A great game for sure. Probably my most awaited game release.
Only issue is that I need to finish factorio before that release and I wasn’t expecting the factorio DLC to extend the game by like 3x…
Anyway Manor lords was my most played single player game for 2024 in its rather barebone build and it was already a blast. Something that brings back when I was playing Settlers as a kid but with modern graphics.
It is advanced access, however Firaxis did an announcement shortly after release, addressing the rocky release and promising to fix things, where they (accidentally) called it early access. It seems they changed that now, still, it was there (and was made fun of) in forums and other Lemmy like communities.
I just checked and nearly choked. I’ve played every single Civ game ever made. As much as I love the series, there’s no way in hell I’m paying AU$160 for a base game.
It does include the first two expansions that will come out and leader packs and shit. I have sunk far more hours into civ than any other game. I very rarely buy a game, maybe twice a year. So it was worth it to me. I’ll play it for 500+ hours and at that point it’s 30 cents an hour of entertainment.
Veilgaurd was a perfectly good game. It’s not a 10/10, but despite some flaws, I’ve had a great time playing it. Too bad some business suit says it’s not “successful” enough to warrant a follow-up.
I’d like to see how they measured success. Was it to break even? Well from what point? Including the time that it was supposed to be a live service game? Through the committees and executives shutting down ideas? It was in the top 10 for games on Steam that week and had generally favorable reviews. If that didn’t match their plan, that’s on them.
Ordered merch from Bioware mid-November for an xmas present. It arrived Jan 4th; they shipped the wrong product.
Contacted them 3 seprate times through their ‘contact us’ page and got ignored for 3 weeks. It wasn’t until I filed a chargeback with my cc that they finally emailed me (4 days after submission).
I had asked for my money back in my various emails; but they didn’t respond to that at all and just shipped me a new package.
Still haven’t gotten that, so no idea if they actually shipped the right item this time. It’s not listed on their site anymore; so they likely don’t have inventory to ship.
We’ll see what’s in the box whenever it gets here.
Yeah, the silver lining of the whole gaming industry fallout is that the indie game scene has never been better. I was lamenting the fact that we hadn’t had a good top-down zeldalike in a long time, echoes of wisdom notwithstanding even though the formula is pretty altered. Someone pointed me in the direction of Master Key and it was an incredibly satisfying time. Almost like it would have fit in perfectly between LoZ 1 and Link’s Awakening.
You can’t build a game studio without funding, and that is where the problem lies…
Publishers have become very risk-averse ever since Embracer went downhill. They basically only invest in <literally the same game as some previously successful title>…
It isn’t that easy to go indie though, unless you do gamedev as a hobby and have another source of income.
I am working at what was a small studio (about 10 persons) when I joined, and has meanwhile grown to more than 50 employees.
I am a coder, and therefore don’t have direct insight into our finances, so please take everything below with a grain of salt. It is also intentionally vague because I don’t want to violate any NDAs.
Over the years we have started two indie projects, that both were completed and released, but both in the end had a publisher funding a part of the development. So, while they were indie initially, the released products cannot be called indie any more… The reason why we went for publisher contracts for those two projects were manyfold, but an important part was simply that we needed a way to cover our running costs. We are doing gamedev as a day-job, after all, so it needs to pay for our rent, food, etc… (Other important reason for going with a publisher were marketing, customer support,… All the things that we as developers have no experience in.)
Now that we have grown to medium studio size, we are hoping that we can at some point fund an indie project by making enough profit with other, publisher-funded projects. We have several projects running in parallel anyhow, and if 3 of them would yield enough money to pay a 4th project that would be fully our own, we would definitely go for it.
However, the market situation is tough, and we currently cannot afford to do that. Almost all profit we make goes into developing prototypes that we need in order to have a realistic chance to get the next publisher-funded project…
Two years ago it was a lot easier to get publisher contracts. Back then we were quite optimistic about being able to fund a fully independent project, but then the market changed, getting new publisher-funded projects has become a lot more difficult, and right now doing an indie project is (for us) not financially possible…
So, what we are doing now is that we are taking our game ideas and presenting them to publishers. The prottypes I mentioned? Most of them are for our own ideas. Having something the people at the publisher can play goes a long way in convincing them that a game-idea is fun. That’s not indie, but it is as close as we can get to making the games we want to make. While the last year has been tough, with publishers being very, very, very cautious about new ideas, the situation seems to slowly change, and we might eventually get funding for one of our own ideas. Maybe. If we are lucky.
