 Hello everyone and welcome to episode 44 of for the minions of this week's episode We're gonna, you know get a little into the news as we always do then we'll talk about the ultimate ultimate competition The winner of that and then we have a very interesting topic for discussion this week, which is why epic didn't just sell paragon Why did they give those assets away for free? I'm your host the man goose joining me as always as the miraculous Mandy Mel How you doing Mandy? I'm wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you for another interesting adjective as always I'm really excited for this show I'm excited for that topic of discussion like you said and also because our returning guest host who really needs no introduction is Ruba so Ruba first of all, thank you so much for being with us But go ahead and let everybody know what you do because you work with omeda studio So let let us know what you do for them Thank you very much Mandy So framers and I'm Ruba. I Have been with a media studios since just before their alpha. I was a moderator for a while We kind of like chat into them help them out and stuff. I have some real engine experience But yeah, I'm presently I am I think technically My title is technical artist and developer But I kind of working gameplay systems. I you kind of experienced in the gameplay ability system that we've been using to change all our abilities around since the alpha Helped a lot with a lot of the some of the issues that we had when the alpha was around I think technically my my skillset is animation programming So doing all the underlying Programming for how animation works in the game, but because we're such a small team in general you kind of just You kind of just do what you have to do to kind of get us over our various milestones. So yeah, I can I do a lot of everything Jack of all trades I was kind of wondering what they had as your job title. I was thinking just all around badass Like you're the head of the all-round badass Very interesting a couple couple episodes of the show would go in the comments You said something about you you you may have fixed some of grucks's animations Ah Yeah, so the he's missing two key things smashing grab and his ultimate warlords challenge The they just shipped the animations incomplete. So there's there's missing animations. So all I did was Output one of the existing animations to Maya, which is an animation program and just rekeyed them So it was it wasn't a big task It was it took a while to get the the full editing needed Because a lot of the animations an Unreal Engine or motion captured It's something quite difficult to have to hand key Which is when you specifically key and then divide your frames to get it looking right But yeah, I took a bike about an evening to get it working right No, it may not be a big thing to you But to grucks fans out there whenever they can actually play grucks they have you to thank I'm sure they'll be lining up to shake your hand Oh, yeah, one of them definitely one of them. Oh good That's awesome. Let's scoot it along into the news and updates. We're gonna start with omeda studios They're beginning to work on their mini map We have seen a little bit of mini map in some of the streams before but the only thing it really showed was your position on the map So smoke he's been banging that out. Hopefully it'll be done fairly soon It's one of the one of the final steps They need I mean there's several steps that they need before the alpha is released But the mini map was one of them and it sounds like smoke. He's got a gonna be Putting the cap on that I can't wait to see that stream whenever it finally goes off because that that is something that was kind of missing from the alpha originally and It was needed. It was very necessary I got lost several times just because I didn't know where I was on the map and Wasn't as experienced with that map as as maybe everybody in Paragon was Maybe what do you think what do you think about the mini map gonna be glad to have them? Yeah, it was good to have one. I played a couple weeks ago I guess it's been three. I'm sure fourish weeks now And like you said, it was very helpful to have that little mini map And I want to say it would also show your teammates position. I could be wrong rubo correct me if I'm wrong But I I think it was still showing even your teammates position to which is of course always helpful I don't remember We've been through so many iterations of it. I think so I think so This seems like a difficult task seems like you're programming a mini game inside the game. Yeah sort of it's like so When we had the first we had the technical alpha back in March Like on the last like a couple of days leading up to it We were like like because like at the time we were like trying to squeeze in as many like last-minute updates To get the alpha ready and a mini map and the scoreboard were like in and working And working really really well and as we went to like we were doing the 5v5 tests and Back at the time we did the technical alpha That was because it was like it's almost like an entirely completely different version of the game like smoke He has completely redone a lot of the underlying systems the maps completely new There was so much going on like we turned off many math Scoreboard the last minute and it was a really hard decision because we know that there are a couple of things that are really really important For players to kind of feel immersed in the game and kind of get back to what's going on and like the map at the time Was still kind of a work in progress And so it was easy to get lost like you're in the jungle and you're running around You know like I have