Epic Lays Off 16% of Workforce, Cocoon, Holocure & More! | Dropped Frames Episode 367
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- Опубліковано 1 сер 2024
- Catch DROPPED FRAMES LIVE every Sunday 1PM ET on / itmejp !
Rami Ismail returns! And you know what that means - More news of devs getting decimated by an increasingly unsustainable games industry! Also Jim Ryan retiring from Playstation, Kamiya leaving Platinum Games, SAG-AFTRA targets AAA game publishers. Games talked about: Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, Lies of P, Cocoon & many more!
0:00 - 0:50 - Halloween baby
5:00 - Counter-Strike 2 launched
12:55 - Horizon: Forbidden West coming to PC
13:30 - Jim Ryan stepping down from Playstation
22:30 - CEO of Capcom says game prices are too low
27:40 - SEGA canceled Hyenas
34:00 - Homeowners
37:00 - FTC challenging Microsoft again
40:35 - SAG-AFTRA approves striking against games industry
47:00 - Hideki Kamiya leaves Platinum Games
50:45 - Epic Games layoffs & the Metaverse dream
1:18:20 - Rami's rant
1:35:00 - How to help
1:43:40 - Godot
1:49:10 - Rami has started making a new game
1:53:00 - Rami's playing games
2:02:40 - Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
2:20:25 - Lies of P
2:28:10 - Cocoon
2:39:00 - Chants of Sennaar
2:41:40 - Party Animals
2:43:50 - El Paso, Elsewhere
2:51:50 - Holocure: Save the Fans
2:56:50 - Lamplighter's League
3:01:00 - Shoutouts
JP's thoughts on Lies of P:
- • Is Lies of P Better Th...
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#DroppedFrames - Ігри
It's great that you upload this to youtube so I can watch at my own pace :)
Same here. Stopped watching regularly twitch long time ago, but this show keeps pulling my attention and I am all for it.
Same, it's perfect for my Monday morning podcast listening while starting work.
Same here - i can't catch whole show on twitch and don't really want to watch for example just middle of it - so youtube VOD is perfect.
I stopped on twitch because of the damn ads. At least here on UA-cam I can skip them. The ads on twitch are just so ridiculous, I have only been watching vods or UA-cam uploads from streamers I follow. Is terrible without Twitch turbo or being a subscriber
:)
Holocure may be the best free game of all time. The game isn't even finished and the next update will likely have a Casino with more gambling madness for you to enjoy.
Thanks for being cool enough to have a friend like Rami. I smile every time I see he's the guest. Such a treat to have a game developer's perspective regarding the industry, especially someone that doesn't mind being honest about the uglier side of it all.
Yes! Best Series on the Net! Every Week a Delight!
Agreed!
3 hours of goodness!! Hell yeah we have Rami!
That was quick. Thank you for the VOD. I already watch (mostly listen) to the live stream while working, and I will rewatch the VOD again later.
Was refreshing until the VOD was posted. And it only took a couple of refreshes. Love how fast you get these uploaded!
Solidarity Rami! So glad to hear reasonable and level headed discussion of the power of unionization.
Agreed. The short term negative effects like delays caused by unionization or striking are nothing compared to the good that they can bring. Worker rights always come first and workers of all fields should support each other. Auto workers should support writers, writers should support game devs, and game devs should support warehouse workers.
I really hope JP plays Phantom Liberty on stream. Shit is so good I wanna see his reactions.
on my quest to see all the non-vtuber-fan reactions to holocure, that fishing minigame bit may well be the funniest thing i’ve seen. well done.
You don't understand, Hololive fan games go hard. Idol Showdown is also a free fan game based on Hololive, and it is a full on indie fighting game complete with arcade mode, rogue-lite mode, and training mode
Rami looks great with the new beard style!
Man, I always liked the Cyberpunk story and got some flak for making an appreciation YT vid on launch, but now, playing on 2.0... HOLY CRAP it's SO much better. It's great to be enjoying the story as much as ever, but now the REST of the game is FUN too! It had very good components before, but now they WHOLE thing just shines.
Real chrome, Choom, yer gonna love it.
36:14 The moment you realise you are growing older together with your favourite podcast
Weird... Cyberpunk Edgerunners ending made me feel extremely uplifted and happy for awhile like no show had in awhile... Guess we're gonna get some new menu items at the Afterlife, which is EXACTLY how I exepect a Night City story to end! I'd be disappointed if there was anything else! Then you end up like that no good dirty Dex.
thank you for the quick upload. And you are the goat for putting chapters!
Man your upload is super quick and I'm super thankful.
Listening to rami explain internet protocols was….interesting
The vibe when Rami brings up unionisation 😂
wow 2 back-to-back Rami episodes, love to see it! great show, have an awesome week, peace!
The fastest uploads in business! Thank you for all!
