Posts by Furyo

Corwin, please let me know if you ever need to talk. I'm responsible for dragging your ass to Germany in the first place, and I don't want it to make you feel this way.

You know I think the world of the family you have built. Your dedication to your craft is what made you so good, and your family is another reflection of that dedication. I really do think they go hand in hand together, and not opposite like you make it seem. Having a creative outlet is extraordinarily important, and in time you may be able to share more of your own outlets with your kids, which will improve things tremendously.

Awesome Alex, congrats on the permanent gig, I'm glad you found your place in this industry of ours

It seems Activision is about to launch Sierra once more at Gamescom, and have a new logo teaser for it here:

There is a difference between F2P as a business model and F2P as a game genre. Most people think of both as one thing, but it doesn't have to be that way. Like Frie said though, no one has cracked that formula just yet, mostly because we haven't found a way to break the traditional SP AAA production schedule into tiny bite size deliverables that can be priced in F2P mode. So F2P really just is mobile games and moba/online FPS games at this point because maps can be broken into parts.

What we're really facing here is what Hollywood did with sitcoms like Friends, and 24, The Shield, The Wire, etc paving the way for all other series. We have to find a way to make AAA high end content in a relatively cheap but very fast way and write story episodes. Once we have that, we'll have the traditional AAA SP games again. For now, it's all online online online.

Some people will always say with hindsight, you could say anything, so I'm calling it now, we haven't seen the end of the huge turmoil just yet.

Quote from Vilham

I am not disputing your general claim, but this claim about Dark souls is pretty wrong. Dark souls was not a sleeper hit, demon souls was. Dark souls was pretty much guaranteed to sell 2m+ units.

Apologies, I got the two confused....

My reply is nonsense? I promise you no large AAA publisher would ever have looked at it twice when presented with it. Way too hardcore, no broad appeal, etc etc. It became a sleeper hit amongst the hardcore crowd and now other publishers will get the sense they can make those games too. But the risk to take on this franchise was way too high for such meager estimated rewards. That's the other problem it has going for itself, you can't grow the target demographic of Dark Souls to a comfortable size for a major AAA franchise the size these large publishers have.

Risk averse also means passing by a few hits every now and then. Namco had to take the risk, and they did and won.

Dark Souls had the sales of a great indie title, no large AAA publisher would ever look at it twice on paper. Hence why Bandai picked it up.

The so-called bubble isn't really one. The drop in sales on those large franchises is a prolonged process that takes multiple installments over multiple years. It started last year for CoD, and Activision is now betting big on Destiny (rightfully so with 4.6 million beta players) so that franchise can take over. Ubisoft prepared The Division, Rainbow Six and Watch_Dogs to take over Splinter Cell and Assassin's Creed (the latter still being hot).

And some franchises can still be dead on arrival. Disney got a few of those recently (Prince of Persia should have been the new Pirates of the Carribean and failed utterly) just like EA pushing for a return of Medal of Honor failed bad too. Still not a sure bet, but the risk is much worse when banking big with these installments.

Nintendo may have been in this business the longest, but year over year they've now lost big on two separate fiscal years. The WiiU is picking up some steam now that Mario Kart has come out, but if there is one company that is so inherently dependent on its big 1st party franchises, it's them.

Please internet, get it right, it's Ken Levine not Kevin. That was the subject of so many jokes at Irrational too. Not a week would go by without Ken telling us someone had called him Kevin again

Look, the argument of "what makes a game successful sales wise" is a tired old bitching fest amongst people who mostly have no idea about the financial aspects of game development (gamers)

1 million, 2 million, 3 million copies sold (either sold in or sold through, another distinction that needs to be made) is all relative. To a gamer it sounds like a huge amount. At 180 million $ revenue, how could you not be making money???

It's a lot more complicated to publishers. Publishers want their STOCK to rise. That's the job of all CEOs of all publicly traded companies. So 180 million $ of revenue seems like a lot to anyone, but when your competitor is selling millions of hats and dresses a month at 25 cents a pop is netting the same amount for 1/10th the investment and 1/20th the risk upfront, it doesn't matter that you made money, your STOCK will DROP. And that will cost you so much more than 180 Million $ that ultimately you will have lost money.

That's the reason why infamous Bobby Kotick once said Activision was not interested in franchises that couldn't net 100 million dollars PROFIT per year. Not that there isn't good money to be made under that artificial limit. But because the resources of his company are better spent (read, create more stock value) working on those few franchises that do net that profit.

That's why the AAA market has shrunk by 48% in the past 5 years (amount of AAA projects published in the Western world). And there would be plenty of other games to make for a B market of publishers and developers, but guess what, no investor wants to risk the cash so the B market died a not so long and painful death circa 2010.

AAA is the Hollywood of the gaming industry. Risk averse companies consolidated the market around key franchises (like Hollywood) and won't spend their cash on anything that doesn't reach their top sales figures of the past few months, cause otherwise they go bust. It's better to win big on 3 games a year than to win some lose some on 20 titles a year.

With the one exception that Hollywood is all centralized in LA, with offshoots in Vancouver, NY, etc to film on location, whereas the game industry still has centers in a few countries around the world.

Not that I know for sure this will happen, and far from me to wish for it too, but I'd be worried about ongoing development post HF2. Also, still very worried with future of Crytek as a developer. I understand they want to publish online games, and truthfully they should, but they also need to make these games or they won't have anything to publish.

Everyone wants to be self publishing, everyone wants to make F2P and everyone is making a MOBA game. Fact of life, the market won't sustain them all.

Edit: As a reminder, people at Crytek blamed the move to F2P everything as one of the reasons for this financial incident.

Point the finger at that's the only fucking thing that everyone in this industry believes in any more. F2P MOBAs up the wazoo, few places under the sun and everyone else left with their eyes to cry in a year or so.

That and the most killer dynamic sunlight at 2.5ms GPU render time

Tiago is awesome, no doubt the best graphics engineer I've ever worked with. And a great chap to boot.

Good time to revive this thread, the level I made in the game just got an awesome Lego scene recreation: http://kotaku.com/lego-bioshock-…sive-1605233931

I'll take a 6th one if you ever come across another

Just started playing tonight, my first little heist offline with bots. Please look for me if you play during euro friendly times, looking for some good coop action

Took the plunge today for the final day and just got Payday 2. Looking forward to playing with you folks Do we have a steam group or something?

Just finished the game, without spoiling it, it felt very personal. It's a subject matter that will make me cry almost every time, and it didn't fail. Superb ending

They did their research well. Pretty sure the characters are fictional but of course the events are very real. They partnered with a few historical departments of various organisations, and are sponsored by a recent documentary that aired on TV and is widely recognized as the best ever made on that time period