They likely had some outlandish request or policy that was anathema to the department’s mission, and just assumed that they would cave. Seems like good leadership stuck to their principles, and the good leaders were followed by teams who weren’t willing to lose that.
If the owner is smart, they’ll backtrack, make concessions when hiring everyone back, and learn from their fuckup. In reality, I hope the new company that forms from the exodus finds fast success.
I’m not surprised over 80% were men. That aligns squarely with video gaming as a whole, as a mostly male dominated marked. But at the same time, I couldn’t help but notice that Nintendo forgot to ask this men between 20 and 40 years old whether they had children or were married. Just to put an anecdote out there, me and my cousins are all video game fans. We account as the ones who buy the most games in our family, but the entire family plays. I buy games for nieces and nephews. My cousins buy games and consoles for their own kids and for his wife. This is a big oversight to confound who buys the games with who is playing said games.
LOL, they say they’ll replace the staff and honor existing contracts. It’s gonna be shit quality. All their partners will be better off severing ties, reclaiming paid funds, and going with the new company that inevitably forms from the department previously known as Annapurna Interactive.
Company was ‘spending way more than we earn,’ CEO said in memo
It needs a genius to see that. All those contracts for timed exclusivity, all those games given for free. Most people just play free to play games on the platform and get the games for free. I thought the idea was to eat the cost and spend more money than to earn, so they can build a loyal customer base. If that wasn't the entire goal, what was it then? Why punish the staff (holy cow its 870 employees!) by cutting them off the company now? The store and launcher of Epic games already struggle to get better.
Unfortunately I can't read the article on Bloomberg, as it requires an account.
I’m guessing it was the goal but it didn’t work as well as they’d hoped. I’ve got a couple of the freebies but I’ve stuck mostly with Valve because most of my games are already on Steam and they haven’t seriously fucked up yet.
They made enticing incentives for developers and publishers, but what incentive would I have as a customer to buy a game from EGS rather than Steam or GOG or even Humble?
I’m guessing here because I don’t sit on Epic’s board of directors, but I would imagine their angle for consumers was mostly to grab new markets with the appeal of free games, which would also establish a library that would be a pain point if they ever wanted to move away, coupled with some of those one-year exclusives that would peel people away from Valve if they wanted to play them day-of.
But there are so many features built in to Steam that if even one or two of them are important to you, there's less of a reason to ever default to someone else doing the same thing but less so. Like with GOG, they don't match Steam feature for feature, but DRM-free and easy preservation of previous versions of games are good selling points that matter to people.
Epic would need to have a “import your games and achievements and saves from Steam” feature AND THEN ALSO have a much better performing app than they currently do, for me to convert. But years later and EGS is still a pretty awful user experience compared to Steam. There’s just no way.
For me, it’d also need a Linux compatibility layer on par with (or exceeding that of) Steam. On paper, I’m not a fan of Valve’s exclusive hold on that market, but in practice nothing has come close for me so far (that I know of, at least).
I tried Lutris and Wine, but I had difficulties getting stuff to run, and the fixes required patience and some level of technical understanding (of Wine, specifically, not just Linux in general). They just don’t have the same (comparatively simple) convenience of “check ProtonDB before you buy it, download game, run it, and usually it’ll work fine”.
The more advanced fixes usually involve nothing more than a few well-documented steps like copy/pasting a launch command, selecting something in a dropdown or downloading and extracting a file into some directory. It’s not a universal “It Just Works”, but I feel like it’s been getting better and better, and that’s just a headstart any competitor would have to work really hard to catch up with.
All these companies that are suddenly having layoffs and/or enshittifying everything at once all shared the same basic business model (pardon the Bronze Age meme format from Slashdot…):
Give goods or services away for free
Attract customers on the basis of getting goods or services for free
???
Profit!
Years of basically free debt service and stupid VC money let them kick the can down the road for a long time in terms of figuring out what Step 3 was gonna be, up to the point that many such services didn’t even bother, replacing both Steps 3 and 4 with “Sell to whichever FAANG is sucker enough to think they can leverage our userbase for their own product.” High interest rates have suddenly put a stop to the money party, though, and now they’re all scrambling to find ways of aggressively monetizing their services.
There’s plenty of jrpgs half that price point with twice the length though. Heck, even the previous GTAs have at least that length for a cheaper price, and are occasionally even cheaper now. Be patient and you’ll likely even get the game given away for free.
I’m lucky enough to own literally thousands of games. Most of which I get at a deep discount. Games like GTA and Red Dead are usually an exception where I’ll play on day one. Even though Rockstar tends to milk a title long after a release, the attention to detail is worth the price to me. I’ll still check reviews first however.
I’m trying to point out that i don’t think that the length of a game shouldn’t really be indicative of the price. I have no issue with him enjoying the game or buying it.
