“ reportedly enforcing uncompensated overtime, allegedly trying to pay staff below minimum wage, and a toxic work environment cultivated by an alleged abusive leadership.”
Hi-Fi rush comes out of nowhere to massive critical acclaim just to be shut down anyway because Starfield sucked ass. Why people ever do business with these shitass publishers I’ll never understand
Because the indie space is also a graveyard. Investors are increasingly wary of funding anything but a “guarantee” and plenty of studios have had to shutter because the funding they were promised was rescinded.
The major publishers are at least a paycheck that can keep a studio going for another year or two.
Because the indie space is also a graveyard. Investors are increasingly wary of funding anything but a “guarantee” and plenty of studios have had to shutter because the funding they were promised was rescinded.
Maybe gaming has become too bloated as a concept if no company can ever produce a product with their own money any more, instead always listening entirely to investor cash.
So… only independently wealthy people should make games?
Game dev takes time. The way you shrink that time is to do it full time instead of working on it in your spare time for a decade or so. Because of increased cost of living, the ability to just take a few months off and burn your savings is increasingly not viable.
That is where investors come in. Whether it is a kickstarter campaign (NEVER PRE-ORDER!! RAWR!!!), a venture capitalist, or a major publisher. And all of those have consequences.
But, increasingly, it is only the major publishers who are even trying. And they are increasingly selective of who they try it with. NoClip have been making an indie game as a way to better understand the market and they have a SPECTACULAR video where Danny O’Dwyer talks about his experience pitching the game to publishers and what kinds of responses they get. And it is really telling that he gushes over how nice one publisher (I think it was Humble?) were in that they actually responded and said they couldn’t move forward rather than just ghosting him.
Sure but that’s only a piece of the puzzle. Housing, food, and general living costs are so insane now that any decent savings would be obliterated much more quickly. UBI would be a better solution here, but that’s almost a pipedream at this point.
Um I disagree. The biggest barrier is having the capital to do the thing. I think a number of states have a reduced/free option if your income is below the poverty line (calculated as having low or negative income in the startup phase, not necessarily based on assets), or being lucky enough to have a spouse with healthcare. That said, it’s entirely doable to go without healthcare, albeit risky. I started a contracting company 3 years ago with almost no money and the tools I had from my apprentice/jman years, and still don’t have health insurance, though I’m hoping to get some later this year.
Taking a look at big-cash high profile releases like Redfall and Starfield…is “guaranteed failure” what they’re going for? Because those indie games were pretty much the main reason I kept subscribing to game pass.
It also bugs me that Bethesda keeps saying that the game is about exploration and finding new planets, but so far every planet I’ve visited has some kind of building upon it. Its clear that people have been on this planet before, so why the hell should I explore this planet? At least give me some incentive or a better reward for finding a true empty planet.
You’re not wrong, but OTOH, it’s pretty funny to see a planet having a building on it equated to the planet being explored, considering Earth was still being explored thousands of years after the first buildings.
Yeah thats true. In Bethesda’s dictionary exploration means: find minerals, 7 life forms and 3 unique geological formations. And by unique we mean like on the other planets.
This was a scam from the start. They fucked themselves because their trailer was popular and they promised the world. Their goal was to create a shit early access game with pre-made assets, get lots of buy in when it was released, endure some bad reviews, promise to fix things but then slowly dump support for the game. I’ve watched this exact thing happen probably ten times now.
What killed them was the hype and popularity. They were called out immediately for what they were doing and got stuck having to now make an actual game or face legal repercussions.
At the very least these cash grabs are getting spotted early and they’re not getting to sneak by without facing consequences.
Scam is still scam, they could have been realising true gameplay trailers instead of wasting time on rendered false gameplay that does not reflect a game at all
This just feels more like incompetence rather than malice.
Yeah although I would argue one does not preclude the other. As in, of course with Hanlon’s Razor, this is because of incompetence not malice. But it’s also a scam, just one born out of not being any smarter/better.
I’d agree with you but then you hear about all the sketch shit with the discord and the volunteers. I think they intended to make a game but planned for it to just be a quick cash grab and then they could just slowly dump it. It’s honestly a great strategy, just look at every game the atlas devs have made. They’ve basically mastered the strategy.
Technically yes it’s still a scam. It’s just one that didn’t pan out for them. In this one particular instance anyways. It will continue to work for others.
I don't think consumers were the target of the scam; if they were, I don't see a reason why they wouldn't have accepted pre-orders for the game. In fact, I think they know that accepting pre-orders would have left them open to false advertising lawsuits which is why they didn't go for them, and I think they were well aware that people could just refund the game so trying to scam consumers (in this instance) was probably not worth attempting.
