I was part of the first big wave and they hard warned us maybe potentially there might perhaps be restructing and “resizing”. We agonized for months waiting to know if it was our teams or no, if we had to look (this was before Unity nosedived and buddy quit).
I’ve somehow survived all the firings and restructurings so far. It’s a shit show over here. I’m trying to get through a few more months then I’m off to another country to go back to school
The agonizing hasn’t stopped for me I’ve just gotten used to it as a part of my day to day. It’s wild what they’ve been putting us through we need to unionize
Is there something to be worried about here with the Unreal Engine being the only big business in town in terms of indie game development for 3d game engines?
I mean obviously yes, but how worried should we be of this becoming a bottleneck?
Godot has been making leaps and bounds. Obviously not close to UE, but if it maintains its rate of improvement, I can see it becoming a more and more common choice in the indie space over the next few years
Nah, it definitely is, in fact I have noticed a disconcerting number of indie games I REALLY like especially 3d games with physics engines are on the unreal engine.
I have always been a massive fan of at least the creative output of projects on the unreal engine, I don’t know much about the politics and details around how it is to actually create games on the unreal engine or anything though. I just don’t trust Epic honestly or whoever owns them now or rather I don’t trust the incentive structure… but yeah I wish the unreal engine success I am just asking how people see the state of similar engines in this moment.
Don’t forget their spectacular Arkham Knight port that was so good, it was delisted from Steam and Rocksteady had to come back and start the port over.
They do a lot of support work, but now and then they get out a project of their own. Rumbleverse was well regarded by its audience, but it was also like the 90th battle royale to come out, and it never stood a chance.
Iron Galaxy was semi-unique in that they basically existed as the company you go to when you need to contract out some support work. Think Bluepoint but the idea is that the end customer never realizes that this wasn’t made by a time traveling Rare from the 00s or whatever. Whereas they basically just stay afloat from a constant stream of low-medium price deals.
The leadership are dipshits and have made it a point to show it many times over the years (and Giant Bomb/Jeff Gerstmann have always done a great job of covering for them…) but it was a solid company that was pretty loved in the area and the industry (leadership aside).
So for IG to be going under is a REALLY bad sign for the health of the industry as a whole. Because this wasn’t “Hey, we have an excellent track record of new IPs and always release our games on time and under budget”. It is “Hey, we have an excellent track record of letting you sell more copies of a sure thing”.
Gee these men-children are going to be awfully sad when there’s no one left to make their games for them anymore and they have nothing left to do but face the shitty reality they’ve created.
All of those are due to the drastic increase in jobs during covid. This is happening in many, many tech related careers. It is not because of inclusivity. Get your head out of your ass.
That’s a factor, but it’s not the only reason, jackass. Look at the games that failed and how they were backed by activists, which led to studio closures.
Ubisoft is mostly subsidized in Quebec by taxpayers, and they have their lowest profits ever because of activists as well.
It’s because of their shitty horrible business practices, nobody wants to pay $100 for a rushed game and nobody wants to invest time into their 500th live service game that they’ll stop supporting in a year.
You would have to jump through a lot of hoops to conclude that activism makes you a bad game developer. If they’re exploiting their customers constantly to try to increase profit margins, they are more than likely exploiting their workers, who they have much more control over.
You’re telling me that a bland and generic Overwatch clone with character designs that were reductive to the groups they were supposed to represent failed because of activists? The games you listed didn’t fail because of activism, they failed because their “activism” was a marketing stunt instead of being actually progressive. There are plenty of games developed by people that care about those issues where they’re represented accurately and appropriately. Those games usually do well and win awards. Making a game where you meaninglessly and inaccurately pander to minority groups is not the result of activism, it’s trying to leech off of actual activism.
Um… Yes? You’re proving my own point based on what you just wrote.
The people that made Dustborn, Concord, etc, all wanted to push a narrative instead of making a good fun game.
Activists, woke people, etc, are more than welcome in the game industry… As long as they keep that shit to themselves. Leave that idiotic nonsense at home.
You get to work, you work to make a good product, and that’s it.
You’re missing the point of what I said. Concord and Dustborn did not try to send a message, they tried to get the profits they thought would come from associating with the message, and implemented it horribly. This is not activism. That would be like saying Instagram changing their logo to rainbow for a month is activism.
As for true activism, video games are both entertainment and an art form. Saying to “leave that shit at home” is missing the point of artistic mediums in their entirety.
Please point out where I implied that corporations got greedy “only now”. Hint: i said “since forever”, the implication is that they were always shit. Then again, can’t expect much from you.
It’s more about the messaging. The mere presence of a POC or trans character isn’t bothersome to most people. But when that character comes with dialogue lines that make the political messaging obvious, then they’re no longer a character that happens to be non-White or trans; they’re a political prop inserted into a game to send a political message, and that can be quite irksome when all you’re trying to do is play a fantasy RPG and escape from the world for a bit, even if you actually agree with the message.
Exactly. Don’t lecture us about being trans or etc.
We honestly don’t care. (Yes, a small percentage of people are actually bigots and hate gays/trans for being who they are). The rest of us just don’t want it shoved down our throats.
