ugg, how did this make it onto the front page of HN. It's been floating around the internet for a few days.
I worked at Irrational Games / 2K Australia from Freedom Force right up until shipping Bioshock 2. I was a team lead, producer, and even ran the Australian office for about year before I left to make Neptune's Pride.
To me there is nothing really controversial in this article. Running big studios full of people with big personalities is really hard. People didn't get along. Things fell apart.
I just saw it tonight on Twitter and thought it was interesting. I know nothing in it is terribly unique compared to what other studios have gone through, but I still thought it painted an interesting picture of the inside of the industry and what happens to the individual parts that make up the mega-studios we're all used to.
This person is obviously unhappy, but I'm not suggesting there is a major scandal here.
It also sounds like it was written by someone who was not actually there. Most of the content in the article is old news and there are no real personal insights that ring true. E.g. the notion that the team was ok with changing the name from "irrational games" is totally inaccurate; it was a source of tremendous tension between the dev team (at least in Boston) and 2K.
Jay hasn't done sufficient self promotion here. Neptune's Pride 2 is one of my favourite multiplayer games ever. It's a turn based "board game", somewhat akin to Risk, that can take weeks to complete.
I can't speak for anybody else, but I was super passionate about my job and the team at 2K Australia, but I didn't enjoy working with my bosses. I found myself arguing with them all the time and felt that I wasn't able to do my job properly. I was burnt out. We argued about what should be in the games, and who should do what and when. There were tussles for creative control and lots and lots of political maneuvering. I wasn't making games anymore.
Rather than stay and do a bad job, I decided to leave and let others step up and have a go.
Glad I did becuase I rediscovered my passion for games and had some success in Neptune's Pride.
So basically the CEOs discovered there buried artistic dreams and took over? If you have to argue about who is on what place in the pipeline, that sounds like what the article is describing.
Yeah, something has been up with HN recently. I posted the original article 2 days ago [0]. It got many upvotes but it didn't show up on the front page and there were no comments.
The article seems to be more lamenting the decision to shut down 2K Australia, given that (from the author's perspective) it was still a productive studio. It's far from a finely-tuned, hard-hitting, ground-breaking treatise on the topic, but "how did this make it onto the front page of HN" seems extreme. If you know of a better essay on the topic of "What happened to 2K Australia?" or "What happened to Borderlands?" I'd love to see it.
I realize that things like:
> People didn't get along. Things fell apart.
and
> Ken Levine got tired of it.
might well tell the whole story...but I guess it leaves me wanting more (particularly since you imply that there was more).
I worked at an isp which serviced their CBR office with a 128k isdn then upgraded to a "2 mbit" PAPL link (a niche product where you used 2 or 4 pairs of directly connected copper which bypassed the exchange).
It's hard to notice or care about the fortunes of great, big, but faceless companies, and indeed I never paid attention to all these studios getting renamed and shut down. But it's eay to notice a single individual, and in this case Ken Levine has been on my radar since Bioshock as I recognized he was the one turning out video game story after video game story that could actually hold a candle to stories in other mediums.
Thus, I heard about the termination of his studio (or scaling his team back to ~15 people-- whatever) with dismay and utter confusion. As far as I knew, he made successful game after successful game, culminating in his whole team getting canned. So that's why I was interested in the story linked above, truthful that it is or not.
2K posted losses in the hundreds of millions in the year leading up to Bioshock Infinite's release (Bioshock would have been a significant percentage of that) and continued to lose money in the year of its release:
People often ignore that these games may cost over a $100 million to develop and the same again to market (Bioshock Infinite ads were everywhere). Selling 5 million copies might only net $100 million back again (after taxes and other distribution costs).
The market has only a specific size. If you sell as many games as the most successful games ever you really can't expect more. Besides, Bioshock Infinite had no special message, it was utterly trivial in that respect. The article is a joke on both fronts: That the sales projections must have been overblown since they indeed regarded the millions of copies sold as disappointing, and that they thought the story with its twist was great writing.
Oops, you're right. In my haste, I really did link to a parody piece. Very embarassing for me.
I was trying to illustrate the point that Bioshock Infinite's early sales were disappointing. Early projections had 2K selling 3 million copies in the first month:
I'd say it qualifies as Hollywood Accounting if the revenue exceeds the budget and yet the project is still deemed unprofitable. I haven't really heard of this in the games industry.
