Companies like Embracer are a disease. Their leadership are taking any passion out of the art, and continue running the money printing machine with no oil between the gears
What I love most about Godot is that it doesn’t give a fuck whether you want to use python-like code or write your own libraries in C#/C++. 10 minutes and you’ve got something working.
I can’t even imagine how that backend must look, 🤣 I work 100% in GDscript, but it’s really cool to hear : “Yeah it’s about 30% GDscript and 70% C++”
Coming from Java, I personally love how signals work between classes. Friggin hated my getters and setters, and the way signals work in Godot is just like how my brain thinks about that problem, so very easy to use and understandable.
Literally the only property of Eidos that I care about, and it was bad enough that the studio wasted so much time on that garbage avengers game rather than finish the deus ex story they left hanging.
It’s always been a race to gobble up the handful of whales that keep the mobile game industry alive. Now add hundreds more desktop and console games to that list. Sure, there are lots of people that will happily spend thousands of dollars on any shitty game, but once you’ve got the entire industry spending billions fighting over those players, the well runs dry eventually.
Underrated comment honestly. That’s nailed on the head, greed drove billions in investments to compete for whales and now it looks like a wasteland…compounded by the fact that the whales were always unsustainable users in the first place. Sometimes rich people were whales but the majority of the time they were users who didn’t have a pot to piss in, in the first place.
I really hope these developers create new independent studios and if they ever get offered a big bag of money, they will remember what happened last time. Maybe they will be smart enough to create worker owned studios and not waste huge salaries on useless CEOs.
Don’t know if I would. Never had such an offer, never will.
I’m not very invested in the game/game studio culture but boiled down it gets to either a private owner or a board of directors deciding if it is the right moment to cash out.
The major share holder of a game studio, with a major success on its portfolio, already working on other projects, decided he wanted to move away from it as the day to day work had become too demanding and made his part of the studio available for purchase, in fact cashing out on a very large sum of money.
I really can’t see where that is “apples to oranges”, concerning the current debate on studios being bought out and shut down on the turn of a dime.
Are game studios some separate entity that exist exempt of the at work business logic or human nature? Studios are companies created to generate profit for its founders, that will most likely take the opportunity to cash out when presented.
By contrast, independent authors/creators are becoming a growing force to be respected - which is very good - but will such authors be immune to selling their work for a high offer their work if such opportunity presents itself? Hopefully, they will, but I won’t bet on it, neither for nor against.
If I ever run a successful company, I am never taking it public, and I hope that I will never accept a sum of money that more than doubles our assets.
I’ve worked in the startup world and seen too many companies fail in all but name when they receive investment money. It really sucks the soul out of a company.
I wish more people would create worker owned cooperatives. They might be more resilient and might even be more productive. Of cause the downside is that they don’t make one person very rich.
Right, because a healthy business consists of a sort of zombie corpse leech, not a symbiosis.
The little diner down the street where everyone has a good time every day? That’s not a healthy business.
It is very important that we twist the definition of every word to ensure people understand how bad capitalism is. Language and the ability to think is secondary to the great Revolution Take 25!
They want to ensure their business is working well, so they shutdown the parts that were working well, and left those that are failing miserably. Logic checks out
FO5 is going to be a FO76 tier disaster. With the show there has to be a ton of pressure to crank something out the door. Microsoft’s folks are probably beating down Todd’s door. Bethesda has never really understood the series anyways.
If TES6 comes out, it’ll have 3 skills and ignore all established lore to turn an interesting and nuanced character into Bad Guy who wants to destroy the world for no reason. Admittedly normies really like this version of the series, so maybe it’ll still be wildly successful.
Which leads to less money. I’d prefer a few failed games and the industry learns. Fun games sell, it microtransaction nor half baked shovelware. Some strike it lucky with micro transactions, but only if the game is good.
I know. I’m personally looking forward to WB declaring bankruptcy now that the morons have announced they’re doubling down on shitservice despite Hogwarts and Shiticide Squad showing what the public actually wants.
More that there’s only so much you can do with a looter shooter. Sure you can dress it up but you’re always endlessly shooting bad guys and occasionally collecting things and putting them places. They didn’t help themselves by sticking weapon crafting unlocks behind forcing you to do the daily bullshit over and over hoping to get 5 goddamn red borders to shred so you could continue to grind until you finally had a version that you cared about when in reality you probably already got the roll you wanted before you even unlocked the pattern.
OK yeah maybe destiny does suck now and I wish it was season of the forge again.
I don't think looter-shooters (and loot games in general) are inherently limiting, but loot needs to be exciting. I've played thousands of hours of Path Of Exile, and hundreds of hours of other looter games, and what holds my interest is interesting loot and build variety/depth. That simply doesn't happen in Destiny. Compare Destiny to Borderlands, for instance, and you can see how boring the loot really is. Look at games like Path Of Exile, Grim Dawn, or Last Epoch, and you can see how boring the skill trees are. In all of those other games, I've had items drop where I've been excited to redo my entire build to accommodate it, or to make a new character built around it. In Destiny, items just don't feel exciting enough. (Not every game needs to be as complex as Path Of Exile, but Destiny is incredibly shallow.)
