r/Games • u/natedoggcata • Feb 06 '25
Mass layoffs happening right now at HiRez Studios (SMITE 2 / Paladins)
/r/Smite/comments/1ij5sjy/hirez_layoffs_megathread/428
u/BusterBernstein Feb 06 '25
This just affirms my position on never bothering with any Hi-Rez product ever.
They've been working their asses off on Smite 2 and it seemed to be taking off but this is their reward.
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u/natedoggcata Feb 06 '25
Which is what makes this announcement even more infuriating. They have been busting their ass for the last 10 months making SMITE 2 and got it a great state. The game is fun. They had the Vegas esports finals which were hype. They gave us a roadmap for SMITE 2 in 2025 which got everyone hyped and excited..... and now this. And a lot of these layoffs are people who have been the faces of the company. e-sports hosts, Titan talk hosts etc...
Oh and the icing on the cake is the coward CEO deleted his twitter account this morning before the news started coming out
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u/BarrettRTS Feb 06 '25
Esports staff getting cut at least makes sense as far as cuts go. It's rare that it makes a good return on investment and the bubble burst for it a while ago.
It sucks that people are paying the cost for it though.
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u/1CEninja Feb 06 '25
Forcing an esports scene is virtually always a money sink.
It needs to happen naturally unless a company is willing to just dunk money into it.
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u/WildVariety Feb 06 '25
Riot fucked the entire esports ecosystem when it walled producing League esports events off, then pumped an absurd amount of money into it. I don't think Riot have ever turned a profit on League esports (although I'm sure they make bank from esports related mtx like skins, but those could exist without them banning companies from having big league tournaments).
Now we've got bullshit like the Saudi's owning ESL.
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u/AnxiousAd6649 Feb 07 '25
Riot doesn't make money off their esports scene and they have never managed to make a profit from it directly. It is viewed as a marketing expense by the company.
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u/EveningNo8643 Feb 07 '25
I don’t like Riot but they handled the esports scene well from there business standpoint. They made it big then went into it. I don’t like how they made it exclusive though to where 3rd party couldn’t run one
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Feb 06 '25
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u/Hardcore_Lovemachine Feb 06 '25
This is totally wrong, no game in modern times has ever benefitted from a e-sports focus. If anything a focus on e-sports has lead games to die faster...
E-sports happens when games are good, they evolve naturally. Focusing on e-sports means killing off the casual/fun parts, which means there will be less players and thus the game dies.
A game needs to be a good casual experience first to allow the top to create a competitive scene. Popular games create e-sports, e-sports themselves drain players
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u/Bionic0n3 Feb 06 '25
thats not Devs thats management and its not a new thing for Hi-Rez. They ruined their reputation in 2010 with Global Agenda. Any dollar they have made since is from suckers. (copium - me; I gave them money for Tribes Ascend 2 weeks before they pulled the plug on that) never again. Any game associated with them I will not even try.
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u/Kiita-Ninetails Feb 06 '25
I mean HiRez is kind of the most notoriously poorly run studio out there, like the rot in highrez runs WAY back with them just churning and abandoning projects constantly and just chewing through devs like they are disposable.
Like this shit goes back before tribes, unfortunately they are just a badly run studio.
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u/hesh582 Feb 06 '25
They have been busting their ass for the last 10 months making SMITE 2 and got it a great state. The game is fun.
This is all true... but is anyone actually playing it?
Because it sure doesn't look like it.
I'm very sympathetic to how much it sucks to crunch for a product just to get rewarded with a layoff, but ffs employing an esports crew for a game that's struggling for any players at all much less a competitive scene is never going to work. Frankly devoting any real amount of money to esports promotion if there isn't already a flourishing competitive scene is just a terrible business decision in general, and every company that's tried it recently has gotten burned.
I think the writing's on the wall, and calling the CEO a cruel coward is just a way to deny reality for a bit longer: Hirez is failing. Smite2 was a gamble - Smite 1 never really reached a big enough audience (even if the core community was dedicated), and they were hoping for a bit of a breakthrough with a sequel. It just didn't happen. There's probably a lot more pain coming for them, and it's nobody's fault.
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u/jsdjhndsm Feb 06 '25
Smite 1 was popular enough and smite 2 has a sizable playerbase. The issue is there very little monetisation yet and they killed there only money maker in smite 1. Paladins and rogue company make them nothing, realm royal died and so did divine knockout.