Typical Hollywood Accounting is when companies make up overhead figures. But in the games industry the costs seem too transparent to be able to get away with posting fictious overheads as most of the cost is dominated by marketing and salaries.
If it exists anywhere it would be in third party publishing deals where the developer takes an advance on royalties with the possibility of more royalties if the project is profitable. I've been involved in a few deals like this and although I have no proof of Hollywood Accounting I've had my suspicions.
Very strange conclusions. Was BioShock Infinite the only game they were developing in that period? Maybe some other development was too expensive. Without all numbers it's quite strange to make such conclusions.
>> the team was so huge and unwieldy that he (Ken) wanted to go back to basics and build a game with a skeleton crew like in the old days
That happens not only in the gaming industry. An approach that works on the small scale may not work on the large scale. If you are small you are forced to take care about your product, customers and employees (maybe not in this order). If you are at a big corp you have to deal with people who only care about company politics and the ego-game, even if you do not care about these things.
A minor issue: Borderlands 2 sold 12 million copies (as of 2015). Borderlands: the Pre-Sequel was quite disappointing compared to it (both sales and reviews) and it seems to be mostly based on Borderland 2's code. So at least part of its short development time and small team can be attributed to it not having been written from scratch.
Yeah. I've been a fan of the Borderlands franchise since the first game and I couldn't believe the guy had the courage of pointing to the pre-sequel as a success. It felt over-extended, and it should have been cut to a third, at most, and sold as a DLC for Borderlands 2.
While the Borderlands 2 and most its DLCs have been really fun and great value for the money, the pre-sequel has left me wary of the 2k shenanigans around the franchise. Won't make the mistake of pre-ordering again.
SWAT 4 didn't sell that well tbh, Tribes Vengeance was pretty bad and Vivendi stopped supporting the game 6 months after it's release, it was primarily a multiplayer only game and received only 1 patch, and Freedom Force was a joke.
It's also should be noted that Ken Levine is somewhat known to be hard to work with, there was a fall out with Vivendi/Sierra and there were issues with employees leaving Irrational after having fights with him (you can find various posts on industry forums) which also lead to Nate Wells (Executive Art Director) leaving Irrational for Naughty Dog.
What was wrong with Freedom Force? City of Heroes, it was not, but it was a fun little game. It also had a great modding community before the cease-and-desist orders from Marvel started.
I agree. It was a great VIDEOGAME. Bleeding edge graphics -- nope, but it made up for it in spades with good, fun gameplay. Reminded me (in substance rather than style) of a PC-equivalent to a first-party Nintendo game -- not everything needs to be a sweeping epic of action movie sizzle, or super dramatic story telling. Call me old fashioned, but sometimes I like playing videogames that are games.
I played through the entire game in 2004 (the original, not Third Reich.) The ending works pretty well emotionally. There were a few levels that almost got me to quit, though, particularly the underground/ant levels.
I played through the whole original Freedom Force when it was originally released. Loved it. Didn't go for the "Third Reich" expansion because I was not super interested in more WW2 sounding stuff at that point and as a youth my gaming budget was quite restrained.
It doesn't meant they were a success, but you said Freedom Force was a joke, and it wasn't. The scores don't prove anything, but support that is wasn't a joke.
I think this isn't necessarily true, especially in an era where returning to underground/cult IPs that didn't sell well is becoming a more common strategy. Shenmue 2 and Nier were both games that didn't make back nearly enough to support the developers, and yet they both have anticipated sequels on the horizon that devs/fans/news outlets are taking seriously.
I agree about Tribes:Vengeance; a pox on whoever decided the game needed a "prequel" that focused on a single-player mode and ignored all the aspects of the previous two games that made them so great. That entire franchise has suffered since it left the hands of Dynamix.
I can't get on board with you regarding Freedom Force, though. While some of the levels were a bit tedious, the character customization and feel of the game was superb. I can't think of another superhero game since (at least, outside of the MMO realm) that allows you that degree of freedom (no pun intended).
FF was a decade too early; had it come out in 2012 it could have ridden the Avengers wave.
The highs and lows are what make life intresting.
Be passionate about what you do and give it your all.
Make it personal.
Give a damn.
