It's the former, unironically. They've always been incompetent, but at least they used to be somewhat hard-working and ambitiuous which is what you'd expect from a small-time no-name company that suddenly got a chance to work on such a large-scale project. Current DelightWorks feels like a former small-time company that now think it's invincible because they went from no-name shitters to being skyrocketed to extreme success/fame on the back of a single project. That or it's as simple as Kanou being completely spineless and incapable of getting his team to do any actual work.
I don't know why people keep forgetting about it, but DW had production issues before Corona was even a thing. They had unfinished animation assets for both Odysseus and Caenis back in Atlantis, even though both were slated for release a few months down the line, and Atlantis was the start of them standardizing 3 Servants per Chapter bullshit as the norm for their production onwards.
Even if you wanted to argue and give them the benefit of the doubt that Corona somehow magically impacted DW's production scheduling so much worse than every other glorified flash game developer in Japan, there's quite literally no excuse why 2021 will, again, have less than 30 new Servants total by the end of the year.
2018 -> 3 chapters per year, 5 servants per chapter standard
Atlantis and onwards -> 2 chapters per year, 3 servants per chapter standard
In the first place, Nasu explicitly said that they devised countermeasures against Corona and could work more efficiently to speed up production back in mid-2020. But now you can see that 2021 is ultimately going to end up the same as 2020 in quantity of new Servants. Funnily enough, I remember Nasu backtracking on his statement later on and saying he thinks they'll probably never be as productive as they used to be.
I'm p sure DW have been messing up since *before* 2020
Downward revenue started with the end of 2019, which is when content drought started becoming an apparent issue. What ultimately killed FGO's grip on the market and player retention is it's abysmal 2020 run though.
DW has messed up prior to 2020, for sure, but like I said they've always kept a somewhat consistent schedule that kept their playerbase well fed. In a market where player retention basically heavily depends on how often you're able to push out content, that was an important factor for why FGO managed to have such an upward trend for 3 entire years.
Also didn't they have a shitton of monetary losses due to the lack of output?
FGO obviously heavily lost the dominance/popularity it used to have due to lack of output, but most of their monetary losses stem from the fact that every single major investment they've had outside of FGO turned out to be a monumental failure for them.
Not that DW is smart about money-making. Their financial losses on their investments is one thing, but their completely tone-deaf demeanor towards the Pity system in this day and age is another thing when their major market competitors all have Pity systems. Still think it's funny they were arrogant enough to release Sakura Wars without a pity system. That shit could pass and be accepted 2-3 years ago, but now it's far considered the market standard to have one. |