Topic: Games Industry Death Watch 2010-present

[broodwars]

Unfortunately, from the available bidders probably the best outcome here is 2K buying the WB Games Division. They'll likely force hundred of dollars of predatory microtransactions into whatever those teams make (though Gearbox seems to exist without them), but they'll otherwise leave them alone.

The 3 big prizes in all this are clearly Rocksteady; Monolith; and NeverRealm. Sony & Microsoft both have teams that do big open world 3rd person adventure games & Microsoft already has a team that does fighting games (Killer Instinct). AT&T would almost certainly keep their IPs, so NeverRealm and Monolith will be relatively worthless. I could see Rocksteady providing value to a potential buyer, though.

[Order.RSS]

Damn, feel bad for all those employees. Who's gonna buy NetherRealm if Warner/AT&T hold onto the Mortal Kombat license you know?
Worth mentioning this presumably also affects TT Games/TT Fusion, who make the LEGO games. WBIE owns them outright. Universal

If this goes ahead, depending how things shake out, it could mean another big player leaving the market. While I'm personally not really in the market for much of their stuff, WB sits on a lot of licenses which could make for decent games (The Matrix, Dune, Godzilla, King Kong, Pacific Rim, Harry Potter, DC Comics, Mad Max, Lord of the Rings, etc.).

[Adrock]

I feel like the Mortal Kombat IP and NetherRealm Studios should be packaged together as they're really not as valuable separately. Any developer can make a Mortal Kombat game. NetherRealm Studios can make a different game. In both cases, should it? And any company that pulls Ed Boon away from the franchise he created nearly 20 years ago is going to face some backlash. A developer is going to have to develop the next Mortal Kombat. Might as well leave it in the hands of the people who have been making it since always.

[nickmitch]

Mortal Kombat is probably the biggest multiplatform fighting game IP in the business, and the Batman games did REALLY well for WB as well (with another seemingly on the way). Add in the possibility of a bidding war - I'm sure Activision would like another 5-6 studios to pump out CODs - and $4bn may be realistic.

I'd need to know more about the financials of the Arkham games to know if that makes the buy more viable. For one, if AT&T maintains the license, you're now in a negotiation with them every time you want to make a Batman game. I couldn't imagine the studio getting charged much for the license being a wholly own subsidiary. So the cost would almost certainly have to go up. And that would be the same with all the franchises that WBIE has access to. There's certainly value in buying talented teams of devs, but the IP is the valuable part and I'm not sure how much is there.

[MagicCow64]

Well, if WB sells off the games division, they'll surely still want to make money on games based on their properties. Presumably Rocksteady, WB Montreal, whoever, aren't just going to trash their projects. I would think it'll just become more like the Star Wars game licensing.

[pokepal148]

RIP Stadia studios.

[Khushrenada]

RIP Stadia studios.

Such a shame. They had made so many great games over the year. Just another studio Nintendo let die instead of buying and saving like Alphadream! Nintendo has so much developer blood on their hands! 

[broodwars]

Mockery aside, I am sad at the closure of Typhoon Studios, who Google bought immediately upon the success of their only game, Journey To The Savage Planet, and then threw them onto Stadia work. I quite liked that game. I hope they can rebuild from this.

[ThePerm]

Google is ran by weird people. They can't take the time to make something work. These things don't work often immediately.

[broodwars]

Sony is effectively shutting down Sony Japan Studio as of 4/1/21, allegedly to focus their studios on games with "worldwide appeal."

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/sources-playstation-is-winding-down-sony-japan-studio/

In addition to assisting on various projects (such as The Last Guardian, the Demon's Souls remake, the Wild Arms series, etc.), the studio's put out such games as Ape Escape, Legend of Dragoon (continuing Sony's legacy of not giving a **** about Legend of Dragoon), Fantavision, Puppeteer, and Knacks 1 & 2.

Look, I'm not going to pretend that Japan Studio put out the most wondrous games, but I appreciated the variety of the stuff they worked on, stuff that modern Sony apparently just refuses to make anymore. However, I will also note that Sony LOVED to not market Japan Studios' games, so I don't completely blame them for their games not selling.

Still, the studio was apparently reasonably profitable, and Sony desperately needed the variety in art styles and game concepts. It just wasn't making "All of the money" (to use a phrase coined by a certain internet blowhard).

I still want a PS4/PS5 version of Puppeteer, Sony. The fact that you homage it in the most recent Astro Bot is rather infuriating.

But hey, we get to look forward to a future of nothing but generic 3rd person action games with light stealth and crafting elements. Because that's what Sony makes now when they don't have a legacy franchise or major license to shill.

[M.K.Ultra]

I still want a PS4/PS5 version of Puppeteer, Sony.

Same here. Puppeteer is one of my favorite PS3 games. It looks gorgeous in stereoscopic 3D. I would love a PS4 version that works in PSVR, but that is very unlikely.

[nickmitch]

RIP Stadia studios.

