Fatshark forged a community that gave them $3 million in a month, then burned it to the ground.
Fatshark knows how to complete a game. The Swedish developer has been making games for almost a decade now, and in that time has gone from the curious mess of Lead and Gold, to the very solid Bionic Commando Rearmed 2, to the cult favorite War of the Roses. In that decade, though, they’d never had a better opportunity than when they got the chance to crack at the Warhammer Fantasy universe with the now-famous Vermintide.
Vermintide 2 ended up making headlines earlier this year when the game sold a million copies in about a month, following fever hype from a small, committed base of raving fans that staunchly set themselves behind the game, despite a troubled beta process and a few incredibly embarrassing technical faux pas in following release, including one instance where the core balancing mechanic of the game was broken. Nobody noticed this bug for weeks because the “public” build internal Fatshark was not the same as the actual “public” build that was on Steam. I have been a professional programmer for 15 years now, and I’ve straddled gaming, banking, data analytic, and real estate industries in that career. In not one situation did we ever have such a profound breakdown in process that we did not know what version of our software our customers were using. Still, this staggering screw up didn’t affect Fatshark. Huge amounts of hype kept flowing regardless of these very serious problems, and people kept buying. I should know — I was part of it.
Nowadays, however, the game is not really doing very well. From its all time high of 30,000 daily players, Vermintide 2 went down to 12,000 in April, and kept crashing down to 5,000 in May. At the time, many people, including myself, pointed out that this loss of players is completely normal. But the count just kept falling. In about mid-June the player count sank below 4,000 and finally cratered in July at 2,500 after Fatshark announced that their top priority at the moment was the console releases.
For perspective, Left 4 Dead 2 and Borderlands 2, the two games most comparable to Vermintide 2 due to the style-defining 4 player co-op and fast action of the former and the flashy effects and loot drive of the latter, both handily outperformed the much newer and much more hip game during this time period. Both of them fluctuate between 8,000–10,000 players per month as their ‘steady state’, years after their release and with no updates or patches in sight. (All numbers courtesy of steamcharts.com.)
So what happened? How did we go from the community advocating so hard for Fatshark that the game shattered all sales expectations — even Fatshark’s — to the community being so inconsolable that they trolled the community manager off of the subreddit six months later? This was a community that worked more tirelessly than any marketing team for the express benefit of Fatshark. It quite literally made them millions of dollars more than they’d ever dreamed. Now their CM literally refuses to do his job because they are so vicious and negative?
This is a story that has been years in the making. While this might seem like a long story, please trust that I’m abridging it heavily for your convenience and my own sanity.
When Vermintide 1 came out, people were understandably wary. Games Workshop had recently destroyed the setting (literally) to bring about the Age of Sigmar game. With that pall hanging over the game, and a practically nonexistant marketing budget, there was an understandably lukewarm response to the launch. It had a mere 4,000 players in October 2015. Bad bugs, bad balance, and bad backing from the overstressed indie developer meant that the game bled players very quickly.
Fatshark spent most of 2016 perfecting and releasing the console versions of Vermintide 1. This meant that the PC had absolutely no content and very, very few patches. No programmer wants to maintain more code than required, so, very reasonably, PC development was all but frozen during this time. But that has a cost, and for the vast majority of 2016, Vermintide 1 had about 500 daily players. It was so bad that, at the time, it was frequently impossible to get a full game even with your range set to global.
During this time, modders carried the torch. In particular, one gentleman named Lupo spent huge amounts of time modding this silly, dead game to see what its engine could do. He created an entire tool set to hook into the LUA engine that Vermintide 1 used and do pretty much whatever he wanted. He could spawn anything, either collectively or individually. He could change models and equipment on the fly. He could change rules arbitrarily. In one of the funniest examples, he was able to add loot bags to every enemy on a map. Normally reserved for a single enemy, adding loot bags to every enemy made hordes explode into various treats and drove players insane with the constant jingling of sailing satchels. Lupo was not the only modder, but he was undeniably the most prolific and most helpful. He invented the proverbial wheel.
