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Blizzard Decimation
It’s been rough going in the game development world, and it’s getting rougher: Microsoft has laid off 1,900 Activision Blizzard staff. Layoffs are an expected reality after corporate mergers, and certainly the industry trend is towards cutting staff this past year. But this… also cuts a bit deeper.
The changes announced today reflect a focus on products and strategies that hold the most promise for Blizzard’s future growth, as well as identified areas of overlap across Blizzard and Microsoft Gaming. Today’s actions affect multiple teams within Blizzard, including development teams, shared service organizations and corporate functions. As part of this focus, Blizzard is ending development on its survival game project and will be shifting some of the people working on it to one of several promising new projects Blizzard has in the early stages of development.
There’s some irony in Blizzard’s abandonment of the survival game project just as Palworld is eating the genre’s lunch – copying existing games and making them slightly better was Blizzard’s whole M.O! No doubt the layoffs were planned months ago, but part of me wonders whether the calculus would have changed had they known of Palworld’s viral success. Then again, if Blizzard released something to less acclaim, then that would be pretty embarrassing.
I’m actually low-key devastated that we won’t see Blizzard’s take on the genre. It may seem like there are a lot of options available – and there are – but it’s quite rare to see AAA development in this space. Right now, it’s like… Fallout 76 and maybe Grounded. No Man’s Sky might count? Just imagine your character running around with the detail of Overwatch rigs. Blizzard already has experience building giant, seamless worlds too. Although… hmm. If you squint hard and ignore the questing, I guess WoW itself really might feel like a survival game already. Maybe that slight overlap was the problem.
In any case, another unfortunate outcome of the axed survival game is the fact that the devs working on it were pulled from other areas months ago, only to be laid off. From a Hearthstone Reddit thread:
—FORMER Hearthstone Devs that were on cancelled Survival Game have been laid off!:
-Matt London – Designed Book of Mercenaries (solo adventures/stories/characters), Twist, and Caverns of Time Expansion
-Ates Bayrak – Designed Duels
—Current Hearthstone Team members laid off:
Cynthia Park – Hearthstone PR Manager
On second thought: oof. Book of Mercenaries was not good content, Twist has been an epic disappointment, and Caverns of Time was an insane cash-grab that’s especially egregious considering they “paused” Twist for months. Meanwhile, Duels is was… cut from the same cloth, let’s say. I don’t want to kick anyone while they’re down or anything, but I’m starting to wonder if Blizzard was really assembling an A-Team for the survival project. Maybe these devs were the ones most willing to take risks to see what works. And perhaps the monetization strategy wasn’t their idea. Who knows?
Oh well. Pour one out for the game that was not to be.
Epic Whims
Epic is in court again, this time facing off with Google. And during the testimony, it was admitted that the Epic Game Store is still not profitable. Not sure of the current figures, but they had lost $330 million back in 2021. That is not always a bad thing for tech companies, who typically operate under a “if you build it, they will come” fantasy funded entirely by rich gamblers who hope to get cheap shares of the next Facebook. Still, even Epic thought their storefront would be profitable by 2023.
Interestingly though, Epic is not being funded by venture capitalists per se. They are being funded by their ridiculous, beyond-all-comprehension wildly successful Fortnite money:
When Fortnite launched in 2017, Epic was a 500-person company—known primarily for producing the Gears of War franchise and creating the industry-leading game development software, Unreal Engine. It was booking about $100 million per year in revenue. A year later, Epic made a staggering $5.6 billion in revenue. Ninety-seven percent of it was from Fortnite.
[…] According to Forbes estimates, the Cary, North Carolina-brd developer posted revenues of more than $6 billion in 2022, with the vast majority still coming from Fortnite.
Forbes (paywall)
I knew Fortnite was successful, but part of me still imagined that the Unreal engine was most of what sustained the company. That does not appear to be the case.
My question is: how long can this go on? I mean, on the one hand the Fortnite money machine is still printing. And, hey, Uber has been around for 9 years and only became profitable a few months ago. But we’ve also seen Epic lay off 16% of their staff this year and divest themselves of Bandcamp and other properties. Clearly, sustainability is a concern.
With that backdrop in mind, will they continue dropping free games every Thursday through 2024?
Beyond the freebies, this is relevant to my interests because of all the (timed) exclusives too. Dead Island 2 is still not available on Steam, and likely won’t be until next April. While the Epic Games Store has improved over the years – they have had wishlists and shopping carts for at least two whole years now! – exclusivity equals higher prices for longer. Who knew? Some of that is changing a little, as it seems Fanatical and Humble are selling an EGS key for Dead Island 2, but that’s just 1 of 2 listed key sellers to the dozens of Steam alternatives.
Not that I’m hurting for games, of course. But I do want to play Dead Island 2.
