Context: Aside from Marathon missing the mark on its early playtests and getting mediocre reviews, Bungie was caught copy/pasting stolen art into a lot of the game’s art and textures. The company is internally under fire.
Live service garbage has costed the industry billions in losses and costed tens of thousands of devs their jobs. Fad chasing in general.
Everyone wants to make the fortnite killer or overwatch killer. They set billions of dollars on fire and get nothing for it. And it’s the devs who pay the price. Not the c-suite dipshits who threw all that money in the fire pit.
I mean, the money does go somewhere. People get paid while the game is being developed. It’s just that the investors don’t get the ROI.
Yes, but then their lives are often uprooted, since the entire existence of their job was based on a bad bet.
Can’t wait until Tom Christie does a Skelator bit about this.
This one and FairGame$ are both screwed, and they’ll mark the end of an era for Sony and live service. What’s funny too is that Bungie was purchased in large part for being experts in making successful live service games, but it reminds me of something in investing where those who appear to be very smart after a string of successes are compared to being “expert coin flippers” who just got heads a number of times in a row. As we’ve gotten a peak or two behind the curtain after the purchase, it certainly looks like Bungie was only lucky.
Bungie is a lot like Bioware in that regard: Some real bangers on the resume, but none very recently. It should serve as a reminder that companies don’t make games, people do. If the right people aren’t involved, or too many of the wrong people are, past successes are entirely meaningless.
It’s not only the people, it’s the people at specific timepoints, nobody wants a remake of skyrim and another iteration of assassin’s creed is only gonna get a lukewarm reception. Games are lightning in a bottle, their successes are basically impossible to replicate because there’s so many variables at play.
“Recently” also means something different in a time where BioWare makes one game every 5 years rather two games in the same year.
It is a little funny that even after Sony backpedaled hard on live service after Concord, the one studio they bought to make live service games instantly started failing too. Destiny hasn’t been doing too great either. Sony have been very unlucky this generation.
