Notably, Alm was hired at Bungie just five months following an IGN report on the company’s work culture. In it, over 25 employees alleged the company had a history of allowing toxic culture to fester, including racial and gender bias, with those who reported such instances to HR alleging their reports were frequently dismissed or even turned against them. Following this report and prior to Alm’s hiring, Bungie’s former HR head stepped down from her role. IGN understands from its sources that following its 2021 report, Bungie also hired a number of new HR personnel in an effort to address the issues from the article, amid some pressure from its new parent company Sony.
I haven’t really noticed that…? But, maybe that’s just because whatever’s being said “agrees” with me or isn’t in the articles I choose to read from them (?)
I think it was more so that they needed those devs on Fortnite to scale it… Then when they got some breathing room to look at other projects, Quake Champions had already released and flopped … as has since Halo Infinite and Diabotical (which Epic partially funded) … AFPS is a genre that isn’t getting much love from consumers.
So, I think Fortnite caused the project to get dropped, but it’s not the reason it wasn’t picked back up. I’d imagine Epic is working on other games, these things just take a while (and they’re going to want bigger profits than they expect UT4 could bring in).
I don’t really think it is. Steam hasn’t really tried that hard to get developers to use their platform because their users already demand their platform. They’ve made concessions on their preferred way in a handful of cases with very large gaming companies like Activision.
I’m pretty sure they have the same refund policy as steam. They also do have a networking system (which I think even has interop with steam – the Bigfoot game tried to use it but it was very unpopular since it required steam gamers to link an epic account but it exists).
Also pretty sure there are cloud saves but less confident on that one.
And yeah, steam streaming and card collecting aren’t really all that important to me in particular, but I get that some people really like them.
You know you made a really interesting point that they marketed to the sellers not the ultimate customers. I hadn’t really picked up on that before, but it does mitigate what should be a healthy dose of competition by altering the target audience a bit.
I mean most games can’t even bother to give colorblind people a slider or a palette of colors to change the red outlines and tints they put on things. That’s a way easier problem to solve than variable sized text in a UI.
I haven’t played many “open world” games, but I think this captures my general feelings for them.
Like, the new 343 Halo Infinite game’s campaign… it just kinda feels like wandering around a big map doing nothing in particular. I couldn’t get into it.
Compare that to what Bungie has been doing recently with Destiny … much more interesting, much less filler/go do this to keep you busy stuff.
There was an old Gameboy Harry Potter game I really enjoyed that was basically you performing the major Harry Potter plot points (sneaking around, buying stuff, talking to people). The combat was kind of the Pokemon style turn based thing where each side had a health bar and so many moves. Very neat game.
Window’s compatibility layer is still far beyond what a console provides. Beyond that, WINE (for Linux) is increasingly able to run Windows programs from many decades… In a sense, Linux is becoming the best Windows compatibility layer for old software and games in the world.
I also just wanted to add; if you want to look at what this looks like when the game development company is functioning properly look at Crytek and Hunt Showdown.
Crytek has publicly stated Hunt has a lot of issues internally in its code base. They then responded by committing to fix those issues (i.e. fix their spaghetti), and then they followed up by actually fixing issues (off the top of my head, an advantage when peeking from the left down to how the game handled the player camera was fixed, bugs in the ammo system resulting in a number of issues with reloading were fixed).
They didn’t stop there though. They said in their last roadmap update, they’re working with their internal CryEngine development team to make major changes to CryEngine (and this is reflected by Crytek’s CryEngine team stopping release of CryEngine to make major refactors for CryEngine 7) to do everything they want to do, remove hacks coded into Hunt’s fork of CryEngine, and pay all the tech debt down to get Hunt running on the most recent CryEngine (and hopefully keep it there, with all the tech advances that brings).