And, of course, Destiny's story has consistently been disappointing. There's some great lore there, but they've failed to translate that into a well-told, engaging story over and over again.
combined with fragments, aspects and seasonal mods it’s just a spreadsheet simulator now.
When in other games I can pick something up with a big green number and purple text that indicates “this will blow shit up real good” Destiny has a icon with some circles and a dot which indicates that if the community does a few hours of research, I can look up on a third party website that this gun will increase my fire rate by 0.3% but decrease my airborne accuracy by 0 .2% unless I’m within 9 meters of 3 enemies and I threw my grenade longer than 1 second ago but sooner than 8 seconds ago in which case it’ll decrease my airborne accuracy by 0.1% and increase any shoe-related buff cooldowns by a third of a second
See, I love spreadsheets and being able to optimise things, but I do need to actually be able to feel the impact in the gameplay, too. And yeah, Destiny is terrible for that; the buffs and upgrades you do get just feel irrelevant, for the most part. Especially with the terrible scaling system they use where you never feel any stronger against weaker enemies, just weaker against stronger enemies. When getting a huge numerical upgrade (in terms of gear score) doesn't change anything about how the game feels to play, I think that's poor design.
I did have a pretty bonkers warlock build that had a bunch of mods or gear that gave me rift regen, plus the boots that shoot orbs as people while I stand in a rift. I basically just used rift on cooldown and could have as many as 5 at once and spam healed the team. Also used rose to heal as well. Obviously not optimal, but I wasn’t about to spend the time collecting the obscure mods and stats that the spreadsheet wizards said I should have, only for the meta to change completely next season.
More that there’s only so much you can do with a looter shooter
Warframe seems to disagree, for better or worse they have a new gimmick every few years to keep it interesting, and a pretty good and interesting story to go along with it. I'd sooner say it's just destiny's problem in this particular case.
Embracer, functionally speaking, have zero understanding of how game dev works. The whole thing is just a massive investment fund. Basically a bunch of rich assholes who bought up every small developer they could get their hands on and then tried to MBA all the numbers up by cutting headcounts and doing other useless metrics driven bullshit. Then when this failed to produce meteoric returns on investment they all went surprised pikachu face.
There is a precise technical answer to your question a finance person can probably give you but it doesn’t really answer the question no matter how many acronyms they throw at you.
The actual answer is that there is no reason any of this has to be rational. Business people believe so strongly that companies like embracer are valuable and have a function in society that they detect zero cognitive dissonance when said companies don’t actually do anything but buy smaller companies, dissect them and destroy value.
You can’t understand business and finance people like they are scientists, they are closer to priests of a religious sect that believe in things because of their belief system not because of some rational framework that actually supports their ideas.
I think for the rich, it is just “good practice” to commit economic violence against smaller companies, it is good hygiene for keeping the power in the hands of the rich like mowing a field once a year or something. This doesn’t fully explain how poorly some of these companies function like embracer however.
Destiny’s onboarding for new players is literally the worst. If you don’t have a veteran guiding you into the game it’s literally impossible to pick up. You want more interest in the game, then make it easier to actually pick it up instead of flat replacing the starter content.
100%! This was exactly my experience when trying to guide a new (to Destiny) friend through the story and get him geared up. He ended up quitting in frustration in less than a month because nothing made sense.
As a gamer who grew up in the 80’s, lots of games that have any significant online component at all feel like this now. If you don’t pick it up in the first couple months, forget it. It’ll be full of people who play 9 hours a day and it’ll have so many layers of systems and currencies it feels like an absurdist satire. Seasons and prestige and lore and so much baggage. I get so tired of asking “wait, can I earn the blue triangles by playing, do they cost real money, do I trade orange circles for them…?”
I started a game that had been out for only hours (the Finals) and people already had advanced builds and insane map knowledge. These guys are preordering and then no lifeing the closed beta. Its crazy man.
Gotta love dropping $100 on a free game before it’s even out, then drip-feeding it thousands more over time when the game intrinsically provides nothing more than a highly engineered dopamine drip. No story, no meaningful progression, no value or benefit to you as a human, just obsessively learning and mastering a skill that has literally only one purpose on the planet: playing that game.
It’s by Nexon anyway. If you don’t play it you probably dodged a bullet. Their games are extremely P2W and they literally pioneered the earn in-game currency that you can only use to trial weapons and characters method of wealth extraction. It’s been so long since I’ve played one of their games, but that form of microtransaction has always stuck with me as a “if I see it, I’m immediately deleting your game” approach to gaming.
The very first time a game tells me I have to pay for something with real currency in game that isn’t purely cosmetic, it gets dropped. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I let a game tell me that the blue triangles are mtx only.
Generally agreed. But it shocks me just how many games out there are making crazy amounts of money just selling cosmetics. I still remember horse armor! It was a scandal!
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