Unreal Engine Fallen Doll: Operation Lovecraft [v0.4.9 Cracked] [Project Helius]

3.80 star(s) 63 Votes
Discussion Reviews (63)
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Terix3

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Aug 2, 2017
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Well finally something, the performance did improve. It used to be about 80-90fps where now its 80 capped with gpu under 50%, so that should be 160fps without cap. clap clap from promised half year, took nearly 2 years.

My bet would be that with the rebuild they didn't actually focus on optimization, maybe laid some groundwork for it. They instead focused on the online aspect and drm. But when shit hit the fan in April they did start working on it. If you think about it that way than it took them just a bit over half year for the optimization part of "rebuild".

yessiyuri1 said:
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I wonder how that works. Based on the grapheon he is short 3k patrons compared to April.

yessiyuri1 said:
Maybe the smear of "scammer" is unjust, because something is being produced.
It's just being released really fucking slowly
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If someone offers to make you a cake for 10$ but you instead only get a cupcake, is he a scammer ? Depends right ? if he was intending to make that cake but failed and only pulled cupcake with leftowers he is just a shit cook. But if he never intended to make the cake than he is a scammer.
Helius lied too much and for too long for people to believe in his good intentions.
 
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omegabox

omegabox

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Jan 3, 2018
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mrme said:
Kind of says it all really when his definition of success is getting his patreon income back up
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Voting with money is indeed the most powerful weapon. They are still one of the most successful projects on Patreon, topped almost all games here by a large margin. All the drama this year didn't seem to make a dent. The difference between their commercial success and reputation here is both astonishing and funny.

Perhaps pirates and all the people who are infuriated by mtx and drm are not their target audience from the very beginning.
 
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Nihil5320

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Jul 2, 2022
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omegabox said:
Voting with money is indeed the most powerful weapon. They are still one of the most successful projects on Patreon, topped almost all games here by a large margin. All the drama this year didn't seem to make a dent. The difference between their commercial success and reputation here is both astonishing and funny.

Perhaps all the people who are infuriated by mtx and drm are not their target audience from the very beginning.
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You are presuming that most of those subscribers know what they are getting before they sub or are actively following development afterward.

I mean have you seen the Steam page for this game? It looks damned impressive, especially with the intro video and game descriptions that have literally nothing to do with the game. Then you go to the Patreon and won't see anything about the game moving completely online or them planning to release as a F2P. The only hint is that your pledge will be converted into in game currency but it says nothing about what that currency can be used for and the gacha mechanics aren't mentioned at all.

So I don't think the games "commercial success" is really related to some magical target demographic that love janky multiplayer animation viewers with gacha mechanics so much as it is the way in which Steam and Patreon combine to give a pretty fantastic platform for false advertising and repeat billing of poorly informed customers.
 
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omegabox

omegabox

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Nihil5320 said:
I mean have you seen the Steam page for this game? It looks damned impressive, especially with the intro video and game descriptions that have literally nothing to do with the game. Then you go to the Patreon and won't see anything about the game moving completely online or them planning to release as a F2P. The only hint is that your pledge will be converted into in game currency but it says nothing about what that currency can be used for and the gacha mechanics aren't mentioned at all.
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There's one thing you got wrong: the game being listed as Free to Play on Steam is a subtext evident and alarming enough to most players, especially to the ones who came to know the game via steam. If you check the other F2P games with gacha elements on Steam you will find none of them being advertised as gacha game and nobody seems to be bothered about it.

Even if all their patrons are poorly informed and being tricked into giving them money, from the graph they showed (I'm not sure which one is more accurate, the one they posted or the one on graphtreon, but both follow a similar pattern) the majority of their patrons still decide to stay if you compare the curve before and after they turned the project into a gaas model, which means the commercial model may not play a decisive role here.
 
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Nihil5320

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omegabox said:
There's one thing you got wrong: the game being listed as Free to Play on Steam is a subtext evident and alarming enough to most players, especially to the ones who came to know the game via steam. If you check the other F2P games with gacha elements on Steam you will find none of them being advertised as gacha game and nobody seems to be bothered about it.
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Thing is this game isn't being advertised as featuring MTX on Steam, it doesn't have the in app purchases flag set as they're implemented via Patreon and since there's no price it isn't apparent it's F2P either unless you look really closely.