Instead, I think the investors were the target. The brothers who own(ed?) the studio have been living off investor money for the last few years, and which how suspicious their finances are (their ludicrously high travel expenses, in particular) I'm sure they've hidden away a bunch more money.
The game that exists is a shameless, cheaply-made asset flip that I suspect only exists at all because it makes it much harder for investors to sue for fraud when there's an actual product. If they'd just tried to take the money and run without releasing anything it'd be obvious fraud, but now they can claim they tried their best, expectations were too high, etc, and it's difficult for the investors to prove otherwise.
This makes the most sense by far. Owners of a company always pay themselves a salary, and for a tech company with investors I'm sure these people were able to give themselves an extremely high salary. That salary money is legally their money forever no matter how crappy or failed the company's output winds up being. Unless you can prove that an actual crime was committed to acquire that money, then it will remain legally theirs.
I get the impression there is a lot of this bait and switch in the mobile gaming circuit with great game play shown on IG ads but the actual gameplay is nothing like advertised?
Due to the way Steam refunds work I feel this wasn’t their end goal unless they really didn’t think it through at all.
The theory i subscribe to is that they intended to release a “decent” game but had no experience or intent to make it themselves. The marketing hype machine was to build community hype, which would drive investor funding so they could pay for new talent or to just outsource most of the work. I’m guessing that either didn’t materialize or they mismanaged that plan.
Nope, no Kickstarter or obvious public funding before the early access “release”.
There’s a chance some people weren’t able to get refunded but due to Steam’s refund policy I suspect most got their money back.
If it was always intended to be a total scam and never release they’d likely have used their own launcher to bypass the Steam revenue share and refund policy.
Management response: Dear customer, thank you for taking the time to try our cake. This is a cake, which is sweet and tasty by definition. We made the cake so customers can enjoy the cake and taste the typical cake ingredients which taste sweet and tasty. The cake experience as we created should appeal to everyone because cake is tasty.
'member when we were able to self host servers of our games? I member. CoD4 was awesome because of that, later the pirated version of MW2 too. These games (the first MW and MW2) are still alive because of that.
I’m having flashbacks to Skyrim. Developers were puzzled how players got a bounty even when no one was around and discovered that chickens were reporting crimes.
And they’re pretty protective of them, I remember learning that one the hard way. Accidentally killed a chicken in Riverwood and suddenly the whole town was out to kill me for de-fowling them.
I’m reminded of CK2, where there was a big performance drop when the India DLC was released. The reason: all of the Greek and Armenian characters were constantly checking if every other character in the game was someone they would like to cut the balls off of, adding more characters caused an exponential increase in the time that check took.
Meanwhile Larian studio reminding everyone that a good way to make money and avoid layoffs is to be nimble and make good games.
Big Corps sees nimble and good studio making a good game, starts layoffs immediately.
The real murderers are the people that sell their studio to a big publisher. They immediately seal the fate of their teams. They will have layoffs eventually…
I love Larian and am ride or die with Swen et al. Have been ever since Divine Divinity was “we have Diablo at home” but ended up being a shockingly good (for its time) hybrid ARPG/CRPG.
But Larian are very much not the example of “how to do business”. Like Digital Extremes, they are a “legacy” studio that is INCREDIBLY lucky to have survived. Larian themselves had to deal with really shitty publisher deals (Beyond Divinity and I think also Divinity 2?) and games so bad it almost killed the studio (even Mortismal himself will acknowledge that Divinity 2 was a trash fire before the DLC… and was still a mess after). It was mostly “lucking out” and embracing Kickstarter before everyone hated it that saved them. And… Dragon Commander still got close.
And you know what has REALLY made them stable? That’s right. A deal with a major company to work on one of the most famous IPs in gaming (tabletop and video) history.
Larian are smart to try to maintain their size and not overly grow. But, like countless game devs have said and gotten shouted down for, they are far from “typical” and got REALLY lucky. Hell, Swen himself has mentioned the same in between the blurbs that outlets love to reference.
You forgot to mention they sold 30% stake of the company to the world‘s largest game conglomerate Tencent. They‘re also working on a supposedly much larger game than BG3 now and plan to release it within the next 4 years which means they will have to at least double their staff. Honestly, judging a developer entirely by a recent success isn‘t a good practice even when it‘s as massive as BG3. Most people who talk about Larian have a very warped impression. Even when their games are great recently, the tides can change rapidly in this industry.
Yeah did someone just run or interpret reports incorrectly? If a person subscribes to Game Pass and plays Hi Fi Rush for X months, I’d consider that a sale.
If they play it exclusively, sure. But people play tons of games on Gamepass. HiFi Rush and a dozen other games splitting that $15/month/account is a lot less rosy.
