Not a lot, but such incidents are a clear indication that we are slowly seeing the Covid effect wearing off at its entirety. Offices and companies are way too eager to get back to the pre-covid grind. Their long held products are now being released.
I am also working in a IT industry and them slowly cutting off our Work-from-home days under the guise of low productivity is disheartening to say the least.
… what? Does lemmy have karma bots that just fire off pre-written feel good comments? … Does lemmy have karma?
What does that have to do with any of this. Where is the “long held product”? Hell, the sister article is even “Yeah… that MP mode is never coming out”
Again, what does that have to do with anything here?
Naughty Dog have not launched anything since the TLOU remake a year or two back. And WFH is not mentioned at all. So I have no idea where you are pulling your random ass talking points out of.
Because this is a pretty bog standard “We have had a troubled development cycle and our publisher/parent company is cutting their losses”
strange, seems to be a country related thing. Working as an UI designer in germany and tech companies here are doubling down on “work wherever the fuck you want”…
My company has offered it from the beginning of covid and did not change it at all and my latest job offers included a 100% work from home option and also a few startet to offer a 4 days week with the compensation of 5 days.
I am from India. My cousin’s job is entirely WFH, and as you said they’ve doubled down on it. India is also infamous for ‘meatshop’-esque IT industry and the biggest of them have forced people to office again, even though they could work from home. I am somewhere in the middle and they are slowly reducing WFH days, I can still work at the least 10 days from home a month, but that’s not a lot.
seriously, you’d think with the holiday season coming up studios would be crunching to get their games ready in time, but since unity shit the bed and epic took their lead it’s been nothing but bad news in the AA and AAA space
one curious sidenote to these cuts is the TLOU multiplayer game, which seems pretty much dead at this point:
Despite hit ratings for the recent HBO adaptation of The Last Of Us, a multiplayer spin-off for the zombie shooter based on the first game’s Factions mode has struggled in development. Bloomberg reported in June that Sony had diverted resources away from the project following a negative internal review by Bungie, the recently acquired live-service powerhouse behind Destiny 2. One source now tells Kotaku that the multiplayer game, while not completely canceled, is basically on ice at this point.
:( very sad to hear that. Naughty Dog has made 3 of my favorite online games of all time (Uncharted 3, Uncharted 4, TLOU) and so I was really excited for the announcement of a new multiplayer game. I feel like historically Naughty Dog has done a good job of finding the parts of a gameplay loop that feels “sticky” and give it some grease to make it feel better in subsequent games. There were a few parts of TLOU that could have used improvements; Clans representing some really interesting and incredibly infuriating ideas in multiplayer games, for example. I expected it would still be a niche game, but sad to hear it is probably going to die in development hell after years of me getting excited for it.
The last multiplayer mode for The Last of Us was designed to keep you playing long enough to not trade the game in. This one is aiming to be a game that has no ceiling on how much you play or spend. I'm not convinced we need another live service game that's inevitably going to get shut down and disappear off the face of the earth in just a few years. This definitely sucks for the people losing their livelihoods, but hopefully this is indicative of the live service model no longer making financial sense.
Because game dev, at the best of times, is a giant multi-year gamble. You have to hope that people like the game you are in year 3 on because you don’t have money to go much past 4. And you also have to hope that another more popular studio doesn’t release something similar that cannibalizes your sales.
One way to make that safer? Get a publisher with deep pockets. Someone who can say “Hey, Elden Ring just came out and even has the same ‘there is a whole other world underground’ gimmick that you do. Can we delay your game for another six months but keep paying you the entire time?”
And those kinds of publishers tend to prefer the big studios where pivoting to a new engine or making a prototype for a radical genre shift is viable.
And this also applies to the insanely successful small studios. Dead Cells is a great example. Motion Twin is mostly a worker cooperative. This greatly limited its scalability (profit sharing for indie games doesn’t scale all that well) and resulted in a spin off of Evil Empire to manage Dead Cells.
Unionization will go a long way toward avoiding the worker abuse inherent in game dev. But startups are dangerous no matter what industry you are in.
Yes, and he’ll do the old “force austerity to temporarily drive up profit margins for a quarter or two, then once it’s clear the next quarter will be crap, sell all of the stock that was awarded (auspiciously with a very short vesting window, if not just given outright)”
Typical bs, probably worth shorting this stock over the next year or so
He has 0 salary, he isn’t getting paid for any of this. Hence the end of the letter. You obviously didn’t even read it.