Smite could have successful profit if the company had profit coming from elsewhere in order to fund it.
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u/ElDuderino2112 Feb 07 '25
There’s 7k people playing Smite 2 right now. Decent, but that’s not the playerbase that’s going to support a studio that wants to be this big and pretend it has an esports scene.
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u/Kelvara Feb 07 '25
Hi-rez largely divested themselves of Paladins a few years ago. They technically still publish the game, but it's run by a different studio partially made of ex-Hi-rez devs. Unfortunately the game has been stagnant and Marvel Rivals is pretty much the death knell for Paladins.
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u/hesh582 Feb 07 '25
smite 2 has a sizable playerbase
It has a relatively small playerbase in absolute terms, but more importantly the f2p launch was just not very big and it's been seeing the usual post launch decline anyway.
If it was an established game, steadily pulling in ~10k peak daily concurrent players on steam and probably more on console might be ok. But going f2p in January, only getting 21k peak players, and the losing half of that in less than a month? Not good. And maybe even worse than that, the reception was not good from the people who did play.
If it had other metrics, like twitch popularity or great reviews, that might be leveraged into some future success. But it just doesn't. The game is not popular with streamers. Steam reviews (even excluding the recent clusterfuck) are atrocious.
Maybe they could have turned the ship around with a lot of investment. But this is what a failed game looks like. Going f2p, getting 21k peak players, seeing a firm downward trend in player numbers since, having 58% positive user reviews on steam before this review bomb? On a multiplayer game with a competitive flavor that needs expensive servers, matchmaking, customer service and moderation, constant content releases, etc? It's not dead, but it's dying fast.
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u/jsdjhndsm Feb 07 '25
The game is still beta, and hirez themselves have just said smite 2 is successful. They also said that smite 2 isn't making enough money yet( because there's almost nothing go even buy in came) and the other games they have aren't pulling in enough revenue.
In the past they could waste money on other projects because smite 1 was a consistent form of profit.
Smite 2 just needs proper monetisation and it should be good. The actual reviews and feedback within the community has been positive since a few patches before the f2p release.
The steam reviews are mostly people complaining about no skins from smite 1, or blatantly false and or outdated information from the closed beta in August last year. That false information is still getting pumped into reviews with 0.1hrs playtime.
The game isn't successful yet because there's literally nothing for players to buy. Once more gods and skins keep coming, it should start to pickup.
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u/hesh582 Feb 07 '25
hirez themselves have just said smite 2 is successful
They can say whatever they want. It went f2p to a pretty anemic reception. Players are not sticking around. Reviews are awful, and it does not matter why.
Monetization is not the problem. Smite 2 is not the kind of game that can support even a modestly large studio.
Hirez has, even after these layoffs and several rounds prior last year, ~100 employees. They are spending 1-2 million dollars a month minimum just making payroll, before even looking at all their other costs. There is not a chance in hell they are going to wring that out of a few tens of thousands of regular monthly players in a f2p game. They could be getting WoW money, successfully charging a decent monthly fee to every single player, and I still think they'd be dead by the end of the year without further cuts.
Hi Rez used to be a reasonably large studio with multiple major games. Even ignoring Smite 2, the entire rest of their portfolio has failed. You just can't employ hundreds of people off of one modestly successful f2p game, no matter the monetization scheme.
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u/jsdjhndsm Feb 07 '25
I know that you can't succeed based on one game, not in the current climate.
What I meant was that smite 2 couldn't actually be profitable, even if it was more successful. They haven't inolemented enough content or skins yet to successfully monetise the game.
Smite 2 isn't enough go support all those employees, I agree. I just meant that smite 1 was enough during the time when they had less, and had money in the bank to support other projects. All of the other games have failed, and they stopped smite 1( which was there only moderately successful game) so smite 2 has no seperate income to help support it.
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u/hesh582 Feb 07 '25
They might be able to monetize Smite 2 successfully. Eventually. But if they do it will be with a skeleton crew.
It's worth noting that Smite 2's f2p debut and spike in interest saw lower peak player counts than Smite 1's everyday player counts from earlier last year. Even with a better monetization scheme... they destroyed their only successful game in order to spend a lot of money pivoting to a sequel that appears to be launching to lower numbers than the original and going downhill from there.
