This episode was delayed a few days thanks to some acting work for Jonah Falcon. The podcast moving forward will be recorded on Wednesdays, partly because videogame releases are on Tuesdays. The guys also discuss the disaster No Man’s Sky has been.
This week’s news includes:
All this and Listener Feedback, too.
The classic 250th Episode with the original hosts – Derrick and Jennifer Schommer and Don Dunn. Enjoy the special episode when they returned to grace the podcast to celebrate the milestone.
Gamers around the world are going to feel the pain in the 2009 holiday season after the economy shakes apart many great development studios. Electronic Arts feels the pain of being a public company as their investors complain about lackluster revenue, THQ deals with closing studios to extend their runway and other firms will lose more headcount in the coming months.
It’s not all bad. But, it’s going to get ugly before it gets better.
The financial market has played tricks on everyone in our global economy and companies across all industries are going to feel a bit of a tightening around the belt. Investors are shaken and doing their best to protect their investments and cutting loose those that aren’t projecting profits in the near future. Game studios are going to slow their financial burn rates, trim a bit of the fat and hunker down the long term. The end result, next years holiday season will have a few less games because those games are being dropped to the floor now.
Mid-sized studios within larger firms may find their projects canceled or put on hold and their employees re-structured or let go while big studios assess what projects will make the long haul. This is the ugly side of the business, having to make a decision on what games stay and what games go with the grief of having to tell some of your best talent “goodbye.”
The bad part of the industry is occurring today, with publishers posting mediocre profits and trying to convince their investors to be patient and trust they’ve got a firm hold on their destiny. The game industry is not alone in this, many firms are reducing head count and many startups are finding themselves without series A or B funding; they’re closing their doors because the money is being directed to more stable ventures.
What’s the good in all of this?
Despite the announced shutdown of Star Wars: Galaxies and the approaching new Star Wars-based MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, loyal subscribers don’t want Galaxies to end. They’ve begun a petition to try to convince Sony to let the MMO live on as a free-to-play MMO.
The petition asks Sony to convert the game to a ‘freemium’, microtransaction-based MMO, and that Sony consolidate players onto a smaller number of servers and facilitate character transfer to reduce operational costs in order to keep the game running. The petition has already gotten thousands signatures in a few days.
One of the petition leaders posted:
We are not your typical gamers.
We are not a commodity.
But if you look at the recent decision by Lucasarts to shut down Star Wars Galaxies, you might be inclined to think we are both of those things. Lucasarts thinks that we are a non-perishable commodity that can be shoved into a shipping crate and moved down the road to their next project. That is not the case. Not even close.
We are a vibrant community. We have seen our ups and downs, but we are only stronger because of it. We have endured all manner of broken promises and misleading “improvements” to this game, and throughout all of it, we have continued to build our community, and show support and loyalty to this great game. But we didn’t do it because of a game. We did it because of our community here.
I read that Civ 6 will use DX12, so it might help low tier PCs as the low-level API reduces overhead, and it could be coded for async compute to accommodate AMD GCN and Nvidia Pascal GPUs via concurrency to gain more performance:
https://www.techpowerup.com/224112/amd-partners-with-firaxis-on-civilization-vi-development