This would destroy me if this happened to me. The publisher thinks lowly enough of the team and product that they won't launch it, but not so lowly that they don't release the IP (perhaps even at a price) to the developers.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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I got a friend in game dev. They've worked for 3 companies over 6 years. None of the titles they have worked on were ever released.
The title they're currently working on has had its funding cut (by Embracer Group) and the CEO of the studio is desperately trying to find another source of funding. Everyday they go into work expecting to be told the studio is shutting down.
Game dev certainly seems to suck the souls out of creative people who just want to make something fun.
Embracer treats studios like they are disposable. They killed Volition (Saint's Row), Free Radical (TimeSpltters) plus a bunch of other studios. All of that was because their $2 billion deal with the Saudi Government fell through. Some studios managed to escape when one of the Saber Interactive original owners bought back a bunch of studios. They recently killed Pieces Interactive (Alone in the Dark).
If a studio is owned by Embracer, they are lucky if they will be around in 5 years.
Taking a page out of the EA Playbook it seems...
For profit software companies (and those who are all abput revenue and shareholders and whatnot) are a pain to the industry at large. If it were not fot the profit motive, this world would be radically different.
Capitalism is a mistake.
I hope we can destroy it soon.
Man, Paradox really just burned every ounce of goodwill they had in mere months, huh? Skylines 2 being a disaster, and now cancelling this. Just unreal.
They never really had any goodwill? What are you on about
They seemed great up until around that time in 2016 they went public.
Before that you had all the Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron games, Cities Skylines they helped make, not to mention Pillars of Eternity eoth Obsidian. Up through 2015 they were great.
What happened with Skylines 2? I don't play the games so I'm not in the know about them
Disastrous, unoptimized launch. Paid DLC whilst the game was still full of performance issues (DLC which was later made free, after outcry. But their hand was shown).
Probably much more, but those are the two big things I remember.
Getting flip flopped around like that on a timescale of weeks fucking sucks (I’ve been in that situation but not in game dev).
Just.. being totally used and owned by an executive team that simultaneously wants to harness/abuse your passion, while also callously making snap judgements like this without any regard for respecting their people.. it’s like “how to destroy morale 101”
Damn, this makes me mad. Reading the news about this I assumed there was a good reason for this cancellation, but the devs were on track for a release. Fuck PDX. This shouldn't be allowed to happen.
I'll bet you anything it's taxes.
I feel like we need a catchy word for this "destroy creative works for tax purposes" thing that has become increasingly normal in the past few years. It's hard to call it out right now in a way that gets people riled up about it, because it's hard to explain to people what it even is. I think part of the reason why so many corpos have become okay with doing it is they realized people don't understand it, and so must assume they are killing the thing for a good reason. I know I was perfectly willing to assume there was a good reason for this game getting delayed back when that was announced.
I still like the one suggestion I saw to combat that… “sure you can claim it as a loss on your taxes, but in return it must be released to the public domain for free”
Yeah, like the Coyote VS ACME movie and Batgirl
I'll bet you it's because the game looked like shit
How does this even make sense? You can't pay more in taxes than the earnings you're paying taxes on. If you deliberately cause a 10 million loss reducing your earnings by those 10 million and thereby saving a percentage of those 10 million in taxes, you're not very good at math, are you?
That sucks! I was really hopeful for the game, it looked super nice and could have given EA a real run for their money