On February 22 2019 07:58 {CC}StealthBlue wrote: Now ArenaNet is planning for Mass Layoffs. This would never have happened if Jeff Strain had stayed and created a new IP there instead of leaving and created another company.
ArenaNet, the studio behind the popular online games Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, informed employees today that it is planning big layoffs, according to a person who is there. Although ArenaNet did not give out exact numbers, and they may not yet be finalized, rumors floating around the studio signal that a significant number of people will be let go.
Songyee Yoon, the CEO of Korean publisher NCSoft West, which owns ArenaNet, e-mailed employees this afternoon with the news. “Our live game business revenue is declining as our franchises age, delays in development on PC and mobile have created further drains against our revenue projects, while our operating costs in the west have increased,” she wrote. “Where we are is not sustainable, and is not going to set us up for future success.”
Yoon added that the company plans to “cut costs across the organization” and restructure across the board, merging ArenaNet and NCSoft’s publishing divisions in the process. “The restructuring, cost-cutting, and strategic realignments are all being done to secure our tomorrow and to provide the foundation that will allow us to grow and acquire,” she wrote.
Later this afternoon, ArenaNet CEO Mike O’Brien plans to meet with staff to discuss the layoffs further.
Around 400 people work at ArenaNet, and for the past few years they’ve been working on a number of unannounced projects, according to one person familiar with goings-on at the company. However, that person said, slow development progress combined with a lack of new games in 2018 and 2019 has led to a financial squeeze. ArenaNet’s last release, the Path of Fire expansion for Guild Wars 2, launched in September 2017.
This news comes in the wake of widespread cost-cutting measures at NCSoft. Last September, NCSoft shut down Wildstar developer Carbine Studios, and earlier this year it began plans to reduce staff at the mobile studio Iron Tiger. In its financial earnings call earlier this week, NCSoft reported an annual decline in PC revenue.
When reached by Kotaku earlier today, an NCSoft representative declined to comment.
This is quite sad. I've been a huge fan of the GW series and supported it as much as I could all the way through (buying all expansions, doing microtransactions etc. - hell I think I own like 3 copies of each GW1 game/expansion). Unfortunately the masses were not ready for genre-redefining stuff they did in GW2...
What made GW2 stick out? I heard it had slightly more open world stuff going for it compared to other MMOs but then nothing else reached me. Didn't really seem to stick out a lot when not playing it or really being into MMOs. There never seemed to be a reason to actually care about that game enough to give it a try.
Star Wars: The Old Republic has that it is a decent single player game going for it and gets talked about due to that. It also has the Star Wars brand. Fell off quickly.
FF14 has the FF brand and generally just positive press over the years (after re-launch). Tons of other MMOs using brands to push initial interest as well, Elder Scrolls online is going well now on that. Then long term success depends on the game itself of course.
Though as I understand it GW2 is among top 5 of MMOs currently? So not doing badly at all.
Any new MMO that launches needs to have a selling point. Don't think GW2 really succeed in pushing one I found memorable or interesting. Most big titles that launches now has graphics as selling point since they can use engines 5+ years newer than what built the older games. They all run into the problem of not having 5+ years of content built though.
For GW2 you had several things that separated it from other titles: 1. The questing: There were no real fetch quests in there. You just get to the quest area (general vicinity), which lists various stuff you can do, you do any of it you fancy (don't have to do it all) and fill the bar - when you do, the quest is over and you get the reward (no need to go to any quest giver). Most of the quests also have multiple stages (especially the open world ones) which vary depending on player activities and how successful they are at things. It's way more interesting that "fetching 20 bird feathers" over and over again. 2. The exploration: You actually get quite a bit of exp just exploring. Finding vistas also leads to some of the most amazing looks at the world you've ever seen. There's also plenty of hidden puzzles and content that doesn't show up on the map and completing those gives you a super duper reward. 3. The teaming: Outside of instances there is no grouping. All the players are automatically grouped together if they're nearby and encounters scale up or down according to that. And everyone gets the rewards so there's no KSing and stuff. 4. The skills: Those are tied to the weapons you're using. Swap out your weapon(s) and you swap your skillbar (can be done mid-combat). 5. The story: Maybe not as technically advanced as in SWTOR (not fully animated) but you have a solid, branching storyline where your choices affect the world around you. Also, the entire world feels alive (just get to a group of NPC's and listen to their conversations, I've literally stopped for hours taking some stuff in). 6. The classes: There is no typical triumvirate in GW2 (tank, healer, dps) since every class can be geared to fill almost any role and since all of them have a strong self heal and everyone can revive you don't really need dedicated team members doing that.
