He went on: "It is a gross but all too common sight to see, another corporate game hitting the top of Steam while the team is left looking for work and cut off from any possible profit sharing.
And, there it is.
Unions. Not just for blue collars anymore.
All devs should be entitled to royalties
Honestly, I don’t understand why any studio wouldn’t do this. Not only does it mean you can differ some pay until later effectively (obviously you still need to be competitive, because people don’t like gambling with their livelihood), but it actively encourages devs to make the best game possible. If they’re just working for a salary, they have no skin in the game. Give them a reason to make the absolute best thing they possibly can make.
Hollywood perfected royalties. If structured right, you can promise everyone at the company 200% of the games profit and never pay them a cent.
For example, you sell all rights to the game to a shell company owned by the studio’s parent for 1¢.
This all sounds nice but isn’t the case in any other industry, why should game dev be different?
I made a statement on what they should do, for best results from employees, not on what they actually do. It should also be true for all other industries. I think all company profits should be shared with employees, and ideally owned, if not totally then at least in part, by employees. Give them a stake in the company, and a reason to care about how it’s doing, and they’ll put more effort in.
The fact this is incomprehensible to the capitalist class isn’t surprising though. They view humans as resources (hence the Human Resources Department), not as people with their own wants and desires.
But what about the moneyyyyyyyyy?
At this point in human evolution, I can’t understand how anybody would want to be in the gaming industry anymore. I would not blame any developer if they just decided “fuck it” and quit altogether. I’d applaud it, actually.
The corpo gaming industry, perhaps. I’ve seen various indie developers have a great time.
The 0.1% who actually hit it big. Let’s not include survivorship bias here :)
You don’t go into indie to hit big though. You do it because it’s your passion, just like any other creative out there.
You can’t pay rent or for food with passion. Indie as in making it your job is brutal.
Indie as a hobby while having a day job can be peachy (I’m doing it myself).
Yep and that’s why it’s really important to have government investment to increase the chances of getting games out there. For example, Untitled Goose Game got government grants and was a huge success - there are many other examples also. Without the grants, they wouldn’t have been able to make it.
You don’t really have to “hit it big” even moderate success (comparatively) is enough to pay the bills for a long while from what I’ve heard from a few indie devs online.
Hitting it big, In Indie terms, is making even $1 in profit, though.
Like 90% don’t even make back their budget
I wanted to be in the video game industry when I was younger and followed through with it by learning programming and pretty much everything I could with computers.
But then while I was in university, the story about EA’s working culture broke. How they’d say hours were normal but they might need extra hours during “crunch time”, which sounded reasonable until you learned that they just set deadlines such that it was always crunch time. The partners of EA workers did a class action suit against the company and won it IIRC.
That was enough for me to adjust my trajectory. I realized the suddenly obvious bit: people usually go into the video game industry because they have a passion for video games, which sets them up for exploitation like any other job that many people want to get in to.
I might still make a video game but I never intend to be a peon in the video game industry.
they’d say hours were normal but they might need extra hours during “crunch time”,
I always had this arrangement at the companies I worked for, except the “normal hours” were actually me doing next to nothing, and the “crunch time” was me genuinely busting my ass for a few weeks nearly every waking hour to get the software finished and out the door. It was nothing more than an extension of how I handled college rather than some arrangement that the companies intentionally offered. Management was always just so utterly fucking clueless about anything related to the technical side of software development that it was easy to fool them into thinking that my way of doing things was just normal for the field.
This whole industry is job security hell. Man, people decades ago dreamed of being somewhere in the industry. I don’t really know now who’d want to be in it knowing how awful job security even is.
It’s like the movie industry, now. They only have a job as long as the game is in production, and all they get is the weekly paycheck.
Except they’re not set up to be able to do that like the movie industry is.
Sounds like a problem for the devs right everyone?
When I was a teenager, I really wanted to work in the video game industry. Really glad I don’t. I still want to learn to make video games, but I never want to work for any video game company. Especially any that have been around for say… 20 years and/or publicly traded.
Unfortunately, you’re not the demographic the industry is looking for. What they want now is obedient, but expendable staff who’ll only be on long enough to see a project done. Then you’re discarded. The other pocket of people they’d want is, you know what type.
You’re better of being your own independent video game worker.
Yeah, I went to school for it. Never broke in. Ended up with a much better and wayyyy more stable job.
Couldn’t imagine trying to get in now that every studio is owned by like ~3 companies.
I think we’re approaching a point where games are going to be made like movies.
Teams assembled for one project, everyone does their bit, and are then discarded when they’re no longer needed.
Big publishers will probably have a pool of people they can push between projects depending on what’s needed. Ubisoft appear to do that, when you look at the credits in their games, there’s like 10 subsidiary studios involved. For smaller studios, you’ll probably be let go between games until you’re needed again. Maybe they’ll keep your information and rehire you because you did a good job of hard surface rigging or whatever last time. Maybe they hire an excited school-leaver to sloperate a clanker. Who knows.
Approaching?
AAA has been following that model for a decade.
They don’t give a shit about the people that work for them and fire them as soon as it’s convenient.
They fire people and allow them to re-apply for their job because then they don’t have to pay continued service rewards.
Major difference is that in Hollywood, you don’t hire a bunch of, say, VFX artists for a movie, you contract the company that retains them. They’ll generally still have jobs when the movie is over. It’s mostly just the cast, director and writers that work on a per-project basis. Games industry is somehow worse than Hollywood.
