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It's worse than that:
Another dev allegedly stripped to the bone is id Software, which according to 3D Realms founder Scott Miller has lost “most, if not all” of its coders.
Man. This is heartbreaking. The Idtech engine is dead, the engine that is extremely optimized and much better that that UT engine junk is dead.
it's fucking unbelievable how these morons can gut dev studios when the product that came out of them is to the scale of Doom 2016, Eternal and Dark Ages. Ridiculous.
I hope they band together and start their own company.
Speaking of which, if you know a way for me to find games made by devs that were once part of larger studios that were gutted, I'm interested.
Apparently these devs are treated the same way as Mick Gordon
Not like they havent mismanaged the music projects...
Have the Eternal pre-orders received their OST yet?
I have no idea about that
So according to discogs (market place for all sorts physical music), users are selling doom eternal casettes on it.
Lighting a bowl and playing Quake and Doom wads and mods only this weekend. Let's see 'em off right, lads.
https://www.slipseer.com/index.php?resources/quake-brutalist-jam-iii.549/
I swear to god if the next Doom game uses Unreal I'm gonna lose it
This is so infuriating.
I get gutting and selling studios that don't hold their own but seriously, id has been delivering banger after banger for 20 years now. Good luck trying to rely solely on fallout to stay afloat you asshats
I'd argue since the beginning not just 20 years.
without id, gaming as we know it wouldn't exist today. FPS games, competitive shooters, hell even Valve itself likely wouldn't exist without id software. goes even beyond that. you could even go as deep as the modding community and all the games that have come from that. the majority of modders got their start with id games. Many rockstar game devs got their start at id or via an id product.
I agree. I was thinking of the "new" id of the zenimax era, but they are truly one of the GOAT studios.
They released Wolfenstein 3D in 1992 - 34 years ago. And pretty much everything they've released since has been great.
I'm going to go sit down now because my bones hurt thinking about that fact.
that don’t hold their own
It never was like that. Studios that do badly are never gutted, not as far as I've seen from online reports.
I think the reason why studios are gutted after success is that it's almost guaranteed that the money will keep flowing even after they are fired, BECAUSE of the success.
If you make a game and it sucks the company can't afford to fire you because they don't have guaranteed cash flow regardless if you're there or not.
Well the one potential silver lining to firing an entire team at once like this is that hopefully they can turn around and start their own new gaming studio free from the corporate overlords. In which case we all win.
At least, until the leaders of that studio get greedy and sell out and repeat the shit cycle all over.
There isn’t any money out there, and a production team trying to run their own studio typically doesn’t work out. „Just go indie“ is not a realistic option. More than likely a handful of these people might be picked up (though likely will have to uproot their lives to do it) but the rest will leave the industry. It’s an incredibly destructive thing MS has done, because id folks often did a lot of knowledge sharing at conferences.
There's plenty of money out there in the economy, we just keep letting private equity buy up everything and funnel it to billionaires while enshittifying the entire world of commerce.
But aside from that you make a good point, if no one will invest in a new studio then that's a pipe dream. And yeah IIRC the ID folks were regular leaders at conferences like SIGGRAPH so yes this looks bad for the industry 😞
In fairness - and I'm a massive id fanboy - the company that gave us quality games and trailblazing tech disappeared when they went to Zenimax.
The publishers admittedly treated them well at the start (Mick Gordon... less so), but this soulless bottom-line thinking was always going to hit them eventually.
Shame.
The arrogance with which Gordon was treated soured me on the whole franchise which is a shame because Doom 2016 is one of my all time favorites. No small part due to his soundtrack.
amen, Loved Doom/doom eternal, but completly skipping the dark age due to that.
zenimax
This. Right there with you. Dead company walking.
Weren't they bought back in the early 2010s? Doom 2016 was great and Doom Eternal has also a great reputation (I own it but haven't played it). So they made good games even after being bought by ZeniMax.
Fucking Bethesda. If Starfield wasnt such a failure (amongst others) this might not have happened. Yet rather than cut where the issues are they decimate the studio that actually produces the great games.
It feels like enshittification has come for the games industry in a big way lately.
It's come for everything. Everything from components used in factory lines to the ingredients bought by restaurants, it's all going to shit. The games industry just happens to be both heavily consolidated and highly public in nature.
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish. Never ever trust MicroSlop; they are a malicious company.
Bringing that zombie out makes zero sense.
3E was about replacing market-preferred products with those of their own. There's nothing to replace these products. This just god-honest mismanagement. Don't make it more complicated (or malicious) than it is.
They released DOOM The Dark Ages DLC to celebrate that.
Appropriate game title.
I loathe Microsoft.
Stupid fucking "we have money" mentality so the best way to make one look better is siphon up successful developers and expect gold.
I didn't even like the most recent doom games and even i could see they were fantastic. Didn't they sell well to? Of all the studios to cut this one seems fucking stupid.
If I were GOG or Gabe, I would snap those folks up and ask them to make something awesome.
Why does Microsoft keep buying game studios if they don't actually want to have a game studio?!
Gutting game studios doesn't actually yield any returns - making and selling successful games does.
So what's the point? If they don't like having functioning game studios, they can just stop buying them.
They're not interested in sales from the product. They want the IP, the patents, and a few of the talent, perhaps if they're particularly good.
You spend years making a large game, all negative profit. Then you launch, make most of the money you'll ever see off that title and go back to hibernate.
They buy the studio, own the ip, flip the crunch switch to on and wait for attrition. If anyone survives that, they put them somewhere else to make them money.
I don't know what the landscape is like in the gaming industry these days so I can't say if it's the case here, but often that kind of pattern is about eliminating competition (i.e. market manipulation rather than innovation).
Companies that have more than 4% of market share are financially incentived to buy out the competition rather than innovate - it's cheaper. The first study on that is from iirc 60s, still holds true.