I wouldn't worry too much about the graphics. ArenaNet is very well known for their super high quality art design and the worlds they create are just awesome. I believe I went up to level 40 just by exploring shit and doing some casual questing. Virtually no grind involved.
Coming from someone who put 2k+ hours into the first game, and maybe a little less than a hundred in the second, I'm just surprised Anet is having issues at this point. It seems on the surface level they're sort of just languishing. The game itself was solid framework, but they definitely focused on PvE content rather than the PvP crowd.
They failed to draw many of the competitive community from GW over to the second installment, especially at release; a lack of a GvG/HoH format with no ladder set it back. And that was one of the nice things about the original; to be in the competitive community didn't require a ton of time investment since you could just go and make a capped character specifically to play PvP. Getting a build together that worked in the meta didn't take a lot of time, and from there it's just about finding teams (which people were getting pubs all the time in those formats). It's really the only thing I think GW2 didn't have going for it; it was a different beast entirely. I'm uncertain how that played out over time, but at least from a distance it seems most of their playerbase at this point are roleplayers and the like. Which may have not worked out in the end.
Then again it's sort of old now, isn't it? It isn't unusual for a developer to reduce workforce when they're just focused on maintaining current numbers. Then again, it also seems sort of short sighted if you want to have something new coming up, to lay off workers. Maybe they just don't have any plans for something other than maintaining their current playerbase in GW2. Which would be a shame, because they are a pretty damn cool developer. Like you said, they are absolutely phenomenal when it comes to artwork, building worlds, and such.
looks like the largest # of layoffs occurred in IT. 41 people laid off from IT. 29 from marketing and 29 from live services. It looks like Blizzard preserved all of its game development staff.
Richard Lewis is quite a divisive character. The posted youtube video has 250+ upvotes and less than 10 downvotes. Considering it has Richard Lewis in it that surprises me. It must be a very good interview.
Lewis interviews Team Liquid CEO Steve Arhancet about a wide range of topics
If this works as advertised, the games industry will be taken over by Google.
Latency will as always be a big question and how it compares price wise. People have massive game libraries built up on other platforms in many cases that they would want to connect into it to use.
Seems they really want to compete with Twitch with the streaming focus on it as well.
From what I am reading, Google did a lot of tests last year across the country with a variety of networks connections. And people were telling outlets like Giant Bomb and so on that even less than great connections were just fine. About as buggy and weird as a normal video game system.
Games still matter. I think Google has made the right decision to open up internal development. But this won't work world wide, so consoles are going to still be a thing for a lot time. It also won't work for every game. But it does open up a possibility space that didn't exist before, to make games that are not limited by consumer hardware. Super complex city builders or 4x games with lots of systems running in the background. A game like Breath of the Wild with internal systems that are far more complicated and deep, but with the same scope. They can make wild shit that wouldn't be possible on consumer hardware just because of cost.
Games still matter though. So long as companies like Sony are making games like Bloodborne and Horizon Zero dawn exclusively for their system, people will buy Play Stations. And game devepers might liek the idea of google's reach and market, but depending on how development costs shake out(Like do they rent dev-kits, or do they have to have their own server rack to develop on), developers might not flock to this Google system. Developers and publishers are used to dealing with big companies that hold the keys their system, so they won't want to put all their eggs in Google's basket. But it will be nice if a new player comes in willing to fight for the talents of different developers. That is good for the industry as a whole.
