(I can't for the life of me figure out how to embed video)
it is a mystery isn't it you would think a simple button in the attachment section or something might work. Anywho, what i try to do is only post the video post the reply then edit it to say whatever you want. usually works.
They were in developement since 2021, would have liked to see what they were working on. This does feel like Concord without any actual release of a game.
Wings clipped and crashed into a corn field. Apparently the studio was hiring to very last min of air time, a bunch of artists had art tests scheduled before people pulled their parachutes!
....an inescapable irony, tonight of all nights : /
The article is confusing. The employees are mentioned as subcontractors from keywords studios, so they are contracted by keywords studios and are keywords employees.
If WB chooses not to renew their contract with keywords then keywords would either move those contractors to other projects or keep them on standby until there is work.
The employees do pay into EI and CPP so they aren't independent contractors. It's not correct to call this a layoff at Warner Brothers
As someone who worked on Dauntless outsource work where we were pretty much partners in asset creation, it breaks my damn heart what has happened to the game. For those who don't know, it was secretly bought out by a blockchain company, and that company was responsible for the layoffs and cancellations:
It's a damn shame, it could have had a second life as a niche little thing on steam... but the game is not going to last past 2025, Phoenix Labs as a whole might not either. It has triggered code red in my brain and I hopped on to get screenshots of stuff I worked on, which thankfully I earned just about all of it before they removed weapon crafting. I highly doubt any devs who helped build it are still left...
with the right leadership, Dauntless could've become formidable competition to the monster hunter franchise. I remember sentiment towards the game was positive early on
It does seem that they are putting all their eggs into one basket called Assassins Creed Shadows. I do wonder if after the dismal performance of Star Wars outlaws they will shut down Ubisoft Massive if Shadows fails. I'd rather not have any more studio closures or layoffs.
I'm honestly more surprised that people are surprised that megacorps do megacorp things, it's like people live in their own tiny bubbles and never step outside. If you work for triple A, it's only a matter of time. We're all cuts of fudgey pudgy meat
Its peculiar about Monolith shutting down. Why would they kill a proven brand, its so bizarre. Wonder how far along the Wonder Woman game was before it got canned. That said a Superhero game probably wasn't the best bet considering how many were slated to release at the same time.
I also don't think we'll see games like the Blood series and the Middle Earth series deserved a triology.
Its annoying that the parent is WB games, because the patent for the nemesis system stays with them in cold storage unless a rival makes a bid to license it. Nemesis would be have been great in EA's Jedi or Iron Man/ Black Panther and even benefited the Assasins creed series.
I don't get why studios don't work cooperatively to better their products, the entire industry can stand together that way instead of competing within extreme secrecy and total lack of transparency depending on FOMO motivated pre-orders and live service until they all collapse in a heap through lack of funding leading to layoffs. While marketing is essential to video game sales, the way its approached is destroying the industry
why would studios want to work together? It's 2025, we're trying to make the world a worse place, not a better one. The more patents, the less creativity = the worse this world becomes = gooder.
why would studios want to work together? It's 2025, we're trying to make the world a worse place, not a better one. The more patents, the less creativity = the worse this world becomes = gooder.
Maybe the indies or AA studios which emerge from the layoffs will follow this model.
As I see it, the reason we are in this mess is because formerly lean and passion driven studios sold out to mega corporations that liquidate their value systems.
Monolith should have always remained independent. Challenging to turn away from a buy out though considering the money involved.
I think I dodged a bullet by not pursuing 3D as a career. This thread and so many other places online has seemingly portrayed the industry in a downwards spiral with no end in sight that its a no brainer why some people have decided against joining this field. Even ignoring the negative news, you see studios pretty much eliminating entry and mid level jobs off their websites and it doesn't help that most 3D skills are non-transferrable because of how specialized this job field is.
...even here, downunder there's no escaping this endless wave of "restructuring" btw pretty sure it's a facsimile of an ea gambit, straight out of their 'playbook'
I think I dodged a bullet by not pursuing 3D as a career. This thread and so many other places online has seemingly portrayed the industry in a downwards spiral with no end in sight that its a no brainer why some people have decided against joining this field. Even ignoring the negative news, you see studios pretty much eliminating entry and mid level jobs off their websites and it doesn't help that most 3D skills are non-transferrable because of how specialized this job field is.
3D skills are very transferrable, but it does require creating those opportunities yourself. The reason for the layoff's is majorly because of companies deciding how to allocate their budgets to guarantee the numbers they want. Currently games are having to compete with more than just other games so its a difficult maket for games with higher budgets to become profitable.
I do wish they would avoid the culture war nonsense since it only makes a bad situation worse. Like Dragon Age Veilguard failing because of its sanitised, politically correct agenda driven writing could have been avoided either by not doing it in the first place or pitching 10 cents per game sale to an established LGBTQ organisation like the Ali Fourney Center.