It's the only way to live.
Unless you have equity (and even then it must be a large amount), you are a cog that can be replaced at will, trading X hours per week of your life that you won't ever get back for your currency of choice.
Give a damn and make it personal: about your growth, your compensation, and your career path. If you want passion, work towards financial security and then work on something fulfilling, where you control your destiny.
No one is looking out for you but you.
Source: 15 years in tech, also watching a friend lose everything (EDIT: friends from 80+ hour weeks, job and house when let go) when High Voltage Studios (a game studio in Illinois) started its decent into failure
Are saying is that unless you can afford to start your own company you should not care about what you do all day every day?
Absolutely agree that you need to be thinking about your own growth and compensation, but let's be honest, your growth probably going to happen inside somebody elses company, I don't think you should let that hold you back on enjoying every day and trying to be the very best at whatever it is that you do.
I would argue you should not put off passions for some future day. Life is short. Be passionate today.
I dont know how your friend "lost everything" when High Voltage went bust. Did he go to jail or something?
It's perfectly possible to be passionate about a company and being part of building its products and making sure that you've properly financially and professionally insulated against failure or calamity.
I have seen too many Programmers lose everything. I'm not sure why.
I think part of it's the big money up front, free perks(food & drink), and all the positive energy that the founder/founders tell the employees. It seems like family--kinda. It seems like a dream come true.
Then your not. A bigger company buys yours, and heads roll. Then the real world rears its ugly head. You are being interviewed by a kid.
Since the barrier to entry is not great--there's usually someone to fill your shoes. The ego is not killed though. You had a really good run. You have skills. You start to regret all those pep talks you gave people. I seen some turn to drugs to fill the void.
I have seen twenty somethings go from the fast food industry to pretty good jobs. Their attitudes changed. They aren't cynical about the "system" anymore. They have a great time at work. They work hard. Some save that money, but a lot of it is just blown. The cute girlfriend worships him. It all seems kinda easy, but hard enough to not worry. "No one can do what I do, or as well." There's company dinners. The awards. There's trips to Europe, with LDS steeped into the luggage. Fun times! Life couldn't be better.
The company quietly losses money, and it's back to just getting by. Too many become homeless.
I really believe unless your the Rock Star Programmer; save your money because their will be a time when the parties over. In this industry, it seems like it's in your late thirties.
I hate to be that guy, but I'm tired of hearing, "I used to be a programmer." from a homeless person. Don't think she will stick by you either. Don't estrange the people you once knew when you get that shiny job. Don't let the "haves, or rich kid's father fill your head with stars, and cliches. He has a huge bank account to fall back upon. He has assets to fall back on. He will take care of his kid, but you are expendable.
> I hate to be that guy, but I'm tired of hearing, "I used to be a programmer." from a homeless person.
Is this really happening? I can't imagine someone good enough to make big bucks suddenly go this bankrupt. Even if you are in SF, you could buy an airplane ticket to some extremely cheap place, do some consulting or freelancing and get back on your feet in no time.
In my experience, the road to personal satisfaction at a corporation is to take pride in doing a great job, taking each day at a time. If at the end of each day you can say you did quality work of which you are proud, then you're doing it right. If, at the end of all that, you are contributing to something of substance (such as a hit game, or a product that gets a lot of users), then that's just the cherry on top.
If you pin your hopes and dreams on the actions of executives above your pay grade, then you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Don't get emotionally invested in stuff that you can't control.
When you're hired to do a job, do it as well as you can, and then go home with the emotional energy to spend on your friends/family/hobbies.
What does that have to do with making the company you work for your life?
If your passion is hinged on your company's success there's a decent chance that is going to end poorly for you.
Indeed - be passionate about the work you do - but that may or may not have anything to do with the company that you work for.
I've had jobs where I very much enjoy and am passionate about the work I do but did not necessarily buy into the company culture or vision. These companies were instrumental in my career growth but ultimately not the right fit for me, but I have absolutely no regrets about my time with them.
On the flip side, I still know plenty of "koolaid drinkers" that are still at these companies (or have been laid off by them) and I can objectively say that many of their careers have not progressed since I was there. I know: different strokes for different folks. Maybe they value stability over career progress and that's okay.
