How 2K Killed Irrational Games — By Anonymous

Accidentally, as commercial "art" is made to sell.

BUD U KNOW, "ID'S JUST BUSINESS :-DD"

Shitty practices aside
Absolutely nothing of value was lost.

That's what confuses me so much is they constantly destroy their own profits though.

...

Gonna raise a glass to 2K tonight it seems.

Do you think 2k might have something to do with gta5 not having any single player dlc, the horrible online mode, and probably why Rockstar is going to ruin red dead 2 with a very similar online mode?

Maybe, maybe not. According to the medium post they are strangely hands off on some studios and completely meddling in others.

Even 2k isn't stupid enough to meddle with Rockstar.

I think single player GTA is over. And it pays off doesn't it?

betty good read

thank you dev-user.

Yeah I kinda doubt that. I'm sure the stockholders of 2k don't care much about Gamergate.

I never understood what you do in GTA5 online other than goof off with a friend for a few hours.

I'm not the author. I found it on plebbit with no attention from the plebbitors and thought it should get a few more eyes.

Citation needed.

But I admire your optimism.

Aside from sports games
Its true

It's quite sad.
archive.is/Qrh6M

I'm actually mad. That one action put a large dent in the tiny Australian games industry, which needs all the help it can get. All it has now are indie hipsters.

wow its almost like executives have no idea what the core of the industry is and are just in it for the big money

who'd have thunk it

If 2k didn't make NBA and WWE games, they wouldn't even exist anymore.

Kinda explains why they showed Turtle Rock the door. I still wonder to this day how much of the DLC-platform fiasco was due to TRS and what was just 2K dictating. I just hope they sell their intellectual properties to someone worthwhile when they go down.

Well Anons, are there any decent publishers/development studios left in your humble opinions?

You're forgetting the whole bit were the Gates foundation was donating to socjus because if they can make games "acceptable" his buddies at microshaft stand to make loadsamone selling education software to common core.

devolver and focus interactive well maybe

This pleases me.

maybe those damn kikes will learn that they shouldnt fuck with our games

None.

Corproations are fucking retarded, and I cannot for the life of me understand how they've ever managed to get to where they are.

what was left of 2k australia (40 guys) made that borderlands prequel
World works in mysterious ways.

Some stats.

And why does the Mafia 3 steam page have 19 fucking videos on it?

Best part of the article along with the reminder about the Xcom shooter. I love seeing big AAA games made by suits tank, Xcom was made even better by enemy unknown being a big success.

I'd agree with Devolver and maybe add Sega. Their inhouse games are hit or miss but quite a few of their contracted games are decent.

There are no more heroes left in vidya ;_;

Why

Amplitude studios seem pretty alright, Endless legend was a good game and although it had a lot of DLC most of that was pretty good. They just got bought by Sega though so I don't know how long that will last.

Is there any other industry with as many mouth breathing retards calling the shots as in vidya games?

What scares me is the thought that the only reason the vidya industry looks this retarded is because I know so much about the industry, and that if I were just as invested in any other industry it'd look just as retarded.

Developers are shit too. It's easy to blame just publishers, but, remember when Kotick explained how shit it was to work with Schafer?
This is one side of the story.
And, while not a developer, I worked with some artists, dude, they can fuck your shit if you have to deliver a product on time. You can give the fuckers the time they asked, and more, and might not be enough.
In the end, this is a bunch of assholes shouting at each other and putting the blame on everyone in the world but them.

Too many retards, there's no hope in Triple A diarrhea anymore, especially if the fucking suits try to "give their input" on devs instead of marketing, budget balance, and scheduling. but a toast to the close death of Gearbox and Burch's magnum opus, Memelands 3 will hopefully fail.

See what happens when you do bad things user? God's punishment is swift and merciless

Ding ding ding
in the non-games software development sector we're pulling our hair out as well

The movie industry obviously. Remember when some suits fucked over Deadpools character in Xmen Origins? Still though, this as depressing from big budget publishers and makes me wonder how you become a suit.

you know it

It's not always the suits fucking it up. The shit world-building you see in memelands, mafia watch nogs etc come straight out the devs minds.

Devolver Digital, I also like the Flying Wild Hog games although they could stand to be improved a good bit.