I’ve had Gamepass since the beginning, and since it was launched it I’ve bought maybe 1 or 2 Xbox games that weren’t on gamepass, whereas I used to average 2-3 a month. My overall spending on games has dropped massively since getting gamepass - especially on Xbox.
Just the fact that they played some minimum amount should tell them the game contributed to the subscriber’s enjoyment of Game Pass. Otherwise if they are both selling a game and giving it to Game Pass subscribers for free I’m not sure what they are expecting. Can’t have your cake and eat it too, but I’m sure they would like that.
Maybe they are hoping that Game Pass is like extended demos and will lead to more game sales. But there are too many new games all the time for most to hold my interest.
I think they expected more casual gamers to sign up for game pass while the more dedicated among us would still be buying new products.
Honestly, they’d probably be doing better if they didn’t put games on there day 1. Sony doesn’t put their biggest titles on PS+ at launch for a reason.
Halo and starfield had shit sales because we didn’t have to buy them. If they required people to buy the triple-A in-house titles at launch, the double-A stuff like HiFi Rush could still be released on gamepass day 1 as an incentive for people to subscribe.
As it stands, Starfield and Forza burned the money that should be used for HiFi Rush and Ori.
Absolutely agree, just recently instead of buying Manor Lords I just found a good deal on a month of Game Pass. I played it as much as I wanted (for now) for less than $10.
Hmmm it’s almost like Jim Ryan was on to something when he said gamepass wasn’t good for the industry and publishers didn’t like it during the antitrust trial with Microsoft.
It blows my fucking mind how stupid some people are just to be able to play the next rehashed bullshit CoD on gamepass instead of paying $70 a year for the same garbage.
Pokémon hasn’t pushed the envelope at all. I think this game really shows what you can do with battle pets in an open world and Nintendo should take notes. Not necessarily breaking their format or making a survival crafter, but there’s a lot of potential they ignore.
Pokémon hasn’t tried anything new in decades because they don’t need to, Nintendo rakes in money from fans buying the same shit every year regardless so why out extra cost in to the product
If a game copies what another game does but does it better and/or gives it own spin on things (which PalWorld arguably does, considering that you can have your Pokemon Pals fight with machine weaponry and also enslave capture people as Pals), I don’t see how that can be a bad thing. Otherwise, people should be up in arms about every roguelike Metroidvania or Soulslike game.
Yeah this is more of the pokemon fandom being deranged. Closest thing in memory was a few people complaining Bleak Faith stole some animations or something from Dark Souls.
The whole thing was resolved without incident and nobody threatened to kill anyone either. Most people didnt even care.
It’d say that exactly what most of the haters are not getting. This is not supposed to be a Pokemon game. It’s a survival crafting and basebuilding game, that uses Pokemon for a great effect and neatly integrates some of the aspects of Pokemon games to fit into the genre.
I’m not saying this is a Pokémon game, but those are Pokémons, they even have Pokeballs. They are so similar to Pokémons that everyone is talking about it.
Anyways, I really don’t care, I don’t play Pokémon and won’t play this game… but those are Pokémon.
Exactly! The game is pretty great case study on how to combine different genres together and make them work, while also being a prime example of how really important theming is.
I haven’t actually played their previous game, Craftopia, but it looks like that both the “using animals in bases” and “catching animals into spheres” was there too, to the point where Palworlds are getting really close to just being mostly a reskin.
But that illustrates really well how much does different theming works wonders for game feel. The mechanic while in Craftopia, with normal animals, wasn’t really much of note. But just by simply reskinning them to a colorful monster collecting game, instead of regular animals, the game feel entirely different, the mechanic is way much more fun to interact with, and it completely changes the game.
Sure, they did build some changes on top of how it worked in Craftopia, and switched the game around to be mostly build around it, but a lot of the elements remain the same, only in a different skin.
And that’s a really good case study in game and themic design, and I really love it.
For that, I really like what they have done, and the game has been so far really fun, even while being only EA. Sure, they still have a long way to go, but I’m really interrested in what direction will they take the game, and I’m really glad they choose the mix of genres they did, and that they mixed and matched elements from other games in a clever fashion, where nothing feels like it was just slapped into the game just because it’s popular. It’s taking the best ideas from other games, and uses them to a great effect together.
I also don’t mind them choosing the traditional Pokemon visual style, because it’s just the best fit for this kind of game. There is a reason why almost every Souls-like game looks like Dark Souls, because the atmosphere just fits into the mood and gameplay the genre is going for. The same can be said about monster collection games.