no idea where I'm going and we were lost all the time Yeah, it's like it's a really really big system to get many map done, right? It's just so much going on like you have all these minions like every single minion on the map at the one time Trying to show them in a way that's efficient That you're not completely bombarding the clients with too much information Making sure that things like vision work like minions have to see other minions and minions have to see players and trying to get a System where all that can go on at the same time almost like Like you see the mini mapping if you played paragon you'd have just this little mini map in the corner You probably took almost no notice of like what was going on But technically it's a huge feat and the smoke is going through just now to get that all working and get it working efficiently Wow, right on I'm going to be glad to see that popping into the game Some other things are working on fringe in his latest stream was he's working on some new materials for the map and he's starting to work on some more complicated designs for the map and One of the things that they've been doing I guess they've been doing it for a while now I know that in the alpha what they use the big tree for it But what what something they want to do what I'm trying to get around to here And I'm not doing a good job of it is trying to make it so that The enemy side of the map isn't visible straight down mid lane So that the jungler can rotate from one lane to the next behind the first tower Without being seen by the enemy team to kind of try and hide those Rotations, I think that's kind of cool because a lot of times you think about the way the map Dictates gameplay like the shape of the map and your surroundings kind of dictates how you play and how you approach the game But this is like an example of how the way people approach the game dictates the way that the map is created and I think that's kind of cool to see I like the idea I do like that the jungler can rotate without being seen I think that was a bit of a problem in monolith with the jump pad was you could Totally see when somebody was jumping over with that jump pad. So Did I did I get that right Ruba? Is that is that the reason you guys are doing that? Yeah, so Yeah, we talked a lot about like how jungle rotations should be fluid and I know in Monolith like towards the end, especially after they introduced the the off-lane black buff Like as a jungler you had a lot of flexibility and freedom. I remember when I was jungling Especially when I was on comms with people like, you know, you could go in you could do three white camps green black gank You could do white black gank You could do white black go over to green do white and then like there was so much flexibility as a jungler that you could Like we want the junglers to feel like you can you can dictate a lot of the pace of the match And to do that we need to make sure that the jungler's presence is either governed by things like a vision so you have to go in place watch to watch the jungler or You just let the jungler do their thing and the mini map and those jump pads like jump pads themselves aren't very efficient And we weren't kind of happy with where it worked But by just changing that map and making the mid lane slanted so that the jungler can kind of move around Not only get kind of adds that suspense of where's the jungler gonna be like how the rotation is gonna work Are you gonna have to worry about a three-minute mark? But then you know as a jungler player, you're not like, okay, this is the rotation and no other games Other mobas and paragon at certain points like there was a rotation So at three minutes you'd be like, okay, but he's coming out the river We want to kind of give junglers the ability to control Where and how they pop up and to do that like if you if you see the jungler go from left to right You're like, okay, be careful right lane and that totally changes the pace of the match So we want that to be a bit more unpredictable for players Not yeah, that sounds scary I enjoyed knowing that the jungler was gonna be coming out after three minutes like I can know I can I Could go hit that river buff but to be very careful because the jungler is probably coming for it as well Sort of thing, but yeah, if you don't know when they're going to be going for stuff That sounds scary. I like it. I like it definitely Can change the gameplay for sure, which you know like you said sounds terrifying Let's move on from a made unless unless you had anything else you wanted to say about a made a rubo since we got you here Um I think no, there's like lots of the smaller stuff going on like what probably like the moment we're Trying to tidy everything up get all the systems that we've got in place working I know you mentioned or smoke you mentioned in the stream a couple of weeks ago. We're working on game left Which is the Amazon web services like game hosting system That's something that I've been doing a lot of research in and working on That's gonna make things so much more easier for us for server hosting I don't know if you know much about game lift, but it's like it's a lot more than just server hosting. So at the moment we have Dedicated PCs that we use for servers. So we've got some in Europe some in America. We have to go and turn those servers on It's probably our biggest cost just now in terms of running servers game lift gives us flexibility so that we can Paragon use to use a version of game lift So you can do things like you can speak and add extra servers based on how many players are there So at the moment we have to physically go and you've probably both seen in your alpha