Rollerdrome was very solid concept but the difficulty curve was pretty intense. One second you feel like you have the hang of it the next you can’t get to the next arena.
Yeah I absolutely adored the concept and would love.to see it picked up. I discovered it after pitching to a friend Tony Hawk’s Borderlands 4 and gradually realising the proof of concept existed.
Hey, at least that game came out. Plus Eidos Montreal also made the actually really, really damn good Guardians of the Galaxy game nobody played. I'd make that trade.
Man, these guys really can't catch a break. That sucks, they make pretty solid stuff.
Well, it depends on when they cancelled it and on how much it cost. That thing didn't sell THAT poorly, but Square, as usual, was aiming way above what's realistic. Estimates on Steam alone put it above 1 million copies sold. You can assume PS5 was at least as good.
Based on those same estimates it actually outsold Guardians. Which is an absolute travesty and I blame anyone who hasn't played it personally.
Well, then you're my enemy, because that game is great, Marvel connection or not. In fact it's a fantastic companion piece ot the third Guardians movie, because they're both really good at their respective medium but they are pushing radically oppposite worldviews (one is a Christian parable, the other a humanist rejection of religious alienation).
And yeah, holy crap, they made a Marvel game about grief and loss and managing them without turning to religion and bigotry and it was awesome and beautiful and nobody played it and you all suck.
Nah, I'm mostly kidding. About the being my enemy part. The game is, in fact, awesome, and you should fetch it somewhere before the absolute nightmare of licensed music and Disney IP bundled within it makes it unsellable on any digital platform forever.
Seriously, I bought a physical copy of the console version just for preservation, beause if you want to know what will be in the overprized "hidden gem" lists of game collectors in thirty years, it's that.
Some day my Marvel fatigue will have worn off, and I'll be in the mood for it. If it's still for sale, I'll buy it. If not, maybe I'll pirate it. I'm glad they made a good game; it just wasn't a game I was looking for when it came out, and I don't think I'm alone. If you want to see this cycle happen again in real time, keep an eye on Suicide Squad over the next few weeks.
Oh, big difference there, though. Suicide Squad actually IS a looter shooter driven by a wish to chase a business trend from five years to a decade ago. Guardians is a strictly single player Mass Effect-lite narrative action game (which yeah, given the material that fits).
I'd be with you in the argument that it would have been an even better game without the Marvel license, because then they could have skipped trying to rehash bits from the movies' look and feel, which are consistently the worst parts of the game. But then, without the license it would never have been made, so... make mine Marvel, I guess. Well worth it.
Oh, sorry, I meant the Avengers cycle, since that article I linked was about a combined loss between the two games, but really...Avengers was the more expensive game and did the brand damage. Suicide Squad will be that again, even though WB had several years to see this coming.
Oh, yeah, for sure. The marketing they did for Guardians was also very bad, it really made it seem of a kind with Avengers, which it really wasn't.
There will be a lot to say about why Rocksteady is getting to the looter shooter space so late and why it was the exact wrong move for the studio and the franchise. Unless the game is great and everybody buys it, I suppose.
I might recommend going and taking a look at Andor. It is IN Star Wars, but it is not Star Wars. It felt like Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, but better pacing.
I’ve been 10 years in the industry and honestly. This feels familiar. I feel like there was mass layoffs about 4+ years ago. There was also the Boston Games collapse around 2013. I’ve been told this industry has a very direct pattern. Expand, contract, expand, contract. What you want to do is to get into it when it’s expanding and hope by the time it contracts you have enough experience to be vital to a project.
And before that in the big 2008 crisis, sure. And, to put forth a silver lining, layoffs tends to get a lot of press and happen all at once, while people start new projects and get new jobs all the time without making headlines.
It still sucks to see social media erupt in lost job notifications every so often, though.
I think this time bothers me more because... well, there isn't much reason for it. Mostly everything blew up during the pandemic, a lot of money was made and now things are going back to baseline. But public companies will NEVER report they're shrinking if they can help it, and if they do they will try to appear to be becoming cheaper to compensate, so the obvious call is to let go of a bunch of people you were mostly hoarding anwyay.
The takeaway here, if you ask me, is to never have loyatly for an employer, at least when it comes to moving on to a different job or ask for better conditions. This sort of thing happens all the time and especially publicly traded companies will not hesitate to cut you loose if it makes business sense. You have less leverage, so the thing to do is a) bargain collectively to get more of that leverage, and b) treat your labour negotiations with the company with the same business sense they do.
