2024 may not be kind for game developers.
- Thread starter Silent_Buddha
- Start date
a great game during our generation. However, games like Alone in the Dark and Outcast aren't big hitters these days, they are most like niche.
Tbh while I had Alone in the Dark, I never played Outcast but I remember how famous it was because it used voxels at the time. It feels like we are transitioning, the classic gamers and the new tendencies seem to be in some kind of mid point, some truce, these days.
Piranha Bytes Has Reportedly Closed Down; Veterans Create Studio Pithead
Piranha Bytes appears to have lost its fight for survival. However, studio veterans (Björn and Jennifer Pankratz) have announced a new studio.
wccftech.com
This is sad news. I always liked Piranha Bytes games, especially the Gothic series, for their ability to make an open world game with little to no hand holding. Also, don't the Elex games use an in house engine? Losing this studio means losing another unique engine for future games.
Humble Games confirms 'restructuring' amid reports all staff have been laid off
UPDATE 24/7/24 3pm UK: Humble Games has denied using AI to write yesterday's statement that characterised the reported …
www.eurogamer.net
Frenetic Pony
Veteran
The problem is there's too many indie publishers, these 2 were hardly the only ones. The big companies that owned them realized the space was too competitive and luck based (combined) to make money in, Private Division getting shut down and Humble Games (which admittedly hasn't had a hit in a while) firing their entire publishing staff for "restructuring" sucks for those affected, but is also a reflection of just how many indie publishers there are.Humble Games has layed off it's entire staff, but is somehow still in operation. This, along with 2K reportedly wanting to close or sell Private Division is going to make it harder for indie developers who need a publisher in the future.Humble Games confirms 'restructuring' amid reports all staff have been laid off
UPDATE 24/7/24 3pm UK: Humble Games has denied using AI to write yesterday's statement that characterised the reported …
Mass layoffs at Bungie. 220 being let go, with another 230 being moved elsewhere.
www.bungie.net
Playstation's Live Service Head:
Bungie.net
Playstation's Live Service Head:
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* I believe this officially means that Bungie is now owned by Sony and is no longer an independent studio under Sony *Mass layoffs at Bungie. 220 being let go, with another 230 being moved elsewhere.
Bungie.net
Playstation's Live Service Head:
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Context:
Bungie.net
The New Path for Bungie
2h - Pete Parsons
This morning, I’m sharing with all of you some of the most difficult changes we’ve ever had to make as a studio. Due to rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions, it has become clear that we need to make substantial changes to our cost structure and focus development efforts entirely on Destiny and Marathon.That means beginning today, 220 of our roles will be eliminated, representing roughly 17% of our studio’s workforce.
These actions will affect every level of the company, including most of our executive and senior leader roles.
Today is a difficult and painful day, especially for our departing colleagues, all of which have made important and valuable contributions to Bungie. Our goal is to support them with the utmost care and respect. For everyone affected by this job reduction, we will be offering a generous exit package, including severance, bonus and health coverage.
I realize all of this is hard news, especially following the success we have seen with The Final Shape. But as we’ve navigated the broader economic realities over the last year, and after exhausting all other mitigation options, this has become a necessary decision to refocus our studio and our business with more realistic goals and viable financials.
We are committing to two other major changes today that we believe will support our focus, leverage Sony’s strengths, and create new opportunities for Bungie talent.
First, we are deepening our integration with Sony Interactive Entertainment, working to integrate 155 of our roles, roughly 12%, into SIE over the next few quarters. SIE has worked tirelessly with us to identify roles for as many of our people as possible, enabling us together to save a great deal of talent that would otherwise have been affected by the reduction in force.
Second, we are working with PlayStation Studios leadership to spin out one of our incubation projects – an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe – to form a new studio within PlayStation Studios to continue its promising development.
This will be a time of tremendous change for our studio.
Let’s unpack how we ended up in this position; it’s important to understand how we got here.
For over five years, it has been our goal to ship games in three enduring, global franchises. To realize that ambition, we set up several incubation projects, each seeded with senior development leaders from our existing teams. We eventually realized that this model stretched our talent too thin, too quickly. It also forced our studio support structures to scale to a larger level than we could realistically support, given our two primary products in development – Destiny and Marathon.