Now EA is added to the list. I have less sympathy for this one cause, ya know, it's EA one of the worst companies to ever curse mankind.
The video game publisher Electronic Arts is laying off 350 people in its marketing, publishing, and analytics departments, the latest move in what’s been a brutal year for the gaming industry.
In an e-mail to employees obtained by Kotaku, EA marketing boss Chris Bruzzo said the goal would be to consolidate those departments, improve the publisher’s customer support, and change some of its international strategies, a move that includes closing offices in Russia and Japan.
“We have a vision to be the World’s Greatest Games Company,” he wrote. “If we’re honest with ourselves, we’re not there right now. We have work to do with our games, our player relationships, and our business.”
When reached by Kotaku this morning, EA sent over the following statement:
Today we took some important steps as a company to address our challenges and prepare for the opportunities ahead. As we look across a changing world around us, it’s clear that we must change with it. We’re making deliberate moves to better deliver on our commitments, refine our organization and meet the needs of our players. As part of this, we have made changes to our marketing and publishing organization, our operations teams, and we are ramping down our current presence in Japan and Russia as we focus on different ways to serve our players in those markets. In addition to organizational changes, we are deeply focused on increasing quality in our games and services. Great games will continue to be at the core of everything we do, and we are thinking differently about how to amaze and inspire our players.
“This is a difficult day. The changes we’re making today will impact about 350 roles in our 9,000-person company. These are important but very hard decisions, and we do not take them lightly. We are friends and colleagues at EA, we appreciate and value everyone’s contributions, and we are doing everything we can to ensure we are looking after our people to help them through this period to find their next opportunity. This is our top priority.”
I really have to disagree with the demonization of some of the larger game studios like ATVI, EA, and Ubisoft, that is so pervasive in the greater gaming community. They get knocked for "money-grubbing" through aggressive business tactics and attacked for rehashing the same games every year with minimal innovation. I feel this is a misguided approach, and of course it serves nobody.
In reality, all of these studios are victims of their own success. When you first release a game as an independent studio, you reap some amount of revenue, let's call that value R. This also comes with increased demand from fans for more features, more content, translation into different languages, establishing regional presences with local retailers and distributors, and so on. There are so many opportunities to broaden reach and increase the value of your game. If your game makes R, then let's say more features add 0.1R, more content adds 0.1R, localization adds 0.05R, regional marketing adds 0.05R... all of these things are really drops in the bucket compared to your big initial product, but they do add up. What usually happens is that studios will aspire to make the game's sequel Bigger, Better, More Extreme in various ways, and that incurs greater cost in terms of personnel and development.
Take one of my favorite games growing up, Need for Speed. The original NFS was pretty cool for what it was. NFS2 (I played the SE version) was full 3D, more responsive, had more depth, and was generally an improvement in every way. NFS3: Hot Pursuit was a phenomenal game with the ability to play in completely different ways by playing as the police. NFS4: High Stakes polished this idea even further and added a pink slip component into the career mode, in addition to gorgeous graphics and traditionally tight controls. However, NFS5: Porsche Unleashed marked a tipping point where the series started to lose its luster, despite massive budgets by this point. EA was sort of locked into a position where they had to offer everything that the previous sequels did PLUS more because that's just what everybody expects. At some point, a game series just becomes too bloated to properly sustain growth, and if it ever slips or fails, that represents an enormous resource sink with no payoff.
For games that reach this level of popularity and remain successful, the business strategy has to necessarily change to one of releasing on a regular cadence. For many of these studios, that cadence is annual. And rather than trying to expand on an already large game, they will instead try to maximize profitability by adding new revenue streams or reducing allocated headcount (doing the same amount with fewer resources). That's often because the risks of continuing to expand on a project that has a gradually declining playerbase over years and decades are too great. The demand is still out there for these games, and they're still very successful and supported by their respective fanbases, but further innovation is a dangerous venture. The other alternative is just dropping the series entirely (which does happen, depending on the studio's goals), but these studios have opted not to do that since people still want new versions.