In the meantime, I still recommend hugging a developer. Patting lightly the back of the head could also be acceptable. Just ask for a preference first.
Loyalty to a company is silly. A lot of people in games learn that quickly in their career because they want to go work for some huge name-brand company that they grew up with just for them to either harshly reject or if they actually get the job, they end up in a crunch cycle trying to prove themselves.
That said people do have loyalty, to other people and to projects. People are passionate about working with people they like and on projects they care about. You only get to make like 20-30 games in your career. Even then that includes all the games that didn’t release. It only really allows for 2-3 years per game whereas lots of games are 5+ years. Projects and people matter a lot and it’s important to not just chase money. Otherwise, you end up working at Google Stadia or Amazon.
Well, yeah, but that bit comes in between the buisness bits. Most managers do care about the people working there, too, but ultimately that will not drive the decisionmaking when it comes to the business, paritcularly in public companies with an obligation to shareholders. It's only fair to reciprocate.
So absolutely be loyal to your team and your project, but never at the expense of your working conditions or compensation.
That's one of the reasons why collective bargaining is important. Short of having representation, like they do on the film business, you want to compartimentalize somehow, and having a designated representative to negottiate with everybody else behind them is a way to get there.
I’d say it’s suspiciously-timed. My guess is Unity were tired of the shit PR, then tried to flip things around and use this to cast themselves as the victim. So I’m taking this one with about a planet’s worth of salt.
Given current events, it seems very plausible to me they got at least one - but let’s not pretend it means the backlash is all wrong and we should start giving up all indie revenue to the great lord engine provider.
At first, Larian had planned to continue working with Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast division on Dungeons & Dragons, but Vincke said he and his team spent a few months working on a new project before realizing they weren’t feeling the excitement they once did. “Conceptually, all of the ingredients for a really cool game were there except the hearts of the developers,” he said. They abandoned that game last year and pivoted to Divinity, a franchise that Larian also happens to own.
It’s crazy they have the finances to be working on a D&D franchise game and decide “…Nah. Let’s do something else.”
They recently switched to a new engine…
Uh oh.
I know folks like to hate on Unity, and Borderlands 3. Rightfully so. But let me list out some “in house engine” releases:
Cyberpunk 2077, which Nvidia backing
Mass Effect Andromeda, after previously being Unreal
Starfield
Paradox Grand Strategy, like Stellaris
A “smaller studio” example, Distant Worlds 2
All these drug their developers through hell, and we’re still technical messes at release. And after.
Now let’s look at some others:
KCD2: CryEngine
Expedition 33: Unreal
Black Myth Wukong: Unreal
Stray: Unreal
As a “smaller studio” example, Satisfactory: Unreal
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are just too many things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
So what I hope this means is Larian moving to CryEngine or something like that, and not making something from scratch. But if they’re talking about early access so soon, I bet they licensed another engine.
They said very little about what that new engine entails, but much like Starfield, I suspect it’s largely reusing their old engine and only remaking select parts of it. Larian is doing something in the RPG space that, to me, makes nearly all of their competitors feel outdated, and it makes sense to me to make their own engine to do that as efficiently as possible. To make one of their games in an off the shelf engine like Unreal, with all of the bespoke physics objects and the ways every entity interacts with spells, elements, and other effects, could easily result in huge performance costs above and beyond what we saw in Act 3 of BG3.
I’m utterly terrified of them pulling an Andromeda/2077 and getting stuck in dev hell trying to debug the new engine bits instead of actually building the game. This is the advantage of prebuilt engines: someone else has already one all the hardware support/optimization and contemporary architecture stuff for you.
I’m less afraid of them pulling a Starfield, I suppose. The “divinity engine” in BG3 already runs okay. It’s not sleek like CryEngine KCD2, but it doesn’t feel janky or dated either, and even the mildest refresh over BG3 would be fine.
Much less is determined by engine than the average person thinks. Andromeda wasn’t a new engine; it was an engine that was made to make Battlefield games that then had to be used to make action RPGs and racing games after the fact. Capcom made an engine for the games they had in mind 10 years ago, and it’s fantastic at Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and even serving as an emulation wrapper, but it’s showing cracks under the support for open world games that they added more recently. Larian’s engine is made to support the systems driven RPGs they conceptualized in the early 2010s, and there’s little chance some other engine will do it just as well or better without plenty of custom code anyway. Ask Digital Foundry about all of the “optimization” Unreal 5 has done for developers already.
