Other countries haven’t fared much better in this regard, with 28 percent laid off in the last two years. 17 percent reported being affected by more recent lay-offs that took place in the last year. Generally speaking, the report notes that the number of lay-offs is likely higher, since it didn’t account for the same employees being affected multiple times.

48 percent of the respondents noted that they were still seeking employment following their respective lay-offs, while 36 percent said that their efforts to stay in the gaming industry haven’t borne much fruit yet.

The report also included 450 respondents who, in some form, experienced closures, mergers, or acquisitions last year. Curiously, around 31 percent who reported being laid off weren’t sure about the reason. Along with this, respondents from AAA companies and older indie teams were more likely to confirm acquisitions, while those from newer studios were likelier to just get shut down.

The reasons behind these job cuts have been attributed to various factors. 43 percent said that the restructuring of their respective companies led to lay-offs. On the other hand, 32 percent were let go after the cancellation of their projects. One of the respondents blamed company leadership for not understanding that the industry-wide boom experienced during COVID wouldn’t last.

“Leadership failed to see that the COVID-era boom was not permanent, [and the] company went on an acquisition spree before being acquired,” they said to GDC. “Now, money is a lot tighter because the goldfish with the money want returns yesterday so they can funnel it into the current fad (genAI).”

“Executives who have never actually worked as a [developer] are pulling up the boards on their ships, throwing people overboard, and expecting these scuttled ghost ships to keep making them infinite money,” said another.

Industry unions in Europe have been wary about more potential lay-offs, especially in light of Ubisoft’s recently-announced organizational overhaul and “voluntary mutual termination agreements”. Since cost-cutting measures are part of the company’s plans, French unions Solidaires Informatique, STVJV, and CFE CGC have asked the employees of Ubisoft Paris to “stop working” if CEO Yves Guillemot shows up during his planned February 3rd visit to the studio.

“It is time to make our boss understand that he is not welcome on our premises as long as he continues to mistreat his employees,” reads a pamphlet distributed by the unions. “We call on the employees of Ubisoft Paris to stop working if Yves Guillemot sets foot in our offices. Leave your desks, and gather in front of the building.”

“One in every three AAA developers surveyed (33%) noted that they are working on a live-service title,” says the report. “Across the entire survey base, 16% are currently working on a live-service game, and while 13% noted they are interested in developing live-service games, 41% expressed that they were not interested at all.”

The report also notes that opinions on the business model diverge depending on which developer you talk to. Some developers appreciate the financial and community-building effects of a successful live-service game. Others are concerned about creative stagnation, microtransactions, and predatory practices.

“One of the biggest concerns surrounding live-service gaming was market over-saturation, with many developers noting how hard it is to build a sustainable player base,” says the report.

The survey also gave us a few other bits of interesting data, like the development of PC games, increasing since the last survey. Compared to 66% of developers confirming that they were working on PC games, this time around, the number of PC game developers has climbed up to 80%.

The report notes that this was likely thanks to handheld gaming PCs becoming popular, and especially the success of the Steam Deck. A similar jump was noticed in the popularity of browser-based games.

The more popular live-service games have seen quite a bit of financial success, including World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 to shooters like Destiny 2, Counter-Strike 2, Overwatch 2 and more recently, Marvel Rivals. However, the market has proven volatile lately, as evidenced by Sony cancelling live-service projects from Naughty Dog, Bend Studio, and Bluepoint Games.

This in the wake of Concord, which flopped badly enough that Sony decided to servers down and refund all players just two weeks after its release. Its failure reportedly prompted the company to re-evaluate its live service ventures, leading to the recent cancellations.

More recently, the long-rumoured Horizon-based MMORPG developed by Guild Wars 2 publisher NCSoft was reportedly cancelled, with developers seemingly moved to other teams in the company. However, more recent reports indicate that this might not have been the case. Guerrilla Games’ own online title based on Horizon is still in the works.

