Well, as the devs wanted the visual feeling of the game to resemble a painting — then it only fits to say “there are no mistakes here, just happy accidents”…
Oh, no worries, I’ve read it. What I meant by the quote is, you are not stuck anywhere, you are just camping in one of the best spots in the game…
I can only hope you had the polaroid and some charcoal on you to map out that great vista in the meantime, between all that looting the cargo containers.
Tachyon was the best space fighter game ever. Even had Bruce Campbell doing some of the voice work. The physics were awesome and the storyline was good.
Was this written by an ai? Yeah xwing was good but so was wingcommander for the same reasons. Every good space combat game done since then has basically duplicated the experience.
Remember playing this quite some time at a friends. But I think we played Wing Commander even more for some reason.
And way before that: Elite on a C64. That blow my mind at the time. Connected lines in 3D! Wow. And yes, I am old.
But my favorite of all time has to be Privateer II - The Darkening. Relatively open world with a cool background story and incredibly immersive with fitting prerendered cutscene visuals and lots of real actors doing the keyscenes.
The fact that Elite was made to work with that amount of complexity on a C64 was absolutely mindblowing at the time. So often we forget how far things have come.
For the people that don't want to read the article, this seems especially relevant:
But much has changed since 2022: Embracer, which owns Gearbox, bet the house on a $2 billion deal with a Saudi investment group that fell through in 2023. Ever since, its many, many properties have been hit by layoffs on a near-monthly basis.
Yep, Embracer bought a LOT of studios expecting this deal to work out, and then it didn’t, so many of those studios are now effectively as good as dead in the water or on their way there. It amazes me how so many people and companies always forget the basic financial idea of “don’t spend money you don’t have”.
So I assume the leadership, which gets paid the big bucks due to their decisions making much larger impacts on the company, will take responsibility for the action and will be fired due to their salary being based on the level of personal responsibility to their company’s success/failure.
Oh wait, no. Once again we wipe out the bottom rung workforce, expect the remaining employees to do twice the work with no extra pay in the face of increasing cost of housing and living, meanwhile their professional gambler CEO either gets off scott free or snags a golden parachute on the way out the door to their next job.
Firing the people that do the work to make the company money is just good business! They're a dime a dozen, just hire another 2 managers and a couple marketing execs and soon you'll be printing money! /s [these companies are freaking dumb]
It's crazy what you can get away with when you have some money and no sense!
As someone who always thought about getting into gaming as a career, i’m so glad i didn’t… it’s a shame that game developers are having to suffer through such a toxic industry, and that there aren’t more protections in place for these people that create the amazing experiences that we all love so much.
I hope that they are able to find new and better places of employment.
Sorry you’re getting downvoted for being correct. I went to school for game design and decided to change career paths when I found out everything is contract work. Once a game is finished, you’re out of a job and need to search for another studio to work for.
If it was all contract work it'd be better, probably. Devs would have representation, like actors or film directors, and they'd sign up for a project at a premium in the understanding that they're getting paid for the downtime after the project ends.
The kinda shitty part is that everybody is a full time employee but you still get frequent layoffs after projects end. That's the worst of both worlds, especially in the US where there are basically zero mandatory protections. In places with actual labor regulations it's... kinda expensive and self-defeating.
It is true that the layoffs get reported but the hires do not, so a lot of devs get rehired fairly quickly or start new projects and studios, so it always seems like there are devs getting kicked to the curb when there's a baseline of churn and cycling. That said, 2023 has been a very, very, very shitty year for the games industry for a number of reasons. Which sucks, because it's been a great year for games themselves.
The kinda shitty part is that everybody is a full time employee but you still get frequent layoffs after projects end. That’s the worst of both worlds, especially in the US where there are basically zero mandatory protections. In places with actual labor regulations it’s… kinda expensive and self-defeating.
Something like 60% of EA employees live outside the U.S.A.
