The Great Video Game Business and Financial (In)Stability Thread

I missed this back in October, but Ubisoft Quebec managing director Patrick Klaus told Gamasutra that despite its massive scope Assassin's Creed Odyssey was completed with minimal crunch time.

While we can always do better, I can tell you hand on heart that [Assassin's Creed Odyssey] hasn’t required a massive crunch, like maybe some of the triple-As from five or ten years ago. We can still always do better, but we have managed pretty well to succeed in delivering a game of huge magnitude which is hitting a good quality [level], while making sure that our teams are not burnt out and disgusted with working in games.

We collectively, on the management team, think that it is a false economy to burn out our teams. We risk losing them, or we risk disengaging them, and we will simply not get the best out of those talents if we’re forcing them to work insane hours in crunch. We’ve got some way to go, but I’m feeling good about what we have achieved.

I'm not sure when this interview took place, but it was posted a couple weeks after the Rockstar stupidbrag.

I'd be interested to hear the opinion of someone in the trenches at Ubi Quebec.

Not quite sure where else to post this, but...

Paradox buys Prison Architect

I know the PA guys spent a lot of time and effort on it over multiple years, but it's still surprising that they'd sell all rights to it. I remember seeing stories about how that studio almost had to shut down at one point, so I can only assume that Paradox threw a lot of money at them to make them willing to give up that revenue stream, assuming people are still buying PA.

I never had that much fun with the game. It was okay, but it lacked a spark, the thing that made it work, at least for me. Other people seem to like it fine, so it might just be me.

Paradox will probably DLC the heck out of any further entries in that line, so I won't be very interested.

tanstaafl wrote:

Not quite sure where else to post this, but...

Paradox buys Prison Architect

It seems like an odd decision to me. For one thing, I think almost anybody who is remotely interested in the game already owns 1 or 2 or 3 copies of it across various platforms.

More critically though, I don't see how Paradox is going to maintain or extend or sequel-ize it without Introversion's involvement. Prison Architect is not like other games. You can't just assign another studio to maintain it. There's a hell of a lot of domain specific expertise in its interlocking AIs and rulesets and you can't just transfer that expertise along with the IP.

Building these sort of complex agent-based simulations is super hard. A good number of indie developers have crashed and burned on this problem and I don't think any AAA developers have even taken it on. The folks who seem most successful seem to be rather obsessive individuals, often self-taught, who have hand built every aspect of their games.

Even if the code is super clean and well documented, it's still going to be horrendously complex. Unlike other hard game programming problems, like building game engines for example, there is no real community of people who know how to do this.

___________ Architect as a series is worth the investment, eh? Even if the games don't turn out to be quite as granular as Prison Architect.

I also think Paradox got it for a reasonable price. I doubt Introversion was in a position of strength in the negotiations.

garion333 wrote:

I also think Paradox got it for a reasonable price. I doubt Introversion was in a position of strength in the negotiations.

What's happened to Introversion, I thought only Delay and Morris were employees now after the failure of Subversion? What would force them to sell? (Have they screwed up their tax returns to HMRC?)

garion333 wrote:

I doubt Introversion was in a position of strength in the negotiations.

I don't understand this statement. As the owner of the IP, don't they have all the strength when it comes to whether or not to sell all rights to it?

MeatMan wrote:
garion333 wrote:

I doubt Introversion was in a position of strength in the negotiations.

I don't understand this statement. As the owner of the IP, don't they have all the strength when it comes to whether or not to sell all rights to it?

Not if they really needed the money.

The Division 2 is going on the Epic store and not on Steam.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...

I think that's cool. Seems like a no brainer for Ubi. They know people may not want to buy from the Ubi store, so it's smart for them to build up another big storefront that won't leech their sales so much.

But it'll be on the Ubi store too, and still require Uplay.

Someone hasn't paid their BBB bribe yet...

Bungie and Activision part ways, and Bungie gets to keep Destiny

Bungie's always had control over the Destiny's IP, Activision just had publishing rights...

https://investor.activision.com/news...