Hooray for ConcernedApe 😊
So the meta idea these corporations have is basically an arms race to whoever gets there first wins the lottery eternally.
I hope for a massive unionization wave in the games industry.
So Cohh has left the rest of Cyberpunk 2077 till Orion comes out... which is gonna be in 5-6 years.
Like at this point you just gonna start a new save buddy.
More Rami! MORE!
Talos principle 2 is comming out tomorrow! the first game is one of the best puzzle games i've played. I think they are sleeping on a potentially a great game
Great show. I'm totally interested with where the games industry is going, since I technically work on an adjacent industry.
2:18:45 nope, i recommend doing the DLC as soon as its available. after you're done with the dlc, new dialogue options pop up on 1 time quests, and are missable.
It's seeming to go both ways as to entertain multiple play throughs.
can't believe you talk about extraction shooters without mentioning Hunt Showdown. It's so underrated and extremely well done.
True, though to me Hunt feels like a game that dropped out of game high school and never got to become what it could have become. It is just... Limited.
@@luuxii really? I haven't deep dived into it, but the 20-30 hours I played, it had some of the most intense moments I can remember. But they will update the engine next year, maybe that'll lift it :)
the tim Sweeny "roman legion post" is even funnier if you know the origin of the word "decimation". Its a punishment of the roman legions where all the soldiers get lined up and every tenth guy(decima in latin) gets killed.
The Metaverse is a mirage. It contains what companies want most, infinite money with no/little further work, but entirely unreachable.
It's crazy to me how the Metaverse and Crypto terminology has been created since the 80s and reading it in scifi books or watching in films (like that Keanu Reeves movie, Johnny Mnemonic) yet the people in the tech industry who probably grew up around said culture are rabidly trying to bring it to fruition.
Great episode guys.
Oh another Rami episode 🎉
This means good news right?
Wishlist the games you want to support is such a good shout
I had to google what Hyenas to know what you four where talking about.
Cohh giving the stare at the end gave me the chills!! XD
Rami again! Well that's a treat!!
talking about dificulty at 2:22:00 whatever happened to easy, medium and hard etc...
Great show as always.
The portal is basically a less functional Wii U pad, a weird thing, I am curious if it will sell.
good episode
Yeah, as someone that can only play 1h~ per day during the weekdays and a couple more on weekends, i literally just got to Act 3 on BG3 and i still have a tonnnnnnnnnnn of 2023' games to play 😅
Any video with a chapter entitled "Rami's Rant" gets a like form me.
2:22:04 Cohh suggestion sounds like FF14's echo for solo duties. I for one have no qualms about turning a fight down if its kicking my ass one too many times.
18:55 PlayStation invents the WiiU
Thanks for the upload!
Any chance the HoloCure VoD will get posted to UA-cam? I despise the Twitch player
"We don't need to spend any more than 30 seconds on this."
3:04:56 good Cohh bit
The only people who knew what Hyenas was, are us Total War fans, and only because we hated it for taking all the funding out of Total Warhammer (their cash cow) for an out of date, out of touch, game.
Nerfing souls like games' boss fights post launch is just bad
"Cost of Living" - Welcome to America
Uhhh got an ad talking about how tinnitus is physically stressing the brain out and deleting memory's
It's interesting what Rami says about institutional knowledge on gaming studios (having a well oiled tried machine). The most acclaimed AAA games of 22 and 23 are from studios with a really long record. Larian was making this style of RPG for more than 10 years before BG3 released. Nintendo was making open world zelda games for more than 10 years before TotK released. And From Software was making souls games for more than 10 years before Elden Ring was released. All of those are peak accomplishments built from previous games following a similar formula.
2:23:07 Bonfire Astetic- Dark Souls 2.
I agree with Rami about over leveraging your company to try to join the "metaverse" instead of trying to develop something genuinely revolutionary or on something that is a safe bet, like establishing Epic as an insane 1st party developer.
Tim's tweet was spot on... CEO/investors are just like the "royalty" in that picture, sitting back in their castles comfortably while they send the poor out to die for THIER benefit.
Wait a second, it didn't freeze at the beginning. What happened to Dropped frames?
widepeepoHappy Rami
2:15:00 For REAL! Cyberpunk is SUPER DEPRESSING. I love the game, but kinda wish I had bought something less sad! I have to play it in chunks just to keep from Dystopia-ing my brain! LOL
So happy you guys are talking about Godot, free marketing.
All of you please check out Chants of Sennaar, I would watch every one of your playthroughs start to end.
We'll all be playing the next big MMO by next year at least, no matter what comes out... Because No Mans Sky is already out!
I wonder how much of the Epic layoffs have to do with the $245 million to FTC.
PagMan Good episode
so the future looks rough concerning good games. My backlog wont know what hit it, i might be able to play 1 or maybe 2 games out of it.
