As you all probably know, we've got an official announcement from the development team that Darwin Project has seized development. While these truly are sad news, it's just one amongst thousands of cases that happen each year. What I want to do in this post is speculating potential reasons for why the game failed to sustain itself. While the game will still have several hundred people playing, it's obvious that it won't last forever, especially with the lack of development support. I do have to commend the developers for at least giving the game some mercy and killing it early when they realized it is at a point of no return and not leaving the community in the dust. I'll try to give heavy duty explanations to every possible point I raise, but now it's just speculation. There's no way the developers could see some of these coming (at least to some of them), so I'm not going to point out how the devs are incompetent, etc. That's not what I do. Anyway, let's get to it!

Overly saturated market

Let's start with a low hanging fruit. The fact that Darwin Project is a battle royale game could sway some players away from trying it out, even though it delivers a fundamentally different experience from its contemporaries. There's a lot of games going for this sort of gameplay, but also a lot of developers willing to give it a spin. I always applaud developers who give old gameplay some new spins on the formula, especially as bold as the Darwin Project, but it's hard to come out as the good guy if the game gets released so close to other games of its ilk. There's always going to be this nagging feeling that part of the reason as to why you're doing a battle royale is because that's what sells. While you can still make an amazing game, you're fighting an up-hill battle. I'm getting this one out of the way early on, because it's probably the weakest contributing factor to the game failing, since there are way more candidates for that.

What is Darwin Project?

Some of the best games (or at least the most unique ones) have some kind of selling point or a hook. It's called an "elevator pitch", which basically means describing the idea of your game in one-two sentences in order to give a good idea on what your game is about and get people interested. Here are some examples:

• Hitman - a stealth assassination game where you blend in the crowd and eliminate your targets in a variety of different ways
• Tag: The Power of Paint - a first person platform shooter, where you use paint and painted surfaces that give you powers in order to get to the finish
• Noita - a roguelike with advanced spell and powder simulation physics, where every substance interacts with everything
• Rain World - a game about a small creature surviving in a broken ecosystem where everything tries to kill you and deadly rain floods everything
• Cobalt - a side-scrolling shooter with bullet time where you can deflect bullets with your head while rolling
• Transpose - you use past versions of yourself that you record to move objects, interact with levers and buttons in order to complete puzzles

I don't think you can do that with Darwin Project, but if I had to give it a shot, here's my interpretation.

• "It's a 10 player battle royale game with lite survival mechanics, crafting and minimal RNG with the focus on easy to learn, but hard to master melee combat."

I tried my hardest to come up with a good way to make an elevator pitch for Darwin Project and even with this sentence, it barely gives you any idea on what the game actually is without playing it yourself. There's so many good feature worth paying attention to that it sounds more complicated than it should. My point is, it's hard for people to care about your game if it's hard to explain what makes it unique and worth playing in easy to digest way without reading extended reviews. Those elevator pitches can perk some eyebrows up and maybe some of you did look up these games I mentioned earlier on Google or Steam based on those short descriptions alone. Not all games "require" a good elevator pitch, but it can give you a big boost when it comes to actually getting people to get excited over your product, which will help in terms of marketing. Speaking of which...

Bad / Inefficient marketing

It's no secret that Scavengers Studios isn't the best at putting its best foot forwards. We had that infamous E3 where they commentated over gameplay to sell the eSports side of the game (more on this later). We have the release trailer that looks like shit (at least the gameplay parts). We had Instagram ads, which landed to the wrong demographic and failed to catch others' attention even with 10 million views. We had Twitch paid streams, which did nothing. My guess is that either the devs took the wrong feature to focus on for the campaign or can't look at their game from an outsider perspective. Normally I'm against just throwing more money at marketing if a certain tactic doesn't work, but I fear that this game was just so weird that it was hard to market by default.

Focus on streaming and eSports

When looking at the trailers and the marketing, it's obvious originally the game was heavily pushed as an eSport and an experiment for streaming viewer retention. This was a HUGE mistake. Don't advertise a game as being eSports unless it has proven that it can be viable as one and popular enough to sustain that scene. Seems like a waste of resources. Street Fighter 2 didn't start off as a competitive eSport unless it has been proven that the game is good, deep enough for pros to enjoy and popular enough to have a viewerbase. Same with Smash Melee.

