They are chopping the development teams and titles up into convenient bite-sized chunks. Ubisoft will hang onto the large titles in the Vantage Studios vertical, and the rest will be spun off or sold off. Any spun off studios will be saddled with crippling debt.
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.
This is a bit of a side point, but this quote seemed off base to me:
“People are paying for these games!,” he exclaimed. “This is not happening for … books.”
50 Shades of Grey was an all-human alternate-history Twilight fanfiction that was largely plagiarised.
There are also entire genres that are becoming successful for independent authors, mostly self-publishing on Kindle Unlimited like LitRPGs (basically fantasy novels with videogame-like systems) or Jane Austen variations (like Pride & Prejudice retold slightly or very differently).
I think the Long Tail of the Internet is changing a lot of industries, creative or otherwise, not just indie games.
In the UK at least there’s a persistent cost-of-living battle being fought, so we’re not spending as much as we were, and large game production has reached a tipping point where the number of purchasers aren’t growing but costs are increasing, so: studios contract; or games are taking longer to make; or games are made with a smaller scope. So basically, there’s less to upgrade your console for.
I mean, for me personally, everytime I think of upgrading from a Series S I find it hard to justify because most games run quite well.
The Xbox One is like equivalent to a GTX 750, it's ancient. The Xbox One X is more like a GTX 1060, so should still be servicable. But they are part of the same family, so they can't make a game for one and not the other.
The problem with consoles is that they are outdated the day they release.
Ignore the thousands of employees we’ve laid off, we have AI that is going to QUADRUPLE our productivity. I’m talking AAAA-AAAA games here, folks. The best is yet to come, it’s going to be fantastic.
I was concerned about this business model from the onset and my worries have proven accurate! Buying the game while in early access would’ve given them more funding to work with instead of going with a free to play with cosmetic only purchases. I hope the affected developers are going to be okay in this layoff heavy year. 😭
Cosmetics are expensive too. I’m afraid a majority of players won’t pay those prices. If they offered some lower priced items they might have more consistent income.
That’s what I thought too…In addition, needing to buy a fake currency with real money before being able to buy a skin pack has a dark pattern vibe to it! They would’ve been better off making the skin packs cheaper (using real world money) and listing their game for a reasonable price during early access. However, their staff is paying the price for the leader’s poor decision and that honestly sucks!
I used to use GameMaker back in the Mark Overmars 5.0/6.0 days, but dropped it the moment it went to a paid model. This is great news, and I might honestly check it out again.
Nowadays I would generally prefer to use Godot - not a surprise, given where I’m posting. But GM was great for quick prototyping, if nothing else.
Unity, as a business, as a stock investment, as a C-suite and board of directors, is rotting in its casket for all I care. I have committed to never buy game built in Unity whose development started after September this year.
This whole debacle wasn’t an engineering problem; it’s not the software development staff’s fault.
Don’t worry y’all. By cloud it’s just gonna be dynamic ads.
But for real, background animations and details could be streamed through another device having to render that something. Anything that doesn’t revolve around the gameplay itself.
This is from the culture where don’t show you outsourced some of your work and claim that you did everything internally. There was a time where players think outsourced anything is bad but we have since gone way past that. Many big studio out-sourced their asset making/audio etc cause it’s simply too much work to do the up keeps if you don’t have a library of them from your past games.
As far as I know some Japanese company still operate this way and the out-source partner are contractually not allowed to disclose what they worked on. You would be considered lucky to even make the partner list with company name only. It’s a really bad standard and I hope we just get rid of that entirely. (If you are not aware, China’s asset outsource companies makes a lot of assets for AAA industry for a long time. )
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