Not only is this nonsense for the obvious reasons, but it’s the kind of nonsense that someone who has no idea how game development works would state without ever bothering to check how it actually works.
Wario64 linked because the original is gated. This would be part of the 1600 layoffs coming over a 12 month period. My guess is any studio that’s about to ship a game, like Gears of War: E-Day, is going to be targeted most.
Honestly, if they are hiring people back, I don’t know how you sustain them with such reduced revenue. It sounds more like false hope to me.
Marathon did not hit, and they laid off half the studio.
Liam from Gaming On Linux doesn’t seem confident, but I don’t see them call it out explicitly.
Without a crystal ball, I can put about 99% confidence in a future where Bungie continues to charge for microtransactions like they always have, and they won’t take a route like No Man’s Sky of being a single purchase. With a crystal ball, I could give you 100% confidence.
Reworking Marathon and restoring “vaulted” content to Destiny are the highlights.
There was a car interstitial that was throwaway, but the parts I was talking about were one where you chased a plane and one where you ran a garbage truck through an alley like a tank, both of which are pretty on-brand.
Wow, I didn’t know that. Those sections are just supposed to be moments that feel cool and stitch together other parts of the game, so they help pacing, but that game’s use of vehicles in general was pretty underwhelming.
Like how they build up the entire game that you get to use this really fancy car in Q branch, and then it’s only used for a glorified turret sequence. It smelled a whole lot like the scene they wanted to make wouldn’t run well and had to be cut.
It wasn’t even that difficult! That meme had been circulating for years, but it only took me like three tries.
Destiny was running the studio into the ground regardless of Marathon. Behind the scenes reporting says it had been a while since Destiny turned a profit, and by the time The Final Shape came out, the damage was already done. The reason they’re not continuing with it is that it just burns through money.
They’re reworking it into something else now in an attempt to salvage it, but for me personally, unless that involves being able to host the server myself, I’m not giving it the time of day.
Always good to get another data point of how much money it costs to create how much video game, and how that was accomplished.
How is this being written as some sort of success story?
Because this is still somehow better than what Sony is doing, as they have no plan for backward compatibility with your disc games. I agree that people portraying this as a success story are very shortsighted.
I already outlined two things you could do instead. Casually overheard on the subway, I know the average Joe who just plays NBA 2K is becoming more and more aware of his other options as the one he liked grows to be worse in some way, whether his line in the sand is physical media or not.
Yes, Netflix got worse; buy some Blu Rays instead…you might find that they’re higher quality video than what Netflix has been sending you anyway, and you can get them pretty cheap on sale. PlayStation got worse; play your games somewhere else, even old or low spec ones that run on machines you already have or that you can afford. You won’t be the only one in this predicament, and game developers are going to have to start targeting a lower spec to survive. These companies get you used to a thing and either cut benefits or raise prices or both, but they’re not essential to your survival or happiness, and there are other things you can do in response.
And even if it was, we’re long past the point of voting with your wallet anymore in this age of tech oligopolies.
Respectfully, the hell we are. Telling yourself there’s nothing we can do about it perpetuates the cycle. For one thing, you could probably stick to just the physical media that already exists and never run out of great video games to play, and besides that, depending on what’s important to you, there’s DRM-free games.
Alternative theory: launching a free to play game in any genre these days may as well be buying an extremely expensive lottery ticket. The top 10 charts in player numbers, not just on Steam but on any platform, are entrenched games that have been out for 10+ years and perhaps Valorant. It takes a lot of players to financially sustain a free to play game, and without the price tag, they would have only burned through money faster. When the game was free pre-release, it had already proven that there was no interest in the game. 2XKO was one of the most popular fighting games out there by player numbers, but for what it needed to make that make financial sense, it was nowhere close. Highguard was free to play and had a tremendous amount of players at launch, but it barely lasted longer than Concord.
Yeah, it’s not new, but it’s gotten more egregious, and everyone keeps pulling from the same bag of tricks regardless of how much sense it makes. Uncharted has a lot of climbing bits because it’s riffing on Indiana Jones, but why is James Bond doing the same climbing bits as Nathan Drake? And why are they so simple that my inputs hardly matter because the only path through the level is so telegraphed that it’s visible from space? Games need downtime between action sequences for pacing reasons, and while I could tolerate it in Gears of War because of their brevity, our answer to this problem needs to be more sophisticated than just holding up on the analog stick.
The problem with Destiny 2 is that its dev team was anything but lean.