Let's just not pretend that the best way to grow a person's career is to attach yourself to someone else's company that doesn't necessarily have your best interest in mind.
Sounds like someone fell for the passionate bit. Translation 'work really cheap for me and really hard'. They take the passion straight to the bank and give you a pat on the back, trust me.
Companies will fire you at the first convienent opportunity. There is no such thing as loyalty for an employer. Don't take it personal, live your life.
Those companys have a tendency to grow, and at a certain point, the old "Loyalists" are swept aside by a silent alliance of douches. After that its run of the mill. Do not bet on human constellations to uphold.
It is actually kind of difficult to get fired at a large tech company, unless you do something illegal, and you'll get plenty of advance notice since you'll be put on a performance plan.
I disagree. At the end of the day you are nothing but a piece of meat to your employer that they are obligated to pay. Almost every employer is actively working to get as much work out of you for as little cost to them as possible. That is to say, there are those employers who aren't like this, but they are few and far between and are the exception, not the rule.
If you aren't a partner, "making it personal" at work means quitting when you have had enough. "Passionate" co-workers quit earlier, without another job ready and/or with some kind of unpleasant showdown.
I m trying to see the other side of this whole affair. Usually buisness-leaders, expect a royal household to form around them, who is rewarded on perceived loyalty.
Now creative personal, can be "unsettling" from that perspective, it might be not that extreme in the video games industry as on the theater-stage, but from the CEO-medieval perspective, the constant fluctuation of signals might seem like betrayal and back-stabbing.
Reaction would be the exactly wrong approach- getting more involved and keeping a tighter control on everything, resulting in content, where the more "extreme" fluctuating personal is leashed. Now the resulting product would miss the extremes, which is exactly what attracts the audience in the first place.
Why is it so hard to run a tech company in Australia? Some days it feels like I either need to start my own company to find out or just leave this country to find job with a career.
What makes you think it's any harder than anywhere else?
Part of 2K Australia's problem was that we grew very big when the Aussie dollar was low, then when it came back up we were a very expensive studio. We had very little turnover and a lot of well paid, senior developers made us look even more expensive per head.
We were working closely with 2K China who were a lot cheaper per head.
Given this direct experience, in this instance do you personally think that the well paid senior developers provided value compared to the cheaper her head talent?
Err, in this instance I don't think they were directly comparable.
We always had the impression somebody far up the chain would be looking at the spreadsheet and thinking about where they want to invest further. It may have been our imagination.
In fact, now that I think about it, probably the opposite was happening because a lot of effort when into growing the Marin Studio in California which I'm sure would have been even more expensive per head than us.
Meh. This is what overseas management do to Australian subsidiaries all the time. They don't worry about the profits made by the employees, what they tend to believe is "It's Australia, we get tax incentives to work here, there's no way Australia workers could be as productive as U.S. workers."
Then they try to introduce business practices that only work in the U.S. and consequently fail. I've seen it time and time again.
While I'm a US worker, I managed a team in Bulgaria. Initially I synchronized via email, chat with each team mate. Met once a month for architectural review over video.
Management hoisted that we had to do stand ups over video chat daily. It was done 9PM EST, and 5AM their time. The time was picked to match my managers PST schedule. There was also the weekly backlog grooming, biweekly poker plannning, etc.
Working with that team, a European Sales team and on site European vendors. The two things I've seen is our meeting culture grates on them. Secondly my American team mates, I don't want to say looked down. But consistently commented, on lack of devotion and effort of other counterparts.
IMO the main issue is the very strong resources sector driving up salaries (there are a lot of tech companies servicing the mining industry), coupled with the comparatively low population meaning that the overall market is pretty small.
> Why is it so hard to run a tech company in Australia
A number of reasons, I think. Our terrible internet, the lack of support from the state governments (and the lack of _understanding_ of our industry for those governments that are trying; see: QLD), an investor base that (after spending the last 7 years navigating it) appear to be desperately afraid of B2C start-ups, and don't quite get B2B start-ups either... the list goes on, really.
Specifically a game development company, you mean? Well, I think video game income is quite a speculative proposition, capital city cost of living is high (and that's where the talent wants to live, you'll have trouble attracting people to Dubbo), and therefore it's hard to pay people a living wage or keep a company alive.
Very similar to the Australian film industry, really.
