is requests to fix this or that (although some issues that are pointed out shouldn't exist in the first place).

 

I think it's more a case of " cherry picking " the questions that don't cause them too much discomfort.

 

Ah well, 3 routes for £39.99. They have achieved better than that.

 

I'll share my thoughts here as the other thread is getting out of hand and looks like going towards being locked, but for what it's worth here are my thoughts after having a week to think it over:


I can't believe i'm saying this but i'm considering cancelling my pre-order for tsw5 deluxe.

As someone who only drives UK routes i was really looking forward to WCML south, and even when it was announced it was terminating at Milton Keynes i could happily accept that, so long as the timetable is busy and life like.

unfortunately we've seen that simply isn't the case in regards to the London Underground and London Overground layers. If we're going to have a 50 mile route out of a London terminus at this stage in the tsw lifecycle, it really need to have a timetable to match.

tsw2 has London to Brighton and that timetable to this day is outstanding. tsw5 should at least have those same ambitions to create a fully immersive timetable.

if anyone at DTG acknowledged thesetimetable concerns in their latest posthighlighting frequently asked questions that would've been okay, but instead they answered a load of questions that either hadn't been asked, or had already been answered.

Without a proper immersive timetable for the UK's flagship route for tsw5, i've gone from genuinely hyped to just ratherunderwhelmed.

i'm thinking cancelling my deluxe pre-order is the right thing to do, and i'll just wait and hope that the WCML timetable is improved, or if not i'll reassess how i feel when Cardiff City Network comes along

and even that will live and die by the same, single critical point: the timetable mode.

for me the quality of the timetable is THEmost important thing to a new route, and WCML in it's current offering just isn't good enough in my view, and nobody at DTG has currently come out to address that.

so i just cannot justify handing over almost£55 to DTG when i currently feel underwhelmed with the state of the UK offering, but i'm hoping things could change on the timetable front

i just cannot help but feel this is somethingthat not only could have been avoided, but absolutely 100% should have been avoided at the very early planning stage of this route, as i've said before and especially a route ofthis nature: timetable is everything.

 

I agree yeh the timetable is everything that concerns me with the WCML I hope they sort it but unlikely before release

 

Remember bml's timetable is made by a single dev who worked countless hours over many many months. He was even watching the simulation run during his break. Possibly working overtime as well to get it all in. There's only 1 Joe at the end of the day

 

The solution is simple: have more Joe's around.

And yes, I know its easier said than done.

 

Joe is incredible for all the hard work he does on the timetables and remasters, often in his own time as well.

 

Yes, and the lovely thing is that DTG saves Money by not having to pay to get the work done. See how nice that is of them to do that?

 

Fax. I mean the no branding is really bad but the trains just look like the time during the change between LM and LNWR during xovid when there was barely a livery so not crazy bad. The time table is bad yes but me personally i only care about the main line and less the london underground. Just wish the train sounds were better.

 

ALLEGEDLY (key word) DTG lost the LNWR License because LNWR wanted all the safety systems to be enabled by default with NO way of disabling them. Saw a post on X from someone who was told by a licensing manager that this was the case. It kinda makes sense though.

 

That can't be it, because they were happy to do that for the MTA.

 

I wouldn’t buy that reason, DTG did it for LIRR & those systems were far more likely to put players off than AWS & DSD, which are mostly non invasive. Doesn’t make sense they’d not do it here & go against the TOC.

Sounds to me like someone playing off the back of MTA & SBB issues.

 

Yes that doesn't really make sense unless there are technical differences between how they have coded in safety systems on UK stock which prevents an "always on" flag from being applied, like LIRR. And if the TOC were that bothered then the livery is still recognisable as LNWR, it was just the branding that got nerfed.

 

To be honest I'd be OK with the safety systems being permanently on. Saves you having to turn them on when you start a service.

 

And personally I would not buy any DLC that had them on without a "turn off" option.
*shrugs*
Different folks I guess.

 

Surely it could be a menu option to enable them by default or not. Long overdue methinks for a more realistic simulation.
Do most players enable them once they're past the newbie stage?

 

If TOCs are going to insist on safety systems on with no option to turn them off then that’s the end of the game for me. A real shame but I want to play this as I, i.e. the purchaser want, not how these people dictate how I should play it.