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@@reggie9595 they redeemed themselves years ago and have released free updates ever since. they just recently added settlements with the frontiers expansion for free.
@@reggie9595 I for sure would pick it up again if it would become good, I want to see it succeed, deep down I'm still hoping that some day it might become good even tho the chances are really slim for it to ever happen, I love this game so much and it could be a lot of fun by removing just a few things and adding some stuff to keep things interesting for some time
8:03 Not true. A streamer DMed Wollay on Twitter back in May, and he got a screenshot of a new gamemode that works pretty similar to Alpha. Some guy also received a reply of an E-Mail near the end of february of this year, where he stated that he re-added big cities, a worldgen without separated lands and improving the new progression system along with changing quests and lore.
@@lawler197 it's not fake goddamnit, it's in the discord server AND there's a history of the screenshots posted there being real. back when people liked to talk out of their asses and affirm with all the certainty of the world that the game was dead and it would never have an actual release, it was there where screenshots were posted, with wollay answering people's emails, giving confirmation that he hadn't abandoned the game, which was indeed true, because a new version was actually released. the screenshot about this streamer may be fake, i don't even think it has been added to #signs-of-wollay, which basically discredits it, but the other one is legit.
I remember playing the Alpha with my friends years ago. Heard about the silence afterwards, heard of the new tweets. Then it popped up on Steam to crazy negative reviews. Real sad story, it's almost like the Alpha is better *still* . Game could have been so much more.
Played both and yeah the alpha was better. It was more buggy and crashprone. After doing a number of streams of it i got bored of it but it had potential. Now the 2019 release, i tried to like it but the game design decisions were just awful. You just end up running over a map hoping to find monsters that wouldnt oneshot you, kitting slowly back up, only to lose it all if you stepped over a zone border. Such a weird way to do a game.
Even though the game has been in development for years, it just feels so rushed and a lot of feautures didnt really fit the game. It could've been a masterpiece if he communicated and interacted with his fanbase a lot more and not just dissapear out of nowhere. I do feel bad for him if he did experience deppresion and anxiety, but he just practicaly robbed his fanbase of there money in exchange for a bad experience. I dont know that was just my opinion your free to have your own.
I am gonna search if the Game is still in Steam it sounds like a cool game i have low standars for Games just by having fin is all i need and since i did not Heard of cube world in me life i only discoverded now the day i watced this vídeo i don't have hype the only things i Will get is well an indie Game in it's purest form a Game that good or Bad if You can have a little of fun Then is not a fáiled game so yeah i would play it what about You people
@@ILoveBeppe he is gonna do that in the now???? the game was rereleased in a very shity vesion in 2019 and hasent uppdated shit probebly beucase it was so bad and they dont know waht they are doing
@@viggecokarlittecola4655 U gotta remember its just a husband and wife working on it. not actual game devs... and yes hes gonna do that in the steam release.
Honestly, this entire story just makes me sad. I remember watching some TH-camrs play this game back 2011 and i practically loved the game at first sight. now all we have is just a steam page with a really painful "mixed" rating. :(
Wollay was already having anxiety about it, and unfortunately it looks like he was right to be anxious. I can only imagine how he feels about the project now.
@@HyPNoTiKx lmao the guy scammed people for 5+ years. Like the video said if he just wanted to move on should have made it free to play not charge 20 bucks.
Projects that are spread out over long periods of time are often doomed to fail. We've seen this happen before. Over many years, the ideas developers themselves have about what their game should be can change drastically, things are scrapped and redone, core gameplay elements are changed significantly. Cube World is a victim of that. If the game was released in the state players liked it, I'm sure it wouldn't be the kind of disappointment it is now. The whole story is indeed a tragedy.
Doesn't help that the dev was incredibly scarce on the details of what he was doing rather than asking his audience directly what they would think of certain changes he'd like to implement. Let's hope this is not the last of Cube World.
@@fernandoc5536 it wasn't necessarily their right to demand changes; speaking as someone in the field. The man and his wife made the game they wanted to make; dude felt depressed as hell then had what he viewed as a magnum opus shit on heavily with nothing but a deluge of bug fixes, requests for extensive changes that would take months and hate.. honestly I wouldn't be surprised if he was seriously depressed on that especially if he was working on it purely as a passion project.
Let's be honest here, if you think CubeWorld is a relatively unknown title - you didn't have internet in 2013. Shit blew up so much, even as a Russian I heard of the game.
one of the reasons a lot of people like indie games is the connection between the developers and the community. In this case, that connection was lost.
I always find it weird no one talks about how Mojang offered Wolley a dev job. This was right after he posted of the not yet releases CW Alpha. He made it through the interview process and just had to sign the contract, but he decided he would, and im paraphrasing, rather have freedom to work as he wanted with his wife. Jeb and/or notch twitted that the hiring didn't go through because Wolley decided to stay indie, and that they respected that. This is all from my memory, so there is that. I also couldnt find those tweets. probably deleted because maybe they saw it as quasi unprofessional to talk about the hiring process of specific devs.
Sony offering NMS devs resources vibes. Seriously the patterns are all there. It makes sense the guy didn't sign. He probably would've been fired after a couple of weeks, months at best.
@Higgs Bonbon ends justify the means i guess but it shouldn't become the standard. Still i agree. Cubeworld never improved prior to official launch. At least not in anyway worth bragging about.
"Is it actually right for people to be mad about this situation." If the game is still $19.99 then yes. While this was just a passion project with no actual promises given it's still a product that's being sold. And as a consumer of said product I'm pretty disappointed with the final product I bought. Does it justify the hate and insults he got? Absolutely not. Being a game developer isn't easy especially with how big his little game got I can imagine the insane pressure and anxiety it gave him. But at the end of the day it's still a product being sold so there's still some expectation especially given how long it's been with the majority of it just being silence during development and after release. Maybe if it was Free to Play the blow wouldn't have been as hard but who knows. And it honestly pains me to say all this. I've been following this game since I first saw it many years ago. And seeing how it ended up just saddens me. I was really hoping to spend hours and hours on end running around Cube World but after the 6 hour mark I just felt like I've done most of what there is to do. Hopefully down the line there will be an update for the game to improve it but I don't blame him if he decides to leave it as is.
Then why buy it no one told you to buy it no promises were made so you cant get mad at someone for consuming there product if you didnt want to take the chance on it then dont buy it, its that simple.
@@pupil5763 Yes you can get mad at someone for doing poorly even if they made no promises. If my friend paul says he's a good painter and shows me a number of houses he painted well and I trust him and pay him market rate to paint my walls only for him to use cheap runny paints, do a random pattern because he thought it would be fine and then moves out before I get home to see his 'work' I'd have every right to be angry at Paul even if painting is his passion because he did a shit job and charged you for it without informing you that he'd changed how he did things. If you miss the metaphors the previous works is the beta for cubeworld, moving out is going quiet and in this metaphor the painter requested payment in advance rather than a bill at the end.
@@jtj1128 How is it a scam? I bought the alpha and loved it. The dev got paid for that. A great game already existed. Literally can't call it a scam because of that alone.
@@AuthorityCat Many people didn't get to buy Cubeworld in it's alpha, so many people who found out about the game since 2017 got scammed on the 2019 steam release. It's painfully obvious in retrospect that he wanted to appeal to the community's emotion so he could make a clean getaway in the aftermath. Just because you weren't scammed doesn't mean others weren't.
As an alpha-backer, beta player and also seen in the video (thanks by the way), let me explain how it went (warning, wall of text): We as the community were hyped beyond belief after wollay anounced the release and the beta. There were no infos about the removed features, changes and so on so NOBODY knew that the game would be in such a state 1 week before release. The feeling of starting cube world was amazing, finally we were able to play the game of our childhood and/or teenage years after 6 years of silence from wollay. That feeling vanished after a few hours ingame as the complete lack of stuff to do while the combat being completely unbalanced was blatantly obvious. Not only that, but gear that you farmed for hours was getting nerfed so much suddenly that it became useless, even travel gear that was a hassle to collect got removed as soon as you crossed a border. Have fun swimming in an ocean biome I guess. The artifacts, that were the shining light at the end of the shit-fest tunnel were nothing but useless travel upgrades and illumination buffs for the lamp and even those were broken as 3 of them didn't even do anything and to this day, still don't. The community was annoyed but hopeful that wollay would fix things in that one week and opened up threads. People were listing bugs, problems and other errors, BEGGING him to add a few weeks to the beta to patch out bugs and add additional content as the current game was unfulfilling and sometimes downright cruel to players. Those people got silenced, called toxic haters, banned, threads got removed and so much more. Every thread that dared to shine a light on the problems this game has was outright closed and deleted. People got pissed, rightfully. We wanted to help wollay, but for that we got punished. We wanted this game to succeed, but got the boot for trying to make wollay mindful of those things. Some people went overboard, yes. I won't defend the ones that were calling for violence, that were harrassing others. But I also won't defend white knights that were flinging toxic sludge at people and their helpful informations this game ABSOLUTELY needed while also presenting wollay as a perfect, never-being-wrong godlike entity. The things wollay created and that are not broken are a sight to behold, the game looks nice, traversing the lands feels amazing and the combat in itself was rewarding (except when you met enemy wizards that aimbotted you across the world) in some places. The things he released broken were just baffling though. Artifacts, the flagship of this game, the ENDGAME CONTENT, were and are still broken. Enemies are uninteresting and just run to you in a straight line. Boss fights are just a slog in which the one with the bigger health pool or cheese tactics wins. Some artifacts spawn in lava lakes, entries to dungeons are generated INSIDE indestructible world geometry. Features got removed or severely dumbed down like the skill tree (that is completely open as soon as you start). the leveling system is gone and towns were more sterile (they were much bigger and more interesting in the alpha, they even got ROADS back then), weapon upgrading is now useless because as soon as you cross a border the weapon and armor became useless, spirit cubes were outright removed without any reason, the "lore" is just random gibberish that doesn't add anything at all (stuff like "the king of XYZ got killed by a snail), planned factions were not implemented, breakable terrain is a thing of the past, planned base building is not in the game and so much more. The game as a whole feels like a test environment with features that clash with each other, are broken or unbalanced. The player is not at fault here, it's wollay. HE was showing off his new "systems" via screenshots on twitter and hyping up the crowd, HE was the one who ignored his own road map while not changing it until release, HE was the one that didn't inform anyone, HE was the one who removed features and HE was the one developing it. he, as a software dev, was also dumb enough to store ALL THE GAME KEYS IN PLAIN SIGHT on the pretty unsecured website server, thus them getting stolen by a skript kiddie. Not the player and the fan community is at fault, he alone is. The DDOS maybe broke something in wollay, yes, but we don't exactly know if that DDOS was of malicious origin. People were so interested in the game that his server maybe got overloaded with repeated connection requests, which has the same effects as a DDOS. Wollay probably didn't imagine his game to become such a big thing and was, because of that, not investing in a DDOS protection or better server that could've prevented the whole thing. I'm not saying that wollay is at fault but it still happened, server crashes are a normal thing though, nothing to be scared of, especially getting PTSD from it. Before anyone says "He was depressed, he wasn't able to talk with people", get this: His wive could've taken that spot or he could've even hired a PR guy for it. The game was a money printing machine back then, the money was there. Invest the money in a better server and people who talk FOR you. Heck, even mojang was interested in the game and wanted to help him with the game by offering him a job while entrusting him with complete control over cubeworld and the development, but he refused. HE REFUSED FREE MONEY, A WHOLE COMPANY OF TALENTED PEOPLE AND HELP BECAUSE "MUH GAME"! Instead he chose a closed system development with only him and his wive as the developer, designer, tester and manager. There was a CLEAR lack of feedback, he got completely lost in his vision of a "perfect" cube world. That "perfect" world isn't as perfect as he invisioned, though, visible through the broken, unbalanced and clashing CORE systems. Some people also say "He doesn't owe you anything, it was his PaSsIoN pRoJeCt". No, no it was not. It ended being his passion project as soon as he took money from people. It became a product as soon as people BOUGHT the game and customers have a right to a FUNTIONING product. He promised so much and kept so little of those promises, no wonder people were angy, myself included. He promised us a voxel-based exploration RPG and he gave us a voxel-based game with uninteresting exploration (if you can even call it that as the map is ALWAYS FULLY VISIBLE, nothing to explore here) and less RPG elements than Minecraft and a gameplay loop that completely hinders a player from developing a character the way he wants as the character is getting reset to 0 after a border walk except some atrificial boosts you can't even use as the traversal items are gone, too. The one thing people agree on is that, if he had COMMUNICATED those changes and showed interest in the thoughts of his players/payers, the whole thing could've been prevented and/or massively cooled down. Most people weren't pissy about the game but were hating the way wollay handled things in the first place. The game as a whole could've been made better if he was able to communicate with the ones who were financing his dream. Instead he ignored everyone, got lost in his own inclusive dev cycle and burned down the bridge between him and the community, again, in the same way he did back in 2013. It is quite sad to be honest that, to most of those problems, the answer was "communication". The biggest problem was also the easiest to fix but he didn't manage to see it that way and did the exact opposite... All in all, wollay did so much wrong in those years that it baffles me that he managed to slither around lawsuits. Oh, one thing: he never EVER said sorry ONCE for going into hiding without notice. He got his pity party, we didn't get an apology for the YEARS of being ghosted. That tells us much about wollay.
