I’m really sad to watch this slow-motion train crash continue to play out. Subnautica 2 was a guaranteed hit thanks to the strength of the first game, and somehow the new studio owners have completely fucked that to pieces. Truly a masterclass in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
But why sell out? They had a guaranteed hit on their hands why did they need to sell the IP to a publisher and not just any publisher but one with a history of ruining good projects.
In addition, the company […] wants to be awarded all rights, title and interest in any intellectual property developed by Cleveland, McGuire, and Gill during their employment at Unknown Worlds, including “all movie scripts, movie footage, game design, game code, play tests, or other software development.”
That’s why if you are ever developing anything you never do it on company computers, it’s always on your own devices and on your own time. Yet time and time again supposedly smart people load up their side project on work computers.
They had one of the coolest games with a lot of faithful fans and they blew it all up by selling out to a shitty company that is focused on squeezing properties for more and more money.
The wildest thing to me about this whole thing is that the company says one of the three founders took company money to invest in a personal film project, but when you look into what film project they are referring to, it is an ad campaign for subnautica 2 that the company itself told him to make.
Sad to hear that company is not doing that great. Hyper Light Drifter is one of my favorite games. I never tried Hyper Light Breaker because of the mixed review and my having less time than usual to play games.
Mostly they bought or founded studios that didn’t produce a product. They bought the Killer Instinct devs, Double Helix, who mostly have now left and formed Quarter Up Games, working on the new Invincible Vs game. They put out a hero shooter called Crucible that launched and was quickly shut down. Their biggest success has been New World, which is a moderately successful MMO. They also forked CryEngine into Lumberyard, which found some favor in the market. Other than that, they’ve got some co-publishing deals, including for an upcoming Tomb Raider game, which may now be in jeopardy.
Its’s complicated, but basically, Amazon also spun off Lumberyard into the fully open source, O3DE engine.
I am not sure if they still hold any particular rights to anything exclusive to Lumberyard, but yeah, O3DE is basically Lumberyard from some years back, that got handed over to a non profit, and has since been developed by that non profit for… 5 ish years? More?
The other wild thing is that… somehow, Cloud Imperium / Chris Roberts of Star Citizen… also got a version of Lumberyard/Crytek, or something like that?.. Before Amazon then later spun it off as O3DE.
So… the crytek engine has very weird family tree, at this point.
gamedeveloper.com
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