“ reportedly enforcing uncompensated overtime, allegedly trying to pay staff below minimum wage, and a toxic work environment cultivated by an alleged abusive leadership.”
Hi-Fi rush comes out of nowhere to massive critical acclaim just to be shut down anyway because Starfield sucked ass. Why people ever do business with these shitass publishers I’ll never understand
Because the indie space is also a graveyard. Investors are increasingly wary of funding anything but a “guarantee” and plenty of studios have had to shutter because the funding they were promised was rescinded.
The major publishers are at least a paycheck that can keep a studio going for another year or two.
Because the indie space is also a graveyard. Investors are increasingly wary of funding anything but a “guarantee” and plenty of studios have had to shutter because the funding they were promised was rescinded.
Maybe gaming has become too bloated as a concept if no company can ever produce a product with their own money any more, instead always listening entirely to investor cash.
So… only independently wealthy people should make games?
Game dev takes time. The way you shrink that time is to do it full time instead of working on it in your spare time for a decade or so. Because of increased cost of living, the ability to just take a few months off and burn your savings is increasingly not viable.
That is where investors come in. Whether it is a kickstarter campaign (NEVER PRE-ORDER!! RAWR!!!), a venture capitalist, or a major publisher. And all of those have consequences.
But, increasingly, it is only the major publishers who are even trying. And they are increasingly selective of who they try it with. NoClip have been making an indie game as a way to better understand the market and they have a SPECTACULAR video where Danny O’Dwyer talks about his experience pitching the game to publishers and what kinds of responses they get. And it is really telling that he gushes over how nice one publisher (I think it was Humble?) were in that they actually responded and said they couldn’t move forward rather than just ghosting him.
Sure but that’s only a piece of the puzzle. Housing, food, and general living costs are so insane now that any decent savings would be obliterated much more quickly. UBI would be a better solution here, but that’s almost a pipedream at this point.
Um I disagree. The biggest barrier is having the capital to do the thing. I think a number of states have a reduced/free option if your income is below the poverty line (calculated as having low or negative income in the startup phase, not necessarily based on assets), or being lucky enough to have a spouse with healthcare. That said, it’s entirely doable to go without healthcare, albeit risky. I started a contracting company 3 years ago with almost no money and the tools I had from my apprentice/jman years, and still don’t have health insurance, though I’m hoping to get some later this year.
Taking a look at big-cash high profile releases like Redfall and Starfield…is “guaranteed failure” what they’re going for? Because those indie games were pretty much the main reason I kept subscribing to game pass.
It also bugs me that Bethesda keeps saying that the game is about exploration and finding new planets, but so far every planet I’ve visited has some kind of building upon it. Its clear that people have been on this planet before, so why the hell should I explore this planet? At least give me some incentive or a better reward for finding a true empty planet.
You’re not wrong, but OTOH, it’s pretty funny to see a planet having a building on it equated to the planet being explored, considering Earth was still being explored thousands of years after the first buildings.
Yeah thats true. In Bethesda’s dictionary exploration means: find minerals, 7 life forms and 3 unique geological formations. And by unique we mean like on the other planets.
This was a scam from the start. They fucked themselves because their trailer was popular and they promised the world. Their goal was to create a shit early access game with pre-made assets, get lots of buy in when it was released, endure some bad reviews, promise to fix things but then slowly dump support for the game. I’ve watched this exact thing happen probably ten times now.
What killed them was the hype and popularity. They were called out immediately for what they were doing and got stuck having to now make an actual game or face legal repercussions.
At the very least these cash grabs are getting spotted early and they’re not getting to sneak by without facing consequences.
Scam is still scam, they could have been realising true gameplay trailers instead of wasting time on rendered false gameplay that does not reflect a game at all
This just feels more like incompetence rather than malice.
Yeah although I would argue one does not preclude the other. As in, of course with Hanlon’s Razor, this is because of incompetence not malice. But it’s also a scam, just one born out of not being any smarter/better.
I’d agree with you but then you hear about all the sketch shit with the discord and the volunteers. I think they intended to make a game but planned for it to just be a quick cash grab and then they could just slowly dump it. It’s honestly a great strategy, just look at every game the atlas devs have made. They’ve basically mastered the strategy.
Technically yes it’s still a scam. It’s just one that didn’t pan out for them. In this one particular instance anyways. It will continue to work for others.
