If people don’t buy your game, you don’t have money to pay people. Ideally, Surgent Studios would have developed their game inexpensively enough and with enough of a war chest that they wouldn’t have to lay people off after their first product didn’t sell enough copies, but that’s clearly not how they were funded. It sounds like the studio still exists, so maybe a smaller version of that team gets to take a crack at that second game, but you can’t pay people with money you don’t have, and we as the consumers have been well served by so many other games that it’s not much of a mystery why people didn’t turn up for this one.
The point of a publisher is to have a whole company. It doesn’t matter if Game A sold because Game B sold. EA used to live on this where games like Mirror’s Edge could be “experimental” because The Sims and Madden made CoD money every year.
The problem is what we saw with stuff like (Let’s say it is “THQ”. My brain can’t remember the specific publisher I was thinking of and the name has probably been reused a dozen times by Embracer et al). Where they are over-leveraging themselves by wanting to make multiple AA or even AAA games and going under because critically acclaimed games just didn’t sell well enough.
But, again, that is not what has been happening for the past year or two (aside from Embracer which is a different kind of evil). It is not “Oh, you made bad games and we need to fire you to save the company”. It isn’t even “Profits are down all over”. It is “Well, we are actually doing great. But you finished your game and don’t have one immediately in the pipeline and the shareholders want to see bigger profits for Q3 so… get fucked?”
Which is why I once again cite fucking Phil Spencer talking about what a great game Hi-Fi Rush is the week Microsoft fucking canned Tango. That was not even “Look, everyone loved The Evil Within but didn’t buy it so…”. That was “Everyone loved Hi-Fi and it sold okay even with the Gamepass hit and our other games sold well but…”
But apparently you are in full bootstraps mode where you think like a CEO who wants to buy an extra porsche so…
If people don’t buy your game, you don’t have money to pay people. Ideally, Surgent Studios would have developed their game inexpensively enough and with enough of a war chest that they wouldn’t have to lay people off after their first product didn’t sell enough copies, but that’s clearly not how they were funded. It sounds like the studio still exists, so maybe a smaller version of that team gets to take a crack at that second game, but you can’t pay people with money you don’t have, and we as the consumers have been well served by so many other games that it’s not much of a mystery why people didn’t turn up for this one.
The point of a publisher is to have a whole company. It doesn’t matter if Game A sold because Game B sold. EA used to live on this where games like Mirror’s Edge could be “experimental” because The Sims and Madden made CoD money every year.
The problem is what we saw with stuff like (Let’s say it is “THQ”. My brain can’t remember the specific publisher I was thinking of and the name has probably been reused a dozen times by Embracer et al). Where they are over-leveraging themselves by wanting to make multiple AA or even AAA games and going under because critically acclaimed games just didn’t sell well enough.
But, again, that is not what has been happening for the past year or two (aside from Embracer which is a different kind of evil). It is not “Oh, you made bad games and we need to fire you to save the company”. It isn’t even “Profits are down all over”. It is “Well, we are actually doing great. But you finished your game and don’t have one immediately in the pipeline and the shareholders want to see bigger profits for Q3 so… get fucked?”
Which is why I once again cite fucking Phil Spencer talking about what a great game Hi-Fi Rush is the week Microsoft fucking canned Tango. That was not even “Look, everyone loved The Evil Within but didn’t buy it so…”. That was “Everyone loved Hi-Fi and it sold okay even with the Gamepass hit and our other games sold well but…”
But apparently you are in full bootstraps mode where you think like a CEO who wants to buy an extra porsche so…