“They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark on everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger. And then it was over.”
I feel like it is hard to mess up the formula as long as it doesn’t get too “modern gaming”. I was playing my Dreamcast over Thanksgiving and really wanting a new Crazy Taxi and JSR so I was pumped at first when I saw this, but I’ve stopped believing in the hype for games a decade ago.
If you’re looking for a new Jet Set Radio style game, make sure to check out the recently released indie project Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. They did a great job of capturing the JSR spirit while modernizing the controls and gameplay. store.steampowered.com/…/Bomb_Rush_Cyberfunk/
Absolutely. It makes me sad that there aren’t many posts about this awesome game (at least on Lemmy; there were at least like three subreddits before I left the other site).
They even got Hideki Naganuma (who did the music for the first two JSR games) to do some music for BRC.
this seems soon-to-be the Embracer cut. this company fucking sucks man. hate this shit
VGC reported earlier this month that Free Radical was at threat of being closed just two years after it was established, as part of huge company-wide cuts at Embracer and its owned publishers.
Although Embracer has yet to publicly confirm Free Radical’s position, sources told VGC that Wingefors has now acknowledged in a company e-mail that the Nottingham, UK-based company could be closed on December 11, following the completion of a consultation process.
Borrowing money was cheap until it wasn't. When they bought the old Eidos stuff, everyone thought Square Enix was taking crazy pills. Now, given that everyone's cutting back right now, it looks more like they knew something Embracer didn't.
I think regardless of that deal, they were already on the debt-go-round for long enough it would’ve caught up to them eventually. I can’t imagine this was gonna be “one last job then we go clean.” The market would continue to demand more and faster growth until they hit the wall one way or the other.
I honestly don’t think anyone was taken back by Eidos being sold off. The biggest mess Square Enix did was let IOI go while putting out The Quiet Man. Hitman 2? No! The Quiet Man, one of the worst games of the decade, YES! MORE PLEASE! Eidos hadn’t made a great game in a while but IOI had just put out a rather successful Hitman 1 season with large seasonal plans to keep it going. Now they are working on a James Bond game that everyone is excited about and Square is looking like an idiot. While Eidos will probably flop and flounder until they can get back their roots and build something substantial.
Really? I didn’t hear that people were shocked at thinking 300 million USD was that little of money for Eidos. It seems about right to me. Especially through Square Enix’s eyes where they had just put out GOTG which didn’t sell well enough to them.
Square Enix was going to close down or sell IO Interactive as they had pulled funding and were talking to other companies to sell them off. IOI employees triggered the MBO clause and made SE sell to them. This was only 2017.
2017 is ancient history compared to the current economic climate, and that sale came out of an attempt to make games episodic to their detriment. $300M seemed low considering the buyer makes that money back with probably 1.5 Tomb Raider games, and Deus Ex and all of those other Eidos properties are a bonus. Yes, the deal seemed crazy for Square Enix at the time.
They sold 9 million copies of Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I think I'm in the ballpark. And again, that's only Tomb Raider, when they're not blowing their money on a live service Avengers game that everyone knew was a bad idea.
Marvel’s Avengers was mainly Crystal Dynamics, not Eidos-Montreal. I don’t think another Tomb Raider would sell exactly as well as Shadow Of The Tomb Raider. Also, come to think of it, I don’t think Eidos-Montreal has the Tomb Raider IP.
Embracer got all of these studios and most of their IPs in the sale, the two biggest being Tomb Raider and Deus Ex. I focused on Tomb Raider because it's the most valuable one in that purchase and almost makes the sale worth it on its own, or it seemed to before the economy turned, but they got plenty more besides just Tomb Raider.
Hmm, that’s a good point, and looking back I didn’t realize it was 300 million for both Crystal and Eidos… that’s pretty cheap considering the IP attachment but I think Square Enix was also looking to shed a lot of their studios.
They bought everything up because loans were cheaper and this positions Embracer as a strong IP holder. They now have lots of IPs they own and while you might think “Well they got no one to make the IPs for them!” that might be true in-house, although they certainly have plenty of successful studios still they are busy they have their pick of IPs. Additionally, you can license out IPs for a lot of money with additional funding from the actual sale of the game while a third-party publisher foots the bill entirely.
Even simpler, just having that IP denies the competition access to it. In their eyes that creates value and at the end of the day that's all that matters to these companies holding IP. They can just sit on it.
And Embracer claims another victim. It feels like they aren't going to have many studios left when they finish their "restructuring" process. At least Wingefors was nice enough to acknowledge that the employees, who might be about to lose their jobs, are going through a slightly more challenging time than the executives who are deciding which studio is next on the chopping block.
Y’all just have no idea how complicated the process is. In 2004 it was OK to just “ship a working game”, - in 2023 you have to include all of the software stacks you have partnering contracts with, deploy an entire cloud infrastructure to deliver updates and short purchases, design and launch automated targeted ads campaigns, pay union-busting lawyers, accommodate for all the “fun” senile execs want to put in the game, pay handsome compensation to these senile execs, pay more lawyers to bury workplace toxicity-related incidents. At the end of the day, you have to sustain the company somehow when 95% of your workforce goes on a sick leave after a 3-month-long crunch period. All of that takes money, time and effort. And y’all don’t get a lot of time in-between autumn release windows.
Hey, we’ve been at it for 20 years, and we have just managed two months of 16-hour workdays without anyone dying, it looks like it might be one of those projects we actually manage to ship - what an important internal milestone!
PS: I don’t actually work at Ubisoft, I love my life too much - this entire comment is a satire
videogameschronicle.com
Aktywne