The new Marathon game seems to be very loosely related to the originals and not even having a single player experience.
Pretty much only Mac users played the original.
I think it would have been better if they gave the game a different name. To me it feels a bit like a “betrayal” of the original game and with very little, if any, benefit.
Halo is in many ways an extension of the Marathon lore but with a different plot. Since Halo is a Microsoft IP Sony probably saw this as a good way to have their own Halo.
I think Bungie eventually confirmed that the two aren't in the same universe, but in the early days it seems like that was pretty up in the air. Prior to the announcement of Halo, a prominent Marathon fan site started receiving emails from cortana@bungie.org - https://marathon.bungie.org/story/cortana.html . The sender appeared to be a rampant AI who was dropping all kinds of cryptic tidbits that linked her to Marathon. For example Cortana and the AI antagonist of Marathon are named after swords wielded by Charlemagne's paladins in the 12th century, and they appear to be aware of this and of each other... at one point in Marathon 2 Durandal asserts that he's got a history with Charlemagne and calls him a fruitcake..!
Cortana later repeats some of the lines from those emails in Halo 3, and Marathon references are all over the place in the first few games.
Bungie was in a league of their own back in the day with all the cryptic references and teasers and connections. At one point they released a timeline for the Marathon universe, and the point in time when Halo takes place is labeled with "Nothing important happened here."
You can play the original Marathon(s) on Mac, Windows, and Linux now thanks to Aleph One [0]. There's also new scenarios for the engine still being released, like Apotheosis X which came out last year [1].
That was the stated reason for the acquisition, and why they put so much money towards retention bonuses.
Unfortunately, since Sony is scaling back their live service ambitions, seems like maybe this wasn't the best move. Then again, this article makes the situation sound pretty dire, and it isn't like those things would be different had the acquisition not happened...
I don't think Sony should get blame on this, Bungie was already well on their way to mediocrity. They had a great IP, great game mechanics but they've been riding the Destiny train for way too long with mediocre expansions (except for Witch Queen). There are also too many looter shooters competing for people's time, live service as a model is a steady revenue stream but the good times don't last forever. It's time for something fresh and new, even if it's not live service, just give players anything.
Not a remake: a PvP "extraction" shooter, which is apparently a term that means something to folks who like to play FPS games online. I, on the other hand, love offline, atmospheric FPS games with deep lore, like the Marathon games I grew up playing on my family's Performa 6115.
The greatest bastardization of all time, which rightfully flopped as hard as a 2 ton pancake, was Shadowrun. [1] Take one of the most beloved RPG and tabletop genres of all time, and create an online only, PVP only, $60, first person shooter. Brilliant!
Yah, but fortunately for that series, they’ve made a few RPGs since then, starting with Shadowrun Returns. No such luck for a proper Syndicate sequel yet…
Satellite Reign [1] did a pretty solid take on Syndicate. For some context on that game, they released in a somewhat absurdly unoptimized fashion (CPU bottle necked), and never really optimized it. It should run fine now though on any modernish CPU, a decade after its launch. There are also some collision issues in the game. They're relatively rare, but common enough to show up on a large scale and drive lots of angry reviews.
Outside of that the atmosphere/aesthetic is well done and the gameplay is great. The story is about as good as in Syndicate... In any case, definitely worth a playthrough or two. But it stings to think about how much better that game could have been with just 6 months more work. Of course that's what they were probably thinking 6 months before they finally decided to launch!
Shadowrun eventually went free or very cheap on Xbox live… I had fun with it, but free is always appealing. No idea why they used the Shadowrun IP for it.
I still remember closing (an overflow, the main was still open with plenty of room) computer lab early at university so a bunch of us could play marathon.
I wish Bungie would make another campaign based game with optional multiplayer, rather than an online only live service game.
Halo is my favourite game of all time but I couldn't be less interested in Destiny or Marathon. It honestly sounds like work. People talk about Destiny like it's a job, a chore. It sounds horrible.
Extraction shooters are like Tarkov. I believe important features include:
* exploring established maps, looking for loot and/or scrap
* entering the map with items from previous runs
* permanent loss of most/all of those items on death.
It rewards surviving through multiple rounds and defeating people who have survived multiple rounds.
