You are correct that they would need to keep staff on payroll to handle maintenance and customer service in case players have problems (e.g. requests for restoring lost special pokemon through server or human error). These staff would not be free by any stretch. That's one of the bigger parts of it for sure, but not the only reason. Did you know that Standard Support for Windows 7 ended in 2020?…
If you think about what the majority of files in an installed game are, this should make intuitive sense. The smallest part of the installed game is the executable that runs the game. Then you've got animations, audio, textures, level geometry, pre-rendered video, and so on. Consider - while you're playing the game, at any specific point in time, do you actually need all of those assets at the…
The Saudis don't own a stake in Ubisoft. The biggest stakeholders in Ubisoft is the Guillemot family (you may recognize the name, their CEO is Yves Guillemot). Second is Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and then Tencent Holdings. That said, I've looked at the facts of the situation and here are the two takes I have on EA Saudi situation. The Charitable Take In most leveraged buyouts, the debt taken…
Let's put on our business hats for a moment to understand what's actually going on here. What you're missing is who is doing the buying and who is doing the selling. The buyer and the seller are not the same people! The company is changing ownership. The old owners are no longer in the picture. It is the new owners who decide the direction, orders. and choices for the company. The sellers here are…
Yes, we absolutely have these kind of established rules. We generally call these metrics and we try to establish them very carefully because they are the assumptions around which design can build levels, environments, combat, and other core gameplay. We often have to establish metrics for most core gameplay actions - how fast a player can run, how high/far a player can jump, how many party members…
From the outside looking in, the situation looks bad, especially to the layman. However, that's not a good perspective because we're really only be looking at one game in EA's entire catalogue and not the larger perspective of the whole company. EA's overall situation is much more than the performance of a single game. First, these two events are actually completely unrelated. Wilson didn't get a…
China is, by far, the harshest regulated gaming market by far. The CCP has a bunch of requirements for any outside developer to sell or operate in China. Here are some of the rules in order to publish in China. No external company can operate autonomously. All game companies must partner up with a domestic Chinese company to distribute in China. Furthermore, the Chinese government generally plays…
Honestly, I think the issue with physical disc is really treating the symptom, not the actual disease. The main issue we're seeing is that the players aren't buying a game, they're buying a license to use software and the license generally does not cover what happens when the publisher decides to pull the plug. Even if the physical disc had all of the game data on it at launch, it wouldn't stop…
From a practical perspective, you need to figure out where you stand. You said that you pitched your game and got the green light - congratulations! That's no small feat and I'm glad you got it. I also believe that you're serious when you say that this is the only thing you want to work on, and that you're willing to quit your job to work on it. I won't comment on whether I think that's a good…
We do. We always plan in additional budget and scheduled time for unforeseen problems. The difficulty comes from more innocuous-seeming problems that creep in during early development that get worse over time if not addressed immediately, but there's a lot of additional factors that exist that can compound this issue. Let's go through an example. Imagine that I'm working on a new game idea that my…
I'll preface this by saying I am not an artist. Obviously, any art done for a studio is owned by that studio and that makes it difficult to use in a portfolio when the art is still covered by NDA. If this is your quandary, I suggest reaching out to an experienced artist in the industry. @axl99 is an experienced veteran artist in the game industry, she can probably answer your question if this is…
Survivor's guilt is a real thing. This is one of those things that you really have to work through on your own. The only thing I can think to say is that they aren't gone forever, they're just doing their own thing. If you work with people you like, you can always make an effort to engage with them and build relationships outside the workplace. After several of my coworkers all got let go in a big…
Most MMOGs (and MMO-related games like looter shooters and such) use them to store game data. On the MMOGs I worked on we had separate tables for account, character, world, guild, bank, and item data, along with other needed data. Columns in the character table would be things like most recent login, character name, account name, current equipment, stash ID, guild ID, quest variables, quest…
In a situation where the loudest feedback of all is the willingness to pay for the product, you really only have one option for success here - you must persuade enough other people to agree with you and forgo the new game. This is not a small task - it is voting with your wallet and lobbying others to do the same. This isn't as "simple" (difficulty notwithstanding) as getting a majority, however,…
To paraphrase, you control the things you buy. Players must make their choices - if their budgets don't increase (and there's no reason to think they would), it means they buy fewer games by necessity. Franchises with large audiences like GTA will be prioritized by buyers over smaller and less popular titles like an unfamiliar new IP. There will be those who test the waters to see how many people…
I caution against going down this path. Enacting some kind of crusade against a video game publisher over a video game is basically "jilted lover" behavior. In situations like this, it's common for a person to feel hurt over something that's got a lot of emotional energy put into it over a long time. That built-up emotion needs an outlet, so people in those situations often end up in the franchise…
The answer is both yes and no. As we get more of a particular thing, it almost always naturally pans out as a bell curve distribution. That means that, as you get more of it, you'll find more and more extreme examples, while most of the things (~68%) will fall within one standard deviation of the mean. What this generally means is that, as we get more Unreal Engine games, we'll see some really…
Unfortunately, voting for something you want does not necessarily mean you're going to win the election. You cast your vote as best you can alongside everybody else and hope for the best. You may not like the result, but that doesn't mean that the election wasn't fair or that plenty of others can't have a different opinion than yours. The fact they are willing to pay that much shows that they can…
This is why good riggers (sometimes called technical animators) and animation engineers are among the more well-paid roles in game dev. The animation engineers work hand in hand with the riggers in order to set up animation systems and rig constraints such that the skeletons move believably, rather than "jank". Jank is what you get when a joint moves in a direction that isn't believable, like a…
Some studios have an in-house engine they continue to develop. Whenever a game is set to launch using that engine, there's an established cutoff date after which they will no longer take new engine updates from the mothership unless those updates are crucial bug fixes, and even then the engineering teams will collaborate to bring over only the absolutely necessary changes. This is because game…