Wasn’t Piranha Bytes not profitable for quite some time?
Their games certainly had a community of fans, but I don’t think those are enough to keep a whole studio afloat.
Just thinking out loud, I did not look at any numbers, but in my head what’s done them in is not producing games that feel good to play. I loved Gothic 3 and Arcania at the time, but I’d choose any other 3rd person RPG that actually has snappy controls over the more modern stuff like Elex and I feel like that’s the mainstream opinion going around.
Yeah, far as I know they also started to struggle with Risen already, as cost started going up for 3D RPGs with open worlds. If you are a niche creator, that’s a problem as your niche cannot be endlessly expanded.
I never tried ELEX or ELEX 2 (kinda should, but eh, bit late now), but they looked fine. Nothing noteworthy, but decent. But the thing is, I have a long long list of just RPGs that I still want to play that are on my backlog, like even Baldur’s Gate 3. And now Dawntrail for FFXIV just released. It’ll be years more before I get around to ELEX. I wish they had gone more something more artsy in style than just generic-3D open SciFi world, as that ages badly. Look at Mass Effect 1 and so on.
The game pass version was broken for me. Sudden and massive fps drops every few minutes, seems like a memory leak. Had to play Lords of the fallen instead.
Still need to play that. But soooo much to play, and I already got a few games I’m actively playing. And I stopped buying onto backlog when I said I’ll need to improve that spending habit of mine on NY 2015. Heh, actually stuck to one of my NY promises for once. 😅
It has gotten to the point where if you work for a game studio that gets bought out or sold, might as well get ahead of the game and start looking for a new job before they have the chance to fire you.
Less than a day after I find out from an old article that there was supposed to be a modernized remake of Gothic 1 on the way to be published this year and got all excited. Fucking fantastic 😮💨
I’ll reserve my final judgment until 2nd of August and the THQ Nordic Showcase but the playable teaser they released doesn’t leave me optimistic either.
I prefer their games over anything Bethesda/Diablo/whatever stuff.
Their games, as clunky and weird they sometimes are, have soul and passion. I’m playing Risen 2 at the moment, and I just love the world. So much too see, every corner has something to find, even if it’s just a bottle of Rum.
So from what I gather, most of these studios were doing fine before they were bought out and now they are all starting over from scratch cause any proprietary stuff they had is owned by Microsoft.
In the end their name, their achievements and their reputation has been transferred, and nothing else. I feel they (the studios’ teams) have been made use of to then deceive people who trust the names.
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Aktywne