That’s simply not true, projects are usually done in stages. You got pre-production, production, testing, launch, post-production, …
So take an employee who mainly works in pre-production. Based on what you said they’d be laid off after everything is done and production starts, right? But that’s not how it works. Those people immediately start with the pre-production work of either the next project, or the DLCs for the current one.
There’s always more to do, after launch of a game you can’t have your developers sit around idle, you need the next project already prepared and ready to go. That’s why game DLCs sometimes release only months after launch, they have been worked on for a while.
What has that to do with this argument? The lay-offs in the last six months were mostly due to massive overhiring while money lending was cheap. Now interest rates are up and those companies are trying to keep their profits up (or become profitable in the first place).
And the thing is: They hired so many people, even with the lay-offs the headcount is still higher than it was a few years ago.
Unions. If we want to stop the suffering of exploited game developers while the gaming industry rakes in more money than the movie- and music industry combined, we should push hard for unions to protect the well being on creative potential of these workers. Idgaf if EA loses 10-25 million a year to additional wages. That money belongs to the workers in the first place.
It’s probably significantly more than 10-25 million a year in additional wages given the quality of employees, but it’s still likely pocket change next to things like the marketing budget. I work in a more capital intensive industry (tooling, hard parts, etc), but we still spend a few billion on engineering. Know what else we spend a few billion on? Marketing, amoung many other things. Job cuts always make me chuckle because they’re a, “we’re doing something” but we spend orders of magnitude more on material, facilities, etc.
According to a quick search engine query, EA had 13500 employees as of 2023. He's proposing a $50-150 monthly pay rise, which is... not much of an upgrade.
And what was the board's compensation in comparison? No, making games costs what it costs. What is expensive is the marketing stupidity and the corruption and self serving in upper management.
Both of those things can be true at once. I don't know how much the marketing is "stupidity", ideally marketing makes you money. Execs being overpaid is absoutely a thing.
But even if you took those out games would be very expensive to make. When you have hundreds of people working on something for years numbers start to get very high. Scale is a bitch.
What a shame, Embracer really seemed like they would bring about a new age of games with free radical and all, but since the 2 billion fell through they are dismantling everything to stay afloat, I’m now afraid we will never get that Deus Ex Mankind Divided sequel.
In what way did a hyper-conglomerate buying up every studio they could for their own profit seem to indicate it would usher in “a new age of games”? It was always going to end like this.
But every single corporation ever says that when they vertically and horizontally integrate their operations, it streamlines workflows and brings quality and savings to customers.
Customers always see that quality and saving, right? That always happens when monopolies form, right?
Games companies expanded like crazy due to low interest rates and high demand for games during the pandemic. Now interest rates are going up and people go outside again.
In this case, and for a lot of other studios, Embracer went on a buying spree some time ago, betting that a deal worth $2 billion with Saudis would go through. It didn’t, and now they are forcing cost cuts across all studios they own.
You've got some good answers already, but I can expand on it a little: businesses in most sectors are feeling the impact of increased interest rates - both because they can't borrow as much themselves any more, and because there is less money coming in from investors because they can't borrow as much either - but tech (including games) is doubly impacted because there was such a surge in demand during lockdowns. While other businesses tended to struggle during lockdowns, and have simply had that struggle replaced with a different struggle due to the interest rates, the tech sector grew massively during the pandemic.
People working at home, or furloughed, had more personal time and more disposable income because they weren't spending money on travelling to work, on overpriced lunches, on dining out with friends, going to concerts, etc. It all added up, and they spent that money on streaming subscriptions, video games and just generally on recreational, home-based activities, many of which revolve around tech these days. So the tech sector grew a lot because of the low interest rates, and it grew a lot because more people were buying its products/services. And now, rather than having more disposable income, a lot of people are facing a cost of living crisis, meaning not only have they reduced their spending because they're back in the office and dining out and going to concerts again (and all those other things people spend money on when they're not confined to their house), but many people have less money to spend on gaming, subscriptions, etc, than pre-pandemic.