Many gamers regard this as running an IP into the ground, and from a certain perspective that is true. However, how many times have we heard players clamoring for Half-Life 3 or Warcraft 4 over the years? At what point would those IPs feel stale, and how large would they have to be relative to their predecessors to garner the same level of interest?
On March 27 2019 06:39 Excalibur_Z wrote: I really have to disagree with the demonization of some of the larger game studios like ATVI, EA, and Ubisoft, that is so pervasive in the greater gaming community. They get knocked for "money-grubbing" through aggressive business tactics and attacked for rehashing the same games every year with minimal innovation. I feel this is a misguided approach, and of course it serves nobody.
a couple of points about this common "narrative" many software dev houses "sell to the public".
Some insightful games industry journalists have a very specific method of getting inside info. THey schmooz the front line or mid-level people. In order to keep the information pipeline open they can never assign blame to the front-line and mid level people. So when things go wrong.. its anyone's fault but the front line people. They have to be careful not constantly to criticize the fans as well. They can not constantly call the fans "entitled". If they constantly demonize the fan base that also harms their livelihood. So what's left? Upper management. Bad stuff happens... its upper management's fault.
In my career in software development I got a speech from a guy in his 60s that stays with me today. We were late getting a new app done that saved the payroll people a giant tonne of gruesome manual spreadsheet manipulation. It was 100% my fault. I had a spotless reputation up until that point. I was loved for making everyone's job easier... viewed as a creative "get it done" guy. The Project Manager would not allow me to accept public blame for it. He looked at me and said "you good cop... me bad cop". He took the public hit for it. He claimed he assigned me to a different project and this new app was not a priority. I got it done 1 week late. Why did he do that? .. Upper management people are the "bad guys" .. they set all the money and time limits on everything.. they fire people.
He maintained his "fuck you" image.. i maintained my image and it allowed me to remain on great terms with the people with whom i had frequent direct contact. In the end, I owed him one... and he knew it! He cashed in on that favour he did for me a few weekends later.
Ironically Jason Schreier's NYT Opinion piece has been published calling for Unionization in the game developer world. In order to prevent cut throat financials and marketing world of simply having a team develop then firing them in order to make a bigger buck.
The video game industry is richer than it has ever been. Its revenue in 2018 was $43.8 billion, a recent report estimated, thanks in large part to hugely popular games like Fortnite and Call of Duty. These record-breaking profits could have led one to think that the people who develop video games had it made. But then the blood bath began.
In February, Call of Duty’s publisher, Activision Blizzard, laid off 8 percent of its staff, or nearly 800 workers, in a cost-cutting massacre. A few weeks later, the game studio ArenaNet cut dozens of positions, while smaller layoffs hit companies like Valve and the digital store operator GOG. And just last week, the video game giant Electronic Arts announced that it was laying off 350 people across the globe.
This brutal start to 2019 followed the closures of major game companies like Telltale, the makers of games based on The Walking Dead, and Capcom Vancouver, the large studio behind the popular action series Dead Rising in 2018. All in all, thousands of video game workers have lost their jobs in the past 12 months.
In many of these cases, laid-off employees had no idea what was coming. One developer at a major studio told me in February that he and his colleagues had been crunching — putting in long hours, including nights and weekends — for a video game release, only to be suddenly told that security was waiting to escort them off the premises.
Worker exploitation has always been part of the video game industry’s DNA. Executives with multimillion-dollar stock packages often treat their employees like Tetris pieces, to be put into place as efficiently as possible, then promptly disposed of. For many kids who grew up with controllers in their hands, being a game developer is a dream job, so when it comes to talent, supply is higher than demand. Some people who make video games receive decent salaries and benefits (experienced programmers at the richest studios can make six figures), but many do not.
Quality assurance testers — those who play a game repeatedly in order to spot glitches before they’re found by consumers — can make as little as $10 an hour. For those living in expensive cities like Los Angeles, working extensive overtime can be the only way to make ends meet.