Then, in December 2016, Fatshark surprised everyone by returning with a vengeance to their beaten corpse of a game. They released a wonderful DLC centered around a Dwarven hold, one of the most iconic settings in the Warhammer Fantasy world. They backed it up with a mammoth balance patch that made every bit of content in the game matter somehow. The bad balance mentioned above meant that a good three quarters of the weapons in the game were not worth using — period. After the balance patch, everything was useful. Literally dozens of bugs were crushed as well. It was an entirely new game, and the game was good.
I was so enthusiastic about the renewed game that I recruited one of the top players in the community and ran a special feature dissecting it on my Youtube channel. People enjoyed it so much that I got personally invited to the game’s subreddit, where I hung out and discussed things off and on. I had never seen a more excited bunch of folks.
But there was a problem. I noticed a really weird pattern there. A few isolated people seemed to be posturing themselves by saying they were doing things that we all knew wasn’t true, but nobody seemed to care. This may seem like a derail as it does not directly relate to Fatshark, but the background is important for later.
Example: in the modding scene, there had been a lot of pressure on Lupo to cut a number of clear cheats from his quality of life mod. Things like noclip, godmode, etc. Lupo generally didn’t want to do this. The cheats were pretty critical for debugging the mod, so removing them added a ton of extra work for him. He had other things he wanted to spend his time on, and he pointed out that if someone doesn’t want to cheat, they can simply not bind the key to cheat — cheaters could be dealt with by the host kicking them regardless.
Many people pointed out that this was a tried and true method. The much larger game Payday 2 had worked pretty much entirely on this principle for years; if you were cheating, you pretty much had to host your own lobby because otherwise someone would kick you. If you joined a cheater’s lobby, you could just leave and search again.
But that wasn’t okay for some folks. One poster named Grimalackt took Lupo’s mod and manually stripped out everything he considered cheating, and reposted the mod for people to download. That much is no big deal — just a normal modding community in action. The problem here was, Grimalackt wasn’t familiar with the toolset and did it poorly. Worse, he erased Lupo’s name entirely, claiming the work entirely as his own. This blatant plagiarism got only a shrug from the moderation teams that saw it happen. Grimalackt did later make a few additions to his version of the mod. One was quite useful and improved how bots worked in game. The numerous rest frequently broke the game entirely. Grimalackt’s attempt at an anti-cheat kicked even vanilla players in many circumstances, and Lupo felt forced to fix Grimalackt’s mod for him. Grimalackt continued to refuse to cite Lupo as a major contributor. When another modder finally called him on that, he posted the following:
“I do have a dislike for Lupo. He’s not fluent in english, categorically refused to make anything seperating[sic] the cheats from the rest before you came around, got mad when I made my own thing as a result and unsurprisingly got the approval of the community, and is generally a pain to try to work with.”
(Original source is here.)
There was a fuss about this at the time, but that’s not the point. The point is that Grimalackt, by his own admission, is a plagiarizer and his first articulated reason for plagiarizing is that the man he stole from isn’t fluent in English.
However, mod drama doesn’t have a huge effect on the mainstream players. In the normal world, I continued to publish videos explaining the game and its subsequent patches with my collaborator, and the steady pulse of good news coming from streamers and places like my channel, the player numbers bounced back and Vermintide 1 started to maintain numbers that looked a lot like its second month of operation for the rest of its lifespan. One such streamer was J_sat, a teacher who streamed a fair bit on the evenings and weekends. He did a good job of being entertaining, but he and I clashed mildly a few times because he gave some advice that, if practiced, was very likely to get people in trouble in game. I pointed out a few examples, and I got the shrugging reply that it ‘works easily enough for me.’ Upon reviewing his videos, and listening to his audio recordings, I realized that many actions were happening for one keyboard click — a sure sign of a macro. This actually didn’t bother me. I personally don’t want to play this way, but I feel like it’s really bold to label it cheating. I mentioned this to some friends, and a few of them brought it up to J_sat. He denied it flatly at the time, despite being unable to explain how he had perfect execution with fewer button presses than were audible.
Again, the point to take away here is that this self-styled pillar of the Vermintide community was not being honest with people he was working with.
