Only HR, IT, and management are believed to be unaffected by the cuts, which reportedly would see the developer’s title, 2016’s Disney Magic Kingdoms, transferred to Gameloft’s studio in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
Kharkiv? Damn. I mean, Kharkiv is an active war zone. As in “I read regular news reports about fighting there”.
There’s just a mild dissonance between that title(which is an awful thing, hopefully they all land on their feet after this), and the happy as fuck Disney Magic Kingdoms image.
You happy about this, Mickey? Does this please your cold corporate heart? They shoulda tied you to the anchor and left you for erased, you sick rat.
I really like it. It’s pretty simple but the small city feels dense and fun to explore. Reminds me of something you’d find on the Dreamcast. If you have gamepass give it a shot.
It’s not the engines’ fault that game development got longer. It’s that most AAA games over scope and go open world when they don’t have to, which not only takes longer to make but often results in a worse game. Make games smaller and iterate on them quickly, like the industry did 20 years ago. That’s how you make this make sense.
One of the things I really hope they learn how to do is launch their games in a straightforward manner. Hitman is a great game but trying to figure out how to just buy the damn thing is so unnecessarily complicated. Someone on reddit made a chart about it and I still don’t understand what I’m supposed to buy on Steam.
"One of the biggest things with Unity and Unreal is that they’re constantly trying to grow. And to grow means they’re constantly adding new features because they want to add more user types. That ends in a polluted engine in terms of features. If you go to the bar at the top, you will see a lot of features and they have so many use cases. And now they’re also building for industrial digitisation, so they need to support that. So suddenly you have this large code, and maybe somebody is only using just 40% or 30% of it, but you need to make sure it’s stable and doesn’t crash.
Yes. But on the flip side, you also have a lot more resources to debug that codebase.
I think that there’s a fair argument that Unity or Unreal might not be ideal for a given game. But:
I am skeptical that game studios are generally better-off writing their own engine, particularly with graphically-spiffier games.
I think that the main case where doing one’s own engine is useful is when someone wants to do something that a game engine simply cannot do. I don’t think that just having one game studio implement 30%-40% of a shared engine from scratch with the goal of having a codebase that’s 30%-40% the current size makes a lot of sense in terms of saving development time. And even if new functionality is required, I’d still argue that if that functionality is at all reusable, it’d be a good idea into looking into spreading those costs over a number of games
They really buried the lede on this one. Sure, Embrace paid back a bunch of money using proceeds from the sale of Take-Two. That’s pretty normal business. But:
The company is also moving €900 million of its debt into tabletop publisher Asmodee as part of its plans to split into three separate entities.
It sounds like they are about to jettison the rest of their debt using Asmodee. Embracer will walk away with whatever money they have made and Asmodee will end up being crushed under most of the debt Embrace used to make that money. Vulture capitalism at it’s finest.
Maybe, though if you think about it, the idea is basically:
Hey, we borrowed all this money to buy up lots of companies. But rather than pay it back ourselves, we are going to put all of that debt on this one company we also bought (probably with some of that debt), because thay actually make money.
It’s a shell game to allow Embracer to walk away with all the profits and never have to pay their investors back. If Asmodee manages to pay off the debt, that’s nice for them. Other than the fact that they will be hamstrung by servicing that debt, rather than re-investing in the company. If Asmodee folds and gets auctioned off in Chapter 7, that ends up having no material effect on the leadership of Embracer who made the decision to take on all that debt. Either way, Embracer is jettisoning all responsibility for the choices the management of Embrace made.
This sort of leveraged debt buyout, loot the company, then jettison the debt tactic has been used over and over to destroy otherwise profitable companies in the name of short term profit for vulture capitalists.
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