It’s not my style of game due to the death mechanics; but it’s been growing with games like Tarkov, The Cycle and Hunt (though Hunt is less aggressively an extraction shooter)
Baffling why Bungie would sell themselves to Sony after their purchase and split from Microsoft considering they are printing cash with Destiny microtransactions.
I don't buy the line it was get bought by Sony or close. The article states that Bungie were giving people bonuses of >100% because they'd been so successful financially, and they'd just signed a lease on a really expensive new office
These are not things you do if you're clinging desperately on for survival.
To me this reads like corporate greed and nothing else.
Here's my take on the cycle Bungie is trapped in and how they got there:
They sold to Sony to get sizeable payouts on their owned shares and they over-inflated the value of the company whilst doing that.
Sony is now asking where the money is.
In response, the senior team at Bungie claim that the economy is hard and then passes on all the consequences of their actions onto the workforce.
In doing so, they destroy the day-to-day working of the company because nobody actually wants to work there anymore and it just becomes a place where everyone is utterly despondent.
The revenue continues to fall, and the senior team continue to respond to the falling revenue by passing more layoffs/discipline/cruelty onto their employees.
Eventually there is a surplus of managers left at Bungie and nobody to actually do the work.
They desperately try to plug these gaps with contractors and outsourced staff but the burden of training people to work within a 7 year old code base that is riddled with spaghetti and bugs just means that nobody can actually successfully build anything.
Bungie as a company will not survive long enough to make Destiny 3.
This makes me wonder, what's the oldest game studio that hasn't devolved into utter garbage or been bought and took out behind the barn?
Blizzard, Maxis, EA, Rockstar, Bungie, Lionhead, every name I can think of from the old days is now utterly disgraced or just dead.
Sierra is still going, kind of. It seems to have devolved into a handful of people with very little money. I actually applied to a job posting from them a couple years ago.
Seems the only source of half decent games that aren't actively exploiting people is just indie studios. Nothing against indie, but it's hard for a couple of people in their free time to compete with the kind of quality and innovation we used to get from the old guard.
My sense is that, for example, the reception of EU4 expansions has generally ranged from lukewarm to absolutely terrible over the past few years, so I'm not sure "they've only been getting better."
Yea, it feels like you move into that smaller studio zone. Paradox, Firaxis, even something like Supergiant. Places that have ups and downs, but generally make a specific sort of thing, get paid for it, and move on to the next thing.
Paradox (the studio) has been going downhill recently. Of the games they’ve released since 2016, Imperator: Rome struggled at launch and has since been completely abandoned and Victoria 3 was a massive disappointment. That leaves Crusader Kings 3, which is good but still lacks a lot of stuff from Crusader Kings 2.
Paradox (the publisher) has had a couple of rough launches recently too. I was really looking forward to Cities: Skylines 2 except it launched with absolutely unplayable performance issues. Meanwhile, Star Trek: Infinite is little more than a half baked reskin of Stellaris.
Paradox is also one of the worst offenders when it comes to DLC. Actually buying the full version of any single Paradox game could cost upwards of a hundred dollars. That was fine when the base version of the game at release time was already good but recently that’s not consistently the case.
There is a middle ground between the massive decrepit zombie studios, and indie. Larian, Grinding Gear Games, Remedy, Valve, and CD Project red are still admirable studios that release mostly masterpieces and are clearly passionate about their product as an art form. Valve and CD project red might have a few caveats, but overall still nailing it if they're capable of HL:Alyx and what Cyberpunk2077 is as of right now. You can't make things of that caliber without being great.
I believe op's point is that they're 1) not independent and 2) not making exploitive games. Exploitive monetization is a fairly subjective call but it seems pretty agreeable that being owned by Tencent certainly makes a studio not "indie".
My only real criteria was studios I could think of that seem to still make games like they (and the leadership) are passionate about it and are making S tier games still. I put GGG on it because Path of Exile 2 looks like what a company with the vision of Blizzard in its hayday would be making today.
I kind of forgot about Sierra. My opinion at the time was, and still is: Whatever Sierra made (mostly adventures and flight sims), usually Lucasarts made something similar but IMO better.
Sierra released a lot more games, though. LucasArts quality was generally better, and the games more memorable due to clever use of humor, but I think Sierra had an epic feel to their games that LucasArts didn't quite match - and Sierra also had more "adult" games, such as Gabriel Knight and Phantasmagoria (if that's your kind of thing!). I think they are both great from different perspectives.