Also, because the tech sector was doing so well during the pandemic, it was an attractive prospect for investors (who themselves had increased money, as well as great interest rates), meaning it grew even more. Everything kind of fed into each other and the tech sector grew exponentially as a result. Whereas right now, not only does the increased interest rate for borrowing mean investors are throwing their cash around less in general, but the fact that the tech sector is struggling makes it a less attractive prospect for investors, meaning the whole sector kind of doubly loses out on that front.
So these tech companies invested their money into growing their companies and expanding their businesses' scopes like good capitalists. Which does generally make sense - if you find yourself sat on a huge pile of money, it's generally better to find a way to invest it into something useful (or to invest it into something makes you an even bigger pile of money if you see the Monopoly Man as aspirational). The issue is, most of them were somewhat short-sighted (plus global economics is a tricky thing to predict); they spent money as if it was always going to be coming in at the same rate. And now that they're being impacted by increased interest rates on their own borrowing, the loss of investors, and the reduced spending power of consumers and they're very suddenly having to make massive cuts to stay afloat.
I think the other thing you need to highlight is that during that rapid growth phase 2 years ago it meant building up teams. In tech it really became an job market where employees had lot of the power in negotiation which drove up the cost of labor to fill this surplus of openings. I worked at a company where team members were being offered 10k to 25k annual retention bonuses to not quit (if you want quit within a certain time you pay it back, but if you quit hopefully your new employer spots you a signing bonus to cover it). But with all of the factors you mentioned in this cool down, you end up with a problem that you now have too much staff, but also too expensive staff that you can’t afford. Employees are definitely losing now with the layoffs, but for the ones that were able to make job moves and survive the layoffs, they’re probably are doing much better because of it (at least from a compensation POV, not sure about anxiety worrying about being laid off next).
I like to dunk on SC as much as the next guy but how can you say this at all with a straight face? For starters, can I walk around my ship? Is there a story-based campaign I can play through? Are there capital ships with dozens of players with different roles working on them?
SC will never get finished or live up to the promises it made but ED barely even tries to do anything beyond being a space truck simulator.
Yes (since the latest DLC), yes (the thargoids mystery), and yes (carriers have been here for a few years).
Of course it’s not exactly what you would get in SC because they’re ultimately different games. But you do have all of that and more, E:D has massively improved since it came out.
You can't walk around on ships in E:D so you're either mistaken or outright lying at this point. I'm not even going to get into talking about thargoids like it's a story campaign, or how co-op works in ED.
I try to avoid reviews for games that haven’t been released or aren’t in an open beta. I am especially suspicious in regards to embargoes that lift less than 24 hours before the game goes on sale.
Publishing peoples’ private info is bad and nobody should be encouraging others to find that info.
On the other hand, info about the games should be published. If a games journalist is willing to tow to company PR lines and withhold valuable info (to players) about games, then they should be willing to cover this. If they aren’t, then they’re just a fan with special access.
I mean, with extremely rare exceptions, basically the entire field of ‘games journalism’ is just doing advertisement for the industry they are supposed to be critical of, even the opinions and culture commentary just serve to drive what is functionally a gossip generator that makes either hype or hate for whatever particular thing is worth talking about right now, and then its forgotten entirely within 72 hours. Net effect though, is more awareness thus more game purchases.
Fucking coffeezilla played a pivotal role in convicting SBF.
When has any games journalism outlet ever done a 60 minutes style actual investigative journalism about the industry? And actually exposed an issue the public was generally not aware of? When have they done anything like that instead of just reacting to someone already doing that for them on some social media site or youtube and then they just summarize it?
Fuck, I am probably being a bit hyperbolic but Christ it feels like almost all gaming journalism is basically classified ads and opinion pieces.
Yep. When the industry can cut off the only way for games journalists to reliably make money (pre-release review copies) then they are totally controlled by the industry. A real journalism industry would see one company not given a copy or blacklisted and the refuse to cover their release entirely in solidarity. Otherwise none of them can be trusted.
Instead we get an article here, pontificating on the concept of whether or not its good to report on something that could harm people if its reported on.
