Tag: KULTAN

Bigpoint Lays Off 120, Halts Development in United States


Bigpoint has abandoned development in the United States, according to a news piece by Gamasutra released today. The bad news comes alongside even worse: 120 employees have been laid off from the free to play publisher, over a third if whom are from the San Francisco studio. The layoffs are due to the cost of labor in San Francisco, as well as competing with other studios in the area for skilled work.

Founder and CEO Henrik Hubertz has stepped down from his role, citing unrelated reasons. Speaking to Gamasutra, Hubertz gave his own insight into Bigpoint.

The games that we have developed in the last two years haven’t been that successful, and the San Francisco area and Bay Area is quite a competitive market,

The other 80 layoffs came from Bigpoint’s office in Hamburg, mostly in administration. None of Bigpoint’s current projects have been affected by these layoffs.

(Source: Gamasutra)

Bigpoint: 250 Million Registered Accounts


Bigpoint Games notoriously has a big mouth when it comes to pointing out their accomplishments, and despite the objections of some of the gaming community over the publisher’s very blatant and self-noted pay-for-advantage model, the company continues to post major profits and major user numbers. Today, the publisher announced that their portfolio of over 60 games has brought in more than 250 million registered accounts. That’s enough accounts for around 3% of the world’s population to have an account.

As I’ve said before, Bigpoint has been consistently up front about selling power in their games, and very successfully at that. The developer raked in revenues of $200 million in 2010, and that number continues to grow as they add more titles to their lineup.

(Source: Bigpoint press release)

Bigpoint Gives Faith in UNITY, Jagex Should Use It


My first, and for a long time only, experience with MMOs on the UNITY engine was Cartoon Network’s Fusionfall, and for all the criticizing I throw at Bigpoint Games for their public comments, I’m very happy that they had more faith in the engine than I did. I say this because I was playing the open beta for KULTAN today, Bigpoint’s upcoming answer to the sea-faring MMOs, and the game looks great to the point where the screenshots (even the one I presented) really don’t do it justice. And the game ran great, apart from a few issues I had with the controls and some problems with targeting, but that can be ironed out in development.

Of course this isn’t the first Bigpoint MMO built on the UNITY engine. Battlestar Galactica Online also does the engine justice. It is a system that is mind-blowing more in the sense of what a browser-based engine can do, rather than expecting Crysis-level graphics. Even in the short period between Battlestar Galactica and KULTAN, the amount of progress tells me that in just a few years the UNITY engine has the potential to evolve the next base platform for MMOs, in a similar way that the Unreal engine became the base for most video games you play today.

Almost immediately I thought “I’d like to see Runescape transition to Runescape 3, released on the UNITY engine.” Java is a great tool, but it is falling behind on the times. For an MMO, especially one growing at the rate Runescape is, the technology has become so old and lacks optimization that Jagex will only be able to stack so much on top before they are forced to switch over. The Java engine doesn’t lend itself well to “real time” on a mass scale, which you can see in Runescape’s mini-games and FunOrb’s mini-games that have some sort of fast-paced measure to them.

Moving to the UNITY engine would allow for keyboard movement rather than relying on point and click pathfinding, fighting would become far more engrossing than standing next to someone taking turns swiping a whip, and while Jagex could get the engine for free, porting the game over to mobile devices would be far easier than on Java. I’m not an expert on the engine, but I get the feeling that removing the point and click aspect of Runescape would also see a heavy decrease in botters, not to mention better support for anti-cheat utilities. Also, UI improvements! I’d no longer have to go through the game seeing every button for every interface I might ever need to use!

And for the people who can’t play Runescape 3, keep Runescape 2 open for five more years (blocking new accounts) and allow people to transition their characters to the new game. No, not everyone has a powerhouse computer, but UNITY engine doesn’t require one and holding back upgrades to accommodate little Timmy on the library’s computer just allows for Chris in Florida to run that many more clients on his gold farming…farm.

How did this article turn into Runescape? Anyway, I think I’ve made my point. The UNITY engine is the base platform for browser MMOs, and something about Jagex not stopping cheaters.