Let's not forget Access of Tex Murphy fame either :).
What's wrong with Rockstar? Some of their handling of GTA Online is unfavorable (GTA+, porting features to console but not PC), but I don't recall them being bought out or selling out.
They continue to set an incredibly high bar from story to engineering with every major release. It’s full of talent pushing the state of the art. Dead, utterly disgraced doesn’t describe the company. Stories about employees feeling exploited is more of a successful, topical company thing than a Rockstar thing.
Well, if you are asking for exactly one, I can tell: It starts with an "N" and has been around since the 1800s.
But besides that, I can not think of any...
I think it is very hard to consistently make good games and also earn money. A few months ago a smaller German gaming company closed (Mimimi). All their games were well received. But even so it was too difficult to continue with just making "good" games: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/shadow-gambit-studio-mimimi...
Larian Studios? Been making games since 1996, and while all aren't the massive succcess that DOS2 / BG3 are, they've always been there just pumping out products.
A lot of the stuff they were making that didn't make a splash was pretty good though. I honestly think The Dragon Knight Saga was incredibly slept on, in part it seems due to a bungled release.
Earlier in my career I worked with a game director who had done "major arcade franchise which is now a console franchise". He had the same employer and similar co workers since the early 1990s and was coming up on retirement.
Nintendo is the obvious example but there are many others. Japan benefits from other jobs being less competitive work/life balance wise so games are if anything a sweet spot. Plus a focus on stability, which brings stability.
The methods are simple but involve defocusing shareholder returns. Hence how Nintendo has Miyamoto as an executive while Tod Howard is not an executive of Xbox.
I agree 100% with you but I will mention three that, for now, are still decent (although not 100% perfect): ID Software, Valve, FromSoftware.
I had to look at over 20 studios that built my favorite games in 1990-2010 to find those 3. And ID Software had the drama with Mick Gordon, for which I am quite angry at them, I hate Valve's focus on boxes in multiplayer games, and FromSoftware cares too little about hacks and in general don't provide a PC experience up to what I would expect considering the general quality of their games.
So yeah, I only know of indie or very new studios that are building pure, clean, fun games nowadays.
CDPR, 2002. Larian, 1996. Valve, 1996. Remedy, 1995. Nintendo 1989. FromSoftware, 1986. Capcom, 1979. That said, before the details, I agree and resonate with your sense of frustration. Every shop you mentioned is one I not just admired for their games, but loved for their games.
I imagine there are others that might pass a bar (seriously, a good exercise to stress the thinking is to argue Rockstar out rather than in). But what's interesting is they're all on a good arc at the moment.
CDPR have 'dug up' for the last few years and Cyberpunk 20077 is now not just a fine game, it's a great game. Their redemption arc will someday be a great documentary or movie. It would not have been hard to see them collapse as an entity, but credit to their grit.
Larian are arguably going to be this breakout AAA, and could imo be a Rockstar/Blizzard level company in terms of gamer attention and production. BG3 is as much a moment as a game. It feels a bit like Doom, or Half-Life, or GTA3, or Halo, or Skyrim. I suspect they have steadily and quietly built out the best game character primitive engine and production setup in the industry by some distance, in the sense the way to compete is year on year capex investment that might pay off in 5-10 years. You might compare Larian to early Pixar or ILM. Even if you were willing to stake, you don't have anything like the network of mo/vo cap talent they do.
Valve is the House of Gabe, it's difficult to quibble with the quality they've put into the new Steam Deck. Looks like a a fine device and worth getting. I get there are criticisms of Valve/Steam but every time I use steam I feel like it was built by gamers. I can't really explain it other than to say Valve has serious, brand authenticity—Your-most-respected-brand-here—for gamers. Sony could be all that but can't be all that because of a broken divisional model. Xbox might well get there. Nintendo are already there.
Were Remedy in cinema or the golden age of tv, we'd be talking auteur level work. It's easy to imagine Alan Wake crossing over in television, and possibly film.
Nintendo are their own category, doing their own thing.
FromSoftware have become like Larian are becoming, this other level company. Elden Ring and Armored Core 6 indicate a serious breadth in ability. They are the biggest surprise to me in the sense of being founded the earliest other than Capcom. I would have said 1990s until I checked for this thread.