Nintendo has gone above and beyond to make the Nintendo Switch an inviting ecosystem for developers (contrary to their attitude towards third party development on their previous systems), and it seems like that effort is bearing fruit. According to the 2019 GDC State of the Game Industry survey, which has a sample of 4,000 developers, more developers are now “most interested” in Nintendo Switch as a platform than they are in any other console.

45% of responding developers answered that they are the most interested in the Nintendo Switch for game development; this is higher than 38% for PS4 and PS4 Pro, and 28% for Xbox One and Xbox One X. Given the success that developers have found on the Switch (in the same survey, 24% of the developers reveal that Switch sales for their games were higher than average, while another 20% found them in line with the average), it’s no surprise that more and more of them are now expressing interest in Nintendo’s platform.

Whether this leads to continued third party support—at least from indie developers—remains to be seen, but for now, things are looking pretty good for the Switch.

The incredible thing is that in 2018, Atari- yes, that Atari- is gearing up to launch a brand new console, with the Ataribox, which they announced last year. While we have been receiving (surprisingly) steady updates on the upcoming console, there is still a lot about it that we are in the dark on.

Thankfully, a lot of that might change next week, because Atari has confirmed that it will give us the first look at the Ataribox in action at the Game Developer’s Conference (which, as you might have guessed by now, presuming you didn’t know already, is next week). We should see then exactly what the new console is- we know it uses a Linux base OS, that it is equivalent to mid range PCs, and that it is targeting indie and mid tier third party games, in addition to Atari’s own fare. What we don’t know is, well, why it has any reason to exist.

Hopefully, all will be made clear soon.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild looks to be a dramatic reinvention of the franchise- it is a thorough modernization of Nintendo’s prestige series, adopting multiple modern trends, blazing the trail with innovations of its own, and still staying true to the spirit of the Zelda games. One of the reasons, indeed, that it has as much hype as it does is that it looks to have successfully modernized Zelda, without losing track of what made the series great in the first place.

And now, Nintendo has announced a panel for GDC where it will discuss just how the creators endeavored to do this. In this panel, game director Hidemaro Fujibayashi, art director Satoru Takizawa and technical director Takuhiro Dohta will discuss the game’s development, and how the team approached such a mammoth undertaking.

“For decades, The Legend of Zelda series has been recognized as a trailblazer in game design that has influenced countless other games and developers,” the panel description reads. “The latest game in the series, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for both the Nintendo Switch and Wii U systems, introduces wide-ranging changes that break with many of the traditional conventions of the franchise. The panel will provide an in-depth look at how these convention-breaking changes were implemented.”

The panel will be held from 11am-12:30 local time on 1st March, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Of course, at that point, the game itself will be just two days from release, so you won’t have to worry about this panel making the wait hard or anything.

[via Nintendo Life]

E3 2016 is almost here and while that means a ton of potential excitements, it’s also likely going to mean a bunch of demos and gameplay videos that might, well, stretch the truth a little. You know what we’re talking about – presentations where the visuals showcased can’t possibly be in real time and when the game is finally out, criticisms of “downgrade” get thrown around.

That being said, Crytek technical director Rok Erjavec did offer a different take on the whole phenomenon. Speaking to DSO Gaming, Erjavec was asked about his opinion on games being downgraded from their E3/GDC showcases and whether developer’s should display games that aren’t possible even on high-end rigs.

Erjavec stated, “I think in many cases, the criticism is misplaced. Trade-show demos are often carefully crafted experiences where a highly-polished single area is shown during the demo. It’s easy to blame hardware-targets when the final game isn’t quite the same – but what you are shown is a 15-minute part of the game that was built in three to six months.

“Meanwhile, the rest of the game’s 10+ hours are built over something in the range of 12 to 24 months. In many cases there was no downgrade as such – just the reality of producing much more content over what effectively amounts to (much) less time.”

That being said, he’s not a fan of showcases like this in general. “I do find gameplay showcases that aren’t running on actual hardware targets or are entirely pre-recorded a bit pointless, since games are fundamentally about interactive experiences.”

What do you think, especially with so many showcases set for E3? Let us know in the comments.