Now that entire team has been moved to work on EA sports games and battlefield which not all of them are happy about.
If this wouldn't have happened we would have more hiring for the next installment, not a restructuring liquidating games across studios. South of Midnight is the next game under the hammer with a 450,000 strong army working hard to destroy Compulsion games like they did Reflector Entertainment, and this is just sad. Unknown 9 should not have failed in the way it did, this one game could have made a world of a difference for the game industry in India.
I feel especially bad because when that curator was only 4000 strong trolls on NeoGaf forums, I did try to get Sweet Baby Inc to see reason and put out a boiler plate disclaimer settling the issue but they just blocked me and doubled down on their resistance against anti-woke gamers and were backed by controversial gaming journalists like Alyssa Mercante who thirsts after Hasan Piker a known Hamas terrorist sympathizer. (which got her removed from Kotaku)
It certainly is a peculiar way to do business in this industry.
The curator was more empathic, when I interacted with their members on their discord I found that they do believe that they are doing a service to developers by liquidating studios they consider to have caused this situation in the first place. But honestly I'm not assured that shutting down all these studios they consider to be woke is going to birth studios that don't politicise their games. With every studio that falls, the curator keeps getting stronger.
They are now at 474,293 and this is not including supporters of Elon Musk since developers challenge him directly, so in that sense maybe its best that AAA studios retreat to more established franchises and create content with less controversy and more player feedback.
I think I dodged a bullet by not pursuing 3D as a career. This thread and so many other places online has seemingly portrayed the industry in a downwards spiral with no end in sight that its a no brainer why some people have decided against joining this field. Even ignoring the negative news, you see studios pretty much eliminating entry and mid level jobs off their websites and it doesn't help that most 3D skills are non-transferrable because of how specialized this job field is.
There is an end in sight. The industry will shrink back to a point where it can sustain itself (roughly the same size it was before Fortnite started printing infinite money) and everything will stabilise.
One reason studios aren't offering entry level positions is because you need experienced people to make inexperienced people useful. Studios that are rebuilding after mass layoffs likely lost a lot of their experienced staff (commonly cos they saw it coming and jumped ship early) and studios that haven't most likely have a shit load of relatively junior staff left over from the covid growth years and are backfilling senior roles as people move on.
I think we are still quite far from seeing the end of this. Nintendo charging 80 / 90$ for their games tells me that they don't want most studios to release titles for their console because they know that most of them seem destined to fail, so their are increasing the pricing on their flagship titles to compensate for that. Either way when you ask for that amount of money for a videogame players are gonna expect a masterpiece or just not buy the game at all unless they have money to burn.
Then there's the thing with the tariffs and I'm not big into economics but if western markets go down that can't be good for the videogame industry, specially since a good part of the market is in the USA too
Nikhil, the “culture war nonsense” you’re talking about is only
one facet of the greater issues of macroeconomics. I’m not nearly intelligent
enough to articulate this, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that it moves the
needle very little comparatively, and just extremely prone to algorithm bias.
It seems like publishers have higher and higher expectations
for sales/concurrent players and are chasing unrealistic numbers. I can’t help
but think about the trend for these live-service “forever” games; since they
are very demanding of a players’ time and are not something you can stop for a
while and come back too. Gamers that play these games are probably only going
to be able to play 2, or 3 of these at most, concurrently? I don’t know. I wonder
if a similar thing happened during the MMO trend a couple decades back?
They are now at 474,293 and this is not including supporters of Elon Musk since developers challenge him directly, so in that sense maybe its best that AAA studios retreat to more established franchises and create content with less controversy and more player feedback.
This sounds contradictory to the twitter post you linked and
missed the whole spirit of what he was saying.
God's sake, NikhilR, grind your axe somewhere else, yeah?
Veilguard didn't do well because it was always going to be a mess when it had been in development hell for so long and famously turned sharply on the fundamentals of what kind of game it was going to be partway through, came out in a year when the economy was already in the shit, and in a year where people had already been burned multiple times by big releases turning out to be mediocre.
How do you think chucking 10 cents per sale to an LGBT organisation would have changed anything? Do you think the average player even gives a single thought to where the money would go if they bought a game?
If I were SBI, I'd have blocked you, too. You're just another randomer with "concerns" in a sea of randomers with "concerns" that just so happen to always be pointed at any media that dares gives PoC, LGBT people or gender nonconforming people the slightest light of day.
Honestly, it makes me cringe to see these losers aggrandised, whether it's self-aggrandisement or by people like you. They're not powerful, they're just noisy and bigoted. Studios are struggling for far, far more impactful reasons than the fact that some whiny manchildren don't want to buy their games because women/gay/whatever the hell they want to pretend is a problem this week.
