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.
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?
The audio quality is a little bad on this podcast, probably because Scott goes on and on about his fractured butt-hole. However, the episode was recorded on January 1, so there isn’t much news. The gang also challenges Paul to pop in and do an episode sometime.
What news that was discussed includes:
All this and Listener Feedback. The Question of the Week remains, “What game are you looking forward to in 2018?”
This week, there was almost no news (until the last second). Instead, the guys talk about videogames they’ve been playing and the minor news items that popped up.
The one major news item:
Let us know what you think.
The post Episode 719: Random Talk first appeared on Gaming Podcast.
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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