However, I’m a little bit worried about some red flags raised about the studio - namely that their history with supporting and finishing EA projects is a little bit wonky (although, it can be explained by them coming up with Palworlds concept, and liking it so much that they just immediately switched over to obviously way, way better concept for a game), and also the fact that one of the developers was tweeting about how AI can be used to circumvent copyright by just letting it generate designs similar to other existing products, while making an example on Pokemon. That’s not really a good look, when you’re working on a game that is also a monster collecting game and you don’t want to be accused of stealing design without making it yourself. And that, especially combined with the fact that Palwords is mostly just a re-skin of Craftopia that has been polished a little bit, may be a red flag that indicates that this may have indeed be just a quick attempt at low-effort cash-grab, where they threw Pokemons to AI to change them a little bit without taking any effort at designing original monsters.
But none of that is a concrete proof, and I still believe and hope that instead of a cheap cash-grab, they really do love the game idea and are excited to work and iterate on it, and will not abandon the game for next project once the hype dies down. Time will tell, but I really hope that it’s the latter.
Yeah, people seem all over the place about whether a copied mechanic is “ripping off” or just a genre.
These pokemon-likes have no more in common with Pokemon than Street Fighter with Virtua Fighter, Tekken, MK, KI, Fatal Fury, Guilty Gear, DBZ, or even Super Smash Bros… and about 2 dozen other games
People keep saying that Nintendo is going to sue them or something, but remember digimon?
Pokemon isn’t even an original idea - they just took one aspect of the jrpg and took it further. There’s been countless games that played with the same concept - they’re very litigious, but they don’t have any standing against a game that doesn’t use their IP - and the concept is not their IP, the Pokemon are
I’d pick I up if there was an actual storyline/something that needs to be accomplished and not just an open sandbox where the point is to just build and upgrade.
Yeah. It’s so crazy what ends up going viral sometimes. Over 5 million in a weekend for an early access from a no name company (essentially) is just nuts. Who knew a pokemon rip off with guns was going to cause such a big haul.
Yeah, I played a decent amount and quit when I realized the first boss isn’t the lead-in to the story. I’ll come back when there’s more to it (especially since the Game Pass version is out of date).
Not quite as important as the right to repair, but close in spirit: I would love to see a legal requirement for shut-down online games to release the server specs needed for the community to replace/maintain them.
Edit: And data export for existing players, so our game progress can be reconstructed on community servers, of course.
shutting down most central servers is a death sentence anyway. I'm not putting another decade of grinding into a private server when my Diablo 3 characters are gone.
Yeah… For battle royal and extraction shooters I think it would also be pretty hard to come close to the experience on private servers.
Granted, I wouldn’t mind being able to play e.g. Hunt Showdown with some friends on a private server/in a private match. It wouldn’t be what it is today, but it could still be fun.
It’s not like games with large populations are really getting shut down anyways. The games that are killed are already dead for most people. I really only am bothered by it when it’s a clearly single player/offline friendly game.
Agreed. But not impossible. Insignia got original Halo 2 Xbox Live servers back online. Most nights you can find a game easily with 20-40 people online during peak hours. It requires a soft mod and maybe 1-2 hours of set up to get online. If anyone could just turn on their old Xbox and play, I’m confident those numbers would be in the hundreds at least.
Allowing people to run private servers is an easy way to allow those that want to play to keep playing in an era where most games have some level of online functionality.
Well, when companies are cutting off people’s purchases and wiping works from our cultural history, a little bit of disregard for the law that is complicit with it is pretty much necessary.
Say, it’s through copyright violation that we can still play games from Mario Maker 1 even though the servers were shut down. People figured out how to copy it even though they weren’t allowed to.
If this is wrong, maybe the law should be fixed to provide a proper path.
This is not enough, the code is old with vulnerabilities that will be exploited with automation nowadays. To correctly do this you need open source server code, or to have it maintained.
What do you mean by specs then? The protocol? The “protocol” is the ABI of the server binary, the logic of it. The networking protocol is super simple. You need the server code for replicating any server.
I mean whatever is needed for the community to replace/maintain the servers, just as I said.
That would obviously include the network protocols, but might also include data structures, API contracts, map data, timetables, and any number of other things.
I wrote in general terms deliberately, since it would mean different things for different games, and to allow for the possibility of releasing source code instead of descriptive specs.
(And no, source code is not the only way to do it. If that were the case, the community-developed game servers that have been made through reverse engineering could never have existed.)
The different school in 8 months after Skull and Bones launch:
Our curriculum isn’t doing well. This is not the curriculum we wanted to deliver. Players expect better, yada yada yada, you know the usual school’s apology stuff. We need to lay off 100% of teachers so as to realign, synergize, refocus, retool, and remoney our money-making money curriculum disguised as a “game”. We will do better. We hear you loud and clear (kind of), and we probably learned a lesson of some kind.
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