This is the last podcast of 2018, and the next episode will be our Games of the Year announcement. Until then, we snark at Pewdiepie, and check some of the news ending the year.
This week’s news includes:
Let us know what your Game of the Year is.
Now that Activision has merged up with Blizzard all under Vivendi it’s time to consider what to do with all the additional overhead, management, internal studios and sheer amount of people working on projects within their organization. In other words, it’s time to trim the fat and get leaned out for the long haul.
This isn’t unexpected news, the only way to grow more effective as a large company is to remove some of the access baggage that can slow you down and let your competitors take control. This is a sad job which nobody takes pride in (most normal people anyway) but it could mean the difference between rising to the top and sinking like a brick.
“We are focused on improving efficiency across the combined organization and are concentrating on businesses where we have leadership positions that are aligned with Activision Publishing’s long-term corporate objectives,” Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith said in a statement. (gamespot)
It’s important to be aggressive as a large company, just like you would be as a startup company. There is a reason startup companies grow into powerful competitors that win, grow and eventually become (or be purcahsed by) larger companies.
As part of this move some staff will be migrated to new projects, persumably reporposed into other divisions or allowed to find new jobs somewhere else. This is called “realignment” by those in the management organization, and currently those up for realignment are:
These realignments along with other organizational changes will effect a few working game titles:
At this point we’re not sure which, if any, will continue to be developed under Activision and which will be sold off to other companies or retired. Surely, those money making titles will be sold off if Activision has no plans to finish them.
Again, it’s hard to consider this a bad decision. This is a decision of growth over having too many “Cooks in the kitchen” making soup. It’s better to have rock solid titles of epic proportions than a large pool of mediocre titles with minimal sales and bad reputations, and that’s why they spend a lot of time in the office working on this and having a type of office chair for long hours on a computer is really helpful in this area.
It’s not that the titles they’re questioning are necessarily bad, but are not the leading titles in their space and are should be either given a stronger team to work on them or retire them entirely. To build a stronger team with passion and direction it might be best to sell the franchise(s) to other organizations so they can do it right with time and attention to detail.
(Thanks, gamespot)
Last week’s episode was torpedoed by audio issues (who knows, maybe they’ll come back in a outtakes episode), so this week returns with half old news and half new news. The Gaming Flashback returns with a vengeance with the classic Popcap game Peggle — which came out while Gaming Podcast debuted!
This week’s new/old news includes:
Also, there’s a Question of the Week — listen in and let us know what you think.
Formerly Green Monster Games, 38 Studios is growing a large pool of talented folks for their MMO endeavor. First, we heard R.A. Salvatore (writer of the Dark Elf series) was heading over to work on a story, art direction by Todd McFarlane (creator of Spawn) and now Irena Pereira from Blizzard and a sound designer, Aubrey Hodges.
Hodges has done sound for games like Kings Quest, Quake and even Madden NFL. Pereira was a World of Warcraft interface designer which allows us to invision a bit about what 38 Studio’s MMO may look like from a user interaction perspective.
The MMO, currently titled Copernicus has a tentative launch date of 2010, which seems short for a full MMO design but they’ve been hard at work for roughly two years. Not too shabby a team for a privately held company founded by baseball star Curt Shilling.
It’s important to note Shilling is an avid gamer and loves massive multiplayer online games. What else does a man with a lot of money do as a side project? Fund a company based on the hobby he loves! If anyone knows the best directions and qualities of an MMO it should be an experienced team guided by someone with a passion for the game genre.
We’ll have to wait and see!
Read on for the full press release
Hi guys.
Thanks again for this nice episode. Sorry that I was a little bit lazy writing comments under the last episodes, but I had to much thing going on :/
Regarding the topic of this thousand crappy small games on steam: I totally agree. There is so many useless shit there, it’s hard to find the good ones (and I bet there are many we will never find). On the other side, I don’t like that every company tries to run their own shop, because so you have to search / look through so many platforms that it feels like work :/
Best games of the year: i did not really played many actual games, because most of the time I played Magic The Gathering Arena and Hearthstone. Some Overwatch and Battlefield 5 the last weeks. BF makes fun because I play it with my friends, I would not have bought it to play it on my own 🙂
I bought some games, but did not find the way play it. These were Mega Man 11, Detroit become Human, Toki (the new Switch Version) and some shmups for the PS4. I think the only actual title I played so far is Life is Strange 2 (episode 1). Hollow Knight was released 2017, but I bought it some months ago. I love those metroidvania games and I am playing hollow knight a lot during the last weeks 🙂 I Stimm want to play God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2, but there are so many games I wanna play, I will wait with these two until they get a little bit cheaper 🙂
I hope all of you had a great New Year’s Eve and celebrated it with your friends and family. I am looking forward to a good 2019 with a lot of good games and many episodes of your podcast. Stay healthy and the way you are.
Greetings from your loyal listener,
Ralf