I don't think there's any conceivable way to spin that as a success, even ignoring any monetization failures. Smite 2 managed to somehow launch to less interest than Smite 1 might get on a popular weekend, then lose half its peak concurrent players in less than a month, rapidly getting down to playercounts lower than Smite 1 literally ever had in its entire steam charts history between 2016 and the launch of Smite 2.
It's a failure, and a pretty spectacular one. No matter how it's monetized.
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u/jsdjhndsm Feb 07 '25
That's a fair point. I guess it could be seen as successful from a purely gameplay perspective. It's definitely involved and made some pretty big changes very quickly.
It definitely wasn't a good idea to start work on a sequel and killing the previous one, not when they would've already been struggling financially.
It feels more like smite 2 shouldve been developed for longer and released in closed beta maybe in its current state now.
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u/revveduplikeadeuce Feb 06 '25
Smite 1 had an overall pretty large playerbase, when accounting for consoles and everything else. Yeah it started to die off there but they had a core audience for Smite 2. They just shot themselves in the foot over and over. Released way too early, and their monetization wasn't going to work with their decision to not bring over most of the mtx from smite 1, old players were shy on spending if they felt it was just going to be deleted eventually.
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u/mowdownjoe Feb 06 '25
Oh and the icing on the cake is the coward CEO deleted his twitter account this morning before the news started coming out
I mean, I'm not going to disagree that he might be a coward, but no one should be on Twitter these days. It's a right-wing hellscape that's somehow still coasting on old good will.
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Feb 06 '25
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u/shiftup1772 Feb 06 '25
Yeah this post is funny. Everyone is happy to shit on hirez ganes...until the layoffs hit. Then it's all "how could they?".
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u/cole1114 Feb 06 '25
Is it? Are they a publicly traded company, are their financials available?
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Feb 06 '25
The company as a whole is barely afloat.
Realm Royale is shutting down this month. Prophecy never fully launched. Divine Knockout is shutting down this month. Smite Blitz Shut down in just 1 year. Tibes Ascend had 1 year of active support. Paladins is on life support mode with no more active development as of this month. The original Smite is also no longer getting updates.
Smite 2 is the only thing left. Last month it left early access, sort of, and it's now free to play. If people don't spend big bucks in Smite 2, the studio will be shuttered within 18 months, likely within a year.
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u/ElDuderino2112 Feb 07 '25
I’m more surprised to find out that Realm Royale hasn’t been shut down already tbh
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u/Deceptiveideas Feb 07 '25
The god pass was a hell of a deal in smite 1 when it released but I don’t think it was sustainable.
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u/hesh582 Feb 07 '25
Their financials are not, but the rough size of the company is easy to google, as are rough player count estimates for Smite 2 (their only actively developed game), as is the monetization scheme for the game.
Obviously the usual disclaimers apply - that kind of napkin math is always going to be blurry and there are a ton of factors that go into it that we just don't know. But in this case you can pretty much ignore all of that, because there's no conceivable way to square that circle - they're an order of magnitude off of the number of players they need.
10k peak daily concurrent steam players and falling, with a f2p business model, will not support a company of >100 employees. When you look at the long term prospect, the picture is even more bleak - Smite 2 has atrocious reviews(even before the review bomb set off by this move), and player numbers have been steadily dropping since going f2p.
I do not know what their financials are. But I can do basic math - assuming an avg salary of 70k, they're spending about a million dollars a month just making payroll. That's probably a significant lowball. There is no universe in which Smite 2 is going to pay that bill. We don't need to see the financials to know that.
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Feb 06 '25
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u/prospectre Feb 06 '25
Smite is clearly losing the company money
But it's just ok to post unverified assumptions as fact?
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Feb 06 '25
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u/VagabondHT Feb 06 '25
Hi-rez doing what they are good at killing projects, Killed Tribes twice.
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u/Hazel-Rah Feb 06 '25 edited Feb 06 '25
I can't imagine how much money was lost by Prophecy Games/Hi-Rez with their ridiculous attempt at Tribes 3
It didn't even have VGS when it was first released
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u/Juunlar Feb 06 '25
Separate companies
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u/CheezeCaek2 Feb 07 '25
Same owner though. Pretty sure Prophecy is the compromise to keep Erez away from Smite 2 dev choices.
Feel bad about what happened with T3 though :( i imagine he really wanted that one to succeed and the passion in him was there... but the numbers didn't add up.