The lawsuit thing at least is depressingly easy to explain: Consumer protection institutions are operated by people that still call all videogames 'Nintendos' and are proudly unable to distinguish Red Dead from Cyberpunk. They'd glance at the little man running around in response to button presses and rubber stamp the whole thing 'product fit for purpose, no case to answer'.
@silverfoxeater Funny how worked up you get, it seems that you have some problems yourself with apologiszing. An apology is something simple and has nothing to do with "fee-wees" as you call it. It's a way of showing that you changed your ways, that you see your own faults and won't do the same mistake. Saying sorry is not hard and shows that you bettered yourself, after 6 years of hiding a simple sorry shouldn't be a hurdle for your broken self worth. A simple apology can fix so much and show that you grew as a human being as you see your own wrong actions. Not to mention that an apology would also show respect to the ones that waited for you. Don't you apologize when you're invited to someone and show up late without announcing it? If not, then you should as it's a simple way of respecting the ones you left hanging. Not apologizing just shows that you didn't change and don't see a problem with the actions you chose to go with.
@silverfoxeater Sir it is 2021. Unironically calling people beta males is pretty pathetic and Discord Moderator-like of yours, which is incredibly bad for your reputation as a whole.
*Sigh*, I have a friend like this, anxious and a perfectionist, so she never came around to asking people for help and most of the times not asking for critique. Once the work is done, the damage's been done and she has to deal with more anxiety. Please, always ask for help.
One question I have: Where was Sarah in all of this? I wonder if they had a falling out. I feel bad for Wolfram. We have no idea what was going on in his life. And if this started out as a passion project, maybe he was entirely unprepared for the responsibility for managing a hugely popular game.
@@alexbaker9996 That's my working theory too. It would explain the development trouble, his disappearance, his need to get the game released so people stop talking to him about it. I believe it's also possible she passed away, that would explain it also.
@@ricksanchez3557 This is pretty gross shit right here. Say what you might and give him the benefit of the doubt but don't make theories about his partner leaving him or dying. That's way too personal, and I know if I were Wollay, I'd fucking hate if someone did that to me. Mind your own business.
@@ricksanchez3557 the other zoomer who replied seems to be too moronic about theories, don't worry about em, bizarre theories id say, but there does seem to be a bit of legs to stand on for it, but i do hope it aint true.
I have been playing Cube World since its 2011 release, Im just glad we didn't have to pay for it again, but they really ruined it with all the new stuff, and it really seems like they coulda done more in the given time.
Wolay gave a list of features that he was implementing in the game on the cube world website before it got deleted. None of those features are in the game
@@d4s0n282 Nah he removed the list after people started to call him out that he didnt do anything that he said he was working on, which is very valid because it said on the original purchase page that that content was planned and was going to be released in updates. Then there were no updates, i was already mad and skeptical of him from the first disappearance, then he did the 2019 release and followed exactly what he did with the first release, Just drum up hype, sell out and dissapear all before shit even goes down. Dude was gone before people even started to download it. He did this as a cash grab and if you followed it from the beginning like i have you see it extremely clearly that that was his intention all along he was never intending on releasing the game. It was so bad that steam was censoring the community hub for the game removing posts from people who wanted their money back.
@@d4s0n282 it’s not my job to care about him especially when he’s a scammer. I paid for a product and was told I would get it. I didn’t and he backpeddled on it and then did it again years later to more people on a larger platform. Your literally an idiot or blind if you can’t draw the conclusion yourself that he scammed everyone. Just look at the work done by the community over at valoren. That’s what happens when work is actually put into something. Imagine that this was Minecraft we were talking about rather than cubeworld. If notch left and the game was still in infdev people would have the same reactions and he wasn’t even promising anything like wolay was.
@@d4s0n282 When people pay money for something it doesn't matter how they treat you; you gotta give them their money's worth. You can't just scam people because they were a dickhead to you.
hi, im one of the guys who's post was in the video. to add to the end points of the video and releasing the game for free. one thing to remember, his software was developed under a german software development initiative of some kind. basically government hosted funding for software development. i dont remember the fine details but i imagine to qualify for this funding, you have to eventually sell your product or make a return of some kind to continue getting the funding. so to an extent, he probably had to charge for it under those stipulations. not ideal but if he truly is ditching the game then this was the minimum to do so. still, not a defense of his actions. he could have come forth and explained everything, then it'd be on the community to understand or not.
also, too bad RoboKast couldnt have seen the massive criticism censoring during the closed beta on steam forums. a mix of valid rule breaking posts being banned, players finding dangerous exploits with the steam network portions of the code and trying to research them and share findings in the forum being banned, to valid opinion and criticism just being outright deleted by fanboy moderators and Pixxie herself. name a steam forum scandal on rights to free speech and this eclipses it easily.
Well this answered my questions about people attempting to sue him and his wife, certainly not the best deal to have taken, and possibly a reason behind him refusing Mojang. This is very likely a very grey issue, considering government hosted funding? Yeah, this was doomed from the start, no matter how good it should have been, there were fingers in that pie already.
Gosh, I just hope the developer is okay, honestly. Yeah, all that happened is messes up but the guy was already struggling, I just hope that this way he might atleast have some weight off his shoulders.
@@raggedymuffinz I don't like the game either. However, I rather our collective internet doesn't kill another person just because they made a bad game. Understand his troubled mental health, and you don't even have to buy or support this game. Just...keep vitriol and assumptions to be more tame.
@@mobile_ingou Bruh, he literally scammed people with a less finished game than the alpha build almost a decade ago *for 20 dollars* then fucked off forever, but we’re “ungrateful”? Okay buddy.
I really do hope that Hytale doesn't run into the same situation. We've been getting weekly screenshots for the past 9 months, but almost no word has been said on the games development except for a blogpost last December. It's really starting to feel like Cube World all over again... Although granted Hytale's dev team has about 70+ people compared to just 2 on Cube World's development
@@Bogglemanify Bro what Hytale promised in the trailer is literally impossible!! For example the movie thing they promised is literally impossible to code because there is no such technology yet!! Also everything that was in the trailer was a animation, none of that was actual gameplay, meaning that when they made the trailer they didnt even have made a portion of the game Hytale? More like HYPEtale, because they hyped a lot of things of which they will never do, or at least it will take them like 20-30 years to complete with all of what they promised in the trailer
@@decas5505 The movie thing is actually common among VR communities. Fake theaters where you watch videos and movies and can see each other in the virtual theater. There's even a mod that allows you to watch youtube in Minecraft so your claim that "there is no such technology yet!!" is just wrong. Yes there is a lot of the trailer was just animation but if you read their blogs, they go into detail in how they currently have them in the game with accompanied footage to back it up. None of the things shown in the trailer seem unreasonable. Everything in that trailer has been done in Minecraft before.
Honestly this video encapsulates most of my fears as a content creator, the idea that my fears, mental issues and personal issues might get in my way and cause me make bad decisions, fear criticism or just fearing failure is absolutely mortifying to me, and what hurts me most is that in a way the dev’s fears where made a reality, his fear of failure caused him to be unnable to take the criticism and people where just outright vicious to him. He did do a lot of crap granted, but most of the attacks where more personal attacks than criticism ( at least on Twitter ).
To be fair, Wollay did almost everything wrong a developer could do wrong. - not getting feedback from anyone outside your dev group - showing screenshots of content that isn't in the game and probably never will be without making it clear - never communicating with your customers and community - if communicating, only over a proxy that is not verifyable as being legitimate (e-mail screenshot of random player) - changing core aspects without telling your customer - outright REMOVING aspects of your game which were loved by the community without telling them - practicly vanishing for multiple years - not updating roadmap - not hiring a PR guy - not hiring other people to speed up the development - never patching things - only one week of beta, thus not giving you enough time to patch stuff - silencing people who want to get your attention on problems the product has - rejected a job offer at Mojang while still retaining full control over the project - going into hiding AGAIN after silence caused another shitstorm - letting your moderators take the flak for it and ghosting them, too - and so on If you can't talk to people, then get someone on board who can. It can be a fried of yours, better is a PR guy as this person is skilled in handling bigger crowds without causing a shit-storm. But TALK with people, especially the ones who funded your product and who want to help you! Being open about things and being clear about it are the most important things in PR.
9:32 Yes, bacuase they liked the alpha and beta versions features that werent on the final release. If an indi developer (heck, even a AAA company) has an open beta of a game that looks awesome, you pre-order it and then at the steam release you find out that all is left is just the cooking minigame that you hated... I think you could call that a ripoff
"Considering Wollay never promised anything with the game." This statement is very much incorrect, his site before the year of the release were full of promises of what Cube World was to become in the future and what I was sold on. Of course he removed all of it from his site hoping no one would go "hey what happened to this and this?" But regardless we were sold a lie. Faction vs Faction gameplay and storyline anyone? Actually lack of storylines in general. Of course in the end this was the only game I got burned on as it taught me the risks of buying into early access's and is always the one I bring up when someone is trying to convince me to buy into an unreleased game.
I remember playing cubeworld... i loved the fact that i found a bunch of bugs and glitches on my own... still dont know if they are common knowledge now or if they have been patched. The rogue backdash could be used to gain insane speed and distance with the glider... by turning around mid dash and activated the glider. You could dupe any refinable resourses.. when ready to create something like an "iron ingot" from "iron ore".. hold your mouse over the "craft" option then go into map.. by clicking while the map was obscuring your vision of anything else.. you would not drain any resourses but you would gain whatever you crafted... effectivly gaining infinit ingots from one ore.
9:00 I'm not mad, just disapointed, he could have released the original alpha with NO CHANGE WHATSOEVER and it would have gone over better than this crap he gave us. He outright killed his game.
I think there is something to be said about someone making a game people loved and ruining it. While the didn't "promise" people anything, he did have to contend with the beta he once released. Everything in the beta was a realistic expectation. People who still had the alpha still played it and loved it. A release is literally a declaration that the game they once loved is gone forever.
this looks almost exactly like veloren, or vice versa, but veloren is 100% free and open source and under active development, although still only limited release (i.e. not on steam) as the devs don't want to release an alpha game too soon to a broader audience. i wonder if cube world, which veloren says it is inspired by (and legend of zelda breath of the wild) got the source code for cube world and continued it. although the current release of veloren has been completely re-written from scratch, and in Rust programming language, so maybe no relation at all, but the look is almost a carbon copy.
