u/Blubbpaule

I just realized that Phasmophobia is the #7 best-selling PC game of all time. NUMBER SEVEN. BETTER THAN GTA 5 ON PC.

And somehow, after 6 years of Early Access and millions upon millions of copies sold, they still managed to release a custom character update in a completely broken state, an update that even 3 Hours in QA would have been deemed as insult for everyone.

I genuinely do not understand how that level of mismanagement even happens. At one point it stops feeling like incompetence, and almost looks malicious.

This is not some gigantic open world RPG with thousands of quests, cinematic cutscenes, branching dialogue trees, motion-captured story campaigns, or an entire simulated world. It's a lobby based co-op horror game that became one of the biggest PC successes ever made, one that actually spawned an entirely new subgenre of Coop Games.

How does a game with that amount of money, success, player feedback, visibility, and development time still struggle to release something as basic as a character creator without it turning into a disaster?

Especially when the game itself already spent years with placeholder store-bought Unity models. (Which is even worse, the game was at its peak when it was slapped together with glue from Unity assets...)

And what makes it even worse is the apparent focus on crossovers, merchandise, Twitch drops, board games, t-shirts, music boxes, and FOMO cosmetics instead of actually pushing out meaningful updates at a reasonable pace.

At some point, the excuse of "they're just a small indie team" stops working as an explanation when you're sitting on one of the most commercially successful PC games ever released.

After 6 years, one of the best-selling PC games ever should not feel less technically stable than smaller indie games with a fraction of the budget.

By now i believe the community deserves a statement from the higher ups of Kinetic Games what exactly they're doing, and why everything takes SO LONG and still releases absolutely broken.

I am so super disappointed.

I try to use a controller but it's not working :c

It's incredible. Like, I have rarely seen an update to an Early Access game break so much stuff that it dropped the reviews IN HALF in 2 days.

Even worse: 6 years of Early Access, while it was a very successful new genre launch that basically defined a modern subgenre of asymmetrical co-op paranormal investigation games

In the same time:

• Grounded (2020 - 2022) got Early Access, release, and its sequel in Early Access.
• Core Keeper (2022 - 2024) got Early Access and release, as well as 1.1 content updates.
• V Rising (2022 - 2024) got Early Access, release, and its DLC.
• Lethal Company (2023 - expected 2026) got Early Access and several big content updates.
• Baldur's Gate 3 got Early Access and release and won Game of the Year - but I won't count this because Larian Studios were known beforehand and already had experience.
• Abiotic Factor (2023 - 2025) got Early Access, 1.0 release, and now a big content update.

I do not understand.

How do you fumble the EA release, hype, and massive success of an entirely new genre that spawned many new games of this type in a way that people now feel like they're being squeezed for money for t-shirts, a music box, and board games, while getting FOMO'd out of cosmetics via Twitch drops instead of gaining meaningful content updates in a reasonable time?

I get that developing stuff takes time.

But I also understand that this is no open world single-player game with deep lore and story that requires careful planning and world building, so how can it take a character creator 6 years to release - only for it to end up in an absolutely broken state?