What a shame... It was a good series... What a rotten way to die. 
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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Eidos Montreal still has the Thief series in limbo, too, which sucks so much.
Something something tech layoffs and taxes. Confucius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embracer_Group
They were able to raise billions in aquiring all these studios - not sure how axing games and not releasing them is going to help them or their investors recover. What a waste of IPs.
No big loss, was just going to be another 3rd person game where you didn't ask for augmented and hear a new tortured Icarus allegory every 15 seconds as you stand in elevators
Maybe its just me but ill always rather have bad art then no art. So every cancelled project is sad to me even when it would probably have been bad.
Call me an art maximalist.
Uninteresting bad art should absolutely not be published, there is already too much.
A new Deus Ex would probably be interesting-bad like the others have been
maybe, it would have at the very least been funny
Uninteresting bad art should absolutely not be published
I dont think "uninteresting bad art" exists. Theres always something to take away or discuss in art. In fact id go as far as to say uninteresting art is an inherent impossibility.
But if such a thing did exist, I would still be against supressing it. As bad art does not do harm so long as curation and effective education exist. And it is not the fault of the artist that they dont.
Also, anti-art attitudes are fascist. If you havent watched "whos afraid of modern art", do so.
There's just so much shit and the amount is only growing. What are we to do about the sheer volume of it?
I dont see this as the problem you see it as but the answer is curation like I said. I know theres problems like the flooding of Steam with broken asset flip crap that JSS complains about. But well, thats a problem with ineffective curation .
(Ive never agreed with JSS that those things should just straight up not be on the storefront, baring things like just reselling UnitZ unaltered and stuff that literally doesnt function, just that the system should filter them out better. Which really, for me it does already. I dont see that stuff. Only people like JSS that browse new do. And i see why they say that its bad for the good devs that Steam doesnt curate for quality anymore. But to me, Steam is the main PC storefront, and gatekeeping whats on it would seem to harm good devs as well. Maybe theres a happy medium to be reached but my ideal is that steam allows most things but also screens them for quality themselves for curating purposes. But im ngl to people like JSS, whether you like it or not you are always going to have to wade through crap if you browse new! Oh also worth noting that Steam's Nextfest project is a good curating effort on their part.)
Keep in mind that this is subjective anyway. What you see as shit that isnt even interesting might be interesting-but-bad or even good to someone else.
Keep in mind also that theres going to be more art under socialism. Because more of us are going to have time to make it, and hopefully IP wont be limiting transformative works, and so on.
And tbh the result of that might be similar to how much bad fanfic exists now lol. Since fanfiction is a profit free medium with no entry barrier already. So we're going to need good curation to filter through it all.
Some problems like the aforementioned asset flips will be partially solved. Since the desire to make a quick buck off little work wont be a thing. But keep in mind that trash devs like Digital Homicide and Gilson B Pontes act actually proud of their work so Im not sure even that will be gone entirely.
But universal artistic license is a good thing. And the existence of bad art is a consequence of it im willing to deal with to allow everyone to artistically express themselves.
I challenge you to find a single interesting thing about those shitty asset-flip fighting games that are just a collection of models along with two movesets whose animations were probably also bought. I'm alright with solo dev jank and even the boring rpg-maker games (though it tests me sometimes), but there are some games that represent nothing to the human condition except a waste of time for everyone involved so the devs can make a total of like $20.
All of those things exist entirely because of the profit motive, in theory under global socialism they just shouldn’t exist anymore. Someone would always put some kind of emotion into it even if it’s attention seeking, because there’d be no other reason to make games (unless you’re employed by the state in which case, I REALLY doubt the state’s profesional game dev team is going to do badly)
Well when you duct tape a banana to a wall and and some schmuck pays millions for it....
I support that because it's an actual statement, which an asset flip isn't
Human Revolution was fine, actually.
One of my favorite games ever tbh. Mankind Divided was great too, aside from the fact that it's clearly missing a third act (and the single-use microtransactions, who the fuck thought that was a good idea).
Makin' a Ex-Deus
Deus Ex has The Fall-en
Is something going on in the games industry or is this business as usual?
It's just the Embracer group as their idea was to just buy up all the independent studios to package them and sell to a big player (MS, Sony, Amazon, etc.) at a higher price than they purchased for.
No value-add finance scheme essentially. Interest rates are higher and they can't get a company to buy out their portfolio, so they're now shuttering all the great studios they bought up. Thousands of hardworking devs are out of jobs and dozens of games are dead because some Swedes wanted to make a buck off of other people's effort.
True but riot games and activision blizzard also doing mass layoffs???
That was always Riot's plan to overhire first and lay off a portion. Blizzard's cleaning house after the acquisition by MS.
Ghoulish still, but done for different reasons.
Here is a good article if you're interested in long-form reading.
TL;DR despite a good year for games, revenue is stagnant in nominal dollars and is declining in real dollars due to inflation. High interest rates also make financing development much more risky. That's leading to a lot of companies cutting staff and canceling projects.
falling rate of profit goes brrrrr