While the game was still tiny by anyone’s standards, the sudden comeback and continual resurgence as the train continued to plod along was remarkable. During this time, Fatshark had a few community managers keeping up, engaging people on a daily basis and learning the landscape. This would become crucial as they continued to build up to Vermintide 2.
In that run-up, Fatshark put out a call for the private beta, and for content creators. I obligingly applied. I pointed to the hundreds of thousands of views my video tutorials had gotten, and my constant advocacy for the game on SomethingAwful, where the one thread had about a quarter of the overall throughput of the entire subreddit. I offered to redo the video series for Vermintide 2 and keep up on content that would keep people playing and happy. I offered to let them review all work before it was published. I asked merely for keys to the game and a link to my playlist on their forums — no money, ever. I encouraged some of my collaborators to apply as well for their own channels.
I was ignored, but that doesn’t bother me. My Youtube channel is not my mode of income. I don’t monetize, and I don’t have a Patreon. I have no dreams of stardom. I have my own projects going on. I just want to help good people when I can.
What is interesting is who was chosen. Most notably, Grimalackt, J_sat, and a few others with dubious records. Lupo, other unquestionably honest modders, myself, and the earnest folks who worked alongside me on Youtube were all ignored. Many of their chosen were flown to Sweden on Fatshark’s dime and treated like celebrities. The rest of us got no communication — not even an email back. At this point, Fatshark had had community managers deployed to the subreddit where the controversy went on for a little under a year. They were aware of their backgrounds. They clearly did not care.
The beta itself was kind of a disaster from a launch perspective. There were numerous gameplay bugs, balance was all over the place, and the graphical engine wasn’t even in its final version. I was unable to give people my wholehearted endorsement for the game (and told them as much), but I told them emphatically that Fatshark would work hard to fix whatever bugs existed, citing their dogged return to Vermintide 1. I remained part of the hype train.
The cracks started appearing almost immediately after launch, though. Fatshark instituted EasyAntiCheat without telling anyone, wrecking the modding community that was chomping at the bit to go. EAC being what it is, this did not actually stop cheating. Further, host kick had been removed without comment, so when you ran into one of these cheaters online, you actually had to live with them. Even worse, the EAC layer had clearly never been tested, and it was the direct cause of many game-crashing bugs — both in the first month, and in later patches. Modders and players alike felt gobsmacked by this inclusion and the utter lack of communication on the matter. Multiple long-time modders told the Fatshark representative, Robin, that they considered this a ‘bait and switch.’ They demanded to know how mods would be supported (a promise they had made), and Robin gave vague answers about Steam Workshop integration and a sanctioning process. It took months to resolve and was done without consulting anyone in the modding community outside of Grimalackt and his compatriots. Grimalackt, an admitted thief, did a poor job of advocating for the modders — as a very weak modder himself, he had little idea of the ecosystem they required. At the time of this writing, there are fewer than a dozen people on the modded realm testing, developing, and using mods at any one time, and the sanctioned mod system has produced less than a dozen mods for display customization and other tweaks. Gameplay mods are flatly rejected. Bug fix mods are, as well.
From the player perspective, things were and are not much better. The primary balancing mechanic, “Hero Power”, was broken on release day. Players noted the oddity as they gained Hero Power, but Fatshark consistently told them things were fine. In public releases, the community managers insisted the game was okay…up until they admitted that no, they had messed up and had no idea what version of the game they had released to Steam. This resulted in a large scale nerf to all players just as they were trying to find their feet. Other major bugs were denied for weeks before some fixes came out unexpectedly in a patch. Numerous player power ups were reported as broken, with supporting evidence pulled from the game’s LUA engine. The bugs were either denied (and sometimes later fixed) or ignored (and frequently not fixed).
Robin pedantically argued with bug reporters over the terminology they were using to report things like enemies stacking inside of one another to browbeat the bug report away. In the linked thread, Robin writes almost 2,000 words not addressing video evidence of erroneous behavior, but arguing with the words users chose to describe the bug report video. He attempts to bury a bug under a sheer volume of words — and apparently succeeds, because the bug reported is still in the game as of the time of this writing.
