Displaying items by tag: Game Development

You know things are bad when you cannot afford to pay employees, but to miss payroll over the holidays seems just that much worse. However, that is what has happened to Red5 the developers behind Firefall. As is usually the case this event is not the first indication of financial troubles. In November the company laid off about 40 employees and then another 2-3 around the 23rd of December. Red6 was founded in 2005 and contained a number of Blizzard employees. Red5 was bought by a Chinese Publisher called The9 around 2010.

Hey, remember that very upbeat and positive message that Crytek put out about securing their financial future? Well let’s just say that the happy smiles and positive tone that were in the message might have been hiding some not so good thing. According to new information from Crytek the money to stay afloat has come from selling off an IP that they just purchased not that long ago.

The next version of Doom will be picking up some new talent to work on it in the form of Crytek Lead R&D Graphics Engineer, Tiago Sousa. In a tweet made over the weekend Sousa says that he will be moving to id Software to work on the new Doom’s game engine idTech 6.

Have you ever been in one of those situations where nothing you say will make things better? You know what we are talking about, you made the initial comment and now… well you just can’t fix it. This is about where Ubisoft is at the moment. After a developer and an art director made the claim that adding in playable female characters into Assassin’s Creed Unity, they have been trying to make things better and only making them worse.

Ubisoft dumbing down Watchdogs for PC, Crytek losing money, game devs claiming next gen consoles will match the graphical look of the PC on Ultra: all of these are interesting signs to a troubling possibility. Is the gaming industry moving away from the PC and focusing on the close environment of the console? From some of the information and the items we listed above it would seem so. Is this a trend of the future? Or is this simply what the industry does whenever they see new consoles hit the market?

On the website of the European Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market appeared registration under a name Deus Ex: Divided Mankind.

After Dong Nguyen released the Flappy Bird game, it has gained considerable popularity, which on a daily basis generated $50,000 in revenues from ads. How popular has it become you can see by many used smartphone on sale whose users among other specifications emphasize the installation of the Flappy Bird and sell their smartphones for much bigger price that they would do it without the game.

VentureBeat talks about how development of an unnamed Blizzard MMORPG, about which rumors have been whispered for years, was stopped and returned to the beginning. From “sources close to the developers’ VentureBeat learned that the project with the working title Titan was reset and we can expect it in two years with that best case scenario.

A video game developer has decided to use an interesting approach to piracy. Instead of trying to prevent their game from being downloaded illegally they actually pushed out their own release for people to download. Now this may sound counterproductive, but they have a plan and one that they hope will help to stop future piracy. They have decided to add piracy and its “effects” to the torrent release.

BioWare co-founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk who needs no introduction, will be awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual Game Developers Choice Awards (GDCA). The thirteenth consecutive awards ceremony will be held on 27th March at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, and will be led by veteran of the game industry Tim Shafer from Double Fine.