Yeah a game engine saving a studio hundreds of thousands of dollars or more per episode on lighting, comp, rendering, and set building or travel costs to shoot on location is not representative of the license fee paid
Definitely not, they’re huge. They even purchased Weta digital recently (lord of the rings animation company). The’re going nowhere fast. They’re just eeking every little cent they can out of every little crevice of their offerings.
I know bevy and I know that it is certainly far behind Godot. It’s written in Rust though, so that gives it a lot of future potential, compared to Godot especially.
I can't wait to have steam charge me $1 every time I re-download a unity5 game. MS should follow suit and force you to pay $1 a pop for each directx install. Which would actually be more like $80 because it loads every patch and version in order on every install.
Fee per download for a game framework that packaged into the download that they have no part of distributing? I hope this is the most recent example of a successful tech company commiting suicide, it really is the best theme this year.
Evidently, all of Epic Games’ business had been “heavily funded by Fortnite” in the last six years, and different parts of the company became “disconnected” from their revenue streams.
Wait, so youre really telling me me Epic giving away a ton of free games on EGS every single month and free unreal engine marketplace assets to devs as well as regular epic megagrants was never a financially sustainable move?
Psssh. In other news, salt is salty. 🤭
I honestly believe Tim is not going to f–k this one up though, as a former one he clearly cares about the game dev community and as majority shareholder he isn’t needing to be driven by profits as much as publicly traded Unity head John Riccatello is.
Plus, fortnite is still a goddamn cash printer, just not printing as fast as they expected.
Western game dev certainly seems to be in a bad place. I think there are probably a few factors explaining what is happening now:
1: Overhiring during the pandemic. There was a lot of money flowing into tech during the earlier days of the pandemic, and companies were hiring and expanding like crazy. The economy settled, and now companies are laying people off left and right. Not even limited to game dev, as we saw this occur for Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and pretty much everywhere else in tech.
2: The knock-on effect. When big developers start to lay off staff in bulk, other companies may be incentivized to copy that behavior. It’s easier to justify firing a bunch of employees when everyone else is doing it, and then when you have a surplus of people in the market for a new job, you can selectively hire new talent for cheaper.
3: More attention in reporting. If it wasn’t a trend, a studio laying off 30 employees might not otherwise be newsworthy. A lot of studios actually make it an unfortunate common practice to lay off their contractors/temps right at the end of dev cycles so that they don’t get any sales bonuses. But there’s a lot of layoffs happening, so even smaller ones are generating buzz, and with a lot of workers’ rights/pro-union sentiments going around following the successful strikes in Hollywood and the automotive industry, people are starting to pay more attention when workers are being treated unfairly or being taken advantage of elsewhere.
Its also typical in game development, you dont need the ‘full team’ all the time, if your in preproduction you hardly need 100 programmers sitting around twiddling their thumbs
High interest rates make investing in risky projects like game development uninteresting. Why take risk if interest rates bring in high returns by themselves.
A lot of the games industry is backed by a constant flow of investment. Which has totally dried up. This company got 80 million in investment last year, this year can’t find more to keep paying the bills. Same is true for most of the announcements.
Then there is large companies like Microsoft, those layoffs are purely about paying shareholders extea money.
Instead of doing their due diligence, they just bought up as many studios as they could and are now considering selling, shrinking or closing them (I assume while keeping the IP for themselves if there is any as well as any valuable assets).
This reads like a „we need to homogenize the game industry so lobbying for anti competitive measures becomes easier.“
I still don’t understand why shit like this is even legal.
At the same time, the industry is looking towards massive monopolization. I think Embracer move was also motivated by seeing how ABK was able to make a sale to Microsoft and cash out. Now everyone is trying to sell themselves, including EA. The buyers are usually trillion dollar tech, or Saudis (who currently own a very big part of the industry), and Chinese megagiants (who own the other big part of the industry). As days go by, we are looking at a landscape which could be similar to early era console wars where players were forced to tie their wagon to one horse and hope that it keeps releasing titles. This might sound a bit doomer speak, but if a studio the size of gearbox can shut down, then absolutely anyone can.
Thanks for elaborating. In other words, we need to make it illegal to buy other companies if you‘re larger than sum x and make it illegal to sell a company (because all industries have that problem) to someone like that. Got it. :)
Unfortunately, Paradox and Colossal represent everything wrong with the games industry.
Rushed, sloppy, and greedy take on a great idea. Shooting PC mods in the foot for hypothetical console support.Trying to rush out a half-baked port to console on a half-baked, buggy game years before it’s ready. Releasing assetflip dlc before the game is even done or even on consoles, lol.
If it starts to expand significantly in order to accelerate their efforts then that seed money will burn out increasingly fast. Unless they can establish significant ongoing income streams of some sort, or sacrifice capacity by keeping their structure similar to now, then they might burn out.
I love it when companies start hanging up their noose and tying it around their necks. Hopefully they get to the point where they'll jump from the hill they chose to die on.
Like everyone else is saying, I think the standard for primarily single player video games should be releasing a finished product for a reasonable price. I’m sure I don’t speak for just myself but I’m super tired of things like: unreasonably priced tiered purchase options, cash shops/microtransactions, battle/season passes, twitch drops, preorder bonuses, and just any kind of FOMO in general. It feels like a lot of modern video games are only designed to siphon as much money from the consumer as possible with the least amount of work possible. A lot of these games have no soul and they’re unfinished and broken on release. I just don’t even bother with them anymore.
Some of the things you just mentioned are actually things Baldur‘s Gate 3 did, though. Namely Twitch drops, pre-order bonuses and (arguably) unreasonably priced purchased options with their day 1 DLC. The latter is especially baffling since Larian Studios makes a big deal of not paywalling extra content while doing exactly that from the start. It‘s also guilty of having quite a lengthy early access phase prior it‘s release.
The success does not come from lack of bullshit, but from delivering a good, polished product regardless.
Yeah, I wasn’t too happy with the twitch drops thing but I caved in and created an account so I could get them. I feel like I let the 10 USD DLC slide because 70 USD total seems to be becoming the standard price for games anyway. They’re not totally innocent of the things I dislike but they delivered such a phenomenal game that I can overlook it.
The 10€ DLC iirc only has content that references their past Divinity games, I feel like it’s one of the fairer DLCs, given that it’s completely innecesary for the full experience and might even detract from it for non larian fans. I feel like it’s better to give it as an extra purchase than include it in the pack.
Full disclosure I backed/preorderd the game the moment they announced in kickstarter and I have gotten it for 40ish euros iirc, and I got the DLC content for being an early backer. I don’t usually preorder but it’s Larian, they always overdeliver, and this time they did also, while raising the price of the completed game because they overdeveloped the initial concept way too much lol.
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