There's also Amplitude Studios, I own all their games, they're great. In a strange twist of things, Amplitude is amazing at making wonderful UIs, Endless Legend looks fucking beautiful.

mein violence-tending ape race individual

Projekt CD, nigger. Daniel Vavra is based as fucked.

Post that comic that assumes that Ghostbusters (2016) wasn't a flop.

bay12games :^)

Not quite sure about that comic, but I dont understand how anyone any sane person would assume Ghostbusters 2016 was anything but a flop when they went out of their way to shit on their fans and tried to make a "Cinematic Universe" from a comedy series that only had 2 movies from the 80s.

Its right there in the OP's link
/spoonfeeding

Is that codeblocks you're using?

I can't wait for Diversity Dogs 2 to tank as hard. Hopefully even harder.

Running With Scissors of course

...

As you've said, it's likely that they mess with it on the assumption that it'll make them more money, or that it'll make them the same money faster if they do. And when various developers would rather not see that happen (To use an example, Sacnoth/Nautilus begrudgingly toned their games down after their publisher and some native fans bitched about how dark the early entries were, but made them even weirder to keep the games to a niche audience instead of how their publisher hoped to get mainstream appeal and profit), they tend to get killed off (with the aforementioned company, their publisher dissolved the development team after their third PS2 game, and has done fuck all with the rights to the series since, aside from whoring characters out to IF for a crossover game).

And then there's cases like DmC, where the publisher (and new dev team, I suppose) gets it in their heads that they can actively disregard the existing audience for the series, actively shit on them and the prior games both during development and ingame, and expect that the new audience they acquire can actively replace if not be even larger than the old one, who is understandably pissed off by the affair (since in most cases nothing good can possibly come of the new game succeeding or failing for them)

...

The trailers look really shitty. Movie will be shit.

I completely forgot that was coming out. Hopefully I will forget about it again.

Boo hoo, they didn't even make Bioshock 2, so I can't say that I'll miss them all that much

Source?

I worked at IG for a few years before the acquisition. I had access to E V E R Y T H I N G.

Ken Levine is a terrible manager and was often very abrasive and insulting to people. All the team leads hated him.

His biggest fault as a manager was being obscenely paranoid and manipulative, and hiring manipulative but paranoid and unstable Yes-men as second-in-commands. In just over two years the company had FOUR different operations managers. Two were manipulative and abrasive fucks—one Cambridge Muslim (who smoked weed and browsed lefty websites after delegating most of his work to others, couldn't operate Excel to save his life) and one West-coast power-lezz (who enjoyed books with titles like "Eco-Feminism and the Sacred" and who said she wanted to hire a gay man as her assistant because they were "easier to control".)

They delivered short term results by cracking the whip and turning people against each other, but who alienated everyone in the long run, since the hoi polloi quickly figured out what scheming liars they were. (They were even better at manipulating Ken, which caused no end of trouble.)

Anyway, of the four Ops Managers, Ken loved those two and HATED the two who were experienced managers and straight-shooters. He pretty much forced them to resign by treating them like shit—-talking down to them, badmouthing them in emails, constantly changing what he had requested and then pretending there was no change, and a whisper campaign that such-and-such person "wasn't going to last long here".

Administration turnover was so high because everyone was overworked, because Ken didn't really want to spend anything on "overhead".

Penny wise and pound foolish as they say. I can't speak to the influence of 2K but, the general tone of disaster in that story is consistent with my Snowden's eye view of the company in the years before that—Ken micromanaging everything very badly and just generally chewing people up and spitting them out.

I worked at IG for a few years before the acquisition. I had access to E V E R Y T H I N G.

Ken Levine is a terrible manager and was often very abrasive and insulting to people. All the team leads hated him.

His biggest fault as a manager was being obscenely paranoid and manipulative, and hiring manipulative but paranoid and unstable Yes-men as second-in-commands. In just over two years the company had FOUR different operations managers. Two were manipulative and abrasive fucks—one Cambridge Muslim (who smoked weed and browsed lefty websites after delegating most of his work to others, couldn't operate Excel to save his life) and one West-coast power-lezz (who enjoyed books with titles like "Eco-Feminism and the Sacred" and who said she wanted to hire a gay man as her assistant because they were "easier to control".)

