Competitive Review of Warframe PDF

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A Competitive Review of Warframe and it's developer, and other similar titles.
Made for Game Industry class of Fall 2018....

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Competitive Review: Warframe, Borderlands 2, Destiny 2, The Division The goal of this essay is to compare the release and development of Warframe to Borderlands 2, Destiny 2 and The Division, regarding company size, release, audience reception, sales, etc. Regarding company size, Warframe’s developer Digital Extremes is the smallest of the four, with about 170 employees. Next up would be Borderlands 2’s Gearbox Software with about 350 employees, The Division’s Massive Entertainment with about 400 employees, and then Destiny 2’s Bungie with about 750 employees. Digital Extremes is also the only one to release its game itself, with Borderlands 2 being published by 2K Games, Destiny 2 by Activision and The Division by Ubisoft. Now, regarding release dates, Borderlands 2’s release came first, in September 2012. Warframe’s PC release was in March 2013, followed then by The Division in March 2016 and Destiny 2 in September 2017. All the release dates are set fairly far apart from each other, and therefore likely didn’t interfere on each other’s release sales even though they share its genre. Referring to platform availability, all 4 games are available on PS4, Xbox One and PC. Warframe was also ported to the Nintendo Switch recently. Borderlands 2, on the other hand, was originally released for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, and later ported to the Xbox One, the PS4 and Nvidia’s Shield line of portables. In regards to marketing presence, Warframe comes ahead of the other 3. Digital Extremes puts a lot of resources into their community building, with weekly Twitch streams and Youtube videos, very active social media accounts, its own annual convention(named Tennocon) and its own forums for players of the game to interact. On the other hand, the other 3 games did have fairly active social media and even Twitch accounts, be them the developer’s own or their publishers’ accounts, but mostly just around release dates for either the game or updates/DLCs. Given that Warframe is a free-to-play MMO and the other 3 actually follow the Premium monetization model, it is safe to say that each game’s marketing presence strategy was coherent with its product. A free-to-play MMO, given its longer span of life, benefits way more from the long-term presence than a Premium model game. About sales, each developer has varied attitudes regarding revealing such information. Digital Extremes openly talks about how much it makes in a year and how many players it’s had so far, the latest info being that it reached over 40 million players in 2018 and that their profit in 2017 was of about $110.7 million USD. Bungie, on the other hand, refuses to reveal sales or revenue numbers for Destiny 2. Borderlands 2 has sold over 13 million copies across all its ports, and The Division knowingly generated over $330 million USD on its launch week alone. Regarding audience reception, Warframe received mixed reviews at first but there seemed to be a consensus that the game had a lot of potential if tweaked a bit, specially regarding its monetization model and UI. Some time and several iterations later, Warframe managed to reach a 92% positive reviews score on Steam and a 8.3/10 Metacritic user score. Borderlands 2’s release went smoothly and had great reviews, being praised not only for its game design but also visuals and technical aspects. The exception for that was the PS Vita port, which suffered from a severe graphics downgrade. Destiny 2 was very criticized on launch for being too similar to the first Destiny game and not correcting a lot of its flaws, but its marketing and advertising strategies, along with its visual aesthetics, seemingly

compensated for that making it one of the highest grossing games of 2017. The Division, similarly to Warframe, wasn’t doing great at first. The sandbox aspect of it was functional, but there was a lack of content. Not much variety in missions and activities, and some questionable game design decisions to top it off such as players actually having to line up in-game in order to go through registration. Again like Warframe, the game was revamped through updates and patches and nowadays has good user review scores. All 4 games have several localization options, covering the main European languages(French, German, Spanish, and Italian), English and Chinese. Warframe, unlike the others, is constantly expanding its localization options in order to reach a greater public, now boasting of over 16 language options including the aforementioned ones....