Capcom it seems are on a tear, and are just steadily releasing solid game after game after game. They in particular, but all these shops in general, feel deeply understudied in terms of game software production. Especially given the attention on AAA development cycles and cost structures that's driving plenty of the shops mentioned into spirals around live service, e-sports, in game payment that seem more like black holes than flywheels.
It's easy to put the challenges driving these companies at feet of the great god greed. And while that might be a component, I suspect a lot of game studios, backers and publishers are struggling with fundamentals of development and production and delivery at scale. Don't just think about the cost basis of ~250 vo/mo cap actors on BG3 [1], think about what you need to to make that work across the engineers and designers and writers and the actors, and, and, and. That's just extremely difficult to emulate without serious conviction and commitment on the long term. Larian did it, and the question everyone else has to answer, do we have the stomach to follow to create games with a payoff quite reasonably not in this decade or a console generation out? Especially bearing in mind, it's way cheaper to build infrastructure out when it's not obvious the value exists. Followers have all the benefits of knowing the path to take with all the negatives that every step is now priced in at a premium.
Games are now the biggest entertainment medium by some distance, dwa...
Probably smart to drop the DIE idealogues. They put everyone on eggshells and rarely get much work done. I bet productivity improves after this, despite IGNs outraged pearl clutching.
Let's look at a little bit of evidence, shall we? There is an ENTIRE FUCKING ARTICLE about the problems that Bungie's developers are having with the changes at the organization. And out of ALL of that, GP focuses solely on DEI, which is nothing more than a declaration that HR is going to follow the diversity rules that HR offices at corporations have been made to follow for over a decade now.
Why would someone have such a strong reaction to DEI policies? It isn't freedom of speech, because that doesn't exist in corporate environments. Guess what that leaves. If you are a Bungie shareholder, then you have a little bit of an out, because you can claim that DEI should already be ensconced in HR. But if you aren't, then you're just mad because someone can get fired or the company can get sued for behaving like a bigot.
I'm not sorry if you're bent out of shape over it. I don't care how you feel it looks. Especially given that the other account and yours are practically brand new just to reply on this article.
Is anyone surprised? Bungie sold out the idea of making good games in favor of making infinite money Skinner boxes. Destiny 2 came out six years ago.
Spoiler alert: the need to make infinite money means your Destiny plotlines and big questions will never, ever be resolved. You will never find out the origin of the Traveler.
I wonder if there's a German word for that feeling. The Traveler mystery sucks, but what really ripped my heart out was realizing I'm never going to know the ending to the mysteries and cliffhanger of Beyond Good & Evil after Michel Ancel retired.
> And yearly studio performance bonuses this year will only be the contractually obligated 80% minimum, after being above 100% for good performance several previous years running.
‘Underperforming’ rewarded differently than ‘performing’ shocks under-performers.
> leaders had reiterated, across multiple meetings, that they couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be more layoffs
Breath of fresh air, since most leadership just lies "that's the last cut forever" then lay off more people next quarter. I once quit a board when it decided to claim the first round was the last while planning 3 more rounds.
It does sound awful, being told this particular truth. But being told the truth, being treated like adults with self-agency, should maintain morale more than being fed lies.
Meanwhile, compare:
> mood within the studio has been “soul-crushing” ... reducing numerous morale events such as cooking and knitting classes from monthly to quarterly
... versus ...
> with Destiny 2 expansion The Final Shape delayed into the next fiscal year and Bungie still investing heavily on Marathon, many employees understand that Bungie is struggling to meet the necessary targets
This sounds like a disconnect between where payroll comes from and the production of value for game players.
If a company isn't keeping something worth paying for in the hands of players, there's no margin to keep the company in knitting classes.
The bottom line is a hard one, and in a large company, the message doesn't feel particularly "inclusive", but from childhood we learn it: "shape up, or ship out". When ability to deliver gets underwater relative to pay, something has to give -- something has to increase ratio of delivery to expense.
All that said ...
While most attention tends to go on how to cut the expense number, it tends to pay off better to figure out how to increase the delivery number (always remembering that's valued delivery, valued by the customer with money). "Management" can cut expenses, but teams have to raise delivery value-per-time which might need to include getting management (overhead) out of the way.
If teams can see and explain how this could work and deliver on it, let your "inside" board members know.
. . .