They are now at 474,293 and this is not including supporters of Elon Musk since developers challenge him directly, so in that sense maybe its best that AAA studios retreat to more established franchises and create content with less controversy and more player feedback.
This sounds contradictory to the twitter post you linked and
missed the whole spirit of what he was saying.
I felt that for AAA, they should take less risk and concentrate only on flagship titles while playing publisher for every other license. That way smaller studios can take a risk on content and its a kind of rebranding.
Seemed a more secure way of keeping the ship afloat until the tide recedes because I know they won't do what Thomas Mahler recommends.
Its very difficult to backtrack once you've crossed into safe space territory, I don't even really understand why they went there in the first place.
@Rima - I do think that there was a marketing push to appeal to Sims players and make the game more accomodating likely because of market share but I'm not sure about this since I was only around later in its development (2022 - 2024)
Also Corrine Busche's designer to director experience is heavier on the Sims franchise which lends credence to this theory, though I didn't get much from interviews and internal updates about this fact, the director did say that she draw on her personal experience as a trans person to design the game.
About SBI, a boilerplate response really would have helped with de-escalating the situation. Its already difficult to sell games so why have all the negative publicity.
I was hoping to have a meaningful conversation with SBI founders, they live in Montreal too so I felt I should be more proactive and do something before the situation escalated, but I was unsuccessful and it became a dumpsterfire and this did play a part in the liquidation of an studio (Reflector Entertainment) that I was rooting for.
About the 10 cents, I felt it would have helped as a last ditch effort to release the game on a philanthropic foundation. Its a good way to cut off the culture war since now there is a genuine real world reason for the game to assert its support to the LGBT community.
Not that it needs a reason, but its a good way to pacify that anti-woke crowd since then they would be going up against a charity and that would look very bad on them, its also more efficient for the media to spin its reporting as "Anti woke crowd is clearly bigoted as it rallies against Ali Fourney center." vs "Anti woke crowd heralds gamer gate 2 and attacks Alyssa Mercante" Its less tabloid (like Daily Mail) and more mainstream (BBC/Wall Street Journal)
And certainly the center could use the funding 10% of $31.2 million dollars is like 3 million, the center wouldn't have to raise any money for the next several decades and so many homeless people in the LGBTQ community would benefit. It would also look really good on EA and deflects attention from the controversy.
Gamers may not care that 10 cents per every copy sold goes to this organisation but they are going to buy the game anyway so why not leverage the opportunity. This way their approach to LGBTQ causes isn't just performative for representation but they make a very real difference which can then be celebrated as a corporate philanthrophy.
Ideally I would have just made a Dragon Age reminiscent of Origins and Inquisition and avoided the controversy entirely. Would have still donated 10 cents per copy, I think that should be standard for every AAA studio and they do raise a lot for charity every year from employee donation matching.
10 cents per sale isn't the same as 10% of each sale--
So $59.99 per copy-- that means for every 59.89 that goes to the Devs etc, $0.10 would go to a charity. Percent wise this is like... 0.16% maybe, if I'm doing that math right? Which is something like $49,920 total.
I felt that for AAA, they should take less risk and concentrate only on flagship titles while playing publisher for every other license. That way smaller studios can take a risk on content and its a kind of rebranding.
Heh…I like it when big publishers swing for the fences, as
it seems like the larger the publisher the more risk averse they are. And alas,
“AA” is supposedly dead or dying. I would’ve taken 10 Annapurna type publishers
over however many people were shed after the MS/Activision merger.
How do you think chucking 10 cents per sale to an LGBT organisation would have changed anything? Do you think the average player even gives a single thought to where the money would go if they bought a game?
I think you may be understimating how informed most players are nowadays about the ins and outs that go behind the development of a big AAA title. Maybe the average person doesn't care about stuff like that but the public's perception of a company is important and anything related to the current culture war can stain the image of a company. SBI and other similar "consulting firms" are on people's lips for a reason and that's because a good amount of players are tired of stuff like that influencing most modern game development studios, and word gets around specially thanks to X or youtubers.
I think Veilgard is hands down quite a terrible game and you can hate me for being so rash but I don't think it has to do with the development cycle being long as much as it has to do with Bioware just being incompetent, and if you need more proof just look at Mass Effect Andromeda. Also the game came out just a year after Baldur's Gate 3 and that game sold like pancakes, so I don't know if the economy has much to do with it.