They delivered short term results by cracking the whip and turning people against each other, but who alienated everyone in the long run, since the hoi polloi quickly figured out what scheming liars they were. (They were even better at manipulating Ken, which caused no end of trouble.)

Anyway, of the four Ops Managers, Ken loved those two and HATED the two who were experienced managers and straight-shooters. He pretty much forced them to resign by treating them like shit—-talking down to them, badmouthing them in emails, constantly changing what he had requested and then pretending there was no change, and a whisper campaign that such-and-such person "wasn't going to last long here".

Administration turnover was so high because everyone was overworked, because Ken didn't really want to spend anything on "overhead".

Penny wise and pound foolish as they say. I can't speak to the influence of 2K but, the general tone of disaster in that story is consistent with my Snowden's eye view of the company in the years before that—Ken micromanaging everything very badly and just generally chewing people up and spitting them out.

It's like this in every single industry.

>steamspy.com/app/261640

1,650,000 people own it on PC alone. That is a big profit for a team of 40 guys and such a short development time. Also add into that the console figure which are probably as high if not higher than the PC numbers since it's an even bigger franchise on consoles.

Interesting if true. Any proof or more details?

A system shock 2 dev has posted here before, so even if there is no proof he might be legit.

Yeah, but at the same time I don't want to embolden the guys who will just lie to feel cool for a single thread by not questioning it at all.

That thread was fucking hilarious though. I wish I had an archive of it because he went on to answer some questions people had and I remember them being interesting.

I worked there well after SS2 and left before the 2k acquisition. I don't really have any proof in terms of files or emails, that stuff is long gone after 10+ yrs. What sort of details would you want?

For some reason, I want to blame Pitchford. Ah, let's not beat around the bush, he probably had 2k can them so they didn't get any bonuses for performing well or some shit, that's just the type of scummy businessman he is.

Thought of something, though you'd have to verify it with another employee to be sure.

One day while snooping I found and read the internal postmortem writeup for their failed/unreleased PS2 game "The Lost". Crave Entertainment had sued IG after development of the game fell apart.

The postmortem described how the LithTech engine (and the vendor's support) turned out to be shitty (at least on PS2) and so Irrational had to start over with Unreal Engine mid-development. The game never recovered from the transition. I played a little bit of The Lost and also watched a fair amount of gameplay—-they never got the frame rate up to something respectable. Also, Sony seemed not to like the game at all — they kept complaining "monsters not scary enough" and the "limbs should be more scary and dripping with blood" and they said it was "boring".

Another bit… at one point a company paid IG to do some pre-viz / writing to brainstorm a licensed Dungeons and Dragons game. However people weren't enthused about DnD so nothing further happened.

Crave eventually lost the lawsuit and we popped champagne bottles in the office, but because of some random thing our lawyer had screwed up, Crave came back with an appeal and things threatened to start all over again. So IG settled for approx $100,000 USD . That's the same amount Crave owed to IG from the judgment but there was a debtor's examination purporting to show that Crave had no money. So IG settled and things ended.

Also, Steve Kimura sometimes wore a pair of blue jeans that had pink fabric letters spelling "SLUT" on one of the back pockets :)

...

ftfy

Ken "Ninjas are immature but Big Daddies are deep and meaningful" Levine
Ken "I write about things I don't understand" Levine

Gee I wonder what the first game he developed was.

I believe you more than I do OP story. Because OP story sounds like some faggot numale who got into games circa 2005 and started poisoning everything for 2007, the fall year.

I remember that Infinite only shipped because 2K hired Rod Fergusson from Epic and he went over Levine's head to get it out the door which pissed Levine off real good and lead to Levine torpedoing the studio because it was clear that he was going to be working under someone since Ferguson made a mircale and shipped that fucker.

Then Fergusson pitched 2K buying the Gears Of War IP from Epic (As Mark Rein wasn't inteested in a new one because it was too expensive) and instead of shutting down Irrational, turn them into a studio to make Gears 4. 2K wasn't interested and put him on Mafia 3. Microsoft were told it was available, Phil Spencer did the deal and got it (Shortly before he became head of Xbox) and Rod moved back to lead The Coalition instead of working on Mafia 3.

