I used to use GameMaker back in the Mark Overmars 5.0/6.0 days, but dropped it the moment it went to a paid model. This is great news, and I might honestly check it out again.
Nowadays I would generally prefer to use Godot - not a surprise, given where I’m posting. But GM was great for quick prototyping, if nothing else.
Fiiiinally some good news on GameMaker. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking with a subscription just to use the engine, their main audience is indie devs that are just starting out so they just chased them away to engines that are free to use like Godot, Unity, Unreal, etc. You can’t even export web games in Gamemaker for free unless you upload it to Opera’s website.
I briefly used gamemaker 2 and it was a pretty good, polished engine. Shame Opera sabotaged it so much. It was becoming clear that Godot was quickly taking its users, so the timing of this announcement is good.
That makes me think that if it wasn’t for Godot and maybe the Unity fiasco they might never have done this. Competition is good and this is probably a practical example of it.
Based in Farnborough [UK], nDreams is the developer behind VR titles such as PowerWash Simulator VR, Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord, Little Cities, Fracked, and Far Cry VR: Dive Into Insanity.
the CEO of nintendo cut his own pay in half twice so that he wouldn’t have to fire anyone. I think multiple CEOs of nintendo have done that actually…not so sure about the american ones.
Also the nintendo switch is the only console at the moment where you actually own the games you buy.
Western game dev certainly seems to be in a bad place. I think there are probably a few factors explaining what is happening now:
1: Overhiring during the pandemic. There was a lot of money flowing into tech during the earlier days of the pandemic, and companies were hiring and expanding like crazy. The economy settled, and now companies are laying people off left and right. Not even limited to game dev, as we saw this occur for Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and pretty much everywhere else in tech.
2: The knock-on effect. When big developers start to lay off staff in bulk, other companies may be incentivized to copy that behavior. It’s easier to justify firing a bunch of employees when everyone else is doing it, and then when you have a surplus of people in the market for a new job, you can selectively hire new talent for cheaper.
3: More attention in reporting. If it wasn’t a trend, a studio laying off 30 employees might not otherwise be newsworthy. A lot of studios actually make it an unfortunate common practice to lay off their contractors/temps right at the end of dev cycles so that they don’t get any sales bonuses. But there’s a lot of layoffs happening, so even smaller ones are generating buzz, and with a lot of workers’ rights/pro-union sentiments going around following the successful strikes in Hollywood and the automotive industry, people are starting to pay more attention when workers are being treated unfairly or being taken advantage of elsewhere.
Its also typical in game development, you dont need the ‘full team’ all the time, if your in preproduction you hardly need 100 programmers sitting around twiddling their thumbs
High interest rates make investing in risky projects like game development uninteresting. Why take risk if interest rates bring in high returns by themselves.
A lot of the games industry is backed by a constant flow of investment. Which has totally dried up. This company got 80 million in investment last year, this year can’t find more to keep paying the bills. Same is true for most of the announcements.
Then there is large companies like Microsoft, those layoffs are purely about paying shareholders extea money.
Ifrs 16 makes things complicated, I wouldn’t pay attention to that part unless you are interested in the specifics of the companies financials. The point is that revenue and profit were up
This year’s Unity story sums up my discontent with tech nicely. Impressive tech made by extremely talented people, botched by incompetent corporate parasites who care only about securing their millions.
gamedeveloper.com
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