Gamedev

Epic begins offering others' games on their mobile app store

Apparently I missed this last week, so I thought I'd share in case anyone else did too. Especially having posted The Game Award and DICE finalists.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24125722

From Jason Schreier. "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'," but this is some analysis from Schreier seemingly rooted in many anecdotes. The long and short of it is that development on AAA games tend to routinely hit bottlenecks where entire portions of a team are waiting for some other team to unblock them so that they can continue to get work done.

Normally I personally don't copy/paste texts, but this isn't a news site, it's a social media post made to the public. Feels different to me. Here's Gavin's post:

Why did we sell Naughty Dog?

It’s a question I’ve been asked countless times. The answer is simple: budgets were skyrocketing.

When we started Naughty Dog in the 1980s, game development expenses were manageable. We bootstrapped everything, pouring profits from one game into the next.

• Our early 80s games cost less than $50,000 each to make.

• Rings of Power ('88-91), saw budgets rise to about $100,000, but yielded slightly more than that in after tax profits in 1992.

• In 1993, we rolled that $100k from Rings into a self funded Way of the Warrior.

• But Crash Bandicoot ('94-96) cost $1.6 million to make.

• By the time we got to Jak and Daxter ('99-01), the budget busted the $15 million mark.

By 2004, the cost of AAA games like Jak 3 had soared to $45-50 million -- and they have been rising ever since.

But back in 2000, we were still self-funding every project, and the stress of financing these ballooning budgets independently was enormous.

It wasn’t just us. This was (and still is) a systemic issue in the AAA space. Developers almost never have the resources to fund their own games, which gives publishers enormous leverage.

Selling to Sony wasn’t just about securing a financial future for Naughty Dog. It was about giving the studio the resources to keep making the best games possible, without being crushed by the weight of skyrocketing costs and the paralyzing fear that one slip would ruin it all.

Looking back, it was the right call.

AAA games have only gotten more expensive since then. Today's big budget games can easily cost $300, $400, or even $500 million to develop.

Would we have been able to keep up? Maybe. But selling -- to the right party -- gave Naughty Dog the stability it needed to thrive — and to continue making the kinds of games we’d always dreamed of!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23327569

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23327568

Well at least it's not a buyout for now.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/49924358

Clown emojis all around

In case anyone is curious

Brand Shield seems to be licensed, not something that belongs to Funko, to clear up the headline.

Here's a direct link to Steam's new guidelines: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/seasonpass

I've been happy settling into Mastodon soon after Twitter was sold. Anyone have strong opinions?