He was saying that £80 was worth it cause of the amount of hours. So i brought up games with similar or more hours that are cheaper. Including prior gta games…
I’m not saying that the game would’ve been kept off Eidos was still at SE, but I’m so tired of big corporations acquiring companies just for their IP while killing their projects and laying off their staff.
Embracer has a long history of acquisitions, and I am kind of wondering how long it will take until they decide to just “loan” out the IP they’ve bought instead of putting out any games at all.
The IP they bought was largely neglected in the first place, so I'm not sure there's much of a market for it. More likely they cast a large net with the properties they own, and the winners are the ones that survive the current economic conditions.
the thing is, cyberpunk 2077 released and did gangbusters (after perhaps the rockiest launch cycle in recent memory, but still. game sold well). Deus Ex taps into a lot of the same themes and aesthetics that got cyberpunk 2077 to sell well, it just seems like embracer doesn’t see it as a safe bet, and their definition of safe is informed heavily by their recent fuck-up with their sauid acquisition gambit. It’s a function of a bunch of executives with eyes bigger than their stomach and then having to ballast every possible IP they can manage in order to not ruin the shareholder value they’re working so hard to not shunt into the atmosphere.
Cyberpunk 2077 had the expectations of the Witcher 3 that a Deus Ex never had a prayer of catching, because at a macro level, those two games are not structured the same despite the shared DNA. Embracer probably doesn't see it as a safe bet, because it's not a safe bet in the current economic climate. Tomb Raider probably is. Gunfire Games is probably plenty safe in the wake of Remnant II, and I'm sure the developers of Titan Quest II, Alone in the Dark, Outcast: A New Beginning, and Tempest Rising are all hoping that fans of those genres are as hungry for the games they're making as possible, because it will likely take a Remnant-sized success to keep them safe from layoffs. In the meantime, they seem to be spared, because it's all hands on deck to make those games great before they release.
I am honestly not super sure about this strategy of buying your way into being a major publisher by vacuuming up IP nobody else was bidding for. What did they think would happen? Did they think the old majors were leaving a ton of money on the table and then realized too late that these really weren't that profitable? Or was it just a bid that the low interest rates would last forever and the portfolion would just pay for itself if they bundled it large enough?
I don't know what the business plan was meant to be, and it's kinda killing me that I don't fully grasp it.
Did they think the old majors were leaving a ton of money on the table and then realized too late that these really weren't that profitable?
It always struck me as Moneyball. That yes, the big publishers were leaving a ton of money on the table by not catering to customers that are there but have been long abandoned in favor of the true goliaths like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed. The way the big publishers used to operate was by making a lot of bets and then building on what worked while making other new bets. Instead, AAA portfolios went from dozens of games per year down to single digits. When you make a lot of bets, some of them inevitably won't work.
Or was it just a bid that the low interest rates would last forever and the portfolion would just pay for itself if they bundled it large enough?
Yes, not mutually exclusive with the above strategy, lol.
I imagine this is a mix of things. UE5 has officially been out for a while, their biggest competitor just offed themselves, Fortnite’s UE editor support is out and thus Fortnite probably doesn’t need as many devs now with UGC to pick up the slack, etc.
That’s still a huge chunk of people though. Wonder if all these financial gambles they’ve taken are starting to add up.
I don’t know what it costs Epic to grab all these “exclusives”, and I know lots of people (myself included) who just wait and get whatever it is on Steam anyway. It can’t cost nothing, and it doesn’t seem to be terribly good business.
Likewise, devs must make something when Epic offers a game for free (I think?).
It does seem to me like a deep-pockets game, and I’m not sure how deep Epic’s are anymore.
Epic bought a lot of companies over the last few years and they also rapidly grew. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games#Subsidiaries_and… They rapidly grew and bought up all these companies in the last 5 years and are now slimming down these ventures and focusing on what they want to do with them.
This game felt like it was written by 2 different groups of writers, who also hated each other. The first group wrote about a world where everything was dying and dark.
The second group was a PR team, who wrote about “wouldn’t it be fun to go camping!” And “the pirates and assassins are unambiguously good”.
I made a rule that I can’t spend over $10 on a game until I’ve played through my entire backlog. I haven’t bought a game over $10 in 10 years and I’ve spent $6k on Steam since I started using it.
There are very few games I would spend $80 on. Actually, at this point I don't buy a lot of new games to begin with, I'm mostly just grinding the same old favorites now.
But for the games I really care about, I'm willing to spend on games I know will be worth it to me. I've waited 22 years for a sequel to Kirby Air Ride and if I have to pay $80 for it, I will pay $80 for it.
There are a few franchises that still have me day 1 even if they went to that price point (The Witcher, Persona, Trails). Those are always 80 hours minimum, though.
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