If that description is accurate then there’s nothing unprofessional about that.

What would be unprofessional in that situation is the original devs not doing their jobs and then allowing a fan backlash to grow.

Again, we don’t know the reality of the situation. I think everyone would be curious to hear from other devs at the studio that aren’t part of management or the three who were fired but we haven’t yet.

I do, I don’t trust the outraged opinions of people using the outrage machine.

They did not have any reason to personally attack the leads except out of spite,

Lol what the honest fuck are you talking about?

They were facing a boycott because it seemed like they fired the original creators to avoid paying the employees.

They could have issued a statement saying that they would still pay the remaining employees and everyone would assume that they still fired the creators out of greed reasons. If the creators actually didn’t do their jobs, then they would want to make it clear that they are the ones actually committed to making a good game and this has nothing to do with greed.

That may not be the case, but at present we simply do not know what the reality of the situation was.

That’s not why people get outraged, they get outraged because it’s addictive and they spend too much time on social media.

To be fair, they didn’t trash anyone publicly until they basically had to.

When you understand how RSUs work and what you’re signing up for there’s nothing inherently wrong with rewarding someone for years of service.

However, their structure / terminology is inherently misleading and manipulative.

A company could just give you stock at each performance review. It doesn’t need to give you magic shares that need to be incubated before they hatch, it could just give you the actual shares they want to pay you at each point.

They don’t because that would expose that they’re actually giving you nothing in the first several years, and they want you to think you own part of the company when you don’t.

Again, when you understand what they’re actually offering then you go in eyes wide open, but they are intentionally trying to deceive people into thinking they’re getting a reward earlier than they actually are.

If you’re basing that on Subnautica Below Zero, it’s worth noting that basically the whole creative team is different, not just the composer:

Subnautica credits:

Director(s)

Charlie Cleveland

Producer(s)

Hugh Jeremy

Designer(s)

Charlie Cleveland

Programmer(s)

Charlie Cleveland
Steven An
Max McGuire
Jonas Bötel

Artist(s)

Cory Strader
Brian Cummings
Scott MacDonald

Writer(s)

Tom Jubert

Composer(s)

Simon Chylinski

Subnautica Below Zero credits:

Director(s)

David Kalina

Producer(s)

Charlie Cleveland
Cory Strader
Max McGuire
Ted Gill

Designer(s)

Alex Ries

Artist(s)

Cory Strader

Writer(s)

Jill Murray
Brittney Morris
Zaire Lanier
Tom Jubert

Composer(s)

Ben Prunty

To be fair, they didn’t gut the original creative team.

Max McGuire was CTO and a programmer on the original game, Ted Gill was President and a Producer on Below Zero.

Charlie Cleveland was current CEO, and the director and lead designer of the original game, so was the head of the origin creative team, and that does seem like a big loss, but no one else from the art, writing, or design teams seem to be leaving, so it’s not really a ‘gutting’ of the original creative team.

My guess (especially given how buggy Subnautica was), is that they were missing their delivery milestones so the publisher wanted to replace the organization heads and move at least Charlie Cleveland back down to a creative role, but they refused and left together.

If this hasn’t remotely been your experience, how do you know rainbow flicking fixes it?

It doesn’t fix it, it’s how you avoid letting get that close to you.

The game is widely known to have multiple bugs affecting gameplay, from lags and desync issues, to crashes and even teams changing colour mid-match. In this case, and this is the second time I’ve seen it, the ball glitched into the ground after randomly bouncing around the pitch following a shot against the post befote finally getting stuck. It couldn’t be interacted with at all.

Well if this is a bug, you should probably make that clearer, because again, have not encountered a single bug.

This has not remotely been my experience. It’s also incredibly easy to avoid getting into this situation by rainbow flipping.

F tier click bait. Literally nothing informative was said in here.

Alan Wake, Quantum Break, Control, and Alan Wake 2, are all some of my all time favourite games.

Going to wait for the next patch before trying out FBC Firebreak, but I’m excited and can’t wait for the Max Payne remakes and Control 2.

I mean, these are nice changes but the real customization we want is to hide the four double sized ads, not our recently played games.

epic bad, upvotes plz

Epic barely changed it. You stopped playing because you put 1000+ hours into it and eventually got bored and moved on.

Well if you’re going to give them another shot, you should try the Outer Wilds.

Much less abstract puzzle solving, and it tells quite a good narrative (no combat).

You don’t have to like it, but out of curiosity, why is this different from a 90s point and click adventure? Isn’t Myst and Riven and stuff basically this, but first person and without combat?

Because I was thinking of being a mystified child staring at Myst on my friend’s computer more than once while playing Tunic.

It never clikced with me moment to moment and the self-congratulatory aren’t-we-smart information discovery stuff just doesn’t work for me in most cases (this applies to Fez and The Witness, too).

I think the word you’re looking for is “puzzle”.

I would not describe Control as mostly somber.

Things about it that are somber / serious:

Things about it that are whimsical:

Things about it that are both:

I have complete faith in Remedy, both of the Alan Wakes and Control have been surprisingly funny and whimsical, often in unexpected ways. Quantum Break had less humour and was a bit more self serious, but Microsoft also had more control of that project.

💯

If gamers are bitching about a game not adding a whole new island, you should ignore them because they’re clearly idiots.

If gamers are bitching about your menu system being navigable by someone with less than a PhD (cough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough), and you’re estimating that will take 6 months to fix, then that’s because you (as a company) coded your software badly.

Sweeney is not lionized as a false saviour.