At the time, we as the community merely groused that Fatshark sucks at communication, but in hindsight, the pattern is one of telling players everything is fine until you can fix things. That is not honest.
To make matters worse on this front, the primary person Fatshark chose to do player outreach was J_sat. As noted above, J_sat employs tools that most people are unable or unwilling to use, and doesn’t mention that. Also, J_sat noticed, as did I and some other first wave of players, that the game actually was easier, not harder, with only one player standing on the highest difficulty. The game spawns fewer hordes, fewer special enemies, and is much easier to predict.
Vermintide 2 apes Left 4 Dead in many ways, so doing levels alone looks very impressive. But in terms of technique and skill, it isn’t impressive at all. If you are honest about that, then there’s no problem; you show off some great looking gameplay and everyone has a good time.
J_Sat was not honest about that. He used ‘true solo legend’ runs to build his credibility as an especially good player among prospective players that couldn’t have known any better, even though the task he was performing was much easier normal play.
He consistently performed precise blocks, attacks, and weapon switch tricks on stream, many of which are not practically possible unless precise circumstances are true. In some cases, such as the weapon switch tricks, they’re difficult because of outright bugs in the command queuing in the game. J_sat’s macros only work because they’re precisely tuned to. When frustrated players said they were having trouble duplicating his motions, he simply said that it was difficult to get down precisely. It was only when he started streaming with a display that showed his keypresses that people widely noticed he was using AutoHotKey macros — something he was eventually forced to admit was true. He has since removed the display and avoids the question of his macro use. I personally know two full groups of friends who stopped playing the game because they could not match up to what they were seeing ‘on streams’, and seen many more claims of that on forums. J_sat is the person Fatshark directly worked with to head up the game’s evangalization. They flew him to Sweden and everything to talk about launch and collaboration.
Again, I want to emphasize that macro use is officially not cheating in the context of Vermintide 2. Fatshark has said they don’t care. The point here is the pattern of dishonesty, both from Fatshark and from the people they have chosen to work with. Do note, as well, that I specifically call everyone involved here dishonest and but not liars. Half truths, non-answers, and misleading practices have been the order of the day, not flat untruths presented as fact. Whether that is more or less insidious I leave for the reader to decide — but regardless, it does not inspire trust, and people don’t appreciate being treated so disrespectfully.
With all of this in mind, it’s bluntly surprising that it has taken a full 6 months for things to fall apart as they have; also, there’s other layers to this rotten onion I haven’t spoken about. Brief example, in July 2018, the entire company got up and left for a month’s worth of vacation while the game was suffering from multiple critical bugs, including a resurfacing of major, previously fixed bugs. They phrased this as ‘required by Swedish law’, but that isn’t really true.
Sweden has strong worker rights laws that mandate employers provide a lot of vacation for full time employees, but nothing says that it must be all at once. Hedge, the beleaguered community manager I referenced at the beginning, is proof positive of it. He worked the entire time the rest of the studio was gone.
Nothing actually mandated that work had to stop while the game was in its worst spot since release. They simply chose to represent it that way. Is it really so surprising that the community went toxic? On the internet, it’s one of the only ways to take your complaint to a level that has an effect on the people you’re complaining about. These people can’t boycott — they’ve already paid their money. I’m not saying it’s moral, positive, or ultimately even acceptable…but it is rational.
While there have been faster speedruns to the bottom in gaming (The Culling 2 and Lawbreakers come instantly and hilariously to mind), the fall from such a strong position is astounding. Fatshark had a legion of rabid fans marketing their product for them, for free. They had a huge name franchise and a durable track record. They had a proven team with tons of social credit.
And 5 months after release, they had lost 92% of their launch player base. Even after a content drop they cannot match the numbers of rival games many years older than them.
I don’t see why it had to happen this way. Being honest and working with honest people would have worked, precisely because of that durable track record. Vermintide 2 is, of course, far from dead and buried. The game could be revitalized if Fatshark stops making all of these questionable decisions and starts engaging the community at large like equals. But if there’s one thing we can take from the last 6 months, it’s that honesty really is the best policy.