To put it into perspective Australia's population is 23.13 million. Most people live near or around the main capital cities. Flipping the coin on the other side when looking at the population for some American States/districts California (38 million), Texas (26 Million), Florida (19 Million) it's pretty easy to see why Aussie market is so much smaller.
There are plenty of smaller nations with booming tech industries, Australia lacks government investment and natural accelerators and incubators which are especially needed in this case due to it's very high COL and COB.
I don't think it's necessarily true that the government doesn't support startups. Programs like the R&D Tax Incentive (cash back on R&D spent, including local developers) and Export Market Development Grant (refund up to 50% of overseas marketing costs) are very useful to small businesses. That said, I don't think the government does a good job
Disclaimer: I work for PwC's Nifty Forms team, which helps SMBs in Australia with these programs.
This was written 4 days ago and says Bioshock Infinite sold 4.3 million units, yet the Wikipedia page says it has sold 11 million copies. Where is the disconnect? Seems like a huge discrepancy.
Is "units" normalized to full price or something where "copies" just total games sold even at sale price? That is the only guess I could come up with.
Funny how the article mentions Bureau as the point where it all came crashing down.
I actually quite liked the game. The problem I think is that there was a market mismatch with that title.
XCOM 2012 caught a lot of flak for it being too different from the 1994 original. Only brilliant execution made it possible for it to succeed.
An XCOM TPS (Which is what Bureau is, to a degree) is just too much of a stretch, most of XCOM's audience are not that open minded unfortunately.
I believe that ultimately the aforementioned market mismatch was too difficult to overcome, even without the publisher's interference and micromanagement.
> XCOM 2012 caught a lot of flak for it being too different from the 1994 original. Only brilliant execution made it possible for it to succeed.
I believe XCOM 2012 got a lot of flak prior to its release because 2K at first announced an FPS game called "XCOM". After lots of delays and a pretty cool reception from gaming press and fans, there was an announcement from Firaxis that they were also making an XCOM game, this time a TBS. The TBS, when released, got almost universal praise, and sports a heft awards list.
I grew up with the original x-com and terror from the deep, and regularly play them to this day. I personally didn't mind the FPS/third person shooter bit, and I think it even felt a lot more "under invasion" and scary than the x-com remakes.
So I actually liked it, but because it was so poorly made technically I never bothered to Finnish it. Maybe I'll force my way through it one day, because of the story and atmosphere, but it's frankly one of the worst pieces of gameplay I've ever tried.
> So I actually liked it, but because it was so poorly made technically I never bothered to Finnish it. Maybe I'll force my way through it one day, because of the story and atmosphere, but it's frankly one of the worst pieces of gameplay I've ever tried.
I'm a bit late to the party here, but this is where "Let's Play" videos on YouTube are really great. You can get all the bits you want without any of the frustrating gameplay. The trick is just to find a YouTuber you can stand for the duration of the video (Nerd Cubed is one of my favourites, but he would be an acquired taste).
The latter part of the game is tedious but in the end I think it was worth it as I was pleasantly surprised by the ending. Did not see that one coming.
I also liked the Bureau, but it took a while to do so. The start was a little bit slow and hard, so I guess if you didn't forced yourself to keep on playing it might have made a far worse impression than it actually was.
Any amount means profit. Is there any sensible reason not to release them DRM-free? Besides psychological / political ones (like 2K being scared of DRM-free conceptually), I don't see any reasons.
You don't matter to 2K. The number of people who would ttly pay for a DRM free version is way smaller than the number of people who would be stopped from just pirating the thing by the DRM.
This is why DRM is a fact of life. Adjust or do without.
I just had a look, and found Infinite + all DLC very easily in a torrent index. Dozens of seeds, too.
The number of people stopped from pirating the thing is effectively zero. The number of people willing to pay for a DRM free version demonstrably exceeds that.
> You don't matter to 2K. The number of people who would ttly pay for a DRM free version is way smaller than the number of people who would be stopped from just pirating the thing by the DRM.
Nonsense. Number of people stopped by DRM for such games is zero, because it's broken already. Do the rest of the math. As I said, it's not about the money, they are losing money by not selling it DRM-free. It's about some irrational fear of admitting that DRM is garbage and isn't needed.
How does it prevent them from making more money? It doesn't really answer the question why they can't release it on GOG.
