this post was submitted on 11 May 2025

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Ori studio in crisis: No Rest For The Wicked could be their final game (www.gamereactor.eu)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I was a mega-fan of both Ori 1 and 2. I've got a mug based on the first game, but when I first saw the trailer for this game, nothing about it interested me. Kind of like the Xbox 360 era of "brown and gray cover shooters" I've never understood the appeal for grim, depressing medieval worlds. I like having some vibrancy and inventiveness, as well as some motivation behind the violence used to achieve some end.

One of the only Soulslike games I've finished is Another Crab's Treasure. The story/setting in that game ends up being pretty depressing, but it at least maintains a lot of humor and colorful design.

What's more, I looked through the negative reviews, and a lot of them touch on incomplete or over-punishing systems, rather than seeming motivated by external factors.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Big ori fan, bought no rest for the wicked at launch day. Its sadly just solid as far as i can remember, bad mouse&keyboard controls wich is why i dropped it, and not insanely good like Ori. Mby they shouldve stuck with SideScrollers.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

This is rather disappointing. The game looks really good and I've been looking forward to playing it. But I meant to play the game in co-op with my husband and when it launched in early access it didn't seem to have co-op yet (if I remember correctly) so I decided to wait until that was added (and working of course). But after hearing this news I'm a bit wary of buying a game that I'm not sure they'll even finish. That's such a shame because the game really looks amazing and super fun to play in co-op.

(What's the state of the game right now? Have they added co-op yet and how is the game so far?)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I think the game is great right now. Sure, there are things to do still but they have a combat patch planned and i believe multiplayer is coming with that. Can't wait to play it with my friends.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

I bought the game on release mostly to support them. The folks at Moon Studios are seriously talented and deserve some support.

I played ~2 hours on release and thought the game was decent. The combat had some weight, the art style was excellent, the bosses were fun and challenging and the exploration was pretty neat. There were many performance issues which they have since mostly fixed but there were also a few systems taken from different genres that didn't work that well together for me. I didn't play for a while though, so maybe they improved things in that area.

Still, I'm also waiting for the coop, which is scheduled to release with the next major update.

I wouldn't read too much into this news article. Their CEO has since clarified that he might have been a bit hyperbolic and didn't expect the media to pick up on his random Discord post.

I don't quite agree with his assessment of being "review bombed". Most negative reviews come down to the game being released in early access: bad performance, many systems not working well together, being behind roadmap, missing coop on launch and more recently, difficulty. I do get their need for releasing in early access after Microsoft dropped them but it might have hurt them in the long run.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I hope this works out for them. Ori is an awesome game and I'm interested in the new project. I wishlisted it because the videos of it look great but I usually don't buy early access games. Was planning to get it when it officially launches.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 week ago (2 children)

They're sitting at 71% (mostly positive) for a game they released as early access. If your studio can't survive that kind of response, you don't get to blame the fans, you're not managing your company well.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Yeah I’m sort of interested in the game but I wanted to wait for full release. I get that a lot of indie games are helped tremendously by the money and player feedback they get out of early access, but if if the whole bottom falls out because not enough people bought the game you’ve very openly told people “this isn’t finished, don’t buy into this if you aren’t willing to be a part of the testing process,” then something is very wrong. Early access income should help bridge the gap, but you shouldn’t be entirely reliant on it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Not only that, but using the typical back of the napkin math based on the number of reviews (you can usually multiply the number of reviews by 55 to find the number of copies sold, and I omitted the reviews they've gotten in the past 48 hours that they asked for), they've brought in over $30M for their unfinished game.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yep Around $26 million according to https://games-stats.com/steam/game/no-rest-for-the-wicked/

According to Wikipedia they have at least 80 employees. Ball park cost per employee is around $10k a month (this includes more than just salary). So around $800k per month to run the studio. $9.6 million per year. So they probably spend more than a third of their earnings since launch. And Take Two got their cut (usually half of net revenue, so revenue after the store cut) before Moon Studios went independent, they only became fully independent in March of this year. So they have even less money left. So yeah they saying that they are in financial trouble is probably not exaggerated.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Where did you get the "multiply by 55" part from?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There's a correlation to how many reviews a thing gets in a given marketplace compared to how many of it were sold. This was a mostly unscientific number shared among devs once the user privacy settings changed for Steam and we could no longer count on SteamSpy for copies sold metrics. At one point years ago, the multiple passed around was as high as 77. Here's a slightly more scientific accounting of it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I am always amazed and baffled at how statistics work

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

How is the game coming along? I bought it a while ago to support the team, but don't really want to jam it until it is at least close to complete. Can't really leave a review for something I haven't played.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm waiting for their multiplayer patch to play the game in full but I enjoyed the combat in the first 10 minutes and an excited to play it. ARPGs need to evolve past the idle games most of the current popular ones devolve into.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There are a few different types of ARPGs, such as:

looters like Diablo - perhaps this is what you consider "idle"?
guided "sequential discovery" games like Ys and Zelda - progression is scripted
souls-like - combat-heavy ARPGs where combat is skill/reaction based instead of build based

I really like the last two, not the first one.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I guess I haven't heard Souls-Like or games like Zelda or Witcher 3 (what I'd call Action Adventure I guess or RPG) called an ARPG although they fit the name well enough that maybe I have and today I'm falling on the other side of a fuzzy line.