There are also going to be lots of talent who permanently leave the industry because there are no longer any stable decent paying jobs at larger studios.
So EA put way too high of a sales target on the game, obviously held it back from becoming what it could be, and now are blaming the studio with layoffs, ensuring the next game will flop.
I don’t care what their “numbers” and “projections” were. The game was on the top 10 list in Steam. Even if it wasn’t an A+ game I’d say it looked like it at least hit Assassin’s Creed numbers, I’d hardly call that a failure. Sounds more like a failure to accurately predict, maybe they should fire their business analysts instead of the people who you know, make the games.
But the business analysts are the most profitable group, anywhere! If you don’t believe me just hire a business analyst to analyze things and they’ll prove it to you!
As a Data Analyst / Business Analyst, let me assure you: Not all of us are stupid (some are, for sure), but there’s only so much you can do about stupid managers. If they decide that a certain measure is key, it can be really hard to explain why it isn’t that important or where a certain distortion comes from. To compound this, some managers genuinely don’t understand their business processes and are unwilling to have it explained to them. They’ll make assumptions about how things work, then base their demands on those.
For an entirely made up example, consider a department manager looking to monitor a software development team’s workload. That workload, to them, consists of bug tickets and feature implementations. Not counted here are feature requests because, apparently, fielding them and discussing their feasibility isn’t actual development work. That’s management work, which is the Product Manager’s job… Except the Product Manager can’t unilaterally decide whether something is feasible without consulting those actually familiar with the code, taking up the developer’s time. On the other hand, since it’s an internally developed tool for other units, they can’t just say No to every request or else they risk people calling their team’s funding into question.
Now, you have the choice between frustrating yourself and annoying the manager by trying to explain all that, or gritting your teeth and just giving them the stupid chart on bugs closed and feature implementations completed over time. Guess which one is healthier for your employment prospects?
And we haven’t even started talking about the variance in effort of bug fixes or about non-feature work for code stability or QA. Eventually, we’ll reach the point where the measure becomes a target and you have to start reframing bug fixes as features and splitting features up into smaller features just to make the figures look nicer.
What I’m getting at is this: Sometimes, the analysts aren’t to blame, but the managers making decisions.
That’s not to say there aren’t absolutely shitty business analysts out there that will gladly figure out ways to polish the figures and then cash the check for making the figures look better.
Thank you for that perspective. It seems to be somewhat similar and thankless to when I get tasked with taking microbio samples from the machines to check for contamination and then get grumpy department leads because the analysis results show over and over again that their cleaning procedure is inefficient.
What, can’t you just… idk, check better to see how clean it actually is? That can’t be right, you probably got your samples contaminated. Were those really from that machine? Maybe you got them mixed up. Well you’re really itching to find contaminants, aren’t you? Of course you’ll find something if you look hard enough…
I don’t know how your business works, so I’m trying to project the managers I know onto it - am I so far off that I look like a manager?
Hahaha the production lead actually suggested that I might have been sick and coughed germs onto the sample sponge or that the sponges themselves were already contaminated during manufacturing, because every single sample showed high counts of pseudomonas.
Maybe instead she should start listening to us when we tell her that production equipment from 1970 might not be sufficient to run a food production with the hygiene requirements of today. But no, replacing that would cost more money than just taking samples over and over until the results are low enough (probably because by the 37th swab I cleaned the surface better than the production workers)
Couldn’t you just add up the germs found in successive swabs to the total and increase the total count with each test?
(I assume you have certain testing and evaluation standards you’re bound to, so that’s a “No”, but I like the idea of the results getting worse rather than better)
What would newer equipment do differently to make it less prone to hygiene issues?
I think the real world implementation of “Kingdoms of Elyria” is Kingdoms Reborn. A multiplayer 4X/city-builder hybrid (although it works just fine in single player too).
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