Newell is.

100%.

Gamers act like Gabe Newell is a god, when he’s just a billionaire that charged them more than he needed to, like all the others.

Epis using Fortnite money to break up Apple and Google’s app store monopplies an objectively good ded

Apple is such a piece of shit company.

Valve literally hosts petabytes of game data and allows any user to download them at any time. That’s not nothing, data storage is

No, it’s really not. Azure and AWS storage is dirt cheap, especially if it’s cold storage and you can have a second or two delay when retrieving the file. If it was expensive, they wouldn’t be the most profitable tech company per employee.

Steam has so many backend features that allow devs to skip so many networking steps that can otherwise be a huge nightmare.

No, it doesn’t. It provides a small handful of APIs around friends and matchmaking, which Xbox and Epic also provide for half the fees, in addition to the generic Azure and AWS versions.

Not sure why you think they are literally just a webpage that has a purchase button next to a game.

I’m a software engineer whos built both an app store and 3d rendering engines. I know exactly how little work it took Valve to build Steam and how much work it took Epic to build Unreal.

They are not remotely comparable. Gamers are just lemmings who love Valve cause everyone loves Valve and talks about Valve, when in reality Valve has overcharged and ripped them off for decades.

for building most of those games

providing an engine does not build the game.

Well good thing I said “most” of a game. Go ahead and write your game logic and then tell me how you get it to render graphics on a screen without any engine code.

Valve has recieved 30% for doing fuck all. Why are you so adamantly defending them?

I’m not defending valve, I’m attacking epic

Yeah, in the context of a discussion about whether or not Valve is overcharging customers.

Jesus Christ, keep up.

Yeah, for building most of those games. Valve has recieved 30% for doing fuck all. Why are you so adamantly defending them?

If you’re building a game, and you build it on Unreal engine, so it’s handling literally all of the rendering, development tooling, animation engine, game logic engine, etc. etc. you’ll pay Epic a smaller percentage than you’ll pay Valve for hosting your exe file in cloud storage with some reviews and comments.

Think 5% vs 30%.

Given that they offer half the fees of Valve, it’s more like 'we don’t want to keep having to pay Valve 30% of our entire Revenue on every game we want to sell when we can make a profit running a store that charged half as much.

Hot damn I want to see what modders do with this game.

Saber’s really showing itself to be a great studio.

Oh yeah, let’s all repeat the playbook of GoG, first you just have to spend a decade establishing yourself as the only publisher able to get former Soviet gamers to pay for games rather than pirate them, then turn that trust that you built with two third party developers into a storefront selling their classic titles for them for 6 years, then use your established customer base and goodwill to try and transition into being a proper AAA storefront.

Totally viable business strategy /s

Another thread where gamers praise Valve for ripping them off for years, and think Tim Sweeney is the devil for trying to break into the market.

Valve never had to because they established a monopoly so developers did that on their own without Valve paying them. Meanwhile Valve has ripped off the entire gaming industry for its entire existence, charging absurd fees to gamers and developers and you guys are all so bought into their monopoly that you blindly praise them for it.

Gabe Newell is a billionaire. No billionaire earned their money. Every billionaire exploited people for it.

The epic launcher is exact as spyware filled as the steam launcher.

Also, tabloid journalism predates magazines.

Some of the replacement stuff is bad, but some is good. I personally get more out of my favourite podcasters going in depth on their feelings on a game than I get out of whoever is running reviews at IGN right now.

Like even in movies, pre-youtube, pre-social media, people flocked to individual reviewers they liked, more so than publications. It’s why Roger and Ebert / Siskel got so huge, people agreed with their tastes, trusted them, and sought them out specifically. That’s not that different from today’s world of following your preferred YouTuber or podcaster, but rather than everyone following the few individual who can publish, you end up with a giant web of individuals following and influencing each other’s opinions.

And to be clear, I think games reviewing has merit and value, it’s just that outside of reviewing and technical analysis, there’s not much in the way of stories to cover on a regular basis. So you end up with dedicated games journalists having to write about tripe half the time just to fill word / article counts.

I mean I also grew up in the 90s reading video game magazines, I’m just still growing up.

There is definitely journalism around consumer media.

Yes, see my comment about tabloid filler

I mean what is games journalism? How many full time, major publication, food-packaging-industry journalists are there? Where’s our aluminum can reporters? Who’s covering the waxed cardboard beat? Where’s the lifers on butcher paper?

I mean food packaging is a $500 Billion dollar a year industry, roughly double the size of the video games industry, why are there zero full time journalists focused on them?

I grew up reading a ton of early video game blogs like Joystiq, but games journalism has always been a breath away from celebrity chasing, drama stirring, tabloid filler.

There’s one end of it that analyzes the in depth technical details of engines which is interesting to some, and there’s one end that is reviewing and discussing games as art, but otherwise there’s very little journalism to do full time on any given industry. Journalists should follow the story, not insist on finding one in the industry where they want to look.

The fact that they dodged questions of durability and did nothing to reassure says that they’re probably identical and Nintendo just enjoys the revenue it gets from people buying more joycons.

Showing someone Control after their minds were blown by Severence, is probably how I felt when I found SCP after having my mind blown by Control.

Skyrim’s varied gameplay systems?

It has stealth, it has magic, it has melee combat, it has ranged combat, it has dialogue options for talking your way through stuff, it has multiple ways of solving quest lines…

It’s basically Skyrim, if it was smaller and more focused, with better combat, voice acting, level design, and heads and tails better writing.