By comparison, Activision Blizzard’s chief executive, Bobby Kotick, made $28.6 million in 2017, a package that included cash, stock and other compensation. That was 306 times the median Activision Blizzard employee’s salary.
There’s only one way for these workers to push back against the way they’re exploited while franchises like Call of Duty churn out money for those at the very top: unionization.
The idea of unionization in the video game industry only recently started to build momentum. In 2018, the grass-roots organization Game Workers Unite began encouraging game studio employees across the world to unionize. At the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last month, union organizers hosted several sessions on how workers might start unions at their own companies. They also passed around cards comparing the salaries of industry executives to those of the developers who work under them. One stated that Andrew Wilson, chief executive of Electronic Arts, made $35.7 million in 2018, while the average worker at his company got $93,336. Another said that Tim Sweeney, chief executive of Fortnite’s developer, Epic Games, has a net worth of over $7 billion.
So far, progress has been slow. While game workers have become more likely to voice support for unionization on social media and in private gatherings, no major studio in the United States has seen an attempt to organize yet.
I don’t work in video games, but as a journalist who writes about them and is part of a union, I’ve seen the benefits of organization firsthand. In 2018, our union was able to negotiate the layoffs many of my colleagues faced into buyouts. Like journalists, workers in the video game industry will be better off when they are able to leverage their talent and experience to demand better conditions from the executives who profit off their work.
One common argument by critics of unionization is that it won’t prevent layoffs or studio shutdowns. It won’t automatically provide money to struggling companies or force Mr. Kotick to take a lower salary. That’s true, of course. But unions will open lines of communication between workers and management. Unions will allow video game workers to negotiate guaranteed severance packages, mandatory paid overtime, stronger benefits, better salaries, notification before layoffs and fair crediting policies.
Another argument is that if American workers unionize, companies will just turn to cheaper countries. Anyone who’s ever glanced at a video game’s credits section knows that companies are already doing that to some extent. But it would be prohibitively expensive for a company like Activision to simply pack up shop and move all of its developers from North America and Europe to a cheaper area, not just in cash but in terms of lost institutional knowledge. Besides, in the ideal version of this scenario, game developer shops all across the world would also be organizing, allowing them all to stand in solidarity together.
Right now, all of the power belongs to Bobby Kotick, Andrew Wilson and their fellow rich video game executives. There’s only one real way to change that.
In response to a request from Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), the Federal Trade Commission now says it will be convening a "public workshop on loot boxes" later this year.
The FTC said it hopes to attract "consumer advocacy organizations, parent groups, and industry members" to take part in the workshop, according to a letter from FTC Chairman Joseph Simons provided to Hassan. The short note suggests such a gathering could "help elicit information to guide subsequent consumer outreach, which could include a consumer alert."
Elsewhere in the letter, Simons notes the FTC's previous efforts to gauge the marketing and accessibility of violent video games (and other media) to children. And though the FTC in November revealed publicly that it is investigating the loot box issue, Simons also notes that he can't publicly comment on any potential law enforcement efforts in the space that might be ongoing.
It looks like August 7th is "D-day"
"The FTC will hold a public workshop on Aug. 7 and "bring together a variety of stakeholders, including industry representatives, consumer advocates, trade associations, academics, and government officials" to talk about marketing and use of loot boxes and in-game purchases, "and the potential behavioral impact of these virtual rewards on young consumers."
I'm kinda torn on lottboxes. It's the usual gambling problem, it's the consumers choice and I profit, but it's also abusing mental weakness and some people get addicted, which can cause serious problems.
But game design is a lot about manipulation and giving in to manipulation anyways, so I'd rather see devs build in a monthly limit on ingame purchases or a "no doubles"-mechanic for loot boxes than shutting them down completely.
The problem isn't that people can gamble 50$ away, it's that some start believing that "next time I'm gonna get the super rare" and continue to pour huge amounts of money into the game, which in turn funnels the feeling that they need to get something out of it. So if devs put a stopper to that by automatically getting every item from a lootbox for a certain amount of money the problem should deescalate.
