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Did Game Pass kill Doom: The Dark Ages?

Gaiff

Gaiff

SBI’s Resident Gaslighter
2016 and Eternal were widely successful. It seems TDA significantly underperformed as it resulted in what is pretty much the closing of Id software. The one noticeable difference is that the previous two games didn't launch on Game Pass day 1.

So, did Game Pass effectively sink it or it would have failed regardless because it diverged too much from the classic formula with too much emphasis on melee combat? Doom Eternal also released at the crossroads of generation, coming out 8 months before the PS5/SX and being available for 6 different platforms vs only 3 for The Dark Ages.
 
I enjoyed the game, but I probably wouldn't have bought it even it wasn't on game pass.

To be honest, I wish they would have just made "Doom 2", where the maps, gameplay, aesthetics, and [lack of a] story were slight evolutions of Doom 2013.

That's all I've ever wanted. Just more Doom.
 
Yes and No.

Obviously Gamepass had a big effect but it was the games price that was the main problem. And i'm judging that from what people were saying at launch on the Steam forums. Even fans of the series said they couldnt justify £70 for a short one and done campaign, and would play on Gamepass instead.
 
Absolutely one hundred percent. Microsoft needs to kill off the day 1-perk of Game Pass, it's obvious now it's not only killing the games commercial viability but also the studios making them as well.
 
Stuart360 said:
Yes and No.

Obviously Gamepass had a big effect but it was the games price that was the main problem. And i'm judging that from what people were saying at launch on the Steam forums. Even fans of the series said they couldnt justify £70 for a short one and done campaign, and would play on Gamepass instead.
Click to expand...
this if anything maybe slightly lower price could have made more buzz in social media. Imo it was the best game in trilogy.
 
Nope, it's nothing but a cope, and always has been. Stalker 2 and E33 were on on game pass, and still put out better sales numbers...neither IP are as known as DOOM.

They changed up the formula, but the mix wasn't what people ended up wanting. They slowed down the pace of the game, they neutered glory kills that represent the tone of the new formula, and they put the most focus on the story of the nu-trilogy games...even though 2016 succeeded by making fun of needless exposition in a game about rip & tear. Should've been $60 like Pragmata, and had a non-RT option that would've lowered the minimum requirements to get more people.

I liked Dark Ages, but not as much as Eternal...that is the biggest problem for a sequel.
 
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kikkis said:
this if anything maybe slightly lower price could have made more buzz in social media. Imo it was the best game in trilogy.
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I think £50 would of been a very fair price for the game, and i bet it would of sold a lot more.

I'm a fan of the series but i also waited for a few months and bought it on a key site for £20.

Also to the OP, yes Eternal was big, but it also released right in the middle of lockdowns in covid, where everything was doing good numbers.
 
it was probably a factor? But I also personally know people who loved doom but felt disappointed with eternal and they didn't play dark ages at all because of it.
 
Both GP and the fact it wasn't as good as Eternal or 2016. Since they never released hard sales numbers, we can only guess as to how many people actually bought the game which seems lower than the first two of the reboot series.

I'm sure D:TDA sold more than other MS failures like South of Midnight, Avowed, The Outer Worlds etc, but not to the level that a Doom game should.

Whatever the reason, it's a damn shame that Id is basically dead at this point when they and Toys for Bob were the only good studios Xbox had. I understand getting rid of the rest of the dead weight at Xbox, but how Sharma and co considered Id not worth keeping is braindead imo.
 
I doubt it. MS has all the metrics for how many people have played TDA and for how long. It doesn't matter whether it's on Game Pass or not when they're collecting money either way.

I blame this purely on MS executives being utterly incompetent.
 
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Naw, TDA being a shitty game killed it, also Eternal turned a lot of people off being that it was a game designed entirely around making PC players feel like they are skilled at something
 
T-Reks said:
Naw, TDA being a shitty game killed it, also Eternal turned a lot of people off being that it was a game designed entirely around making PC players feel like they are skilled at something
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Tom Cruise What GIF
 
It simply wasn't a compelling game after doom eternal.

Its existence was completely unnecessary. No one was asking for it and no one would've been mad if they let the IP lay dormant for a decade again.

