You’ll be surprised how many Star Wars games got canned in the last two years. I can’t really say because of NDAs and don’t want anyone in trouble. The whole industry is in trouble.
“the whole industry” lmfao no. Just shitty AAA studios that can’t function without a c suite fucking up everything to milk as much profit as possible for their shareholders. Blessings to the indie devs, and fuck the rest of them. Hope they burn and give real studios a chance.
I agree on this actually, I was referring really to that when I said industry. I think indie devs, well most, have a love for it so it’s not industrialized.
I think we’re approaching a point where games are going to be made like movies.
Teams assembled for one project, everyone does their bit, and are then discarded when they’re no longer needed.
Big publishers will probably have a pool of people they can push between projects depending on what’s needed. Ubisoft appear to do that, when you look at the credits in their games, there’s like 10 subsidiary studios involved. For smaller studios, you’ll probably be let go between games until you’re needed again. Maybe they’ll keep your information and rehire you because you did a good job of hard surface rigging or whatever last time. Maybe they hire an excited school-leaver to sloperate a clanker. Who knows.
Major difference is that in Hollywood, you don’t hire a bunch of, say, VFX artists for a movie, you contract the company that retains them. They’ll generally still have jobs when the movie is over. It’s mostly just the cast, director and writers that work on a per-project basis. Games industry is somehow worse than Hollywood.
A lot of them do seem to do that. The credits for most games are ludicrously long and thank dozens of subcontracted companies.
I honestly don’t think your average AAA studio could even tell you how much AI slop is in their final product. It’s not none, and hasn’t been for years.
Approaching?
AAA has been following that model for a decade.
They don’t give a shit about the people that work for them and fire them as soon as it’s convenient.
They fire people and allow them to re-apply for their job because then they don’t have to pay continued service rewards.
Yeah I’ll not be buying this then.
Gamerant is saying the studio was low on funds and facing a $20 million dollar lawsuit from a former exec when the workers were furloughed weeks prior to launch, that dozens of employees have already been brought back, and that Bit Locker is claiming to want to bring the rest back.
This was their first game, and if they do bring back the team members (with back pay) now that the game is a sucess, I would actually be much more understanding.
Unions. Not just for blue collars anymore.
All devs should be entitled to royalties
Honestly, I don’t understand why any studio wouldn’t do this. Not only does it mean you can differ some pay until later effectively (obviously you still need to be competitive, because people don’t like gambling with their livelihood), but it actively encourages devs to make the best game possible. If they’re just working for a salary, they have no skin in the game. Give them a reason to make the absolute best thing they possibly can make.
Hollywood perfected royalties. If structured right, you can promise everyone at the company 200% of the games profit and never pay them a cent.
For example, you sell all rights to the game to a shell company owned by the studio’s parent for 1¢.
But what about the moneyyyyyyyyy?
This all sounds nice but isn’t the case in any other industry, why should game dev be different?
I made a statement on what they should do, for best results from employees, not on what they actually do. It should also be true for all other industries. I think all company profits should be shared with employees, and ideally owned, if not totally then at least in part, by employees. Give them a stake in the company, and a reason to care about how it’s doing, and they’ll put more effort in.
The fact this is incomprehensible to the capitalist class isn’t surprising though. They view humans as resources (hence the Human Resources Department), not as people with their own wants and desires.
He went on: "It is a gross but all too common sight to see, another corporate game hitting the top of Steam while the team is left looking for work and cut off from any possible profit sharing.
And, there it is.
They did their thing. No use of them anymore :)
Gane dev gig economy
“Congratulations. Great job. Goodbye now.”
This whole industry is job security hell. Man, people decades ago dreamed of being somewhere in the industry. I don’t really know now who’d want to be in it knowing how awful job security even is.
Yeah, I went to school for it. Never broke in. Ended up with a much better and wayyyy more stable job.
Couldn’t imagine trying to get in now that every studio is owned by like ~3 companies.
It’s like the movie industry, now. They only have a job as long as the game is in production, and all they get is the weekly paycheck.
Except they’re not set up to be able to do that like the movie industry is.
Sounds like a problem for the devs right everyone?
When I was a teenager, I really wanted to work in the video game industry. Really glad I don’t. I still want to learn to make video games, but I never want to work for any video game company. Especially any that have been around for say… 20 years and/or publicly traded.
Unfortunately, you’re not the demographic the industry is looking for. What they want now is obedient, but expendable staff who’ll only be on long enough to see a project done. Then you’re discarded. The other pocket of people they’d want is, you know what type.
You’re better of being your own independent video game worker.
Yet another certified bruh moment,
The devs keep getting stabbed in the back by evil greedy CEOs
I won’t even buy the game then
This is why I pirate most games unless it’s from indie devs. Fuck any and every corpo entity. Like hell I’m gonna let them profit from me while stabbing those who actually did the work in the back.
At this point in human evolution, I can’t understand how anybody would want to be in the gaming industry anymore. I would not blame any developer if they just decided “fuck it” and quit altogether. I’d applaud it, actually.
The corpo gaming industry, perhaps. I’ve seen various indie developers have a great time.
The 0.1% who actually hit it big. Let’s not include survivorship bias here :)
You don’t go into indie to hit big though. You do it because it’s your passion, just like any other creative out there.
