Warframe Got Big By Doing Right By Its Players
We've talked about Warframe's unlikely success story before, and Digital Extremes' space-ninja hack-and-slasher has exceeded its creators' wildest dreams. How have they done that? By being nice, it seems.
Polygon has an interview up today with Art Director Geoff Crookes and Studio Manager Sheldon Carter that hits all the usual virtual-rags-to-riches bullet points. "We didn’t have lofty expectations," Crookes says, while Carter admitted to "screaming" when the early numbers got good enough.
The key to Digital Extremes' and Warframe's success? Communication and openness with players. Crookes calls it a "collaborative development relationship that we still have to this day with our community" while Carter says that the team has changed 'frames based on player feedback when they're revealed on streams.
The interview also discusses one of the game's rare miscues, when DE offered a random dye on the cash shop for players' in-game pets. "We weren't trying to make a lottery," said Crookes. When the system was patched out only days after being added, the team refunded the money players had spent on the random dyes. Imagine any other company doing that with its unpopular loot boxes!
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About the Author

Jason Winter is a veteran gaming journalist, he brings a wide range of experience to MMOBomb, including two years with Beckett Media where he served as the editor of the leading gaming magazine Massive Online Gamer. He has also written professionally for several gaming websites.
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Looking forward to 2018 and hope Warframe continues to grow.
Who would've thought that communicating with the community was a good idea.
Looking at you EA.
im with the game from its early early beginnings and i would say ... in Sheldon dreams ;p
game changed from awesome to worst .. some stuff they put into the game are useless and players dont want it .. other stuff too little too late .. other stuff are just pure deny by themselves ... i remember when Scott was talking on some dev stream that he dont want to game to be a grinding game ... and what warframe is now ?? grind to oblivion . Instead of awesome coop game like it was at the beginnings we now have rushers game from point A to B ... with mission summary Player X kills 1000 Player B kills 20 unbalanced shitty weapons and frames ... Ember Banshee ..LIMBO FFS .. PVP FFS .. Lunaro FFS .,.. Archwing FFS .. and we still dont have any decent endgame still ...Veterans really playing only on update day cause basically they are piss upon .. Players are banned for absurd reasons . The do want they want cause there isnt any other game like it which would be a concurrent for them maybe then maybe they would start to listen the players and start to take care for the Veterans players . and i still remember the times of stealth and Grineers talking English .. when the game was semi hard , COOP and rewarding