You “own” your car, but the dealership stole the keys, removed the engine, and locked the wheels because you bought a used set of winter tyres from a reseller.
I was there with KSP from the early days. Squad was not in the video game business, they were a billboard advertisement company. The lead dev HarvesteR started it as a passion project. It found success with the alpha and full release in 2015.
Then in 2017 Take-Two bought the rights to the game. Squad kept working on the original, but development of the sequel was handed off to Star Theory with Private Division publishing. The game was delayed, then development was moved to a new studio, Intercept Games, which was owned by Take-Two. They also poached a third of Star Theory’s personnel, which resulted in the studio’s death. They fucked around for a few years, released the early access version, then sold Private Division, closed Intercept Games, and abandoned the game.
In short: corporate interests. KSP2’s failure had nothing to do with KSP or its developers.
Criticall acclaim doesn’t make a thing automatically good. The criteria are way too arbitrary, and sometimes boils down to “a well-known publisher has done a thing” simply because it attracts more eyes and journalists have a financial interest in playing nice with those publishers.
A Hat in Time was released around the same time as Odyssey. It’s the first game of a small indie studio and it beats the living piss out of Mario in terms of gameplay and style. The only reason it wasn’t more of a breakthrough was timing and getting eclipsed by Mario’s shadow.
Oh, bollocks to that. All it took was one serious competitor to Pokémon to make Nintendo shit the bed. Excepting Zelda, most of the pathologically Nintendo games are shovelware-tier trash. If the current iteration of Mario or Mario Kart were released today without the nostalgiabait and brand recognition, they’d be the laughing stock of the industry.
All Nintendo has is quirky gadgets, a closed ecosystem, and notoriety.
I’m not convinced that is the case. The studio was purchased by a holdings company, then its CEO bought four early sketches of DE from the studio for pocket change. When Kurvitz, Rostov, and Hindpere (writer) objected, they were demoted and later fired. Unless another exchange took place, I don’t see how this would amount to Kurvitz selling his rights; at the very least, he still owns Sacred And Terrible Air (with DE itself naturally belonging to the studio).
Shitty people are abundant in the creative industries, I have no delusions about that. Probably even more of those that have no public presence. But that has no bearing on whether or not he should retain sole ownership of his work. It’s an entirely separate issue. Andrzej Sapkowski is also a massive douchebag, but nobody would deny that The Witcher is his property.
Kurvitz and Aleksander Rostov (the lead artist) formed their own company Red Info in 2023. I will only recognise a game as Disco Elysium’s successor if it comes from them.
It’s a reference to a line in a Stargate episode, uttered by a historian in reference to outdated medieval practices (specifically trepanning). If I have to make a point, it is that historical fiction about a specific time and culture should reflect the values and prejudices of the people and not be condemned for it.
That article reads like that other shitpiece that called Ghost of Tsushima racist for portraying Mongols as evil. Like, bruh. It wasn’t called “the dark ages” for a lack of sunlight.