A lot of them do seem to do that. The credits for most games are ludicrously long and thank dozens of subcontracted companies.
I honestly don’t think your average AAA studio could even tell you how much AI slop is in their final product. It’s not none, and hasn’t been for years.
There go my hopes of a post launch performance patch.
The game runs like arse even on a 9070XT.
60-70fps with egregious cutscene pop-in even after the INI engine tweaks mod on a 5090 is criminal.
“Firaxis” developers create a working game challenge (impossible)
Lmao I built my computer 8 years ago, and it was mid tier even then. Runs it just fine. You may need to tweak some settings.
I think we have a very different opinion on what runs fine. I wouldn’t be PC gaming on eight year old hardware. My PS5 and Series X are five years old and I don’t much like how they run modern games.
I’m sure your setup is fine for you but ZCOM has obvious performance issues represented by the Steam user reviews. Ignoring that isn’t truthful.
Okay, what would you like details on?
It runs without stuttering, the controls are responsive, there’s no lag. Like, what do you suspect I’m experiencing that I’m not telling you about? I’m unsure what could be different about my set up from all of the people having issues. Perhaps I’m just lucky?
Game runs fine for me (4070 Super), but I can’t play more than 20 minutes without hitting bugs.
I’m not sure I’d say not being able to play longer than 20 min without hitting bugs is “running fine”
You can have performant jank :D
Running smooth but encountering logical error that messes up the ability to play
Is different from
Sluggish performance and choppy rendering
Gamerant is saying the studio was low on funds and facing a $20 million dollar lawsuit from a former exec when the workers were furloughed weeks prior to launch, that dozens of employees have already been brought back, and that Bit Locker is claiming to want to bring the rest back.
This was their first game, and if they do bring back the team members (with back pay) now that the game is a sucess, I would actually be much more understanding.
You’ll be surprised how many Star Wars games got canned in the last two years. I can’t really say because of NDAs and don’t want anyone in trouble. The whole industry is in trouble.
“the whole industry” lmfao no. Just shitty AAA studios that can’t function without a c suite fucking up everything to milk as much profit as possible for their shareholders. Blessings to the indie devs, and fuck the rest of them. Hope they burn and give real studios a chance.
I agree on this actually, I was referring really to that when I said industry. I think indie devs, well most, have a love for it so it’s not industrialized.
Yet another certified bruh moment,
The devs keep getting stabbed in the back by evil greedy CEOs
I won’t even buy the game then
This is why I pirate most games unless it’s from indie devs. Fuck any and every corpo entity. Like hell I’m gonna let them profit from me while stabbing those who actually did the work in the back.
What’s the point? You can’t even enjoy your laurels. Just fucked the minute release hits so they dont have to pay you. Fucked up. Nobody should work for a game corporation.
Nobody should work for a
gamecorporation.My actual goal, anymore.
A wise man once said devs that are afraid of losing their jobs dont go on to make great games. I was going to purchase this game but now ill wait till its on super sale.
I saw it available on high seas
Yeah I’ll not be buying this then.
The unfortunate reality of it now, like having to keep your CV constantly updated and ready if ever to be laid off at any time. And it’s worse than ever.
“Congratulations. Great job. Goodbye now.”
I was considering buying this as a massive fan of XCOM 2.
Was.
I’ll just keep playing Cyber Knights: Flashpoint thank you very much.
I love that game, played the crap out of it, waiting for another major patch to come back.
Check out Xenonauts 2. It’s positioned as a spiritual sequel of classic X-COM, rather than modern XCOM, though so there are differences.
Probably the best difference, and I don’t understand why modern XCOM did this, is classic and Xenonauts have larger squad sizes. This is huge, because the entire genre is about gambling on actions. If you only have four actions, taking a 50% shot, but potentially being in danger, is an issue. If you have 8+ actions (8 squad members minimum, and you’ll often get multiple actions per member), a 50% shot is a lot less risky. It’s more about setting yourself up to get many attacks, rather than one perfect attack. There’s a lot more opportunities to mitigate risk.
It also has a much stronger strategic game, which I feel is largely lacking in modern XCOM. It’s all about tactical battles. This game, in particular, I think is almost entirely tactical battles, with little strategic opportunity, and no strategic layer IIRC.
I actually prefer the smaller squad sizes and more barebones strategic level. Having a more RPG-like structure and more focus on a small number of characters is my jam. I looked at xenonauts, I think it’s absolutely amazing for a specific kind of player, and I know that I’m not that specific kind of player.
Menace’s solution to this is to basically remove the option for most weapons to miss entirely. A squad in that game is treated like a single unit, the equivalent to an XCOM/Xenonauts soldier. When you attack, it’s the same percentage roll applied to every bullet in the burst for each soldier. This means a single attack might have 40 individual dice rolls. The question is not if you hit, it’s for how much. Seems like a nice way of solving that issue without adding a whole bunch of units.
Cyber Knights does something similar: an attack with most weapons is a burst with each bullet’s chance to hit being individually rolled. This normalizes the chance to hit so it’s not all or nothing.
Loved xcom ufo defense. Didn’t even bother with the newer games because of the squad size. Xenonaughts is a great recommendation, thanks for being here for us all.
