Elephant in the room:
Hackers should be doing this to our elected officials, not companies, much less stuff that hurts employees.
Yeah, but companies seem to pay more when extorted ^^" (the hackers are not doing it out of the good of their heart, and most "hacks" are just bad security where somebody by accident found something and shared it with others or employees had their credentials/tokens taken, or had sensible data on private computers with maleware...)
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• Re: Dev costs - companies need to do something. If they asked for a $10 premium because of the need of more revenue, then what’s gonna stop them from asking another $10 premium? Getting games to $79.99? Sony won’t care. They’re positioning themselves as the premium product. These budgets are too bloated. If graphics are causing this, then I’m sorry, but there needs to be a peak of graphics performance ans focus more on stuff that can cut costs.
• Re: Insomniac - I’m sure they’d rather work and other original stuff, but if Marvel is guaranteeing their paychecks for the next decade, then so be it
Why are we always sure that "they ( a company with almost 600 employees...)" want to do something else?
Not every developer, artist, etc wants to work on the next artistic indie darling or on a specific IP. There are more then enough that would give an arm and an leg to work in a game studio that produces marvel games.
There are probably also a good amount of people that would have greate ideas in there and many more that want to work on their projects. Then again, if insomniac would work on 2 R&C games nobody would say anything against that, but for somebody that joined the studio the last decade, thats also "just" an IP that he does not own and hasn't contributed, since the initial games are now 20 years old.
people mix craft and artistry all the time. They often come together, but you have tons of masters of their craft that don't really aspire to artistic mastery, and you have many artists that barely go by with their knowledge in the tools needed.
Lets say you are a mechanics designer, and don't really care for what character is doing the things, then this is a great big budget relatively secure job (unlike indie studios where it can happen that you all have to reduce pay till release and hope that the game is a success).
Just look at the code of many indie games, where its inefficient, unreadable, no chance for a third party to maintaine the code base, etc. Making a new game based on the underlying codebase? no chance, the game and the code are one, no abstraction happening there. Is it a bad thing? nut really, well written code would be great, but the aim was to make the game they wanted to make, and were the happier for it being finished.
Just look at the super hero comics scene: going from writer to writer, from artist to artist, and many are actively seeking out the characters since they feel like they have something to tell with the story. The Star Wars expanded universe did not get that big because people got payed to write something, but also because writers WANTED to contribute to an existing IP.
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And i myself have 0 interest in something like that, heck, even if somebody would ask me if i want to do my own game or work on a zelda, my answer would be on my own. If somebody asks me: work on my own game, but get no money, or have a cool job working on zelda...then i would probably work on zelda, lets be fair ^^"
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Im sorry if i sounded aggressive, but its just frustrating seeing how many people are just deciding that their values and expectations for a gaming industry job have to be the ones for all and all those sad developers that have no say at all are forced to work for a prestigious successful studio in game dev, instead of working in tech support or under payed as an indie dev. (just going by statistics, we can argue that <10% of indie studios are successful, maybe less then 5%)
