That’s a shame. “Narrative-driven, story-rich games” are mostly all I play. Just because people spend more time in strategy or MOBA games doesn’t mean they’re more popular, just that they take more time and don’t have a designated end point, so people come back to play more often. But we still enjoy story-rich games and they’ll still sell.
This is why Call of Duty has turned to garbage. Because they realized they could get more gameplay out of the multiplayer mode, so they stopped making good campaign modes and focused all their energy on multiplayer and pushing microtransactions. It’s literally prioritizing money over quality gaming.
And I know, they’re a business and the goal is to make money, but who can remember a fun multiplayer level? What even is the point in getting invested long-term in multiplayer when they’re releasing a new game every 1-2 years? Counter-Strike has been mostly the same for decades and was extremely popular because it was so well-known and hardly changed. It only recently released a sequel, which was basically just a huge patch to the original game. Meanwhile, my memory of Call of Duty multiplayer games is fuzzy because I’ve played so many over the years and none really stand out to me.
Do they consider frostpunk a “story rich game”? If that’s what all story rich games were like, I’d play more of them - most of them feel like cereal box toys, and I’d generally prefer just reading a book so the subpar gameplay isn’t all I’ll remember.
Both Frostpunk 1 and 2 had fans requesting a sandbox mode and endless modes without victory conditions. They finally did it for 1 and made it a part of 2… but it was clear the drive of the fans (open ended sandboxing) was at odds with the devs wanting to using narrative and story to govern game mechanics.
Are they publicly traded? Being publicly traded is just the death of game companies, some decisions have to be based on more than profit.
They also have a really good universe in Frostpunk they could explore through other game-styles.