Additionally, in 2023, our rapid expansion ran headlong into a broad economic slowdown, a sharp downturn in the games industry, our quality miss with Destiny 2: Lightfall, and the need to give both The Final Shape and Marathon the time needed to ensure both projects deliver at the quality our players expect and deserve. We were overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red.
After this new trajectory became clear, we knew we had to change our course and speed, and we did everything we could to avoid today’s outcome. Even with exhaustive efforts undertaken across our leadership and product teams to resolve our financial challenges, these steps were simply not enough.
As a result, today we must say goodbye to incredible talent, colleagues, and friends.
This will be a challenging time at Bungie, and we’ll need to help our team navigate these changes in the weeks and months ahead. This will be a hard week, and we know that our team will need time to process, to ask questions, and to absorb this news. Today, and over the next several weeks, we will host team meetings and town halls, team breakout sessions, and private, individual sessions to ensure we are keeping our communication open and transparent.
Bungie will continue to make great games. We still have over 850 team members building Destiny and Marathon, and we will continue to build amazing experiences that exceed our players’ expectations.
There will be a time to talk about our goals and projects, but today is not that day. Today, our focus is on supporting our people.
-pete
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Honestly it doesn’t seem all that different than why all other studios were closed. Pandemic drove gaming and tech to new heights, they all risked staffing up and loaning heavily to meet the new demand.
Then the demand dropped like a rock post pandemic, and lending got crushed due to edit: High inflation. And the entire tech industry began a long stint cutting back and some.
Then the demand dropped like a rock post pandemic, and lending got crushed due to edit: High inflation. And the entire tech industry began a long stint cutting back and some.
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Fair enough. High Inflation
Your point led me to Google, and there's talk of Bungie growing from 1000 people pre-pandemic to 1400 during. So 400 layoffs would actually be a return to norms.
Sadly not sourced with evidence.
But it does show that this wide 'market shrinking' story needs to be backed with graphs of head counts for all companies to compare it not to the past year or two but historical references. It would make it very easy to see covid anomalies and where all these job-losses fit in.
I guess in short, where were the "2021 may be really kind for game developers" stories?
Destiny 3 and destroying Marathon's legacy. Plus apparently a new IP sci-fantasy shooter that is now going to be an in house Sony game.
I think the story that's overlooked here is that Bungie sold to Sony because they were promised full creative freedom, but this move is taking an IP and team from Bungie and turning them into a non-Bungie studio. That means that team and IP are no longer bound by the creative freedom that Bungie has. Will this new game still be multiplatform?
To be clear, is it Sony taking, or Bungie shedding the game and staff because they don't believe in it enough and Sony saving it because they see a future in it?
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
It's the same old story, where people fooled themselves into thinking Sony was a white knight, when really they are just another profit-seeking corporation (which I'm fine with).
I guess they're just destroying Marathon's legacy now.
Bungie Has Reportedly Canceled Destiny 3 'Payback' Following Layoffs
Bungie has reportedly canceled previously rumored Destiny 3 codenamed "Payback," according to Jeff Grubb.
destinybulletin.com
I gotta ask the question, since I wasn't old enough to really know or understand it, I was only born at the time. I suppose I could just Google it, but I'm looking for anecdotal first hand account of what it felt like. What happened during the great recession of games in the 80s? Did anyone experience it? Was it slow moving death like this?
Entirely different. The big console was the Atari 2600 and a flood of truly horrible games over saturated the market causing people to just stop buying games. Arcades were still around to keep games alive but there was just nothing for the home market since no one wanted to be the next grand failure like Atari.
Spent a lot of time in arcades during those years, almost cried in relief when the NES took off. Interesting times and it's been f-ing amazing to see where games have went since then. This isn't the slow death of gaming it's just big business being stupid about things trying for short term gains when gaming is a long term yield type thing. Games aren't going anywhere and this is nothing like then. Now we have so many options of platforms and games to choose from it's hard for me to even conceive it and it ain't gonna suddenly fade away like the 2600 after the launch of ET.
Spent a lot of time in arcades during those years, almost cried in relief when the NES took off. Interesting times and it's been f-ing amazing to see where games have went since then. This isn't the slow death of gaming it's just big business being stupid about things trying for short term gains when gaming is a long term yield type thing. Games aren't going anywhere and this is nothing like then. Now we have so many options of platforms and games to choose from it's hard for me to even conceive it and it ain't gonna suddenly fade away like the 2600 after the launch of ET.