Report: Embracer’s ongoing layoffs kill a new Deus Ex game after 2 years’ work
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You smell that? Do you smell that?... Capitalism, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of capitalism in the morning.
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fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
That said I never finished Mankind Divided. It just didn't feel right. Human Revolution still holds up as a good game though. MD never clicked for me, and I just didn't see the point of continuing Adam' story.
That said I never finished Mankind Divided. It just didn't feel right. Human Revolution still holds up as a good game though. MD never clicked for me, and I just didn't see the point of continuing Adam' story.
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This sucks badly.
Deus Ex remains one of the best video game IPs, and has always been fun (though I confess I never played Invisible War).
Deus Ex remains one of the best video game IPs, and has always been fun (though I confess I never played Invisible War).
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Jakelshark
Ars Tribunus Militum
It's nuts how the subsidiary companies have to take the fallout of their corporate owner's poorly planned spending spree. All to make the losses look less bad now while simultaneously kneecapping their future projects that would bring in much needed revenue.
This is a slow moving train crash
This is a slow moving train crash
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I would have been happy with a Special Edition of Human Revolution, where they actually finished the Montreal section. (It felt rushed and incomplete because Squeenix refused to give them the time and budget to finish it up.)
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Human Revolution was one of my all-time favorites a few years back, and while MD is not as good (and the PC port is still in a rough state) it is still a fantastic game by most measures. I was excited that we might see this when they left Squeenix, and now I'm just incredibly disappointed. This sucks.
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Unsurprised but still a little sad to see the inevitable fallout of yet another buyout. The buying company puts out this over-constructed PR statement about how they'll make the bought company better with more resources and money. Yet every single time the bought company gets shuttered because it didn't make enough money for whatever reason, and all the employees get hurt by layoffs while the executives keep getting their bonuses.
How many more gaming IP/series need to die before buyouts are investigated with a bit more oversight?
How many more gaming IP/series need to die before buyouts are investigated with a bit more oversight?
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Invisible War's biggest sins were:
1. Having to follow up the first game, which was a masterpiece
2. The universal ammo pool, which made most of the weapons entirely pointless
3. Primary target for the game was the Xbox, which made the levels much smaller and forced more loading screens
It wasn't as irredeemably bad, but compared to its predecessor it was a disappointment. And with the release of Deus Ex: The Fall, there's now a game that's demonstrably terrible to point at as the worst in the series.
Also echoing with the choir, it sucks that they're not going to wrap up Jensen's storyline so we can move on to other parts of the universe.
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Just a reminder that Embracer endgame was to get a $2 billion investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth videogame fund. They thought they'd gobble up enough stuff that eventually they'd be too big to fail.
Narrator: They weren't.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/14/...nt-lord-of-the-rings-investment-deal-collapse
Narrator: They weren't.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/14/...nt-lord-of-the-rings-investment-deal-collapse
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steelcobra
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
MD's flaws are in that there's boss battles you can only really fight one way randomly inserted into a game that's built around having a lot of choice how to play, that can build up to having a build useless for the boss fights.
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Damn, when you suck so hard not even the infinitely wealthy murdering types are willing to back you
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Not as much capitalism but rather a complete inability to make reasonable and grounded business decisions that involve the livelihood of thousands of people.
So it's another case of management being a bag of dicks.
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I think most of the competent people in the gaming industry are currently unemployed and not likely in the market to buy up IP.
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Not so much "inability to make reasonable and grounded business decisions" (though they're probably incompetent, too) as "lack of care whether or not their bets would end with results".
They were playing their own asshole game, betting big on the payoff from the Saudis resulting in fat sacks of cash to upper management. Now they'll flap their wings and just move off to another carcass.
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Well, the plan of "buy lots of studios and then cancel the games they're making" is certainly one way of trying to pay off all that debt.
Somehow the C-Levels that come up with this will rake in millions and continue to get work, because past a certain level of the corporate ladder, failure simply doesn't matter.
Somehow the C-Levels that come up with this will rake in millions and continue to get work, because past a certain level of the corporate ladder, failure simply doesn't matter.
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Yeah, it's dicks all the way down.
The problem is that companies went from "making a thing and selling the thing" to "making a company that makes a thing and selling the company that makes the thing." It warps business plans at a fundamental level.
As I mentioned above, their plan wasn't to do all these buyups and then cancel stuff. It was to do all that, then get billions from the Saudis. Not that they wouldn't have fired some people. They always do. But it wouldn't have been this complete fuckfest.
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In the movie business, every movie is structured as its own company that is sort of designed to send all the money to the investors/producers and then go under, and that company just contracts out to lots of other people/companies that do all the actual work without the studio really employing much of anyone directly. I wonder if all these game layoffs are going to start to create that same sort of ecosystem of contract shops vying for sections of a game's production rather than having lots of full production teams within the game studios themselves.
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I just finished Mankind Divided last month, it was OK. As it didn't do very well I was already convinced there would be no sequel to wrap the loose ends 
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In fairness, MD did poorly mostly because Square Enix decided to make some monumentally bad decisions with marketing, between the #AugLivesMatter fiasco and the gated preorder bonuses and the real-money cash shop for single-use items. The story was incomplete to be sure, but even before we knew it was incomplete there was a lot working against the game.I just finished Mankind Divided last month, it was OK. As it didn't do very well I was already convinced there would be no sequel to wrap the loose ends
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There's fun video of the Embracer 2023 Q4 Shareholder meeting last year, which was just hours after the CEO lost the 3b deal with the Saudi's (but the specific size and scope of the deal wasn't public during this discussion).