It’s like making a game and having the main character proclaiming: “look how straight I am! Wow I sure do love women! I’m so straight and anyone who isn’t should do pushups”.
And yet, from the downvoting here and everywhere else this comes up, it’s clear: some people can’t take nuanced opinions on topics like this. If you object in any capacity, you’re the worst possible objector.
A bad written character is a bad written character, their dialogue could be about candies and is still a bad written character. This argument is bullshit, bad case of confirmatory bias.
There are plenty of record breaking games that have released while the industry has been “filled with activists.” Many of them are even about politics, like Helldivers 2.
Just down vote and move on. She’s just a troll with no facts or figures, she just wants your attention that Daddy never gave her growing up. It was either the pole or the troll for her.
You don’t even want to look. You think games are failing just because or capitalism which is the dumbest, leftist excuse that you always all give when you don’t have the knowledge to see what’s truly happening.
Enjoy living in your angry little leftist bubble echo chamber.
Did you also know that marvel rivals, that somehow idiots think it’s woke earned 130 million in it’s first month. I mean that’s a whole other capitalism conversation but still.
I’m honestly surprised that Slack doesn’t have some kind of steganographic watermarking so that leaked screenshots can be traced back to the original user, given how many big companies use it for all their internal comms.
I did use slack; we had general channels with tons of people and smaller channels/meeting rooms with 5-30 people. If it was a 5-30 channel they can be found.
Ok well Im not an idiot, I have plenty of comms apps and that one died really quickly presumably because everyone’s experience was as boring and disjointed as mine
The techniques you’re thinking of are for documents sent by email or some such. You add innocuous whitespace or typos that are unique to each one, and send them individually. If one leaks, you can match it to the employee who received it. That doesn’t work for screenshots of Slack.
Well you could make it work, for example some random pattern in chat backgrounds that trace back to whoever is the user. That would still show up in a screenshot.
To be fair, Sweet Baby Inc. censoring shit is a real problem, whereas the “first gamergate” was mad about Baldur’s Gate having transpeople in it when according to the “real gamers”
The game takes place in the Middle Ages and they didn’t have transpeople back then!
Problem
Transpeople have existed since pre-history
Baldur’s Gate does not take place in the middle ages, but rather during modern day in an alternate dimension in a thriving multiverse
If transpeole existing is against the original vision of the game, then explain to me why the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity and Edwin/Edwina exist. Or did you never actually play Baldur’s Gate and just wanted to be part of an outrage machine?
I thought the first gamergate was about gatekeeping women away from games games journalism. Imagine getting mad at trans people existing in a game where shapeshifting monsters and magic exist.
It was, but Baldur’s Gate was the first game they had a beef with, and it was mostly because they made an Interquel to connect the first two games and one of the female characters was written out of character because a new writer NOT INVOLVED WITH THE ORIGINAL GAME OR ITS TEAM thought the old version of her was sexist and degrading…
The also included joke idle lines that referenced Gamergate and poked fun at it. “It’s all about bringing honor back to knighthood!” (ethics and journalism was the original quote)
While I do believe Gamergate did have some legitimate grievances and myself was part of the early movement (I was kicked out of a facebook group connected to it for “Being a fake girl gamer” who “Just pretends to like games to find a boyfriend”, which… kinda legitimized all the criticism flung its way for me)
The rewrite of the BG Character was a legitimate grievance, since it doesn’t matter how much you personally dislike how the character is written, you still need to be faithful to what came before it while working within the same continuity or you create a plot hole and alienate fans of the character.
However these two things were buried, because the introduction of a random NPC who could be asked about her background was a bigger outrage than these two things.
Other times Gamergate had a legitimate grievance -Game Journalists writing articles about liking Postal 2 as a game, but being in their words “being almost ashamed to admitting it” because it’s “Not politically correct enough”
-Kotaku writing articles that legitimately asked if beating a woman in a video game should legally be counted as rape
-Anita Sarkeesian blatantly lying in an effort to make a career out of demonizing video games like Jack Thompson before her (But as a Journalist instead of a Lawyer) (The lies are too numerous to list, but two that I caught her on personally was claiming that an oversexualized ad for Persona 4: Dancin’ All Night had been used as an official con badge for an event she was covering… It turned out to be a flier she attached to her Con ID just for the outrage machine… and there was a time she wrote off the Hitman franchise for being sexist as she claimed it “encouraged violence against women”, when in reality, the game actively penalizes you for doing anything but taking out your target as silently as possible, with as little collateral damage as possible, and the targets… while I’m not 100% comfortable saying they’re exclusively male, I legitimately can’t think of any female targets off the top of my head, and even then Hitman Targets typically have a backstory showing why they deserve a death from Agent 47 usually involving them making a decision that was financially profitable for them but cost the life of another)
Other times they did not have a legitimate grievance
-Lesbians exist! (Outer Worlds)
-Black people exist! (World of Warcraft)
-Fat people exist! (World of Warcraft)
-Visual Novels exist! (Oh don’t get them fucking started on Depression Quest, a game that literally doesn’t cost anything)
-Female Video Game Developers Exist!