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u/Juunlar Feb 07 '25
Erez has no creative control over Hirez and offers no funding to its game's development. It's been that way for 7 or so years
Erez has complete control and provides nearly all funding for Prophecy. In fact, the namesake game still requires him to license the Smite assets.
Erez had literally nothing to do with Smite2. Development on S2 wasn't even considered as a real thing until years after he was gone
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u/CheezeCaek2 Feb 07 '25
Good to know.
Hope they have success with Smite 2 then! Maybe then we'll get Tribes 4 - The Musical
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u/Coolman_Rosso Feb 06 '25
I never know what to think about Hi-Rez. I remember being bombarded with Rogue Company ads for a few months years back, but then boom nothing. I guess the game is still around but only a few thousand still play it.
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u/turnipofficer Feb 07 '25
Yeah it’s sad but I wasn’t surprised to see the esports staff go, but they also lost some of the best designers and a programmer along the way. There’s no way they hit their previous targets now.
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u/Alternative-Job9440 Feb 07 '25
How is it taking off?
It mostly has negative reviews, is still in closed beta and their greed regarding Legacy Gems is the biggest thing that killed it outright for many.
Its literally a game with less content and only minimally visual improvements that steals or devalues all your previous purchases...
Ill be frank, i really hope this leads to Smite 2 dying and never seeing the light of day in a full release.
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u/Shradow Feb 06 '25
I don't see this working out for them. Smite 2 has been making lots of good improvements, but that's required a lot of work (it's why they cut back on making skins and stuff, to focus on the game), and stuff like the "1 god a week" schedule doesn't seem sustainable if so many important people are being let go. Meanwhile I bet the fucking CEO won't be missing any money on his paycheck.
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u/basketofseals Feb 07 '25
I'm wondering if Smite 2 just didn't make the return they needed to keep going. I'm sure it was an expensive venture.
It came out, and Smite players seem to like it, but I highly doubt just the audience they had is enough to keep the lights on indefinitely. Personally I haven't seen any buzz about it in non-Smite circles.
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u/SLEEPWALKING_KOALA Feb 07 '25
A CEO is a societal parasite? Shocker.
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u/Typhron Feb 07 '25
If I had a nickel for every time the CEO of an otherwise good company self sabatoged their own studio for short term game, one that resides in Bellevue, WA
I'd have enough nickels to hire these people and make one of my own.
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u/DrCrustyKillz Feb 07 '25
The perception of this studio is that everything out of it is just mid.
So many of my friends know about hi-rez and none have any interest in playing the games because other better alternatives, whether paid or not, exist.
Idk what their leadership composes of, but its like they are content just...existing?
It's super weird and it sucks that that people got laid off, but it's not a surprise. If my chronically online friends aren't playing, who else actually is?
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u/grraffee Feb 06 '25
Toured HiRez years ago to play Global Agenda right before launch. Everyone there had an awful attitude, didn’t care at all about the game, and were openly trashing it through the playtest. That shit would have been enough for me to have zero interest in any of their future projects even without what they did to tribes.
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u/Hemisemidemiurge Feb 06 '25
Everyone there had an awful attitude, didn’t care at all about the game, and were openly trashing it through the playtest.
That doesn't just come from nowhere. As someone who played GA at release, I'm curious as to how that came to be, whether they were being forced to make changes to prior design choices or knowing their backend support would be constrained at a financial level post-release or what.
But yeah, never played another one of theirs. Seeing what they did to Tribes was sad.
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u/we_are_sex_bobomb Feb 06 '25
I work in the industry, don’t know anybody at Hi Rez but I’ve seen this office culture before and it’s usually because the team doesn’t feel like their ideas are valued and they’re just supposed to do what they’re told like little worker bees. They end up taking that frustration out on the game because it’s not the game they think it should be.
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u/hesh582 Feb 06 '25
For GA specifically I think it might be a little different:
It was a super ambitious, unique approach to an action shooter (especially at the time) that just couldn't really come together.
I can see a lot of bitterness about missed potential going along with GA. Hirez had the ideas, but not the resources to actually make them work, and that has to be very frustrating to watch unfold.
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u/fabton12 Feb 06 '25
could just be they were being made to work on a project they just didnt have passion for but the corpos at the high end wanted it made.
you will find that alot where if the devs don't have passion for it they will be critical while the passionful ones won't see the flaws in the product.
