They are asking the impossible. If they refuse to take any risks on new titles they will not have breakout hits like they are wanting. They have enough studios that you can have some stinker releases that get offset by the surprise hits.
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.
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.
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.
This is my point exactly. Art should be accessible for both the artist and those that enjoy the art. In the current landscape too many artists is a terrible thing for most besides the ones who are already wealthy, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I see so many extremely talented and creative people who can’t afford to make art and are forced to waste their talents because they can’t survive as an artist. Good art takes a lot of time to create and only wealthy people have free time.
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.
To be fair though, this is about the easiest prediction you could possibly make. I don’t think anyone expects this thing to come in under $400 even in a world where there aren’t tariffs looming in the distance.
Wow. I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality. I’m devastated to hear that this publishing company is floundering.
I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality.
That didn’t make them good either, though. Companies like them and Devolver Digital have had a bad habit of, for lack of a better term, using up developers and throwing them to the curb after. You’ll notice that a lot of stuff they publish get marketed as though Annapurna made them, which ends up hiding the actual developers behind the curtain, thereby robbing them of fans and thus seriously hurting their long-term prospects.
That’s a great point. I suppose one could tell how healthy the relationship is between developer and publisher by looking at how many dev companies on the roster have created a second great game. Of course, that’s tough even with a great publisher, so maybe that’s not realistic.
They abandoned Linux support. Fuck them. It was one of the only games that did. Linux users were a bug part of their initial success, and they dumped us as soon as the money came in.
It’s on Bioware not EA. This is the third flop out of Bioware, and the post mortems for the past failures have all indicated that Bioware’s management has a dumpster fire for years, with EA often uncharacteristically serving as a voice of reason to protect them from their own mistakes. For example, it was EA that got them to include the flying in Anthem, the only fun part of the gameplay. Unfortunately, in the case of Andromeda and Dragon Age 4, EA’s mistake may have been giving Bioware’s management so much rope that they hung themselves.
bloomberg.com
Ważne