From Developer to Defunct - Scott The Woz

Hi everyone Scott, nine steps ago I wanted to experience difficulties and indigestion, but then I discovered this nine step plan on how to successfully fail in the video game industry and now I'm finally broke and depressed, so now it's time to extend that bankruptcy a First of all, here's how to successfully fail as a video game studio, please take a look at this, yes, my pants, this is not Gary, stop, we want to do this, but we failed, so what? Maybe if we eliminate the extremes, the TVE, the DVO and launch it. some C's and Ellen's and M's, well son of a, we ourselves have a role model, the video game industry can be a difficult thing, these things take a lot of time, money and manpower to put together if a game that creates a Developer does not meet expectations. could be enough to sink the entire ship because many publishers believe that new releases should be strategically designed and well thought out to make the most money possible on game purchases and microtransactions dlc collector's editions day one editions of gold will accept any opportunity to melt people's enthusiasm for a new game as much as possible must be exhausting, think about it, what do you really want to be a video game company?

I tried to be Activision once and it was hard for anyone not to like me. It was too scary and laid off over 800 people, it was the worst Halloween ever, but sometimes, even after layoffs and cost cuts, some studios don't get past much of that and go out of business experiencing the worst possible fate, having the same company status as acclaim for some reason. It doesn't seem like a claim has gone away now, that's a name that just screams video games, it's one of the first non-major publishers these days that I think of when the whole concept of a video game company comes up and I don't know why. they were never a particularly good company, they released some NBA jams, early burn games, Tarak, some console versions of Mortal Kombat and a lot of licensed games, they went bankrupt in 2004 and what didn't you know?

It hasn't melted yet, so I guess it's claiming that existence isn't vital to our lives, but it's still hard to believe they haven't been around for so long. They are simply an unforgettable name in the industry, just like Midway, their name is mentioned. a decent amount for a dead company and that's because Warner Brothers bought its assets after going bankrupt in 2009 and was still using its name for re-releases of its old arcade titles, but the names of these two companies are some of the most important of the gaming sector. Well, looking at them both, it's pretty easy to see where things went wrong.

Midway found most of their success in arcades in the '80s and '90s, so in my opinion, although poor management and poor decisions can be blamed for them going bankrupt when they were forced to. compete in the console market it seemed like they were having a hard time keeping up with the competition they had Mortal Kombat but not much else that statement was never that good overall someone the quality standards of video games increased their profits increased In retrospect, the death of a video game studio is quite understandable and easy to explain, but sometimes their disappearance comes out of nowhere, they just randomly shut them down and that's always to varying degrees depressing, even then I'd say the idea of ​​Atari disappearing It loses all meaning every time I open the refrigerator there is an article about the purchase of Atari or its bankruptcy.

This Atari, yes, it is not the same as this one or this one. The name has been swapped around for years, so as long as Atari still exists, it's next. which has nothing to do with Atari, everyone knows that this current Atari used to be from the 70's and 80's. Graham's info is talking about a name I've seen hundreds of times, but I don't know anything about this. It seems they wanted to call themselves. Information about games, that was the name. They already took it, so it was, uh, yeah, information. Graham acquired Hasbro, which acquired Atari before, and then they rebranded themselves as Jesus.

Hasbro Interactive went men, who else will make the game of life for PC in 1998, but that's what happens most of the time? Many game

developer

s and publishers no longer exist, but are still alive due to mergers or acquisitions, which sometimes means that the studio still exists. Now I have a different name to remember Namco, remember Bandai, why not merge the two now we have Namco Bandai Games which was later changed to Bandai Namco Games which didn't change Bandai Namco entertainment thank goodness they changed that three times. Squaresoft and Enix, both known for Japanese role-playing games, merged to become Square Enix.

Konami acquired Hudson Soft and basically absorbed it into everything. the company later killed off the name, well, I mean, at least one of my husband's franchises survived after the merger, which just goes to show that sometimes a studio is no longer just due to a restructuring. Nintendo EAD was the development studio behind the mainline Mario Zelda Animal Crossing. mainline Nintendo games and no longer exist, that's only because Nintendo restructured its development studios by merging Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development and Nintendo Software Planning at Boman into an internal studio, Nintendo Entertainment Planning at Boman, Nintendo EPD and now, when a studio is acquired. by a larger company, that must mean the studio is safe from closure, right?

