I’m not EA, but surely they are cheaper than people living in LA. Explanation done.
I think the folks laid off are in Louisiana (LA), rather than Los Angeles (LA). I suspect cost of living/employment/etc. is probably higher in most of Europe and the UK than Louisiana…?
Damn you American acronyms!
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that perhaps QA jobs at large videogame publishers are not the best place to look for work if job security is extremely important to you.
All the EA game testers I knew in California got laid off when they made the deal for this office with LSU in 2012/2013: Electronic Arts brings the game to LSU main campus | Center for Computation & Technology. Louisiana was giving them space in the university, tax credits, and access to an exploitable student population.
I’d guess they’re saving even more money making the UK/EU localization teams do double duty with functional testing.
This game just came out last week, and I mentioned it in the Indie 3D Souls-like thread. Apparently it has animations stole from From Software?
I would not be surprised to find out there a whole lot of stolen assets available from less reputable “creators” on the Epic and Unity asset stores. I’m not sure how they would be able to do robust proactive validation of assets like that.
In a statement shared with Eurogamer, the developer said that 10 percent of the game had been created using Epic Marketplace assets.
“As a three-person studio, [Epic Marketplace] was a vital resource to utilise throughout the four year development. The assets in question were purchased from the Epic Marketplace in good faith and with the understanding that Epic went through the proper vetting and review process before listing them for sale,” reads the statement.
After contacting Epic for an investigation into the origins of the assets, Epic responded to the developer: “Pursuant to the Marketplace Distribution Agreement, each Marketplace seller represents and warrants to Epic that they have appropriate rights to upload their content. As with any store that hosts third-party content, however, Epic is not in a position to independently verify such rights, and Epic makes no such guarantee to purchasers of the content.”
As a result, Archangel Studios is removing these assets from the game out of respect for the original artists and the players.
Sounds like a reasonable response to the situation, tbh.
Yeah, pretty much. In an ideal world, sure, they would have done due diligence on those assets, but in an ideal world, the jokers who stole them and uploaded them to the Asset Store wouldn’t have done that either.
The news follows last year’s underwhelming launch of Need for Speed Unbound, which arrived to a warm critical response but little fanfare from publisher EA.
Fuse Games will be led by former Criterion boss Matt Webster, with four former Criterion co-founders in senior roles. Together, the team has worked together for nearly two decades on Criterion’s various projects: Burnout, Battlefield, Star Wars: Battlefront and Need for Speed.
Now, Solomon has revealed he is hoping to find some funds for a new studio. Speaking on Simon Parkin’s My Perfect Console podcast, Solomon reflected on his time at Firaxis, saying following the release of Midnight Suns he found himself unexcited “about doing another turn-based strategy game”.
“[It’s] not because the genre isn’t amazing - it’s where I’ve spent my life - but I felt like I didn’t have anything more to say in that area,” Solomon explained.
“So I started thinking, what would I do if I wasn’t making this? If I wasn’t making another turn-based strategy game at Firaxis? And I started to get excited about… Well, there are other things that excite me as a designer, and the idea of starting something new was really exciting to me.”
He continued: “And I kind of I realised, as the company was changing, this was my opportunity to think about maybe I should make a change. If I’m ever going to do my own thing, which again Sid [Meier] had started multiple companies and I thought to myself, if I’m ever going to start my own company, which isn’t in my nature but… I felt like I can do this, do a whole new thing and be completely in charge of it, and that was just too exciting for me.”
Obviously a stunt, but some developers on Twitter have pointed out that this will help convince players that games are easy to make. Like players already think that coding is free instead of every game’s single biggest expense.
Yeah, here’s a vid of the actual state of AI in Unity right now… ;)
(It’s an early proof-of-concept integration of ChatGPT inside Unity)
Coding is expensive, but not that expensive.
I was probably being too hyperbolic, I should have said developer salaries are a much bigger expense than people assume. Players understand servers, marketing, and art cost money but tend to discount the development itself.
Uh, Atari bought the remaster outfit Night Dive. That was unexpected. I hope their lackluster Blood collaboration isn’t an indication of their future efforts. I’m surprised modern Atari would have the resources to pull off a deal like this.
Atari as in, the French company formerly known as Infogrames? I’m sure this will end well.
I thought that most game studios have a lot more artists than developers.
I had previously thought that the software developers would have been the major cost, but I seem to recall finding that wasn’t the case.
In my experience, the coding is the most complex and demanding part of game development, but for raw dollars, usually a lot more is spent on artists cranking out art assets. There’s a reason dozens of huge art outsourcing companies exist to make assets cheaply.
Yep, content production (art and design) is were the big expenses are in many games, in my experience. Coding is complex and extremely specialized, but generally managed by a smallish team wrt the whole studio.