For what? They can’t even use a lot of these IPs anymore. Fallout is now associated with 76 unless you’re thinking of Obsidian. Bethesda as a whole is not trusted for big RPGs after Starfield. Blizzard is a shell of its old self, cutting interest in Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch. Id has been doing okay, but has had a lot of brain drain, and they definitely don’t produce the “live service hits” MS appears to be looking for - just things people would love to see on Game Pass and discard. There’s rumors even Call of Duty is struggling to retain relevance in new releases.
…We about to see Crash vs Spyro Autobattle Royale?
That’s the thing though. Gamers have a special kind of amnesia that gets triggered every time BIG_IP_OF_THEIR_LIKING releases a new sequel or edition. The communities on Lemmy and reddit are unfortunately not indicative of how the wider audience actually perceives games. We’re a fringe group, and the publishers/studios bank hard on that. The uneducated and apathetic masses are their target audience. If the gaming world listened to the likes of Lemmy and reddit users, micro/macrotransactions, early-access hell, and half-finished releases wouldn’t have become common practice. But here we are.
Fallout is now associated with 76 unless you’re thinking of Obsidian.
You may be right. Fallout 76 has however seen a record number of players since the show aired. That’s commonplace with most gaming franchises when a film or TV series comes out. See also: The Last of Us, and SWTOR when The Mandalorian came out.
(I personally think of Neverwinter Nights 2 when thinking of Obsidian. t’was peak gaming)
Blizzard is a shell of its old self, cutting interest in Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch.
I agree with you here. In reality, Blizzard still consistently has queue issues when releasing a new WoW expansion or game, even after all this time. They know it happens, and won’t scale up for launch day on WoW retail AND Classic. Their target audience eats that shit up and I’m saying this as a former player that quit during Battle for Azeroth. No comment on Starcraft as I quit when the OG Starcraft scene died down on aus-1 back in the day. Overwatch 1 was seeing incredible numbers when I played from launch until Moria was released. OW2 being a pay-to-win shit show ate into their numbers until they gave up the pay-to-win bullshit. I see more and more of my friends and streamers playing it again now that Bobby Kotick is gone. I’m quite disappointed in some of them, but it is what it is.
There’s rumors even Call of Duty is struggling to retain relevance in new releases.
Good thing they’re just rumours until the earnings report comes. Sony has poorly-redacted court documents stating that CoD is their bread and butter on the playstation. There’s no way that’s changing in the forseeable future (at least not in the billions of dollars range), even with the absolute shit-show that was MW3. When MW4 comes out, the diehard fans will forget it even happened, as they have with every single release since its inception.
Rollerdrome was very solid concept but the difficulty curve was pretty intense. One second you feel like you have the hang of it the next you can’t get to the next arena.
Yeah I absolutely adored the concept and would love.to see it picked up. I discovered it after pitching to a friend Tony Hawk’s Borderlands 4 and gradually realising the proof of concept existed.
Hey, at least that game came out. Plus Eidos Montreal also made the actually really, really damn good Guardians of the Galaxy game nobody played. I'd make that trade.
Man, these guys really can't catch a break. That sucks, they make pretty solid stuff.
Well, it depends on when they cancelled it and on how much it cost. That thing didn't sell THAT poorly, but Square, as usual, was aiming way above what's realistic. Estimates on Steam alone put it above 1 million copies sold. You can assume PS5 was at least as good.
Based on those same estimates it actually outsold Guardians. Which is an absolute travesty and I blame anyone who hasn't played it personally.
Well, then you're my enemy, because that game is great, Marvel connection or not. In fact it's a fantastic companion piece ot the third Guardians movie, because they're both really good at their respective medium but they are pushing radically oppposite worldviews (one is a Christian parable, the other a humanist rejection of religious alienation).
And yeah, holy crap, they made a Marvel game about grief and loss and managing them without turning to religion and bigotry and it was awesome and beautiful and nobody played it and you all suck.
Nah, I'm mostly kidding. About the being my enemy part. The game is, in fact, awesome, and you should fetch it somewhere before the absolute nightmare of licensed music and Disney IP bundled within it makes it unsellable on any digital platform forever.
Seriously, I bought a physical copy of the console version just for preservation, beause if you want to know what will be in the overprized "hidden gem" lists of game collectors in thirty years, it's that.
Some day my Marvel fatigue will have worn off, and I'll be in the mood for it. If it's still for sale, I'll buy it. If not, maybe I'll pirate it. I'm glad they made a good game; it just wasn't a game I was looking for when it came out, and I don't think I'm alone. If you want to see this cycle happen again in real time, keep an eye on Suicide Squad over the next few weeks.