The lesson is 2K are full of fucking idiots who somehow survive because of their Basketball game and GTA. Evolve, Mafia 3 and Battleborne would have killed any other publisher on their own

Amplitude were acquired by Sega recently. So even though they are no longer independent, they are in good hands.

:) :) :)

So let's see:

i.e. typical pump and dump, let somebody else clean it up. Ken Levine never built a sustainable business around creative people, and he never will. He (((parlayed))) Looking Glass' lack of non-compete into a pile of cash by shitting into everyones mouths with a smile

Why anyone who has skills would even work in this industry is beyond me. Long hours, mediocre pay and absolutely no job security or long term prospects. You'll be burned out before you reach 40.

I've basically stopped playing games except from a few old games i loved. everything the fucking same and I'm not having fun, theres no reason to play new games anymore.

CD project red is pretty OK all things considered.

your thinking of warhorse studios that vavra is running. they have deep silver as a publisher, which has such stellar titles under their belt like ride to hell: retribution and Mighty no.9

yeah this seems true.

That is also down to the fact they wouldn't even dare fuck with Sid Meier because he has enough clout that leaving 2K would be a massive blow and Meier was based enough to stake his name and Rep on Firaxis making an XCOM despite the concern from the suits and the backlash from fans because "Not muh Gollop" (And then Julian Gollop said it was his favorite game of 2012 because it was so surprising and inventive without straying from being XCOM).

Meier could easily walk from Firaxis, have most of his staff follow and set up shop for an AAA studios with the backing of some venture capitalists or another publisher.

Just shows how fucked 2K's structure is, really.

Posting a picture of a Nintendo game is a bit ironic because they are well known for being the best paying and secure developer/publishers to work for, so much that they have a lot of people in their mid-50's still going and developing games while people like Miyamoto are being almost forced to retire because it's created an issue within Nintendo where younger staff aren't getting necessary experience and opportunities to advance.

Is there no such thing as a good Jew in this industry?

Cisbusters was a perfect microcosm to observe what's actually wrong with the industry: suits looking to make a quick buck by using an old IP that the holders have been sitting on for decades aka making the least effort possible outside of (((marketing))) and creative teams being typical cucks who wish to project their fetishes onto the audience. Guess what, turns out audiences can no longer be expected to keep tolerating both kinds of bullshit, not even Tumblr goes out of their basement long enough to watch it. This, in a way, is also the situation in vidya. They keep blaming pirates while in fact it's because the gayems themselves are shitty enough that no one, not even the most deluded white knights, go and buy them.

I would like to know more. Cisbusters you mean Mythbusters did something? I thought it ended?

Makes me think of Top Gear. Is the new version still going?

Ghostbusters reboot

Ah yes how could I forget. But it is well known that SJWs don't use money on things they say they want.

user. nobody ever killed anybody

It's almost like they think the ones who make those things they want will eventually be bailed out by the government or a sugar daddy or something, a completely childlike mindset. And if that fails too, they will blame the audience for still being bigoted enough in le current year of our lawd and savior that they won't go out and prostrate themselves to buy the piece of shit they tried to elevate to Holy Grail status.

im going to drool in your anus

Video game industry crash 2.0 when?

Considering all SJWs are rich kids who get everything from their parents there's nothing surprising about this mentality.

Also SJW-ism = Communism so there's that too.

Son, it bombed so hard without Clarkson, Hammond and May that they axed it after 6 episodes due to overwhelmingly negative reception.

Real Top Gear with the Clarkson, Hammond and May trio is called Grand Tour and is coming out like next week :^)

Well, time to re-subscribe, and get free 2 day shipping on muh vidya along with it.

Irrational Games dying is entirely Bioshock's fault. If they didn't make that piece of shit and if it didn't take off because of all the kids who thought it was some deep, thought-provoking irrefutable refutation of Ayn Rand's work and a true piece of art, they could have continued making great games with moderate success. Instead, they had to go full one-hit wonder and the publisher rightly got upset when everything afterwards tanked (as they should have).

RIP Irrational Games that made SWAT 4 and Freedom Force

Rot in Hell Irrational Games that made Bioshock and Bioshock Infinity.

Good!
Neat!