Tbh the fact that a tweet about his depression and condiction from those past 3 years gets less attention (based on what you said) than sneak peaks of just some houses and tree tells a lot about this community.
@@kaklikful I would think he is a poor guy..... if he didn't get freaking rich with the game sellouts, imagine promising something, not giving what was paid and then hide with the money and let other people defend him. Easy money alright. Meanwhile some devs work their asses off for way less.
Simply announcing something is like promising because of the hype that people stir up over it. It's not about honesty and integrity. It's simply about the emotion of hype and how powerful it can be for people. Letting that down is similar to breaking a promise.
Wait so Cube World didn’t become Trove I was so convinced when I first saw trove pop into my recommendations it was just what Cube World had become. Wow...
I remember being 10 seeing this game on TH-cam, I never played it because I couldn’t get it and my computer likely couldn’t handle it, nearly a decade later I’m in college and that long lost game I wanted to play so bad comes out and it’s in ruins. A shame
I was one of the alpha testers and my friend (who was also hyped) told me the game was going to go on Steam soon. Once I figured out there was a beta, I rushed to grab my brother's account (the two of us had picroma accounts but I lost mine) and then when the beta went live, I realized firsthand that so many things were changed for the worse. Apart from the art style I could barely recognise the game. My friend did not purchase the dumpster fire.
If the game gave people expectations that it didn't live up to (which it didn't) they have the right to be mad. Especially the people (like me) that payed for the alpha and then were just screwed over by the developers literally saying "thank you for your kind donation, would you like to purchase the game again?". Good job Picroma, you could be an excellent EA v2.0 Now I'm not the best when it comes to licenses, but it's the first time I have heard that you literally lose your right over owning a game just because you didn't log into the website in time. Next to that I never recieved any kind of information on that part so I would really like to know if the move they made is legal.
What I was most upset by with this game is how they removed custom weapons. I remember going out and getting resources then going back and making a ridiculous looking sword but it was my ridiculous sword something I made that looked how I wanted to and unless someone copied how I made it then it would be the only one of it's kind. Then you know it got removed. -_- Also I feel like people have the right to be mad not at the game it self but how he handled the situation and failed to make his ideal version of the game known to almost all of the player base. He should have released demo footage of the game and a better explanation of how the system worked as well as why things were removed/added. Instead of having a 8 year long steak of silence he should have posted from the very beginning about the situation. It could have been something as simple as the following: Hey guys I know the hype around this game is massive but some major difficulties have been getting in the way of how I want things done so for the time being I'm not going to be posting anything new about the game from now on as to not get your expectations too high. He could have also given a more detailed responses like: Hello everyone recently we have had run ins with DDOS attacks on the website because of some of our updates and this has led to some serious mental health problems on our end. Because of that we are going to stop public updates for quite a while. I'm sorry it has to be this way but it is the only way I can think of for production of the game to continue. Just keep in mind that this is a side project and I am a perfectionist so it might be a long long time before I'm ready to share anything about the game. I am sorry and I hope you can find enjoyment for this game in the future. Either of these would have been an amazing response that would have solved a large majority of the issues surrounding Cube World and so again with the way he handled the situation I think people have the right to be mad.
It's honestly bizarre how much it got changed from it's original form to what it currently is. I can't fathom the reasoning for the rework, because the current form is super unfun.
I remember playing a space sandbox a long time ago, StarMade, back when it first came out in early access around 2012 It’s still in early access and pretty much abandoned at this point. It had a lot of potential but the devs just ran out of funding.
Theirs a game called zombox that was in development years ago that I used to follow and then the creater kind of just disappeared and never released the game.
The problem with some devs is that they are absolutely shameless and unfazed by criticism of their work, some like Wollay are the other extreme. If the man had just 10% of the nerve of Todd Howard, Whoever the hell is behind sims 4 , and the people behind those god-awful Chinese cash shops mmos, then Cube-World would have been a great game .
If it was free, I don't really think the anger would be justified. But since people paid for it, were made to wait forever with little communication, and rightfully expected more, they can absolutely be mad about it. It's his fault for failing to properly communicate and allowing the hype train to grow as it did. However, I think people also need to also be understanding of him as well, he very clearly was dealing with personal issues directly related to communication.
Cube World discord has some insight into Wollay's current work on the game, they managed to contact him and get a reply back in february this year. He said he is working on a new mode that includes XP, and other stuff but it's mostly in experimentation phase.
What I hate most about this is that the alpha was really good, and all he really needed to do was expand on that, but there were so many strange design decisions that basically removed what people liked about the game... I dont understand how you can change essentially everything that people praised your game for and then ignore when people say it isn't what they wanted
@@tonictarsier1868 for real. It was actually more enjoyable they just needed to add more multiplayer ideas and give more things for people to grind for. It was one of the most fun games out there and it’s pretty sad that they just gave up and left it here
This is a great guide on what not to do, Wollay fucked up at every single step of the way. Just be transparent and you'll be fine lmao, Wollay was just straight up a dumbass.
Honestly, it almost feels like the man did everything he could to try and make the internet hate him. As long as you be honest, transparent, and realistic with your community and actually hear out what they have to say, people can be very forgiving. When you start deceiving them, scamming them, and completely ignoring their voice as you change everything that made your project popular, don’t be very surprised when they start treating you as poorly as you treated them.
I only played the game once as some kind of demo (I don't remember where); but I was not wholly impressed with it--but at the same time I don't remember any promises made with it (but again, I didn't really follow it closely). Making a game is harder than a lot of people assume. If he didn't break any promises, I don't blame him for releasing it and disappearing. I'm not saying it happened with this game, but a lot of people feel entitled somehow to other people's work a lot of the time (movies, games, etc).
I think your friend has a point wondering about the validity of the feelings from the players. Just like with an abstract painting, we might not see the art in the end that the artist saw when they began. However, as an almost (at this point) life-long fan of Wollay, I’m not only mad, but a little bit of my heart is broken. I was 13 when I got the alpha, when it was first released in 2013 (and it was a pain even then to get the alpha before it was taken off the market for the next 7 years). My friends and I played and played for days while ~patiently~ waiting for the “weekly updates” that Wollay had promised us, that never came. Eight years go by, all the while us devoted fans, loyal to Wollay and his vision of his “passion project”, patiently waited. Every time we truly began to lose hope and give up because it seemed like he had too, he would update his website, or post on Twitter, or someone, somewhere, would dig up some piece of information about the project, and that kept us going. Eight years go by and all that patience and hope was rewarded with a game that I didn’t even buy in the end because of it’s reviews and what I was seeing. It is disappointing and pretty heart breaking to be apart of such a loyal fan base and support group and to be excited about, not necessarily a game, but an experience promised, and never getting that. We were hoping for a good game, really for just what he told us it was going to be, and we believed him. My whole experience with this boils down to a dissatisfied comment on a TH-cam video, and that’s pretty sad. So, in a way, I do feel justified in being upset with the way everything ended up. It was more than just a bad game.
"i just came back from depression and anxiety please dont bully me" the entire community proceeds to bully him and then gets confused on why he stopped updating it
8:13 "It appears as if he released the game as a last-ditch effort to get everyone off his back about it", or you know, the reason for his disappearance this time was that despite detailing his anxiety, the gaming public generally comprised of toxic sociopaths lacked the empathy to give constructive criticism in a manner which would be encouraging instead of trawling him through a torrent of abuse. Doesn't take Grade 1 mathematics to understand that permanent abandonment is a response which balances this equation.
Knowing the years and how the community would love this game, why not allow community programmers to help support the workload, funnel inspiring ideas and flush out updates. I can see the anxiety and the pressure having more people under your belt, the other side would just let us mod the game on steam workshop and do basically what I said above, but you could still walk away with a positive press of "he made an unfinished game but his community explored and created with innovative ideas.
Would really love to see, maybe years from now, Woolay come out in maybe an interview and give us the deets on how that happened, what went wrong, etc. Got that idea from a video I saw recently where Rebecca Black, the one who sang that "Friday" song people loved to hate back in the day, talking about how that ruined her life for a few years but eventually she bounced back. I was among the lucky few who managed to buy into the alpha way back in 2011 and I poured dozens of hours into it. That thing felt like "next gen terraria" and the ONLY thing it was lacking at the time was music. Seriously, just add in music to the alpha and you got a feature-complete awesome voxel game, even if a little bit rough around the edges. Only thing I can think of that would explain what happened with the final release is that the game was likely entirely remade several times, to the point it became unrecognizable.
If y'all would like to see a game much like cube world, you should check on Veloren, it has the same style, and a team of 150 people working on weekly updates since it first was released as a project. It really surprises me, because I think Veloren is putting a lot of effort and it doesn't have that big of a community.
I was definitely someone who really wanted the game to be good. I played the... I think alpha (hard to remember) with a friend of mine. and we had hours of fun traversing the world, fighting monsters, plundering dungeons. it was amazing when it finally released we both bought a copy and got started. it seemed very trimmed down. neither of us liked what it had become. but we played for a while together pretty much just staying in one region for the time being. I was sad that the cubes you could add to your weapons were all but absent. but when we reached the next region I found out why. let me put this into perspective. imagine if minecraft was released, and upon buying it you discovered it was a walking simulator. you couldn't mine anything or build... it was just a world you walk around in... the weapon modding in cube world was the entire selling point for me (probably for other people too but I can't speak for anyone else), most of the time playing the classic version was finding cubes to design cool looking bows, or staves, or swords. or grinding exp and gold to buy the hangglider and use it as much as I could "do people have the right to be mad?" I feel like that's a dumb question... I'm sorry to be rude like that... but it is. because charging money for something blatantly worse than what came before. and which undermines the original selling point(s). is unacceptable
My story of CubeWorld involves me reading a piece about it in 2011 on a website called Kotaku. I was so intrigued with this unreleased game that I started a list of yet to be released games to keep track of all the games that fascinated me, that I wanted to make sure I tried eventually. CubeWorld was the VERY first game on this list. Eventually, in 2020, CubeWorld would be the very first AND only game on this LONG list to be removed without me ever trying the game, because I was certain it was vaporware.
I played the game for hundreds of hours. It's true that the levelling system isn't the best, but it can be fixed with mods and the game is really good :) The only downside would be the levelling system which again, can be fixed with a mod. You shouldn't jump to conclusions without testing the game first. I really liked it and I think it's worth it. Have fun!
The game is an objective downgrade from the previous version, the marketing system is scummy, the players waited 8 years for a downgrade of a perfectly functional game only to have it cost 20 dollars and barely give anything to the alpha testers and then have the creator dissapear without fixing the shit he put on the table, not to mention he posted "upcoming features" and "teasers". Teasers don't mean something that MIGHT be in the game, but something that will be in the game but is not fleshed out. And features that already were in the game were suddenly removed. Lastly when you talk about "art", why charge 20 $ for art that you know people will hate? Its pretty scummy to know that something is bad and still put it up and have people PAY FOR IT?
@@tornglory5709 if I don't like it of course I won't buy it. But what about the tons of thousands of people who were waiting for this game to come out and even bought the alpha version? Are they supposed to not buy it too? And what about the people with the alpha keys who didn't make it in time to redeem their full game?
@@tornglory5709 bro, the game was officially released and you are making the argument that it wasn't finished.. of course it wasn't, but did the dev say that? No, he just told them the release date and then dissapeared.
Wollay developed A.I who would post twitter updates and release final build of Cube World in Steam, all these years of radio silence was just because he was developing it. That would be a cool plot twist lmao
for everyone, Wollay is working again on cube world, hes gonna bring back the xp system, skills etc. you can look it up on the Cube World Discord! There's also a picture from the "new" Cube World
This guy doesn't do his research. I'm on the cube world discord and the actual last known contact with Wollay Is an email where he says he is currently working on the game and adding new features as well as re-adding many that were removed. The issues with Wollay is he is incappable of taking negative critisisim. Hes one of those people who just shuts down. So for the years he was developing the new version he was not looking at any of the feedback to see what people liked and what they didn't. So features were cut that people did like. So hes working on it. Slowly. Cuz hes the only one who codes it. His wife is the one that does the music.
