Making good, profitable games 'will no longer keep you safe': industry expresses fury and heartbreak over closure of Hi-Fi Rush and Prey studios
Making good, profitable games 'will no longer keep you safe': industry expresses fury and heartbreak over closure of Hi-Fi Rush and Prey studios
Gamers and game developers are reeling from yet another wave of layoffs and studio closures.
What will keep you safe is not selling your business to a mega corp.
Not even that, but usually this comes with the actual big target on your back: Being publicly traded.
Now of course, you can be publicly traded without being a big corp, and you can be a big corp that is held privately. But usually these big corpos are the ones that are on the stock market, and yes, the moment that happens everything becomes secondary to your actual responsibility: To the shareholders. Line must go up! And an easy one is to fire more workers.
Or going public in general.
Unless I'm not seeing something, game production is expensive. Most studios are 1-2 bad games away from closing their doors. Games are expensive as hell to produce and as much as it sucks the "going public" option is sometimes the only way to go.
It's easy to forget but most small (1-3 people) team indie devs probably aren't even working a salary. They split the earnings from the game and either live off of that or reinvest it into their company but the moment salaries need to get paid, or office space needs to be used (not really necessary for small teams) that's when expenses get insanely high. I'm not a business person but I can understand why you'd want to "trim the fat" (I don't support it at all but to play devil's advocate, I can see the logic despite the flaws). Growth means structure, and structure means expense.
Except for all the small studios also struggling or going out of business because getting investment right now is really, really hard.
The megacorp closures and redundancies are far from the entire story, they're just the headline grabbers.
All that talk about how Xbox is investing in the Japanese market and then they close the one prominent Japanese studio that they own. The same one that, as the article points out, made Hi-Fi Rush which was "a break out hit". What the hell, Microsoft.
It's not about making good games. It's about acquiring assets then liquidating them, marking them as a loss.
Microsoft have been doing this for decaces, they're low key known for aquiring good IPs and then just shuttering them forever.
Maybe they hired Google execs.
Tango closed cause it was the one of the only studios under Zenimax that wasn't currently making a game with "executive producer: Todd Howard" squirted all over it
AAA gaming is doomed, it has been irreversibly tainted by capitalism and I don't think it can recover. Indie games are where it's at, typically higher quality and much cheaper. It's shameful how terrible most AAA games are nowadays because they have to put in excuses for microtransactions. It's depressing but I think we're truly entering a golden age for indies and other smaller budget games.
I've been playing the Hades 2 beta recently, and I keep thinking about how incredible it is that this game is already better than any AAA title I've played in the last like 8 years. And it's still in beta and made by just 23 people. Call of Duty, FIFA and the like will keep the big studios running for a while, but indie has definitely overtaken the industry and I'm all for it.
Such a waste of talent!
I just heard a podcast from 'better offline' titled 'how managers are breaking the internet' and he calls these kinds of things 'the rot economy', kind of like enshitification but it happens when some completely disconnected suit takes over projects from passionate developers and brings the whole thing to the ground with their 'line must go up' mentality.
I'd say it's exactly whats happening here.
Ed Zitron is on a rampage against consultants and managers breaking the industry and I'm all here for it.
Definitely started following his posts after his google search piece, he is now hunting rabbits.
Before I read this, let me guess: publicly traded or ultimately owned by an entity that is publicly traded?
Microsoft
You're right. So, the problem is working for a publicly traded company, IMO.
Devs have to either unionize, join private gaming companies, indie gaming companies, or band together and make their own.
Arkane Austin is understandable; nobody bought Prey and Redfall was a disaster.
Should have called it Neuroshock as it would have been a great tie with the other "shock" immersive sims
We were still reeling the loss of Prey 2 and the political duplicity that may or may not have happened with Bethesda and Human Head which resulted in the cancellation.
Calling it "Prey" was fucking poison
Ah, you see, the issue is that it wasn't profitable enough. You just gotta try harder, devs, it's easy.
It's crazy though, they plopped HFH on the store the day it was announced with no marketing push, it became a critical and audience darling and execs said it was a breakout hit.
What else do you need to stay alive in this industry? Insomniac made one of the best selling games of the year and got rewarded by getting 10% of its workforce cut.
I wonder if a number of those people playing it day 1 on gamepass affected their numbers, because there's no way they didn't account for GP downloads...
Maybe it didn't bring enough new GP subscribers in addition to sales...?
publishers are a scam
This really reminds me of the latest wendover video. It seems like large companies see small studios as an investment and take any chance to cash out and fire everyone as soon as it’s hurting their short term profits.
They made Redfall, it doesn’t matter if their last game was Super Mario Galaxy. Releasing a single bad flop like that and all of a sudden you need to split the $127 profit with your 60 employees that just spent 5 years making a pile of micro-transactional shovelware.
Most of their Devs quit because they didn't want to work on it: https://www.pcgamer.com/report-most-of-arkane-austins-prey-veterans-quit-during-redfalls-development-and-the-ones-that-stayed-hoped-microsoft-would-cancel-it/
Hell even the super successful Baldur 3 is apparently not successful enough to have further development.
?
Larion Studios is still doing fine. They’ve decided to pursue their own IP rather than continue to work with a 3rd party’s.
Larion Studios is still doing fine.
Maybe, or maybe not.
They’ve decided
I don't believe that, half of Baldur success was because it was Baldur and gained massive hype for that. Larian's credit was delivering to that hype (mostly), but if you were following the development, literally the main fear from fanbase was precisely because it was Larian making that - Divinity 2 was very far from universal acclaim in the niche. And this here look extremely suspicous even if it was just about the next game, but no DLC, no expansions, not to mention that continuing the success is an 1st iron commandment in entire industry, nobody stops doing that unless there is no possibility.
There's a lot going inside we don't know because no company would just release such turbulences publicly.
Even a 9 year old knows that's not the conclusion you should draw from the closure of Hi-Fi Rush and Prey Studios
enlighten us plebs with your wisdom and tell us which conclusion should be drawn then
That selling to the next buyer who throws money at you obviously leads to risks of getting shutdown. People don't want or care about long term sustainability and cry when business daddy decides that record profits this year don't match up with imaginary made up profit growth and hence declare this as a failure.
Edit: "Making good, profitable games 'will no longer keep you safe'" But only if you sold your soul for a bunch of retirement money from Bethesda or whoever else. If you are so keen on that sweet retirement exit then your studio was doomed the moment somebody offered the founders to a buyout. I am baffled at how people are missing this obvious conclusion.
Pretend I'm 8 and explain the right conclusion to me, please. I don't know what it is.
That selling to the next buyer who throws money at you obviously leads to risks of getting shutdown. People don’t want or care about long term sustainability and cry when business daddy decides that record profits this year don’t match up with imaginary made up profit growth and hence declare this as a failure.
Edit: "Making good, profitable games 'will no longer keep you safe'" But only if you sold your soul for a bunch of retirement money from Bethesda or whoever else. If you are so keen on that sweet retirement exit then your studio was doomed the moment somebody offered the founders to a buyout. I am baffled at how people are missing this obvious conclusion.