Adell

(article transcribed below)

Destiny 2 developer Bungie is laying off 220 people, CEO Pete Parsons announced Wednesday in a post on the Bungie website. Bungie previously employed more than 1,000 people to support the ongoing Destiny 2, its next game Marathon, and “several incubation projects.” The company is cutting that number down to 850: 220 people have been laid off, 155 people will be moved to Sony Interactive Entertainment, and around 75 to a new studio, according to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier.

“These actions will affect every level of the company, including most of our executive and senior leader roles,” Parsons wrote. “Today is a difficult and painful day, especially for our departing colleagues, all of which have made important and valuable contributions to Bungie. Our goal is to support them with the utmost care and respect. For everyone affected by this job reduction, we will be offering a generous exit package, including severance, bonus and health coverage.”

Parsons cited several reasons for the layoffs — “rising costs of development and industry shifts as well as enduring economic conditions,” topped off with what Parsons described as a “quality miss” with Destiny 2 expansion Lightfall. He added that Bungie took “exhaustive efforts” to mitigate layoffs.

Beyond the layoffs, Parsons said Sony Interactive Entertainment will bring over staff to build a new studio to develop one of the aforementioned incubation projects — “an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe.” Parsons later added that the incubation program “stretched our talent too thin, too quickly.” He continued: “It also forced our studio support structures to scale to a larger level than we could realistically support, given our two primary products in development — Destiny and Marathon.”

Bungie’s latest Destiny 2 expansion, The Final Shape, was released on June 4, and was a critical success. Lightfall missed Bungie’s expected revenue by 45%, and Parsons blamed the expansion for waning player retention, according to a Bloomberg report from October 2023. Lightfall was released in February 2023, after which Bungie laid off around 100 workers. Shortly thereafter, Parsons spoke directly to players in a message published on the Bungie website: “We know we have lost a lot of your trust. Destiny needs to surprise and delight. We haven’t done this enough and that’s going to change.”

Lightfall, while described by Parsons as a “quality miss,” still helped Destiny 2 reach its highest concurrent player count on Steam during its launch — a number that was just nearly matched with the launch of The Final Shape.

As expected, set up impossible goals and you can punish workers for anything. Reach the highest and second highest number of concurrent players since the game launch, but its still not good enough.

actually extremely amused by Shigatake (from Vanillaware) spending years working on a remake of a shmup game released when he was in his teens

(I watched Terminator 2, c'est a joke)

in the interest of finding stuff to post here more often, here's an idea I've always had bouncing around the back of my mind:

There should be romhacks that merely add secrets to existing games. As in, someone strictly playing the critical path of the game, would find no differences between the original and the hack. But someone who poked around, would find things beneath the surface -- maybe small, maybe huge -- in all of the places that you expected something to be hidden as a kid, but that never panned out.

And in particular, the audience should be invited to play the hack, with the knowledge that new secrets exist, but without being told exactly where..... You'd get to play the game you love, but with an invitation to experiment again. To know that anything is possible, the way it was when you were playing it for the first time!

Maybe it's shallow nostalgia, but doesn't it sound like a fun project?

Somehow the idea of sitting down and just doing a single romhack like that in a vacuum feels silly or self-centered, but I've always been tempted to organize a game jam where everyone picks a different game to hack new secrets into, and then we all get to compare what sorts of things we each felt each game was missing.....

so there's a fun thing that isn't really this, but is kind of adjacent and this post reminded me-

This threatening sentence is a decently well known example of an anti-piracy message. In Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen, when you get to the SS Anne and tried to hand over a (likely) hacked in event ticket to go and catch a legendary Pokemon, if the game detects you're on a pirated copy, the ticket checker will append his spiel with this cheerful message.

Except well- that can't be true. Right? There's no way it is. Family friendly multi-million dollar juggernauts Nintendo and The Pokemon Company wouldn't risk telling an unsuspecting child to pay up or kick the bucket. But it was there. People swore up and down they saw it, a few codemonkeys even dug into the hex and it was right. there. So how did this slip by?

Well, it didn't! While this message was in "the rom", it wasn't in a clean rom. Turns out, internet pirates don't like paying for games somuch, and so people had been trading around the same handful of rom files dumped by some crackers of yore. "Buy it or die" had been slipped in by one of the original dumpers with a hex editor, who then shipped it out as a clean unaltered rom. This file got copied and shared across the internet and over time a subset of kids and nerds got threatened by everyone's favorite games company.

Your options for piracy rumors are either that or blatant mistranslations

Amusingly enough, the pt-br fan translation also had that line adulterated, which makes the rumor mongering international