Most of those games are in the phase where people who never played them buy them because they got interested in them. So it means it's not a huge, but at the same time stable influx of sales, since there are always people interested in good classic games. So selling them as wide as possible only brings them additional profit.
As I said, it's only additional profit. After the prime time of those games, it's sales that come from those who appreciate playing good games regardless of how recent they are. So they already don't "care" about these users because they are a minority, but they can care about more potential sales in the long term. Percentage of those who wouldn't buy those games with DRM is the same as for new games (DRM-free preference doesn't depend on how new the game is). It's large enough in that long term. So if they are interested in such users, there is no point for them to lose out on those who would avoid such games because of DRM.
No, it's not only additional profit - you need people to make the DRM free version. It doesn't appear out of nowhere. It takes paid developers to do. Let alone future support if you plan on issuing patches down the road.
That's not even factoring the risk that you are now releasing a super easy to pirate version.
It doesn't seem that illogical to me that a publisher might forgo a DRM free version considering cost and risk.
> No, it's not only additional profit - you need people to make the DRM free version. It doesn't appear out of nowhere. It takes paid developers to do.
That's only for games really seriously infested with DRM. There perhaps, it takes some effort to weed out that stuff. But it's really the most recalcitrant cases. Usually it doesn't take any substantial effort.
> Let alone future support if you plan on issuing patches down the road.
That's unlikely. They might issue updates such as add-ons / expansions and other missing stuff. But they wouldn't issue bug fixes and etc. For instance EA are now releasing their games like Dragon Age: Origins on GOG. They offered their expansions there after the release as a "patch", but they wouldn't make any bug fixes and etc. Such games are way past their production cycle. Clearly EA don't mind extra sales coming from such games. Though quite a lot are still missing.
> That's not even factoring the risk that you are now releasing a super easy to pirate version.
So you are saying they shouldn't sell those games because what, pirates already pirated and still pirate them? That's ridiculous. It's simply saying - we can have more sales, but we shouldn't. That release has no effect on piracy whatsoever. If anything it can actually reduce it, because some might pirate cracked versions because they are DRM-free.
You now have to support an additional production build of your game.
You're suggesting that takes no effort?
By the way - patches don't just mean actual gameplay patches. Patches also means compatibility with future operating systems, drivers, and hardware that you can't possibly know anything about today.
> You now have to support an additional production build of your game.
What kind of build? The most they'd need to do is to repackage it. And really GOG do it on their own, so all they need to do is to provide the game to GOG. There is no build involved for such older games.
> Patches also means compatibility with future operating systems, drivers, and hardware that you can't possibly know anything about today.
Those don't depend on distributors, they are universal. I.e. if they are doing it on Steam, they can use it on GOG as well.
> What kind of build? The most they'd need to do is to repackage it. And really GOG do it on their own, so all they need to do is to provide the game to GOG. There is no build involved for such older games.
It doesn't matter. It's an extra build. That means extra testing and QA resources. Have you heard of regression bugs?
> Those don't depend on distributors, they are universal. I.e. if they are doing it on Steam, they can use it on GOG as well.
Maybe. Maybe not. Either way it's another build to support. You won't know until you test it.
If they can't handle trivial packaging (tarball) or consider it an insurmountable effort - they should switch to some other business. Again, such older games don't get allocated QA and other resources normal production cycle games do. They get very minimal treatment. GOG do that QA for them actually. And if there are major problems, GOG either fix it on their own, or they reject those games if they can't fix some very major bugs. In result their versions actually tend to work better than Steam ones. Such companies like EA or 2K on the other hand aren't likely to go and fix bugs in their old releases.
The question isn't how trivial it is (fairly), but how much work it is compared to the money it would bring in. From my limted experience if could well be < $5,000. That doesn't buy a lot of developer time.
Trivial one time effort isn't a problem in comparison with potential sales.
If 20,000 already requested a game on GOG which they sell for around $10-$15, you'll get way more than $5,000. How much sales that would be can of course vary from game to game, but I don't think Bioshock games are in trouble of not being bought.
> So you are saying they shouldn't sell those games because what, pirates already pirated and still pirate it? That's ridiculous. It's simply saying - we can have more sales, but we shouldn't. That release has no effect on piracy whatsoever. If anything it can actually reduce it, because some might pirate cracked versions because they are DRM-free.