Absolutely, I have the entire right to be upset about his choices. It feels 100% like a cashgrab. I REALLY loved this game, but to disappear with MY money considering his history, absolutely. This game had SO much potential.
All Wollay had to do is just re-release the Alpha version with slightly more content like new biome/creature, that's about it. I don't get it why he have to rebuild an already solid foundation of a game from scratch to be honest.
I totally forgot about this game. Bought it near it's beta release in 2013 and... honestly I didn't see the hype at the time. I was only playing single player so maybe that had something to do with it, but it seemed too difficult if you went to far off the path and grinding to get good enough didn't appeal to me. It's sad to hear all the people who actually supported the game basically get screwed over. Maybe it could make another comeback, but after what the developer did, I highly doubt it.
In my mind, I want to pretend that the dev anxiety'd himself into starting the development over from scratch only to breakdown and decide he was just gonna post the half-baked remake to get some money to support himself so he could retreat inward and be alone without it nagging at the back of his head.
I hope this man can recover from what mentally pressures him. That is all i wish for him. It is sad to me that people think that more being angry would change anything if it already had ruined everything. I don't blame the dev.
To be fair, Wollay did everything wrong a dev could do, no wonder he got that much backlash. He silenced people before release, didn't take feedback, didn't communicate, removed features without telling anyone, never got help in terms of development, never appologized for anything he did wrong, took money without delivering on the promisies made, screwed over people (CW steam forum mods included, ghosted them, too), stored EVERY GAME KEY on the same server the website ran IN PLAIN TEXT without protecting them and getting them stolen, hindered people from getting their keys by removing the login, never patching things, never updating the roadmap from 2013 and then removing it completely 2 days before release and so on. I could go on like that for an hour... Also, if he was damaged because of the DDOS and wasn't able to communicate, then he should've hired a PR guy to talk FOR him, the money was there. Even his wive could've acted as a communication-bridge between him and the community. heck, even the community was interested in aiding him with programming, feedback and so on, he could've gotten someone on board to write a dev blog or something like this. Even MOJANG was interested in Cube World and offered him a job while entrusting him with complete control over Cube World. HE REJECTED FREE MONEY, PR, DEVELOPERS AND A JOB AT ONE OF THE FASTEST GROWING COMPANIES because "muh game". It was his own stupidity and Inclusivness that made the whole debacle as worse as it was.
i have my theory that the game he planned on and was working on somehow got deleted , but he had old backup files . so in twitter we saw all big cites and factions and pirate ships and much more that never was in the finall game. it made me think that he probably had to start from a backup and try to get back most of the things he did but couddlnt iimplement them all so he chose to try something else and it kinda failed.
I don't care how the game turned out, it's never ok to personally attack someone like what happened. Especially when the poor guy was feeling anxious and threatened already.
Y'all heard about veloren? No this isn't advertisement, they don't even know who I am but although is in a really raw state it reminds me of cube world. It is free to play at their site
Followed the game since early alpha, Got a windows system near when it got full released, and I was pretty sad. But I understand the video game industry and the difficulty of ground-up game design. More sad is that man's dream was never fully realized.
Kickstarter, early access, etc. have a real downside and this is it. In any other field, if someone told a consumer "Give me X dollars and I'll give you Y in return" the expectation would be that they make good on that agreement or find a way to make an equivalency if they can't. In general, paying for something before it is done in a problem and getting paid for something you haven't done or finished takes away a huge incentive which is why I think many indie folk that this isn't something they have tempered themselves for end up slowing down or stopping after getting income from it. They got the reward (and not just money, recognition too, having people see their creation, etc.) without having to finish the job.
At the VERY LEAST the developper still learns and listen from us, unlike a certain cum chalice guy, and as top comment says, the game is eventually gonna come back to his original success, maybe too late, but atleast for good.
oh yeah, i was wondering, i think around 2011, there was a big youtuber of my country playing this game, but stopped after 2 weeks (only 4 episode, 9 min long) and never talked about it what happen, after that, i was sure this game is dead. just today i re learned of this games existence
Tragedy is a good word for it, because it seems like a cascade of shitty situations without clear right or wrong. In some ways, it is Wollay's fault for the poor communication, but the one time he put out a very detailed and personal communication about his fears, the fears were immediately validated. It's like the developer had the self fulfilling prophecy of being seen as a failure, and the gaming community was quick to make him feel like one. Just a shitty situation all around.
i know the delevoper personally, wolfram had depression, after the long pause wolfram did, he saw his wife playing alpha and he fall in depression again
@@fewstr i know him not that much (im just living near him) but one thing i noticed is that wollay always show gameplay fotage with his wife together, now with the new release he walks there alone around, i think he had some trouble with his wife
@@Neyo-vo6rt dang... That's tough. I've seen what happens to people when they have messed up close relationships. Sometimes they recover, but sometimes they don't bounce back and it spirals down from there.
@@Neyo-vo6rt "now with the new release he walks there alone around, i think he had some trouble with his wife" you are psychotic lmao, why do people enjoy just sitting there making shit up about someone
I was one of those who prepurchased the game. My computer could barely handle it (just using the lantern reduced my perfomance drastically) but I absolutely loved it. Unfortunately, when it was abandoned I left it as well. Only so much you can do playing by yourself in an empty world like that. I found out about its release to Steam too late to get the game I had purchased. Upsetting, but I also knew at that point already via the comments that he for some reason removed features from Cube World. For what it is it's still a good game. Perfect? No. But better than a lot I have seen and better than a lot more that come out these days. But I understand why he might have wanted nothing more to do with it. I don't think Wollay expected his passion project to explode like it did and I suspect that in addition to the changes others still felt betrayed by that original ghosting. I'm sad about it, not mad. Just disappointed.
if you go to the market you choose what car you gonna buy , its your decision , that means the only thing u can be mad is about your own decision. good example is starbound , in the very begining it was fun game , but once devs decided to change all damage and what not things to be scaled to the player level , game became crap to me , because there was no more reason to improve , it does not matter what gear u have or how high your skills are, there will be mob that 1HKO u anyways. but thanks to that game i kept searching until i found "signs of life". lovely game that i knew it was worth to buy even in alpha stage.
4:25 Wrong. Shame you're running damage control for Wollay by refusing to point out his lies about the """ddos""" attacks, calling realists "the haters," etc. 8:50 The insults weren't even harsh. The most outrageous one you posted was some of the gentlest criticism ever given on the internet. 9:00 "Do people have the right to be mad about his myriad broken promises, cut content, radio silence, and outright lies? I don't know..." No shit they do, Sherlock. What kind of asinine, boot-licking question is this??
this guy doesnt live in the real world lool. His compassion only goes one way and ignores what he and the other customers deserve. I see a lot of this crazy shit nowadays.
i thing he screwed up and erased a bunch of stuff and had no backups so he made up the depression BS so as to get people off his ass and to soften the blow when the now MUCH shittier version got released.
the first i seen of cube world was when members of yogscast like martin and hats films played some of it and i remember really liking the look of it, it seemed like a pretty fun game, and when it was released i really enjoyed it. i never let myself get swept away with overhype or anything i just looked forward to playing it one day even if it was for a few hours and i was pleased
I agree with your friend's take on this. I felt the same way when I first played the new cube world. It disappointed me, yes. But I still wanted to support wollay. This game was his idea of a game he wanted to play and share to the world. You could argue he could've just made it free to play, but to me, it felt like he was checking if he could make this job full time or not. If the hate wasn't so vocal, and if people tried to understand how wollay saw the game, maybe we could've hoped for further updates the game that may or may not fix the main complaints somewhere down the line. But I'm not blaming the fans either. I just want people to understand both sides of the situation.
It's a shame people couldn't just chill out and approach the situation calmly, because it was already extremely apparent that Wollay has anxiety issues and isn't a people person. People reacting the way they did probably just reaffirmed to him that he shouldn't have done anything in the first place.
Did you ever play Tony Hawk games, MX vs ATV, SSX, or Skate? Check out my video talking about the rise and fall of extreme sports games!
th-cam.com/video/jtv2uItHgkI/w-d-xo.html
Yep played the he'll out of the Tony Hawk games back on the ps1&2
MX vs ATV had to have been my favorite extreme sports game of all time.
Would love to see a no-mans-sky redemption arc with this one. It definitely has a load of potential and the framework is there.
It's probably too late for a redemption arc don't you think?
@@reggie9595 they redeemed themselves years ago and have released free updates ever since. they just recently added settlements with the frontiers expansion for free.
@@lukeyyyyyy I'm talking about Cube World
@@reggie9595 o
@@reggie9595 I for sure would pick it up again if it would become good, I want to see it succeed, deep down I'm still hoping that some day it might become good even tho the chances are really slim for it to ever happen, I love this game so much and it could be a lot of fun by removing just a few things and adding some stuff to keep things interesting for some time
8:03 Not true. A streamer DMed Wollay on Twitter back in May, and he got a screenshot of a new gamemode that works pretty similar to Alpha. Some guy also received a reply of an E-Mail near the end of february of this year, where he stated that he re-added big cities, a worldgen without separated lands and improving the new progression system along with changing quests and lore.
thanks for the update! I pinned your comment where people know about this!
@@robokast No problem!
if i may? that could have easily been faked. nothing has officially been posted by wollay, and there have been fake leaks before.
@@lawler197 it's not fake goddamnit, it's in the discord server AND there's a history of the screenshots posted there being real. back when people liked to talk out of their asses and affirm with all the certainty of the world that the game was dead and it would never have an actual release, it was there where screenshots were posted, with wollay answering people's emails, giving confirmation that he hadn't abandoned the game, which was indeed true, because a new version was actually released. the screenshot about this streamer may be fake, i don't even think it has been added to #signs-of-wollay, which basically discredits it, but the other one is legit.
@@todessehnsucht Well, I suppose we will see. no need to be aggressive, but the last time we counted on wollay getting it right, this happened.
I remember playing the Alpha with my friends years ago. Heard about the silence afterwards, heard of the new tweets. Then it popped up on Steam to crazy negative reviews. Real sad story, it's almost like the Alpha is better *still* . Game could have been so much more.
Played both and yeah the alpha was better. It was more buggy and crashprone. After doing a number of streams of it i got bored of it but it had potential. Now the 2019 release, i tried to like it but the game design decisions were just awful. You just end up running over a map hoping to find monsters that wouldnt oneshot you, kitting slowly back up, only to lose it all if you stepped over a zone border. Such a weird way to do a game.
So, I found a way to play the alpha again... Does anybody know how I could play the multi-player now?
@@richi2703 Port-foward or use hamachi
If you have the alpha it should come with a server.exe in the same folder. It's basically the same deal as multiplayer Minecraft or Valheim.
@@marcforrester7738 thx mate, I already tried it, but it didn't work. Now I found mods for the full version which deactivats the region lock
it really is so sad, the game could have been so fun :/
Even though the game has been in development for years, it just feels so rushed and a lot of feautures didnt really fit the game. It could've been a masterpiece if he communicated and interacted with his fanbase a lot more and not just dissapear out of nowhere. I do feel bad for him if he did experience deppresion and anxiety, but he just practicaly robbed his fanbase of there money in exchange for a bad experience. I dont know that was just my opinion your free to have your own.