You are stupid? It's heartbreaking and frustrating to see a studio get bought or started up just to make a few games and then go out of business a few years later, and it happens with surprising frequency. Bizarre Creations can blur the geometry wars closed by Activision Lionhead Studios closed the fables series by Microsoft Capcom Vancouver had the game Dead Rising closed by Capcom guerilla cam bridge made Sony close the mercenary Killzone as box mates gave me four games of speed closed by EA Maxis Emeryville made EA close the sims in SimCity these RPGs closed the dead space for you see a pattern here that's why I even buy these studios if you have to make some games and then close them and lay off employees.

These are brilliant corporations that are always looking for new jobs. Surely they could have relocated many of these employees to other subsidiaries they owned, as most of the time the studio goes out of business when the games they made underperform. They are no longer profitable, but that's not really a good majority of employees fought, so why not relocate them to another part of the company? But surely everything happens for a reason, many studios end up merging, the studios that closed were because the games they were making were not selling, the parent company did not see much value in maintaining them.

I understand that it's incredibly sad to see a company that made legitimately good games close and see employees laid off, which is never fun to see. but these companies are trying to run a business most of the time. I doubt CEOs will say, "I'm dying to close that studio today." Study closures are mainly done for strategic reasons. These companies are businesses at the end of the day and sometimes they have to make difficult decisions that negatively affect many people. It's sad, but it has to happen. Sometimes that happens and then Activision lays off 800 employees to cut costs when the CEO makes 30 million a year.

What the hell? So it's pretty easy. fail to succeed in the video game industry, so let's dive into some key examples of studios that succeeded to fail. Disney Interactive Studios was one that just closed out of the blue and it really shocked me. I love Disney Magic artists. for PC of course they mainly made Disney related games and also dabbled in the pure market but their last big project was Disney Infinity developed by Avalanche, this was part of the toys come to life trend that Skylander started where you buy figures toy that you can scan. in the game, but Disney Infinity used figures of pre-made Disney Marvel and Star Wars icons, which you think would translate to greater success.

Well it was a big hit but not big enough for Disney because with Disney Infinity 3.0 Disney abruptly canceled the line of games and figures, this obviously didn't take long to come because plans were already being developed for a fourth game with new figures in Overall, of course, Disney is a smart corporation. I think they could see that toys coming to life were a fad and it was smart to bow out before they had a flop on their hands with Disney Infinity 4.0. It was a dying market. Why try to make more money on it and have a bunch of unsold figures and games on hand and then cancel the future? of the Disney Infinity franchise, they shut down the entirety of Disney Interactive Studios just to really keep it with us.

Disney Interactive suffered significant losses over the years, and while Disney Infinity was enough of a success to help the division stay afloat, the writing on the wall was that Toys That Came to Life was fading and with a future without Disney Infinity, Disney Interactive didn't have a reason to exist in the company's eyes. I developed their own games back when they could license their brands to video game publishers like EA, which was a great idea. idea, it's actually the same reasoning behind Disney's closure of LucasArts: they bought Lucasfilm in late 2012 and then closed their video game division in April 2013, laying off a good portion of their employees.

LucasArts created some of the most beloved adventure games out there with some big names. the process at the time like Star Wars 1313 and did you see that everything disappeared almost immediately after being purchased was discouraging for fans? The reasoning for closing LucasArts was simply because Disney found the possibility of licensing their IPs to other game

developer

s to be more attractive, how was it a great idea to talk about Lucas Arts in their adventure games? A company that was seen as its modern equivalent. It also happens to be one of the largest company closings in recent memory.

Telling games that these guys have been around for a while. I initially heard about them when it was announced that they were making the Back to the Future game in 2010. It was a point-and-click adventure game that basically acted as a fourth Back to the Future movie. They were mainly known for doing things like that. They took well-established media franchises and turned them into episodic story-based adventure games. They worked on several titles, but really hit it big in 2012. Telltale's The Walking Dead was a monumental success critically and commercially. He told a great story. It popularized episodic release.

The strategy rejuvenated the story-driven graphic adventure genre and came out at the height of The Walking Dead franchise's popularity, which definitely helped turn the tables in this game's favor. The revealer really had Walking Dead to thank for its overall success and also its eventual demise. He picked up too many projects and pushed too many games in such short periods of time. Since 2012, games never really improved from The Walking Dead, they didn't really evolve along with the industry and instead kept doing what worked in 2012. Episodic story-driven adventure games based on media franchises Popular series usually had three series running at the same time each and every year, which was too much for most to keep up with the formula showing oversaturation fatigue, and in late 2018, it was announced that Telltale would be closing just as They were in the middle of releasing the final season of The Walking Dead and had a good number of upcoming projects in the works, at least games arrived to finish the final season of The Walking Dead.

