No because it’s stupid to preorder digital goods. I’ll happily join early access to help fund projects I find interesting lile enshrouded.

Possibly. Wanna set fire to Andrew Wilson and use that to ignite the rocket to send Riccitiello to orbit. I’ll bring the lighters and beverages while we watch the firework.

a case that ‘they make poor games and thus it doesn’t matter that they’re laid off’

Oh, not at all, it does matter they’re laid off. They make poor games because that’s all that they know, since companies like EA churn out blueprint made after blueprint made games with no spirit or excitement, built only to leverage the IPS they own (and other EA studios the same, DeadSpace3…). They basically adopted the FC strategy company-wide (except 3rd pty indie publishing) which has created a vacuum of talent and imagination. This situation has been evident for more than a decade. They acquire/absorb talented studios, get rid of those pesky expensive senior workers and milk the franchises to the ground. That’s the EA MO. Sadly, people joined Bioware hoping to get a successful AAA game on their resumé to bolster their chances at pursuing greener pastures, the gamble didn’t pan out. Good luck to them, especially non programming staff, since code monkeys find a much better job market than English majors. Also, it’s a travesti the lady who led DAV got canned. She had worked on Sims games before and was handed a shit hand to play with. At the end of the day, the whole Institutional Knowledge schtick is a misnomer because very little of it was present in the latest round of layoffs at Bioware, they’re assembly workers now. Doesn’t mean they are less important, just means the larian marketing guy is talking out of his arse for clout.

That said, at the end of the day, the writing was on the wall. This goes for EA, Ubisoft, MS, et al. If you’re on the bottom, your arse is out the next time line goes down. Join a private studio instead, like Larian, they pay less but pay longer!

Edit: Almost forgot, fuck John Riccitiello to the moon on a fucking rocket. Him and Don Matric are the main responsible people for the shit environment we have in the games industry today.

Same guy who happens to be an exec.

Same guy who said “marketing is dead” is playing the CDPR startegy “we’re the good guys” to endear himself with the public. It’s a dangerous game, especially when he decides jack shit about game structure, engine, writing et al. He’s Literally a marketeer.

Regarding Bioware, I actually went to check game release dates. Turns out the signals they were bleeding talent were there already when ME3 released, roughly 13-15 ago. Wow, ty for mentioning that, Bioware has had 15 of releasing bland crap I don’t find good. Given the current state of the studio, I’m not the only one with that view, clearly.

Yes, I’m sure this 2025 article comes right on time to address the 15y old layoffs that gutted Bioware before you could speak.

What institutional knowledge? Most of the people who made the games we loved at Bioware are long gone… EA found them to be too expensive so they resorted to hiring cheaper “talent” like Heir. Now it’s too late, they have the IP but none of the passion and inventiveness.

Remember Marty Straton is a grade A cunt. Boycott doom.

I’m never paying for an ID game while Stratton is around, which is fine, because after the MS acquisition, there’s only one direction to the quality of the franchises…

By design. Cut all the middle men (including thousands of jobs in logistics, distribution and sales) and absorb all of that trickled down wealth upwards in the form of bonuses to the gents who annihilated an entire industry, not by lack of demand, but because the incentive structure is completely opposite to the interests of society at large.

Nintendo caters to a captive audience of children of all ages that have exactly 0 critical thinking. More than half of Nintendo’s releases of the past decade were shovelware leveraging the fanbase for their characters, like Mario and Sonic at the Olympics. It’s the pepsi man equivalent of the modern era. For every masterpiece, there are two or three shovelware games with low production cost.

When Nintendo does this “genius game design”, when Ubi does it, well, the coment section above. We’ve lost the plot. If the game is good it should be lauded, if it’s bad, it should fail. Regardless of who are the main characters…

I had forgotten about EA. What has gaming become…

Can we cut the transatlantic data cables please. Tired of these culture wars spreading everywhere. They have guns, just shoot at each other and leave the rest of the world alone.

I hope it’s good, especially the writing and progression systems. The art will be not to my taste, as usual, Obsidian is into garish colorful shit to detach themselves from other brands, which makes it right at home in Grounded, but in a fantasy RPG… nevertheless, if the gameplay and writing are good, it’s definitely a play.

I call BS on this. This is only true if you include gambling proceeds like CS skins, etc.

What are the chances the other half of the dev team had all the technical know how and prison just became a really convenient cover for a bait and switch of an EAG?

It always cracks me up, the dudebros buying 2k GPUs because MUH PCMR and then use framegen to play with console input latencies…

FML, we’re breeding intelligence out of the gene pool at speeds that threaten the survival of the species.

It was quite literally the reason why it hit 70k players, NVIDIA. cdpr, allegedly, got wads of money to become the tech demo for the green team, which made the red engine require an overhaul that killed its performance on old gen consoles. Nowadays it’s used as a benchmark. If you look at the player chart it peaked during CES and cratered back down to almost half of the 70k Tassi (aka mouthpiece) is touting. What really is a team worth exploring is how CDPR knowingly deceived millions of people, and thanks to the short memory of the Internet and (likely paid) puff pieces like this, has regenerated its image (and stock price) to a point that quite literally they got away with what they did and saw no consequences. It’s appalling that companies no longer pay when they cheat customers.

This is also a strong message on media literacy. There’s two main types of bait, rage and circlejerk, Tassi enacted the second with this puff piece. A real journalist, would have looked at the average player count of the last few months and used that, but no, “journalist” Paul Tassi chose to make a point from a blip caused by an event that EVERYONE could be aware of and, “journalist” Paul Tassi, should be aware of. This is so disingenuous that it becomes a master class on how media influences people with distorting information.

Edit: As another point, “journalist” Paul Tassi purposefully omits the genial Stardew Valley which usually clocks in close to double the playerbase of Cyberpunk (among over 10 single player games that overtake or compare, like FM, Don’t Starve, Terraria, RDR2, HoIIV, et al).

PCGamer running FUD ads for ActiBlizz, nothing new. Move along.

Wait, but we had recently a feature from PMG on YouTube showing how a significant portion of the art of devs like the coalition and Naughty Dog being contracted to sweatshops in Asia. So basically game development budgets are to pay a handful of talented programmers and the friends of the art and writing department while sweatshops do the work. Mega lol, we have bay area entitled shitheads playing ping pong in the office and adoring Elon while costing millions while the people who do the work are getting abused across the planet…

Another episode in the series: “South Korea is a dystopian hellhole”