testing in your Internal testing that you know, we go turn the EU server on and go turn the any server on and go and play Game lift is like I just turn it just turn servers on as we need them So if a hundred people are playing it will spin up however many servers we need It can handle things like matchmaking and reconnection. So disconnect you can reconnect All those other cool things. He kind of does a lot of work for us in the background. So Yeah, like so it's really good for us to build like something stable that we can play games on The players can get on it means in future potential future testing We've got more flexibility in terms of who gets to play and how we get to test it But yeah, like at the moment is more like everything sort of there But I can I can only begin to start to explain how Complicated some of the small things are when you start getting down into the details So like all the abilities are in they all work good But then just trying to like refine it work out bugs Sometimes that can be really lengthy and time-consuming as a process But yeah, like the game at the moment plays really well the map performance and what the updates have taken off a lot of Burden off the players. So we're really comfortable with how the gameplay feels And then like once we've got everything says that like lots of the set up that we've been doing for gameplay abilities It smoke he's been doing is doing a lot of template type work So even though we have the five heroes and we're probably gonna have the five heroes for a while It means that once all that stuff's refined and worked out and running really well It's gonna be much easier for us to do things like for example add new heroes in the future Once we're ready for it like once everything's working nice It'll allow us to have much faster iteration and cycles to you know make changes on the fly much faster Add the new heroes as I say and so on. So Yeah, it's gonna be good for the rest of the year. Do you think you'll be able to add them every three weeks? No Stupid Sorry No Definitely not like like I don't know like Thinking about it like once everything's done like maybe we could manage to chuck out a couple every three weeks But then like the difference for some of the heroes in terms of the work required to get them in game like I'm thinking about like like Gideon's probably fairly straightforward crunch is probably easy, but then like count us as a pain Aurora is gonna be a nightmare Yeah, and this bunch of others that's just like as revenant and revenants keeping smoky awake at night in terms of Care to get that work. Oh, who's the other one? I was thinking that Revenant is haunting his dreams Yeah, yeah, and I think the one that's probably gonna break them. Yeah, so Implicate as a hero because all of the items and all the projectiles and hell that's just like We're not looking forward to that But yeah, hopefully a lot of the work we've done now and getting all the base core systems up Won't mean this don't make it every three weeks, but I'll make it much easier to turn out heroes at a reasonable pace That's really good to hear. We're not I don't think anyone will be upset if you don't do every three weeks Such a good idea at the time and so inspiring and then it just Ended up with shitty unbalanced heroes Yeah, well saying that like I remember I was talking to Ace about it for a while And I thought I like it used to be really cool like when I was playing a lot of new heroes were coming out Like the meta was constantly changing. It was exciting Like you almost got into this new hero would launch you'd have a week of the new hero Then the trailer would drop and you'd be like, oh my god That looks amazing and you'd be like grumblings and you'd have data mined files people are talking about like it used to drive a lot of excitement into the game and When they stopped doing it like that last year we're like, oh, it's giving me every six months or something And we had drawn what we had nothing for ages like it did change And a lot of how people fought the game. So I think it was a good idea But probably I don't think epic had the resources to do it justice well That's that's that's why we're here right now We've got people that can learn from those mistakes and capitalize on them on the lessons learned So hopefully you guys can do that But let's move on now to ethereal We don't really have any news for ethereal They just wanted me to let you guys know to just kind of pump the brakes a little bit on the hype train I know that sounds weird coming from a company that's trying to kind of advertise and market their game But the game's not out and the they don't want to advertise and market things that they can't Deliver on yet. They their goal is to under promise and over deliver Which I think they've done a pretty good job of up till now, but um With all these voice lines coming out and the huge massive updates to their Website and all the lore and all you know all this stuff that they've had going on over the past month I've got people super hyped up and Seem to have people thinking that the that they're going to be releasing their alpha a little sooner than Then then they thought but that's not that's not gonna happen. They still have a lot of work to do on the game They've done a lot You know they're these updates everything are certainly something to be hyped up about but they do need to Be able to step back take a breather and and launch into their game and make sure that the game is functioning And that that's what they're focused on and not on focused on trying to get Something out into people's hands before it's probably ready to go there Actually a little plug for project stamina