Cliff Bleszinski says he's done making games

Sorry, but while there’s something to this, as a game developer I still have to point out that quality isn’t always the selling point you might assume it is. You kind of have to say something like, “Make better games with enough marketing, and release them at the right time for the market without a lot of competitive products and absolutely avoid launching near the launch date of whatever the next huge thing is going to be that you can’t predict, and probably just generally get really lucky too.”

Spot on.

This is accurate.

Cliff was making Lawbreakers when it seemed to make sense, Overwatch didn’t exist yet when the development started. But they took too long and by the time it released, nobody cared, particularly with the tonedeaf marketing.

Having heard a few too many stories about what an absurd fucking tool Cliffy was from employees past and “current” (I mean obviously not anymore, but more like 10 years ago vs. 1) here in the Raleigh area, I don’t necessarily know if we’ve lost much.

You know that your development cycle is too long when a Blizzard game beats you to market.

Did everyone miss this bit at the end of the article?

(A former Boss Key employee noted receiving three weeks of severance pay instead of months, to which Bleszinski replied, “Maybe I used hyperbole. But I’d like to think I did the right thing.”)

I mean, I guess for American standards he probably did okay by his staff, but if this was “hyperbole” I’d take most of what he says with a grain of salt. He’ll be back, no doubt, with a new studio and a new game, at some point down the line.

FWIW, I’ve heard those stories. On the other hand, I work with a lot of people who either worked with him at Epic or Boss Key and they all say he’s a super nice guy, if a little chaotic in his approach to game design/dev.

I think there comes a point in your career where you become a Celebrity and if you find you enjoy that you don’t want to do anything else.

SecDef??

First thing we’re gonna do, we’re gonna get rid of all the necks in the military. No more necks. We’re getting absolutely fantastic chainsaw manufacturers already on board, truly great American companies. We’re gonna makes so many jobs, people, believe me.

Hopefully they stop short of the rape farms. That was a real high point of my illustrious career writing about games, was reading the Gears of War comic about rape farms. Really great stuff, made me feel good about being a human.

So as a dude who has played all the games but read absolutely zero background comics/books/whatever, my first thought was what, followed shortly by no I really don’t want to know anything about the rape farms.

Was the comic for or against the rape farms?

No you see the rape farms were necessary evils to make sure the human birthrate stayed high enough because you just can’t convince humans of child bearing age to get humpy so you have to send them to rape farms you see

#bothsides

Wait - the guy sold people a game that got pulled (it appears the servers are shutting down) roughly a year after it came out, and he is the one who is upset?

Fuck that, I’d be pissed if I had bought that game.

now you have to continually spend money to make money with gaming as a service now and to prop up esports a la overwatch. blizzard couldn’t forcefully make it happen on their own even with heroes of the storm it seems.

Huh - certainly unexpected. I checked the page and his Twitter thread and it looks like he’s not officially a producer but brought on as an investor.

PUBG gutted PUBG. I and my buddies stopped playing after more than a year of nearly nightly sessions because it was still janky as hell and it was obvious the devs didn’t give half a shit and were way out of their depth anyway, but we sure as shit didn’t start playing Fortnite, which we tried once and hated. We can’t be the only ones.