According to the wiki page… “In May 2024, Take-Two announced it would shut down Intercept Games but continue to update Kerbal Space Program 2 under the Private Division label.”
I wonder how will they manage that logistically. They are firing every single developer from IG. Who exactly in Private Division is going to be doing the updating? I suspect they will just brush a little of the code that is ready, then completely abandon the product in a year or so.
Warner bros has no idea how to media anymore. They forgot about looney tunes characters. They cancel their movies after shooting before release. They do t make dlc for games that sold like hotcakes. All they did was patent the nemesis system. what the fuck are they doing?
im super on the fuck unity train right now but like, real normal people work there that need employ and have families to support. I hope unity changes course due to public sentiment but i don’t really think that death threats forcing an office closed are going to be the way to invite that change
I think it’s more the “find employment” thing, not the “piece of shit” thing. Tech companies have been doing massive layoffs recently so the market is flooded with people looking for jobs when fewer places are hiring.
Tech companies have been doing massive layoffs recently
A. Sort of big, not recession-inducing.
B. Intentionally done by the larger companies to price-fix the tight job market so they don’t have to pay so much.
I hope they do. But for now I’d rather them not all lose work overnight, nor do I want all of the indie devs getting blindsided by these changes to unity to have to give up on, port, or delist their projects. I want unity to change for the better more than I want them to crash and burn. But I do think this will serve as an awakening for some segments of the industry to not put all their eggs in one basket with a company as greedy as unity. I hope Godot takes off in use, or Epic keeps using fortnite money to make unreal an attractive development platform and continues to be a good steward of it. That’s wishful thinking though, given the current state of unity lol
The investigation found that Barrett called lower-level female employees attractive, asked them to play truth-or-dare and made references to his wealth and power within the studio, suggesting that he could help advance their careers, according to two people familiar with the case.
In a statement to Bloomberg News, Barrett said that throughout nearly 25 years at Bungie, “I feel that I have always conducted myself with integrity and been respectful and supportive of my colleagues, many of whom I consider my closest friends. I never understood my communications to be unwanted and I would have never thought they could possibly have made anyone feel uncomfortable. If anyone ever felt that way about their interaction with me, I am truly sorry.”
Uh…
That might hold water if it was just casual flirting (though you should seriously be trained at any company near that scale that even that with anyone in your “chain of command” puts them in a really bad spot). But not for (alleged) open quid pro quo.
Seriously, I just finished my annual “preventing harassment’ training and there’s a whole section on power differential and how just asking puts employees in a bad spot. Just…don’t.
It’s one thing to say “your hair looks nice today, Susan.” I don’t think 99% of people would take that as anything beyond an innocent compliment.
Asking to play truth or dare is another thing entirely, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the guy saying that, probably isn’t going to just be complimenting Tina’s earrings
Ahh fuck, stuff being published by them was usually a decent sign that it'd be interesting in some way. Best of luck to the actual team, I hope they can put something new together
$200M ain’t no pocket change. One would hope such high-profile failures as this or Avengers would curb execs enthusiasm for live service games, but I’m not holding my breath.
The article even cites all of the similar flops prior to Suicide Squad not deterring leadership on their plan for Suicide Squad. Someone else out there is still making that same mistake. Like Bungie with Marathon, for example.
Sucks for the low level employees losing their jobs, but I can’t possibly feel bad about Epic losing money. Garbage company that needs to lose their grip on the industry after the shit they pulled with Epic Game Store and buying up games/studios just to delist their games from Steam, axe the Linux support, and make them exclusives on the worst platform in gaming.
Of course the companies pin the graphics as a culprit. Otherwise they would have to admit the mismanagement is the reason they burn through millions of dollars. Mismanagement brings with it another aspect the author did not mention: stress and burnout. Either working too hard, or spinning wheels doing nothing is pure poison to a creative person. Constant direction changes, lack of clear communication, never knowing whether you did well or are on the verge of being laid off - all these make people work harder but output less/worse quality assets.
Wow, this guy has serious punchable face energy. It’s not even that interesting, the leakers he catches (or at least the only ones he talks about) are really dumb (one is a child who data mined!).
yep, ‘tis the way of the ceo. being so delightfully out of touch that you make the shittiest decisions possible just for your quarterly profits to be marginally higher
In general, he made decisions to attempt to buy the market rather than have the best services/console.
I'm not sure if MS is going to go the good route, but they have said that their acquisitions won't be console exclusives. I've understood that consoles lose money. Selling games is where you make it. Why limit your games to a single console? We're unlikely to see incredible dominance of a console in the future. You'd just be limiting your consumer base
MS has indicated that they will honor contracts and some promises were made to get their acquisitions through.