In my opinion there are many reasons as to why the games industry is going down the drain: greediness, bloated development teams and budgets for a single game, unaffordable pricing, culture wars, lack of innovation and talent, etc. Either way players are just tired of feeling insulted by most western developers nowadays. You can just call everyone that disagrees with you a "manchild", and even though I do agree that some people just wanna stir up drama while others are very on the defensive and doubting every new big release, when half the industry is talking about the same thing over and over again and plenty of players keep telling companies like Ubisoft to stop and do something else while Ubisoft threatens to hire layers (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ubisoft-reportedly-implements-anti-harassment-plan-for-assassins-creed-shadows-devs) you should probably stop and listen. Also as another factor there's the chinese player market now while Steam keeps gaining huge amounts of chinese players and these western companies do nothing but alineate their playerbase, and the chinese don't buy into that PoC / LGBT / gender noncomforming stuff. You wanna push out millions of players and die for some moral highground? Go ahead, but then don't be surprised if you see players switching more and more to a chinese market or gacha games like Genshin Impact make millions while the average western developer is still wondering what went wrong.
I think you may be understimating how informed most players are nowadays about the ins and outs that go behind the development of a big AAA title. Maybe the average person doesn't care about stuff like that but the public's perception of a company is important and anything related to the current culture war can stain the image of a company. SBI and other similar "consulting firms" are on people's lips for a reason and that's because a good amount of players are tired of stuff like that influencing most modern game development studios, and word gets around specially thanks to X or youtubers.
That's a contradiction. You can't start with "the average person doesn't care" but then say "the public's perception". The average person's perception is the public's perception. Randomer McRandomface doesn't know or care about culture war shit, or how games are developed. In some ways, that's half the problem; they'd probably be much less unreasonable with their demands on dev time, graphical fidelity and gameplay limitations if they actually understood how it's made and how long these things actually take.
SBI and others are on people's lips because there's been a concerted effort by right wing bastards to put them there. Nobody in the general public, or the "Gamer" demographic knew or cared who SBI was until they were told to by right wing, mouth-frothing hate pushers and useful idiots. Nobody was "tired of stuff like that influencing most modern game development studios" until they were told constantly that it's a huge problem.
You can act like they're reacting to these naturally, but they're just not. You see it just as much in real life. Speaking from my own experience, I've watched the UK go from not great, but decent with regards to trans people, to completely frothing at the mouth and letting bigotry decide our government and healthcare system's policies essentially just because a load of bigots pumped a load of time and money into manufacturing the idea that there's some huge problem.
All this shit? It's exactly the same. Taking things that weren't problems and blowing them up to line their pockets and spread their bigotry. And, of course, it's part of the broader push in recent years to drag the world backwards into depths of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and other rejects that we'd gradually been walking away from.
Also, "the chinese don't buy into that PoC / LGBT / gender noncomforming stuff" is a really, really generous way to say "China is a lot more bigoted and restrictive towards LGBT people, PoC and gender nonconforming people."
10 cents per sale isn't the same as 10% of each sale--
So $59.99 per copy-- that means for every 59.89 that goes to the Devs etc, $0.10 would go to a charity. Percent wise this is like... 0.16% maybe, if I'm doing that math right? Which is something like $49,920 total.
Need to brush up my math, but if that's the case then 10% per sale to charity does seem more appropriate.
I think you may be understimating how informed most players are nowadays about the ins and outs that go behind the development of a big AAA title. Maybe the average person doesn't care about stuff like that but the public's perception of a company is important and anything related to the current culture war can stain the image of a company. SBI and other similar "consulting firms" are on people's lips for a reason and that's because a good amount of players are tired of stuff like that influencing most modern game development studios, and word gets around specially thanks to X or youtubers.
That's a contradiction. You can't start with "the average person doesn't care" but then say "the public's perception". The average person's perception is the public's perception.
I think Ruflse was trying to say that the average gamer doesn't know or cares about game development. With a different subject, he goes on to say that the public perception of a company is important. The intricacies of game dev vs how a company is perceived by the unclean peasant masses are two different things.
@Rima With respect, the last couple of your posts sound like: "Don't buy into that culture war! You should buy into my side's culture war!" Its clearly a personal thing for you, but this kind of hyperbolic argument erodes your position.
Imagine being so obsessed and sucked in to whatever flavor outrage of the week, there is the need to derail not just this thread, but several others.
Read the room, our industry is in shambles and the economy is about to hardcore tank, which will further impact our industry and chances of recovery it can have. Pronouns aren't the reasons tariffs are in place starting a global trade war and threatening to jack up the price of everything, including consoles, computer hardware, stuff people need to make and play games. A black protagonist isn't the reason the number of layoffs have greatly outpaced the number of re-hires, threatening people's livelihoods, homes, families, visa status, so much so that some people have to leave the industry entirely. A woman not being pretty enough, isn't the reason people are seeing their savings and 401k tank in real time, greatly threatening whether or not they will be able to comfortably retire, if they even have anything left at all by the time this turns around. We've also seen again and again, it doesn't matter how good the game does, there will be layoffs. The corporate motive is profit by any means, and we're all numbers on a spreadsheet when they decide cuts need to be made.