Walking Dead, but it's sad to see how revealing it's gone, the closure really came out of nowhere for me. I wasn't expecting it at all, but I actually thought about it for a second, it made too much sense, like I remembered everyone playing The Walking Dead when that happened. came out and some of their other later games were pretty great, but in 2018 I didn't really hear anyone talking about Telltale games, they really did do great things, but when it was obvious they had to change things to keep up. For the industry it was too late, however, I argue that one of the most famous falls of a company occurred when I think of THQ.

I think the games licensed for the Gamecube, some good, some bad, most completely mediocre, but still a valuable presence in the industry when As far as the original franchises go, they had Saints Row Destroy All Humans which included good stuff from Darksiders, they were definitely not the biggest names, but they hadlicenses for Pixar and Nickelodeon games for a while, so that made up for the lack of notoriety like me. He said that the Gamecube era was really when THQ was firing on all cylinders. Licensed kids games were pretty popular back then during the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii era, although that's when they started to struggle and that was partly because THQ said you know what Nintendo is going to do in two years. , yeah let's fail before they make that drawing tablet released in 2010, it was a drawing tablet for Wii, pretty solid idea overall, but I think THQ really put too much into this one, they could have gotten away with just the tablet and the drawing software included under the hood, no, they made a lot of games that required this.

I never really thought that the drawing board was worthy of being an accessory that should be mandatory for certain games like that, something that Nintendo does for its own console with things like the Wii Balance Board or Motion Plus, the other thing that THQ was able to do is that the drawing games were mostly licensed kids titles and I feel like a lot of parents who just wanted to give their kids some gameplay and action were disappointed. when they realized we needed this 3rd party drawing tablet from some bankrupt company, but the drawing problems really started to appear in full force when THQ decided to release it for ps3 and xbox 360.

Oh, sign up anywhere scare you!Someone, well the Utah tablet we did well on, the other consoles flopped hard, in my opinion it wasn't a big enough hit to justify distribution on other consoles that primarily appealed to an audience completely different compared to the Wii, this tablet was one of the biggest contributions to G's bankruptcy, but other factors were definitely still at play here, children's licensed games were starting to become less and less important, like thinking about how many there were on previous consoles compared to the Xbox 360 onwards, especially in some years. Years ago on modern platforms, like without a claim on THQ releasing movie related games, it made Activision release a crappy Ghostbusters game that really stood out.

If I had to guess why licensed games are not as prevalent now, it may be due to a development cause. Quite expensive for HD consoles, but recently we've seen more games tied into Cod's house. I think they found a way to avoid high development costs and have no development costs, it's great, but licensed games accuse pan and- butter, so when they weren't doing well they tried to buckle down and focus on more mature hardcore titles, it didn't really work because most of their games were just safe pre-average stuff like Darksiders in Saints Row have their fans, but when they were gambling mainly on the internal front of the game to prevent them from closing.

I think choosing THQ without the tie-in games wasn't a big deal. They filed for bankruptcy in early 2013 auctioning off their game assets in development like South Park. Ubisoft bought the stick of truth and 2k bought franchises like the WWE series currently, although THQ is back in some form. Nordic Games originally bought most of the original Q franchises and later in 2016 bought the THQ name and now operate. under THQ Nordic just because the THQ name is still pretty iconic, especially compared to the Nordic Games name, their entire game plan seems to be to acquire every B-tier game franchise ever conceived.

THQ Nordic will probably acquire the state of Nevada soon when a game company goes under, blows up, tons of people lose their jobs, games may be canceled, franchises are in limbo, it's never good when a solid studio closes, at least it exists the possibility of franchises being bought by other better companies, let's get jobs, we'll get new better jobs incredibly fast or the studio will merge with a bigger one and nothing really changes outside of the name of the studio, well everything happens for a reason, the closure from a gaming company is always one of the saddest things you can read in the news and there you are. go listen to me talk for 13 minutes on step one of our nine step plan, we only have eight more to go until this bankruptcy meter drops even lower.

I can't go on with this, we need to earn money quickly for someone's soup, it's always like this now. plays