He’s reworking the ‘arcade’ part of the game! Skill tree, exp, and i think hes also adding a bunch of new stuff, SUPER HYPED FOR THAT
I am gonna search if the Game is still in Steam it sounds like a cool game i have low standars for Games just by having fin is all i need and since i did not Heard of cube world in me life i only discoverded now the day i watced this vídeo i don't have hype the only things i Will get is well an indie Game in it's purest form a Game that good or Bad if You can have a little of fun Then is not a fáiled game so yeah i would play it what about You people
@@ILoveBeppe he is gonna do that in the now???? the game was rereleased in a very shity vesion in 2019 and hasent uppdated shit probebly beucase it was so bad and they dont know waht they are doing
@@viggecokarlittecola4655 U gotta remember its just a husband and wife working on it. not actual game devs... and yes hes gonna do that in the steam release.
Honestly, this entire story just makes me sad.
I remember watching some TH-camrs play this game back 2011 and i practically loved the game at first sight.
now all we have is just a steam page with a really painful "mixed" rating. :(
I’ve seen it in 2014 But still this made me sad
Wollay was already having anxiety about it, and unfortunately it looks like he was right to be anxious. I can only imagine how he feels about the project now.
@@HyPNoTiKx lmao the guy scammed people for 5+ years. Like the video said if he just wanted to move on should have made it free to play not charge 20 bucks.
Same, such a good game...
Yep, should have made it free imo
Projects that are spread out over long periods of time are often doomed to fail. We've seen this happen before. Over many years, the ideas developers themselves have about what their game should be can change drastically, things are scrapped and redone, core gameplay elements are changed significantly. Cube World is a victim of that. If the game was released in the state players liked it, I'm sure it wouldn't be the kind of disappointment it is now. The whole story is indeed a tragedy.
Doesn't help that the dev was incredibly scarce on the details of what he was doing rather than asking his audience directly what they would think of certain changes he'd like to implement. Let's hope this is not the last of Cube World.
RIP terraria 2
@@fernandoc5536 it wasn't necessarily their right to demand changes; speaking as someone in the field. The man and his wife made the game they wanted to make; dude felt depressed as hell then had what he viewed as a magnum opus shit on heavily with nothing but a deluge of bug fixes, requests for extensive changes that would take months and hate.. honestly I wouldn't be surprised if he was seriously depressed on that especially if he was working on it purely as a passion project.
omori
And, more time before release, more expectative people create, and the game become something it never was, because of people's expectative.
Please, do more of the successes and failures of these relatively unknown indie titles. They're fascinating.
Will do!
Vouche
Let's be honest here, if you think CubeWorld is a relatively unknown title - you didn't have internet in 2013. Shit blew up so much, even as a Russian I heard of the game.
@@danimadi3 yea that game got more popular than minecraft at the time until it disappeared
Even I knew about it and I didn't even know who pewdipie was at thr time
one of the reasons a lot of people like indie games is the connection between the developers and the community. In this case, that connection was lost.
I always find it weird no one talks about how Mojang offered Wolley a dev job.
This was right after he posted of the not yet releases CW Alpha.
He made it through the interview process and just had to sign the contract, but he decided he would, and im paraphrasing, rather have freedom to work as he wanted with his wife.
Jeb and/or notch twitted that the hiring didn't go through because Wolley decided to stay indie, and that they respected that.
This is all from my memory, so there is that. I also couldnt find those tweets. probably deleted because maybe they saw it as quasi unprofessional to talk about the hiring process of specific devs.
Sony offering NMS devs resources vibes.
Seriously the patterns are all there. It makes sense the guy didn't sign. He probably would've been fired after a couple of weeks, months at best.
@Higgs Bonbon ends justify the means i guess but it shouldn't become the standard.
Still i agree. Cubeworld never improved prior to official launch. At least not in anyway worth bragging about.
Imagine if Microsoft published cube world and in turn got the proper treatment it needed
"Is it actually right for people to be mad about this situation." If the game is still $19.99 then yes. While this was just a passion project with no actual promises given it's still a product that's being sold. And as a consumer of said product I'm pretty disappointed with the final product I bought. Does it justify the hate and insults he got? Absolutely not. Being a game developer isn't easy especially with how big his little game got I can imagine the insane pressure and anxiety it gave him. But at the end of the day it's still a product being sold so there's still some expectation especially given how long it's been with the majority of it just being silence during development and after release. Maybe if it was Free to Play the blow wouldn't have been as hard but who knows.
And it honestly pains me to say all this. I've been following this game since I first saw it many years ago. And seeing how it ended up just saddens me. I was really hoping to spend hours and hours on end running around Cube World but after the 6 hour mark I just felt like I've done most of what there is to do. Hopefully down the line there will be an update for the game to improve it but I don't blame him if he decides to leave it as is.
Then why buy it no one told you to buy it no promises were made so you cant get mad at someone for consuming there product if you didnt want to take the chance on it then dont buy it, its that simple.
@@pupil5763 Yes you can get mad at someone for doing poorly even if they made no promises. If my friend paul says he's a good painter and shows me a number of houses he painted well and I trust him and pay him market rate to paint my walls only for him to use cheap runny paints, do a random pattern because he thought it would be fine and then moves out before I get home to see his 'work' I'd have every right to be angry at Paul even if painting is his passion because he did a shit job and charged you for it without informing you that he'd changed how he did things.
If you miss the metaphors the previous works is the beta for cubeworld, moving out is going quiet and in this metaphor the painter requested payment in advance rather than a bill at the end.
@@pupil5763 PEOPLE PAID FOR IT, and fans supported it from day one, it was disappointing
Its really sad cause if the story of anxiety is true, then this is his true worst case scenario
Was probably an excuse. This was just a scam. Release an unfinished hyped game and profit off of it.
@@jtj1128 lmao this isn't YandereDev.
@@jtj1128 How is it a scam? I bought the alpha and loved it. The dev got paid for that. A great game already existed. Literally can't call it a scam because of that alone.
@@AuthorityCat Many people didn't get to buy Cubeworld in it's alpha, so many people who found out about the game since 2017 got scammed on the 2019 steam release. It's painfully obvious in retrospect that he wanted to appeal to the community's emotion so he could make a clean getaway in the aftermath. Just because you weren't scammed doesn't mean others weren't.
After reading some of these comments....yeah. I can kinda see where he was coming from.
As an alpha-backer, beta player and also seen in the video (thanks by the way), let me explain how it went (warning, wall of text):
We as the community were hyped beyond belief after wollay anounced the release and the beta. There were no infos about the removed features, changes and so on so NOBODY knew that the game would be in such a state 1 week before release. The feeling of starting cube world was amazing, finally we were able to play the game of our childhood and/or teenage years after 6 years of silence from wollay.
That feeling vanished after a few hours ingame as the complete lack of stuff to do while the combat being completely unbalanced was blatantly obvious. Not only that, but gear that you farmed for hours was getting nerfed so much suddenly that it became useless, even travel gear that was a hassle to collect got removed as soon as you crossed a border. Have fun swimming in an ocean biome I guess. The artifacts, that were the shining light at the end of the shit-fest tunnel were nothing but useless travel upgrades and illumination buffs for the lamp and even those were broken as 3 of them didn't even do anything and to this day, still don't.
The community was annoyed but hopeful that wollay would fix things in that one week and opened up threads. People were listing bugs, problems and other errors, BEGGING him to add a few weeks to the beta to patch out bugs and add additional content as the current game was unfulfilling and sometimes downright cruel to players. Those people got silenced, called toxic haters, banned, threads got removed and so much more. Every thread that dared to shine a light on the problems this game has was outright closed and deleted. People got pissed, rightfully. We wanted to help wollay, but for that we got punished. We wanted this game to succeed, but got the boot for trying to make wollay mindful of those things.
Some people went overboard, yes. I won't defend the ones that were calling for violence, that were harrassing others. But I also won't defend white knights that were flinging toxic sludge at people and their helpful informations this game ABSOLUTELY needed while also presenting wollay as a perfect, never-being-wrong godlike entity.
The things wollay created and that are not broken are a sight to behold, the game looks nice, traversing the lands feels amazing and the combat in itself was rewarding (except when you met enemy wizards that aimbotted you across the world) in some places. The things he released broken were just baffling though. Artifacts, the flagship of this game, the ENDGAME CONTENT, were and are still broken. Enemies are uninteresting and just run to you in a straight line. Boss fights are just a slog in which the one with the bigger health pool or cheese tactics wins. Some artifacts spawn in lava lakes, entries to dungeons are generated INSIDE indestructible world geometry. Features got removed or severely dumbed down like the skill tree (that is completely open as soon as you start). the leveling system is gone and towns were more sterile (they were much bigger and more interesting in the alpha, they even got ROADS back then), weapon upgrading is now useless because as soon as you cross a border the weapon and armor became useless, spirit cubes were outright removed without any reason, the "lore" is just random gibberish that doesn't add anything at all (stuff like "the king of XYZ got killed by a snail), planned factions were not implemented, breakable terrain is a thing of the past, planned base building is not in the game and so much more.
The game as a whole feels like a test environment with features that clash with each other, are broken or unbalanced. The player is not at fault here, it's wollay. HE was showing off his new "systems" via screenshots on twitter and hyping up the crowd, HE was the one who ignored his own road map while not changing it until release, HE was the one that didn't inform anyone, HE was the one who removed features and HE was the one developing it. he, as a software dev, was also dumb enough to store ALL THE GAME KEYS IN PLAIN SIGHT on the pretty unsecured website server, thus them getting stolen by a skript kiddie. Not the player and the fan community is at fault, he alone is.
The DDOS maybe broke something in wollay, yes, but we don't exactly know if that DDOS was of malicious origin. People were so interested in the game that his server maybe got overloaded with repeated connection requests, which has the same effects as a DDOS. Wollay probably didn't imagine his game to become such a big thing and was, because of that, not investing in a DDOS protection or better server that could've prevented the whole thing. I'm not saying that wollay is at fault but it still happened, server crashes are a normal thing though, nothing to be scared of, especially getting PTSD from it.
Before anyone says "He was depressed, he wasn't able to talk with people", get this: His wive could've taken that spot or he could've even hired a PR guy for it. The game was a money printing machine back then, the money was there. Invest the money in a better server and people who talk FOR you. Heck, even mojang was interested in the game and wanted to help him with the game by offering him a job while entrusting him with complete control over cubeworld and the development, but he refused. HE REFUSED FREE MONEY, A WHOLE COMPANY OF TALENTED PEOPLE AND HELP BECAUSE "MUH GAME"!
Instead he chose a closed system development with only him and his wive as the developer, designer, tester and manager. There was a CLEAR lack of feedback, he got completely lost in his vision of a "perfect" cube world. That "perfect" world isn't as perfect as he invisioned, though, visible through the broken, unbalanced and clashing CORE systems.
Some people also say "He doesn't owe you anything, it was his PaSsIoN pRoJeCt". No, no it was not. It ended being his passion project as soon as he took money from people. It became a product as soon as people BOUGHT the game and customers have a right to a FUNTIONING product. He promised so much and kept so little of those promises, no wonder people were angy, myself included. He promised us a voxel-based exploration RPG and he gave us a voxel-based game with uninteresting exploration (if you can even call it that as the map is ALWAYS FULLY VISIBLE, nothing to explore here) and less RPG elements than Minecraft and a gameplay loop that completely hinders a player from developing a character the way he wants as the character is getting reset to 0 after a border walk except some atrificial boosts you can't even use as the traversal items are gone, too.
The one thing people agree on is that, if he had COMMUNICATED those changes and showed interest in the thoughts of his players/payers, the whole thing could've been prevented and/or massively cooled down.
Most people weren't pissy about the game but were hating the way wollay handled things in the first place. The game as a whole could've been made better if he was able to communicate with the ones who were financing his dream. Instead he ignored everyone, got lost in his own inclusive dev cycle and burned down the bridge between him and the community, again, in the same way he did back in 2013. It is quite sad to be honest that, to most of those problems, the answer was "communication". The biggest problem was also the easiest to fix but he didn't manage to see it that way and did the exact opposite...
All in all, wollay did so much wrong in those years that it baffles me that he managed to slither around lawsuits.