I don't think consumers were the target of the scam; if they were, I don't see a reason why they wouldn't have accepted pre-orders for the game. In fact, I think they know that accepting pre-orders would have left them open to false advertising lawsuits which is why they didn't go for them, and I think they were well aware that people could just refund the game so trying to scam consumers (in this instance) was probably not worth attempting.
Instead, I think the investors were the target. The brothers who own(ed?) the studio have been living off investor money for the last few years, and which how suspicious their finances are (their ludicrously high travel expenses, in particular) I'm sure they've hidden away a bunch more money.
The game that exists is a shameless, cheaply-made asset flip that I suspect only exists at all because it makes it much harder for investors to sue for fraud when there's an actual product. If they'd just tried to take the money and run without releasing anything it'd be obvious fraud, but now they can claim they tried their best, expectations were too high, etc, and it's difficult for the investors to prove otherwise.
This makes the most sense by far. Owners of a company always pay themselves a salary, and for a tech company with investors I'm sure these people were able to give themselves an extremely high salary. That salary money is legally their money forever no matter how crappy or failed the company's output winds up being. Unless you can prove that an actual crime was committed to acquire that money, then it will remain legally theirs.
I get the impression there is a lot of this bait and switch in the mobile gaming circuit with great game play shown on IG ads but the actual gameplay is nothing like advertised?
Due to the way Steam refunds work I feel this wasn’t their end goal unless they really didn’t think it through at all.
The theory i subscribe to is that they intended to release a “decent” game but had no experience or intent to make it themselves. The marketing hype machine was to build community hype, which would drive investor funding so they could pay for new talent or to just outsource most of the work. I’m guessing that either didn’t materialize or they mismanaged that plan.
Nope, no Kickstarter or obvious public funding before the early access “release”.
There’s a chance some people weren’t able to get refunded but due to Steam’s refund policy I suspect most got their money back.
If it was always intended to be a total scam and never release they’d likely have used their own launcher to bypass the Steam revenue share and refund policy.
Management response: Dear customer, thank you for taking the time to try our cake. This is a cake, which is sweet and tasty by definition. We made the cake so customers can enjoy the cake and taste the typical cake ingredients which taste sweet and tasty. The cake experience as we created should appeal to everyone because cake is tasty.
'member when we were able to self host servers of our games? I member. CoD4 was awesome because of that, later the pirated version of MW2 too. These games (the first MW and MW2) are still alive because of that.
Riccitiello also came under fire in 2022 for referring to developers who don’t focus on microtransactions as the “biggest f*cking idiots” before apologizing.
Classic CEO brainrot. There’s more to life than just maximizing profit.
Maybe this will be the kick in the rear that gets people to drop them enmasse. I’d definitely explore the other options for any new projects I was starting.
Even if they drop this fee, is it really worth the headache in the future when they try something again?
No, Unity has always been an inferior engine to others such as Unreal Engine, Lumberyard, Blender, etc. In fact, the Unreal Engine 3 UDK became free well over a decade ago, and it’s basically Unity if Unity weren’t the scummy corporate vampires they’ve always been.
I’m sorry but Blender game engine was pretty cumbersome to use. It was officially dropped awhile ago and last I heard it was picked up by the community
Meanwhile Larian studio reminding everyone that a good way to make money and avoid layoffs is to be nimble and make good games.
Big Corps sees nimble and good studio making a good game, starts layoffs immediately.
The real murderers are the people that sell their studio to a big publisher. They immediately seal the fate of their teams. They will have layoffs eventually…
I love Larian and am ride or die with Swen et al. Have been ever since Divine Divinity was “we have Diablo at home” but ended up being a shockingly good (for its time) hybrid ARPG/CRPG.
But Larian are very much not the example of “how to do business”. Like Digital Extremes, they are a “legacy” studio that is INCREDIBLY lucky to have survived. Larian themselves had to deal with really shitty publisher deals (Beyond Divinity and I think also Divinity 2?) and games so bad it almost killed the studio (even Mortismal himself will acknowledge that Divinity 2 was a trash fire before the DLC… and was still a mess after). It was mostly “lucking out” and embracing Kickstarter before everyone hated it that saved them. And… Dragon Commander still got close.
And you know what has REALLY made them stable? That’s right. A deal with a major company to work on one of the most famous IPs in gaming (tabletop and video) history.
