Titan Talk Feb 10 Notes

Took these for a friend and saw nobody had posted any here like they were earlier on in Titan Talks, so I figured I'd go ahead and share :p

- OB3 came this morning. The schedule has not changed for patches. “Keep patching” new god once per week.

- Sad they had to lay people off

- They spent this weekend, and are still, determining what the company structure and who has what responsibilities in the company now that they laid so many people off.

- They think Smite 2 has been a success as far as getting Smite 1 players to play Smite 2, but it’s not great for bringing back old player or bringing in new players, retention has not been very good.

- Bots/bot games are really important for the new players experience. (This went on for a pretty long time lol)

- They are focused on appealing to the core playerbase.

- Wandering market is not expected to make much money because most people that play the game have enough diamonds in their account to buy it.

- A bigger company buying the IP is very unlikely.

- They’re taking this week to determine what they need to prioritize in regards to porting gods, new gods, and wandering market/skins.

- As a free to play game, they get an influx of new players every day without any marketing or anything.

- The big reason that their financials are in the bad spot they’re in is because Founders Packs didn’t sell as well as they thought they would.

- Smite 1 couldn’t be pushed any farther, they couldn’t port it to new consoles, they couldn’t improve graphics, people in the industry couldn’t be hired to work on the game. They announced Smite 2 super early because they didn’t want people to think Smite was dying because they couldn’t push Smite any farther and they wanted to make the transition to Smite 2 before it was actually completely technologically dead.

- Killgoon apologized for not making it more clear in all the early early announcements that Smite 2 was not as far along as it seems people thought it was.

- There’s not plans to port a bunch of Chibi skins soon are pretty hard to make, 4-5 other skins worth of work.

- Unlikely to get Paladins x Smite crossover skins because there’s not much overlap in the fanbases, there’s some animosity between the two, and Fernando Ares sold poorly.

- Twitch drops returning. Will probably give Wandering Market coins.

- HUD editor still in the “soon” radar. There’s a working basic HUD editor but it doesn’t save settings.

- Those that are laid off got 60 days notice where they’re getting paid and not expected to work. Their benefits will extend through the end of the last month of the 60 days. They’re being given resume writing help and possibly job search help (Killgoon was unsure of the last point).

- Custom builds still on the roadmap, early development on it has started.

- Everyone at every level of the company considered Vegas one of the best run, if not best run, esports events the company has had. The run up was great as well. Vegas went better than expected and Vegas’ success had nothing to do with esports going the direction it has. They were expecting more players to start playing or return to smite after Vegas tho. “A dollar is a dollar” and they’re focusing even harder on the development of the game, they had to get rid of people for financial reasons and slim down to as few employees as possible without making development literally impossible.

- Titan Talk will continue, but they want to focus more on the game/gameplay in future shows.

- The team is hurting emotionally, but everyone is back on the grind.

- The Smite playerbase knows what they want and they expected the playerbase to be more open-minded to things changing in Smite 2, but they’ve been more constrained to parity of Smite 1 than they thought they would be. Even if something is objectively better, it might not be what’s best for Smite 2 because the core playerbase doesn’t like it because it’s too different from Smite 2. They do not blame the playerbase for the bad things that have happened.

- They're going to try and evolve kits instead of doing any full reworks because of negative feedback. They’re using aspects as a way to rework gods.

- Guan Yu is in playtest. Smite 2 release Guan won’t be as OP as Smite 1 Guan. There’s been Smite 2 releases that have already had higher win percentages than Smite 1 release Guan.

- HUD themes are a stretch goal (unlikely any time soon).

- They are very appreciative of how engaged the Smite playerbase is and how so many players feel so strongly about so many of the employees.