Hitting it big, In Indie terms, is making even $1 in profit, though.
Like 90% don’t even make back their budget
You can’t pay rent or for food with passion. Indie as in making it your job is brutal.
Indie as a hobby while having a day job can be peachy (I’m doing it myself).
Yep and that’s why it’s really important to have government investment to increase the chances of getting games out there. For example, Untitled Goose Game got government grants and was a huge success - there are many other examples also. Without the grants, they wouldn’t have been able to make it.
You don’t really have to “hit it big” even moderate success (comparatively) is enough to pay the bills for a long while from what I’ve heard from a few indie devs online.
I wanted to be in the video game industry when I was younger and followed through with it by learning programming and pretty much everything I could with computers.
But then while I was in university, the story about EA’s working culture broke. How they’d say hours were normal but they might need extra hours during “crunch time”, which sounded reasonable until you learned that they just set deadlines such that it was always crunch time. The partners of EA workers did a class action suit against the company and won it IIRC.
That was enough for me to adjust my trajectory. I realized the suddenly obvious bit: people usually go into the video game industry because they have a passion for video games, which sets them up for exploitation like any other job that many people want to get in to.
I might still make a video game but I never intend to be a peon in the video game industry.
they’d say hours were normal but they might need extra hours during “crunch time”,
I always had this arrangement at the companies I worked for, except the “normal hours” were actually me doing next to nothing, and the “crunch time” was me genuinely busting my ass for a few weeks nearly every waking hour to get the software finished and out the door. It was nothing more than an extension of how I handled college rather than some arrangement that the companies intentionally offered. Management was always just so utterly fucking clueless about anything related to the technical side of software development that it was easy to fool them into thinking that my way of doing things was just normal for the field.
I gave it the 2 hour test run on Linux and I get getting blackscreens and stutter so unfortunately it went to refund town.
Live by the AAA die by the AAA
This game has absolutely horrendous performance problems.
It baffles me that people are rating this higher than games like KOTOR and Republic Commando.
Well the gameplay is very different, and maybe people like the way star wars feels when applied to XCOM type strategy games?
People are not looking at the performance in isolation when rating games.
Steam reviews for other games says otherwise. Plenty of games with reviews only on performance.
I guess because it’s new? Xcom has s big fan base too
And wasn’t xcom buggy as shit too? Lol
99% chance of no bug
99% chance to uninstall and never go back.
Replace “wasn’t” with “is” and you’re correct. I still love XCOM 2, play it to this day. But it’s a buggy mess and sometimes it feels it’s just held together with software-ducttape and positive thoughts lmao.
The carry unit mechanic still needs a mod to work properly, otherwise the carried unit’s position is only updated on the visuals, not mechanically.
It’s ass given how important it is.
Performance is a stinking mess but gameplay is a joy. It’s not XCOM but it’s great in its own right.
Because people like us in the tactics genre really are used to incredibly buggy and laggy games. XCOM, anything made by paradox - all of that suffers from performance issues and gameplay bugs. It’s a bit like buying something from bethesda - you just expect those kinds of problems, which is why it doesn’t really influence our rating.
Also, it isn’t that big of a deal in a turn based tactics game to have all the animations be silky smooth or responsive like it is in games with real-time combat. The quality doesn’t directly affect the play experience for the most part.
A turn based game at 30 frames plays the same as it does at 60 or 120. It only doesn’t look as good. Can’t say the same for other genres.
That’s not really detrimental to a game this like though. Some pop in and occasional hitching isn’t going to cause a character death or a missed shot, it’s just mildly annoying. It’s definitely no kotor, but it’s fun as hell.
Can’t even play with your wookie in this game
Meh, i can tolerate shitty fps and even some stutter on turned based games. It’s not ideal but not as much of a deal breaker.
I would still say it’s worth buying at least from my personal experience. I’m still really enjoying the game despite the performance but it’s probably heavily dependent on your system.
Not worth buying with how they have treated the dev team with these lay offs but it’s a perfectly reasonable game to pirate if one wants to play it.
Games having dodgy performance on release is effectively normal now.
It makes more sense to rate based on the gameplay otherwise 99% of releases would be 1 star.
But how likely is any optimisation going to be forthcoming if there’s no-one working on it?
I imagine that’s the difference the majority and all?
I expect the remainder are the department heads planning out the next game.
Now?
The first video game I ever l played was Pong.
Dodgy performance on release has always been the case. Would like to hear the tale of the Atari ET game?
Being able to remotely update games after release definitely lowered the bar for release considerably.
Im not saying there were no bugs before that, definitely not.
Can’t remember any particular performance problems with ET - it’s no more flickery than any other 2600 game, sound plays fine, screen changes when you fall in a hole are prompt, all that kind of thing. Now, utterly bizarre and unintuitive gameplay, yes; it has that in spades. Also quite unfinished, but Howard Scott Warshaw only got five weeks to develop it so I’m prepared to point the blame at Atari for that.
Like any good train wreck there are always many reasons why they happen.
performance is not everything
What’s the point? You can’t even enjoy your laurels. Just fucked the minute release hits so they dont have to pay you. Fucked up. Nobody should work for a game corporation.
Nobody should work for a
gamecorporation.My actual goal, anymore.