If they can shoehorn in something akin to KCD2’s or Satisfactory’s Global Illumination, but keep their dev workflows and existing systems in place, that’d be perfect.
From the other Larian article in this community, it seems their engine improvements are largely things that they claim will allow them to iterate on ideas faster, like going right from mocap to a usable animation more quickly.
I truly love that Larian leadership frames everything they talk about around devs and their needs/wants. Another D&D game? “Oh, that’s great and all, but our devs hearts weren’t in it so we dropped it like a rock.” New engine? They ramble about improvements to dev workflows. It is so obviously a top priority.
Keep in mind that also comes with Vincke championing AI, and though he says no genAI assets will make it to the final product, there’s still some dissent. Here’s hoping though.
Well that can be reasonable. Obviously don’t vibe code an engine, but LLMs are great for basic code autocomplete, or quick utility scripts, things like that.
Really specialized AI (not LLMs/GenAI) can be great at, say, turning raw mocap into character animations. Or turning artist sketches into 3D models. Cogs in their pipeline, so to speak, which has nothing to do with GenAI slop making it into a final product.
The line is very fine though, and most in the business world skew to the side of pushing slop.
I think very little about AI compared to most people, for or against, but it largely seems to me like a solution in search of a problem, and it’s very cult-like how many CEOs get on board with it so quickly despite its very public lack of actually good results. On paper, the way Vincke describes their use of it sounds fine to me, but hopefully he’s not doing something so idiotic as to mandate its usage, as is happening at workplaces for friends of mine right now.
“Mandate its usage” could mean the motion cap/animation people have to learn some kind of automation tool, that’s now part of the engine.
That’s fine.
And that’s very different from the “you MUST make X hits to Microsoft Copilot” type garbage that’s so common now.
I’m harping on this because I’m afraid Larian will try something reasonable, yet get immense, unwarranted backlash (both internally and publically) because of other workers’ experiences with enshittified ML. And how politicized “AI” is becoming.
Machine learning is not bad. Tech Bro evangelism and the virus they spread among executives, is. And I don’t want the garbage they sell to poison tools studios like Larian could use to get ahead of AAA publishers.
Hasbro could have done nothing and made a bunch of money, but they chose temporary short term gains. Baldur’s Gate 4 will arrive far sooner than you think, and it will be terrible.
WTF. That’s awful, and also totally baffling. “This single game is responsible for a huge chunk of revenue and introducting countless people to D&D; let’s lay off its staff and leadership.”
Baldur’s Gate 4 will arrive far sooner than you think, and it will be terrible.
What do you mean by this? An outsourced spinoff is already in the works? I don’t see that in the linked article.
Nothing has been announced as far as Baldur’s Gate 4 goes yet. It looks like Hasbro is being a little bit smart and are going to try and make (“make”) a handful of other smaller games, like the recent Warlock game announcement.
But at some point Baldur’s Gate 4 will be announced, but Hasbro isn’t going to be willing to invest properly into it in order to make a good game.
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are just too many things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
Larian’s track record is good. They used an in-house engine for Divinity: Original Sin, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and Baldur’s Gate 3. They also made their own game engine for their older Divinity titles (Divine Divinity and Beyond Divinity). And Vincke attributes at least part of their success to using in-house tools instead of “off the shelf” engines.
The problem they describe will self-correct; the “market” will drive that. But it might not be pretty. The things below are already happening, but will be further instigated:
New AAA non-franchise titles will be less common because return is less likely amongst the sea of new games coming out. Investors will continue to gamble on them, but they’ll be fewer and further between.
Mid-budget AA games not in a niche will disappear. You’ll still have your city builders, your milsim squad shooters, your competitive RTS games, but you won’t be seeing many new AA action platformers, multiplayer CoD style shooters, block puzzlers, adventure RPGs, etc. They’ll either be bare budget / indie or mega budget.
You’ll see dev cost continue to be driven down to mitigate this risk, making quality suffer. Asset flips, AI, and outsourcing will increase for most studios that don’t get recurring revenue from live service games.
Indies will continue to be random breakout hits, but their studios will die fast because followups to their breakouts often drown in the sea too.
Being an employee in the industry will probably mean jumping from company to company where you might only stick around for 1 - 2 titles before a major layoff. Contracting will get more common.
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.
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