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.
as Rigney defines it, deprofessionalization is […]
The older games are not “overperforming”. The newer games are underperforming.
Large studios are “struggling to drive sales” because customers take cost and benefit into account.
The success of those solo devs and small teams is not “outsized”, it’s deserved because they get it right.
What’s happening is that small devs release reasonably priced games with fun gameplay. In the meantime larger studios be like “needz moar grafix”, and pricing their games way above people are willing to pay.
More than “deprofessionalisation”, what’s primarily happening is the de-large-studio-isation: the independence of professionals, migrating to their own endeavours.
Also: “deprofessionalisation” implies that people leaving large studios stop being professionals, as if small/solo devs must be necessarily amateurs. That is not the case.
Deprofessionalization is built on the back of devaluing labor
And he “conveniently” omits the fact that most of that value wouldn’t reach the workers on first place. It’s retained by whoever owns those big gaming companies.
And people know it. That’s yet another reason why they’d rather buy a game from a random nobody than some big company.
As A16z marketing partner Ryan K. Rigney defines it […]
Rigney offered some extra nuance on his “deprofessionalization” theory in an email exchange we had before PAX. He predicted that marketing roles at studios would be “the first” on the chopping block, followed by “roles that seem replaceable to management (even if they’re not).”
Emphasis mine. Now it’s easy to get why he’s so worried about this process: large studios rely on marketing to oversell their games, while small devs mostly reach you by word-of-mouth.
Something must be said about marketing. Marketing is fine and dandy when it’s informing people about the existence of the goods to be bought; sadly 90% of marketing is not that, it’s to convince you that orange is purple.
My PAX trip validated my fear that three professions are especially vulnerable in this deprofessionalized world: artists, writers, and those working in game audio or music.
Unlike marketing teams, I’m genuinely worried about those people. I hope that they find their way into small dev teams.
I’d add that it’s not that larger studios want more impressive graphics that’s the problem but that their games are often monetized to hell and designed by committee to be as marketable as possible instead of being someone’s vision brought to fruition.
And because this sort of big business often focuses obsessively on what can be measured, ignoring what cannot be. Even if the later might be more important.
You can measure the number of vertices in a model, the total resolution, the expected gameplay length, the number of dev hours that went into a project. But you cannot reasonably measure the fun value of your game; at most you can rank it in comparison with other games. So fun value takes a backseat, even if it’s bread and butter.
In the meantime those small devs look holistically at their games. “This shit isn’t fun, I’m reworking it” here, “wow this mechanic actually works! I’ll expand it further” there.
Yeah corpos love their metrics - even though as soon as you measure them they cease to be useful as people will be gaming them. Not to mention they can only show a small part of what is actually happening.
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!
Whitehurst and chief product and technology officer Marc Whitten discuss Unity’s plans to rebuild trust with developers after the 2023 Runtime Fee fiasco.
Here’s a hint, it’s gone. You’re not going to get that trust back for 10-20 years, if you ever get it back.
What do you expect them to say, “it’s all fucked, let’s shut up shop”? They’ve fired JR, undone most of his wild spending, gutted the company to desperately undo his mismanagement and make the company profitable. Saying “were trying to go back to how it was” seems like a non-insane risk-averse business way to try and keep the Unity users who haven’t been able to jump ship already.
Despite all that’s happened, at least one source told the outlet they don’t think Unity’s moves were made out of complete malice. “They need to do something to make more money. Sadly, it wasn’t delivered well, but the need to make more money is still there.”
And that’s why every dev (who can) should run as far away from Unity as possible, because Unity will try to screw them some other way.
