My thoughts on Keen's handling of ME

I may get banned or this may get removed, but I feel compelled to write it anyway.

I have both SE and ME. Though ME was not as much fun for me as SE was. I still stood behind Keen through the ups and downs of both titles.
I would defend them when either title was being talked about as being abandoned and being another Miner Wars.

Today when I saw the statement released about ME going out of Early Access, my heart sank.
ME did turn into another Miner Wars. Keen's track record now is shot.
3 incomplete (yes Marek despite what you called finished and accomplished) games, only one success (SE) is poor performance.
Anything else Keen develops we would be fools to sink our money into.

As much as I love SE, I will no longer support it. I will no longer buy the DLC's or any expansion etc.
From this point forward you have lost a valued customer. I am not wishing failure for your company, I do hope in the future you find more success, it just will be without me.

Losing one person you will say to yourself, is not that big of a deal. I have a gut feeling I am not the only one.
I will think fondly of the good times I had with your product.

I know it is a rarity that any of the dev team reads the forums, maybe my words will reach them somehow.


Again I wish you success, and hopefully I will hear good things about Keen.

 

When a lot of people were telling Keen it was a bad idea to work on two games at once, I was one of the ones that said it made sense. I thought the two games would compliment each other. For a short while it appeared, at least to me, that I was right. But for whatever reason, ME seemed to diverge away from engineering and it began to look more like a generic Medieval Era game, and any engineering type stuff in the game began to stutter and fail. It appears there is a part of the fanbase that liked the direction the game was headed, but that wasn't me. I watched people play on Twitch, just as i had done with SE, and the longer I watched, the less like SE the game became. A friend thought my lack of enthusiasm was the result of not actually participating, so he gifted me a copy. I played it for a minute, but it was just not the game I was looking for. SE was.

Still, I had faith that the few things that weren't developed yet would get attended to. I came here and admonished people for accusing Keen of abandoning the game. I just figured that they would pull back and regroup, then do to ME what they did to SE. Instead, they gave up.

Well, at least they admitted they're giving up. I am, indeed, very disappointed.

I still like SE, I'll continue to play it, and I will buy DLC if I think I can use it. But I'm done cheerleading, and any future offerings from KSH are going to have to be more impressive than SE ever was, and I will NOT be among the first to try or buy.

I don't understand this, and I was a Business major in college.

 

I agree.

What makes it worse is that the moment they saw the SE DLC was selling they immediately just made more DLC, even though Marek wanted to drop SE at some point and focus on SE 2... Do you guys remember his streams? The ones with Jango the cat.

The huge fallout from those streams was how Marek was saying no to all those features people asked for and was trying to say that SE was also completed and that they were just going to focus on streamlining "the core".

If I heard anymore about "the core", I was going to tune off the stream.

And then, presto, here is a test for some SE DLC. It ended up working. People bought it. A lot of it. Myself included.

Then, another DLC package.

And another DLC package.

Followed by another DLC package.

And now "Frostbite".

They are turning Space Engineers into a mobile service and abandoning making single titles like Medieval Engineers.

Do you guys remember the new "feature" warning label for SE? You can no longer play Space Engineers in offline mode without getting a red warning in the game, that tells you that you are not online. That is also by intention. Their goal is to turn SE into an online only platform, do an Xbox port, and never stop selling DLC for it. They will turn it into a service. Because they saw that DLC makes money, something they hadn't seen in a long time, and are now cash starved for it. So they will continue this business practice of selling out with DLC while starving out their other titles instead of really developing them. And their brand. And unfortunately, Medieval Engineers took the first bullet for this brand new business practice.

As a result, I will also no longer buy SE DLC and I will no longer support this company, because Marek is a scam artist that cares nothing about the quality of his games. Or the integrity of his titles. And constantly moves towards different things at a whim and when they need more money for their fail AI research division, they come back to the things that actually made money for Keen, which has been the Engineer titles and constantly try to milk them without providing the adequate work load to warrant the consumer investment.

As a result, I believe we all got scammed.

I will still love ME and play it, and I will try to make my own blocks and fix the ones that already exist (and don't work), but I will no longer wait for these developers to turn themselves around and sell an honest product.

All they do is lie and Marek the Overlord is a disaster.

He turned away good people who actually cared about putting out an actual product, not selling nickle and dime stuff to finance their non profit AI.

The words "looking at the numbers" and "we consider Medieval Engineers a finished product" do not belong in the same paragraph, unless you are in fact a pyramid scheme running company.

And making the game cheaper out of early access just to hopefully bait a few more last minute buyers who wouldn't know what they were buying into was also a nice touch. Horrible.

 

So ME will be no longer supported by devs in the future? is this confirmed?

 

Greetings

All I can say to Keen is BOOOO! I won't be buying another Keen game.

 

@freesoul Taken off Marek's Blog (https://blog.marekrosa.org/2020/03/medieval-engineers-update.html):

Q: I am not happy that you stopped developing Medieval Engineers
A: For us, Medieval Engineers is a complete project. We are sorry that we cannot continue development. Do not hesitate to reach out to us at support@keenswh.com.

 

Latest and final version is 0.7.2.

 

What you wrote is very similar to "cry from the heart".

Personal opinion about the engineers:
When I was just studying (then I had a lot of free time), the engineers were an interesting but poorly optimized game (when the update came out with the planets, it completely killed my weak computer).
A few years later I got a job and bought a powerful computer, installed engineers again ... and I realized that this game is time-consuming. If you play multiplayer, it will take even more time, and as far as I understand, it is necessary to visit the server often so as not to die, I can not provide this because of my work.