Oh, big difference there, though. Suicide Squad actually IS a looter shooter driven by a wish to chase a business trend from five years to a decade ago. Guardians is a strictly single player Mass Effect-lite narrative action game (which yeah, given the material that fits).
I'd be with you in the argument that it would have been an even better game without the Marvel license, because then they could have skipped trying to rehash bits from the movies' look and feel, which are consistently the worst parts of the game. But then, without the license it would never have been made, so... make mine Marvel, I guess. Well worth it.
Oh, sorry, I meant the Avengers cycle, since that article I linked was about a combined loss between the two games, but really...Avengers was the more expensive game and did the brand damage. Suicide Squad will be that again, even though WB had several years to see this coming.
Oh, yeah, for sure. The marketing they did for Guardians was also very bad, it really made it seem of a kind with Avengers, which it really wasn't.
There will be a lot to say about why Rocksteady is getting to the looter shooter space so late and why it was the exact wrong move for the studio and the franchise. Unless the game is great and everybody buys it, I suppose.
I might recommend going and taking a look at Andor. It is IN Star Wars, but it is not Star Wars. It felt like Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, but better pacing.
I’ve been 10 years in the industry and honestly. This feels familiar. I feel like there was mass layoffs about 4+ years ago. There was also the Boston Games collapse around 2013. I’ve been told this industry has a very direct pattern. Expand, contract, expand, contract. What you want to do is to get into it when it’s expanding and hope by the time it contracts you have enough experience to be vital to a project.
And before that in the big 2008 crisis, sure. And, to put forth a silver lining, layoffs tends to get a lot of press and happen all at once, while people start new projects and get new jobs all the time without making headlines.
It still sucks to see social media erupt in lost job notifications every so often, though.
I think this time bothers me more because... well, there isn't much reason for it. Mostly everything blew up during the pandemic, a lot of money was made and now things are going back to baseline. But public companies will NEVER report they're shrinking if they can help it, and if they do they will try to appear to be becoming cheaper to compensate, so the obvious call is to let go of a bunch of people you were mostly hoarding anwyay.
The takeaway here, if you ask me, is to never have loyatly for an employer, at least when it comes to moving on to a different job or ask for better conditions. This sort of thing happens all the time and especially publicly traded companies will not hesitate to cut you loose if it makes business sense. You have less leverage, so the thing to do is a) bargain collectively to get more of that leverage, and b) treat your labour negotiations with the company with the same business sense they do.
In the meantime, I still recommend hugging a developer. Patting lightly the back of the head could also be acceptable. Just ask for a preference first.
Loyalty to a company is silly. A lot of people in games learn that quickly in their career because they want to go work for some huge name-brand company that they grew up with just for them to either harshly reject or if they actually get the job, they end up in a crunch cycle trying to prove themselves.
That said people do have loyalty, to other people and to projects. People are passionate about working with people they like and on projects they care about. You only get to make like 20-30 games in your career. Even then that includes all the games that didn’t release. It only really allows for 2-3 years per game whereas lots of games are 5+ years. Projects and people matter a lot and it’s important to not just chase money. Otherwise, you end up working at Google Stadia or Amazon.
Well, yeah, but that bit comes in between the buisness bits. Most managers do care about the people working there, too, but ultimately that will not drive the decisionmaking when it comes to the business, paritcularly in public companies with an obligation to shareholders. It's only fair to reciprocate.
So absolutely be loyal to your team and your project, but never at the expense of your working conditions or compensation.
That's one of the reasons why collective bargaining is important. Short of having representation, like they do on the film business, you want to compartimentalize somehow, and having a designated representative to negottiate with everybody else behind them is a way to get there.
I’d say it’s suspiciously-timed. My guess is Unity were tired of the shit PR, then tried to flip things around and use this to cast themselves as the victim. So I’m taking this one with about a planet’s worth of salt.
Given current events, it seems very plausible to me they got at least one - but let’s not pretend it means the backlash is all wrong and we should start giving up all indie revenue to the great lord engine provider.
Yeah with their “everything is an Xbox” nonsense it’s pretty clear they want to focus on the platform, marketplace where you buy games. Playing them is kind of second. I’m sure they’ll still have something, but it’s going to be more geared towards cloud streaming, pc, handhelds, and “play where you want” so they can just do the digital side. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get partners like Asus to build boxes now.
Xbox will still exist as a platform, just not the console. It’ll probably just be stuff like the Xbox ally x; Xbox partners with brands to sell hardware with cut down versions of windows that has access to 3rd party markets like steam and such, but a major emphasis on the Xbox/windows store.
