it's fucking unbelievable how these morons can gut dev studios when the product that came out of them is to the scale of Doom 2016, Eternal and Dark Ages. Ridiculous.

I hope they band together and start their own company.

Speaking of which, if you know a way for me to find games made by devs that were once part of larger studios that were gutted, I'm interested.

Apparently these devs are treated the same way as Mick Gordon

Lighting a bowl and playing Quake and Doom wads and mods only this weekend. Let's see 'em off right, lads.

https://www.slipseer.com/index.php?resources/quake-brutalist-jam-iii.549/

I swear to god if the next Doom game uses Unreal I'm gonna lose it

I'd argue since the beginning not just 20 years.

without id, gaming as we know it wouldn't exist today. FPS games, competitive shooters, hell even Valve itself likely wouldn't exist without id software. goes even beyond that. you could even go as deep as the modding community and all the games that have come from that. the majority of modders got their start with id games. Many rockstar game devs got their start at id or via an id product.

They released Wolfenstein 3D in 1992 - 34 years ago. And pretty much everything they've released since has been great.

I'm going to go sit down now because my bones hurt thinking about that fact.

that don’t hold their own

It never was like that. Studios that do badly are never gutted, not as far as I've seen from online reports.

I think the reason why studios are gutted after success is that it's almost guaranteed that the money will keep flowing even after they are fired, BECAUSE of the success.

If you make a game and it sucks the company can't afford to fire you because they don't have guaranteed cash flow regardless if you're there or not.

There isn’t any money out there, and a production team trying to run their own studio typically doesn’t work out. „Just go indie“ is not a realistic option. More than likely a handful of these people might be picked up (though likely will have to uproot their lives to do it) but the rest will leave the industry. It’s an incredibly destructive thing MS has done, because id folks often did a lot of knowledge sharing at conferences.

The arrogance with which Gordon was treated soured me on the whole franchise which is a shame because Doom 2016 is one of my all time favorites. No small part due to his soundtrack.

zenimax

This. Right there with you. Dead company walking.

Weren't they bought back in the early 2010s? Doom 2016 was great and Doom Eternal has also a great reputation (I own it but haven't played it). So they made good games even after being bought by ZeniMax.

Bringing that zombie out makes zero sense.

3E was about replacing market-preferred products with those of their own. There's nothing to replace these products. This just god-honest mismanagement. Don't make it more complicated (or malicious) than it is.

Chex Quest sales are through the roof though.

It's come for everything. Everything from components used in factory lines to the ingredients bought by restaurants, it's all going to shit. The games industry just happens to be both heavily consolidated and highly public in nature.

Appropriate game title.

Stupid fucking "we have money" mentality so the best way to make one look better is siphon up successful developers and expect gold.

All blame falls to Microsoft. They hollow out companies that deliver on time and under budget to well above expectations. They're just fucking stupid.

It sold like 4.5M copies so I'm not sure it was a failure per se

GOG has no money, and Gabe has no incentive.

They're not interested in sales from the product. They want the IP, the patents, and a few of the talent, perhaps if they're particularly good.

You spend years making a large game, all negative profit. Then you launch, make most of the money you'll ever see off that title and go back to hibernate.

They buy the studio, own the ip, flip the crunch switch to on and wait for attrition. If anyone survives that, they put them somewhere else to make them money.

I don't know what the landscape is like in the gaming industry these days so I can't say if it's the case here, but often that kind of pattern is about eliminating competition (i.e. market manipulation rather than innovation).

Do you have the money to buy out id software and pay all the payroll for its coders?

Well there's different groups of folks. There's a group who aren't going to tolerate this and won't give them another cent, and another group who will look past it until it destroys their favourite series completely, and I guess another, enormous group who are entirely oblivious to any of the goings on behind the scenes and just buy game play game

Nobody tell them anything! No spoilers!

You're very lucky, my friend. Doom II is one of the greatest games ever made. Don't stay up too late playing it tonight. You're welcome.

Do you mean since Doom 2016 or since the original Doom?

No one was spared. Blizzard has been slashed as well. These big Mega companies were never going to be good stewards. No one should have ever assumed they would be. It was always a mistake to sell to them.

Hopefully something good can come up this. Such as the developers Etc unionizing widely. It's a lesson that we unlearned that we desperately need to learn again. And hopefully many of these laid off can keep cut and form new groups of their own. Which they can control for their own benefit. And keep it that way. So what if these big Mega corporations have all this ip. It sucks that it will decay and die. But the artists and creatives we're always the heart and soul of it. And we'll be capable of making more. Even under a different name.

For a while, video game sales were shooting up, during COVID-19. Lot of people inside with nothing to do.

My guess is that the people acquiring studios expected the increase in sales to outlast the pandemic, that it was a permanent change. That increase did not, in fact, persist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_on_the_video_game_industry

The video game industry was substantially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, as most industries were. The restrictions to social events and movement globally led to a sudden interest in gaming worldwide. This was credited with bolstering the success of many games, particularly games that launched in the March 2020 window, when gatherings were first restricted in many countries. A "gold rush" of video game acquisitions and investment ensued, marked by multi-billion dollar studio deals such as Microsoft's $75bn acquisition of Activision. However, this would prove unsustainable as the rapid pandemic-era growth was temporary. Major layoffs occurred when restrictions began to ease in 2022, and it was clear that the rapid industry expansion would not be sustained.[1]

The NPD Group reported that video game sales in North America in March 2020 were up 34% from those in March 2019, and video game hardware up by 63% – which included more than twice the number of units of the Nintendo Switch console. Net spending across the first quarter of 2020 in the United States reached US$10.9 billion, up 9% in 2020 compared to 2019 according to NPD. An increase at this point, near the planned end of the eighth generation of video game consoles, was unusual and was attributed to the pandemic.[128][129] By July 2020, NPD Group reported that the total sales of video game hardware and software within the United States in the first six months of 2020 reached US$6.6 billion, the highest since 2010.[130]

Post-COVID

Towards the end of 2023 and continuing into 2024, the video game industry saw a large number of layoffs, with over 10,000 jobs lost in 2023 and at least 8,000 in 2024 by February 2024. While other factors contributed to the layoffs, such as previous acquisitions and mergers that came after 2021, the return to normalcy after COVID changed the profitability of video games, lowering market forecasts, which the inflated industry could not sustain.[300]

"We've got to have...money."

You mean other than being an anti-"woke" libertarian chud?

the Xbox restructuring massacre

Fixed it for you