On April 09 2019 00:04 Archeon wrote: It's the usual gambling problem, it's the consumers choice and I profit, but it's also abusing mental weakness and some people get addicted, which can cause serious problems.
i don't want to have "home slot machines" on my TV that a 10 year old can get addicted.
are loot boxes in-home slot machines? to answer that ... i guess the devil is in the details.
Tbf if the 10 year old has access to online banking and a bank account that allows to accumulate debts the parents screwed up royally.
Imo the mainly affected groups are probably late teens. People who spend a lot of time gaming, have full access to online purchases and can go deep into the red because there's very little regulation from family. But I agree that there are people that ruin themselves, hence I'd like some regulations from the dev side and a limit seems more easily doable and effective than age controls when age is only part of the problem.
On March 27 2019 06:39 Excalibur_Z wrote: I really have to disagree with the demonization of some of the larger game studios like ATVI, EA, and Ubisoft, that is so pervasive in the greater gaming community. They get knocked for "money-grubbing" through aggressive business tactics and attacked for rehashing the same games every year with minimal innovation. I feel this is a misguided approach, and of course it serves nobody.
a couple of points about this common "narrative" many software dev houses "sell to the public".
Some insightful games industry journalists have a very specific method of getting inside info. THey schmooz the front line or mid-level people. In order to keep the information pipeline open they can never assign blame to the front-line and mid level people. So when things go wrong.. its anyone's fault but the front line people. They have to be careful not constantly to criticize the fans as well. They can not constantly call the fans "entitled". If they constantly demonize the fan base that also harms their livelihood. So what's left? Upper management. Bad stuff happens... its upper management's fault.
In my career in software development I got a speech from a guy in his 60s that stays with me today. We were late getting a new app done that saved the payroll people a giant tonne of gruesome manual spreadsheet manipulation. It was 100% my fault. I had a spotless reputation up until that point. I was loved for making everyone's job easier... viewed as a creative "get it done" guy. The Project Manager would not allow me to accept public blame for it. He looked at me and said "you good cop... me bad cop". He took the public hit for it. He claimed he assigned me to a different project and this new app was not a priority. I got it done 1 week late. Why did he do that? .. Upper management people are the "bad guys" .. they set all the money and time limits on everything.. they fire people.
He maintained his "fuck you" image.. i maintained my image and it allowed me to remain on great terms with the people with whom i had frequent direct contact. In the end, I owed him one... and he knew it! He cashed in on that favour he did for me a few weekends later.
This is the easiest narrative to convey to the general public... so its used a lot.
upper management are the bad guys though. this is only fair, because developers do all the actual work, upper management get all the rewards. they eat first, and eventually send some scraps down. i'll never forget one time we were working late many weeks in a row, the director at the time (who was acting as the dev manager until the role was filled), got bumped to sr director after, and a few years later hit VP. i dont mind it though, we got paid well, and the enormous pressure that upper management faces is not glamorous. people who don't work in corporations dont know. as a dev, i can provide business insights and recommendations, but im not on the hook for the decision making at the end of the day. whatever the management says, i may disagree, but i commit. if it ends up not being what customers want, well, i only built what you told me to.
so yeah, evil corporations are fully the incompetent management fault. its never the developers fault. if developers are incompetent, management is incompetent for hiring them in the first place, and/or not firing them. also, people who don't do dev, don't realize that slipped deadlines on any non trivial project are very common. coding is hard. coding when there's multiple external dependencies and coordination involved? good luck lol. so management has two choices - push the date back, or cut scope, or ship with bugs, or add more resources. the last approach sometimes makes things worse, as the famous book, mythical man month, talks about. now, i do web services my whole life, but i imagine game dev is no different, and that's why AAA games ship with bugs and cut features. the devs no doubt are working brutal hours to hit an unrealistic deadline, and management doesn't give a shit. they are evil. "they" being a crappy company like EA. OG blizzard had the right idea with diablo and starcraft and etc having multiple delays, but when it was released, they were MASTERPIECES.
EPT