I hadn't kept up with the Amazon(?) project where they're simply keeping Top Gear as Top Gear so this is great to hear.

You mean Infinite.

I really liked the first Bioshock, even though I know it was dumbed down. It's a quality game overall. The whole franchise is definitely a downward trend though that's for sure.

Test

It's literally just Top Gear under new name.
They even took most of the crew and cameramen with them when they quit Big Black Cocks.

Also fun fact, it's going to be one of first shows aired in 4K, Amazon is going all out on this apparently.
Still gonna pirate tho because fuck paying Amazon sub.

Yeah bruh I read about it when it went down. Sounds like its gonna be great. Almost makes me want to pay an amazon sub. Almost.

2K doesn't own Rockstar.
Take Two does.

WHO RUNS THESE COMPANIES

To be honest, it sounds like the decline happened way before 2K started fucking with them.

Making shitty System Shock sucessors with fake deep plots instead of doing that Freedom Force action game was a mistake.

Me and some friends got to go to one of the initial tapings out in the Mojave, they seemed to be having a blast being together. I have far more appreciation for all the 'Hammond is short' jokes, the man simply got lost in the mob around him.

Cuckolds high on leftist pozz that live in a bubble and seem to think niggers sell for whatever reason. I will never understand how these people can be so moronic that they think pandering to the 12% of the population whose majority is well below the poverty line (or in jail), and whatever percentage of whites are race traitors, will earn them that much cash.

I would have no problems with BioShock if it didn't play like a subpar FPS game. As it is, it's a "shock" game in name only.

Problem with Levine and Irrational in general is that they focused on the narrative to the detriment of everything. They came away with the wrong idea of what made SS2 so popular, and instead of following the evolutionary path of the immersive sim by building on top of what made Deus Ex so good. They instead came to the conclusion it was the story that sold the game, not the diverse gameplay and dungeon crawling, and the more games they made, the more gameplay they stripped away in favor of writing they didn't have the talent to live up to.

Both are under the same umbrella company, Take 2 Games, user. 2K was just a separate branding based off the old Sega 2K series they had to use because the various leagues didn't want to be associated with GTA.

Take 2 games suits are the ones who make the decisions for 2K games. Also why they are high as fuck

The original crash only happened in the US while a Boom period happened in Europe. And the US crash was caused by too many companies, including industrial and furniture companies, investing and releasing consoles into the market and fragmenting it.

No conditions for a AAA crash right now. Even Holla Forums stopped buying anything to try cause it. You are 0.01% of the audience these days.

The best I can see is maybe an indie crash because of too many indie companies making the same shit, abusing early access. Destroying the indie market and destroying trust with their badly supported and technically incompetent games would easily do that.

Video crash didn't stop Nintendo either since the Japanese economy was booming in the 80s. It wasn't a global crash like in 1929 or 2007.

No crash, maybe, but the AAA model is already becoming unsustainable. Budgets are still ballooning out of control but the market has already expanded as far as it can. It's why publishers are trying to push microtransactions, DLCs and the rest of the kikish shit so hard, they are seeking further ways to monetize the product to cover the costs of developing "blockbusters".

What we are likely to see is a sustained move towards f2p models and an increased focus on the mobile market as consoles keep floundering.

Yet some niches are seeing something as a comeback. I know that as a cRPG fan the market didn't have as many games aimed at me as it does now in quite a while, possibly more than a decade.

Yeah, sure I only play Japanese games and the occasional indie/AA. But Holla Forums isn't indicative of the videogame market at large.

How many games that come out are sequels? What are the best selling games of this year?

The movie industry has some saving grace, such as the critics being actual critics and not glorified PR.

Have you looked up the Cuntbusters reviews?

Yeah, negative.

It has an aggregated score of 60 on Metacritic (inb4 >metacritic). Birth of a Nation has 68, 12 Years a Slave 96%. Meanwhile, Hardcore Henry has a score of 51%. In what world is Cuntbusters and We Wuz Rebels better than Hardcore Henry?

Obviously critics are doing fuckall, and are just as susceptible to their Oscar Bait as game journalists are to shitty indie trash.

cont.
The Force Awakens, is at 81%. Fuck critics.

