I think the problem is that AAA immersive sims just don’t sell enough to justify the budget. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Dishonored 2, Prey, etc, all sold below expectations because their publishers had AAA expectations.

I don’t disagree. I’m playing Like A Dragon right now and the pacing is terrible. You have like 2 minutes of gameplay, then 5-10 minutes of cutscenes.

So is this an accurate assessment of your opinion: It’s better for workers to be fired than to be involved in a large merger?

Would be nice if they ported this to PC and consoles. Without the MTX.

Square’s PC strategy is definitely... something. Did they just forget that they released Kingdom Hearts on PC? That’s the only explanation for it still being exclusive to EGS. Then they delayed the FF7 Remake port for almost two years, only to make it EGS exclusive for another year. No doubt they’ll launch FF16 PC as…

You’ll need to clarify what you mean by “large company.” Most independent studios are not large companies if we’re using Activision as the standard for “large.” Again, you specifically stated that the closure of independent studios is less harmful than giant mergers.

The DF acquisition wasn’t that long ago and as far as I know, no one in DF was laid off recently.

Is that actually true? Hitman 2 apparently didn’t sell very well which is why WB didn’t want to publish Hitman 3. Hitman 3 was the only game IO self-published and it did relatively well, though that’s largely because it was effectively an expansion pack that built upon the work done for the previous two games,…

Embracer itself is just a company that owns a bunch of publishers and developers. The problem with Embracer is that they rapidly expanded based on a $2b gamble that didn’t pay off. Had it paid off, everything would be fine right now and none of these cancelations, layoffs and/or closures would be happening within the…

It’s almost as if layoffs can be caused by more than one or two things. But these giant mergers ultimately have more harmful effects on both consumers and workers than when an independent studio goes under.

Sure, but right now, GP is a great deal for customers. Will it always be a good deal? Maybe, maybe not. We can only judge things based on the data that’s currently available and that data shows that GP can save customers a lot of money.

You should watch the Psychonauts 2 documentary. Psychonauts 2 was originally crowdfunded but that funding was really only enough to build a prototype and some pre-production work. They signed with Starbreeze to fund the rest of the game but Starbreeze effectively went bankrupt before the game was done. That’s when DF…

Yeah, it’s one thing to not give review codes to media outlets until launch. That happens a lot and usually doesn’t mean anything. However, not giving out review codes at all? That’s a giant red flag.

It’s probably a scaling issue that’s hard to reproduce in an internal setting. That’s why so many multiplayer games have server issues at launch. WB likely underestimated how many people would be playing SS during its “early access” window.

Sure.

The game was still in pre-production and that’s the most common phase for games to be canceled in.

Nope. You said that large mergers are more harmful than the closure of individual studios. That means you view the layoffs as the lesser of two evils.

Sure, but Obsidian’s games are historically unpolished so if they take an extra 3-4 months to avoid that, that means they’re focusing on quality.

That may be true for you but I don’t think it’s true for most of the people who play AAA games. RDR2, for example, has pretty terrible controls that make the game decidedly annoying to play. However, people still love the game for its presentation, writing and worldbuilding. Even the Portal series, which actually has…

I wouldn’t say BGS is completely oblivious to the rest of the industry. Starfield seems to be heavily inspired by No Man’s Sky, for example. Fallout 4 adopted a lot of standard FPS mechanics, such as one-button grenade throws, sprinting, ADS, gunbutts, etc.