The only way most users would find out is trawling through their discord or maybe getting lucky and stumbling on a thread that mentions it in the steam community forum.

omegabox said:
Even if all their patrons are poorly informed and being tricked into giving them money, from the graph they showed (I'm not sure which one is more accurate, the one they posted or the one on graphtreon, but both follow a similar pattern) the majority of their patrons still decide to stay if you compare the curve before and after they turned the project into a gaas model, which means the commercial model may not play a decisive role here.
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Yeah I'm saying the commercial model is irrelevant, because a lot of those users don't realise the direction the game is going in or how long it has been in development (8 years now). The subscriber count is still trending steadily downward since the Harem release whichever way you look at it.

I'd also note OL has less active players than carnal instinct, which hasn't been updated in 4 months and has only 4k Patreon subs. It's not a great sign that those 12k subs are actively following development.

Lastly I'd be wary of comparing this to other F2P games. F2P can be insanely profitable but it's competitive and most games in the genre, even the porn ones, have immaculately crafted gameplay loops and monetization schemes. Helius has never shown any inclination toward being capable of building something like that, the assets in this game are high quality but that's about it as far as development is concerned.
 
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omegabox

omegabox

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Nihil5320 said:
The subscriber count is still trending steadily downward since the Harem release whichever way you look at it.
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The peak was when they listed the game page on steam, which is only natural to ebb away after the publicity boost. The decline mainly happened during the months when no updates was delivered, which happened a lot after the harem mode was online (I just checked, there were even a few months with neither updates nor patreon posts, it's a miracle that they haven't lost all their patrons already)

Nihil5320 said:
I'd also note OL has less active players than carnal instinct, which hasn't been updated in 4 months and has only 4k Patreon subs. It's not a great sign that those 12k subs are actively following development.
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I think you are looking at the active players of Operation Lovecraft's steam page demo. The concurrent player count of unreleased games' playtest branch (which i assume was how they conducted the closed beta test) on steam is not publicly available even on Steamspy.
 
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yessiyuri1

Member
Sep 14, 2022
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omegabox said:
Even if all their patrons are poorly informed and being tricked into giving them money, from the graph they showed the majority of their patrons still decide to stay if you compare the curve before and after they turned the project into a gaas model, which means the commercial model may not play a decisive role here.
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I assume by "gaas" you mean gotcha?
There really isn't any indication that this is a micro-transaction game on Steam or their website, at least when I subbed. Even on their Patreon, they don't really mention it. Only some people make comments about it.


I feel like that graph is kinda bullshit when you consider you have to pay an accumulated amount of $36+ through Patreon before you get a serial to play the game. And most people don't know that prior.

So after you sub your first month you either walk right then or you sub upfront on a high tier for next month or you pre-order a year at discount or you sub at minimum for 9 months per month, all prior to being able to play the game.

Which means their monthly sub counts are inflated and can't be directly correlated to anything specific.
The least of which is subbscriber satisfaction or quality of game/devs, which imo is more valuable information and what I assume was the point of them posting the graph in the first place..
 
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Nihil5320

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omegabox said:
The peak was when they listed the game page on steam, which is only natural to ebb away after the publicity boost. The decline mainly happened during the months when no updates was delivered, which happened a lot after the harem mode was online (I just checked, there were even a few months with neither updates nor patreon posts, it's a miracle that they haven't lost all their patrons already)

I think you are looking at the active players of Operation Lovecraft's steam page demo. The concurrent player count of unreleased games' playtest branch (which i assume was how they conducted the closed beta test) on steam is not publicly available even on Steamspy.
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The closed beta is a
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. Current players is 85 vs. 72 for Carnal Instinct, so a touch higher but not meaningfully and especially not considering that OL had a patch this week (and this isn't comparing it to a particularly good game either). It does have a higher peak but you're talking differences measured in tens of users.

As for the decline this seems pretty unequivocal to me and started immediately after the first Harem release:
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Graphtreon scrape this data from Patreon directly so I don't know why Helius' random graph doesn't line up but I'd take it with a pinch of salt since you can validate the former by looking at the about page on Patreon itself:
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omegabox said:
(I just checked, there were even a few months with neither updates nor patreon posts, it's a miracle that they haven't lost all their patrons already)
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As an aside I've seen creators on Patreon that haven't made a post in years but still have subs. As a business model it's almost designed to encourage the sub and forget mentality, it takes time for a creator to lose their subs even in extreme scenarios and even more so if they're putting up a thin façade of ongoing work.
 
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omegabox

omegabox

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Nihil5320 said:
Graphtreon scrape this data from Patreon directly so I don't know why Helius' random graph doesn't line up but I'd take it with a pinch of salt since you can validate the former by looking at the about page on Patreon itself
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So I did a bit of research and it seems that the graph Helius posted should be from Patreon's creator insight page
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Which should be more accurate than Graphtreon.
 
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3.80 star(s) 63 Votes