Larian are smart to try to maintain their size and not overly grow. But, like countless game devs have said and gotten shouted down for, they are far from “typical” and got REALLY lucky. Hell, Swen himself has mentioned the same in between the blurbs that outlets love to reference.
You forgot to mention they sold 30% stake of the company to the world‘s largest game conglomerate Tencent. They‘re also working on a supposedly much larger game than BG3 now and plan to release it within the next 4 years which means they will have to at least double their staff. Honestly, judging a developer entirely by a recent success isn‘t a good practice even when it‘s as massive as BG3. Most people who talk about Larian have a very warped impression. Even when their games are great recently, the tides can change rapidly in this industry.
Yeah did someone just run or interpret reports incorrectly? If a person subscribes to Game Pass and plays Hi Fi Rush for X months, I’d consider that a sale.
If they play it exclusively, sure. But people play tons of games on Gamepass. HiFi Rush and a dozen other games splitting that $15/month/account is a lot less rosy.
I’ve had Gamepass since the beginning, and since it was launched it I’ve bought maybe 1 or 2 Xbox games that weren’t on gamepass, whereas I used to average 2-3 a month. My overall spending on games has dropped massively since getting gamepass - especially on Xbox.
Just the fact that they played some minimum amount should tell them the game contributed to the subscriber’s enjoyment of Game Pass. Otherwise if they are both selling a game and giving it to Game Pass subscribers for free I’m not sure what they are expecting. Can’t have your cake and eat it too, but I’m sure they would like that.
Maybe they are hoping that Game Pass is like extended demos and will lead to more game sales. But there are too many new games all the time for most to hold my interest.
I think they expected more casual gamers to sign up for game pass while the more dedicated among us would still be buying new products.
Honestly, they’d probably be doing better if they didn’t put games on there day 1. Sony doesn’t put their biggest titles on PS+ at launch for a reason.
Halo and starfield had shit sales because we didn’t have to buy them. If they required people to buy the triple-A in-house titles at launch, the double-A stuff like HiFi Rush could still be released on gamepass day 1 as an incentive for people to subscribe.
As it stands, Starfield and Forza burned the money that should be used for HiFi Rush and Ori.
Absolutely agree, just recently instead of buying Manor Lords I just found a good deal on a month of Game Pass. I played it as much as I wanted (for now) for less than $10.
Hmmm it’s almost like Jim Ryan was on to something when he said gamepass wasn’t good for the industry and publishers didn’t like it during the antitrust trial with Microsoft.
It blows my fucking mind how stupid some people are just to be able to play the next rehashed bullshit CoD on gamepass instead of paying $70 a year for the same garbage.
Not quite as important as the right to repair, but close in spirit: I would love to see a legal requirement for shut-down online games to release the server specs needed for the community to replace/maintain them.
Edit: And data export for existing players, so our game progress can be reconstructed on community servers, of course.
shutting down most central servers is a death sentence anyway. I'm not putting another decade of grinding into a private server when my Diablo 3 characters are gone.
Yeah… For battle royal and extraction shooters I think it would also be pretty hard to come close to the experience on private servers.
Granted, I wouldn’t mind being able to play e.g. Hunt Showdown with some friends on a private server/in a private match. It wouldn’t be what it is today, but it could still be fun.
It’s not like games with large populations are really getting shut down anyways. The games that are killed are already dead for most people. I really only am bothered by it when it’s a clearly single player/offline friendly game.
Agreed. But not impossible. Insignia got original Halo 2 Xbox Live servers back online. Most nights you can find a game easily with 20-40 people online during peak hours. It requires a soft mod and maybe 1-2 hours of set up to get online. If anyone could just turn on their old Xbox and play, I’m confident those numbers would be in the hundreds at least.
Allowing people to run private servers is an easy way to allow those that want to play to keep playing in an era where most games have some level of online functionality.
Well, when companies are cutting off people’s purchases and wiping works from our cultural history, a little bit of disregard for the law that is complicit with it is pretty much necessary.
Say, it’s through copyright violation that we can still play games from Mario Maker 1 even though the servers were shut down. People figured out how to copy it even though they weren’t allowed to.
If this is wrong, maybe the law should be fixed to provide a proper path.
This is not enough, the code is old with vulnerabilities that will be exploited with automation nowadays. To correctly do this you need open source server code, or to have it maintained.