here. I was talking to well. I was reading an article by by their producer it was available in their their patreon and He was talking he used to work work for halo. He was talking about how one of their one of their trailers they had to Pull like six members of the team just to work on a game trailer for games calm it ended up slowing the rest of the production down and Sucked up a whole bunch of the budget just so they could get it out in time for a specific Like a function so we don't want that to happen to a theory We want that we want everything that they have allocated into producing the game that we can play as soon as possible not into Making trailers and all all the other stuff before they're really ready for it I know a lot of people are concerned that we have seen gameplay, but we'll get it when we get it We'll just have to be patient until then It's all I got to say there any any comments I think it's really important and I probably sound like a broken record at this point But I think it's just really important to keep in mind how what a task this is that they have taken on I mean you even heard Ruba speak to how difficult it is to implement things when you have assets that were free, but they're still not complete and It still takes a lot of work from the developers to get things working right and check for bugs and this that and the other thing So just think about you know the extra step of creating those assets from scratch like ethereal is so just kind of keep that in mind that this is an Epic task they have taken on. This is not you know game development is not overnight And I don't I don't really know where people got that idea why they think it should just happen so quickly but just hang in there and just savor the little bits that we do get and keep Supporting them but not kind of pestering and pushing for for things that they're just not ready to to supply yet Yep, Ruba anything? I Don't know. There's two parts. I mean if they part of me that Understands game develop and like especially when you considering that like I'm and I'm bad for this Like I'm I say like I talk like I've been working in predecessor a lot Like I've been super super busy with work like I'm just back from a business trip last week where I was gone for a week Smokey he works full-time job fringe works full-time job aces in the process of building a massive empire Like everyone's super busy and when people are doing this like like remember like this is what people are doing in their evenings They're free time. They've got families They've got all their other commitments. They're free time like most people like a lot of people working on these types of projects poor Every freed minute they have in their spare time into working on stuff like this like it's not like a full-time job They're usually really small teams usually in game development like in big triple-a studios like you have a guy Like just does one thing epic. They had like three guys that used to work on animation pro And like like they were like specialists and went to universities into this and like I didn't have the shit watching YouTube tutorials As I go along and it's like is me and then like so it's like it's really really difficult to try and set people's expectations Because I used to like big game developments, you know like fortnight and or whatever Apex legends or all these other big games like well, I don't know what's biggest now like Warcraft Like there's like teams of like hundreds of people working on this and getting paid to do it as full-time jobs And then you're trying to compare that experience to three or four guys working in their home offices in the evening Trying to balance wife and kids and all this and yeah, like I think it's ideal like for me The player part of me well the developer kind of understands like the player part of me is like when you see gameplay I'm like voice lines are really the voice lines are so cool But at the same time, it's almost like the they're they're trying to sell steak And then they're they're talking about their side dishes just now So I'm looking forward to I think it's amazing some of the work They're doing and like the nature and the feel and some of the new concepts like they're called scunglers Sounds so cool, but yeah, like Yeah, they need to manage their hype train as well like so much stuff's coming out like your voice lines every week And then you're like, oh, it's really by the way the game is not coming out for a while It's like I think they need to make sure that they're managing their community's expectations Like it's not just in the community to like oh story. We got hyped like yeah Like they need to take responsibility for how they're generating hype and how they're managing themselves That's very well said I think it's one of the reasons they told me to tell everybody So I think that's about it for them nothing from made about yet Nothing from Phoenix Rising yet if you're interested in learning any more about these games just a Hit up the video description below you can find out all the information you want But now we're gonna move on to the poll results of the final finally man I didn't realize how much I was I was biting off for this one The ultimate ultimate competition what you guys thought was the most impactful ultimate in Paragon I did a tournament bracket and it came down to Aurora and Gideon the Cryosism versus the Black Hole and Aurora won. It was pretty close. It was 60 to 40 and Yeah, it's a 1.1 K votes But yeah, apparently as least my community feels that Aurora's ultimate her name is so hard to say well ultimate was More impactful than than Gideon's and was in fact the most impactful in the game