So, as many as y’all would’ve guessed, Catalyst Black, the game SEMC ditched VG for, in many ways has already failed. Here’s a quick summary of how it happened, how it’s soured the playerbase of CB, what it means for everyone else and how SEMC is doing overall as a company:

So CB, ever since global launch, hasn’t been doing so well for four reasons: Little to no marketing for the game at all. The playerbase was told the target market for the game was veterans already playing the game (facepalm). RNG (lootboxes) affects every aspect of progression, as a result F2P & P2W players have terrible odds & experiences acquiring gear needed to compete. 2). The introduction of an OP piece of gear called Horn of Supremacy ( It’s a passive conditional piece gear that Grants 40% Lifesteal & 39% (Dmg reduction from all types of dmg) Global Armor after using an ability for three seconds [Can be abused with multiple charge abilities to prolong the duration even longer and double the lifesteal if your ability dmgs on two fronts]) that despite the troubles of gear acquisition for all players is available in a bundle for direct purchase for real money (P2W) and hasn’t been nerfed significantly at all (10% nerf on the values. The horn sells because you can buy power). 3). The Lack of communication for nearly two whole MONTHS and No balance patches in two months either. Each update brings less content than the last, bugs haven’t been fixed in months (Hundreds of bugs), and the roadmap they’ve created is delayed by a month.

Which brings me to the topic of SEMC and how they’re doing as a company: Recently, on the Catalyst Black Discord Server, some players found the company reviews of former employees from SEMC on a company review website called Glassdoor. The reviews were awful to say the least. They pointed to management that doesn’t listen to their employees and are out of touch, favoritism in the workplace (speaking up got you outcasted; those with tenure were treated better), constant layoffs, no real sense of direction in developing projects, and underpaying compensation. Not to mention understaffed and overworked. SEMC was blasted by the CB community immediately for these reviews, so much that the Director of Operations of SEMC replied to each and every negative review posted about SEMC on Glassdoor. (You can see it for yourselves).

While, at best it’s a very hasty and awful PR cleanup; he ironically revealed that the company is already developing its next set of games; one of which has already began small scale external testing. He said they’re excited to see what they can do with the CB IP but it’s not stated whether the titles being developed are part of the CB franchise (I doubt it since CB isn’t successful ). This was to the surprise of the CB community, who never heard a word back from the devs even till this day. So, CB has failed. The community is still waiting on a long promised ranked mode that looks highly questionable to come.

This fiasco with CB and internally with the company has allowed one dev to finally be able to return work on VG CE, check my previous post for a summary of what they discussed about the future of VG CE.

It seems the company we all grew to love for their amazing work on VG has lost it’s identity with itself and its fans. They seem to become a money hungry gaming developer searching for the next gaming fad for a quick buck rather than sticking with their projects (despite the triple AAA funding they receive). Who ultimately will come back to their community they alienated with hopes we can support their new titles.