Bungie, the developer of blockbuster game franchises including Halo, Myth and Marathon, and Activision, a wholly owned subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, the #1 online games publisher (Nasdaq: ATVI), announced today that they have entered into an exclusive 10-year partnership to bring Bungie's next big action game universe to market. Under the terms of the agreement, Activision will have exclusive, worldwide rights to publish and distribute all future Bungie games based on the new intellectual property on multiple platforms and devices. Bungie remains an independent company and will continue to own their intellectual property. Additional terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Yeah, honestly it sounds like Destiny underperformed, so Bungie got dumped. But viewed through the lens of devs always being good and publishers always being bad, it's a break up in Bungie's favor.

Oh, thank gawd. Now they can make other games again!

The entire 10 year partnership ended up being a mistake as games as services operate differently than the typical release schedule of games every couple of years. It never made sense to me to fracture the Destiny fan base between Destiny 1 and 2, especially when 2 came out and many found it an inferior experience until the latest expansion.

As Schreirer's post says:

One of the most significant tensions between Bungie and Activision had long been the annualized schedule, which mandated the release of a new Destiny game or expansion every fall.

At the end of the day it sounds like Bungie would do best to stay indie as they keep getting out from under publishers.

I'd like to know more about the inside story here.

I was a fan of Bungie's from Pathways into Darkness to Halo:Reach. But, I just could not be less interested in Destiny. Even the times I tried to give it a fair shot, I just bounced off hard.

From the mid '90s through the aughts, Bungie had a distinct corporate voice and their games had a distinct style. I haven't seen any real sign of that since they left Microsoft.

I think it's going to be hard for them to survive as an independent studio.

Yeah, they're not at all the same Bungie, anymore. The people that made it up back in the glory days are probably almost all gone, and maintaining a corporate culture with that kind of turnover is not easy.

Companies the size of Activision need releases to perform to such an unsustainable degree, it's not much of a shock that a successful hit like Destiny was below their expectations. It will likely be tough, lots of factors, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if Bungie was able to get along just fine.

polq37 wrote:

I think it's going to be hard for them to survive as an independent studio.

I dunno. They're clearly a technically proficient studio capable of turning out big, shiny, well-made games.

From where I (and the majority of consumers) sit, "corporate voice" is neither here nor there.

Bungie is also attractive to investors and the tech talent swimming all over Seattle looking for something fun to do after Microsoft and Amazon burn them out. I think they'll have some time to find out who they are again.

Jonman wrote:
polq37 wrote:

I think it's going to be hard for them to survive as an independent studio.

I dunno. They're clearly a technically proficient studio capable of turning out big, shiny, well-made games.

From where I (and the majority of consumers) sit, "corporate voice" is neither here nor there.

I think it plays a role in maintaining a core fan base. The core base builds momentum, maintains playerbase, and evangelizes to everyone else. Do they have a core fan base post-Destiny?

In their heyday, Lucasarts and Blizzard had a 'thing' that could get fans to take a chance on new concepts.

2019 Bungie has enough juice to bring in investors for another AAA game. But, nobody is writing them blank checks anymore, especially now that the management has twice publicly broken with their major patrons.

I think there is a likelyhood that they won't be around as an independent entity in the next 5-7 years.

polq37 wrote:

I think it plays a role in maintaining a core fan base. The core base builds momentum, maintains playerbase, and evangelizes to everyone else. Do they have a core fan base post-Destiny?

They did, but they lost a huge portion of them with Destiny 2. That game courted a completely different audience than Destiny 1, and that audience was never going to stick around and support a persistent online game. It was a bad move. If you want evidence, just look at what Destiny 2 is now. Almost the entire last year of patches was dedicated to slowly morphing the game back to what Destiny 1 was.

Forsaken brought some of that base back, but not enough. They burned too many bridges.

If you want an example of a game that took great strides to court a new audience without forsaking its base, just look at what Monster Hunter World did last year. It's the most successful Monster Hunter game by far, and it's already Capcom's best selling game ever. The overwhelming majority of the Monster Hunter community was happy with the changes made to bring on new players.

Destiny could so easily have taken a similar approach, but instead opted to "fix" a bunch of stuff that wasn't broken in the first place. They completely alienated their existing fans and replaced them with a larger audience of players that was never going to support their ongoing model.

How much of this has to do with Activision's influence? I have no clue, but I'm certainly curious to see where things go from here.

That's what I've always wondered. Was Destiny the game Bungie wanted to make? Did they make it the way they wanted to? What would they do given more freedom?

