Oh no! Venture capital has moved to AI! (Anyways.) The article goes on to talk about humongous corporations making dubious decisions and toppling over themselves. Are we supposed to lament Ubisoft’s demise now?
Expedition 33 just came out of nowhere to great acclaim. Valve is hosting a thriving market & slowly but surely freeing PC gaming from Microsoft’s grip. SILK SONG IS DUE THIS YEAR MY FRIENDS. Everyone’s wishlist is as long as their backlog. The bar to entry for development has never been lower. Video gaming is an established medium at this point. A handful of corporative giants infected with a rotten management culture matters little. What essentially matters to me is for the creators out of a job to find new footing.
Even the Devs out of a job isn’t necessarily something you should concern yourself too much with.
Games development is a fairly privileged job to have and for the Devs working for big dubious companies…? Let’s not pretend like they didn’t know who they worked for, what they worked on and what the personal risks attached were.
I understand how you’d extend reproach to the employees of a bad business. I don’t feel it personally though. Solidarity for all workforce trumps it in my heart. Maybe it’s my family ties with active union members.
In gamedev particularly, a lot of creators get in there mainly because of their passion for the medium. Then they get chewed up by shit work conditions. Ultimately dream job type positions are especially vulnerable to abusive management.
We probably all have our own factors that go into determining whether or not someone deserves our sympathies.
And there’s definitely some circumstances where I’m more understanding. Like, Ubisoft as you mentioned. I have zero relation to their products nor the company it self. They’ve never really been on my radar. So I can’t speak to that.
But then we have something like Microsoft. A giant among giants in the corporate world. You don’t become a 3 trillion dollar company by playing by the book. And I understand why people would want MS on their resume, but I can’t understand wanting to work for them.
But that’s just a part of my little black book. I imagine you have your own, most people do.
It’s a privilege to work for a shitty mega corporation making substandard pay for the skills you have?! And those mega corps routinely buy up the small studios, so it’s not like people have to even seek out employment with them to end up working for them.
Working in entertainment is privileged. It’s not a job you just happen to end up with by accident. Most people are there because they want to be there.
And yes, the shitty mega corporations will use that against you. And yes, again, your small indie company can get purchased and suddenly your boss is the shitty mega corp. But you have a choice even then. Try to get out on your own terms or stick around until it’s time to cut the fat and get fired.
You can think I’m a dick all you want. I have my principles and I live by them. I have taken jobs most people don’t even know exist, because they can’t even imagine themselves in a position that would ever warrant something like it. And I’ve quit jobs for less than how game developers get treated. I don’t care what I do, I care about who I work for and how they treat the people around them.
Aren’t delays to video games good though? Less crunch and hopefully fewer bugs.
Also it being an industry always seemed wrong to me. If big corpos are dying off then that’s good. Video games shouldn’t be about soulless money grabs and ever increasing profits, they should be about art and making enough to live on.
I have fun popping into them every once and a while to play with friends, but it’s very rare for them to stick. Usually it’s a “Let’s play one or two matches” and then we go back to our usual thing
Yeah that’s probably the key. While I’m blessed in that I have friends in my life, I don’t really have any gamer friends so it’s also just me vs randoms in these scenarios
How is this news? This is always the case if a game has a public play test, even if the public play test isn’t open. There is always a play test with smaller exclusive group with a much newer version. And above that there is an even smaller group who plays the latest nightly builds, those play testers are in-house employees.
Would‘ve played the hell out of a new Team Fortress but I‘m completely burned out from MOBAs personally. Invite-Only is also something I deeply reject as a concept no matter the reason.
Kinda weird to be against invite only for an unreleased game. Even more so when signing up for a playtest is more or less similar except if youre not chosen then your out of luck.
At least with this you can literally find someone online and ask for an invite guaranteed.
It’s much better performance wise now, but you better have a good internet connection because at the first sign of a dropped package the whole thing breaks down…
You must have played in its early versions. I started playing since November of last year and it had been smooth and polished and only improved from there.
Its in alpha so I’d expect it to be buggy for a while. Performance for me is pretty much the same as it was a few months ago, but I never had any issues.
Performance is utterly trash atm until you win matches at which point your shifted to priority servers. It still suffers from incredible amount of cheaters tho
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