We try to focus the marketing message based on the scale of the patch. We have our own in-house creative team that handles trailers and artwork, and an in-house community team as well. We have about a 10 person publishing team inside the studio. But it all starts with the dialogue with the community.Īnd how do you structure your marketing communication around these updates? We embraced it and then rolled out first ranged only weapon. And then when we found that it felt pretty good and that the community really liked it. So we started experimenting with it in specific weapons we already had. Clearly it wasn’t a fad since it was coming up over a long period of time. Over the course of several months, we had the conversation with them. However, the community kept asking for it. In our own heads, it meant that ranged combat was just a non-starter. We had told ourselves that Dauntless is all about high fidelity combat experience where you’re really up close and personal with a Behemoth. The community also convinced us to update our strategy and implement a kind of ranged combat. But that doesn’t mean we weren’t ready to have it. And the feedback we got in our closed beta very early on was, “Hey, it feels really bad to spend money on a random item!” It forced us to have the monetization conversation much earlier than we had initially planned. I know that sounds crazy, but for us, it was more important to nail the core game experience than focus on store content and monetization. At the time, we hadn’t really ascribed a strategy for monetization. For example, we had loot boxes early in our closed alpha and closed beta. We’re not going to turn Dauntless into a battle royale PVP experience tomorrow because a couple people on our Reddit tell us that they want more BR in their life. It’s always about balance, I’ll say that. What if the feedback goes against your vision? That’s because we want to hear feedback from the community early and often. In the build that we’re playing today, you might see some of our play testers running around. Everyone on the team is super involved either on our Reddit and our Discord. So if we ship this new patch and find some surprises, we’re more than happy to pivot.Ĭommunity is one of our studio pillars. But that doesn’t mean that it’s set in stone. We’ve already got the rest of 2020 roughly mapped out in our own heads. We do have our own product roadmap, and the same time, we are very big on community feedback. These bigger updates, are they feedback-driven mostly, or are they part of your long-term vision? It’s basically 50 levels of content that you can unlock by playing the game: everything from cosmetics to consumables, to currency.Īnd then, these larger updates we create every three months or so. It’s just bug fixes and polish to keep the game fresh.Įvery month or so, we release a new Hunt Pass, which might sound familiar if you’ve played games like Fortnite. Typically, we patch the game no less than every two weeks. What kind of updates do you do for Dauntless in general? What’s the cadence? Escalation seasons last two to three months, they come with their own rewards and their own talent tree that you can spend experience points on. It challenges players to take on a series of Behemoths back to back. It sits alongside the main campaign within Dauntless. We’ve been focusing on it since December. We’ve also got a new game mode called Escalation in this build. These players can now come through this training experience as part of their onboarding and test all of our seven weapons in a safe environment.Īnd it’s good for end game players to really fine-tune their loadouts. We realized that for new players who are just learning how to play the game, being immediately pushed into live combat can be intimidating. Big part of it is our new Training Island ( “Training Grounds” - Ed.). This is definitely our largest update of 2020 so far. Nick Clifford, Marketing Director at Phoenix LabsĪlexander Semenov, writer at GWO: Tell us about the Call of the Void update? That’s one of the big ones, right? On June 11, the developers rolled out a major content update called Call of the Void.Īhead of the update release, we caught up with Nick Clifford, Marketing Director at Phoenix Labs, to check out the new content and talk about the studio’s take on multiplayer games in 2020. Dauntless is a free-to-play online action RPG from Phoenix Labs that is available on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and the Nintendo Switch.
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