This becomes even worse when you also want to play old gems that missed because you weren’t even born, or because you had kid taste in your early gaming days, but there are worse things to complain at.
My first two video games that I had were Gran Turismo and Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Battle 22, so at my 6 years old or so I already had negative time of hundreds of nice jRPG gems LMAO.
And you know, if wouldn't hurt my ability to play more games if more of them were shorter.
From the article:
In 2024, a staggering 18,626 games were released on Steam, according to SteamDB, a website that tracks data on the popular PC platform. That’s an increase of around 93% from 2020, when 9,656 games were released.
By my count, if you don't sleep or eat and only play videogames you need every game to be about 30 minutes long on average.
I mean, it wouldn't hurt, but I'm gonna say it's not enough.
In all seriousness, I'm more concerned by the competition from social media and on demand video. I'm typing this, which isn't that interesting of an activity. Idling online is a huge time sink, and it's getting bigger.
Luckily sounds like they aren’t gutting Ghost Story Games, also owned by Take-Two. That’s the BioShock director’s new studio, they’re making a game called Judas. Looks very Bioshock-like.
Anyone who played Hollow Knight and knows Team Cherry does not need to read this article (but you might still have some fun reading some of the details!). The answer is exactly what you think it is - they are a small team and they made a new game as big as or bigger than the original Hollow Knight. There was never a dev hell moment. They just bit off a lot and never stopped chewing.
That’s straight up the behavior of a company that wants to create a monopoly. Buy up the smaller companies so the competitors can’t buy them up and then just shut those companies down so their products can’t compete with the existing money makers. The money they put into those studios for game development is just a charade to please the authorities. Cause if they would shut those companies down immediately after purchasing that would be undeniably anti-competitive behavior and illegal even in the US.
Which is exactly what I expected them to do. I laughed at Blizzard fans being hopeful about the acquisition because things didn’t go well at the time. It was always just another step towards closure.
Blizzard fans have a habit of believing Blizzard is still this small indie company with humble games like Starcraft, Lost Vikings, and Diablo, and that it’s just mean ol Activision making them do things like…
sigh
Have two to three whole expansions of Sylvanas Windrunner being not only the Warchief of the Horde, but for all intents and purposes being basically the main fucking character, complete with a writer who brought her previously killed off-boyfriend Nathanos, only as a self-insert.
Like I love Sylvanas, she was my favorite character, but Jesus fucking Christ that was cringe. Not only was it completely out of character for the Horde to give her leadership (Protip: The Forsaken aren’t trusted by anyone because they’re scary fucking zombies who do scary zombie shit, the Horde just figures they’re less dangerous as allies than enemies), but she continously forced the Horde to do horrible shit.
Now if the point was that Sylvanas was evil and the Horde’s mistrust of her was valid, I guess that’d work, but the way it was executed was more like “Look how cool Sylvanas is for doing all this edgy shit.”
I don’t know who the Warchief is now, I honestly don’t think they have any fucking Horde characters left to be Warchief given how often Horde leaders get killed off. Jesus Christ WoW’s story just completely shit itself after Legion.
I got off-topic, my point was Microsoft was never going to save Blizzard from Activision, because Activision isn’t holding Blizzard at gunpoint and forcing them to kill off Heroes Of The Storm, Steal female employees’ breast milk, or making Overwatch 2, Blizzard’s just not a cool company.
And these fuckers were trying to “celebrate” the Rare anniversary on social media recently like they didn’t just cancel Perfect Dark and have done nothing with any of the other properties in years.
So, how does this work? Were people actually developing a game that will never be seen? Or did they likely stop working on this years ago and just forgot to tell the world?
At the time it was announced, money was cheap to borrow, so a trailer like this came out when it was way too soon to let customers know about it but exactly the right time to entice new employees to work on your new project, so they were staffing up to make that game. They probably were working on it for the past four years; Avalanche hasn’t had a release since it was announced.
Well since there has been absolutely nothing revealed since, I can only guess and speculate. But I would say the most likely scenario is it was in active development hell.
Like, developers were working on it, but there were probably major problems that were holding them up. Perhaps they restarted development due to some factor. If the game was originally going to be a PvEvP looter shooter, for example, that plan may have changed after seeing the severe negative public reception to that genre (except for streamers). It may have been planned as a live service game but then Concord happened and developers decided to change everything because they were worried the same could happen to their game. Maybe some of the developers wanted a “realistic” depiction of the 1970s and other developers wanted a “sanitized” depiction and there was infighting preventing the game from progressing.
My point is, there are a lot of way that there could have been active development with no actual progress. But since nothing has been shown since the announcement trailer ( a render, not gameplay), I can say with some level of confidence that it likely had no meaningful progress in terms of gameplay development. Otherwise, we would have seen it. 4 years is a long time to spend with no updates just to be cancelled. If there was progress, the game should have been finished by 4 years.
Why would we have seen it? You normally don’t see anything until they’re gearing up for launch.
I think it’s more likely MS looked at their portfolio, looked at how much this was costing, and decided it didn’t fit what they were looking for for how much it was costing.
This is not to say it’s a good call, just that MS executives are pretty shit at game development analysis.
4 years of development and they didnt have anything to show except for a CG render? That is absolutely troubled development.
Are there any examples of games which have had 4 straight years of radios silence that have not had major development problems? I mean, Metroid Prime 4 had major issues and was restarted twice. Halo Infinite had major problems and that took 6 years. Scalebound was in development for 4 years before it was cancelled, and it obviously had very troubled development. At least Scalebound had some gameplay to show after it was in development for 2 years (it was cancelled 2 years later), Contraband didn’t even have that for all 4 years. That would indicate to me that the gameplay was not in a state that could be shown to the public. The developers could have been actively working on the game, but no meaningful progress was being made.
This was probably the right call from Microsoft. Though depending on the problems being had, they probably should have cancelled it sooner. It sucks for me to say that because I was interested in this game, but thats the reality of game development. Sometimes an impassable roadblock comes up and its not feasible to continue to fund the sinkhole for 10 years, sometimes its better to pack up and go around.
4 years of development and they didnt have anything to show except for a CG render?
Anything to show you. They aren’t beholden to you. The CG render was to get applications for jobs, not to sell the game. That happens when it’s almost done.
Are there any examples of games which have had 4 straight years of radios silence that have not had major development problems?
The vast majority! Game dev cycles are often 8+ years now, and you don’t hear anything from them until about a year before launch. You think about the canceled ones, but most of them that launch you just don’t consider, which is good. No news is good news, as the saying goes.
I’m still really looking forward to clockwork revolution. Hopefully that actually gets released but at this point it seems like almost everything Microsoft touches is doomed.
bloomberg.com
Aktywne