If you're getting sucked into this culture war nonsense, please go touch grass, read a book, do some life drawings, interact with some people in real life, remember what real people look like, how there is so much variation to humanity and we need to step outside of our own bubble sometimes. I cannot imagine asking for a very narrow definition of what games and game characters should look like that is completely safe, a cookie-cutter proven formula. That sounds so boring and limiting, and quite frankly absurd.
@Rima With respect, the last couple of your posts sound like: "Don't buy into that culture war! You should buy into my side's culture war!" Its clearly a personal thing for you, but this kind of hyperbolic argument erodes your position.
And what, exactly, would "my side" be? What I'm saying is that the whole thing is just being pushed by one side; the idea that the left or whoever is doing some conspiracy, takeover shit is basically just a complete fabrication by people who are angry that society has made progress. I'm not telling anyone they have to support "my side"; I'm just saying that lot are full of shit.
In any event, this is getting off topic again. At this point, I'm starting to think the whole thing needs a containment thread.
@Rima With respect, the last couple of your posts sound like: "Don't buy into that culture war! You should buy into my side's culture war!" Its clearly a personal thing for you, but this kind of hyperbolic argument erodes your position.
And what, exactly, would "my side" be? What I'm saying is that the whole thing is just being pushed by one side; the idea that the left or whoever is doing some conspiracy, takeover shit is basically just a complete fabrication by people who are angry that society has made progress. I'm not telling anyone they have to support "my side"; I'm just saying that lot are full of shit.
In any event, this is getting off topic again. At this point, I'm starting to think the whole thing needs a containment thread.
Alright. Well I thought about writing a response to that, but instead I'll just wish you the best. Truly, no offense intended.
I meant that we could have done without the culture war nonsense since it isn't helping an already dire situation.
The charitable focus was a strategy to alleviate the damage by emphasizing corporate philanthropy insulating publishers from the fallout. It also makes representation more impactful than performative as is the case today.
Personally I'm of the opinion that while DEI is used for hiring, extending it into a marketable product isn't always profitable unless there is a market to support such a product. Pornographic games are a good example since they have dedicated markets and likely more diversity than we'll ever see in the mainstream, but they are in the extreme and I don't think AAA can ever achieve a reasonable balance atleast with the way they are approaching this.
is garbage, but it raised over 2 million and even the anti-woke crowd aren't demanding drivel like this. I'm also not seeing AAA studios devalue themselves by lowering standards to this extent so that is a good sign.
Also I was posting with regards to Dragon Age Veilguard and EA's approach that didn't involve layoffs to the magnitude of Microsofts buyout of activision. Hence my focus was on that game underperforming and the criticism around it because of the quality of its writing and design choices.
Ubisoft's approach also is more digging in atleast for the moment but the tencent creep on its business is concerning and the tariffs will only make that situation worse.
Hopefully the industry bounces back, and I'd hoped that these culture vultures would stop circling but they are not going anywhere despite any efforts I've taken to approach them directly on their discord. They genuinely feel that they are helping developers by liquidating studios and can't seem to be convinced of otherwise. I was mostly trying to find a middle path which is usually assured by boiler plate responses.
We developers get them all the time when we get rejected from job applications, so why did they not put one up promptly when the SBI detected curator was just a drop in the ocean instead of the tidal wave its become now?
What need was there to challenge Elon Musk directly on a platform he owns and then announce on linkedin that the impressions on the comment are good publicity for assassins creed shadows when more than 90% of those views and likes are a combination of bots, trolls, islamists, zionists, communists, trump supporting nazis, incels, psychopaths, human traffickers, sex workers, drug dealers and all manner of the worst dregs of society that frequent that absolute cesspool of a social media platform?
Its literally extending an open invitation for harassment during the entirely of a games life cycle. https://www.pcmag.com/news/ubisoft-roasts-elon-musk-over-his-dubious-pc-gaming-credentials And the reason this started was because Ubisoft paid Hasan Piker, a Hamas terrorist sympathizer to stream their game and then lawyered up against their customers. I really don't get their marketing at all. All it does is make a bad situation worse. And they don't bother answering any questions I have in this regard.
A fellow dev's from France's perpective was that atleast in the case of Reflector Entertainment, Ubisoft and Sweet Baby Inc, being Montreal based studios, it may have to do with being french i.e being revolutionary, hence the natural tendency to not take things lying down and fight back, which hasn't yet proven to be a good strategy imo. In that sense what I was trying to do was to get them to touch grass and prevent the situation from escalating in the worst possible way.