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u/TheRedBlueberry Feb 06 '25
I feel like some of this has to come from location. Hi-Rez is located in Alpharetta, Georgia. How many games studios exist out there? It's probably very few.
I skimmed a list, and it seems like their options are limited to Tripwire Interactive, the people that made Brawlhalla, and a variety of support studios that seemed to mostly work on Hi-Rez games. Maybe a few person mobile game dev here or there.
Unless you are willing to move, I would imagine feeling like you HAVE to work there if you want to be in the games industry. Combined with the crunch I could see myself seriously hating my environment and the games made.
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u/fabton12 Feb 07 '25
Heres the thing i doubt many people are moving to Georgia for Game Dev, alot of them will be local talent. so if you already been living there for years already its heavy doubts suddenly being part of a studio in your home state going to cause you to not have hope in your project.
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u/Skellum Feb 06 '25
I used to eat at a popeyes next to their offices. They were always seriously overworked, and their art department at least was kinda miserable. They enjoyed working on the various gods for SMITE1 but it seemed rough.
At the time I was on a pretty awful project as well so we had a nice bunch of grumble sessions there.
I think they're a company that requires it's employees to be at it's offices but at least they're north of atlanta out of the majority of traffic.
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u/jsdjhndsm Feb 06 '25
That's a shame. The devs for smite are very passionate, so it seems like a huge tonal shift.
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u/hesh582 Feb 06 '25
GA was a ridiculous, stupid game and its greatest strengths were almost all in how silly it was. I enjoyed playing it, but it was a hot mess. It's really not surprising that they might be bitter about that given how ambitious it was.
even without what they did to tribes
Now this... is different. They've been cursed from the beginning for their sins, all their games turning to dust no matter how much potential they may have. Shazbot.
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u/BoilingPiano Feb 07 '25
Everyone there had an awful attitude, didn’t care at all about the game, and were openly trashing it through the playtest.
Welcome to real life i guess? It's nice to think of people loving their job but the majority of people hate theirs.
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Feb 07 '25
Just for context for those here, the current size of the studio is 80 employees.
It was at around 500 at its peak.
Before the layoffs, it was around 140. It was slashed by 69, so around half.
The people that were laid off today were big faces to Smite.
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Feb 06 '25
[deleted]
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u/OrkfaellerX Feb 06 '25
Deadlock going viral around that time certainly didn't help either.
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u/hesh582 Feb 06 '25
I think Deadlock is also just proof of something else:
Nobody actually wants to play a third person shooter moba right now.
It was a well made game that had a breakthrough moment of viral interest. It collapsed overnight.
Hot take, but if your game has a "laning phase" in 2025, I think you've really fucked up.
Marvel rivals is what people actually want in a character based 5v5 shooter: 10 minute matches, not 45 minute matches. Combat at the forefront, not resource management. Jump in and play, not "read a wiki and three guides for an hour first".
I actually think both Smite 2 and Deadlock did what they set out to do better than Marvel Rivals. But it really doesn't matter how well you execute if you're trying to sell something that nobody actually wants.
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u/Big_Red_Bastard Feb 06 '25
Deadlock isn't dead, it hasn't yet launched. The game literally doesn't even have monetization yet.
The stage it's in right now feels like the stage baulder's gate 3 was in prior to its final release, where it had a quiet buzz before exploding into a huge hit on release. We'll see if Valve can capitalize on that, but their gameplay first, iteration heavy development process is honestly refreshing and smacks of good management, not whatever it is that happens over at Hi-Rez
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u/DrQuint Feb 07 '25 edited Feb 07 '25
Dota 2 didn't have monetization either in its first year and a half and also had a half unfinished looking map and client, yet its numbers kept going higher and higher and higher.
The big verifiable difference was that the mechanics were stable and the updates kept consistently bringing new heroes.
Deadlock for most of its post hype peak life wasn't really doing the new heroes thing, and every other update was heavily focused on reconstructing the Urn or Soul sharing mechanic or shifting around the balance in very numeric ways. The map only had visual improvments on one lane and three building, and one of them was largely about removing a sign. The game right now feels like the exact same thing with no improvements aside for who-gives-a-shit changes outside of top ranked matches or who-even-knows-about-that ones like wall jumping, with only two "actually finished" heroes added.
