FunkMiller
Member
Everything you bring up can be managed by a well run independent studio. And well run independent studios produce the best third party games.
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Meta shuts down developer Ready at Dawn (Lone Echo, The Order 1886, GoW Chains of Olympus/Ghost of Sparta, Daxter)
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Everything you bring up can be managed by a well run independent studio. And well run independent studios produce the best third party games.
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CliffyB's Cock Holster
No it cannot. If you don't have the money to keep the lights on, you're done. Period.
If you end up overextended on a project, and it flops, you are in deep shit. End of. And sooner or later most indies that try and do anything of a significant scale will run into this situation because that's the nature of dev. Nobody has a crystal ball that infallibly picks winners, and no team is immune to having progress disrupted due to unforseen circumstances.
Sorry, but just look at the historical record. Most independent teams simply do not last that long, and it'd be incredibly arrogant to argue that its all on them because its tantamount to saying "everyone is incompetent". Honestly, how likely is that really?
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FunkMiller
Member
A well run company keeps the lights on. And I think there's a lot more incompetence, greed and stupidity out there than you're giving credit for.
Pedro Motta
Member
Was this delisted? Can't find it anywhere..
CamHostage
Member
Yes, servers were shut down only a year after release. It was published by the short-lived GameStop digital publisher GameTrust, and just never got any notice (and got okay-not-great reviews from the few sites which played it.) Seemed like silly fun, but for whatever reasons, it came and went like a ghost.
Yes it was an online game.
Gamer_By_Proxy
Member
I have it in my purchased titles and can download to console.
They gave it away at some point so I grabbed it. Never played it.
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CliffyB's Cock Holster
The business is predicated on selling copies of software. If there's nothing saleable generating income, you have no income. And without income how do you meet payroll, running costs, etc?
This is what's meant by "the nature of the business". Especially historically where product was generally sold as single payment products.
Why do you think service models for gaming have seen such massive uptake? Its because of this.
Even going back to the start of the century, a game would typically take over a year to make start-to-finish. Thats a fucking lot of money to find when you have no other income! Yes, milestone payments may cover costs, but the publisher has you over a barrel, and come launch day your regular income goes away... Royalties can take awhile to come in, and not only is most of this taken straight off the top to REPAY the debt you're in with the publisher, but the amount you actually stand to receive varies based on sales (an unknown variable) and how hard or gently the publisher decides to fuck you!
And I'm not exaggerating at all saying that: I've personally witnessed publishers blatantly fuck over small devs just because they can do so, safe in the knowledge that they won't have the financial wherewithal to assert their legal rights.
Pedro Motta
Member
Thanks guys.
It's a shame, seemed like a ton of fun. Just wanted to try it out.
FunkMiller
Member
And yet... there are independent video game companies who continue to survive and make games, without having to sell to major corporations.
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CliffyB's Cock Holster
This is turning circular because you're too stubborn to accept the truth in what I'm saying. So this is my final world on the subject.
The reality in business is that its always "fine" until it isn't.
The "isn't" can come as a result of a myriad of reasons, not all of which are down to anyone being at fault.
The basic economic reality is just what I described.
If you've got enough seed capital or some angel investor with cash to burn then you are protected to a degree, but most companies won't have that, and most certainly won't always have that.
Ultimately the business model demands significant cash and time investment up-front, in many cases for years prior to the project reaching a point of fruition where it can start to repay, this is extremely consequential in a creative business.
CamHostage
Member
Also, producing entertainment is not the same as producing steel girders or investing in orange crop futures.
You think up the best idea you can with the most viable reasons it should sell, you whittle it into shape over a prolonged production without a complete vision of exactly what it will be when it's done (often using Tut l technology which didn't exist when you started,) you weather the unexpected storms of crisis and ego, and in the end you attempt to sell it to fickle children (and adult-babies) for as long as the market is interested before you have to do it all over again...
FunkMiller
Member
Whereas you're too stubborn to accept the fact that it's possible for an independent video games company to succeed and survive without having to be bought out by a major corporation. You've bought into this idea that it's either a failure state, or a buy out. And that isn't true.
SF Kosmo
Al Jazeera Special Reporter
Their VR games are honestly the best things they have done though
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Ozzy Onya A2Z
Member
Cannot play Mighty DOOM on my phone, damn it.
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CliffyB's Cock Holster
No, your argument is like saying if you ever get sick or injured then it must be your fault. Whereas my position is that its more likely than not, with the probability increasing the longer the time-span.
Buyouts are typically the solution to, not the cause of, problems. With money being the analog of "health" in my sickness metaphor.
FunkMiller
Member
Stop trying to tell me what my argument is. It doesn't work like that. Your position is that no independent games developers can possibly exist and succeed.
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CliffyB's Cock Holster
How else am I supposed to interpret your argument but like that?
Your entire thesis is that if an independent dev is "well run" (whatever that means in practice) it can succeed perpetually.
How is that any different than saying that if a person "stays fit" then they will always be healthy?
In both instances you are choosing to pretend that the indie dev (or the person in my analogy) exists in a vacuum, and can never fall victim to forces or happenstances outside of their control.
I went into the detail I did on the economics and business practices for the precise reason that I wanted to demonstrate how much is out of the developer's control.
"Well run" just doesn't cut it!
You might as well argue "be lucky"!
TheDreadBaron
Member
When echo got shut down some meta dude that made the decision was saying 100,000 active players was chump change and they were retasking RAD to do something so much greater. Welp...
Haint
Member
There are just some people out there who never resist an opportunity to insult and diminish. For the life of me I'll never understand why so many have to be angry and negative about everything. Videogames are serious shit, I guess. In any case, no idea what is going on in that shot or how/where it was captured, but that's not representative of Liv at all, in either game.
Liv Rhodes is such an amazing experience in the games. She is a fully developed AI driven character the player interacts fully with, in complete freedom, for most of the game. The amount of tech, experimentation and just brute force work that had to be done to sell that illusion was crazy, but the whole premise relied on the player buying into their relationship with this character. One mistake and the magic trick of making you care for her would collapse.
Recall also that this is almost 10 year old tech, well before the advent of spatiotemporal reprojection and other low level techniques which have since eased some of the burden of rendering in VR (not to mention the huge leaps in GPU power). LE had to run on min spec PCs locked at 90Hz or 120Hz rendering TWICE per frame. It was a struggle to deliver what we did. She is even more detailed in LE2, which pushed the boundary further in many ways. Anyhow, here is a quick clip to give you an idea. The experience in VR is on other level, of course, but at least you can get a sense of the context:
I am incredibly proud of what our team accomplished with these two titles. They are some of my favorite games ever, and a genuine attempt at revealing some of the potential of VR as a medium to expand traditional narrative and mechanical possibilities.
As always, I am sorry to interject here, but I will take this opportunity to express my gratitude for the kind words that many have thrown in our direction in light of yesterday's news - 21 years is a long time, we had a great run and lived through some crazy highs and some of the lowest lows. We still had a lot of fun doing it all - hopefully we learned a thing of two, and each one of the members of our group will bring some valuable experience and ideas to whatever future projects they work on.
Personally, I can tell you one thing: I have been doing this since I was a teen, I am 58 now, and if you think I am done you don't know me at all.
See you all in a few years for something new...
So yeah, looks like I was probably barking up the right tree and you guys were shuttered in large part because you lost a lot of your contemporary VR talent to the Gorilla Tag studio. I remember reading rumblings about that happening years ago. Looks like they've basically been making a more ambitious Echo Arena 2/spinoff this whole time:
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