It also seems likely that the case between Alyssa Mercante and Smash JT is going to trial and will be on camera, I dread the kind of interrogation both of them are going to have to face from their legal teams, they really should live stream it as a reality show and raise money for devs laid off in this crisis.
Replies
This does feel like Concord without any actual release of a game.
I remember being in the polycount art contest for chivalry 1 lol
I wonder if I can still log in and see my polycount participation helmet
Wings clipped and crashed into a corn field.
Apparently the studio was hiring to very last min of air time, a bunch of artists had art tests scheduled before people pulled their parachutes!
The employees are mentioned as subcontractors from keywords studios, so they are contracted by keywords studios and are keywords employees.
If WB chooses not to renew their contract with keywords then keywords would either move those contractors to other projects or keep them on standby until there is work.
The employees do pay into EI and CPP so they aren't independent contractors.
It's not correct to call this a layoff at Warner Brothers
Pretty much gutted the majority of the team behind Unknown 9 Awakening and killed the remainder of the transgenic project.
Whats left of the studio will be continuing on a Bandai ip so let's see how that goes.
https://www.eurogamer.net/ubisoft-announces-studio-closure-as-it-lays-off-185-staff
It does seem that they are putting all their eggs into one basket called Assassins Creed Shadows.
I do wonder if after the dismal performance of Star Wars outlaws they will shut down Ubisoft Massive if Shadows fails.
I'd rather not have any more studio closures or layoffs.
Why would they kill a proven brand, its so bizarre.
Wonder how far along the Wonder Woman game was before it got canned.
That said a Superhero game probably wasn't the best bet considering how many were slated to release at the same time.
I also don't think we'll see games like the Blood series and the Middle Earth series deserved a triology.
Its annoying that the parent is WB games, because the patent for the nemesis system stays with them in cold storage unless a rival makes a bid to license it.
Nemesis would be have been great in EA's Jedi or Iron Man/ Black Panther and even benefited the Assasins creed series.
I don't get why studios don't work cooperatively to better their products, the entire industry can stand together that way instead of competing within extreme secrecy and total lack of transparency depending on FOMO motivated pre-orders and live service until they all collapse in a heap through lack of funding leading to layoffs.
While marketing is essential to video game sales, the way its approached is destroying the industry
As I see it, the reason we are in this mess is because formerly lean and passion driven studios sold out to mega corporations that liquidate their value systems.
Monolith should have always remained independent.
Challenging to turn away from a buy out though considering the money involved.
The reason for the layoff's is majorly because of companies deciding how to allocate their budgets to guarantee the numbers they want.
Currently games are having to compete with more than just other games so its a difficult maket for games with higher budgets to become profitable.
I do wish they would avoid the culture war nonsense since it only makes a bad situation worse.
Like Dragon Age Veilguard failing because of its sanitised, politically correct agenda driven writing could have been avoided either by not doing it in the first place or pitching 10 cents per game sale to an established LGBTQ organisation like the Ali Fourney Center.
Now that entire team has been moved to work on EA sports games and battlefield which not all of them are happy about.
https://x.com/thomasmahler/status/1852673064900735308
If this wouldn't have happened we would have more hiring for the next installment, not a restructuring liquidating games across studios.
South of Midnight is the next game under the hammer with a 450,000 strong army working hard to destroy Compulsion games like they did Reflector Entertainment, and this is just sad.
Unknown 9 should not have failed in the way it did, this one game could have made a world of a difference for the game industry in India.
I feel especially bad because when that curator was only 4000 strong trolls on NeoGaf forums, I did try to get Sweet Baby Inc to see reason and put out a boiler plate disclaimer settling the issue but they just blocked me and doubled down on their resistance against anti-woke gamers and were backed by controversial gaming journalists like Alyssa Mercante who thirsts after Hasan Piker a known Hamas terrorist sympathizer. (which got her removed from Kotaku)
Then you see rubbish like this which I don't understand why the media sees as a win since its practically inviting dissent on a massive scale.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/ubisoft-roasts-elon-musk-over-his-dubious-pc-gaming-credentials
It certainly is a peculiar way to do business in this industry.
The curator was more empathic, when I interacted with their members on their discord I found that they do believe that they are doing a service to developers by liquidating studios they consider to have caused this situation in the first place.
But honestly I'm not assured that shutting down all these studios they consider to be woke is going to birth studios that don't politicise their games.
With every studio that falls, the curator keeps getting stronger.
They are now at 474,293 and this is not including supporters of Elon Musk since developers challenge him directly, so in that sense maybe its best that AAA studios retreat to more established franchises and create content with less controversy and more player feedback.
One reason studios aren't offering entry level positions is because you need experienced people to make inexperienced people useful.