The new generation of graphical APIs is here- both, DirectX 12 and Vulkan look incredible, and look like they will be able to extract far better and more impressive performance from games than anything before. At this year’s Game Developer’s Conference, AMD is promising that it will share its insights on these two new APIs with developers, presumably demystifying them in the process.

“Vulkan and DirectX 12 are new, low-level APIs which require developers to think about graphics in a new way,” AMD says. “In many cases game engines need to be restructured to take advantage of low-level parallel submission, asynchronous execution and new state & resource handling features provided by the API. In this lecture, these new concepts will be reviewed and we will take a look at how launch titles successfully handled the transition to the new APIs. The presentation will include useful insights gained while developing the first wave of Vulkan & DirectX 12 titles.”

Hopefully, this kind of a presentation will spur more adoption of these APIs by third party developers- so far, in spite of all the hype surrounding them, not many DirectX 12 or Vulkan games really exist.

After  so many delays, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is (hopefully) finally almost here. ahead of its release, developers CD  Projekt RED held a panel at the just concluded Game Developer’s Conference, where they talked about how the power afforded to them by the next generation machines enabled their vision for The Witcher 3, and everything that they want to do with it.

A lot of it comes down to them wanting to craft an open, living world for the game, one that appears believable to the player. According to CD Projekt RED, this was only possible because of the enhanced power of the new consoles and the next generation PC CPUs and GPUs.

For instance, they pointed to the incredible destruction in the game as something enabled by the added power, but destruction is, of course, something a lot of games do and have been doing for a while. So they also decided to some more subtle touches that will probably consciously never be noticed by the player, but which all make a believable world for the player to inhabit, and all of which are taxing on the hardware.

The example used was hunting. Say you decided to hunt a deer. Now, the deer would produce smell, which would dissipate to a given radius around you before it was too diluted. Monsters, which spawn at great distances from you, should they fall within the circle, might decide they want to go and gorge on the meat. But more than one monster might show up, since more than one might have smelled the deer- and upon getting there, the monsters might engage in a fight over their prey. And all of this would happen in response to you shooting a deer, all of this how the world would react to a small, simple act by you. And of course, all of this would have to be constantly calculated and computed by the CPU.

It’s pretty awesome, actually, and sort of reminds me of something Bethesda tried to achieve with Skyrim on the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. I can’t wait to see how the game turns out.

Localization was something that was completely new to Bungie with Destiny- it wanted to avoid the common pitfall of Anglo-centrism that so many games and game developers make with their game, and make it feel truly international, especially since so many players from all over the world would be playing. Translation would, of course be, one step of the solution to the problem, but it was more complicated than just that.

Originally, Bungie had The Tower full of signs, and the signs were all in English. Bungie’s initial idea had been to translate the signs to other languages for other languages versions, before they realized that the translation did not always go down well, linguistically and/or aesthetically. Their solution? Never communicating anything essential to players via text, and instead developing a universal series of gestures and symbols that transcended language, via the UI. And all of this was done so that every player would feel at home.

I gotta say, for as much as I like to get on Bungie’s case for everything that it did wrong with Destiny, I have to give them mad credit here- something like this requires an extraordinarily astute amount of sensitivity and empathy, and I am glad to see a major video game actively working to counter Anglo-centrism, which is a great problem in the industry today.

Hopefully other games follow suit.

Source: GDC Presentation.

Valve debuted its revolutionary new VR headset and technology at GDC this year, and to do so, it also showed off some great tech demos. The one that instantly caught our eye, and instantly got the internet buzzing, was this one that you can see above- you see, it is a new tech demo showing off the Aperture Science facilities. Yep, Aperture Science. As in from Portal.

It looks pretty neat too (though of course it needs to be seen in VR for maximum impact), though Valve was quick to shoot down any rumors and speculation that this might be a tease for a Portal 3. Apparently, this is a tech demo, and nothing else. So don’t go on getting your hopes up too high, because Portal 3 is not happening.

Which makes sense too- after all, Valve cannot count to three, remember? Stay tuned to GamingBolt and we will keep you posted on more of the latest and greatest.