-Transpeople exist! (Hogwarts Legacy, Baldur’s Gate, Guilty Gear, and for some reason the unreleased Fable reboot was accused of having, without evidence a trans protagonist… even though it’s a series largely based in customizing your own hero and deciding their moral compass)
-Female Ratchet’s boobs aren’t big enough, and she was designed by a transguy
-The New Fable has a protagonist that isn’t even implied to be trans, but they’re convinced she is
-There’s a trans character in anything
-Gail Simone doesn’t like being mansplained to about comic books she literally fucking wrote.
-One of two Optional Lead characters of an Assassin’s Creed game is female! (Which is even funnier considering it was accused of being an executive mandate… When interviews revealed that they originally wanted the game to ONLY have the female character, and her male rival who can ALSO be chosen as a player character… was the one added by Executive Mandate)
-Mortal Kombat isn’t sexy enough because the women have actual designs instead of just wearing underwear, even though they’re still just wearing underwear… and the original designs are literally unlockable (Even for this group I still don’t get it)
-Homosexuals exist (Mortal Kombat X - This one killed me because Kung Jin has one line that hints at him being gay and it’s so subtle I figured it was talking about a girl, the writer had to clarify… Yet people immediately screamed Kung jin was “rubbing the LGBT Lifestyle in people’s faces!”… This game literally has a scene in which an evil necromancer is being held hostage by the US Military to prevent the return of an Elder God who has threatened revenge on the Guardian Deity of Earth… that itself is interrupted by Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade complaining to each other about their failed marriage… meaning the HETEROSEXUAL UNION IS THE ONE BEING SHOVED IN MY FACE!)
-A black guy doesn’t like slavery (Mortal Kombat 11, no seriously they whined about Jax canonically disagreeing with America’s Institution of Slavery)
-Women with facial hair exist! (Horizon Zero Dawn)
-People called the movement’s founder anti-semetic and homophobic despite him being a gay jew… A gay jew that is constnatly saying homophobic and anti-semetic shit and claims to either be Catholic or Jewish depending on which suits him better, claimed to be married to a black man who is oddly absent from his life, and then “divorced him” and became an “ex-gay”
AND THE LIST GOES ON
Basically, GamerGate had SOME legitimate concerns, but, their bad takes far outnumbered the good takes and were mostly just “MINORITY IS IN A THING, THAT’S BAD!”, which hurt any legitimate cause they may have had, and makes it obvious the real goal was to push gamers to the Far Right
Sidenote: To whom it may concern, I actually hated when they made Bridget a transgirl in Guilty Gear. I mean Transpeople are based, but… given that her backstory is basically “Anime John Money Experience”, it rubs me entirely the wrong way and I liked her “femboi” incarnation a lot better. IT would have been cooler if her unnamed sibling in an ironic twist, turned out to be a transgirl, if they really wanted to appeal to Transgender Bridget fans. Having Bridget herself be trans is very uncomfortable when you remember that she was raised as a girl, told she was a girl, and made to present as such solely to try to fool the concept of fate.
“This employee took screenshots of ABK wide discussions about the safety of our protected information (like name changes and visa statuses) and sent them to an an extremely racist, sexist, and transphobic individual on Twitter who has over a 100 thousand followers,” they added.
Like really? Concord went bust because of woke? It can’t be an overused genre and a bad game? It has to be “wokeism”?
Like, please think.
And ask for marvel rivals I think you’re confusing that with multiverse.
Edit: like I’m not even against a game that is just trad wives and big tits or whatever, it’s up to the customer if they want to buy that. And if they do there will be a market for it.
Edit 2: didn’t notice the poster deleted his comment, here it is:
“What happened to Concord? And what happened to Marvel Rivals?”
Seems to me like names were censored in the released slack screenshots (except the CEO). Were there uncensored screenshots that I missed or that were deleted?
Easy there, I’m already planning on not buying it, just like I’m sure plenty of others are planning not to. Just need to get the word out that the company isn’t one to buy from.
They are not doing anything wrong, dipshit. What is the horrific thing they are doing? Protecting trans colleagues? Protecting people of color they work with? Just because your fuhrer wants a white straight male environment, does not mean everyone else does. Go outside for once in your life. Maybe you will gain some empathy for your fellow humans.
Being left wing is not wrong, just like being right wing isn’t wrong. Further more, nothing wrong with customers being more informed about the company they’re buying from.
What, are you upset that the multinational corporation might lose out on a few sales?
Lol, yes it is, you brainrotted simpleton. Your continued attempts at normalizing psychotic behavior under the auspices of consumer protection proves as much.
Go do a few cartwheels through a busy intersection, chud.
Activision is a lefty company with a lefty culture. Dear fucking lord, that has to be one of the worst takes I’ve read on lemmy. What’s next, Mark Zuckerberg is a deep cover lefty librul?
As depressing as it is to ask, I feel I should kick off the brainstorm: Given that this personal information has been doxxed, is there anything that individuals could do to help the affected developers in any way?
gamedeveloper.com
Aktywne