Gamepass probably told Microsoft what they needed to know about its quality. Especially if a lot of people bounced off it after two hours like I do after beating the previous several times.
 
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I liked Dark Ages, but diehard OG Doom fans didn't seem to like it because it strayed too far from the source. And it didn't grab a large enough audience to justify its inflated budget. Game Pass didn't have much to do it with; it was DOOMED regardless, imo.
 
He'll to the fuck yes it did. I got it on ps5. You all failed this franchise.

The game is still an 8/10. 2016 and eternal are just 9.5s so yeah it's a drop off but people out here acting like it's some 5/10 woke slop.

Now, Msoft has left you with the new id software team:

zU7SUwQP8ZK21CVj.jpeg


Enjoy fuckers.
 
I'm sure Game Pass was a factor but the reality is that Dark Ages appeared as a significant divergence from what I think of as Doom. I never ended up playing it even to this day but a lot of the content I saw promoting it was not very appealing and perhaps others felt that way also.
 
Arsic said:
He'll to the fuck yes it did. I got it on ps5. You all failed this franchise.

The game is still an 8/10. 2016 and eternal are just 9.5s so yeah it's a drop off but people out here acting like it's some 5/10 woke slop.

Now, Msoft has left you with the new id software team:

zU7SUwQP8ZK21CVj.jpeg


Enjoy fuckers.
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Gonna need "X"'s across the face of how many of them got let go this week. Just out of curiosity.
 
Just for reference, The Dark Ages has 41k user reviews on Steam, while Eternal has 215k user reviews.
Now obviously Eternal has been available for 6 years longer, but i would guess after 6 years, The Dark Ages will probably be around 100k user reviews. So i would guess TDA probably sold around half of what Eternal did in the same time.
 
2016 wasn't my jam (I don't think it was a bad game, the opposite really, but it just wasn't what I wanted from a Doom game) and Eternal turned everything I disliked about 2016 up to 11. I played a bit of TDA on GamePass and all I remember was a shitty turret section to end one level and an even worse Godzilla-like level that followed shortly after.
 
I was going to buy it, but they made it key-Disc...

And thanks to that "funny" little stunt, I didn't buy it.

If it had the full game... I would have bought it
 
Durin said:
Nope, it's nothing but a cope, and always has been. Stalker 2 and E33 were on on game pass, and still put out better sales numbers...neither IP are as known as DOOM.

They changed up the formula, but the mix wasn't what people ended up wanting. They slowed down the pace of the game, they neutered glory kills that represent the tone of the new formula, and they put the most focus on the story of the nu-trilogy games...even though 2016 succeeded by making fun of needless exposition in a game about rip & tear. Should've been $60 like Pragmata, and had a non-RT option that would've lowered the minimum requirements to get more people.

I liked Dark Ages, but not as much as Eternal...that is the biggest problem for a sequel.
Click to expand...
I am going to be honest here Doom is the one game that really does not need a story. Or cutscenes. Or deep characters. It is basically portal-demons-kill satan.
 
no, it was a combination of multiple really bad design choices that probably made people just not interested in it.

the wider levels were a weird choice, and that completely braindead "just make your own game by using these sliders, cuz we can't be arsed to balance our own game" thing didn't help either.

every time you see someone defend the game it's someone who tells you how to change the sliders to make it fun. this instantly tells you that they completely forgot to actually make the game fun, and then just threw a bunch of value tweak sliders in the game.


it is by far the worst of the trilogy, it's not even close... I have still not finished it, every time I try playing it again I get bored after half a mission. the level design is terrible, the combat feels weird, and I just can't shake the feeling that I shouldn't play the game "as intended" and should look up how I should tweak the sliders to make it good... and that's just such an insane turnoff. you basically need a guide to make the game good...

and as someone who already dislikes even so much as having a difficulty selection when you first start a game, having a difficulty selection AND multiple sliders to tweak the difficulty setting further was such an insane red flag right off the bat.


I have no idea who thought that was a good idea, but my god, whoever it was ruined the game imo.
 
I think GamePass is where plenty of games go to die, but this just isn't it.