To where? Godot isn’t there yet (sorry, maybe in five years, it’s impressive and on the right track. Not today). And unreal is under the same pressure.
i don’t think unreal is under the same pressure for three reasons:
they already have a reasonable revenue sharing model. they make a lot more per licensee than unity does because they take a cut of your sales rather than charging a per-engineer license for the dev kit.
epic’s headcount is not nearly as horrendously bloated, even before the recent layoffs.
the company is still privately held with Tim Sweeney the majority owner.
points 1 and 2 mean epic is actually profitable, and has been for decades at this point. meanwhile, the publicly traded unity has struggled to break even for most of its existence
Yes, point 1 is the model they should have adopted in the first place. The whole problem with their original announcement was that it was a) retroactive, b) structured in a way that would significantly hurt f2p and indie games, and c) based on installs rather than sales, meaning you could get charged multiple times for the same sale. If Unity had come out and said “starting with Unity 2024, we will be switching to a revenue sharing model", a lot of people might have still been upset, but it would not have caused nearly the same shitstorm and they would have had a better path towards sustainability.
Point 3 is absolutely real, because when you own your company, you do not have legal obligations to throngs of faceless public stockholders. Companies turn to shit all the time when they go public, because the pressure for immediate quarterly returns outweighs the pressure to maintain long-term sustainability. I think it’s exactly why platforms like Steam have avoided enshittifying, because their owners know they can make more money long term by building a sustainable platform that people like rather than burning their users to make a quick buck and juice their next quarterly report.
Its stating that because he owns a majority share, he has the ability to suppress publicly traded short term value inflation in favor of showing other private investors that long term growth is both sustainable and profitable.
Which, as shown by how completely anti-short term the epic games store is run, is clearly a sales pitch that his other private investors are buying into.
Which is probably the exact reason they are remaining off the public market
It points at the long term focused business decisions, and then points at the private nature of its investors, and says “hey thats a pattern we see a lot with privately owned and invested companies.”
You know what else isn't there yet? Unity, Unreal, Source, CryEngine... literally every commercial game engine requires development if you're actually looking to push hardware limits. They're just toolboxes.
Godot is no different, except that developers are going to be much more likely to release their changes publicly.
Keep in mind that the console makers likely don’t want too much of their SDKs to become part of Godot’s open codebase. They license it to publishers who promise them that they won’t divulge important IP.
keep in mind that unreal engine is also open source. Epic just has a system where if you get the go-ahead from a console maker, and they can confirm that, then you get access to the parts of the engine that connect to the console SDK’s
if you are an indie dev today, you can get the go-ahead from sony/nintendo/whoever and launch your UE/unity game on those platforms without much fuss. if you have a godot game you have to contact a third party porting house and ask them to port the game to those consoles. those companies have already made the godot hookups into platform specific SDK’s but you still have to contact, and licence them to do this, if they accept working with you.
keep in mind that unreal engine is also open source.
The Unreal Engine is not open source by any reasonable definition of open source. Being "source available" is not the same as open source, as you can't use the code whoever you like.
you can’t use most open source code “however you like” either, they all have licenses. the main restriction with unreal engine is that you can’t mix it with copyleft licenses and you can’t use it commercially.
but you can do what most people want to do, modify, extend, fix, learn. that’s the most relevant thing for what we are talking about here
you can’t use most open source code “however you like” either
Alright, sure my language was overly broad. "The licensing is restrictive in a way which makes it clearly not open source." would have been a better choice.
...the main restriction with unreal engine is that you can’t mix it with copyleft licenses and you can’t use it commercially.
So, it's not open source.
...but you can do what most people want to do, modify, extend, fix, learn. that’s the most relevant thing for what we are talking about here
That still doesn't make it open source, mainly because you are missing one of biggest aspects, distribution.
Open source != copyleft. That’s free software if you want to go that route.
Also, you can distribute your version, of course you can. Both your changes and binary form. It’s just all distributed under epics unreal engine licence
Also, you can distribute your version, of course you can.
Are you sure?
You may Distribute Engine Code (including as modified by you) in Source Code or object code to a third party who is separately licensed by us to use the same version of the Engine Code that you are Distributing.
