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Visceral Games shut down by EA, Amy Hennig's Star Wars game cancelled - LOL new game cancelled too

fabrulana

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A Beautifully Desolate Campaign
:rage:
I loved the Dead Space franchise.
First EA removes the developers to other projects and then they killed them off! Fuck you EA!
I'm joining the boycott bandwagon, they won't see my money again...
 

Ash

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This might be the only meme that becomes relevant again at least once every 1-2 years. The corpses on that mass grave just keep piling up.

Meh. Visceral made a ton of poop anyways. Maybe one or two decent games (Dead Space) among a horde of crap. Can't say I care about the head lady behind the decline that is Uncharted either.
 

Trodat

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Just hold on, EA still has Respawn Entertainment working on that another Star Wars game with the ex God of War guy as a lead? That is the game I'm most interested about.
 

Cross

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This might be the only meme that becomes relevant again at least once every 1-2 years. The corpses on that mass grave just keep piling up.
That meme isn't particularly relevant here since Visceral was never an external developer that was acquired by EA, they were just a part of EA that got renamed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visceral_Games
Visceral Games was known as EA Redwood Shores from 1998 to May 2009.
 
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Ideally at least this means no one will be able to make more bad Dead Space sequels (which ended with 2 as far as I'm concerned).
Who's to say? They brought Hennig and Raymond to work on a Star Wars title, then cancelled it and closed the studio; they can have anyone work on anything OR not, no guarantees they won't have an arcade dungeon crawler like Silent Hill Book of Memories, or that Metal Gear fuck-up, or whatever bull-crap Capcom comes up with RE, regardless of how the various titles are doing.

I enjoyed the first 2 Dead Spaces a lot. But after 3 and that battlefield game, i can't really say i will miss these devs.
Hardline Was Fine (cue narcissistic hip-hop bullshit). Seriously though.

This sounds very much like "open world, shoehorned in co-op/multiplayer focus, games-as-a-service"
Some of the shittiest trends in the industry. Games-as-a-service especially.
That's why I like my annual dose of CoD (as a linear title).

Also bear in mind, that Hennig (or Naughty Dog) has worked on much more "classic" titles than Uncharted.
 

Infinitron

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All the dirt is coming out:



http://www.pcgamer.com/former-visce...d-space-2-cost-60-million-and-underperformed/

In follow-ups, Wilson said that he's "back of the napkinning" the numbers, but added that they're close to the real thing. "I don't know the exact marketing budget but they're frequently close to the dev cost (I have heard this anecdotally)," he wrote.

Sky-high budgets are also why developers are launching their own digital storefronts, rather than simply relying on the simpler and far more ubiquitous Steam.

"Do you hate uplay? Well, the pub gets 90% of the $$$," he tweeted. "EA makes $30 per copy after retailers and console makers take their cut. Then consider that a chunk of the game was sold on sale ... Through Origin they get 90%"

Wilson's tweets don't directly address the reasons for Visceral's closure, but they do paint a very grim portrait of the state of the business, and the extent to which major publisher releases are either big hits, or big busts. If a mid-tier game like Dead Space 2 can knock out four million copies and still be considered underperforming (and keep in mind that EA reported two years after its release that the original Dead Space had sold roughly half that number), then the bar is incredibly high. Any new project that looks like it won't be a huge hit, or won't have a long tail via microtransactions and DLC, suddenly starts to look like a risk from that perspective.
 

Roguey

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Later in that thread he says Dead Space took 37 million to make. Given that the sequel used the same engine and took ~2 years to make I'm guessing the multiplayer mode is largely responsible for the budget increase.
 

Ash

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I'd bet on Marketing as the prime factor. The multiplayer from what I recall is relatively barebones and uses few unique art assets.
 

Roguey

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I'd bet on Marketing as the prime factor. The multiplayer from what I recall is relatively barebones and uses few unique art assets.
numbers are meaningless without knowledge what was marketing chunk

..? He made it clear with his second tweet that marketing wasn't part of the figure. With marketing, it's 120 million.
 

Ash

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I thought that was an exaggeration. Don't know why. I'm fully aware it's roughly half (if not often more) of the overall budget that goes on marketing for AAA these days.

Way too big business for its own good. The decline will truly never begone.
 

BlackAdderBG

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I don't believe the 60 mil for marketing, as this is a Hollywood thing not games.How do you spend that much on Dead Space game for marketing ,did it had super bow ad?
 

Infinitron

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I've heard crazier numbers than that. 100-200 million dollar marketing campaigns for games that sold about the same amount.
 

BlackAdderBG

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But Dead Space? I can believe with CoD or some top of the line hype trash ,but Your mom playing DS2 costed 60 mil... what a scam
 

Icewater

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So basically, they had slam dunk medium-sized success and when interest in the series simply couldn't support the septuple-A megahit that EA wanted, they just shut it down rather than accept a lesser payday.

Yep, sounds like EA.
 

Roguey

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By the way, that "I don't know if it turned a profit. But it underperformed, and meeting expectations are as important" is particularly funny since Sawyer once said

from what i've heard, everything at EA is driven by actual results vs. (financial) projections. by their metrics, DA2 is considered a great success because it was projected to do worse than it actually did.

Now that's how you beat the system. :cool:
 
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unfairlight

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It's fucking depressing that creative studios get killed because of shitty publishers forcing them to do something they don't want to make and then killing them once they don't turn a profit and merging them into some nameless studio churning out yearly sports titles.
 

Grauken

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As shitty as EA is, most of these studios were bought when they were well on the way to decline anyway
 
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unfairlight

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The circle of shitty publishers is forcing a good dev to do what the publisher wants, casualising games for the sake of profits which ends up in disaster and decline, very rarely is it the fault of the developer exclusively.
 

Grauken

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I don't want to defend publishers much, most of the EA or Ubisofts I wish cancer on as much as everybody else, but honestly, Origin of for example was well on the way to decline and its failures just as much internal as forced by EA

That said, if I were in the same situation as most of these developers, I probably would have sold out as well. You only have so much creative juice in you before you run out. And look at the biowhore docs, able to do brewing as a hobby and not a care in world, that's what I call a happy end
 
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unfairlight

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Maybe some of them apply but a lot of them don't. Maxis was killed because EA forced the bullshit they did on SimCity (I doubt anyone forgot, but it was always online and a fuckton of people couldn't play the game, even singleplayer and the game was far inferior to older SimCity titles with forced online shit no one asked for) and as a result of EA's decisions they killed Maxis due to poor sales. What about Pandemic? Both Mercenaries 1 and 2 were good games, and most of their games were well received with Mercenaries 3 looking extremely good from the leaked gameplay.
 

Martius

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I don't believe the 60 mil for marketing, as this is a Hollywood thing not games.How do you spend that much on Dead Space game for marketing ,did it had super bow ad?

For example few more like this. Besides that, anyone remember fake protest against Dante Inferno?
 

LESS T_T

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So Mass Effect Andromeda is the last big story-focused single-player game from EA?

I'm curious what's going on with the next Dragon Age and the departure of Mike Laidlaw has something to do with this trend.
 

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