I assume a lot of the top level staff stick about until their contractually obliged period for getting a massive payday is over, and then look very closely at whether they actually want to be told what to do by a bunch of suits all day long.
Realistically they’re working to make somebody else richer at that point, and there’s only so much enthusiasm anyone can have for that. Certainly not enough for the long hours needed in the games industry.
Bizarre Creations had the misfortune of being owned by both of them before being shut down.
It really shows that something is fucked up in businessland that they’re so bad at managing studios, when managing studios is literally all they fucking do.
Same with EA. It’s just a wasteland of dead companies. The list of studios they’ve closed is bigger than the list of ones they still own.
Eh? They’ve been chasing the one-off Xbox 360 high for two generations now, and are nowhere near it. Sony have near full dominance in the console space. Valve have so much dominance in the PC space that they’ve got people to try Linux.
The aim of GamePass was that people would stream games and not need a console at all, and that just hasn’t happened for them. Their entire gamble was on cloud gaming, and it’s not paid off at all.
As much as the higher tiers of PSN aren’t as good value as GamePass, it’s certainly lead to higher quality games for Sony’s platform as they can still get sales revenue from shorter or niche games, rather than just looking at a single figure and laying off whole studios.
I’d much rather pay money for a full game now (and I’ll be honest, my day one purchases this gen are limited to games I’m really interested in), or wait and play on sub later (and it’s about 18 months I think for games to go “free”), than have half a game on sub now and get nickle and dimed for the rest of it.
Yes, that’s why they’re at home all day, and ignoring all the well paid jobs out there with free healthcare that I’m sure they’d get if they just went door to door with a résumé like these ghouls pretend they did in the 1950s.
I don’t get how Apple has to open their shit up (although they’re certainly dragging their heels over it and sulking like a toddler) but Sony, MS and Nintendo don’t.
They’re polished, but nearly all of them are too safe.
The ones that subvert things a little are always best for me, and these always get mixed reactions from people who went in with a set idea of what they wanted from it.
Red Dead Redemption 2 being a slow paced wild west simulator rather than Grand Theft Horse is a prime example. It didn’t play by safety and doing popular things. It did what they wanted it to be, and it’s all the better for it.
And to add to that, it also gives you the tools for discovery. It’s not just “Ubisoft, but they hide the icons”.
The shrine detector (which can become an anything detector), the ability to look through binoculars or whatever it is and stamp a limited number of visible waypoints onto the map. Tears of the Kingdom gives you a slightly obscure ability to highlight all the cave entrances nearby, which you can then try to mark up and see if you’ve been there.
Other games have started trying to do some of this, but I think a lot of it is added late on in development and doesn’t really work well. Like Jedi Survivor gives you the ability to mark things with icons, but what for? You can’t see the markers when you’re walking around. There’s not really much to discover from a distance, and it’s pretty far from being a vast open world.
Is it perfect? No. The last few shrines are often a complete ball-ache to find, although a lot of them are just a generic fight and they’re pretty optional, it feels like you should do them.
Is it better than a world as a menu screen as offered by Ubisoft and those that copy them? Yes.
I think in general a lot of developers should take a long look at what they’re actually trying to make before going with the open world approach. It’s getting tired, and they’re mostly doing it badly.