No critics in movies are just as shit in taste.
Just 2 easy examples, they've been over the years falling for the hype train more and more, IDK if they're being paid for these reviews but it's getting more and more common for films to get higher end scores when they're nothing that would have deserved it 10 years ago

My guess is that it's part bribes, part strong-arming from movie companies least they get blacklisted and a large part being pozzed, Marxist filth.

Somebody please post this, it sounds hilarious.

AAA is currently unsustainable, but the industry has unfortunately been smart enough to start working towards bringing down budgets using engines like Unreal 4 and starting to share tech instead of making expensive internal engines for each product that when they do bring down costs, the kikish shit will still be there and it will be back to massive profit.

A friend of mine works at one of the top indie publishers and they mentioned that as the big engines get more homogenised and tech sharing becomes more common, costs come down for everyone and companies are forward thinking instead of just developing for one generation now. Certain genres will move towards F2P because the model benefits them. But big AAA's, the cost will inevitably come down. Most games are already factoring in 4K and shipping with 4K textures these days. And indies can compete using the same toolsets.

And from what I heard, some companies are just completely switching to UE4 unless their game is specialized and needs an engine focused to the genre (UE4 isn't great for realistic racing games yet despite Epic's partnerships with Ford and McClaren) because it's cost saving, efficient, cheaper to develop on and produces amazing looking games very quickly. And costs will keep on going down because there's a lot less fear of keeping proprietary tech to themselves (The Global Illumination system used in UE4 was developed by Lionhead and Microsoft gave the source to Epic to allow anyone to use it, for example)

We're still going to get agressive kikery like loot boxes and DLC. That's what the normalfags want. But the AAA "Crash" is already seen as a problem and companies are taking steps to avoid it.

It's why I'm a lot more confident in an Indie crash because they are piling stores with junk and believing they are entitled to have customers spend money on them because they made a special snowflake game and the only quality control is indie publishers like Devolver and Team 17 who have the money to pick and choose the best games and get them featured, (especially since Devolver has a deal with Sony for most of their games debuting first on PS4 and Team 17 has close relations with Microsoft). Too many companies trying to compete with low quality games and the market will bottom out with no one buying them or buying transactions in the case of F2P games.

...

imb4: "muh 'cause people are racist"

well they are

I don't think publishers have taken into account costumer fatigue and the suckers finally wising up.

So far they could avoid extreme backlash for a shitty product because the market was expanding and new blood constantly kept streaming in. Now that the initial boom is over and most new "gamers" have a few years of gaming under their belts they are also starting to develop some semblance of standards.

It's why Ubisoft was forced to put off yearly releases of AssCreed games or why WB's reputation is tarnished and they had to deal with massive refunds for Arkham Knight.

And tying into the above, I don't think costs are going to go down all that much. For example, people have gotten very, very tired of AssCreed's repetitive gameplay and lack of innovation, as well as all the glitches, bugs and poor optimization that result from tight development schedules. I don't think the current way things are done is sustainable, shared tech or not.

BioWare is another company that is falling apart despite giving the normalfags what they ostensibly want, Bethesda pissed a lot of people off with FO4 and their paid mod policy, so it's not like the people in charge are any smarter. All they know how to do is be kikes and cut costs wherever they can, underneath all of that they're still the same clueless, soulless lizards that will suck Marx's dick and smear us with niggers because they think that's where the money is.

There's no consumer fatigue since games like Battlefield are still selling millions. Ubi responded the right way with no AC till 2018. Warner cancelled it's PC versions. They reacted like a business should in that situation.

People on Holla Forums are so desperate for AAA to collapse when there's no chance of it, companies are already working on the cost issue and revenue has never been higher in the industry. It's wishing for the TORtanic again.

And believe me. I wouldn't lose any sleep if AAA colapsed. But it's not happening.

Reminder that the supposed "Great Crash" of 1983 was in fact almost totally confined to consoles, whereas PC gaming simply had its rate of growth slowed slightly, and arcades were entirely untouched. PC gaming was also much stronger in Japan than later years. If it weren't for Nintendo's evil deeds and highly predatory licensing, consoles would've stayed dead.

We can do it, we can kill consoles once and for all, stripping away any delusions of grandeur casuals and the corrupted AAA studios supported by them labor under, exiling them into the realms of mobileshit/socialshit for eternity, far away from any serious comparison with proper vidya.