Oh, one thing: he never EVER said sorry ONCE for going into hiding without notice. He got his pity party, we didn't get an apology for the YEARS of being ghosted. That tells us much about wollay.
The lawsuit thing at least is depressingly easy to explain: Consumer protection institutions are operated by people that still call all videogames 'Nintendos' and are proudly unable to distinguish Red Dead from Cyberpunk. They'd glance at the little man running around in response to button presses and rubber stamp the whole thing 'product fit for purpose, no case to answer'.
> beta male
Way to tattoo 'proudly socially inept' across your own forehead there.
@silverfoxeater Funny how worked up you get, it seems that you have some problems yourself with apologiszing.
An apology is something simple and has nothing to do with "fee-wees" as you call it. It's a way of showing that you changed your ways, that you see your own faults and won't do the same mistake.
Saying sorry is not hard and shows that you bettered yourself, after 6 years of hiding a simple sorry shouldn't be a hurdle for your broken self worth. A simple apology can fix so much and show that you grew as a human being as you see your own wrong actions. Not to mention that an apology would also show respect to the ones that waited for you.
Don't you apologize when you're invited to someone and show up late without announcing it? If not, then you should as it's a simple way of respecting the ones you left hanging.
Not apologizing just shows that you didn't change and don't see a problem with the actions you chose to go with.
@silverfoxeater beta male? You are sad
@silverfoxeater Sir it is 2021. Unironically calling people beta males is pretty pathetic and Discord Moderator-like of yours, which is incredibly bad for your reputation as a whole.
Veloren is picking up where cube world left off. It's open source with an active group of unpaid devs and is actually seeing regular weekly updates
thx man was looking for games like cubeworld in these depressing days of game failing era
Thank you for the recommendation, it does look super cool!
No problem 👍
Thanks for the recommendation, man, it looks awesome
New version of CubeWorld is coming out, called CubeWorld Omega
Hopefully Hytale won’t end up like this
Riot bought it so i wouldn't have high expectations
@@davidtyierejian1033 Why? That should give you more hope. The studio got acquired but they still have their freedom.
@@davidtyierejian1033?
I Fucking hope not.
@@davidtyierejian1033??
*Sigh*, I have a friend like this, anxious and a perfectionist, so she never came around to asking people for help and most of the times not asking for critique. Once the work is done, the damage's been done and she has to deal with more anxiety. Please, always ask for help.
I'm like this, and I don't like it haha 😅
This is so me. I can never finish anything because of this.
help of what kind?
One question I have: Where was Sarah in all of this? I wonder if they had a falling out.
I feel bad for Wolfram. We have no idea what was going on in his life. And if this started out as a passion project, maybe he was entirely unprepared for the responsibility for managing a hugely popular game.
that is my thinking i thought maybe sarah/pixie left wolfram through the games production and he lied and covered it up with the fear of failure
@@alexbaker9996 That's my working theory too. It would explain the development trouble, his disappearance, his need to get the game released so people stop talking to him about it.
I believe it's also possible she passed away, that would explain it also.
@@ricksanchez3557 This is pretty gross shit right here. Say what you might and give him the benefit of the doubt but don't make theories about his partner leaving him or dying. That's way too personal, and I know if I were Wollay, I'd fucking hate if someone did that to me. Mind your own business.
@@ricksanchez3557 the other zoomer who replied seems to be too moronic about theories, don't worry about em, bizarre theories id say, but there does seem to be a bit of legs to stand on for it, but i do hope it aint true.
This is why dev communication is important and the cycle of feedback -> changes -> feedback is crucial for indie games
I have been playing Cube World since its 2011 release, Im just glad we didn't have to pay for it again, but they really ruined it with all the new stuff, and it really seems like they coulda done more in the given time.
It was given like 9 years to go in the opposite direction of what made it popular.
Wolay gave a list of features that he was implementing in the game on the cube world website before it got deleted. None of those features are in the game
this prob happened cus the amount of shit people gave wolay, thus him not doing it in the end
@@d4s0n282 Nah he removed the list after people started to call him out that he didnt do anything that he said he was working on, which is very valid because it said on the original purchase page that that content was planned and was going to be released in updates. Then there were no updates, i was already mad and skeptical of him from the first disappearance, then he did the 2019 release and followed exactly what he did with the first release, Just drum up hype, sell out and dissapear all before shit even goes down. Dude was gone before people even started to download it. He did this as a cash grab and if you followed it from the beginning like i have you see it extremely clearly that that was his intention all along he was never intending on releasing the game. It was so bad that steam was censoring the community hub for the game removing posts from people who wanted their money back.
@@drudigger and this is the reason he disappeared lol, cus you dont give a fuck about the devs, why else would he just disapear
@@d4s0n282 it’s not my job to care about him especially when he’s a scammer. I paid for a product and was told I would get it. I didn’t and he backpeddled on it and then did it again years later to more people on a larger platform. Your literally an idiot or blind if you can’t draw the conclusion yourself that he scammed everyone. Just look at the work done by the community over at valoren. That’s what happens when work is actually put into something.
Imagine that this was Minecraft we were talking about rather than cubeworld. If notch left and the game was still in infdev people would have the same reactions and he wasn’t even promising anything like wolay was.
@@d4s0n282 When people pay money for something it doesn't matter how they treat you; you gotta give them their money's worth. You can't just scam people because they were a dickhead to you.
hi, im one of the guys who's post was in the video.
to add to the end points of the video and releasing the game for free. one thing to remember, his software was developed under a german software development initiative of some kind. basically government hosted funding for software development. i dont remember the fine details but i imagine to qualify for this funding, you have to eventually sell your product or make a return of some kind to continue getting the funding.
so to an extent, he probably had to charge for it under those stipulations. not ideal but if he truly is ditching the game then this was the minimum to do so. still, not a defense of his actions. he could have come forth and explained everything, then it'd be on the community to understand or not.
also, too bad RoboKast couldnt have seen the massive criticism censoring during the closed beta on steam forums. a mix of valid rule breaking posts being banned, players finding dangerous exploits with the steam network portions of the code and trying to research them and share findings in the forum being banned, to valid opinion and criticism just being outright deleted by fanboy moderators and Pixxie herself. name a steam forum scandal on rights to free speech and this eclipses it easily.
Well this answered my questions about people attempting to sue him and his wife, certainly not the best deal to have taken, and possibly a reason behind him refusing Mojang. This is very likely a very grey issue, considering government hosted funding? Yeah, this was doomed from the start, no matter how good it should have been, there were fingers in that pie already.
Gosh, I just hope the developer is okay, honestly. Yeah, all that happened is messes up but the guy was already struggling, I just hope that this way he might atleast have some weight off his shoulders.
He just got away with a ton of money for doing what amounts to pretty much nothing so I’d say he’s probably alright
@@raggedymuffinz "Doing what amounts to nothing" You really are that ungrateful, he literally tried his best and you didn't personally like that game
@@raggedymuffinz I don't like the game either. However, I rather our collective internet doesn't kill another person just because they made a bad game.
Understand his troubled mental health, and you don't even have to buy or support this game.
Just...keep vitriol and assumptions to be more tame.
@@mobile_ingou Bruh, he literally scammed people with a less finished game than the alpha build almost a decade ago *for 20 dollars* then fucked off forever, but we’re “ungrateful”? Okay buddy.
@@raggedymuffinz No need to get personal toward him though
I remember playing cube world for a bit casually and *really* enjoying it. I'm just gonna keep those good memories
I really do hope that Hytale doesn't run into the same situation. We've been getting weekly screenshots for the past 9 months, but almost no word has been said on the games development except for a blogpost last December. It's really starting to feel like Cube World all over again... Although granted Hytale's dev team has about 70+ people compared to just 2 on Cube World's development
Hollow knight silksong is doing the same thing.
I think Hytale will be another scam
@@decas5505 Doubt it will be a scam but I am worried that they will run into the problem of feature creep after reading their summer update.
@@Bogglemanify Bro what Hytale promised in the trailer is literally impossible!! For example the movie thing they promised is literally impossible to code because there is no such technology yet!! Also everything that was in the trailer was a animation, none of that was actual gameplay, meaning that when they made the trailer they didnt even have made a portion of the game
Hytale? More like HYPEtale, because they hyped a lot of things of which they will never do, or at least it will take them like 20-30 years to complete with all of what they promised in the trailer
@@decas5505 The movie thing is actually common among VR communities. Fake theaters where you watch videos and movies and can see each other in the virtual theater. There's even a mod that allows you to watch youtube in Minecraft so your claim that "there is no such technology yet!!" is just wrong.
Yes there is a lot of the trailer was just animation but if you read their blogs, they go into detail in how they currently have them in the game with accompanied footage to back it up.
None of the things shown in the trailer seem unreasonable. Everything in that trailer has been done in Minecraft before.
Honestly this video encapsulates most of my fears as a content creator, the idea that my fears, mental issues and personal issues might get in my way and cause me make bad decisions, fear criticism or just fearing failure is absolutely mortifying to me, and what hurts me most is that in a way the dev’s fears where made a reality, his fear of failure caused him to be unnable to take the criticism and people where just outright vicious to him. He did do a lot of crap granted, but most of the attacks where more personal attacks than criticism ( at least on Twitter ).
To be fair, Wollay did almost everything wrong a developer could do wrong.
- not getting feedback from anyone outside your dev group
- showing screenshots of content that isn't in the game and probably never will be without making it clear
- never communicating with your customers and community
- if communicating, only over a proxy that is not verifyable as being legitimate (e-mail screenshot of random player)
- changing core aspects without telling your customer
- outright REMOVING aspects of your game which were loved by the community without telling them
- practicly vanishing for multiple years
- not updating roadmap
- not hiring a PR guy
- not hiring other people to speed up the development
- never patching things
- only one week of beta, thus not giving you enough time to patch stuff
- silencing people who want to get your attention on problems the product has
- rejected a job offer at Mojang while still retaining full control over the project
- going into hiding AGAIN after silence caused another shitstorm
- letting your moderators take the flak for it and ghosting them, too
- and so on
If you can't talk to people, then get someone on board who can. It can be a fried of yours, better is a PR guy as this person is skilled in handling bigger crowds without causing a shit-storm. But TALK with people, especially the ones who funded your product and who want to help you! Being open about things and being clear about it are the most important things in PR.
Just don't scamm people this dude is just playing victim
@@lucho1limte what happened to his partner? No one is blaming her?
@@lucho1limte what happened to his partner? No one is blaming her?
@@lucho1limte what happened to his partner? No one is blaming her?
9:32 Yes, bacuase they liked the alpha and beta versions features that werent on the final release. If an indi developer (heck, even a AAA company) has an open beta of a game that looks awesome, you pre-order it and then at the steam release you find out that all is left is just the cooking minigame that you hated... I think you could call that a ripoff
This was a great documentary! Also liked my footage at 8:59 ;)
Woah that's cool.
Had to get that ego stroking self plug in there didnt ya ;)
"Considering Wollay never promised anything with the game." This statement is very much incorrect, his site before the year of the release were full of promises of what Cube World was to become in the future and what I was sold on.
Of course he removed all of it from his site hoping no one would go "hey what happened to this and this?" But regardless we were sold a lie. Faction vs Faction gameplay and storyline anyone? Actually lack of storylines in general.
Of course in the end this was the only game I got burned on as it taught me the risks of buying into early access's and is always the one I bring up when someone is trying to convince me to buy into an unreleased game.
I remember playing cubeworld... i loved the fact that i found a bunch of bugs and glitches on my own... still dont know if they are common knowledge now or if they have been patched.
The rogue backdash could be used to gain insane speed and distance with the glider... by turning around mid dash and activated the glider.
You could dupe any refinable resourses.. when ready to create something like an "iron ingot" from "iron ore".. hold your mouse over the "craft" option then go into map.. by clicking while the map was obscuring your vision of anything else.. you would not drain any resourses but you would gain whatever you crafted... effectivly gaining infinit ingots from one ore.