But everything has either been vague or outright said will be console exclusive. Bethesda is the earliest example of this, and we’ll probably see more later.
PS mostly makes their console exclusives in house. Even Spider-Man (the prime example people point to) was always intended to be console exclusive by Marvel and is only as good as it is because of Playstation funding.
The point of first party exclusives is to make money from your store long term. If they make their first party titles available on other platforms, fewer people would buy a PlayStation, which means less long term royalties from store sales.
So you limit the customer base for your first party titles, but ideally you make a ton more on your store fees. That’s the same reason Valve makes first party titles, to get people on Steam, not to make money from game sales.
What they should do is make a handheld that can play PS4 titles. That attracts a different demographic and keeps control of the store royalties. But they really need to make sure it works well, since it’ll be competing with the Switch and Steam Deck (and similar handheld PCs).
Uncharted 2, from Sony Group Corp’s Naughty Dog, was released in 2009 and had a budget of $20 million. The studio’s latest game, The Last of Us: Part 2, cost more than $200 million.
So, uh…why can’t we do that anymore? Even if you account for salary increases and avoiding crunch and such, $40M-$50M for a game as good as Uncharted 2 sounds great!
Because graphics still sell games. You can do simplified graphics like Nintendo and still sell games, but lots of people want the photo realistic experience and the bar for that has gone way way up incrementally over the years.
I think we’re seeing that that’s no longer true. Minecraft is the best-selling game ever, for instance. If you want to build the photo realistic experience, maybe aim for a smaller scope of video game, like the more linear action games we used to get, because otherwise, the industry ends up in the state it’s in.
Yeah, maybe I’m just wrong in general … The above doesn’t look that different from say black ops 6 footage.
I definitely wish for a return to the linear format (or simi linear where there are a few concurrent linear quests going on). I think straight up open world just lends itself to making a lot of walking simulators.
Halo Infinity was one of the most boring games I ever played between the weapons sounding like toys and the spread out objectives with no clear central mission.
I don’t think you’re necessarily wrong on this. Part of the problem is new IPs are risky, and I’m sure market research is telling the big publishers that you’d better not suddenly downgrade your graphics on an established property. Nintendo’s very comfortable in this space because they haven’t really gone this route with first party. They’ve even managed to thread the needle on Mario, Metroid, and Zelda by having both 2D and 3D offerings.
Nintendo is in a very envious spot in general. Hell, I think Nintendo makes some great games, I just wish they wouldn’t force me to buy yet another computer solely for the purpose of playing their games. I haven’t owned a Mario Kart or Zelda game in years but I’d love to play if I could do so on PC/Linux.
Uncharted and Last of Us are first party Sony games. If they were to say that a game can still be enjoyable without cutting edge graphics no one would want to buy the latest PlayStation iteration.
I think they’re already running out of people who want to buy the latest PlayStation, and Sony clearly can’t afford to throw hundreds of millions of dollars after this level of graphics anymore, because it’s not resulting in equivalent growth of console sales to make up for it.
I am a pc gamer and I have the latest-ish video card. I got an expensive card so that I can play any game, but really don’t consider graphics much anymore. You are correct, some people still chase that aspect of video gaming. I think if you have been around for a while, that desire fades. I have lots of low res games these days.
Also a PC gamer and I’ve discovered as I’ve aged, CPU has been more of a bottleneck for me than GPU. Games like Factorio or Path of Exile need a powerful CPU, but their graphics are secondary at best.
Same here. My favorite game is Kerbal Space Program, and the graphics look like they are straight out of the early 2000s, but even with a 12 core CPU I still get crazy lag during explosions, staging, and other physics interactions. Transitioning from "on rails" flight to actually modelling physics when within a few km of something else has also not ever been smooth.
There are plenty of games that don’t do high-end graphics and are still very good, even games that look intentionally low res/quality like Valheim did very well.
Graphics are only really a thing for games that aim for realistic visuals in the first place, but even then it doesn’t need to be so overly high in visual fidelity and pushing better graphics every time. The average gamer isn’t going to care about being able to see reflected objects in windows that you can see in the reflections of puddles, or that a leaf from a tree has a diffused shadow 300 meters away. Yet a lot of these big studios are pushing this tech and stuffing it in their games.
Not saying that’s a bad development, but they’re creating a lot of these budget problems for themselves by setting bars so insanely high and focusing on side-stuff that only increase the scope of the project. Where small indi developers create masterpieces on a budget barely a percentage of what those corporations are throwing at their projects.
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