Studios that are rebuilding after mass layoffs likely lost a lot of their experienced staff (commonly cos they saw it coming and jumped ship early) and studios that haven't most likely have a shit load of relatively junior staff left over from the covid growth years and are backfilling senior roles as people move on.
Then there's the thing with the tariffs and I'm not big into economics but if western markets go down that can't be good for the videogame industry, specially since a good part of the market is in the USA too
Nikhil, the “culture war nonsense” you’re talking about is only one facet of the greater issues of macroeconomics. I’m not nearly intelligent enough to articulate this, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that it moves the needle very little comparatively, and just extremely prone to algorithm bias.
It seems like publishers have higher and higher expectations for sales/concurrent players and are chasing unrealistic numbers. I can’t help but think about the trend for these live-service “forever” games; since they are very demanding of a players’ time and are not something you can stop for a while and come back too. Gamers that play these games are probably only going to be able to play 2, or 3 of these at most, concurrently? I don’t know. I wonder if a similar thing happened during the MMO trend a couple decades back?
This sounds contradictory to the twitter post you linked and missed the whole spirit of what he was saying.
Seemed a more secure way of keeping the ship afloat until the tide recedes because I know they won't do what Thomas Mahler recommends.
Its very difficult to backtrack once you've crossed into safe space territory, I don't even really understand why they went there in the first place.
@Rima -
I do think that there was a marketing push to appeal to Sims players and make the game more accomodating likely because of market share but I'm not sure about this since I was only around later in its development (2022 - 2024)
Also Corrine Busche's designer to director experience is heavier on the Sims franchise which lends credence to this theory, though I didn't get much from interviews and internal updates about this fact, the director did say that she draw on her personal experience as a trans person to design the game.
https://www.inverse.com/gaming/corrine-busche-interview-rpgs-dragon-age-veilguard
About SBI, a boilerplate response really would have helped with de-escalating the situation. Its already difficult to sell games so why have all the negative publicity.
I was hoping to have a meaningful conversation with SBI founders, they live in Montreal too so I felt I should be more proactive and do something before the situation escalated, but I was unsuccessful and it became a dumpsterfire and this did play a part in the liquidation of an studio (Reflector Entertainment) that I was rooting for.
About the 10 cents, I felt it would have helped as a last ditch effort to release the game on a philanthropic foundation. Its a good way to cut off the culture war since now there is a genuine real world reason for the game to assert its support to the LGBT community.
Not that it needs a reason, but its a good way to pacify that anti-woke crowd since then they would be going up against a charity and that would look very bad on them, its also more efficient for the media to spin its reporting as "Anti woke crowd is clearly bigoted as it rallies against Ali Fourney center." vs "Anti woke crowd heralds gamer gate 2 and attacks Alyssa Mercante"
Its less tabloid (like Daily Mail) and more mainstream (BBC/Wall Street Journal)
And certainly the center could use the funding
10% of $31.2 million dollars is like 3 million, the center wouldn't have to raise any money for the next several decades and so many homeless people in the LGBTQ community would benefit.
It would also look really good on EA and deflects attention from the controversy.
Gamers may not care that 10 cents per every copy sold goes to this organisation but they are going to buy the game anyway so why not leverage the opportunity. This way their approach to LGBTQ causes isn't just performative for representation but they make a very real difference which can then be celebrated as a corporate philanthrophy.
Ideally I would have just made a Dragon Age reminiscent of Origins and Inquisition and avoided the controversy entirely.
Would have still donated 10 cents per copy, I think that should be standard for every AAA studio and they do raise a lot for charity every year from employee donation matching.
So $59.99 per copy-- that means for every 59.89 that goes to the Devs etc, $0.10 would go to a charity. Percent wise this is like... 0.16% maybe, if I'm doing that math right? Which is something like $49,920 total.
Heh…I like it when big publishers swing for the fences, as it seems like the larger the publisher the more risk averse they are. And alas, “AA” is supposedly dead or dying. I would’ve taken 10 Annapurna type publishers over however many people were shed after the MS/Activision merger.
I think Veilgard is hands down quite a terrible game and you can hate me for being so rash but I don't think it has to do with the development cycle being long as much as it has to do with Bioware just being incompetent, and if you need more proof just look at Mass Effect Andromeda. Also the game came out just a year after Baldur's Gate 3 and that game sold like pancakes, so I don't know if the economy has much to do with it.