PS. This comment is incoherent, but presumably someone is unpacking it:
> "I’m angry. I’m upset. This isn’t what I came here to do,” one person said. “It feels like many higher ups aren’t listening to the data and are like, ‘We just need to win our fans back, they still like us.’ No. They don’t...We got rid of some of our most knowledgeable beloved folks who have been here for 20+ years. Everyday I walk in afraid that I or my friends are next. No one is safe."
The phrases "We just need to win our fans back, they still like us" and "higher ups aren't listening to the data" sound (if taken charitably) like the same goal.
Given enough fans with wallets, "What do fans want? Let's deliver that!" should be the best morale booster, with margin -- and bonuses -- to follow.
93 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadGood job Sony.
Pretty much only Mac users played the original.
I think it would have been better if they gave the game a different name. To me it feels a bit like a “betrayal” of the original game and with very little, if any, benefit.
Cortana later repeats some of the lines from those emails in Halo 3, and Marathon references are all over the place in the first few games.
Bungie was in a league of their own back in the day with all the cryptic references and teasers and connections. At one point they released a timeline for the Marathon universe, and the point in time when Halo takes place is labeled with "Nothing important happened here."
[0] https://alephone.lhowon.org/ [1] https://www.moddb.com/mods/apotheosis-x
Unfortunately, since Sony is scaling back their live service ambitions, seems like maybe this wasn't the best move. Then again, this article makes the situation sound pretty dire, and it isn't like those things would be different had the acquisition not happened...
https://blog.playstation.com/2023/05/24/bungie-unveils-marat...
The very same thing happened to Starsiege recently:
https://youtu.be/EAB4vDhCHf0
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowrun_(2007_video_game)
Outside of that the atmosphere/aesthetic is well done and the gameplay is great. The story is about as good as in Syndicate... In any case, definitely worth a playthrough or two. But it stings to think about how much better that game could have been with just 6 months more work. Of course that's what they were probably thinking 6 months before they finally decided to launch!
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/268870/Satellite_Reign/
Halo is my favourite game of all time but I couldn't be less interested in Destiny or Marathon. It honestly sounds like work. People talk about Destiny like it's a job, a chore. It sounds horrible.
It’s not my style of game due to the death mechanics; but it’s been growing with games like Tarkov, The Cycle and Hunt (though Hunt is less aggressively an extraction shooter)
To me this reads like corporate greed and nothing else.
Here's my take on the cycle Bungie is trapped in and how they got there:
They sold to Sony to get sizeable payouts on their owned shares and they over-inflated the value of the company whilst doing that. Sony is now asking where the money is. In response, the senior team at Bungie claim that the economy is hard and then passes on all the consequences of their actions onto the workforce. In doing so, they destroy the day-to-day working of the company because nobody actually wants to work there anymore and it just becomes a place where everyone is utterly despondent. The revenue continues to fall, and the senior team continue to respond to the falling revenue by passing more layoffs/discipline/cruelty onto their employees. Eventually there is a surplus of managers left at Bungie and nobody to actually do the work. They desperately try to plug these gaps with contractors and outsourced staff but the burden of training people to work within a 7 year old code base that is riddled with spaghetti and bugs just means that nobody can actually successfully build anything. Bungie as a company will not survive long enough to make Destiny 3.
It’s why if I can avoid it I won’t touch anything that considers it’s exit strategy more important than its product.
Blizzard, Maxis, EA, Rockstar, Bungie, Lionhead, every name I can think of from the old days is now utterly disgraced or just dead.
Sierra is still going, kind of. It seems to have devolved into a handful of people with very little money. I actually applied to a job posting from them a couple years ago.
Seems the only source of half decent games that aren't actively exploiting people is just indie studios. Nothing against indie, but it's hard for a couple of people in their free time to compete with the kind of quality and innovation we used to get from the old guard.
Paradox (the publisher) has had a couple of rough launches recently too. I was really looking forward to Cities: Skylines 2 except it launched with absolutely unplayable performance issues. Meanwhile, Star Trek: Infinite is little more than a half baked reskin of Stellaris.
Paradox is also one of the worst offenders when it comes to DLC. Actually buying the full version of any single Paradox game could cost upwards of a hundred dollars. That was fine when the base version of the game at release time was already good but recently that’s not consistently the case.
This is a rollercoaster of a list. Valve's $7.7bil versus a company who's only product is Path of Exile?