when you compared to everyone else I I like I like this I don't know if Aurora's was the most impactful in the game as far as I'm concerned However, I do think it probably was more impactful than Black Hole Aurora's ultimate was made of defining at one point in time. You had to have somebody on your team in the What was the? the white one called Order order affinity so that they could have purity sensor to counter Aurora Her ultimate while there was a spin-up for it and you could and you could stun her out of that spin-up It didn't really do much because she could just do it again And once her ultimate released it was instant like it wasn't like Gideon's where it was channeled over a long period of time And you could just he was just a sitting duck up there. Aurora could spin in Slap her ultimate and get away Gideon's as well. You couldn't it could only be used really as an engage You couldn't use it as an escape like Aurora could so I think there's a lot of benefits to Aurora over Gideon here Maybe what did you think? You pretty much summed it up perfectly. That's I I may not agree that hers is the most impactful Out of every every single one But between her and Gideon I did think that she was a little bit more impactful For the exact same reasons that you said, you know, he was like a sitting duck Hers was kind of multi-purpose. You could use it as an escape if necessary and that just gives it a little bit more Pazazz over him that Made made her a little bit more attractive. I think as a As a hero. I think it was the side cheek that made her more attractive as a hero, but you could be right I think yeah, you could be right about that Ruben, what do you think of the the poll poll results? I don't know. I I'm kind of I kind of Think that I totally agree that I think it was probably one of the most impactful Like I had a buddy called AK and he used to use like a big Aurora main was always to play 5C blight Aurora off lane the whole time and And even now like when we're talking about bringing back heroes Like we have we had that for a while like a lot of discussion about the heroes that we're gonna bring back and what we're gonna do And Aurora was one of the ones that is she's so hard to balance as a hero because Her ultimate is so impactful. Like she's probably one of the few heroes when we've been talking about kits Like I love the opinion like unless unless something's broken We as a team should learn from Epics decisions and iterations and cycles like we shouldn't throw away like they changed like a lot of their heroes kits and a lot of how things work We shouldn't just naturally throw it away Aurora's like man, how do you balance like her ultimate was so impactful Almost at the point where after Aurora had had our various guttings like she was just like She'd like do her stuff in off lane push lane blah blah blah and then like let's go do let's go do a team fight Aurora comes in do does her ultimate and Then she's done like that's her like okay. That's my kit gun I pressed our I did my job You guys got the rest Like all right, okay, you guys can just deal with killing stuff So I think yeah, like Gideon's was really powerful Like it was like Gideon's I didn't mind Gideon's last iteration of his ultimate with a stun and all that because Like he was so vulnerable when he did it like get it I remember having Gideon's all and you be like, all right That's a free kill as he stood there when you're not inside it. Aurora's was just like, you know Like you clump up But you don't realize and then people jump in and there's minions around and even without purity sensor Even using purity sensor getting the timing on it was so right I remember I played lots of Dekker at the time and it was like even once you got like, okay Purity sensors online you'd have to rush it as a support You'd have to forget about things like honor the pure and all these other like really useful even like quenching scales Like you're like I'm gonna as a support who has no gold I'm gonna have to get this one card just to deal with this one hero and there's one ultimate only in team fights like Like having an aurora and the enemy team used to dictate how much he'd be so have to be so careful with what he did Good auroras would completely decimate a team. So yeah, I think the polls are good I'm glad I'm glad auroras came out because she's the one I'm like, yeah her all of it Definitely changed the tide of battle Yeah, that was I Didn't even think about that way to like I do remember that as a support Saving up gold so that I could get purity sensor as fast as possible and being like it was a race to How fast I can get gold as to how fast she can hit level five which she always won that race, but It was like once you got that purity sensor You could kind of breathe a bit of a sigh of relief if you knew how to use it Well, but like you said Ruba, you really knew how to time it well Man, she was she was one of the heroes that you're talking about that race to five Like I remember we have like he was like steel like on like steals offline like always go Oh, like be careful now. Yeah, and if you weren't careful like that was a free kill aurora was like, okay I've got five someone jungle would come get me Help me out like this offline jewels is dead Like it was such a big impact early and then like a really kind of I think that was what her one thing was like Her help was just so impactful throughout the whole match Like it was team fight defining and then at the start when you're in that TV2 or 2v1 lane like such a big thing. So yeah, I'm glad it came out on top And I was like seeing people like we call my oh Yes, all that Like we call got beat by aurora, thank God Yeah, this