In my opinion there are many reasons as to why the games industry is going down the drain: greediness, bloated development teams and budgets for a single game, unaffordable pricing, culture wars, lack of innovation and talent, etc. Either way players are just tired of feeling insulted by most western developers nowadays. You can just call everyone that disagrees with you a "manchild", and even though I do agree that some people just wanna stir up drama while others are very on the defensive and doubting every new big release, when half the industry is talking about the same thing over and over again and plenty of players keep telling companies like Ubisoft to stop and do something else while Ubisoft threatens to hire layers (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ubisoft-reportedly-implements-anti-harassment-plan-for-assassins-creed-shadows-devs) you should probably stop and listen. Also as another factor there's the chinese player market now while Steam keeps gaining huge amounts of chinese players and these western companies do nothing but alineate their playerbase, and the chinese don't buy into that PoC / LGBT / gender noncomforming stuff. You wanna push out millions of players and die for some moral highground? Go ahead, but then don't be surprised if you see players switching more and more to a chinese market or gacha games like Genshin Impact make millions while the average western developer is still wondering what went wrong.
I think Ruflse was trying to say that the average gamer doesn't know or cares about game development. With a different subject, he goes on to say that the public perception of a company is important. The intricacies of game dev vs how a company is perceived by the unclean peasant masses are two different things.
With respect, the last couple of your posts sound like: "Don't buy into that culture war! You should buy into my side's culture war!"
Its clearly a personal thing for you, but this kind of hyperbolic argument erodes your position.
And what, exactly, would "my side" be? What I'm saying is that the whole thing is just being pushed by one side; the idea that the left or whoever is doing some conspiracy, takeover shit is basically just a complete fabrication by people who are angry that society has made progress. I'm not telling anyone they have to support "my side"; I'm just saying that lot are full of shit.
In any event, this is getting off topic again. At this point, I'm starting to think the whole thing needs a containment thread.
The charitable focus was a strategy to alleviate the damage by emphasizing corporate philanthropy insulating publishers from the fallout.
It also makes representation more impactful than performative as is the case today.
Personally I'm of the opinion that while DEI is used for hiring, extending it into a marketable product isn't always profitable unless there is a market to support such a product.
Pornographic games are a good example since they have dedicated markets and likely more diversity than we'll ever see in the mainstream, but they are in the extreme and I don't think AAA can ever achieve a reasonable balance atleast with the way they are approaching this.
This game,
https://www.pcgamer.com/mass-effect-inspired-porn-game-is-now-one-of-the-biggest-gaming-kickstarter-of-all-time/
is garbage, but it raised over 2 million and even the anti-woke crowd aren't demanding drivel like this.
I'm also not seeing AAA studios devalue themselves by lowering standards to this extent so that is a good sign.
Also I was posting with regards to Dragon Age Veilguard and EA's approach that didn't involve layoffs to the magnitude of Microsofts buyout of activision.
Hence my focus was on that game underperforming and the criticism around it because of the quality of its writing and design choices.
Ubisoft's approach also is more digging in atleast for the moment but the tencent creep on its business is concerning and the tariffs will only make that situation worse.
Hopefully the industry bounces back, and I'd hoped that these culture vultures would stop circling but they are not going anywhere despite any efforts I've taken to approach them directly on their discord.
They genuinely feel that they are helping developers by liquidating studios and can't seem to be convinced of otherwise.
I was mostly trying to find a middle path which is usually assured by boiler plate responses.
We developers get them all the time when we get rejected from job applications, so why did they not put one up promptly when the SBI detected curator was just a drop in the ocean instead of the tidal wave its become now?
What need was there to challenge Elon Musk directly on a platform he owns and then announce on linkedin that the impressions on the comment are good publicity for assassins creed shadows when more than 90% of those views and likes are a combination of bots, trolls, islamists, zionists, communists, trump supporting nazis, incels, psychopaths, human traffickers, sex workers, drug dealers and all manner of the worst dregs of society that frequent that absolute cesspool of a social media platform?
Its literally extending an open invitation for harassment during the entirely of a games life cycle.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/ubisoft-roasts-elon-musk-over-his-dubious-pc-gaming-credentials
And the reason this started was because Ubisoft paid Hasan Piker, a Hamas terrorist sympathizer to stream their game and then lawyered up against their customers.
I really don't get their marketing at all. All it does is make a bad situation worse.
And they don't bother answering any questions I have in this regard.
A fellow dev's from France's perpective was that atleast in the case of Reflector Entertainment, Ubisoft and Sweet Baby Inc, being Montreal based studios, it may have to do with being french i.e being revolutionary, hence the natural tendency to not take things lying down and fight back, which hasn't yet proven to be a good strategy imo.
In that sense what I was trying to do was to get them to touch grass and prevent the situation from escalating in the worst possible way.
It also seems likely that the case between Alyssa Mercante and Smash JT is going to trial and will be on camera, I dread the kind of interrogation both of them are going to have to face from their legal teams, they really should live stream it as a reality show and raise money for devs laid off in this crisis.
On a positive note this dumpster fire also helped me discover gems like Laura Fryer so I'm grateful for that,