Corporate fuckery is not a good smell to gamers. Smells like month old genital pus.
Just starting an article by explaining “Unknown Worlds Entertainment has been acquired by Somebody Interactive, the parent company of Hunka Chunka Studios and Rumpy Pumpy Inc” and we’re already suspicious, because corporate acquisition means the game now has more parasites to fund - layers of upper management, investors, etc.
Then we hear about major names that are the people that had the vision for the original game being replaced “immediately” in a press release full of bullshit corpowank marketing boilerplate…it means this game is almost certainly going to be cancelled, the studio shut down and the staff laid off, probably after a lot of players have purchased the game in early access.
There’s quite a bit of overlap in Subnautica and KSP’s player bases, and we’ve already had our asses burned by Take Two Interactive.
So, I’m not going to be joining any early access campaign. I’m not paying for the game before it is finished, I’m not playtesting it for free, I’m not pre-ordering anything and I’m not buying any merch, and there’s a reasonable chance I’m not buying the game at all, because it has already been smeared with the aforementioned month old genital pus.
I don’t think I want to buy games from companies that have parent companies. Parent companies make everything fucking suck.
Absolutely. I won’t touch shit until I see the EULA. The fuckery with the ownership of mod code was enough to burn me for KSP. How the fuck do you seize ownership in completeness for an entire code base just because it happens to extend your product. That is like Pillsbury claiming ownership for your grandma’s cookie recipe because it contains their flower as the primary component.
“Wah wah DOTA wah wah.” So fucking what. It isn’t a stand alone, just because someone makes an entirely different game inside of your game and it is more popular than your game does not give you the right to claim their code and profiteer off someone else’s passion project without compensating them. You want to own the code, buy it. All of the players still have to buy your game to play the mods, so you are still making even more money you dillholes.
Good article, I just wish it would say why the game still isn’t available. I never played this game but went down a little rabbit hole looking for it and ET: Quake Wars and it’s insane the hoops you have to jump through to play these games that used to sell. I still hope to jump through those hoops one day and try it out.
I'm unsure if you ever figured out how to play ETQW, but your comment inspired me to go find out for myself. In case you didn't, this discord looks to be the answer:
I watched some videos of ET:QW and it looked really dated and I lost interest haha. I bet having nostalgia for this is probably required. I still really want to play gunman chronicles, I can hang with a Half Life engine game!
I feel a bit of shame that back in the Win7, Xbox Series S era of Microsoft I was sort of cheering them on as an underdog in several markets.
But it does seem like every large company is driving these zero sum efforts now. Anyone that high up is chomping for workforce reduction.
If larger-scale changes don’t prove possible, I still want Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism act as a way for majority workforce in a company to declare “No, this way is insane, fire whoever suggested it” earlier rather than later.
Developer Unknown Worlds has shared a letter asking for patience from Subnautica fans after publisher Krafton announced the departure of its senior leadership—including studio co-founder Max McGuire—and the installation of Dead Space producer and Striking Distance (The Callisto Protocol) CEO, Steve Papoutsis, as the new studio head.
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The letter does firmly deny that the game will be live serviceified or otherwise experience a monetization change.
It’s a shame that Microsoft owns id Software and Bethesda now. They’ll fuck that up too along with all the major IPs they own. Coz they are stupid too large corporate bullshit that only looks at numbers and nothing else.
I get a feeling MS doesn’t want to be in the game production/publishing space anymore. They see bigger growth opportunities elsewhere. I personally believe that it’s a big mistake and the ai bubble will cost them dearly, but chasing very short term profitability has never hurt an executive.
Micro$oft is like the new EA. This is the exact same shit EA did 10 years back when they bought up dozens of studios, milked the shit out of them, and then closed the studio so the executives could get bonuses. Now EA has like, 5 studios that make games while the rest got gutted for the IP and then taken out back with a gun.
I think EA was still worse. At least in my perception.
I think EA actually bought studios just to get the IP and immediately get rid of the employees. I also think they tried to milk a few of the IPs before letting it go downhill.
MS, from what I can tell, gave studios quite a lot of freedom to do what they do best. I don’t think they intentionally wanted to fuck over studios, but they rather sacrificed them.
Don’t get me wrong: that’s still bad. But there’s a difference between fucking studios over with intent and reacting badly to changed circumstances.
Unlike EA, Microsoft can afford to wait a little and then get rid of the employees. They let them do what they want because they have no idea how to run a gaming studio anymore. They don’t have any incentive to have expertise, which is why the old Xbox IPs like Halo or Gears died so COD can live in another part of town. They are like tech venture capitalists now, not even just in gaming.
pcgamer.com
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