I expect everyone to roll up their sleeves and work hard. I’m not getting paid, so I’m either going down with the ship or turning the company around. I much prefer the latter.
No shit, he’s an activist that bought in and turned the company around when it was being run into the ground by consultants working for short sellers. He owns about 15%
Now compare that to executives with no personal stake in their company, making millions in salary and not giving a fuck about anyone else
There's so few instances of corporations doing actually good things so opinions tend to skew negative. Epic hasn't been thought of fondly since they started doing those exclusivity deals to try and bring people to their platform rather than making their platform a worthy competitor to Steam.
It’s very rare that those who hate Epic also hate Valve though, so it’s not about standing against a corporation. People just defend what they are used to and Epic disrupts that.
I'll be the first to say that I only begrudgingly accept Steam exists. However, I avoid using it and vastly prefer GOG due to the DRM-free nature of their store and the offline installers.
Just because the hate on Epic is vocal does not mean that everyone likes the Steam status quo.
You’re presuming the contributors to Lemmy are just the same in their choices of gaming as the broader market.
It doesn’t take that much reading of posts in Lemmy to conclude that it’s heavilly biased towards adults, techies and lefties.
In Statistics you can only make presumptions about a subset of subjects from statistical distribution data from the whole universe of subjects if the subset has been randomly selected, which this one most definitelly hasn’t - if only because of the “Reddit migration” Lemmy is filled with people with a certain kind of mindset (the ones for whom the actions of the Reddit CEO were displeasing enough to make them want to move and who actually had the will to do so) which isn’t at all the average person’s behaviour (the “average” just stayed there) plus even the Reddit population was already not representative of gamers generally (older in general).
The general market share of GOG might give you a hint that here too it’s likely going to have fewer customers than something like Steam, but judging by comments I’ve read here it’s probably more than 2%, at least amongst commenters (no idea about lurkers).
epic is a lawful good with epic mega grants, but their partial owner tencent is lawful evil. if Sweeney ever loses a controlling amount of shares to them, I’m likely done with them for good.
if Sweeney ever loses a controlling amount of shares to them
To be clear, he can’t “lose” shares to them. He might willingly sell shares to them (although that’s unlikely as he’s shown no indication of giving anyone else control over the company thus far), but it’s a private company - the shares aren’t just out there for Tencent to buy up and force a takeover.
It's getting pretty tiring on Reddit. You'd think Sweeney were Hitler. I get that Epic's exclusives were annoying, but they also give us free games every week. The hate is far past justification.
Opposing it? EOS supports Linux, EAC works on the Deck, and Epic regularly invest in things like Lutris. Sure, there are no native Linux ports on the Epic store, but that’s not been the general direction of the industry either. Proton/Wine can still be used to run the games sold by Epic.
Rocket League also dropped Mac support, which would be perfectly compatible with the store, so you can’t argue it was about Linux. The actual reason was the need to upgrade to DX11.
Payday 2 has no connection to Epic, but it’s common for developers to revisit and update games when releasing on a new platform. For example, the upcoming Steam port of THPS 1+2 even has a new developer behind it, and set to include achievements and potentially other perks.
There are also games like Rust that have dropped native Linux support without any ties to Epic.
Why do people always say this as if these forums are some niche group and not a huge spread of the general population?
If you’re seeing multiple communities with a general opinion, maybe it’s “people hate them” instead of “why do all these different groups hate the same thing?”
This is the part that blows my mind. When you have a money-printing machine like Fortnite and you still manage to lose money, maybe it’s the CEO you need to be firing.
So, Microsofts suggestion for the problem of studios beating old IP to death isn’t to support smaller indie projects that are developing new IP.
Doesn’t gamepass make this problem worse? It makes it affordable and incentivizes people to try many of those big AAA games so studios still get paid (maybe less than if it’s bought outright, but still i imagine it’s still compensated).
I’m already 50% of the time on my ship to the seven seas. Do they want me permanently at sea? Same goes with the media companies like Disney+, Netflix and Amazon. They push it any further, I’m pushing off to seas for good.
They *literally, figured out how to beat piracy. The unbeatable problem. And then they had to go and blow it with their greed.
Meh. Capcom games just became $0 for me, because I’ll swear an oath before you to pirate every one of their games, from here on out.
I'm from a third world country. I still buy games as often as I can, but I also get that these price hikes are stretching people thin. A $70 game is like a third of our monthly minimum wage, it's a huge chunk of money that people need to live, and most companies don't bother to adjust it proportionally to our financial situation, even though there is no reason not to do so when it comes to digital media.