Daybreak Outlook Dim
In the long-term, it’s possible the “restructuring” going on at SOE Daybreak could result in a better game company. In the short-term though? Jesus Christ:
Dave “Smokejumper” Georgeson (Director of Development for the EverQuest brand, @DaveGeorgeson)
Jeff Butler (Creative Director for the EverQuest brand, @JButlerDaybreak)
Linda “Brasse” Carlson (Community Manager, @Brasse)
Akil “Lyndro” Hooper (Everquest II developer, @akilh)
Aaron “Gnobrin” Bisnett (Weapon and Armor designer for 12 years, @Gnobrin)
Douglas “Endymion” VanDerveer (Everquest II game designer, @douglastweets)
Aimee “Ashlanne” Rekoske (Community Relations Project Manager, @Ashlanne)
Eric “Felgon” Smith (Associate Producer for EverQuest Next and Landmark, @F4Felgon)
Steve “Moorgard” Danuser (Lead Content Designer and Head of Story, @Moorgard)
Tiffany “Amnerys” Spence (Social Media, @JustTiffy)
Kyle “Hats” Manchester (Community Manager, @Hats)
Racheal “Afista” McKenny ( Everquest II community Manager, @Afista)
Noah Watkins (Graphic designer, @noahwatkins)
Kelduum Revaan (Programmer for H1Z1, @Kelduum)
Katharine Anderson (Build master for PlanetSide 2, @katharinelilly)
Xander Clauss (Base designer for PlanetSide 2, @XanderClauss)
Taylor Dowell (Systems designer for PlanetSide 2, @Tayradactyl)
David Carey (Systems designer for PlanetSide 2, @dcarey7761)
Aimee “Ashlanne” Rekoske (Community Relations Project Manager, @Ashlanne)
Michael “Xelgad” Ganz (Systems designer for EQII, @Xelgad)
Jeffrey Bard (Everquest II development)
Possibly all contracted employees – Not confirmed
(source1, source2, source3)
A more structured data post can be found here.
As you might imagine, morale in the /r/EQNext, /r/H1Z1, and /r/Planetside subreddits are at an all-time low. There is a thread up by David Carey (former PS2 dev) asking people to not hate on Columbus Nova, and the arguments presented make sense in a lot of ways. On the other hand, for PlanetSide 2 specifically, it’s not entirely clear that there is another “base designer” on staff to, you know, build more bases. So what we see currently might be all we ever get. Which is… not exactly encouraging. To say nothing about the future of H1Z1 or EQN especially, assurances be damned.
Huge Layoffs for Wildstar
In a statement provided to Polygon by NCSoft, the layoffs were described as part of “a restructuring of key operations with [NCSoft] West.” The publisher says it is devoted to its core massively multiplayer franchises — Aion, Wildstar, Lineage, and Guild Wars — but it also plans to expand into mobile and tablet products.
According to the statement, there were “staff reductions” across all of NCSoft’s western branches except for Guild Wars developer ArenaNet.
A source speaking to Polygon who wished to remain unnamed said that Carbine was especially hard-hit by the layoffs. The studio reportedly lost over 60 members of its team of a few hundred. Our source says the layoffs included Carbine employees across all levels, not just entry level or less senior staff.
Although I let my Wildstar subscription lapse after the first month (I had one extra free month via in-game gold), I left /r/Wildstar subscription active on Reddit just to keep an eye on things. For the last few months I thought it might be good to track down just how many developers were leaving Carbine, but it didn’t seem especially pertinent considering I did not know their relative “value” or impact to the game. Given the news of this heavy cut, I decided to go ahead and post what I could find:
- Jeremy Gaffney (President of Carbine | Aug 26)
- Hugh Shelton (Class Lead | Sept 23)
- Stephan Frost (Design Producer | Sept 30)
- Matt Mocarski (Art Director | Oct 14)
- Bitwise (Lead Client Engineer | Oct 23)
- Rob Hess (Dungeon and Raid designer | Oct 23)
- Ryan Moore (Senior World Artist | Oct 23)
Some of these people left for personal reasons, some got better offers, some were hit with layoffs. To an extent, this is pretty “normal” in the game industry anyway. No doubt some of those people have been working on Wildstar for 5+ years.
At the same time… yikes.
Too soon? Too soon.
In An Age 
Microsoft Fallout
May 9
Posted by Azuriel
About a week or so ago, the rumor mill was a-churnin’ about how the surprising popularity of the Fallout TV show – 65 million viewers in 16 days! – was causing Xbox execs heads to extend (pardon my Seuss). Even Todd Howard was saying Bethesda wants to “find ways to increase our output, because we don’t want to wait that long either.” Which is funny, considering that it is Bethesda’s own metered cadence which will ensure that Fallout 5 is not released until the 2030s; Elder Scrolls 6 is next in line after the tepid Starfield, with Fallout 5 not coming out until, presumably, the ending of the TV series.
Welp, cue that monkey paw finger-curl:
A further quote from Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, says:
Cruel irony abounds, considering a year ago Matt Booty said Microsoft has no plans to shut down Arkane Austin “right now,” after the disastrous Redfall launch. And I guess he was technically accurate. There are fewer charitable interpretations for axing Tango Gameworkers though, considering the effusive praise Hi-Fi Rush received from Microsoft brass – “Hi-Fi RUSH was a break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations. We couldn’t be happier with what the team at Tango Gameworks delivered with this surprise release.” Certainly seems like they could have been happier after all.
I don’t want to undersell the sad reality of thousands of game devs losing their jobs. That shit sucks.
…however. In the specific case of Arkane Austin, I have to wonder if there is the barest glimmer of a silver lining. For one thing, it is worth pointing out that no one at Arkane actually wanted to develop Redfall. It was a studio known for immersive sims, and Redfall wasn’t that. In fact, that same report stated that 70% of the team members who worked on Prey left the company during Redfall development. So, really, Microsoft is kinda putting the zombie studio out of its misery.
Oh, but know what might be an interesting franchise for an immersive sim? Fallout. That is wild-ass speculation on my part, and contradictory besides considering most of the immersive sim devs already left. But. BUT! Can you imagine? Of course, it would probably be best (and poetic besides) for Obsidian to take up the mantle of Fallout again, especially considering both studios are under the same (reaving) Microsoft umbrella. Unfortunately, Obsidian is releasing Avowed this year and they are also working on The Outer Worlds 2 for some reason. Seriously though, was anyone asking for that?
Alas, we will have to see how things shake out. Just… goddamn, could someone give me more Fallout?
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: Arkane Studios Austin, Cruel & Usual, Fallout, Fallout TV, Layoffs, Microsoft