No, like I said - it's a risk that needs to be factored. You're making it sound like DRM has no affect whatsoever.
Yes - pirates will still crack DRM and pirate games, however, that's a hell of a lot different than downloading a binary and having it run with no modifications whatsoever.
To suggest that DRM doesn't at least somewhat thwart mass piracy is ridiculous.
There is no risk there, and nothing to factor. DRM has nothing to do with piracy, especially for older games which were and are widely pirated already. I.e. not releasing those games DRM-free means lost sales, point blank.
> Yes - pirates will still crack DRM and pirate games, however, that's a hell of a lot different than downloading a binary and having it run with no modifications whatsoever.
You miss the point. Once it's cracked - that's it. It's pirated forever since, and no further DRM would stop that. So again, not releasing it DRM-free means some sales will be lost and there is zero risk in such release.
> To suggest that DRM doesn't at least somewhat thwart mass piracy is ridiculous.
It doesn't. It actually is shown to increase it, especially for older games. Some most obnoxious DRM like Denuvo is shown to slow it down, just by the mere fact of placing draconian restrictions on usability, but even that is being cracked eventually. However such older games we are talking about don't use this trash most of the time.
> You miss the point. Once it's cracked - that's it. It's pirated forever since, and no further DRM would stop that. So again, not releasing it DRM-free means some sales will be lost and there is zero risk in such release.
I don't agree with this. To acquire a cracked version of something you have to research and understand the channels in which pirated material is released - this means having the basic technical competency to do things such as download a torrent or run a game crack.
I know people that cannot or will not put in the time to do this and will simply purchase the material instead.
If, however, it was simply a binary to download this would not be an issue.
To suggest that DRM is completely useless is inaccurate. Even if it is just a hurdle, it does have an effect.
> I don't agree with this. To acquire a cracked version of something you have to research and understand the channels in which pirated material is released - this means having the basic technical competency to do things such as download a torrent or run a game crack.
Which is trivial, since nothing stops first knowledgeable pirates from applying those cracks and releasing cracked versions ever since. Downloading such games is trivial, you can either accept the inevitable, or pretend there is no elephant in the room (pirates providing easy to use DRM-free versions).
Business wise however, you can get more sales by releasing it DRM-free, because not only those who avoided the game because of DRM would buy it, but some of those who pirated it before, would buy it as well. It's good there are sensible studios who realize that and release even their new games DRM-free.
> To suggest that DRM is completely useless is inaccurate.
It's not useless, but it's not used for increasing sales. It's useful in a crooked sense, i.e. its purpose is always bad.
DRM tends to thwart piracy for, what, 24 hours after release, usually? The crackers are very good, and they usually break any kind of DRM, no matter how onerous and convoluted, in short order.
It's almost certainly not even that - after all, they gutted the DRM from Bioshock 1+2, and went with Steamworks for the minimal DRM in Infinite (AFAICS just used to validate DLC), versus the SecuROM invasion (and GFWL, for 2).
I'd guess you might see something like that show up for the remastered edition in a year or two, since "doing it while remastering the game" would be the time that might make the most sense for that.
Usually acquired studios pay for the mistakes of their parent companies. I don't know to which point it is a good idea to acquire a profitable company for millions of dollars, to set it for failure and then close it.
Starting a studio in Canberra seems like a peculiar choice. Canberra doesn't have the population, nor the standards of living needed to attract tech talent. It isn't even a cheap city to live in.
Large publishers like EA and Ubisoft always operated differently compared to other companies. Smaller companies usually just hire contractors or use 3rd party companies to work on their projects since they can't afford to employ someone to work on concept art, audio or voice over full time.
Large publishers able to keep employees even if they have months between different projects. Still they move people around their subsidiaries and projects a lot since in game development most of staff only work on certain part of project for limited time.
So closing isn't always mean someone was fired at all and in same time any acquired studio might be soon only exist on paper since all people might be working in different studios on different projects.
As much as I love the Bioshock series, I take all of the figures with a pinch of salt considering I, presumably not alone in this, own at least 3 copies of each on various platforms. I'm also about to buy the remastered for PC, just because.
The sad part is that the real people who made these great games will see none of this continued income.