is ultimate wasn't back for but for all the wrong reasons and we've already covered that I'm not gonna I'm not gonna bash recall it again Let's move on now We don't have any highlights this week if you guys do have any highlights be sure to send them to me But I just I've kind of ran out of steam when the highlights pulling them from my own channel But uh, yeah, if you guys got some make sure you send them on over But we're gonna get right on into the topic for discussion for this week Which is why did epic give the assets away for free? Why didn't they just sell the game to another publisher or something like that? This is why I asked Ruba to come in Ruba always is has very insightful and Knowledgeable comments to make on the old things like this. So that's that's why I got him in here So so Ruba, what do you think? What's your what's your theory? I don't know no What a question so It's a really good question longest. I'm glad thank you very much that question. I'm glad I'm glad you did time to ask it Man like okay, so this is okay. I should be clear So I do I do know a couple people in epic and I do know a couple people and this is like 20% kind of knowing certain things and whatever but a lot of it is speculation and this is my speculation, but I think there's a lot of a Stuff that backs up the speculation Like I'm not one just like oh, I think it's Donald Mustard was like no no no For me probably the biggest thing like you have to remember right a lot of people are like I know you guys talked about it last week I think was the promotion of Paragon and like they didn't promote it and they didn't do it and like I think it's really important to to think about why Paragon was made in the first place Paragon was never designed just to be a game Like remember before Paragon epic used to have like this development team that we're working on Unreal Engine They used to pull together like all these Graphic demos and all these features where they're like they're basically trying to sell Unreal Engine Like like they're selling their new car and like these are all these new fancy features So they were like basically pulling together all these technical demos Where they were showing new technology and new heroes and whatever And at some point they went we are putting all this resource and energy into what are effectively these really short demos That sell our game Engine But like we don't get to reuse the technology like it's almost like it's really wasteful We're like we're making these really high quality assets Way above what anyone else in the industry is doing because we're trying to showcase our engine And then we're not doing anything with it And so Paragon was like what if we can build something that showcases all our engine features But at the same time we can get a bit more longevity out of it So you're building a game and like the game is at one like both a game itself Plus a platform for them to sell features and if you either of you remember like when they were showing off things like new heroes like Twin Blast and Sparrow where the showcase heroes for how you do here properly Um Who was it? I want to keep more a guess. I keep want to call her Mamba More a guess was like one of these things where they did lots of work on All the hair positioning and her model like they actually we actually found out a bit more a guess before she got in game Because unreal we're talking about her about a conference Um, so Paragon was like it was both a a game itself But it was also that's massive platform for the unreal engine And epic have this really high standard for what Paragon had to be like they weren't happy with anything being half-assed Like it had to be top-notch because If epic couldn't do something really good in their engine It was going to impact their ability to sell their engine to others the memory at the time like this was before the fortnite days Um when like like fortnite was a license to print money Epic epic's base main source of income was the the licensing rights for their engine Like most of their money came from people buying the unreal engine or using the unreal engine and getting licensing back Let's go for them Like there was no they did what they want to share Paragon and all the features I think that's why they didn't promote it a lot Because they didn't want it to for them to like show off a shoddy half-baked product um So when Paragon died It went down and they were like obviously they went through and people have talked about their reasons for it, but Fundamentally epic were bleeding resources Trying to keep Paragon Paragon required so much effort Just to keep the servers running and real-time operations and updates Like Paragon required a huge team And at the same time fortnite was like this massive engine this massive game Like it was changing the world like even like a thing in a couple of years time People look back at the impact of fortnite had on our society like it was massive And they've got this game called paragon that's not really doing much That is like that they can't get people in the door fast enough to work in fortnite Um, so like that drove a lot of the decision And for them like there's a number of factors like paragon had lots of code internally This used in fortnite. I think that was probably one of the big one like yeah, I remember that When epic jumped on the MOBA train That was when like league and smite were just like just starting to come through like leagues like the biggest game today Like hands down MOBA at the time epic banked on a good horse Um, but they were like changing like a lot of the way the technology works Um, and I don't think they were willing to just you know go and