It manages to do all the words and stuff to let you know that basically, they can see arguments both ways, but uh in the end its published so kinda just obviously went one way on all that.
The function is, I guess, just to indicate that the writer is conflicted and well informed? But its so obvious theyre just writing a bunch of words to hit a word count because uh its published anyway so the author obviously donesnt care that much for half of what they said.
Then it just ends with like a magical fantasy useless ‘I believe things will get better and we can all be better people’ ending with absolutely no set up or explanation why this might be likely.
Its honestly a baffling piece of writing.
All I can actually take away from it is a hack happened, hacking is bad, the author needed to hit a word count, and I probably should have just read the headline.
I mean here I am commenting on it so thats something, it worked! It got a click rofl!
There is no obligation for publishers to send early copies, although when you don't do it selectively you're sending a bad message that you have something to hide or an axe to grind, so it's pretty bad PR to handle things that way.
Plus nothing stops an outlet from still getting a copy and reviewing the game day one. With so much of today's content being live video the kind of thing you're describing is... pretty inefectual? I get that it's the stuff people remember from the old days when there were more gatekeepers and print media could be reliably delayed by months by doing that, but... yeah, that's pretty anecdotal these days. It's mostly messing with critics' free time, which isn't the best way to get them to be nice to your game, if that's what you're trying to do.
You risk losing the audience when the other outlets’ reviews are up days before the game release while yours will be published a week after the game release unless really cutting corners or reviewing a short game.
See, I hear this a lot, and it's a bit disappointing. Because hell yeah, there is great journalism being done. If you want "investigative journalism"... I mean, why? It's videogames, not politics, but yeah, there are people out there doing that stuff (Jason Schreier comes to mind, even if I don't particularly like the guy, but he's not alone). If you want genuine, in-depth documentaries and explorations of the process of game development then I like you more. Noclip and People Make Games come to mind, in terms of sheer production value and coming from the journalism side, but Youtube is full of in-depth looks at games from that perspective based more on documentation and less on talking to the actual devs.
So maybe the question I have is why aren't those better known? Why is the hype machine still what the audience cares about? Because all of those are publicly available, and some even very popular. Why isn't it the default and why do people not actually engage with it even when they claim they do want to engage with it? Particularly when Noclip started doing what they do, it was such a common trope to say that people wanted that exact thing and nobody was doing it, and then the very, very good 2Player Productions documentary on Double Fine's Broken Age happened and it seemed like it was possible to do, so Noclip started doing it... and they're fine, they're good, they're still going, but they certainly haven't exploded in popularity or anything.
Whatever, this is an old argument. At this point most gaming coverage is let's play videos and Twitch streamers. And you know what? That's fine. that's still better than the relentless hype machine. I just hope the good ones doing good work get to keep doing it as well.
So you say theres great investigative journalism being done and mention Jason Schrier. Agreed, he is the only person that I as well can even think of as an actual journalist in this field, hell, also James/Stephanie Sterling.
But you are… disappointed that I wish there was real journalism around gaming and the gaming industry?
You also say ‘Why would you even want investigative journalism relating to gaming?’
Well uh because to me that is real journalism, and real journalism is historically hugely important to keeping society balanced in a democracy. It acts as a counter to corporate and government propoganda, lies and malfeasance.
Then you ramble about basically how you can find some actual deep dives about how games were made on youtube, (noting that such content is not super popular) and gamers streaming themselves gaming on twitch, and conclude that ‘this is an old argument’ and basically ‘i can watch gaming content somewhere so its fine I guess’.
MudMan.
You are arguing with yourself, in your own comment.
The topic is journalism. We were talking about investigative journalism in this subthread. Journalism as it pertains to the field or industry of video games, how a lot of it is just garbage.
And you spent the vast majority of your reply here /not talking about investigative journalism, not talking about how gaming journalism is largely just advertisements for game companies/.
‘Content’ relating to video games is not the same thing as Journalism.