What do you mean by specs then? The protocol? The “protocol” is the ABI of the server binary, the logic of it. The networking protocol is super simple. You need the server code for replicating any server.
I mean whatever is needed for the community to replace/maintain the servers, just as I said.
That would obviously include the network protocols, but might also include data structures, API contracts, map data, timetables, and any number of other things.
I wrote in general terms deliberately, since it would mean different things for different games, and to allow for the possibility of releasing source code instead of descriptive specs.
(And no, source code is not the only way to do it. If that were the case, the community-developed game servers that have been made through reverse engineering could never have existed.)
The different school in 8 months after Skull and Bones launch:
Our curriculum isn’t doing well. This is not the curriculum we wanted to deliver. Players expect better, yada yada yada, you know the usual school’s apology stuff. We need to lay off 100% of teachers so as to realign, synergize, refocus, retool, and remoney our money-making money curriculum disguised as a “game”. We will do better. We hear you loud and clear (kind of), and we probably learned a lesson of some kind.
Most of the upper eschalon of 343 have left or were kicked out over the last year, including some of the worst offenders who drove the creation of the crap we've had recently such as Kiki Wolf kill.
It seems like they're internally rebuilding 343 because they know how much of a powerhouse that IP can be if done right. I'm not optimistic about the next Halo, but cautiously hopeful now at least.
I doubt it is even thoughts over how powerful Halo is as an IP. I would be shocked if MS corporate hadn’t realized that any 343 Halo is going to get shit on because “this isn’t Bungie”. And people hate 343 enough that firing them and pushing the leads out won’t raise any red flags.
But yeah. Look at how much damage control MS did when they were releasing fucking Pentiment on switch (look, I love that game with all my heart but you know things are fucked when people remember it exists). There is zero chance 343 “closes” until the next full generation… probably that gen’s refresh SKU consoles. Because it would instantly be interpreted as “xbox is dead”.
But gutting Bethesda? We already see people in this very thread talking about how it is good because they didn’t like a game one of the studios did.
It's possible people won't accept a new game just because of the name attached, but that's not what I'm seeing.
I still play Infinite pretty heavily and most of the people I chat with there are saying the same, thank the lord leadership changed, let's give it a year or two and see.
If halo infinite had been a well balanced Battle Royale game… I’d probably have thrown away everything I love due to overplaying a damn game.
I’m just so sick of multiplayer shooters. The repetition didn’t seem so bad when I was young, but now it just numbs my brain.
But BR is the perfect combo of “my squad vs the world” that you get in a PVE coop, but also the rush of beating real life opponents that makes you keep coming back.
Warzone is all my friends play now, but it’s gotten so stale that no one really pushes to squad up too frequently.
Halo infinite multiplayer is free. The forge community has created a battle royale mode I've heard. Maybe give it a shot? I don't know anything other than it exists.
I personally can't stand battle royale games, so sorry, but I hope the next isn't. It's just not what Halo is. If they released a mode, or a side game as a Battle Royale I'm all for it, but not a full main game.
I feel the burnout though. My normal gaming friends and I are in a mode of trying new games right now and don't play together as much.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Am I the only one that felt Hi-fi Rush was a disappointment? I played plenty of rhythm games and Hi-fi Rush just felt off throughout, landing beats didn’t feel satisfying and it felt off sync at timee. The story was well I can see people liking it but it felt too Disney-ish and cringe for me. I couldn’t get past playing it after the 2nd level.
It’s an interesting concept but I can’t call it a good game.
Cancellation like this aren’t always bad. Especially given BG3 as a whole, sometimes it’s good to just ship a complete product, and move onto newer things. They earned a break
Yeah I don’t think so – Sequels are the thing you’re supposed to have I think. Everyone drooling over having subscriptions since MMOs sucks and it really looks like the whole culture of the industry is pretty shitty in a lot of ways
E: I guess expansions can be good so you don’t have to be an EA sports franchise if you’re not changing the engine a bunch. Other than EUIV though, whose expansions are a money grab way to make the game cost 150 bucks, I haven’t ever played DLC I can think of.
Unless the sequel is using way better tech and requires a new engine or massive engine tweaks, a sequel that comes shortly after the original release could be done better, faster and cheaper as an expansion pack.
Other than EUIV though, whose expansions are a money grab way to make the game cost 150 bucks, I haven’t ever played DLC I can think of.