This could've done so well if the developer had just stuck through it. I remember playing the alpha myself and boy what was there was damn good!
I remember spending so much time porting over the alpha to my Mac so I could play with my friends. It’s really sad this is where it ended up
9:00
I'm not mad, just disapointed, he could have released the original alpha with NO CHANGE WHATSOEVER and it would have gone over better than this crap he gave us.
He outright killed his game.
we live in a society
Reminds me of starbounds original versions, really.
@@mrwizard5012 oof
@@TheSoCalledZoner1 yes, and?
@@marmar3530 Too soon?
I think there is something to be said about someone making a game people loved and ruining it. While the didn't "promise" people anything, he did have to contend with the beta he once released. Everything in the beta was a realistic expectation. People who still had the alpha still played it and loved it. A release is literally a declaration that the game they once loved is gone forever.
this looks almost exactly like veloren, or vice versa, but veloren is 100% free and open source and under active development, although still only limited release (i.e. not on steam) as the devs don't want to release an alpha game too soon to a broader audience.
i wonder if cube world, which veloren says it is inspired by (and legend of zelda breath of the wild) got the source code for cube world and continued it. although the current release of veloren has been completely re-written from scratch, and in Rust programming language, so maybe no relation at all, but the look is almost a carbon copy.
I love how most of the reviews were just instructions to download the alpha
RoboKast: the most overhyped disappointment of all time
Cyberpunk: am I a joke to you?
Yes
Tbh the fact that a tweet about his depression and condiction from those past 3 years gets less attention (based on what you said) than sneak peaks of just some houses and tree tells a lot about this community.
He also deleted the blog post about his condction after the hate started, poor guy... i feel so sad for him
@@kaklikful I would think he is a poor guy..... if he didn't get freaking rich with the game sellouts, imagine promising something, not giving what was paid and then hide with the money and let other people defend him. Easy money alright. Meanwhile some devs work their asses off for way less.
He is a liar and a scammer cmon guys
@@Ordep_Aviaras You’re missing the point dude
@@littlemoth4956 What point "dude"? A guy scamming hundreds of thousands of people by selling an unfinished piece of crap?
Simply announcing something is like promising because of the hype that people stir up over it. It's not about honesty and integrity. It's simply about the emotion of hype and how powerful it can be for people. Letting that down is similar to breaking a promise.
Lmao he didn't announce anything that he wasnt gonna do
Wait so Cube World didn’t become Trove I was so convinced when I first saw trove pop into my recommendations it was just what Cube World had become. Wow...
no, it was just a game super alike it, that released around the same time
I remember being 10 seeing this game on TH-cam, I never played it because I couldn’t get it and my computer likely couldn’t handle it, nearly a decade later I’m in college and that long lost game I wanted to play so bad comes out and it’s in ruins. A shame
I was one of the alpha testers and my friend (who was also hyped) told me the game was going to go on Steam soon.
Once I figured out there was a beta, I rushed to grab my brother's account (the two of us had picroma accounts but I lost mine) and then when the beta went live, I realized firsthand that so many things were changed for the worse. Apart from the art style I could barely recognise the game.
My friend did not purchase the dumpster fire.
If the game gave people expectations that it didn't live up to (which it didn't) they have the right to be mad. Especially the people (like me) that payed for the alpha and then were just screwed over by the developers literally saying "thank you for your kind donation, would you like to purchase the game again?". Good job Picroma, you could be an excellent EA v2.0
Now I'm not the best when it comes to licenses, but it's the first time I have heard that you literally lose your right over owning a game just because you didn't log into the website in time. Next to that I never recieved any kind of information on that part so I would really like to know if the move they made is legal.
What I was most upset by with this game is how they removed custom weapons. I remember going out and getting resources then going back and making a ridiculous looking sword but it was my ridiculous sword something I made that looked how I wanted to and unless someone copied how I made it then it would be the only one of it's kind. Then you know it got removed. -_-
Also I feel like people have the right to be mad not at the game it self but how he handled the situation and failed to make his ideal version of the game known to almost all of the player base. He should have released demo footage of the game and a better explanation of how the system worked as well as why things were removed/added. Instead of having a 8 year long steak of silence he should have posted from the very beginning about the situation. It could have been something as simple as the following:
Hey guys I know the hype around this game is massive but some major difficulties have been getting in the way of how I want things done so for the time being I'm not going to be posting anything new about the game from now on as to not get your expectations too high.
He could have also given a more detailed responses like:
Hello everyone recently we have had run ins with DDOS attacks on the website because of some of our updates and this has led to some serious mental health problems on our end. Because of that we are going to stop public updates for quite a while. I'm sorry it has to be this way but it is the only way I can think of for production of the game to continue. Just keep in mind that this is a side project and I am a perfectionist so it might be a long long time before I'm ready to share anything about the game. I am sorry and I hope you can find enjoyment for this game in the future.
Either of these would have been an amazing response that would have solved a large majority of the issues surrounding Cube World and so again with the way he handled the situation I think people have the right to be mad.
You can still design custom weapons, there's just no point because you won't get to keep them.
It's honestly bizarre how much it got changed from it's original form to what it currently is. I can't fathom the reasoning for the rework, because the current form is super unfun.
I remember inthelittlewood and nerdcubed playing this together years ago I always was intrigued by it this brought back memories for sure
INTHELITTLECUBED
@@TheCat_MP4 yes
I remember playing a space sandbox a long time ago, StarMade, back when it first came out in early access around 2012
It’s still in early access and pretty much abandoned at this point. It had a lot of potential but the devs just ran out of funding.
it does not take funding.
Theirs a game called zombox that was in development years ago that I used to follow and then the creater kind of just disappeared and never released the game.
The problem with some devs is that they are absolutely shameless and unfazed by criticism of their work, some like Wollay are the other extreme.
If the man had just 10% of the nerve of Todd Howard, Whoever the hell is behind sims 4 , and the people behind those god-awful Chinese cash shops mmos, then Cube-World would have been a great game .
If it was free, I don't really think the anger would be justified. But since people paid for it, were made to wait forever with little communication, and rightfully expected more, they can absolutely be mad about it. It's his fault for failing to properly communicate and allowing the hype train to grow as it did. However, I think people also need to also be understanding of him as well, he very clearly was dealing with personal issues directly related to communication.
...this makes me sad, not the game but the whole situation. I feel sad for both sides :/
Dude really got traumatized by losing internet connection briefly
Passion projects are short lived, whether they mature into a completed project or just die.
Cube World discord has some insight into Wollay's current work on the game, they managed to contact him and get a reply back in february this year. He said he is working on a new mode that includes XP, and other stuff but it's mostly in experimentation phase.
What I hate most about this is that the alpha was really good, and all he really needed to do was expand on that, but there were so many strange design decisions that basically removed what people liked about the game... I dont understand how you can change essentially everything that people praised your game for and then ignore when people say it isn't what they wanted
i remember before this game came out and people were thinking it would take over minecraft
It could have if it would of happened The way alpha was looking
@@tonictarsier1868 for real. It was actually more enjoyable they just needed to add more multiplayer ideas and give more things for people to grind for. It was one of the most fun games out there and it’s pretty sad that they just gave up and left it here
The height of cube world was the height of youtube
Things like this make me think that I should never even try to put anything out into the world.
Don't be scared to. Just don't charge people for an unfinished product; it rarely ends well.
Don't gun it alone, don't be scared of internet "threats", interact with the communities your work appeals to.
This is a great guide on what not to do, Wollay fucked up at every single step of the way. Just be transparent and you'll be fine lmao, Wollay was just straight up a dumbass.
Honestly, it almost feels like the man did everything he could to try and make the internet hate him. As long as you be honest, transparent, and realistic with your community and actually hear out what they have to say, people can be very forgiving. When you start deceiving them, scamming them, and completely ignoring their voice as you change everything that made your project popular, don’t be very surprised when they start treating you as poorly as you treated them.
Do but never delay. If you do then you already lost.
I only played the game once as some kind of demo (I don't remember where); but I was not wholly impressed with it--but at the same time I don't remember any promises made with it (but again, I didn't really follow it closely). Making a game is harder than a lot of people assume. If he didn't break any promises, I don't blame him for releasing it and disappearing. I'm not saying it happened with this game, but a lot of people feel entitled somehow to other people's work a lot of the time (movies, games, etc).
I think your friend has a point wondering about the validity of the feelings from the players. Just like with an abstract painting, we might not see the art in the end that the artist saw when they began. However, as an almost (at this point) life-long fan of Wollay, I’m not only mad, but a little bit of my heart is broken. I was 13 when I got the alpha, when it was first released in 2013 (and it was a pain even then to get the alpha before it was taken off the market for the next 7 years). My friends and I played and played for days while ~patiently~ waiting for the “weekly updates” that Wollay had promised us, that never came. Eight years go by, all the while us devoted fans, loyal to Wollay and his vision of his “passion project”, patiently waited. Every time we truly began to lose hope and give up because it seemed like he had too, he would update his website, or post on Twitter, or someone, somewhere, would dig up some piece of information about the project, and that kept us going. Eight years go by and all that patience and hope was rewarded with a game that I didn’t even buy in the end because of it’s reviews and what I was seeing. It is disappointing and pretty heart breaking to be apart of such a loyal fan base and support group and to be excited about, not necessarily a game, but an experience promised, and never getting that. We were hoping for a good game, really for just what he told us it was going to be, and we believed him. My whole experience with this boils down to a dissatisfied comment on a TH-cam video, and that’s pretty sad. So, in a way, I do feel justified in being upset with the way everything ended up. It was more than just a bad game.
🤓
"i just came back from depression and anxiety please dont bully me" the entire community proceeds to bully him and then gets confused on why he stopped updating it
8:13 "It appears as if he released the game as a last-ditch effort to get everyone off his back about it", or you know, the reason for his disappearance this time was that despite detailing his anxiety, the gaming public generally comprised of toxic sociopaths lacked the empathy to give constructive criticism in a manner which would be encouraging instead of trawling him through a torrent of abuse. Doesn't take Grade 1 mathematics to understand that permanent abandonment is a response which balances this equation.
Considering the "updates" I think I am happy with the alpha I installed on my computer back in 2012.
Knowing the years and how the community would love this game, why not allow community programmers to help support the workload, funnel inspiring ideas and flush out updates. I can see the anxiety and the pressure having more people under your belt, the other side would just let us mod the game on steam workshop and do basically what I said above, but you could still walk away with a positive press of "he made an unfinished game but his community explored and created with innovative ideas.
Would really love to see, maybe years from now, Woolay come out in maybe an interview and give us the deets on how that happened, what went wrong, etc. Got that idea from a video I saw recently where Rebecca Black, the one who sang that "Friday" song people loved to hate back in the day, talking about how that ruined her life for a few years but eventually she bounced back.
I was among the lucky few who managed to buy into the alpha way back in 2011 and I poured dozens of hours into it. That thing felt like "next gen terraria" and the ONLY thing it was lacking at the time was music. Seriously, just add in music to the alpha and you got a feature-complete awesome voxel game, even if a little bit rough around the edges. Only thing I can think of that would explain what happened with the final release is that the game was likely entirely remade several times, to the point it became unrecognizable.
If y'all would like to see a game much like cube world, you should check on Veloren, it has the same style, and a team of 150 people working on weekly updates since it first was released as a project. It really surprises me, because I think Veloren is putting a lot of effort and it doesn't have that big of a community.