They probably make that much in revenue yearly, the number from 2019 has to be way out of date.
I believe op's point is that they're 1) not independent and 2) not making exploitive games. Exploitive monetization is a fairly subjective call but it seems pretty agreeable that being owned by Tencent certainly makes a studio not "indie".
It's not owned by TenCent.
CD Projekt has more employees than Bungie, and the current market cap is ~70% of what Bungie was bought for?
They also benefit from Polish salaries. I think at one point a couple years ago they were barely paying $300-700 a month to staff.
Larian (Belgium), GGG (New Zealand), Remedy (Finland), CDPR (Poland) ... I'm spotting a trend here.
Meanwhile Blizzard (US), Maxis (US), EA (US), Rockstar (US), Bungie (US), Lionhead (formerly UK, now Microsoft (US)) ... there's got to be a pattern?
Let's not forget Access of Tex Murphy fame either :).
The "Wives of Rockstar" letter came out _13 years ago_; and from I understand, this was not a surprise within gamedev circles.
Labor situation being part of broader gaming coverage is a relatively newer phenomenon, but the miserable environments are not.
Given that I am super interested in the indie titles they are publishing right now I will still be cheering on for the new company!
I think it is very hard to consistently make good games and also earn money. A few months ago a smaller German gaming company closed (Mimimi). All their games were well received. But even so it was too difficult to continue with just making "good" games: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/shadow-gambit-studio-mimimi...
Earlier in my career I worked with a game director who had done "major arcade franchise which is now a console franchise". He had the same employer and similar co workers since the early 1990s and was coming up on retirement.
Nintendo is the obvious example but there are many others. Japan benefits from other jobs being less competitive work/life balance wise so games are if anything a sweet spot. Plus a focus on stability, which brings stability.
The methods are simple but involve defocusing shareholder returns. Hence how Nintendo has Miyamoto as an executive while Tod Howard is not an executive of Xbox.
I had to look at over 20 studios that built my favorite games in 1990-2010 to find those 3. And ID Software had the drama with Mick Gordon, for which I am quite angry at them, I hate Valve's focus on boxes in multiplayer games, and FromSoftware cares too little about hacks and in general don't provide a PC experience up to what I would expect considering the general quality of their games.
So yeah, I only know of indie or very new studios that are building pure, clean, fun games nowadays.
And that’s accounting for the fact that one of their first games was Max Payne, which created a very difficult hill to top.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedy_Entertainment
I imagine there are others that might pass a bar (seriously, a good exercise to stress the thinking is to argue Rockstar out rather than in). But what's interesting is they're all on a good arc at the moment.
CDPR have 'dug up' for the last few years and Cyberpunk 20077 is now not just a fine game, it's a great game. Their redemption arc will someday be a great documentary or movie. It would not have been hard to see them collapse as an entity, but credit to their grit.
Larian are arguably going to be this breakout AAA, and could imo be a Rockstar/Blizzard level company in terms of gamer attention and production. BG3 is as much a moment as a game. It feels a bit like Doom, or Half-Life, or GTA3, or Halo, or Skyrim. I suspect they have steadily and quietly built out the best game character primitive engine and production setup in the industry by some distance, in the sense the way to compete is year on year capex investment that might pay off in 5-10 years. You might compare Larian to early Pixar or ILM. Even if you were willing to stake, you don't have anything like the network of mo/vo cap talent they do.
Valve is the House of Gabe, it's difficult to quibble with the quality they've put into the new Steam Deck. Looks like a a fine device and worth getting. I get there are criticisms of Valve/Steam but every time I use steam I feel like it was built by gamers. I can't really explain it other than to say Valve has serious, brand authenticity—Your-most-respected-brand-here—for gamers. Sony could be all that but can't be all that because of a broken divisional model. Xbox might well get there. Nintendo are already there.
Were Remedy in cinema or the golden age of tv, we'd be talking auteur level work. It's easy to imagine Alan Wake crossing over in television, and possibly film.
Nintendo are their own category, doing their own thing.
FromSoftware have become like Larian are becoming, this other level company. Elden Ring and Armored Core 6 indicate a serious breadth in ability. They are the biggest surprise to me in the sense of being founded the earliest other than Capcom. I would have said 1990s until I checked for this thread.