They also heavily pushed the streaming aspect, which according to this page was their true motivation all along. It almost feels as if Darwin Project was a victim to this little experiment the devs wanted to do and they wanted to have a guinea pig game they could try this on. Except they shouldnt've focused on it so early on in development and only implemented it if the game was indeed a success on Twitch. Noone cares about watching a game noone cares, unless they're already a fan of the game to begin with. Other eSports are easy to follow when you're a spectator, which is harder to do with Darwin Project matches. Even with that focus, Sudden Death was full of hiding and crafting armor, which was boring to watch. If the devs truly cared about the competitive scene, they would balance their stuff around highest level of play and watch these tournaments in order to notice tells and patterns something might be wrong.

Change in vision

Let's talk about the release patch, shall we? My opinion on it is as follows: I know why it was made, the reasons for it were noble, the patch was great in terms of quality, but it wasn't the right move for the game. What do I mean by that? Allow me to explain.

The game always suffered from a steep learning curve. There's so many mechanics and ways to play, it can be overwhelming. If you're playing weird games on the daily and take the time to figure stuff out yourself, it's not problem, but not everyone operates on the same wavelengths. I can imagine the developers looking at the game and noticing these issues:

• Game has a steep learning curve and bad tutorials
• Crafting system is unnecessarily complex and results in a stale meta - hard to call it customization if you're forced to choose the same loadout in order to succeed
• Early game is boring
• Game's too slow and not fun to watch

Good news is, they realized after years of playtesting that it doesn't work to some degree. They addressed every single issue with the new patch and it's now a much more polished experience because of that. The bad news is, they realized it this late in development and they decided to go through with it anyway.

The release patch was controversial, but I can agree on one thing: that's not what the players signed up for. If the design was truly bad at the beginning, the best course of action this late into the game should've been persevering despite the game's flaws and finding other ways to fix it. A total rework was a waste of resources that could've been additions to make the learning curve as seamless as possible, buffing more situational picks (or nerfing more versatile ones), giving each choice more of a reason to exist, giving us more options to problem solve and ways to counterract the game's shortcomings. Was the patch competent? Yes. But that's not what the game needed. It was a high risk move that didn't pay off.

I'll be blunt here. If the release patch was here from the beginning, I wouldn't have any issues with it. That's because by then, the developers are selling us a different experience altogether and we'd get another community with different motivations backing your game. But the devs picked a lane and now two months after launch, the game is in a freefall. I'm fairly generous and I would've stuck around and gave the game more credit even with its rework, but even with some people liking the changes, most of the fans that signed in to play slow-paced deliberate Darwin. Of course the devs might've not realized that their design was faulty early on, so I can believe that they would leave their archaic design for years. However I can fault them for not monitoring the main core loop of the game, basically announcing it as finished when Early Access rolled around. I don't think "reverting" would fix anything at this point, it's over. Here's my version of events:

• People start playing Darwin because the game had a specific mood and goals in mind, like melee combat, it being different to its contemporaries, it's atmosphere, pacing, etc.
• Devs thought people started playing Darwin, because they've seen the game is exciting to watch and are interested in its unique features.
• Developers fail to monitor mechanics and instead focus on adding content without getting the core gameplay loop good early.
• Developers prioritize their vision. Instead of asking the community to "make the game better" they should've been more like "help us achieve our vision for the game" and making it clear from the start what the developers want the game to be.
• Community was left constantly guessing on what the developers prioritized and what their vision was for the game.

I rest my case.

Here's a lightning round on smaller issues that the game had:

• Invaders got implemented, but it should've been available to all streamers, not just Darwin Partners.
• Removing options from Custom Matches, which gimped the longevity of the game at least to some degree.
• Show Director getting ignored, especially bad since some players played Darwin only because of that feature alone.
• Lackluster Battle Pass left a bad taste in the mouth of many, especially after the game cancellation.
• Fixing a lot of issues with the release patch, but ignoring others that were just as important if not moreso.

I'll probably still jump into the game from time to time before its shutdown and play with friends, but it definitely won't be a regular occurence. Was fun playing and talking about the game though! Cheers!