Wasn't 3d realms also fucked over by 2k, alongside playing wow and going to horse races with id soft for almost a decade instead of working on the fucking game?

what makes you think that will assist computer gayms?

Hopefully most of the cancer will be siphoned into cellphones and NSAbook, leaving AAA more reliant on people who actually enjoy games. It's true the cancer could just migrate over whole, but even then they would at least be exposed to things like mods, private servers, full backward compatibility, and responsive controls.

This

Like I explained, for every $60 physical unit sold the publisher gets roughly $27, digital is more lucrative and 70%, in case you ever think they want digital because it is better of you, dont.

It sold like ass around launch. So many things were wrong with it that they had to bundle it with Borderlands 2 with all the DLC and it still didn't sell for shit. No wonder when Handsome Jack's VA sounds like he is phoning it in and hates the script he's been given the entire game. Yet comes back enthusiastic when he VAs the Tell Tale Borderlands because it is the character that was intended for Handsome Jack.

With all their advertisement the game bombed.

That's after a ton of sales, and years. Publishers do not care if something breaks even eventually. First two weeks are their target window. Game failed hard.

Publishers do not care if something breaks even eventually

This. It's all about the fiscal year. Investors want to see results fast.

What did you do there(I take it you worked in Boston?) Do you know the person who wrote that medium piece?

Yes, Boston. I worked in Operations and had several titles over time. I just read over the Medium piece again and nothing really sticks out as identifying. He/she paints a rosy picture of what IG was like in the years before the acquisition—the bedlam was kept (mostly) well hidden between the admin team and the various dept leads, so I'm guessing the Medium piece writer was not a senior employee. He doesn't mention the Crave lawsuit at all, and he lists Freedom Force, Tribes Vengeance, Swat4, without saying he worked on any of them in particular. No mention of the crunches on those either (i think particularly Tribes.) It's also not clear to me which office the Medium author worked in (if any.)

My guess is: medium author was a non-senior employee in Australia who started working there in about 2004 (acquisition was mid 2005). Canberra was well managed in those years (by the genius Chey brothers), and profitable—-Boston was neither. So a Canberra person might have a rosier view and might have heard less about the lawsuit.

pic related, comment from medium

I see. You place most of the mismanagement woes on Levine(makes sense) and mention Chey managing well in Australia, what about the other guy Fermier? Also was it one of those things where one guy's megalomania(Levine) caused things to deteriorate from the get go?

Did the crave lawsuit make it impossible to continue on independently money wise? I remember hearing things were getting pretty bad for a lot o studios back in like 2004-6.

their last good game was swat 4, everything else after that was shit.

Rob Fermier was a silent partner who didn't participate in management AFAIK.

Not sure that's the right word but he just had this talent for fucking things up and not listening/seeing signs of problems

Demoralizing and expensive—at one point Ken joked "I don't make games anymore. I just litigate." I don't think they shopped the studio around right away as I think there was significant time in between the $100k settlement and the acquisition. But I do think it was a factor in the decision to get away from independence.

Should have added "by the time 2003- 2004 came around."

So far, I'd say THQ Nordic has been pretty solid.

http:// www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?s=7bbaa1777db5c1862a5a84048b9f76a5&t=1302747

Some interesting (and skeptical) comments about the Medium article, on neogaf neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?s=7bbaa1777db5c1862a5a84048b9f76a5&t=1302747

sorry

Nothing of value was lost.
Bioshock was never good.
Levine is a hack.

What is he doing

maybe it isn't the right word, bioshock infinite probably shaped my perceptions of Levine. Was that canceled game about cold war spies before your time there? It had a porno-sounding name, deep undercover or something

Deep Cover, that was before my time there.

I'm gonna hazard a guess: I think the Medium piece is fake. To make his point the author seems to need information about how great IG was before 2K ruined it—-and while he says he was there before IG became part of 2K, there's no actual information beyond what you could get searching the internet. Again, I can't judge for myself what happened after the acquisition—but I think the author of this piece is at least exaggerating his tenure at IG or possibly making the whole thing up.

agreed.