Either way, I don’t think there has to be a third platform if Xbox went away. PC looked kinda shaky there for a moment in the '00s/'10s, but at this point it seems pretty well poised to become the dominant platform. Xbox and PlayStation already port games to steam and even GoG. Nintendo is the harder nut to crack, I’m not sure what’d it take for them to get out of the hardware business. I read somewhere they have enough cash on hand to operate at a loss for like a decade or something.
This is a couple days delayed response, apologies for that I’ve been pretty busy.
With the rise of game streaming services like Xbox Cloud Gaming and Amazon Luna I predict that the console market is basically over. I honestly don’t expect Microsoft to release another console and if Sony does it’s almost certain to be the last. Nintendo may stick with it longer since they just released the Switch2 but they seem to be prepping for it with the digital key thing.
It sucks for the players but it makes fiscal sense for the Publishers and Console Makers (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) if there is an industry wide pivot to game streaming where players are required to pay every month. I know that some games don’t lend themselves well to this, yet, but it’s blatantly obvious (at least to me) that this is where the industry is headed.
We’ve already reached the end of “Console Exclusive” games and I think what comes next is “Streaming Platform Exclusive” games. I think what comes after that is the Publishers establishing their own Streaming Platforms for their own games.
This is precisely what has happened with the rest of the entertainment industry and there’s no reason I can see for gaming, which is a subset of that same industry, to do anything else now that the streaming technology exists.
Steam and GOG will end up pushed out of the market or they will also become Streaming Platforms, just ones that cater to a different set of players.
That would be a shakeup. If they released a Gaming veraion of Windows on a PC with quick resume that also played much of the Xbox library going back to the OG Xbox, that could appeal to a lot of people.
Its shocking to me that Xbox is run by the same company that has an operating system installed on 71% of the worlds computers, and they still haven’t figured out how to leverage that for Xbox gaming.
That’s my theory. They’ll pump out a few cookie cutter games on the existing IPs, but relatively little creativity is going to be allowed. It’s all for gamepass.
They’ve been touting Gamepass as the xbox seller for a long time now. Several years since they gave up on competing using exclusives if you ask me.
XBOX can’t be buried soon enough. It’s been dead in the casket for over a decade and it’s time to start throwing dirt on it.
I love the original and the 360. The people that had the passion and vision for what XBOX was and needed to be are long gone and this is what we’re left with. A bunch of suits making decisions who probably don’t even know how to play pong.
“Everything is an Xbox” now. Even the PlayStation is living on borrowed time. The way Xbox is run right now may not be very good, but the vision for what Xbox was had to change. They were just an earlier casualty of the way things are changing than their competition.
I don’t see it that way at all. Xbox took their foot off the gas when Kinect came out and has been dying from 1000 cuts. What was working for Xbox - they stopped doing. This isn’t the future, this is them throwing anything they can at the wall and see what sticks.
Yeah, but that’s something you do when times are changing and you need to adapt. Sony investors are already asking if there will be a new PlayStation or if they’ll just go to PC. (There will be at least a traditional PS6, but Microsoft doesn’t have the same luxury.)
Why? What about their strategy right now it because of the way things are changing?
None of it is. It is because of mismanagement that happened with Don Matrick and the OG Xbox one focusing on fucking cable hookups and banning their users from borrowing physical games.
That corporate garbage in Xbox NEVER fully disappeared and now they’re reaping what they sowed.
Also not releasing an exclusive game worth buying since before 2014 is a wild strategy.
Why? What about their strategy right now it because of the way things are changing?
Accepting other storefronts on their platform going forward, choosing to instead make their money via Game Pass and third party publishing. An Activision or Bethesda acquisition made great strategic sense when you needed to lock up exclusives for the way consoles used to work, but in the time it took for Activision to go through, they realized that strategy no longer makes sense. It’s a huge paradigm shift to decide to no longer take a cut of every “Xbox” game sold the way that Nintendo and Sony do, for now, but it’s in their best interest long term to be the first to do so.
Still waiting for them to drop Denuvo so I can pirate it. Yes, I am aware there are some old builds out there, but I know what kind of crazy circumvented Denuvo in those. No, thanks.
I remember when this news first leaked, people online were joking about getting into fights over a 200 dollar bet on a kid’s game if skeeball.
While I’m not sure how common that type of phenomenon would be, I have to agree with the author of this article that I would certainly think twice before bringing a child to a location where gambling is encouraged (especially in conjunction with drinking).
I know people like the originals more than the newer ones, but I really enjoyed those too, I really love Adam Jensen and all the stereotypes on him, and Mankind Divided ended in a huge cliffhanger. I guess I'll never know how it ends =/
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