ampersandrew

Live service taking its toll on yet another studio.

A NYTimes piece on Will Wright, as well as talking about some of the themes in the Sims that got overlooked or lost in its massive success.

Both were live service; one at Bend, one at Bluepoint. Bluepoint was helping work on God of War: Ragnarok until 2022, at which point they were developing this now-cancelled God of War live service game.

A Direct is announced for April 2nd to cover the games.

Always online games. What could go wrong?

Jeff Grubb confirming. It's a 2-step reveal. On the 16th will be almost 100% hardware with little to say about software. It's expected to launch by summer.

Robocraft was near and dear to me. It's also the reason I don't bother with live service games anymore. In 2017-2018-ish, Robocraft was one of my favorite games, ever. Then they were able to take that game away from me and replace it with something I liked far less. This is inevitable for any live service game; if not replacing the game you liked with something else, then its removal altogether so that no one can play it anymore in any form. It sucks.

It’s with a heavy heart that we have to tell you all that we’re ceasing production on Robocraft 2 and closing Freejam as a studio. With the current market conditions and the server costs required to keep a game like RC2 running, we’re simply unable to launch or sustain development.

You know, if you let your customers run the servers themselves, we'd be able to keep playing the game and you wouldn't have to bear the burden of those costs!

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.

Seemingly confirming the theory that "Xbox" will just be Windows going forward, at least on handhelds.

I don't know why Schreier hyphenates "video-game".

There are a lot of reasons that this makes sense for them. But also, given the other things they've been promising, I think this is going to be an expensive piece of hardware that basically just hides Windows under the hood.