Why would that make you take the numbers with a pinch of salt? It doesn't matter that you bought 3 copies, they sold 3 copies. The numbers are still accurate for copies sold, they aren't claiming active players or something, there's no subscription fees here.
"...Now to correct one thing, what keeps 2k and Take 2 afloat is Rockstar Games. They produce multimillion dollar games that go on to produce over 700 million dollars from their online mode alone. Their games are the top sellers in their years and even decades. Firaxis Games as of now is a failure of a studio. Years back yes they did develop the wildly successful Civilization 5 which went on to sell over 9 million units and Xcom Enemy Unknown that went on to sell over 3.4 million units. [1] Then they developed Beyond Earth which tanked at 1.4 million and Xcom 2 at .8 million, a game so bad by even it’s supporters admission it needs mods to be playable. Civlization VI is off to a rough start and will probably match Beyond Earth. It hasn’t even broken its first million yet.
Given how poorly they are doing, my money on the next studio closure is going to be them if they are not overhauled instead. I have no clue how their capacity to develop has declined so fiercely but sadly it has.
On to your question as to how a game can sell 1.7 million units and not be profitable. I’m going to break this down for you, on console sales the publisher only gets on average $27 for every $60 sold. Digital is more profitable at 70% of total sales. For that 1.7 it turned out $45.9 million, give or take a few million. After development and marketing the fact it sold significantly less than Borderlands 2 is why it is considered a failure. You sold 14% of what Borderlands 2 did.
Worse and I am going to give you the consumers perspective on this, the game is god awful. For starters it story is loaded with virtue signaling, but that’s only a minor annoyance. What truly cans it is the fact it is either the Pre Sequel is canon or 2 and the books are canon. That’s how atrociously written the presequel was. Even the voice actor of Handsome jack sounded miserable spewing out those out of character lines. The game was received so poorly that within months it was being bundled with Borderlands 2 to desperately sell units.
While I understand that development on The bureau wasn’t your fault it also was atrocious. I must say I loved their original version of the game that was first shown off. The final red flag for the games low quality should have been the YOLO trailer, but sadly I still purchased it, much to my regret.
Autralias other projects aren’t exactly well recieved. At best they are controversial, Bioshock 2 is hated by half the community at least, CodShock was an embarassment that alienated the entire original audience for the game and came with a story only the greatest of idiots thought was intelligent that ultimately damage the continuity of any future Bioshock games going forward in the manner of public perception. It sold well on the hype of Bioshock in the Sky, instead it was Call of Duty with color.
I understand that people put a lot of passion and work into those games, but that doesn’t make them by default good or profitable.
Thanks for giving us insights into what transpired though. Even if they are through tinted lenses it is always great to see insights into what transpires behind closed doors inside the industry."
Just the opposite. The sort of person who straightfacedly uses the term "virtue signalling" is also likely to rail about how the SJWs are ruining civilization.
Bioshock Infinite is one of the most acclaimed games in the last few years and only two from 2013 are rated better. It has a 94% Metacritic rating and was declared a 10/10 game by dozens of reviewers.
No idea about profitability, but it was a great game.
People retrospectively don't like it because it didn't live up to some of what the trailers promised (in terms of how large or open the city was) and the dimension tearing mechanic robbed it of weight for some ("If this is just one version of how things play out then what's the point?" Missing, of course, that THAT is the point).
Personally, I really enjoyed Bioshock Infinite including the so-called "Twist" ending. I did not see it as a Twist since they very obviously foreshadowed it. But to each their own.
In a sense, Civ 3 seemed more detail oriented in some aspects to me. For example how you could tell which "age" other players were in by the characters clothing, the art style seemed a little bit better suited for the game, the city zoom UI was in my opinion more clear, the diplomacy UI was more clear, etc. So yes, I am happy to see like-minded Civ players.
Now, I think with Civ 4 they tried to emphasize online play a bit... which to be fair, is not a bad motivation to have. The only problem is that emphasizing online play will impact offline play.
I worked at Irrational Games / 2K Australia from Freedom Force right up until shipping Bioshock 2. I was a team lead, producer, and even ran the Australian office for about year before I left to make Neptune's Pride.
To me there is nothing really controversial in this article. Running big studios full of people with big personalities is really hard. People didn't get along. Things fell apart.