I was definitely someone who really wanted the game to be good. I played the... I think alpha (hard to remember) with a friend of mine. and we had hours of fun traversing the world, fighting monsters, plundering dungeons. it was amazing
when it finally released we both bought a copy and got started. it seemed very trimmed down. neither of us liked what it had become. but we played for a while together pretty much just staying in one region for the time being. I was sad that the cubes you could add to your weapons were all but absent. but when we reached the next region I found out why.
let me put this into perspective. imagine if minecraft was released, and upon buying it you discovered it was a walking simulator. you couldn't mine anything or build... it was just a world you walk around in... the weapon modding in cube world was the entire selling point for me (probably for other people too but I can't speak for anyone else), most of the time playing the classic version was finding cubes to design cool looking bows, or staves, or swords. or grinding exp and gold to buy the hangglider and use it as much as I could
"do people have the right to be mad?" I feel like that's a dumb question... I'm sorry to be rude like that... but it is. because charging money for something blatantly worse than what came before. and which undermines the original selling point(s). is unacceptable
My story of CubeWorld involves me reading a piece about it in 2011 on a website called Kotaku. I was so intrigued with this unreleased game that I started a list of yet to be released games to keep track of all the games that fascinated me, that I wanted to make sure I tried eventually. CubeWorld was the VERY first game on this list. Eventually, in 2020, CubeWorld would be the very first AND only game on this LONG list to be removed without me ever trying the game, because I was certain it was vaporware.
I played the game for hundreds of hours. It's true that the levelling system isn't the best, but it can be fixed with mods and the game is really good :)
The only downside would be the levelling system which again, can be fixed with a mod. You shouldn't jump to conclusions without testing the game first. I really liked it and I think it's worth it. Have fun!
The game is an objective downgrade from the previous version, the marketing system is scummy, the players waited 8 years for a downgrade of a perfectly functional game only to have it cost 20 dollars and barely give anything to the alpha testers and then have the creator dissapear without fixing the shit he put on the table, not to mention he posted "upcoming features" and "teasers". Teasers don't mean something that MIGHT be in the game, but something that will be in the game but is not fleshed out. And features that already were in the game were suddenly removed. Lastly when you talk about "art", why charge 20 $ for art that you know people will hate? Its pretty scummy to know that something is bad and still put it up and have people PAY FOR IT?
Lol them just don't buy it if you dont like it
@@tornglory5709 if I don't like it of course I won't buy it. But what about the tons of thousands of people who were waiting for this game to come out and even bought the alpha version? Are they supposed to not buy it too? And what about the people with the alpha keys who didn't make it in time to redeem their full game?
@@AndOnliCar They chose to buy a game that wasn't even finished. And the people that didn't make it in time have a right to be mad.
@@tornglory5709 bro, the game was officially released and you are making the argument that it wasn't finished.. of course it wasn't, but did the dev say that? No, he just told them the release date and then dissapeared.
@@AndOnliCar You just said "what about the people that bought the alpha version"
Wollay developed A.I who would post twitter updates and release final build of Cube World in Steam, all these years of radio silence was just because he was developing it. That would be a cool plot twist lmao
for everyone, Wollay is working again on cube world, hes gonna bring back the xp system, skills etc. you can look it up on the Cube World Discord! There's also a picture from the "new" Cube World
That's what happens when you don't listen to your community. And yes I have the right to be mad because I PAID for it.
A real tragedy that these “things” would happen
This guy doesn't do his research. I'm on the cube world discord and the actual last known contact with Wollay Is an email where he says he is currently working on the game and adding new features as well as re-adding many that were removed. The issues with Wollay is he is incappable of taking negative critisisim. Hes one of those people who just shuts down. So for the years he was developing the new version he was not looking at any of the feedback to see what people liked and what they didn't. So features were cut that people did like. So hes working on it. Slowly. Cuz hes the only one who codes it. His wife is the one that does the music.
Absolutely, I have the entire right to be upset about his choices. It feels 100% like a cashgrab. I REALLY loved this game, but to disappear with MY money considering his history, absolutely. This game had SO much potential.
All Wollay had to do is just re-release the Alpha version with slightly more content like new biome/creature, that's about it. I don't get it why he have to rebuild an already solid foundation of a game from scratch to be honest.
I totally forgot about this game. Bought it near it's beta release in 2013 and... honestly I didn't see the hype at the time. I was only playing single player so maybe that had something to do with it, but it seemed too difficult if you went to far off the path and grinding to get good enough didn't appeal to me. It's sad to hear all the people who actually supported the game basically get screwed over. Maybe it could make another comeback, but after what the developer did, I highly doubt it.
he came back because he needed more money and this time he took all he needed
In my mind, I want to pretend that the dev anxiety'd himself into starting the development over from scratch only to breakdown and decide he was just gonna post the half-baked remake to get some money to support himself so he could retreat inward and be alone without it nagging at the back of his head.
I hope this man can recover from what mentally pressures him. That is all i wish for him. It is sad to me that people think that more being angry would change anything if it already had ruined everything. I don't blame the dev.
To be fair, Wollay did everything wrong a dev could do, no wonder he got that much backlash. He silenced people before release, didn't take feedback, didn't communicate, removed features without telling anyone, never got help in terms of development, never appologized for anything he did wrong, took money without delivering on the promisies made, screwed over people (CW steam forum mods included, ghosted them, too), stored EVERY GAME KEY on the same server the website ran IN PLAIN TEXT without protecting them and getting them stolen, hindered people from getting their keys by removing the login, never patching things, never updating the roadmap from 2013 and then removing it completely 2 days before release and so on. I could go on like that for an hour...
Also, if he was damaged because of the DDOS and wasn't able to communicate, then he should've hired a PR guy to talk FOR him, the money was there. Even his wive could've acted as a communication-bridge between him and the community. heck, even the community was interested in aiding him with programming, feedback and so on, he could've gotten someone on board to write a dev blog or something like this. Even MOJANG was interested in Cube World and offered him a job while entrusting him with complete control over Cube World. HE REJECTED FREE MONEY, PR, DEVELOPERS AND A JOB AT ONE OF THE FASTEST GROWING COMPANIES because "muh game".
It was his own stupidity and Inclusivness that made the whole debacle as worse as it was.
i have my theory that the game he planned on and was working on somehow got deleted , but he had old backup files . so in twitter we saw all big cites and factions and pirate ships and much more that never was in the finall game. it made me think that he probably had to start from a backup and try to get back most of the things he did but couddlnt iimplement them all so he chose to try something else and it kinda failed.
I don't care how the game turned out, it's never ok to personally attack someone like what happened. Especially when the poor guy was feeling anxious and threatened already.
You always have a right to your feelings/emotions, it's how you act on them that can be criticized
detractors
The thing people love to give, but never accept is why you keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Y'all heard about veloren? No this isn't advertisement, they don't even know who I am but although is in a really raw state it reminds me of cube world. It is free to play at their site
Followed the game since early alpha, Got a windows system near when it got full released, and I was pretty sad. But I understand the video game industry and the difficulty of ground-up game design. More sad is that man's dream was never fully realized.
Kickstarter, early access, etc. have a real downside and this is it. In any other field, if someone told a consumer "Give me X dollars and I'll give you Y in return" the expectation would be that they make good on that agreement or find a way to make an equivalency if they can't. In general, paying for something before it is done in a problem and getting paid for something you haven't done or finished takes away a huge incentive which is why I think many indie folk that this isn't something they have tempered themselves for end up slowing down or stopping after getting income from it. They got the reward (and not just money, recognition too, having people see their creation, etc.) without having to finish the job.
At the VERY LEAST the developper still learns and listen from us, unlike a certain cum chalice guy, and as top comment says, the game is eventually gonna come back to his original success, maybe too late, but atleast for good.
oh yeah, i was wondering, i think around 2011, there was a big youtuber of my country playing this game, but stopped after 2 weeks (only 4 episode, 9 min long) and never talked about it what happen, after that, i was sure this game is dead. just today i re learned of this games existence
Tragedy is a good word for it, because it seems like a cascade of shitty situations without clear right or wrong. In some ways, it is Wollay's fault for the poor communication, but the one time he put out a very detailed and personal communication about his fears, the fears were immediately validated.
It's like the developer had the self fulfilling prophecy of being seen as a failure, and the gaming community was quick to make him feel like one. Just a shitty situation all around.
i know the delevoper personally, wolfram had depression, after the long pause wolfram did, he saw his wife playing alpha and he fall in depression again
please elaborate more on what you know
@@fewstr i know him not that much (im just living near him) but one thing i noticed is that wollay always show gameplay fotage with his wife together, now with the new release he walks there alone around, i think he had some trouble with his wife
@@Neyo-vo6rt dang... That's tough. I've seen what happens to people when they have messed up close relationships. Sometimes they recover, but sometimes they don't bounce back and it spirals down from there.
@@Neyo-vo6rt "now with the new release he walks there alone around, i think he had some trouble with his wife" you are psychotic lmao, why do people enjoy just sitting there making shit up about someone
@@wipedfromexistence3693 wenn das so ist kennst du ihn ja besser dann können wir auch deutsch reden, was hat den seine Frau wieso antwortet sie nicht?
1:01
"WinRAR is a better purchse" lmao
I was one of those who prepurchased the game. My computer could barely handle it (just using the lantern reduced my perfomance drastically) but I absolutely loved it. Unfortunately, when it was abandoned I left it as well. Only so much you can do playing by yourself in an empty world like that. I found out about its release to Steam too late to get the game I had purchased. Upsetting, but I also knew at that point already via the comments that he for some reason removed features from Cube World. For what it is it's still a good game. Perfect? No. But better than a lot I have seen and better than a lot more that come out these days. But I understand why he might have wanted nothing more to do with it. I don't think Wollay expected his passion project to explode like it did and I suspect that in addition to the changes others still felt betrayed by that original ghosting. I'm sad about it, not mad. Just disappointed.
if you go to the market you choose what car you gonna buy , its your decision , that means the only thing u can be mad is about your own decision.
good example is starbound , in the very begining it was fun game , but once devs decided to change all damage and what not things to be scaled to the player level , game became crap to me , because there was no more reason to improve , it does not matter what gear u have or how high your skills are, there will be mob that 1HKO u anyways.
but thanks to that game i kept searching until i found "signs of life". lovely game that i knew it was worth to buy even in alpha stage.
4:25 Wrong. Shame you're running damage control for Wollay by refusing to point out his lies about the """ddos""" attacks, calling realists "the haters," etc.
8:50 The insults weren't even harsh. The most outrageous one you posted was some of the gentlest criticism ever given on the internet.
9:00 "Do people have the right to be mad about his myriad broken promises, cut content, radio silence, and outright lies? I don't know..." No shit they do, Sherlock. What kind of asinine, boot-licking question is this??
this guy doesnt live in the real world lool. His compassion only goes one way and ignores what he and the other customers deserve. I see a lot of this crazy shit nowadays.
i thing he screwed up and erased a bunch of stuff and had no backups so he made up the depression BS so as to get people off his ass and to soften the blow when the now MUCH shittier version got released.
the first i seen of cube world was when members of yogscast like martin and hats films played some of it and i remember really liking the look of it, it seemed like a pretty fun game, and when it was released i really enjoyed it. i never let myself get swept away with overhype or anything i just looked forward to playing it one day even if it was for a few hours and i was pleased
I agree with your friend's take on this. I felt the same way when I first played the new cube world.
It disappointed me, yes. But I still wanted to support wollay. This game was his idea of a game he wanted to play and share to the world. You could argue he could've just made it free to play, but to me, it felt like he was checking if he could make this job full time or not.
If the hate wasn't so vocal, and if people tried to understand how wollay saw the game, maybe we could've hoped for further updates the game that may or may not fix the main complaints somewhere down the line. But I'm not blaming the fans either. I just want people to understand both sides of the situation.
9:16 yeah, because hes is charging money for it, it is a product, a product have to be enjoyable, he just hit and run.
It's a shame people couldn't just chill out and approach the situation calmly, because it was already extremely apparent that Wollay has anxiety issues and isn't a people person.
People reacting the way they did probably just reaffirmed to him that he shouldn't have done anything in the first place.
I think his wife left him and he was trying to cover for her with lies