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The Human Toll Of Fallout 76’s Disastrous Launch KOTAKU.COM Former ZeniMax developers claim that Fallout 76 was severely mismanaged

In a game development world seemingly dominated by garbage corporate cultures, it's REALLY great to see a company embracing a positive work/life balance and experiencing outstanding success with its output! The Secret To The Success Of Bastion, Pyre, And Hades: No Forced Crunch, Yes Forced Vacations KOTAKU.COM It’s been ten years since Supergiant Games opened its doors. The team put all of their hopes into the studio’s debut game, Bastion, an action-RPG with a narrator. It succeeded with flying colors. Since then, the studio has released Transistor, Pyre, and Hades, every single one receiving critical acclaim and financial success. The team’s big secret? Everybody’s actually happy about working there.

https://kotaku.com/press-sneak-out-1842900864 It'll be interesting to see where he's heading given he's arguably the most high-profile journalist in gaming.

Kotaku

https://kotaku.com/the-video-games-that-made-people-question-their-beliefs-1836045401

https://kotaku.com/the-human-cost-of-call-of-duty-black-ops-4-1835859016

I think the "traditional" eSports genres like fighting games and LoL/Dota 2 will be fine, but newcomers like the Overwatch League will be toast. “I feel like esports is almost running a Ponzi scheme at this point,” Frank Fields, Corsair’s sponsorship manager, told an audience at San Francisco’s Game Developers Conference last March. He smirked. The crowd laughed uncomfortably. The smile dropped from Fields’ face as he continued. “Everyone I talk to in this industry kind of acknowledges the fact that there is value in esports, but it is not nearly the value that is getting hyped these days.” Later, Fields would clarify that this value, and future value, “as of now, is optimistic at best and fraudulent at worst.”

With the ongoing fragmentation of the PC gaming landscape, Kotaku decided to have some fun and rank the current batch of PC game launchers both by the quality (features, etc.) of the launcher itself as well as rating their desktop icons based on a 5 point scale. Launcher ranking: 1. Steam (icon - 2/5) 2. Battlenet (icon - 3/5) 3. Epic (icon - 3/5) 4. GOG ( icon - 3/5) 5. itch.io (icon - 4/5) 6. Uplay (icon - 4/5) 7. Origin (icon - 5/5) 8. Bethesda (icon - 1/5) 9. All those other random launchers, like Nexon or single-game launchers, that pop up whenever I turn on the office PC and I have no idea why (icon - 1/5) 10. Windows Store (icon - 0/5)

Kotaku has a lengthy feature on the making of Anthem, and how it went wrong. Among some of the good bits: -Some blame Dragon Age: Inquisition's success, because it was created under such incredible crunch time, but still turned out well. -It was originally called Beyond, but Bioware had to change it days before the reveal -Flying was added to and removed from the game repeatedly. -Frostbite sucks to work with. They had to build things like camera, inventory, and save systems from scratch. -The best Frostbite folks from Dragon Age were sent to work on FIFA when that game switched to Frostbite. -Even as they stole ideas from Destiny, it was a taboo word to say. The prefered point of reference was Diablo 3. Since Destiny was taboo to discuss, they couldn't have open conversations about what that game did well or poorly. -The E3 Demo was (like many others) mostly fake, taking the game in a different direction than many of the devs thought they were going. -The game concept (RPG or loot shooter? Open world or not?) wasn't nailed down, even long into production. -Most of the game was built in the final 16 months of development hell. -The game was evolving so much at the end, and performance capture was so expensive, that much of it was cut or doesn't make sense.

Facing Financial Pressures, GOG Quietly Lays Off At Least A Dozen Staff Amid a month full of mass layoffs across the video game industry, the digital store GOG quietly let go of what it says was a dozen staff last week. GOG, which is owned by The Witcher 3 publisher CD Projekt, did not say why the layoffs happened, but one laid-off staffer tells Kotaku that the store has been in financial trouble.

Guild Wars 2 Developer ArenaNet Plans For Mass Layoffs ArenaNet, the studio behind the popular online games Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, informed employees today that it is planning big layoffs, according to a person who is there. Although ArenaNet did not give out exact numbers, and they may not yet be finalized, rumors floating around the studio signal that a significant number of people will be let go.

Jason with yet another insider scoop!

This is one nasty court battle.

I know many of us very much enjoyed his first book "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" and were really pleased to hear that he's working on a second book about the gaming industry. Those of us on his mailing list received an update from him yesterday regarding the status of the book and it seems that he's "rebooted" the project to have a more focused purpose: Time for a status report! As you might already know, I signed a contract last year with HarperCollins to write a new book about video games. As you might not know, last fall I realized that my original idea wasn't coming together. It was too broad, too vast, too hard to sum up in a single sentence while talking to friends and colleagues. I had gotten some good material -- material that I'll almost certainly use either for this project or a future one -- but the book wasn't coalescing in the ways I was hoping. So I rebooted! My second book is now headed in a different direction, one that I think is working out so far. Throughout 2019, I'll be reporting and writing this new iteration of book two. I'm keeping the details vague because who knows what might change, but the short version is: It's going to dig into some of the darker aspects of game development, and it'll hopefully help humanize events that we think about in the abstract. From the start, I didn't want book two to be just another compilation of game development stories -- I wanted to try something different. I knew that'd be a riskier approach, but I also wouldn't have been satisfied doing the same exact thing a second time. Right now we're looking at a Spring 2020 release, but as countless E3 press conferences have shown us, anything can change. I'll be staying quiet about this for the next few months as I continue to write and report. Expect to hear much more from me later this year. Happy New Year, and I hope you all have an excellent 2019. Jason

https://kotaku.com/the-past-present-and-future-of-diablo-1830593195

The original plan for BlizzCon 2018, according to two people familiar with Blizzard’s plans, was for Blizzard to announce the mobile game Diablo Immortal and then end on a video in which company co-founder Allen Adham told the audience that a proper Diablo 4 was in development but not ready to show just yet.

One person with knowledge of the deal told Kotaku they’d heard it was “90%” finished. Said a second person: “It’s a matter of when, not if.” There is little doubt in my mind that Obsidian is DOA without this deal.

https://kotaku.com/sources-google-is-planning-a-game-platform-that-could-1827217387

The new game places more emphasis on how to build a better world out of the ashes, versus simply surviving in the original. Based on the short demo that Techland was showing at this month’s E3 Expo, that means more player choice, and , not shying away from the political implications of those choices.