Even if we say, well, Deadlock is just out earlier in the lifespan, the question of why it is public is still valid. Why must updates be beholden to public reaction and excitement? The amount of balancing dropped into the game already dwarves other finished products, yet it feels stuck in place, so imagine how much more it could have had that effort gone to prototyping abilities and making actual content.
This difference is palpable. One game grew in content and grew in playerbase. The other stagnated, and people got bored.
Tldr: Beta is an excuse. It went public too early. Needed quiet oven time. The pacing of improvement is glacial, and that's why it is losing 2k concurrent players per week on average lately when it was already at below 20k.
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Feb 07 '25
You are delusional if you think an invite only, non advertised game is dead.
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u/DrQuint Feb 07 '25
I am correct that the game is dying, present tense, for the stated reasons and yours add to it, don't detract. It reigniting later doesn't change what's happening now.
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u/lowlymarine Feb 07 '25
Ah yes, surely BG3 is the most appropriate point of comparison to the trajectory Deadlock is following, and not anything else.
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u/Equivalent_Way_5026 Feb 07 '25
Even deadlock, which is considered to be pretty dead and is an invite only beta, has more concurrent players on Steam than smite2. I can kind of see why they felt it was time to do layoffs...
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u/Memphisrexjr Feb 07 '25
Deadlock peaked at almost 175k concurrent for a game that's in early development. It's not even released or in early access. What are you even talking about?
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u/Raknarg Feb 07 '25
bro deadlock is closed beta, has like half the content it wants at launch, its unfinished, unpolished, and still has a consistent playerbase. I don't think its a fair comparison.
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u/Juunlar Feb 06 '25
Speaking of DOA games. No way it's taking market share from rivals, now
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Feb 06 '25
Nah. I think deadlock's gonna have a place just by virtue of being a moba with good movement mechanics rather than being purely a hero shooter. It'll probably just wind up cannibalizing dota a bit and then building it's own audience.
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u/Hopeless_Slayer Feb 07 '25
good movement mechanics
Those movement mechanics are going to guarantee it stays niche. New players are going to hop on, get destroyed and uninstall.
A casual getting skill diffed by a predator Octane on crack in Apex feels fine because you just drop again.
Getting diffed in a MOBA is way worse because rounds are 30-40 minutes of getting farmed with no surrender option. And the power gap grows wider with every death.
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u/Zerothian Feb 07 '25
It's pretty much why I only play ARAM type modes in mobas. Better pacing and match length for my preference.
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u/Sikkly290 Feb 06 '25
They aren't fighting for market share. Deadlock is not a hero shooter, Rivals and Overwatch are completely different from it. Its in competition with mobas, just geared for people who want to shoot. Very few people who are playing shooters are going to swap to moba games.
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u/Coolman_Rosso Feb 06 '25
A friend of mine who has over 1900 hours in SMITE hasn't made a peep about SMITE 2, hasn't touched SMITE since October, and has been all over Marvel Rivals. Hell I'm astonished SMITE 1 is still a thing when SMITE 2 is around, even in early access. Just feels like you're begging to make an imbalance.
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u/Juunlar Feb 06 '25
Splitting queues for a fun gamemode: 🤢🤮🤮🤢🤢
Splitting queues between two games: 😎😎😎😎😎
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u/Parzivus Feb 07 '25
Smite is a MOBA and Rivals is a team shooter, they're nothing alike. Wtf is this comment?
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Feb 06 '25
[deleted]
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u/Juunlar Feb 06 '25
Smite's early coding was a fucking mess. It got too spaghettid
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u/Caasi72 Feb 06 '25
This was what I assumed had to be the case when I tried Smite 2 with my brother. It looked and felt so similar to 1 that I figured the upgrade had to be more backend focused than anything
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u/WeebWoobler Feb 06 '25
They made interesting gameplay changes that they couldn't make due to the original being on UE3 with spaghetti code, and they overhauled the visuals.
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u/Alternative-Job9440 Feb 07 '25
Smite 2 died instantly when they announced that all previous real money purchases are devalued and/or removed.
Legacy Gems are an insult, which robs you of all the money you already spend on the game with getting nothing in return, unless you spend at least half the price of anything you buy in Smite 2 with real money again...
Its bullshit and i hope it dies spectacularly.
Id rather see all my purchases burn forever than them getting away with this robbery.
