This is twiddling mustache bad.
Sounds like he’s angling for a job with Musk!
“Bethesda did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.”
I’ll bet.
I forgot that Devolver went public.
Hey, that’s a much a better P/E ratio than Paradox.
This neutrality agreement apparently only applies to workers at ABK after the merger (if it happens). It means that Microsoft will not interfere with organization efforts within ABK.
Doesn’t seem to apply to the rest of Microsoft or Xbox, but theoretically it could be extended to them later.
First time in a while I’ve heard of EA opening a new studio, instead of shutting them down.
EA’s official twitter account blasted this out a few days ago:
https://twitter.com/EA/status/1542652454159798272
It’s one of those “hey fellow kids” moments where EA is trying to participate in a the “red flag” meme. “He/she/they are a 10, but…” Then followed with a thing that supposedly should throw up red flags to the reader about how the potential 10 has something deeply wrong with them. As you might imagine, some of EA’s own people did not take the tweet well.
https://twitter.com/VinceZampella/status/1542728204749680641
Apparently, there was quite the hubub internally over it and how to correct it.
“As the negative reactions grew, and more of us began being more assertive, a plan was put together – very haphazardly! – to have other internal studios reply to that tweet,” one of our sources explained. “They were desperately trying to turn things into a positive. Even people working on multiplayer games didn’t like it.”
There was a call to action in the Slack channel featuring an “all hands on deck” plan asking social managers to workshop replies where EA studios would publicly ridicule their publisher online. The idea was to get more attention on the tweet, then use it to highlight some of EA’s single-player games. They wanted to flip the narrative and turn it into a marketing win.
Some EA employees pointed out that the “roasting EA strategy” would feed into the “big, bad EA” narrative that even their own studios and franchises don’t like them.
The decision was made to just toss up a tepid apology tweet and hope it went away quickly.
https://twitter.com/EA/status/1542706383694565378
“I’m 99 percent sure the person who posted the tweet and their manager don’t even know about the single-player games comment from a decade ago,” said one of our sources, referencing EA Games label president Frank Gibeau’s infamous 2010 comment about the death of the single-player game.
“They’re all new and most of them, to my knowledge, aren’t really game industry people. The person who posted that tweet didn’t know and wasn’t supported properly to ensure something like this didn’t happen.”
So much hubbub over one stupid badly tasted joke. Kinda typical these days.
That’s the problem with media. The more powerful it is, the more it amplifies everything. You don’t get to choose what to amplify, it’s all or nothing.
Copenhagen-based Nordisk Games has fully acquired Supermassive Games, the BAFTA-winning, independent UK game developer best known for the critically acclaimed narrative games Until Dawn, The Dark Pictures Anthology and the recently released The Quarry. The acquisition follows Nordisk Games taking a 30.7% stake in the studio in March 2021.
Their next game will be a Lutefisk based horror game where a group of Nordic teens are stranded on an arctic island with nothing but a can of lutefisk.
One the one hand, they’re hungry. Otoh, the whiff.
How long before Nordic buys Nordisk? Embraces I mean.
What a buzzword salad press release. Riccitiello may not have been as bad for Unity as some people feared he would be, but there’s a far cry from the company that set out to democratize game development to what it is today. This is … what… the ninth or tenth acquisition/merger in the past 2-3 years?
I hope Parsec and Weta survive this fuckup by the former EA CEO
In non-buzzword explanation (paywall) - more monetization (F2P app focused)
ironSource’s main product is ad mediation for mobile apps — mostly games. The goal of publishers is to fill as much of their ad inventory as possible with ads that have the highest rates as possible, all while controlling their own cost and complexity. These two things work against each other: a publisher could work with only one ad network, but then they are limited to whatever ads and rates that ad network can achieve; alternatively, they could work with multiple ad networks, but then they have to manage multiple SDKs, figure out how to run ads from which ad network when, etc.
Ad mediation platforms solve this problem: publishers only need to install one SDK from the ad mediation provider, which incorporates multiple ad networks […]
Unity Ads, meanwhile, is one of the largest ad networks in mobile gaming; Unity announced its own ad mediation platform last fall, but announced on its last earnings call that it was delaying its launch
“Dynamo Pictures is a company that plans and produces visual content,” Nintendo wrote. "Nintendo has decided to acquire 100 percent of the outstanding shares (excluding treasury shares) of Dynamo Pictures and make it a wholly owned subsidiary to strengthen the planning and production structure of visual content in the Nintendo group.
“The acquisition is expected to close on 3rd October 2022, pending satisfaction of all relevant terms and customary closing conditions.”
Originally founded in 2011, the production company has a string of video game and anime credits to its name, including motion capture and animation work on episodes of Yuri!!! On Ice, plus Persona 5, Final Fantasy 13-2 and Metroid: Other M.