That person just said in another comment that they have the money. Before you even get to piracy, there's also the option of purchasing and playing the games that you feel are priced fairly, because that incentivizes more of that to be made at those prices, and those games typically need your money more anyway. As for adjusting prices for different territories, I'm no expert on it, but I understand it might be related to people in stronger economies buying games from cheaper regions with something as simple as a VPN to get a game for a fraction of the price, which at any kind of scale means that that game needs to sell substantially more copies to break even.
Some companies still manage to offer regional prices. It's more of a matter of poor implementation or even plain indifference. The latter especially when the platform offers that option but the publisher maintains the prices high.
Eh, I won't speak for that person's habits but for me piracy was not the last possible resort but rather the entry point that allowed me to develop enough interest that I do buy them today.
And when today the "free" options peddle gambling to children, I cannot take the moral argument seriously even for a second. I would much sooner have people pirate than develop gambling addictions, the publishers be damned.
That’s just it. First off, I rarely am interested in Capcom games, think the last one I bought was in maybe 2016? (RE7). So this person you are responding to really is going off the handle over a nothing burger, I assure you.
But you’ve hit on an important point, that’s important to discuss. These price hikes are disproportionate to the growth of household earnings, and more importantly, digital media was supposed to drive costs down, and not up for the end consumer. We don’t actually own these games, we more or less lease them. There’s nothing physical anymore. Which is a problem. Not that I don’t like the ease of digital purchases, it’s the fact that at any moment I can be stripped of access to the product. Which makes it a lease or rental, not full ownership. Yet they keep wanting to drive the costs up up up, in light of that fact. It’s getting to be gross behaviour. The products are declining in quality, the costs keep going up, actual ownership of the end product comes into question, and the profits keep going to a smaller and smaller circle of people, some of whom are among the most vile of people alive today.
Nope. I only pirate when media companies can’t stop gorging themselves on billions of dollars in profit and shovelling shares and dollar bills down their greedy little throats.
It’s not that I don’t have the money, I’ve just had enough. When you had one of two streaming services and a Spotify and good prices on steam and whatnot, that worked.
Today we have preorders that eclipse 100 dollars, my streaming service bills are more than the cable bills they were supposed to be replacing, and now it’s just more more more. We want more more more
Two streaming services is less competitive than the 5 or 6 major ones we have right now, you can choose them a la carte in a way you never could with cable, and even if you felt compelled to have all of them at the ad free tier, you're paying less than cable and getting no commercials. Video game prices have lagged behind inflation, not even kept up with them, and the game you want will probably have a substantial sale 3 months after release anyway. It just seems like an incredibly thin premise to justify piracy.
I don’t need to justify piracy to you. You are the one that’s morally outraged here. Again, I have the money, it’s not a poverty thing. It’s a perception thing. When people act gross, I act gross in response. Plain and simple. You can try to defend these companies, some of which have larger profits than the GDP outputs of some countries, all you want. That’s your prerogative. When companies put greed before the goodwill of the customers, which this is by the way, then I act shitty in response. That’s my prerogative.
You were morally outraged enough to decide that this justifies piracy, but this is Capcom we're talking about, not EA. From what I can see, they're not making their money off of gambling mechanics like Ultimate Team. They're talking about raising prices on products that are generally seen as quality and charging what they believe those products to be worth, even saying that this will allow them to raise staff salaries to retain talent. I don't condone piracy, but I was asking you what line you believed they crossed when price increases are just inevitable for anything that costs money, and I personally don't really see any scummy business practices attached to this. Beyond that, I'd also argue that you have a greater effect on the market when you just don't pirate or play those games that offend you at all and instead direct your time and money to a game that could use it more. That means they make more of the latter and the former is less successful for doing something you didn't like. Word of mouth of the games you played and the lack of word of mouth for the ones you didn't has an effect on the market as well.
I agree you don’t have to justify it, but I also feel like you don’t need to glorify it either. I’m not morally opposed to it and jah knows I’ve don’t some piracy in my day, but people who have to make a big statement about it as you’ve done above invite the arguments from people who are morally opposed.
Having 5 streaming services instead of 2 when they each have exclusive content isn’t competition, it’s just separate small monopolies. They hold the content hostage and you can’t actually choose when you want to watch something specific.
It’d only be competitive if they all had the same catalogue or you didn’t care at all what you watch, which I suspect just isn’t a reality for most people.