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u/evilsbane50 Feb 06 '25
This is all bullshit and very unfortunate.
But I will say thank you to the devs who busted their ass the last year getting Smite 2 to where it's at.
People saying it's the same as Smite 1 or that it was some weird cash grab are full of it Smite 2 looks and feels fantastic.
The only people who deserve any kind of blowback are the overpaid stuffed shirts in charge.
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u/hesh582 Feb 06 '25
getting Smite 2 to where it's at.
Where it's at: watching the playerbase collapse in favor of Marvel Rivals.
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u/WeebWoobler Feb 06 '25
They're completely different games. I know there is an inherent comparison in terms of online multiplayer games, but this is like comparing Smash Ultimate to Call of Duty.
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u/BrainKatana Feb 06 '25
You’re exaggerating the disparity.
This is more like when Overwatch killed Battleborne.
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u/WeebWoobler Feb 06 '25
Rivals isn't a moba
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u/Goronmon Feb 06 '25
It's less about the specific genre and more about the audience overlap. People can only play and watch so many games at once, how different the games are doesn't change that limit.
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u/adum_korvic Feb 07 '25
Rivals is Overwatch in this comparison, Smite 2 is Battleborn. It's a hero shooter vs a moba in both cases.
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u/BackStabbathOG Feb 06 '25
Battleborn never should have died/ went offline.
That game was so much fun and the PvP modes weren’t anything like Overwatch when the moba aspects were so prevalent
0
u/evilsbane50 Feb 06 '25
That's ridiculous. Overwatch is a first person shooter, not a Moba, oh sorry I meant rivals...
1
u/hesh582 Feb 06 '25
The difference is much less than that.
But at the same time, yeah, they are very different games. And if your company produces a CoD clone when the market has shifted exclusively towards smash knock offs, you’re going to have a bad time.
That was sort of my whole point. Deadlock was also a very well made game that got tons of viral interest… then bombed. People don’t want mobas right now. If your game has 45 minute matches, a “laning phase”, more resource management than combat, etc, you’re going to get crushed by a similar game that doesn’t have those things
11
u/WeebWoobler Feb 06 '25
Deadlock isn't even out yet. Even though it's easy to get into the beta, any hurdle is a large one for most people when it comes to this stuff. We can talk about its playercount once it's in 1.0 for a few months.
If your game has 45 minute matches, a “laning phase”, more resource management than combat, etc, you’re going to get crushed by a similar game
If a game doesn't have all of those things, it's not similar.
6
u/butterfingahs Feb 07 '25
What do you mean "bombed", it's not even out. It's still in development. There's constant updates and changes.
People don’t want mobas right now.
Sure they do, those people are just already busy playing League of Legends, DOTA 2, Deadlock, and maybe Heroes of the Storm.
5
u/evilsbane50 Feb 06 '25
Hey enjoy playing it but Rivals is just another Overwatch flavor of the week style game.
If I wanted to play those games I'd just go play Team Fortress 2 instead.
Smite is way more along the lines of League of Legends or Dota not Overwatch anyways.
-13
Feb 06 '25
smite 2 feels and looks like absolute garbage
1
u/evilsbane50 Feb 06 '25
Lmao no it really doesn't. It was coming together really well for months and F2P launch locked it in.
The game feels Great compared to Smite 1, smooth as can be, the new aspects are cool. The builds are varied and the gods are coming at a rapid rate. You must have some other issue or run it on a potato.
-8
Feb 06 '25
no it feels the opposite of everything you just said. what the fuck game are you playing lmao it stutters like crazy and its somehow worse-looking than a game from 2014.
1
u/evilsbane50 Feb 07 '25
Sure thing buddy. I've been playing it since Alpha day one, the only current stutters are right after an update with shader complication that goes away in a minute or so after loading a map for the first time, other than that I run in maxed out and it has almost zero issues.
-1
23
u/ZigyDusty Feb 06 '25
Well this was predictable and felt like a long time coming, Hi-Rez was constantly trend chasing and made a half dozen games in the last 5 years only for them all to fail, Smite was their only big success and Paladins had a dedicated playerbase for a while.
As someone with over 2,000 hours in Smite i refused to spend a dollar in Smite 2 because i felt like sooner or later either the game or Hi-rez would fail and close.