The Dark Ages isn't nearly as bad as some people make it out to be, but it doesn't even come remotely close to achieving the highs of 2016 and Eternal. It didn't help sales - obviously - but enthusiasm for TDA was through the floor compared to the last two games.
 
Not gonna lie, I was in line at Bestbuy for both Doom and Eternal pre-orders when they launched... but for this one I tried it on game pass first. Literally just bought it on the summer sale because I felt bad about it as it's quite a good game.
 
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  1. People were anticipating a Quake revival after Doom Eternal.
  2. Instead they triple down on the worst part of Eternal, the story, and make a prequel, something no one asked for.
  3. Gameplay is a huge course correction from Eternal, but it might have gone too far in the other direction. Eternal: melee is resource like everything else. TDA: Melee is your primary attack, always use this.
Doom TDA's art assets should have gone toward a Quake 1 reboot. In fact, I wonder if it started out that way.
 
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Gaiff said:
2016 and Eternal were widely successful. It seems TDA significantly underperformed as it resulted in what is pretty much the closing of Id software. The one noticeable difference is that the previous two games didn't launch on Game Pass day 1.

So, did Game Pass effectively sink it or it would have failed regardless because it diverged too much from the classic formula with too much emphasis on melee combat? Doom Eternal also released at the crossroads of generation, coming out 8 months before the PS5/SX and being available for 6 different platforms vs only 3 for The Dark Ages.
Click to expand...
Doom 2016 steam high was 44000, DA was 31000. Not exactly a huge gulf.
 
Doom: The Dark Ages killed itself. As it's already been stated, lesser known IPs sold better despite being day 1 on gamepass. Played through both Doom 2016 and Eternal multiple times each, I couldn't even finish The Dark Ages once and it wasn't due to difficulty. Felt like it was made by some lesser outside team based on the doom world.
 
It was a Doom game with turret and flying dragon sections.

Big focus on a boomarang shield.

I want to reiterate, this was a Doom game.
 
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It wasn't GP. It was the doubling down of the same shit to where it got stale.

Keep in mind, this is the first example of the direction they're heading in now.

They are going to burn people out on the IP that survived. Get keen!
 
2016 was good
Eternal was less good, with story that I couldn't give a fuck about
TDA didn't look like Doom in any way, plus seemed to be doing even more story

Result: Went back to playing OG Doom wads. Happy boy.
 
Jinzo Prime said:
Doom TDA's art assets should have gone toward a Quake 1 reboot. In fact, I wonder if it started out that way.
Click to expand...

Very selfishly, I'm glad there is no Quake reboot. Quake, not to mention Q3A, is one of my favorite games ever and I'm not sure I have the heart to see it modernized.
 
A little bit. Instead of trying it on gamepass and being disappointed, I would have bought it at full price and probably coped through the refund period. Would there be more of me? Probably. Wasn't expecting a Serious Sam-like.
 
DOOM flew too close to the sun. Too many casuals bitched about Eternal enough because it wasn't 2016 part two, then TDA double down on it being more a character action game than FPS. It became niche. Also, they kind of miss Mick Gordon badly, that's my one complaint.
 
Stuart360 said:
Yes and No.

Obviously Gamepass had a big effect but it was the games price that was the main problem. And i'm judging that from what people were saying at launch on the Steam forums. Even fans of the series said they couldnt justify £70 for a short one and done campaign, and would play on Gamepass instead.
Click to expand...
Why would anyone pay 70 if they can pay 20 for the same game? Good job gamepass.
 
While The Dark Ages is a huge departure from Eternal's mechanics, I respect id Software's ambition to shift the fundamentals with each entry. And I love TDA it's no less than a 8/10 game.

It also boggles my mind so much why it flopped so badly compared to Eternal.

Yeah Game Pass and that 70 bucks are the culprits I can think. Same thing can be said for Indy game too, aint no way a full-fledged AAA Indiana Jones game would only have 12k peak CCU on Steam had the game not been put on Game Pass.

Tns3SSEJZw7jhMU0.png


Also Doom Eternal released at the very peak of COVID lockdown so probably the sales got boosted a lot by the lockdown.
 
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