Games journalism 2019 - Everything is streaming

YongYea is part of Games Radar? I thought he was his own thing, one of those critical let me explain the gaming industry while being a sort of consumer advocate, sort of, and also explaining everything about it to those who listens type.

dive is referring to the games radar story he linked, not the YongYea tweet.

This is literally their entire story:

This “news article” is, in fact, a complete restatement of the Tweet, with the words rearranged, and a little bit of background. Without any attempt to contact the author of the Tweet on which the entire article is based.

Games Journalism is pathetic and sad. But social!

Oh yeah, i was referring to the one Jaosn seems to point at as the worst, but there are other repeating this. I see them as mostly talking heads with a story to repeat to a bunch of listeners. That group that is helping spread this story, they’re not journalist but they are probably getting more eyeballs.

Well, you gotta get over 10 mins for that full monetization.

Is this true?

My God, think of the billions of hours of time that YouTube wastes around the globe due to this policy.

Payday 2 launched in August 2013 and it was a monster hit. The game’s phenomenal popularity ensured the DLC sold by the bucketload and Starbreeze’s share price soared. But internally, Starbreeze was tearing apart. According to multiple sources, Bo and Ulf had a bitter falling out. I’ve been told Ulf, burned out by the making of Payday 2, wanted to make something smaller-scale. Bo, on the other hand, had grander ambitions.

“After Payday 2 was released, he didn’t come to work anymore,” one source said of Ulf Andersson. “I didn’t think much of it, I thought he was a bit burned out and took some time off. After a few months they said he had some back problems and needed more time off. People who knew him more said he’s probably not coming back. After a while everyone knew, but pretended not to. It was a bit weird.”

Bo bought his brother out of his share of the company they co-owned, Varvtre AB, which also happened to be Starbreeze’s largest owner. Ulf, who was the creative chief of Payday while Bo handled business matters, went on to found a new independent developer called 10 Chambers Interactive and set about making a new game titled, perhaps appropriately, GTFO. According to those close to the pair, the brothers do not speak to this day.

Man, that sucks.

Absolutely worth reading - and full of headscratchers. It’s just absurd how quickly they went from being close to insolvency to sinking so much of the new cash into an engine and a VR headset nobody really asked for.

Yeah, not only there was personal drama, but from that point onwards, there was a serious mismanagement. Betting in an unfinished, unproven engine, which in the end it had to be abandoned, wasting one year and a half of work. Having two duds one after another (the Raid game and the Walking Dead game), instead of using their strongest license. Wasting money in VR ventures that went nowhere. All together and well, you can’t be surprised what it happened.

At least the article served me to remind me GTFO, I had totally forgotten that game.

It’s too bad when a wrong person gets in charge and runs a company into the ground with their moronic ideas.

But personally I considered Starbreeze dead ever since Machinegames got created.

Now if only Machinegames could create something better than Wolfenstein games.

The article also explains something I never really understood completely before: that even though Starbreeze “bought” Overkill, they bought them with really low-valued Starbreeze stock, which was pretty much most of their stock. So Overkill then owned Starbreeze. So the old Starbreeze was shutdown soon after, and all remaining stuff got moved to the Stockholm offices of Overkill. So even though Starbreeze bough Overkill, in essence, Overkill bought Starbreeze and shut it down.

Ubisoft’s space game Pioneer has morphed into a co-op shooter.


Ubisoft actually rebooted Pioneer once again, transforming it from a non-violent exploration game into a coop multiplayer alien shooter that uses some of Pioneer ’s old features.

I’d say that’s still “canceled” in that Pioneer now is nothing at all like the Pioneer that was.

You summed up why vlogging passed me by. My time is precious, i read fast.

The fact this got cancelled and replaced with yet more alien shooting makes me sad.

Yes, Ubisoft needs its own Destiny too.

Oh wait they already have one with Division. But now it has aliens!

Waypoint may be one of the casualties and could be eliminated entirely.

I have heard (you know, “on the street”) that the changes to Waypoint, while drastic, may actually be helpful to those remaining.

Those remaining? It’s like five people, and they’ve already narrowed their content strategy to basically nothing but podcasts due to not having the staffing for anything else. It’s hard to see how there’s any middle ground between unaffected and eliminated.

(Austin Walker’s post on said content strategy is an interesting contrast to the title of this thread).