Updates and insights on Stadia

Basically, the writer says that Stadia failed to follow the usual Google approach.

But all the buildup had some developers within Stadia worried, according to people familiar with the matter. Their deadline to ship the platform in the fall of 2019 wouldn’t allow them to deliver what players expected, they said. They argued that Google should position the launch as another beta test. After all, Google’s most successful products had followed a similar approach. Gmail was officially in beta testing for five years, for example, as the company continued to tweak and refine it.

This may or may not come as a surprise.

Stadia missed its targets for sales of controllers and monthly active users by hundreds of thousands, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. A Google spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

A really interesting tidbit to me is this part about how much Google spent on each port. (Emphasis added)

His team wooed big-name publishers like Ubisoft and Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., shelling out tens of millions of dollars to get games like Red Dead Redemption II on Stadia, according to two people familiar with the deals. The amount of money Google was willing to spend came as a shock to veteran game developers, but even that wasn’t enough. Video game platforms live or die on exclusive content. So Harrison also brought in Jade Raymond, a veteran executive who has worked on Assassin’s Creed and Star Wars, to start building an in-house development division.

[MASB]

The whole Stadia thing felt like the third-party developers knew it wouldn't amount to anything and were just trying to get as much of the grift as possible. Now that we know it was tens of millions per port, the third-parties must have felt like they met the prize sucker of the decade.

As for Japan Studio, it's sad. But Sony Santa Monica has made it known for quite some time that those  "Japs" and their games aren't wanted. It kind of feels like Sony's game development is run by all those hipster game journalists and indie devs (usually indie devs who haven't accomplished anything since) that were constantly crying about how Japanese game devs and design were out of touch a decade ago.

[broodwars]

Continuing Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO's Jim Ryan's legacy of incompetence and disdain for Sony's heritage, Sony finally officially confirmed today the closure dates for the PS3, PSP, & Vita PSN Stores. This follows last year's removal of those systems from their redesigned-to-be-**** browser-based store.

The PS3 & PSP online stores will go offline on 7/2/21, and the Vita's store will go down on 8/27/21. This effectively permanently kills off the Vita (which was still seeing new indie games), as Sony shut down manufacturing of Vita game cards years ago so no new physical media can be produced.

The one good(ish) piece of news from all this is that owners of these consoles will still be able to redownload titles from their Download History, provided they're willing to scroll through the thousands of pages of entries they've accumulated by this point (I did that once. Never again).

I fucking despise Jim Ryan. I've never seen someone so dedicated to killing the PlayStation brand, from his censorship policies almost exclusively against Japanese games, to his on-record disdain for older games, to the closure of Sony Japan Studios, to his lack of interest in making anything other than games in the Naughty Dog mold.

https://www.ign.com/articles/playstation-store-shut-down-ps3-vita-psp

[M.K.Ultra]

I really miss the wishlist in the store. I had a list of a dozen games I planned to get and they are gone. I can only remember half of them. I need to pick up a game or two on vita before it's too late.

[broodwars]

I really miss the wishlist in the store. I had a list of a dozen games I planned to get and they are gone. I can only remember half of them. I need to pick up a game or two on vita before it's too late.

I really don't understand why they redesigned that storefront to REMOVE functionality. Along with Wishlisting, they also removed categories, the ability to filter games, and the demo section of the store in general, which got especially strange when games like RE8 and Ys 9 got demos after the change.

[Ian Sane]

I heard the rumours about the PS3 store going down so my brother and I were spending a good part of the weekend downloading patches for all of our physical releases.  We only recently started living in the same house again so we had amassed independent PS3 collections over the years.  So I was going through a stack of his games downloading the most recent patches on the off-chance I might play his games someday and he was doing the same with mine.

Meanwhile I had bought some huge Capcom Humble Bundle years ago and had downloaded and installed a few of the key games I was interested in but had not downloaded a good 8 or 9 games because I was running low on hard drive space.  I had demos I didn't need anymore that I could delete but that was not a time sensitive job so I kept putting it off.  I also wouldn't have enough room for all the games anyway so I assumed I would have to upgrade the hard drive.  Well I deleted the demos on Saturday and started downloading the remaining games, often over night so as to not affect any internet performance for the rest of the family.  The lack of space was resolved by installing some of the biggest games on my brother's PS3 since he has a bigger hard drive and now that we're in the same house it really doesn't matter which PS3 "my" game is on.

Of course now it turns out you can re-download stuff so presumably this was all unnecessary.  Well, it still got me off my butt to do something I had literally put off for years so it wasn't a total waste.

[ThePerm]

Consoles with battery clocks should have a window to open and replace them.

Score one for the Sega Saturn. The system had built in storage, and external storage, and you could replace the battery.
Too bad I only ever play the system around the time the battery died. But it's usually a fun weekend playing Nights again.

[M.K.Ultra]

Google Stadia officially shutting down January 28, 2023

[nickmitch]

A couple of devs revealed on Twitter that they had no advance notice or communications from Google about the shutdown.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.