You opened with being disappointed that I would wish there was real investigative journalism about video gaming, which is a stance you never explained or justified with anything other than ‘other content about games exists.’
Is your stance that its fine actually that there barely is any actual real gaming journalism… because other content about games exists?
Huh. Normally, you'd think when somebody takes longer to rephrase a post than it'd take to read the original they're trying to straw man the hell out of it...
...but no, you mostly got it.
Define "investigative journalism" when it comes to television. Radio? Maybe movies.
At best it's generalist journalism looking into a major issue, like the Ronan Farrow work that resulted in the whole MeToo movement. Other times it's straight-up business journalism, like the mainstream coverage of mergers or tech regulations. There is no reason why gaming can't be treated the same way, and in fact it is, as we saw through the whole Activision/Microsoft merger.
The idea that gaming needs a specific brand of "investigative journalism" as a matter for the daily gaming trades, such as they are, is based on this weird, antagonistic perspective that gaming fandom has about game development and it is, very much, part of the same problem as the hype cycle.
Sometimes, "investigative" journalism comes down to gossip, too, which is less relevant and I do not love. Schreier's brand of "I have insider buddies and they tell me this stuff" coverage can stray into that. He walks the line, for sure. Some of it is genuinely interesting intrahistory, some of it doesn't clear that bar for me.
What I do care about, though, is good journalism, and there are definitely people doing that, including those in-depth, after-the-fact analysis and historical documentaries. If those don't qualify for what you want to see in games journalism, then we just disagree about what is needed.
Sometimes, “investigative” journalism comes down to gossip, too, which is less relevant and I do not love. Schreier’s brand of “I have insider buddies and they tell me this stuff” coverage can stray into that. He walks the line, for sure. Some of it is genuinely interesting intrahistory, some of it doesn’t clear that bar for me.
This is how the sausage is made, unfortunately. Schreier has to work with the same kind of currency any investigative journalist does, and sometimes that means publishing a piece as part of an agreement. I’ve seen this happen for decades in sports journalism, and in turn, that facilitates a lot of what labor has needed to survive in that industry. Considering professional sports is one of the very last bastions of collective bargaining in my country, I find it easy to overlook there.
Schreier’s work has similarly been important for labor in making games, so yeah, while there’s garbage sometimes, I have zero problem with it.
Schreier has not published any of his gossipy pieces because he had a deal with anyone, at least that I know of. If what you mean is that he publishes the gossip because that's the red meat what keeps him employed at Bloomberg so he can write more thorough coverage of the really interesting stuff.... well, you have a worse opinion of Schreier than I do.
Honestly, you guys are doing little to get me on board with that sort of thing. From the way you talk about it I'm getting the distinct impression that this sort of "investigative journalism", which often boils down to "game development went poorly for reasons", is only feeding into the antagonistic relationship and not, as I'd hoped, creating more awareness of how the process goes so people can have more informed opinions.
To me the real story here is that the field of cybersecurity, and actually proprietary software in general is a giant fucking scam: we see hacks happening constantly to huge companies and government agencies that either advertise their products/services or market/promote themselves as very secure.
The only actual known and effective way to combat this in almost every scenario you have ever heard of is to use open source software that can be reviewed by anyone, and when a flaw is found, an alert can go out and then it gets fixed, and you can actually verify that it has been fixed; that combined with actually having employees follow basic cybersec guidelines.
Time and time again individuals and large organizations pay for proprietary software that claims it is secure, and often either have cybersecurity ‘experts’ on staff, or consult with a cybersec firm.
Time and time again people and organizations pay for software that is sold to them as providing security, and when it doesnt, the sellers of said software are never actually liable.
Why would anyone trust any kind of such software at all? Much less pat for it?
And the hacks just keep happening.
Accountability for this is no where. Not in any real, effective sense.
Yes, which can be avoided with the basic cybersecurity standard of teaching your employees how to not fall for that.
