News that Intrepid Studios, developers of the upcoming MMORPG Ashes of Creation will be shutting their office on the 1st February as everyone has been laid off. They had around 250 developers with the studio being based in San Diego but a lot of people working remotely across the US. Will update...
I’d say a big part of that is that no major player in the video game industry is still interested in investing long-term into building something. Games like FFXIV started out with huge losses, and they kept with it. Any worthwhile MMO is going to have falterings like that at some point in its life, and they’d need investors that can actually stay calm about that. In today’s markets, where they expect development time to be something like 1-2 years for something that must follow every monetizing trend (battle pass, loot boxes, etc) it’s extremely unlikely. It’s probably not consumer expectations making it impossible.
Well, part of why they want to follow the latest monetisation trends is that the idea of a subscription-based game is a much harder sell these days than it was 20 years ago. The landscape is just different.
I’d say a big part of that is that no major player in the video game industry is still interested in investing long-term into building something. Games like FFXIV started out with huge losses, and they kept with it. Any worthwhile MMO is going to have falterings like that at some point in its life, and they’d need investors that can actually stay calm about that. In today’s markets, where they expect development time to be something like 1-2 years for something that must follow every monetizing trend (battle pass, loot boxes, etc) it’s extremely unlikely. It’s probably not consumer expectations making it impossible.
Well, part of why they want to follow the latest monetisation trends is that the idea of a subscription-based game is a much harder sell these days than it was 20 years ago. The landscape is just different.