The CEO does lots of literal hand wringing and tries to excuse it away, but it's clear he doesn't know what he's doing and he's very uncomfortable talking about it:
View: https://youtu.be/Tb_qLngxhYQ?t=1078
The CEO does lots of literal hand wringing and tries to excuse it away, but it's clear he doesn't know what he's doing and he's very uncomfortable talking about it:
View: https://youtu.be/Tb_qLngxhYQ?t=1078
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Feels like another video game industry crash is coming with all these layoffs. There's been almost as much this year as last year and it's only January.
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Artem S. Tashkinov
Ars Scholae Palatinae
One of the best games I've ever played (talking about Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Human Revolution):
Damn, that's such a loss there won't be a sequel. I had my hopes crashed in regard to HoMM 8, now this.
- Spectacular graphics
- Spectacular voice acting (Elias Toufexis was born for the role)
- Spectacular plot
- Spectacular mechanics (you can finish the game without killing a single person, full traversal freedom - get almost anywhere you can reach)
Damn, that's such a loss there won't be a sequel. I had my hopes crashed in regard to HoMM 8, now this.
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What a waste. CDPR should buy rights on Deus Ex from Embracer Group and make more Deus Ex games.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is quite close to Cyberpunk 2077 in many ways.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is quite close to Cyberpunk 2077 in many ways.
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Perhaps strangely I played Invisible War before the first game (reasons below*), but point 3 is the biggest thing IMO. It's still in many respects solid, but those tiny areas and all those loading screens really bring it down. Having the game on a fast SSD does not make them shorter. Thief 3 has the same problem BTW.
*the reason is the very first time I tried Deus Ex I was so deep into Thief 2 that I was well and truly annoyed that Deus Ex was not as good a stealth game as Thief 2. Which was silly of course, but that's the way it was. Didn't play it properly until ... 2009? or thereabouts and was of course properly blown away.
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I thought the latter games were fun but parts of it were annoying. I know concessions have to be made for gameplay but in particular this was irritating:
Like he's a super secret spy with lots of funding with a secret underground base, aircraft and connections all over the world...and they literally don't give him any ammunition and expect him to raid dead bodies for bullets before sending him off to save the world. I mean you arm yourself by dealing with a local drug dealer rather than go to your HQ a block away.
Like he's a super secret spy with lots of funding with a secret underground base, aircraft and connections all over the world...and they literally don't give him any ammunition and expect him to raid dead bodies for bullets before sending him off to save the world. I mean you arm yourself by dealing with a local drug dealer rather than go to your HQ a block away.
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Tragic but also hilariously amusing. When your CEO is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet.
What's so annoying is these Capitalism Bros are so predictable and obvious but play it like they're masters of the universe or something. Like this guy placed a multi-billion dollar bet on the whim of some prince.
Not to mention the recent economics underlying the whole situation.
Then: "Whoa, there's a pandemic, so to spur the economy the govt is printing money like crazy and interest rates are zero. This is our YOLO chance to consolidate and aggressively expand beyond all logic or reason!!"
Now: "Oh man inflation is blooming and interests rates went up. And we're so in the hole we need to fire the new guys and a lot of the old guys too. Who could have seen this."
Like... duh.
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Not counting the bosses. Well, you can tranquilize dart them away now, but still. The boss fights are the letdown, but I also kinda enjoy some old school boss fights.
Not to go on a tangent, but that series well and truly died with the fourth game for me. Not because of the graphics or gameplay or anything, but rather because they took the setting and characters and just butchered it. Enroth being nuked by Gelu and Tarnum was alright, but the forth game just didn't feel right. Some characters had the same names as the old heroes, but different faces and a bunch of icons were reused for different things. It felt like I was played a fan-fic remix of Heroes 3. It just didn't make sense to me. The campaigns didn't click for me. I've played it a bunch, but eventually I always just go back to Heroes 3.
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There's capitalism ("an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit") and there's Later Stage capitalism ("I'll kill my own kids unless you peasants make the line go up next quarter, so help me GOD seriously look at where I'm holding my knife, one movement from me and this infant is dead YOU WOULDN'T WANT THIS"), which is what the world is currently experiencing.
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Human Revolution was one of my favorite games of the last decade, I was totally drawn into the aesthetics, the story, the music (that soundtrack helped jumpstart my interest in electronic music), the fever dream "what if every early 2000s conspiracy theory was real?" setting, and the Splinter Cell style stealth gameplay.
Mankind divided was disappointing in many ways, but still had its moments. I remember when they made an iOS mobile game to tie in with MD's imminent launch and it had a "Deus Ex Universe" title card, implying that there were ambitions to widen the series beyond the main games.
This really blows. It's another example of how the AAA game industry has deteriorated over the last decade.
Mankind divided was disappointing in many ways, but still had its moments. I remember when they made an iOS mobile game to tie in with MD's imminent launch and it had a "Deus Ex Universe" title card, implying that there were ambitions to widen the series beyond the main games.
This really blows. It's another example of how the AAA game industry has deteriorated over the last decade.
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Copy that post and save it.
It can be pasted into virtually every news story that involves a merger acquisition or project being cut to the detriment of the customers and the company, but always to the benefit of the people least deserving of benefiting from other people's misery: "Investors" and the C-levels who get the pay bonuses for "saving the company".
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Square Enix retained the rights to Just Cause, Life Is Strange and Outriders: https://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/news/pdf/20220502 A_Press Release_fin.pdf
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