Let's be honest, was anyone expecting any different outcome from Embracer's hasty growth with cheap money? There was no way this would have worked out.
My expectation was that they were spending money that they mostly already had, but I was very excited to see a company picking up the pieces that the biggest publishers left behind. No one was going to make a new Outcast game before this, for instance. Game publishers used to put out dozens of games of all types per year, and now they might put out 5. They hinged it all on debt that they couldn’t afford though, so they’re ruining the chances of us returning to sustainable normalcy instead of what AAA has been doing for a decade.
How independent is Relic really if they got bought by an unnamed external investor? Still better than getting axed and hoping the same kinda layoffs won‘t just come later („The studio hasn’t indicated if it will lay off any workers as part of the shift“).
The investor has a stake in the company, so they share in the successes and take on the risk of failure, but they provide capital to make this purchase from the parent company in the first place.
I mean that’s how most independent studios work. There’s always someone with money investing into the studio, be it an external investor or sometime at the studio.
damn, I knew that Sega had had a few big blunders lately, but having to straight up sell Relic is pretty huge... Wonder how their output will look from now on, it's no secret that some of their output under Sega was questionable (primarily Dawn of War 3) and one has to wonder how much of their failings were due to Sega's directive.
It was a play on the Eric Andre meme, following Swen Vincke’s comments recently and his speech at the game awards “We don’t have shareholders, but we also don’t think about them,”. Which maybe got through to a few studios that have the ability to take back their independence, especially those under the likes of Embracer, who are currently haemorrhaging money.
Ha! Can’t cut down on the QA and testing stuff if there is none! Smart thinking, CA!
Damn this sucks though. Happy for Relic that they escaped it, but Sega has been dropping the ball so hard lately, it sucks they take it out on their workers.
You mean the near Paradox levels of DLC for Three Kingdoms and Warhammer? And selling blood as a fucking DLC for every Total War game since Shogun 2? Yeah, I’ve heard about it.
The games are good, but Sega’s forced monetization is atrocious.
Of those three, the one I bought was Three Kingdoms, and I was certainly not forced to buy more than the base game. Paradox’s DLC strategy is a-okay by me. Neither company puts a gun to my head to buy their DLC. Pretty sure blood is a DLC to get away with a lower age rating.
Eh, CA pretty much aced their DLC strategy for warhammer 2. It’s with Warhammer 3 that they fell of a cliff. And three kingdoms barely got any DLC before getting cancelled.
One thing I didn’t like about Shogun 2 and all subsequent sequels was enforcing a limited number of armies by forcing a general to be present. The maximum number of armies you could field is naturally bottlenecked by your economy, so you should have the flexibility to use some non-generaled armies to bolster garrisons in key strategic locations. Instead, you need to use one of your scarce generals to defend it, which prevents them from being used offensively so they just sit around.
This makes me realize that I can’t think of hardly any videogames with a black character at the forefront.
Sure, there are black playable characters in MOBAs and MMOs, but how many story-driven games have black characters at the forefront?
The most recent one I can think of is Alan Wake 2. And Spider-Man Miles Morales. But there really are so few compared to those with white main characters. Which is sad.
can’t even pick a decent black hairstyle in the character creators. 90% only have a fro, 9% that weird comb over dread style bc it was in black panther, even tho i’ve never seen a real person wear it
Slime Rancher’s protagonist, Beatrix LeBeau, is definitely not white. It’s not the most story-driven game out there, but I really appreciated how the main character is a PoC woman, with zero fuss about it. She’s just a lady with a ranch on an alien planet, and why shouldn’t she be a PoC woman rather than a white dude?
Just for the record I agree with you, but the opposite of that final question is true, why shouldn’t she be a white dude, or a PoC man? Ranching/farming isn’t a job that requires a specific gender or sex.
I mean, that’s kind of the point. For the vast majority of games, there’s no real reason why the protagonist has to be a straight white dude, yet 99% of the time, that’s what they are. I like it when devs do something different.
One of the 6 characters in Xenoblade 3’s main cast is black. He’s quite interesting too, this game has pretty good character writing IMO. They’re not the usual stereotypical JRPG character types.
Final Fantasy XIII had Sazh Katzroy. He’s not the main character (that’d be Lightning), but he is an important playable character right from the get-go. He has his own storylines as well.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey? Or Origin? Too many of them, don't know.
Watchdogs 2.
Most games with a customizable main character.
Mafia 3.
Crysis 2 and sort of 3?
Some platformers I can't name because it's not my genre.
That 80s Kingdom offshoot.
Does Crusader Kings 3 have African leaders enabled or does it come as a DLC?
Civilization series.
Representation of any demographic in games should be done by those who have an interest in doing it well.
Doing it just to pad the numbers is more insulting than even not doing it at all.
Does Crusader Kings 3 have African leaders enabled or does it come as a DLC?
The base game has a notoriously difficult achievement involving starting as a specific female tribal chief uniting “all of Africa” under one reformed pagan religion. Scare quotes because the map doesn’t go further south than approximately the Sahel, not all Africa is playable. Whole of the Americas, Oceania, as well as much of east Asia (incl. China and Japan) are missing. There’s probably going to be map extensions (and China and Japan will be DLCs with lots of custom mechanics) but the original map is already bigger than CKII ever got, and India was playable from the start, with custom mechanics and all.
The efficiency of capitalism. Spend god-knows-how-many millions of dollars and time, then realize you’d rather spend 125 million all over again just to go back and spend even more millions to hire back the dame numbers again in 1-3 years.
They make 5 billion a year, thats less than 2.5% of the money they make every year, it’s a rounding error to make the spreadsheets look real good to the money lenders .
My company just let me go with a 6 figure package (x amount of pay + stocks). They could have easily kept me there for another year, but that’s not as good for the spreadsheets.
Yeah that was kinda my point. All that matters is what the spreadsheet looks like now. It would have probably been a net positive to keep me given they are only going to grow and spend a fortune on hiring and new stocks. That’s a different spreadsheet though, I also live in a country where it’s expensive to fire full time employees collectively, so it’s not like they are paying these kinds of sums for everyone. It’s pretty cheap to make things look good on paper.
Yeah, their whole goal is to look good on papers and stock market. Not to grow as actual company. They would rather cripple themselves than to strengthen themselves by slow growth…
“These charges consist of approximately $50 million to $65 million associated with office space reductions, approximately $40 million to $55 million related to employee severance and employee-related costs, and $35 million to $45 million in costs associated with licensor commitments,” reads the filing.
The severance I get, but why is closing offices costing them so much. And what are “ licensor commitments?”
It is dystopian really the nature of shuffling hundreds or thousands of people to a building, into a cubicle, in front of a computer for 8 hours a day.
cause commercial rental is a commitment, if you can’t find another company to take over your lease, chances are you have to pay the majority of left over amount + penalty + restoration. Licensor commitments are similar but probably on tech/software licensing, ie. server rentals, Maya/Speedtree licensing agreement for the site, whatever cloud service they use for backup and share stuff, etc. Those at bigger scale aren’t paid year to year like your regular indie studio just subscribe to Adobe/Autodesk for app uses per seat.
Every big UK company I have worked for doesn't own its building. They will typically agree to rent a building for 5-20 years at a fixed rate (longer times if its being purpose built for them) .
So I would expect this is paying out the rest of the rental agreements for a building to escape the building lease.
It is to do with financial reporting and the way asset and operational costs are reported.
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