Another high ranking member bites the dust.
Continue reading “Ubisoft Fires Ashraf Ismail For Misconduct”
Tag: Kotaku
GameStop Thinks It Is Essential Retail To Stay Open During Lockdowns
Hey that Animal Crossing is important.
Continue reading “GameStop Thinks It Is Essential Retail To Stay Open During Lockdowns”
Bad Press: Kotaku’s Owner Demands Removal of Article Criticizing Obnoxious Ads
How do you guarantee that something will gain traction on the internet? Try to silence it.
Kotaku today penned an editorial from the staff explaining to readers that ads are not at the discretion of the editorial team. More specifically, the editorial team has no input over the obnoxious automatically playing video ads with sound that are popping up on the website. The article dutifully pointed users to where they could complain to Kotaku’s parent company, G/O Media.
Had the story ended there, there wouldn’t be anything worth covering. G/O Media has since apparently ordered the article taken down, as the article is now gone and Jason Schreier posted on Twitter; “This article is no longer up. The staff of Kotaku did not remove it.”
In G/O Media’s attempt to silence the article, they have only ensured that a lot more people will be talking about it.
Amazon Game Studios Suffers Layoffs, Cancellations
Amazon Game Studios confirmed this week that it has laid off dozens of employees in a report published by Jason Schreier of Kotaku.
Affected employees have been told that they have 60 days to seek new positions within Amazon or they will receive a severance package upon dismissal. An Amazon spokesperson stated to Kotaku:
“These moves are the result of regular business planning cycles where we align resources to match evolving, long-range priorities. We’re working closely with all employees affected by these changes to assist them in finding new roles within Amazon.”
Amazon began building its gaming division in 2014 and so far the company has yet to produce much of anything. The layoffs accompany the cancellation of multiple unannounced titles.
[NM] Kotaku Investigates Bioware, Bioware Makes It Worse
The only constants in life are death and taxes. The only constants in the gaming industry are EA (or a subsidiary) creating its own PR nightmare and then making the situation worse in response.
If you’ve been following the tale of Anthem and its alleged six year development cycle, today’s investigative piece by Kotaku’s Jason Schreier may not be that surprising to you. Titled “How Bioware’s Anthem Went Wrong,” Schreier talks to no less than 19 ex-Bioware employees who had been involved in the development of the game. The story is a tale of ineffective leadership, understaffed teams, and various departments either unwilling or unable to work together to put a cohesive and thought out plan together. While EA may tout that the game has been in the works for six years, according to employees the majority of the game was built in the last 12-16 months.
Bioware responded with a very stern letter to the public addressing the article. The response is quite baffling as the developer hides behind its declared passion for its customers, concluding with a thinly veiled attack at Kotaku that the article exposing Bioware’s poor working conditions and indifferent management is somehow a detriment to the industry and craft.
“People in this industry put so much passion and energy into making something fun. We don’t see the value in tearing down one another, or one another’s work. We don’t believe articles that do that are making our industry and craft better.”
And here’s the kicker; You may notice that the letter from Bioware doesn’t actually address any of the specific statements made in Kotaku’s article. That’s because Bioware’s response went up mere minutes after Kotaku published their piece. The folks responding to the article didn’t even bother to read it, and it also means that they had this pre-written and ready to go.
How fitting that a company accused of being tone deaf would be so tone deaf as to so blatantly not read the article that they are dismissively responding to. The management at Bioware either naively thinks that this response is going to pull the public to their side, or they are so deep in denial that they don’t see how bizarre the response comes off as.
Source: Kotaku
ArenaNet Braces for Layoffs As NCSoft Tightens Its Belt
Kotaku’s Jason Schreier is reporting today that ArenaNet employees have been told to brace for big layoffs. According to the article, CEO Songyee Yoon emailed employees to inform them that due to declining revenue, the company will be cutting costs across the organization, and merging NCSoft and ArenaNet’s publishing divisions in the process.
There has been no word on how many employees will be affected by the layoffs.
Source: Kotaku
Brad McQuaid Responds To Vanguard Criticism
Brad McQuaid is seeking eight hundred thousand dollars via Kickstarter for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, and not everyone is falling over themselves to hand their money over. For many, the disastrous launch of Vanguard is still fresh on their minds, an event that is causing them to be less than confident in Pantheon’s prospects. One gamer, Clmeas left the following comment on a Kotaku article promoting the Kickstarter.
Microsoft gave him $40,000,000 to make Vanguard with almost absolute creative control and he still released an unfinished, buggy, POS of a game after 5 YEARS in development.
The comment garnered a response from McQuaid himself, noting some of the challenges that Vanguard faced in its development from internal and external sources.
Microsoft funded us to almost $30M, after which there was a regime change at Microsoft and virtually all of the people we had been working with disappeared. The new people didn’t want to make Vanguard… they really didn’t want to make an MMO at all, and if they were, they wanted a Wow-clone-beater. We broke away from them and I turned to SOE and got them to fund as much as they could. Unfortunately, it fell short of the 6 months we needed, and the game was released too early.
WoW came in around $80M and they took at least 3 years to develop it (probably more, but 3 years after they *announced* the game — I have a feeling they were already working on it).
Star Wars: The Old Republic took at least 3 years, had hundreds of people involved, and cost between $150M and $200M (no one really knows for sure except the publisher).
Anyway, just some numbers for perspective. In any case, Vanguard was released too early but if you go check it out now it’s a solid game. The world is underpopulated but beyond that I’m still very proud of what we accomplished.
It’s good to see that McQuaid is proud of what Vanguard has become. You can check out the Kickstarter for Pantheon here or follow the link on the side-bar.
(Source: Kotaku)
Major Layoffs At Sony Online Entertainment
Word that Sony Online Entertainment Seattle is having layoffs and that studio closure is possible. http://bit.ly/eSxtvq
-George Broussard on Twitter
This was reported by Kotaku, although there has yet to be an official statement, Kotaku reporter Owen Good (who reported on the story) has confirmed it with a more involved source than George. It has yet to be seen which studios have closed down, although reportedly the studio behind the upcoming Agency MMO has been slashed.
This is no doubt a bombshell, not only for us playing Sony’s games but more importantly for the people who are losing their jobs and livelihoods. MMO Fallout is committed to this story, and will be updating as soon as any news is released.
Star Wars Galaxies: Server Shutdowns
I’ve been criticized a few times for being somewhat harsh on Star Wars Galaxies, going as far as calling it a comatose title that Sony Online Entertainment continues to hold on life support, giving it regular changes of clothing and painting pupils on its eyelids so people think it still has some life in it. For several years now, players have reported that all but the most populated of servers are faced with legions of empty player owned villages, desolate cities, and much of the world virtually abandoned. Sony still supports the title with frequent updates, such as the upcoming deathtroopers, and were it not for Sony’s attempts to keep their titles profitable to the point where the only cost is the electricity to keep the servers running, the plug would have been pulled a long, long time ago.
So it comes as no surprise when Kotaku reported today that Sony is shutting down 12 Star Wars Galaxies servers on October 15th. The following servers will be shut down:
o Corbantis
o Europe-Infinity
o Intrepid
o Kauri
o Kettemoor
o Lowca
o Naritus
o Scylla
o Tarquinas
o Tempest
o Valcyn
o Wanderhome
Players have until 5:00pm PT on October 15th to vacate the servers before they are shut down for good. After the change, there will be 13 servers remaining, offering plenty of space for players to fight the zombie hoards in the upcoming content update. That’s right, I said zombies. In Star Wars. Zombie Wookie.
More on Star Wars Galaxies’ downward spiral as it turns up.
MMO Fallout 