Well there ya go. Paradox DLC is just bullshit. Most of them just add like 1-2 units or characters or factions which mostly boil down to an aesthetic change. Most big games get real additions via DLC that can add up to 50% more game.
The non cosmetic Paradox DLCs fundamentally change the games so if you want to actually play the latest version of the game with all the mechanics you have to get them all. You can get them on steam sale usually for like 50 bucks a couple times a year.
I’m not defending it – It is what colors me most against DLCs.
I still just don’t like the idea of it – Why not do a DLC for movies and paintings and books? It feels wrong to fork a work of art or say “Oh sorry I didn’t actually make it all here’s the other 20%”
Come to think of it – Movie sequels are kind of like that these days where it’s just one story broken up instead of multiple separate stories. I wish we just did 4 hour movies with intermission but I’m sure I’m alone there.
Just a few dlc/expansion packs that were totally worth their money
All Rimworld expansions. Diablo 3 reaper of souls/ D2 lord of destruction The witcher Ballad of gay tony Star craft ones Red alert yuris revenge Horizon zero dawn frozen wilds
Etc… There are good expansions that are totally worth their money and add to the overall game.
That being said, I’m not a huge dlc fan and rarely spend money on them if they don’t really add to the game. More partial to spend on dlc for smaller studio games rather than large ones.
I didn’t even buy the Rimworld DLCs and I have 500+ hours! I did look at them but didn’t buy. Now that DF is graphical I mostly just play that now tbh.
DF is a great example – 15+ years updates no DLCs unless you count the steam release.
In what world is paying 40usd for a game and 3x 30usd for 500h of entertainment not a good deal? (not particularly aimed at you, but at dlc haters in general)
I am glad when they release a dlc. I get more great content. They get some more financial support.
I am 100% against cheap cash grabs. I am 100% pro multiple well made extentions for a game that allow me to support the studio.
They didn’t add all that many units, two per race. But they did have a great impact on the game (mostly).
Also, new campaigns for each race was awesome. The level editor not only brought many fun custom maps (I still think about that weird 300 map I played when I was 16), but ensured longevity of the game until this day by enabling new maps to be played in regular games.
I miss getting all this stuff with a game or expansion too.
web.archive.org/web/20230924045050/…/PureDarkHe started hiding his count but he was at 11k last week and his most popular/cheapest tier is $5 USD so he makes 55k a month. So basically 660k+ a year.
Patch 5 also improves inventory access, letting players manage the inventory of all companions from one single UI, regardless of whether or not they’re currently in your party.
YES. I was just looking for a mod to do this but it’s so much better when the devs build out a highly-requested feature like this.
While at camp, you can now access and manage the inventories of companions who aren’t in your active party.
Sounds like it’s not possible everywhere just at camp, also, the main thing I want is official autosorting containers, I use the mod but it can be janky at times, inventory management has put me off playing and I really want to I just got sick of organising loot and marking as items to sell and splitting stacks etc etc
You know I was trying to figure out why I lost interest in Chapter 3 and started playing Total War, and I think this is it (also a dialogue bug that made companions start spoiling the plot…)
I’ve never been a huge fan of inventory management and after a while it gets very tedious in BG3.
Jokes on me though, I’m playing Thorek in Warhammer 2 rn and he’s a crafting lord so I turned a semi-RTS into an inventory management game anyways.
The inventory management in the game is shockingly bad.
“Oh, I got a new companion. I wonder what I can equip them with.”
Good luck, because the gear is scattered among your inactive companions, or the chests that might be locked to you in co-op.
“I need to take a potion mid combat”
It’s somewhere in those 20 inventory wheels!
The whole inventory weight is kind of pointless as well, since you can send to camp at any point, and there’s very few places where you can’t just go back and get something. It’s just inconvenience kept for the sake of following some arbitrary rules.
Gear especially should just be kept in a separate place from consumables and quest items, with maybe some quick swap wardrobe feature for e.g. switching to a bludgeoning weapon for smashing walls.
Good luck, because the gear is scattered among your inactive companions, or the chests that might be locked to you in co-op.
This has explicitly been changed this patch.
It’s just inconvenience kept for the sake of following some arbitrary rules.
It’s on one hand a BG throwback and more.importantly a minor impediment to the time-tested tactic in Larian games of “barrelmancy.” Look up some Telekinesis runs on Divinity:Original Sin to see why.
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