Yes, I was referring to Diablo, PoE, Last Epoch, and the rest of the "looter" ARPG's or what I'd just call ARPG's. Maybe this is why the Diablo-like meme came up? To further drill in to the genre.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Zelda

I think Zelda is right at the boundary of Action-Adventure and ARPG, and some games fall on the RPG side (TLoZ, Zelda 2) and many on the action-adventure side. But many are right at that limit, using equipment and heart containers as progression.

Dark Souls is absolutely an ARPG. You have leveling mechanics, different builds with impactful player choice, and other forms of progression. Likewise for Witcher 3.

And yeah, what frustrates me a lot is that many people seem to mean "Diablo-like" when they say "ARPG," which it is, but the genre is much larger than that.

Here's an interesting part from the ARPG Wikipedia article:

Diablo's effect on the market was significant, inspiring many imitators. Its impact was such that the term "action RPG" has come to be more commonly used for Diablo-style games, with The Legend of Zelda itself slowly recategorized as an action-adventure.

To me, ARPG means any game with strong RPG mechanics and a focus on the action instead of stats for determining player success.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, the snippet from the Wikipedia article you quoted exactly exemplifies my understanding of the genre tags and how I've seen them used since I was old enough to get on the Internet and read such things.

Zelda has, for me, always been an action adventure game. I don't think I'd called Zelda breath of the wild an RPG game or an ARPG game but that's because the item portion of the game felt incomparable to a game like Witcher or Diablo where every piece of your character is an item that can be upgraded.

That being said, I'm not exactly the biggest Zelda fan and BotW was like 10 years ago for me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Yeah, Zelda was originally what I thought of when I heard "ARPG" because I grew up on the NES games. If I started w/ something later, I might consider the series "action-adventure" instead, because the definition of what an ARPG has changed somewhat. And yeah, I'd consider BotW "action-adventure" as well using today's definition, but it would've been an ARPG using the earlier definition.

There are plenty of other somewhat similar games that do qualify as ARPG today that are very different from Diablo games, like the Ys series, Gurumin, and Cross Code. The Ys series is fairly diverse, but generally speaking, gear upgrades are plot-based (find in a chest in the dungeon you're exploring) and there's not a ton of diversity, and leveling your character is very important (1-2 level difference can be the difference between a nearly impossible boss fight and a manageable one). In Gurumin, there is a fixed set of upgrades, and you combine these to get effects. CrossCode has stats, unlockable abilities, and action-oriented combat. Loot isn't really a major part of any of those games, they're too action-oriented to be an RPG, and they have too much emphasis on progression to really be action-adventure.

Those are the sorts of ARPGs I absolutely love, yet everyone seems to focus on the Diablo-like dungeon crawlers where loot is a defining factor.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Yeah, the problem might not be review bombing, but rather lack of advertising.

Until now I've honestly never heard of No Rest for the Wicked. I didn't even know Moon Studios was busy on anything after Ori 2.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

To be fair, I was served this game on steam. I was about to buy it but the negative reviews turned me off from it.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

It's always lack of advertising. The unfortunate fact of life is that 99.99% of indie studios have no clue how to market their game. They think they just have to make a good game, and boom, people will flock to it.

Steam is there to make sure users have a platform to download their game. It's not there to market it. Marketing is just an occasional side effect.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Steam is a marketing machine. The developers just need to do the leg work first. Steam will heavily promote games that have high wishlists and sales momentum. All those personalized recommendations you see on Steam is Valve doing marketing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's not one you should rely on. People don't stare at their Steam page every day.

This should have been promoted through the usual YouTube and Twitch channels. Find all of the YouTubers that review indie games and start sending emails.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes of course you have to market outside of Steam. But actually most traffic to the game page will come from people discovering it through Steam. Especially for an indie who can’t afford a traditional marketing campaign. A feature on the front page will blow the traffic you’d get from a Tuber or Twitch play out of the water. But you’d only get featured if you have high sales momentum or high wishlists before launch. That’s what the pre launch marketing campaign is for. Getting on YouTube and Twitch channels is just to get the snowball rolling. The rest comes from the Steam algorithm and word of mouth.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That’s what the pre launch marketing campaign is for. Getting on YouTube and Twitch channels is just to get the snowball rolling.

Right, and that's what this game didn't have. You have a trailer and some people who happened to discover this game and decided to play it. No real marketing campaign push to get indie streamers to play it. And the ones who do happen to play it are PoE2 players, which doesn't do a good job of shaking off this looter ARPG image it's trying not to make.

The name makes it even worse because it's not a unique phrase.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

I think, the problem is rather that they have no budget for marketing. If they become visible on Steam, that's significantly more visibility than they can hope for from a few social media posts...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I mean I imagine that comes down to the fact that Ori was published by Microsoft while this game was self published. Someone like Microsoft is gonna have a lot more resources for advertising a game versus trying to self publish it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Microsoft got ori on the gotdamn cereal boxes.

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