Bloodhunt - Vampire: The Masquerade is a Vampire Battle Royal set in modern day (night actually) Prague . A variety of vampire classes, guns, sexy skins and a lot of verticality on the map. Sounds amazing right? So, what could go wrong? Apparently quite a bit because less than 2 months after the official launch the newest member on the Battle Royal scene is struggling for views on Twitch and struggling to find it's player base.
Let's travel back in time to 02/04/2019 a little known title Apex Legends explodes onto the gaming scene out of nowhere! Expert marketing strategy had every single big name streaming influencer playing Apex Legends 24/7. To the point that within the game's first 24 hours of launch it amassed 1 million players. By the end of the game's first month it had reached 50 million players.
Is this extreme? Yes absolutely. Unfortunately, in terms of extremity Bloodhunt's player and viewer numbers are trending in the opposite direction of Apex Legends respective launch. Current stats from TwitchTracker.com have Bloodhunt at #104 yikes with about 2300 average daily viewers. In its first week of launch the game peaked at 29,000 concurrent players. It's been downhill from its lacklustre premiere. But why is that and will Bloodhunt's creator studio Sharkmob be able to keep this sinking ship afloat?
I personally love Bloodhunt but facts are facts and numbers are numbers. Bloodhunt was in early access beta for more then 7 months. It officially launched 04/27/2022 on PC and PS5. No Series X no huge blitz of streaming superstars other than Shroud (barely). Very little fanfare at all. To say the environment it launched into was a challenge would be an understatement.
The first issue is their "Easy Anti-Cheat" is not up to par with the nature of cheats available today. Cheats were available from day 1 in the beta and although there aren't many rage hackers, the lobbies are plagued with many people abusing sticky aim and walls among other advantages.
Recently on Twitter I had a conversation with Jaqub Ajmal from Sharkmob. On June 2, 2022 He shared his promotion to "Player Relations Manager" with responsibilities of Community support and Anti-Cheat efforts. I asked him point blank what he plans on doing differently to combat the cheating issues in his game. He did not hesitate to respond however his strategy seemed out of touch with the volume and complexity of cheats in online gaming present day.
Jaqub shared with me Sharkmob is openly stating "The main weapon that we have against cheaters is that we have a dedicated team that is continuously looking over various reports that we get, and monitors for cheaters and hackers through various means" and "The success of this is very dependent on player reports" Riiiiight...
Cheating problem aside. Basic playability issues abound, and the list is long, about as long as it takes Sharkmob not to fix them. On June 8th their first major patch was released. The player base has been waiting about 1 month for this patch.
The patch included 1 shotgun classes rebalance, adding .25 sec to revive invulnerability from .75 sec to 1 whole sec, A Nerf to the Archetype Enforcer's flesh of marble ability, Gamepad (controller) improvements to better compete with m&k and a Melee nerf. Seems like a lot right? Here is what they didn't have time to do in 30 days. Fix the glitch that makes weapons not be able to reload. Lose all your ammo when picking up a weapon. Not be able to pick up a weapon in some cases at all. Be killed by the storm even when you are not in the storm and although they claimed to make Vandal's Earth Shock ability be able to target straight down it still lacks consistency & useability.
According to grojo.com Sharkmob Games based in Malmo Sweden has over 300 employees with about 50 in their London UK location. I would like nothing more than to see them succeed in providing Bloodhunt the ability of bringing hours of fun to the masses for some time to come. However, their turnaround time to patch basic playability aspects with their game and no real comprehensive plan to combat cheaters unfortunately has Bloodhunt in a death spiral. In the meantime, I'll be praying for a miracle.
BBB Gaming News Community, this is the first gaming related article I've had the honour to write for BBB Gaming news. I hope you've enjoyed it. I'd love to hear your feedback and constructive criticism in the comment section below to help me improve on future articles I'll be writing. Happy Gaming, Murk Monst3r!
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