Literally not much more complicated than ‘dont give anyone your work login and password, If you think something is suspicious, report it to security and never, ever, EVER connect any of your work hardware or accounts to your personal hardware or accounts’.
But to your main point yes, its a million times easier to hack a human brain than a computer, and no one seems to get this.
Am I the only person that has read or even heard of Kevin Mitnick?
Heh. It's a LOT more complicated than that. Especially post-covid, with everybody ready to support working from home.
Hey, good luck getting hundreds to thousands of people, ranging from engineers to a bunch of kids doing QA to technically illiterate administrative positions and office workers to keep rigid, government-level security standards when each and every one of them has some degree of remote access and mostly are just... you know, going about their lives and going to work every day. You sound like you'd love doing IT for a game studio.
And hey, guess what, all of their work hardware and accounts are probably connected to their personal hardware and accounts. Or are, in fact, the same hardware and accounts. Nobody has time or money to equip every single employee with a second phone and laptop overnight and all of them had to work remotely during the pandemic, just as much as everybody else. It's kind of chilling to know that the games industry is under this level of harassment and these leaks keep happening, because I guarantee any other non-tech industry that has shifted to remote work the past few years is doing much worse at this. Gaming was already weirdly secretive, even when compared to movies and TV or other similar cultural industries.
For the record, games are full of open source software (and closed source as well). Go check out the list of OSS on any game's credits. They still have to comply by disclosures required by most licenses, so it'll be in there somewhere.
Uh… I have managed and maintained cybersecurity policies for a non profit albeit not as head of IT but working in close cooperation with him as the team i was on was in charge of a huge system that nearly all employees and definitely all our clients used.
We successfully managed to not have any cybersecurity incidents while I was working there.
We gave everyone work phones and work laptops because that is how you do cybersecurity right.
And uh, no, if youre going by companies specifically being targeted and compromised by hackers, as opposed to hackers going for anything connected to a widely used software service, uh, gaming companies are actually doing far worse than other industries, likely due in large part to incompetent management.
Sure, yep, its chilling that employees at video game companies are at risk because their management is incompetent.
No clue what you mean by ‘gaming was always weirdly secretive when compared to movies and music.’ Music and movies are even easier to pirate than video games which have to be cracked… Not sure what youre talking about here.
And oh dear god here at the end youre going to ‘for the record’ inform me, a person who has written code for game mods for 20 years and professionally for various roles in the tech industry for a decade that games have open source and closed source code in them.
Thats not even relevant to how a whole company’s network gets breached and its employees get basically doxxed.
The… the video game company’s internal software for managing employee records, clock ins, clock outs, wage payment, emails, etc, is different from the software it uses in its product, the game.
It doesnt matter if a game has OpenGL and a bit of a liscensed proprietary physics engine.
Thats not connected to the company email server.
Why do you have such an arrogant attitude when you have no idea what you are talking about?
Partially. Too much of the software and defenses require the user to act in a specific way to complete the defenses. And humans are not rational beings. This gives attackers ways to circumvent the security measures. This in addition to cybersecurity too often being an afterthought.
Yes, which is why I said ‘and also get employees to follow basic cybersecurity practices.’
If the problem is either company culture or human nature is in the way of implementing cybersecurity properly, and I can assure you that this is true, having managed cybersecurity policies at a large non profit for over a year…
…then the field of cybersecurity should actually be figuring out how to successfully mitigate or solve this issue, they should be focusing on far more than just esoteric techno buzzwords in their marketing, and you know, actually be capable of delivering ‘security’, the thing they claim to sell.
If that means pivoting to things like the imoportance of training employees, developing a security conscious company culture, holding seminars to convince execs and middle management to not have cybersecurity as an afterthought as well as what it actually takes to actually be secure… then the field of cybersecurity should do that.
Sorry if i came off as too hostile, a bit off the anger may have carried over from explaining to graphics card marketing buzzword enthusiast ninjan, as politely as i could, that he has no idea what its actually like to work for a world class tech firm as a software engineer, over in another thread.
aftermath.site
Aktywne