Excuse the overdramatization, but it feels a lot like Frodo going to the Grey Havens. They did something great and now their reward is to disappear forever and be well taken care of.
When asked if he was sure that Albion couldn’t be copyrighted due to its historical context, he replied: “I don’t know if I’m honest, I don’t really know… I hope so. I mean you would think that the responsible person I should be, I would’ve spent the last six months in lawyers’ offices…”
I had to look it up. It was called Guardian of Atlas and Sean left the company right after the beta launched and then the game got cancelled. My guess as to why it went poorly is just that it was inexperienced devs making a game at a time when SC2 was still actually relatively popular. There was no space in the already tiny genre of RTS.
Now that Blizzard has essentially abandoned StarCraft, it might be possible for some folks to carve some of that tiny market away.
If they go off to form their own studio, they probably have to take out a business loan to pay themselves for the time being. Interest rates are high right now, and rent and food are both expensive. It’s a huge gamble to make a game and put it out on the assumption you’ll be able to pay back 6%+ interest on whatever you took out. Games are not a reliable money maker. Especially from new studios.
Even if you get some sort of deal with a publisher to fund your first endeavor, there will still be strings attached to that, and publishers are pretty tight with the purse strings right now.
Which means really the only viable option, assuming you’re not already independently wealthy, is that you have to work another job to work on the game in the meantime, which means it will take even longer to come out.
It’s not clear to me what happened with RoR today. So they released this, which is a remaster of the original with some new content, and they announced a DLC for 2, and they also announced a gacha game or something?
Not to diminish your point because all fields should be unionized, but nurses and teachers are drastically underpaid and overworked, despite many of them having unions.