Capcom it seems are on a tear, and are just steadily releasing solid game after game after game. They in particular, but all these shops in general, feel deeply understudied in terms of game software production. Especially given the attention on AAA development cycles and cost structures that's driving plenty of the shops mentioned into spirals around live service, e-sports, in game payment that seem more like black holes than flywheels.
It's easy to put the challenges driving these companies at feet of the great god greed. And while that might be a component, I suspect a lot of game studios, backers and publishers are struggling with fundamentals of development and production and delivery at scale. Don't just think about the cost basis of ~250 vo/mo cap actors on BG3 [1], think about what you need to to make that work across the engineers and designers and writers and the actors, and, and, and. That's just extremely difficult to emulate without serious conviction and commitment on the long term. Larian did it, and the question everyone else has to answer, do we have the stomach to follow to create games with a payoff quite reasonably not in this decade or a console generation out? Especially bearing in mind, it's way cheaper to build infrastructure out when it's not obvious the value exists. Followers have all the benefits of knowing the path to take with all the negatives that every step is now priced in at a premium.
Games are now the biggest entertainment medium by some distance, dwa...
Let's look at a little bit of evidence, shall we? There is an ENTIRE FUCKING ARTICLE about the problems that Bungie's developers are having with the changes at the organization. And out of ALL of that, GP focuses solely on DEI, which is nothing more than a declaration that HR is going to follow the diversity rules that HR offices at corporations have been made to follow for over a decade now.
Why would someone have such a strong reaction to DEI policies? It isn't freedom of speech, because that doesn't exist in corporate environments. Guess what that leaves. If you are a Bungie shareholder, then you have a little bit of an out, because you can claim that DEI should already be ensconced in HR. But if you aren't, then you're just mad because someone can get fired or the company can get sued for behaving like a bigot.
I'm not sorry if you're bent out of shape over it. I don't care how you feel it looks. Especially given that the other account and yours are practically brand new just to reply on this article.
Spoiler alert: the need to make infinite money means your Destiny plotlines and big questions will never, ever be resolved. You will never find out the origin of the Traveler.
Any hopes of this went out the door alongside Joseph Staten's departure.
‘Underperforming’ rewarded differently than ‘performing’ shocks under-performers.
> leaders had reiterated, across multiple meetings, that they couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be more layoffs
Breath of fresh air, since most leadership just lies "that's the last cut forever" then lay off more people next quarter. I once quit a board when it decided to claim the first round was the last while planning 3 more rounds.
It does sound awful, being told this particular truth. But being told the truth, being treated like adults with self-agency, should maintain morale more than being fed lies.
Meanwhile, compare:
> mood within the studio has been “soul-crushing” ... reducing numerous morale events such as cooking and knitting classes from monthly to quarterly
... versus ...
> with Destiny 2 expansion The Final Shape delayed into the next fiscal year and Bungie still investing heavily on Marathon, many employees understand that Bungie is struggling to meet the necessary targets
This sounds like a disconnect between where payroll comes from and the production of value for game players.
If a company isn't keeping something worth paying for in the hands of players, there's no margin to keep the company in knitting classes.
The bottom line is a hard one, and in a large company, the message doesn't feel particularly "inclusive", but from childhood we learn it: "shape up, or ship out". When ability to deliver gets underwater relative to pay, something has to give -- something has to increase ratio of delivery to expense.
All that said ...
While most attention tends to go on how to cut the expense number, it tends to pay off better to figure out how to increase the delivery number (always remembering that's valued delivery, valued by the customer with money). "Management" can cut expenses, but teams have to raise delivery value-per-time which might need to include getting management (overhead) out of the way.
If teams can see and explain how this could work and deliver on it, let your "inside" board members know.
. . .
PS. This comment is incoherent, but presumably someone is unpacking it:
> "I’m angry. I’m upset. This isn’t what I came here to do,” one person said. “It feels like many higher ups aren’t listening to the data and are like, ‘We just need to win our fans back, they still like us.’ No. They don’t...We got rid of some of our most knowledgeable beloved folks who have been here for 20+ years. Everyday I walk in afraid that I or my friends are next. No one is safe."
The phrases "We just need to win our fans back, they still like us" and "higher ups aren't listening to the data" sound (if taken charitably) like the same goal.
Given enough fans with wallets, "What do fans want? Let's deliver that!" should be the best morale booster, with margin -- and bonuses -- to follow.