Posted by: Drew Sikora at October 8, 2009 11:46:56 AM
Howdy folks! This week I'm going to remember to re-read the Daily's of my fellow editors so half the stuff I post isn't a rehash from earlier in the week. Not that a reminder (or few) isn't always a bad thing, however.
Studio News - Activision, Emergent, Valve, Sulake. Heads are rolling in the Activision empire once again as the publisher closes downSpider-man: Web of Shadows developer Shaba Games (which includes around 30 employees) and a developer which they recently purchased, 7 Studios was forced to lay off 30 people (eerie coincidence?) due to a studio "realignment". This is, by the way, from a company that was one of Inc. Magazine's 500 fastest-growing companies in 2007. The Layoff Report unfortunately continues with Habbo Hotel developer Sulakeletting go of around 20% of it's staff, or 40 people. Nope, can't stop yet - Emergent has announced that it will be "restructuring its businesses", which it admitted meant that an unknown amount of people will be let go. Maybe some of these people will seek out newly-founded mobile games studioTarver Games, co-founded by Chris Cross, game design director for the Medal of Honor series. Finally, and as a reminder to you all what a great idea modding is for budding developers, Valve has hired the developer behind the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients.
Randy Pitchford and Brad Wardell throw down the gauntlets. Both Randy Pitchford (Gearbox head) and Brad Wardell (Stardock head) had some choice words to say about certain game services from Valve and Microsoft this past week. We'll start with Randy, who, in an interview with MaximumPC, blasted Valve for taking advantage of its grip on the digital indie market with Steam and in the process "exploiting a lot of small guys." Who are these small guys? He doesn't say. He does suggest that Valve and Steam become totally seperate business entities because "There's so much conflict of interest there that it's horrid. It's actually really, really dangerous for the rest of the industry to allow Valve to win." We can expect to hear lots more on this story, both from Valve and (hopefully) the "small guys".
In regards to Microsoft, Brad Wardell appears to have gotten completely fed up with Games for Windows Live to the point that, should the platform gain PC dominance, he would no longer consider making PC games. At all. It appears that his well-justified anger comes out of the Live team over at Microsoft forcing console standards on PC games, which is rather silly considering the technical differences of the platforms. It's almost as if they (*gasp*) want every PC game created for the platform to be relatively easy to port over to Xbox.
Class action lawsuit hits Sony over v3.0 firmware. Apparently someone got pissed off enough at Sony for ruining his console after upgrading to the new 3.0 firmware (and being charged $150 to get it fixed) that he filed a class action suit alleging that Sony is guilty of (among other things) breach of implied warranty, negligence, and negligence misrepresentation. The defendant claims that "thousands of Sony PS3 video game owners" were similarly affected, although it's unclear how many of those thousands ended up in his position with a completely bricked (so he claims) console. Many only reported controller issues and game freezing. We'll see how Sony responds.
Follow up: Japanese Game industry in decline.Last week I mentioned that Capcom's Keiji Inafune admitted to losing faith in his country's industry, and TGS showed a noticeable drop in attendance. This week, a report shows that the Japanese game market experienced a 10.5% fall over the first half of fiscal 2009.
Daily Remainders - more cool stories that didn't make the cut along with game dev articles/features.
Indie game maker Phil Fish (Fez) has already expressed how much love infuses the Indie Games community, but it was proven beyond a doubt this past week when Edmund McMillen (Gish, Aether, etc) had to be rushed to the hospital to have his gall bladder removed. The support from the Indie community was immediate and overwhelming. In a note on Facebook (after the successful surgery), Ed expressed:
"I appreciate every single amount of effort you've all put into the kind words you've sent me and money you've donated. I didn't expect anything like this at all, being in a drug addled haze for the past 5 days and waking up to something like this was beyond moving and brought me to tears many times. I love all of you guys and hope to repay you all in some way eventually."
His wife, Danielle, also deserves credit for hijacking his Facebook account to let everyone know what was going on.
And lastly, for some video entertainment, you're definitely going to want to check out the short indie film TURBO, which is about a futuristic 4D fighting game. The story is good, the acting is good, but the choreography is pretty stunning for such a project. Then again, they are Koreans. Enjoy!
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