They're all trying to have enough to watch to keep you subscribed all the time, which means they have an incentive to keep making more good shows. But there's no world where 5 streaming services will have something I'll want to watch every month, so it's pretty easy to just cancel until you've got a handful of shows to go through on that service. Then you subscribe for a month or two and come back later. That's way, way better than a local television monopoly like cable typically had, with channels you couldn't opt out of for a cheaper bill, that still forced commercials on you regardless of your exorbitant bill.
That’s so convoluted that at that point I can just torrent the show. It’s easier, faster, free and I don’t have to wait for it or try to figure out which streaming service has it.
That's not convoluted in the least bit, nor is it faster or easier to torrent. If you somehow found out about a show but not which service it was on, there's justwatch.com.
I didn’t decide to pirate when games went from $70 to $80 (CAD). I didn’t decide to when they went from $80 to $90. I decided to when, on top of that price, I also am encouraged via predatory tactics (such as matchmaking intentionally matching you up with players who have all of this nonsense so you can “see what you’re missing”) to buy a deluxe edition, season pass, monthly battlepass, “cosmetic only” microtransactions, second season pass, additional DLC not part of any season pass, and whatever other crap they want to nickel and dime their playerbase into buying. All just to actually get the full content of the game. Remember when games had the full game when you bought it? Maybe an expansion pack that had a substantial amount of content that was developed and released after the game was released?
You're free to do as you please, but if the game wasn't worth it enough to pay for, pirating it still does them more of a solid than if you had bought and played something else. Let's say the game is Starfield. Sure, they didn't get your $90 if you pirated it, but if you're contributing to discussions about it, it keeps people thinking about it, and especially if you have positive things to say about it, you end up encouraging other people to buy it, which means that their business strategy of selling the game at $90 CAD (or any other strategy you decided justified piracy) is still that much more effective, and they'll do it again, because the game sold at that price. But maybe Broken Roads comes out for cheaper and you get your RPG fix there instead. They could use your dollar more, and each sale counts way more toward a future where that team gets to make another game after this one. If your word of mouth instead convinces someone to pick up Broken Roads (which you also hypothetically paid for), you're contributing toward encouraging more games to come out at that price point. Both games are going to take up your finite time, so both your time and your money influence what survives in the market.
Godot is an open source game engine that is incredibly trending among the “hipster” developers community and fanatics of FOSS.
It’s absolutely not even close to the features offered by Unreal Engine or Unity but people that are barely informed are all excited because now an open source project with some serious bugs and limitations “will show them”.
Unless there is a serious rewrite, Godot will never be a valid alternative to the two main commercial engines. And with the fact that it had been recently heavily rewritten to be updated to v4, it is really improbable that it will happen soon.
Unless there is a serious rewrite, Godot will never be a valid alternative to the two main commercial engines
How so? I’ve seen complaints about the C# API and some similar challenges, but nothing show-stopping. Obviously you won’t be making a AAA game in it, but for indies it looks like a decent option.
The dirty secret of software is that any given user-facing OSS application is about 15 years behind the closed-source competitors, but the fact is that most software was good-enough 15 years ago and the industry has spent the last 15 years on cloudifying and A-B testing and GUI revamping and other stuff that isn’t basic functionality.
The thing is, even Indies can look and feel like AAA games (well, the good ones) with something unreal engine for example.
I’m not a fan of Epic by any means but all I’m saying is that they asinine aren’t in the same league while with Unity they could at least be close.
Unity have done a real shitty moves but all this “We’ll do even better without it” attitude that I’m seeing around is either coming from people that just think “shitty move” or really really really naive developers.
I guess that since Epic owns Unreal Engine that bad news for Epic means good news for Godot?
I don’t think that Epic is going to want to divest from Unreal considering how much money it makes.
I also don’t think that it’s a zero-sum game. As a developer I want Unreal (and Unity) to be great so it creates more competition. Unreal has led the way in a lot of cool gaming tech that Godot is picking up.
Maybe it was reverse psychology. Epic is trying to destroy the competition by giving them money. Then, paranoid gamers will refuse to use or support Godot, because there’s a connection to Epic.
Epic also gave money to Lutris, while Epic’s CEO was smearing Linux users on twitter, so I wouldn’t count on Epic’s stance on things and where some of Epic’s money going aligning any time soon. Those megagrants feel very disingenuous to me (doesn’t mean that those money do not help those “underdog” projects, though).
kotaku.com
Aktywne