The last few days have been hard for the Rocket League community. What can be considered the worst update of all time was released just a few days ago, and the player-to-player trading system was also removed. This left the Rocket League community in an uproar.
To add salt to the wound, Rocket Racing was announced, a new game mode that is available only on Fortnite. The community felt betrayed and forgotten, mostly because there had been little to no communication from the Rocket League team.
However, the route to this problem has been encountered, and it explains why the communication from the Rocket League team has been lacking.
It was the Epic layoffs all along
Last week, a former Rocket League marketing employee shared that the Rocket League team was hit by the Epic layoffs that happened a while back. According to JJ (Juliventure):
"Almost all of marketing, PR, community were let go (1-2 ppl left for each). Plus the ppl handling RL socials, the lawyer handling a lot of RL, folks from video & creative too. Ppl don't realize how badly the place was ripped apart Dev side is spread thin across projects too".
If this is indeed true, then it explains the lack of communication from the Rocket League team with the community. Apart from announcing the Season 12 rewards, and Season 13, the Rocket League social media channels have stayed very quiet.
Despite heavy criticism from the community because of the removal of the player-to-player trading system, Rocket League didn't address this criticism or explain why doing this was good for the game and the players.
Lack of communication is one of the fastest ways to turn your community against you, as happened in Rocket League. Even if most of the marketing department being let go somewhat explains this lack of communication, it doesn't make it right.
This current communication policy is leaving fans in the dark and making the Rocket League community feel like their voices don't matter. So Rocket League must fix this problem as fast as possible.
Could the Epic layoffs also have affected game content?
In her post, Juliventure also mentions that the "Dev side is spread thin across projects too". This can mean most of the efforts of the Rocke League developing team were focused on other projects, such as the Rocket Racing one.
It can explain the lack of new and exciting content the game is suffering from, and why Season 13 didn't introduce great content. If the developing team is indeed spread thin and working on other projects it is hard for them to deliver top-tier content to Rocket League.
However, the Rocket League team has addressed this issue and explained that they will continue to work on updates and more content for the game in 2024. It also explained to fans that Rocket Racing isn't replacing Rocket League, which was one of the biggest fears the community had.
This was the first time in a long time that Rocket League addressed its community and their worries. Hopefully, this is just the first step in improving the communication between the community and the developers.