give out their secret sauce To anyone that was wanting to do it I also think for them saving face was really important as a development studio and giving away the assets that they did Was the best way for them to save face And to be perfectly frank if they did want to take the game apart and share it Like I don't think any other student like if you gave so you gave omeda Um the paragon source code today It would probably still take us a year to get something working even having access to everything It was so complicated and so in depth So, uh, and even like even the assets they probably gave us I want to say maybe about 10 of like the total game when they gave us the assets They still weren't complete and it was still a huge task for epic to give us that because of how complicated and interconnected everything was That's my opinion. I think why they didn't just give the game off because well to be honest When they decided it didn't really need the money It was probably a big thing as well. They're like Yeah, I didn't think of that like if the wolf was at the door and I'm like I need to do something like go sell paragon go give it to another game studio or You know go make a new game studio and give them paragon as an ip and that effort were like We don't remember like like they were making what 300 million a month I probably made that number up like a hundred million or like a ton of money like a hundred million dollars I'm pretty sure a hundred and eighteen million at peak a hundred and eighteen million dollars a month in fortnight I'm like triple a games typically cost Anywhere in the region between thirty and ninety million to develop Like one month of fortnight probably probably cover the cost of the entire paragon development So I'm like they were just saving face Like they're still trying to sell their engine Fortnights are really good showcase for it still but paragon assets are like Triple a quality assets people can use it get them into the engine That probably drove a lot of the decision again About speculation in my part. I think a lot of the the PCs that are out there kind of tie together with that statement Yeah, that's a lot of the things that I was going to say as well Um, mainly before I dive into mind you do you have any comments? um, I actually had a question um in Ruba's opinion, um Is was fortnight Because of paragon's downfall or was it just a nail in the coffin? Like it it didn't necessarily it wouldn't have survived regardless of if fortnight were a thing Um, oh, that's interesting. I mean my buddy read we did a An hour long video where we went through and talked a lot about this. Um I think that fortnight definitely was one of the final nails Like I genuinely think that if fortnight hadn't have taken off the way it took off Paragon would have lived on for at least a year Maybe longer Um, like I remember one someone I know was out speaking to epic They were chatting to cam Winston and just like asking his opinion on what needs to do and cam said that if they took the game offline And stopped like doing real-time updates and new updates and whatever It would take between six months and a year to fix everything they wanted to in the game Uh, that's a massive statement. It's gonna take us six months to a year if we're not working on it Just to fix everything we want to fix on it um Um, but yeah, I definitely think that fortnight definitely accelerated the demise like it made decisions much easier for epic If they hadn't have had the blowout success for fortnight I probably I like reckon that the decision to like when you're making a hundred million dollars a month Throwing away 50 million dollars of work that you've done or 112 million of paragon But they can claim the assets were worth that's a much more difficult conversation When you're like We're talking about a month worth of profit of fortnight for paragon. It becomes much easier So I think it probably still would have like it still would have been a struggle for them Like when they started the conversation at the end of I want to say 2017 When like oh paragon's in trouble. We need the community's help to figure out what to do the genuinely we're struggling fortnight was making that a much easier conversation to have I think internally but um, personally if fortnight hadn't taken off let's say I think paragon probably would have lasted at least a year and probably would still be around Wow The the way I kind of think about it is Like paragon wasn't completely like killing them It like it like wasn't losing like a bunch of money or anything like a lot of people say but like If you think of their resources like a plot of farmland like you've got an acre of land that you can farm Paragon was corn. It was making them about 200 dollars per acre. You know like it That was making some profit, but it wasn't a whole lot whereas fortnight was like fucking blueberries where it's making $5,000 per acre So why would you use that land to grow corn when you could use that land to grow blueberries? And I think they of course made the the the business decision to grow them fucking blueberries and they're with fortnight So weird farming reference for you a really good analogy, um uh Mangos because I think because part people like well, why couldn't people I couldn't they have paragon and fortnight And the way that that analogy works is they only have so much farmland Like they don't have an infinite infinite amount of farmland They can buy the farmland in this example is the developers the people working on the game their operations all the people like Rally North Carolina doesn't like you don't have an infinite number of people that can go work there That was the problem