Achi news desk-
All eyes are on the tech industry lately, and especially the gaming space, where redundancies are so widespread that there a whole Wikipedia page about it now to help keep track. However, Michael Douse, publishing director at Larian, the notable private studio is responsible for Porth Baldur 3 a Theology: Original Sinsays that calling it inevitable “is not true.”
In fact, he immediately calls it an “avoidable f**k-up.”
“That’s really all they are,” Douse said in an an interview [Note: The original piece has a hard paywall] with gaming media veteran Stephen Totilo, formerly of Axios and now an independent news and commenter. “That’s why you see one after another. Because companies go: ‘Well, finally. Now we can, too. We’ve wanted to do it for ages. Everyone else is. So why don’t we?’ That is very sick.”
More directly, he says the corporate structure of public game studios is harmful to the workplace, the very games they make, and the players they sell to. After all, as he framed it, “None of these companies are in danger of going bankrupt. They just risk demoralizing the shareholders.”
As a counterpoint to the trend of studios being seen by stockholders as public companies, he discusses that as a privately owned studio, Larian has a better working environment, allowing the studio to work at its own pace. rather than being held to often unrealistic standards. .
The money that comes from becoming a public company, or even owned by one, is an advantage, but the creative and labor cost is too much of a risk: “It might be that creating the games we wanted doing them, going public gives us more money, but it is contradictory to the quality of what we are trying to do. So it wouldn’t make our games better. It would make us hurry.”
Another advantage of being private? Making games that gamers actually want to play. It even compares that kind of success Porth Baldur 3 to game like Palworld, in that sense. “They took a bunch of mechanics that they knew people liked, they made a game that wasn’t bothered by what a game should be, and they gave it directly to players who decided to buy it. That’s really f**king simple. It’s not rocket science.”
Many of these points were about industry greed reflected by CEO Swen Vincke during and immediately after Game Prizes.
The full interview is available by subscription to Stephen Totilo’s independent program Game File Newsletter.
Related:
Opinion: Killing The Big Game
Ad blocking test (Why?)
Source link
Related