Dyni wrote:

They did, but they lost a huge portion of them with Destiny 2. That game courted a completely different audience than Destiny 1, and that audience was never going to stick around and support a persistent online game. It was a bad move. If you want evidence, just look at what Destiny 2 is now. Almost the entire last year of patches was dedicated to slowly morphing the game back to what Destiny 1 was.

Vanilla D2 swung too hard in the direction of casual play, and there wasn't enough content to repeat for rewards. Forsaken swung too hard in the opposite direction at the demands of the playerbase, and it's now basically unplayable for anyone who has a job or wants to play any other video game ever.

Catering to the most vocal components of reddit and the forums in Forsaken actually turned me off D2 completely. All they added was incredibly long, bullsh*t grinds that now require players to play a massive amount to just get the materials needed to progress characters.

I restarted on PC with Forsaken, finished the story, and I have no desire to unlock the Dreaming City because of the sheer amount of grind it's going to take. I don't have time to get 25 spinmetal to infuse. Exotics are nonexistent(or will require hours of grinding sh*t I really don't want to do), and the drop rate feels like pre Taken King. But reddit and the forums are happy, so /shrug.

The MHW comparison is interesting, because almost all of the changes there are designed around reducing the grind. Between faster gathering, the farm being able to grow basically everything, and investigations giving extra shots at the most rare drops, and the combined MP and SP progression, the entire game design was all about reducing the amount of grinding that players need to do to progress. The exact same philosophy behind vanilla D2 is present in MHW.

DSGamer wrote:

That's what I've always wondered. Was Destiny the game Bungie wanted to make? Did they make it the way they wanted to? What would they do given more freedom?

On the flipside of that, I wonder how much influence Activision actually had. All I've seen are complaints about Activision's mandate to release a new game or expansion every fall, which for a persistent online game is a really generous rollout of content. Is the argument that Bungie was prevented from updating the game often enough?

Bungie's in an interesting position now, PR-wise. So far, they've been able to blame all their problems on their publishers, and it works, because as I alluded to earlier: gamers always view the publisher as wrong and the developer as right. Bungie has been able to blame first Microsoft and then Activision for any problems, but from here, they're on their own.

Part of a publisher's job is to soak hate so that developers can do their work. Bungie doesn't have that, now, unless there's someone out there willing to ink them another contract.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

On the flipside of that, I wonder how much influence Activision actually had. All I've seen are complaints about Activision's mandate to release a new game or expansion every fall, which for a persistent online game is a really generous rollout of content. Is the argument that Bungie was prevented from updating the game often enough?

Activision, on the whole, hasn't ever really exerted the kind of corporate control that EA or Ubisoft has on any of their franchises. They have expectations of yearly releases with their franchises, but have shown that they're more than willing to bring on additional development houses to support CoD(there are 3 now, alternating yearly).

And while CoD isn't exactly the most innovative of series, they've shown that they're willing to let Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer and Treyarch do their own thing and change up the games between iterations.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
DSGamer wrote:

That's what I've always wondered. Was Destiny the game Bungie wanted to make? Did they make it the way they wanted to? What would they do given more freedom?

On the flipside of that, I wonder how much influence Activision actually had. All I've seen are complaints about Activision's mandate to release a new game or expansion every fall, which for a persistent online game is a really generous rollout of content. Is the argument that Bungie was prevented from updating the game often enough?

Bungie's in an interesting position now, PR-wise. So far, they've been able to blame all their problems on their publishers, and it works, because as I alluded to earlier: gamers always view the publisher as wrong and the developer as right. Bungie has been able to blame first Microsoft and then Activision for any problems, but from here, they're on their own.

Part of a publisher's job is to soak hate so that developers can do their work. Bungie doesn't have that, now, unless there's someone out there willing to ink them another contract.

Eh, I've always gotten a Halo 2 vibe from both Destiny's: A team of passionate, talented people worked their hardest before the general spec or story was even thought about, followed by an, "oh sh*t, this is sh*t, somebody wipe down the white boards so we can start over!" The loop of cresting a hill, throwing a grenade, popping some heads was gonna be tight. But narrative, lootness, and over all structure feel like they never existed as a prototype, but just kinda winged and patched by leads ready to hand-wave away the difficulty of those components.

They should steal Warframe's monetization strategy for sure. I don't know how you fix the loot system without pissing off a lot of people though.

Things aren't looking good for Borderlands 3 today.