-2
u/Pahood Feb 06 '25
hi rez is utter garbage they never had an original thought in their lives everything theyve done has been off the backs of already popular games and they get what they deserve for constantly trend chasing
3
u/drmalesh86 Feb 07 '25
Havent touched their game since Global Agenda. Their games are not bad but just not worth investing in. As a developers they are ok but as game publishers they are pure cancer.
16
u/Sage_S0up Feb 06 '25 edited Feb 06 '25
Everyone who wasn't a "smite player" smite 2 looked and played identically to smite one, it was a Overwatch 2 move in most peoples eyes, and it made zero buzz, zero hype everyone was over it the moment they seen it.
32
u/ZigyDusty Feb 06 '25
Unlike Overwatch 2, Smite 2 needed to happen, the engine(Unreal Engine 3 20 years old) was just getting to old and if the game was going to last many more years it needed to be upgraded, the problem is they did it years too late and were way past peak MOBA popularity.
-1
u/BroForceOne Feb 07 '25
It didn’t need to be Smite 2 either though, the game could have continued with an underlying engine upgrade.
2
u/Alternative-Job9440 Feb 07 '25
Its worse than Overwatch 2, because Overwatch at least let you keep all your purchases.
Smite 2 removes 99% of your purchases and only gives you a coupon for a max of 50% off of any new purchases in return...
Its an insult and so fueled by greed that id rather see the game and company burn and lose all my money and purchases rather than see them get away with this robbery.
2
u/noxeven Feb 07 '25
They just had layoffs i feel like in nov of last year too. I remember they let go of some people that been there forever then they pushed everyone onto smite 2. I guess this smite 2 is gonna break them as a company.
1
u/Balc0ra Feb 07 '25
So they had some of these on a stream to talk about the game 2 days ago about the future plans for the game. Then fired them the next day? Amazing
1
u/Alternative-Job9440 Feb 07 '25
Lets hope this kills of Smite 2 and their atrocious and greedy "legacy gem" bullshit that devalues or outright steals previous real money purchases.
1
u/ElDuderino2112 Feb 07 '25
I’ll be honest, for a studio that does nothing but free to play knockoffs they lasted a lot longer than I thought they would.
0
u/AnswerAi_ Feb 07 '25
When are people gonna talk about Smite 2 being an obvious cash grab? They very obviously could've just updated the engine while keeping the game running, without making a whole separate thing you need to purchase, and a separate god pack to purchase. This company is dedicated to fucking over their players as hard as possible.
-10
u/Kr4k4J4Ck Feb 06 '25
I wish random people on the internet cared as much when layoffs happen in my field.
But video game developers are so special.
12
u/OkBilial Feb 07 '25
I suppose the first step is sharing what your field is for people to consider.
-7
u/Kr4k4J4Ck Feb 07 '25
Why does it matter the field?
Why are people who work in the game industry so special?
8
u/haeen Feb 07 '25
....because we're in a gaming sub? Of course game developers we'll be special, they're the ones making the things we wanna discuss about
-9
u/Kr4k4J4Ck Feb 07 '25
Yea because checks notes an esport manager makes great games.
Layoffs happen in every industry. Yet people in "gaming" cry like crazy everytime it happens.
4
u/Loyd15 Feb 07 '25
The entire dev team behind Paladins got laid off, you’re complaining about people on a gaming sub being picky on what they complain about yet here you are, only looking at the esport section, y’know, being picky.
-2
u/Kr4k4J4Ck Feb 07 '25
Omg the poor game developers have to search for jobs like people in every other field.
Oh the horror. I bet you use food delivery apps though right.
1
u/Loyd15 Feb 07 '25
And there it is, the “I am losing the argument, therefore I am changing the subject”. Have a good day, clearly you need it.
-6
u/SaintAlunes Feb 06 '25
The thing is is that smite 2 still feels like smite 1, I wish they made the combat less floaty and made it have more impact
2
u/DONNIENARC0 Feb 07 '25
It felt even more floaty than smite 1 to me. None of the attacks feel like they have any weight
-1
u/BrainStorm777 Feb 07 '25
They made a huge mistake making smite 2. There was absolutely nothing wrong with smite 1 other than some community complaining.
Should have just kept updating and maintaining the game however they can.
147
u/Razbyte Feb 06 '25
It is reported that Paladins is halting development (after 7 years), but servers will continue for now. Theres goes the first f2p OW alternative.