they had like I think if they had an unlimited resource of developers and programmers They could work at epic standard like they have a really high standard for intake Maybe they could have had their blueberries and their corn, but when your face was like It's like I said, okay, mongoose give me a dollar And I can either give you invest it and I can either give you a hundred dollars back Or I can give you a hundred thousand dollars back. You're always going to take the hundred thousand dollars Yeah, exactly And then also kind of along the lines of why they didn't just outright sell it to another company Ruben you brought it up at an excellent point. They're pretty much be giving away their code But another thing Again, I'm going to bring up project stamina here because I talked to their producer quite a bit fancy pants. It's just Very intriguing fellow. If you guys want me to start covering project stamina one for the minions Let me know as well. I know it's not paragon related, but it is a third person kind of mobo with gigantic But anyway More on that some other time, but uh, I was talking to him. He was talking about then giving away the assets was kind of a low risk investment on their end because if they give away those assets and And you know bearing in mind that epic is in the business of selling the unreal engine They just kind of stub their toe in a diamond with with fortnight But um, if you think of them as wanting to sell the unreal engine They give those assets away for free. It gets more people interested in using the engine and producing Games with those assets and they end up making money off of those assets in the end Even if the even though they're giving away them away for free So I think that's kind of an interesting way to look at it as a low risk Uh investment of getting giving away those assets Another thing I kind of thought of too was kind of bringing in games as a service into it a little bit Like that's the like you paid for a skin And now you can no longer use that skin because the game is down Well, you kind of can you can go into unreal engine and dick around with that skin now if you want to So that kind of avoids the whole games as a service discussion as well Which I don't think was a big part of it. I did it first, but I was corrected by other people But uh, yeah, I think I think that hits all the bases. I wanted to cover. Um, mandy ruva. You guys got anything else? I'm good No, and I think I honestly want to just like this this discussion Just like why did parry on diabolos kind of go on for ages and um, I don't think we're ever really going to know the secret I know a lot of people are Understandably upset by it like I I stuff like I know so many people like especially in this small community that are trying to get it Bring it back and do whatever Like so many of those people had so much fun and enjoying out of it and they'll never fully understand epic's decision But um Like like it doesn't really like at the end of the day It doesn't matter like it's never coming back like I doubt epic we're ever going to turn around and say actually parry on's coming back Like that's never happening. Um, we just need to be okay with that decision And put our support like if you're like interested for the minions or this entire thing Just put your support behind the teams that are trying to bring it back. Like that's the future for us Um, you know don't dwell on the past too much. Don't get salty about it. Don't don't be mad Just uh try and make the best of what we've got Well said, well said. Yeah That's gonna close it out for the topic for of discussion. Let's uh move on into plugs ruba You got anything to plug you want your plug. I made a series Yeah, man, I'd be definitely not to yeah. I'm in the studios I'm sure mongoose will put all the links down in the description So you can come join us on our discord. Um, we have read it. We don't use it very often We have the website doesn't get updated very often But uh, yeah, come join our discord. You can have a chat. We have a suggestions thing You can you know, if you have anything you want to talk about you can see updates for the game Um, we are not giving out beta keys at the moment until our alpha keys or whatever keys keys keys Until we're we're ready to relaunch you'll find out any information about keys from our discord first Um, we have an faq feel free to when you join the discord Have a quick read through the feq it covers all of our like main points that you might have but yeah Come hang out in the discord chat about chat stuff with us Myself and the other developers are always floating around willing to answer answer questions Yeah, just come in and come and chill with us Right on man. Yeah Very cool Um, I don't have anything to plug. I just now started streaming again last night. I took a little break Uh, and yeah, I haven't posted anything to youtube so How are you how are you finding the life as a streamer mandy? I am demanding Uh, it it it is a little bit. Yeah, it definitely is because I feel I put the pressure on myself to um Perform and and make sure that everybody's having a good time when they're when they're in my stream But I love it. I love my community Um, they're so incredible Like they are just so supportive and incredible that I love it to death. I love every moment of it Very very very cool Thank you And I ain't got shit We'll close it out for episode 44 of four of the minions. I hope you found that topic for discussion Interesting if you have your own little ideas of why you think they did not sell the assets, um Let me know in the comments below. But for now, this is the four of the minions crew signing off you guys Have a good one