I'm still wondering why anyone thought bioshock infinite was going to be good when the earliest footage and preview materials showed some of the exact same awful shit the final game had.

I love delusional retards like this, PC gamers are hilarious

What did he say that was wrong?

major misunderstandings about the PC market, console market, the impact of "the crash", how the "death of consoles" will save gaming, and thinking that consoles/mobile-social games have any crossover what so ever.

It reads like the hopes of a child with a fanaticism for their favorite shit video game platform, unaware of the flaws of that platform and with no idea how the industry actually works. I love it, it's precious.

Yeah?

...

yeah.

Focus Home Interactive. They're a European publisher and they let devs make games without meddling. Usually good niche stuff too.

Reminder that the crash happened in part because gaming had 0 Quality Control and the market was flooded with shit. Also it's funny that even with how shitty [current year] consoles are thanks to QC becoming more of a suggestion than a mandate, PC games/ports still manage to be even worse.

Wanna elaborate on how he's wrong?

Holla Forums being Holla Forums

Take a 5 minute look at Steam and say that again. Same triple A trash, indie shit, hats, MOBAs and a whole bunch of casuals.

I've stopped caring about the mainstream industry. It cannot be saved. Find a nice comfortable niche and ignore what everyone else is doing.

SWAT 4? Wow that brings back memories. Must have been 10 years ago.

Los Angeles never did get the Olympics again.

I'm going back in time.

Reminds me on the launch of 360 that J Allard made it policy that everyone had to ship a working game and companies would pay the QA costs if they needed to patch it (After they get one free patch to sort any last minute bugs they didn't manage to squash) after the disastrous launches on the PC the year before like Vampire The Masqurade and Half Life 2 (Those games are stone cold classics now they have been fixed but fuck me they were literally unplayable at launch). Every dev hated it, but no one shipped a broken game at 360 till Phil Fish did (Not even Todd managed to do that). And then he cried and screamed because Microsoft told him to fix it. And then all the indies complained because mean Microsoft had a policy of not letting you sell a broken game to customers.

And everyone sided with Phil "Suck my dick, choke on it" Fish instead of the company that politely asks you to finish your games before release so that customers could play their games from start to finish as a basic technical requirement.

It's a cruel joke, really how much the customers have killed the industry just as much as the developers.

Don't play games on release.

Take Witcher 3. Completely different game now compared to what it was at launch.

Unless you play games to talk about them on forums/imageboards there's no reason not to wait at least 6 months. Cheaper too.

But I guess people love beta testing.

But the point is that the industry used to make it a technical requirement that it worked on day one. In the 90's Nintendo literally would not let you release a game that had any gamebreaking bugs they found including 100%ing the game. Only one game ever slipped through on N64 (Silicon Valley).

You used to be able to buy games on release with confidence.What you explained should never be happening in the first place.

i agree

Because he's green. He believes, like too many do, in a wholesale collapse is impending. The truth is that for as many idiots subsist in the gaming industry, there are just as many clever rats who have aligned their interests and investments to survive the fall of many, many stupid factors.

There will be no "clean" collapse. Perfect example is the faggot shilling the Unreal 4 engine. That engine is now owned by Chinese jews (Tenscent) and they won't even REMOTELY feel a ding from the collapse of a game industry. They'll simply collect the debts from others and then start actively, 100% controlling those entities in trade for bailing a few of them out. Tenscent will become the new EA, except even shittier because they're Chinese so fuck the idea of quality entirely. F2P moba garbage for everyone staring your favorite past franchises.

There are PLENTY of predatory lenders out there that aren't just EA, and they're now well aware that vidya is the most lucrative hobby the world has, right now. They want that pie and they'll get it. A collapse, then, won't look like the shit that took place with 1980s consoles, who didn't have international investors. The shit is going to look like cancer, toppling business after business, but then propping a lot of them back up in some sick mutated growth display of lands conquered.

Hey. Let me say some positive things about my experience at Irrational Games Boston as well. While I've bitched a bit about management and its weird paranoid atmosphere, I should say that all of the actual creative and technical and QA people were really cool and hard-working and dedicated and friendly open minded people. I got to talk to everybody and learn about what they do and hear the awesome music from the various rock bands engaged in by members of the crew.

ANECDOTE TIME!

depressing if true.