Any public Distribution of Engine Tools (e.g., intended generally for third parties who are separately licensed by us to use the Engine Code) must take place through a marketplace operated by Epic such as the Unreal Engine Marketplace (e.g., for Distributing a Product’s modding tool or editor to end users) or through a fork of Epic’s GitHub UnrealEngine Network (e.g., for Distributing Source Code).
So, you can only distribute source to people who are specifically licensed by Epic to use the source. That sure doesn't sound anything like "open source" to me.
you can only distribute your source under the licence of the source code, yes. just like copyleft licences. The whole concept of open source is demonstrably, flaky.
You want it to be a concept closer to free software, I say if the source is open, you can modify it and your changes are able to have an effect then it’s open source.
I don’t think we are going to resolve this. I would prefer if it was free software but that’s not gonna happen for godot or unreal engine
kinda, its MIT so it’s not free. I can, for example, change a bunch of godot. release my changes in binary only form and you can’t demand the source from me. I mean you can but i’ve no legal compulsion to do that.
Lol! yeah! What sort of nerd do you have to be to enjoy card games? And sports games? Like, go outside, brah. When I get my game on, it’s usually CoD on my Xbox. Headshot after headshot, teabag after teabag. It’s just something else, you know? Not something you can get by playing a card game or some rts or something where someone else is doing the shooting for you… Like… Get some skill brah.
/s … Pfew… That was hard to get through… sorry about that, couldn’t help myself
The way I see it, there are enough quality indie games, retro emulators, and titles on the average Steam backlog (to the point that it’s a tired joke) that gamers can afford to only pay for unmissable quality. People know what they like, and they talk.
Economically, money is scarce. So is free time, for a lot of us. We don’t care what you tell us to “expect” from you, game publishers with hot takes on BG3. If you can’t release finished games at game prices, maybe you’re not the beating heart of the game industry.
That might be the way it works in your head, but the reality looks different.
AAA games make the most money on PC. And even those games despite micro transactions, DLCs and so on are easily overshadowed by mobile games.
My favorite games are indie games, but indie is simply not feasible in some genres. Take MMOs for example, every stab at it has burned to the ground or was abandoned (or a scam).
Criticizing the big publishers is the only thing we have, because obviously voting with your wallet doesn’t work. You might not buy it, but several million other people who saw a shiny cinematic trailer did. And they will continue to do so, even when Call of Duty 23 sucks they’ll go and buy 24 next year.
I wanted to stick to my I Statements a little more than I did. I cede mostly to your points but reserve that it’s bullshit to tell me not to expect quality just because someone proved it can still be done. It tells me the bigger gaming industry has gotten too large and dreary to be much use to me.
“Reducing our office footprint” these ghouls are going to fire people who aren’t following the return to office decree because it will be an easy on paper excuse. Also “revenue came in within guidance” so they expected / planned for revenue to be low enough to justify firing even more people? They’ve already done two other mass firings morale is terrible right now. Lots of the best workers have been quitting to find better work and the drain is noticable. I just need stable insurance for another 6 months then I can leave too, I hope I don’t get fucked
Thank you, I’m honestly terrified. I spent my whole life so far trying to get into this industry, I finally pull it off in my early 30s and now all this. I spent 10 years roughing it and finally have been able to do things in the last two years like go to the doctor ever. I don’t have tech people wealth laying around I’ve spent so much basically doing damage control for having previously been paycheck to paycheck. I’m only just getting the ball rolling and I’m going to be so fucked if I lose this job.
I hate to say it but it might be worth looking for a job outside the games industry. It’s openly known that most gaming companies get away with terrible working conditions and employee treatment. They get away with it because there’s a revolving door of people willing to put up with shit treatment so they can say they got a job in the industry.
It’s fine if that matters to you, but you have to decide how much it matters and stick to your line in the sand. Personally I’d rather work something less interesting and have better pay and reasonable work/life balance.
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