Always a good time for the indie scene, too. EEK-3 showcase has a few smaller titles announcements coming by Halloween that I'd like to give a try (like Lunacid and Slay the Princess.)
I am one of the ones who got Cyberpunk refunded on ps4, I am still going to w8 for a complete edition of something, CDpR still need 2 good games for me to buy full price again
I didn't play Cyberpunk at release so I can't compare it but I did play through (98% of it...) earlier this year and it was fantastic. The only reason I didn't finish it was due to a game-breaking bug in the final mission. I'll wait until later this year to pick up Phantom Liberty and do another playthrough.
It's important to remember a studio is the sun of a bunch of individuals. And so when a studio lays off a large portion of their workforce I no longer consider the studio to exist.
Prey is one of the favourite games of all time but the studio that made it does not exist anymore. 60% of the team that made that game is gone, arcane if functionally dead to me. There is a studio with the same name making games now but they are not the studio that made one of my favourite games of all time.
If you likes morrowind the team that made that game no longer exists. It sucks but that's how you have to view the industry
Rami instantly cursing the universe by mentioning Bobby Kotick in the same breath as Sony CEO 🤦
Is that Kaladin Stormblessed in ur pic?
@@MrRadiantMan Hah, no that is Korra from the Legend of Korra animated series.
@@ahabwolf7580 Oh ok lol
Oct 30th, samesies.
As an 80s kid my mom paid more for my NES games then I paid for my og Xbox games by inflation. I know it's un popular and we need digital rights that continue and provide those upgraded experiences....but games do cost too little at the AAA level
There's no requirement that a AAA game must cost $200 million to develop, market, and release.
@@nelliott500Especially when you got titles on Steam like Vampire Survivors and the sales numbers it got.
I think the only bit of movement I'd give AAA titles is if they want to sell physical copies at a higher mark but keep digital sales as-is. Only problem there is we've been told digital sales would be good for consumers and studios cost-wise only for us to be taxed and new releases to cost just as much, if not more with the few EA jacked up costs of late.
I would also like to see Capcom just bring lower budget games back into the fray, like Bionic Commando.
This is basically the game dev bubble bursting...covid delayed it by two years this would have happened in 2021
JP's dropped frames pun is top tier. Unrated if you ask me.
"Thing isn't profitable, we have to raise prices because we don't make enough money"... said by the CEO/investors who are taking 9 figure incomes AND bonuses.
Funny how some of the best things ever made weren't all that expensive to make. Minecraft was just a school project and is one of the highest selling games of all time, and ended up being sold for nearly $2.6 Billion. Stardew Valley was a passion project by ONE PERSON. Another example of something great as mentioned in the show is HoloCure and its FREE because the maker is just a huge fan of the Vtuber stuff.
And there's a lot more examples out there. Games (even AAA) absolutely do not need to cost $200 million to make.
@@nelliott500yep, like with Cyberpunk, they could have cut a huge portion of the cost of that game out by not hiring one of the most expensive actors to take part in it. I have nothing against Keanu Reeves, but there wasn't a good reason why they needed to have such an expensive person in the game instead of just making a character that wasn't Keanu and just another VA to play them.
@@JohnA...This reminds me of Metal Gear Solid 5 all over again.
I think what was worse about the Keanu Reeves situation is they probably could have gotten him somewhat cheaply as a voice actor, but I feel all the marketing and lying about how Reeves was in-studio and at home playing the game and loving it was a chunk of money that was never needed.
Cohn’s ‘games’ / ‘game development’ distinction (during Rami’s Rant) was unnecessary. He could have added to Rami’s analysis and moved the discourse forward but chose to make a correction to no-one’s benefit.
Like I can't say the playstation portal has no uses. Gaming in bed is a real thing but like nobody will want to buy a handheld that can only do that
But you don't have to make 3x-4x the cost of making a game, at least not more than once or for the reason mentioned. Yes you have to do it once to make the money to start funding ahead yourself but once you've done that you're covered for that. You don't have to do it every time. You will have to make more than just the cost back if you want to open another project/dev path or to cover making future project larger, but not to cover the regular dev time.
as someone who works in Indie games I would say making 2.5x to 3x is the sweet spot. You never know if the next game will sell as well as the previous one so you need to make sure that you have enough money to make sure you can hopefully make game 3
To be fair to the capcom guy im much more open to game price increases than other forms of monetisation.
Nah bro. It's just price increase with monetizations.
Developers of unreal gets a little too real
Pog
It's been a great year for game releases. It's a grim year for the future prospects of upcoming games
One of the main reasons we have language is to be able to differentiate, and talk about complicated subjects/ideas. Instead of trying to just combine "games" and "a good year of games" into one thing, unnecessarily. Unclear language just makes people talk in endless circles
Streaming a game that is being picketed could indeed be scabbing it obviously depends on what the union says but fundamentally the point of a strike is to demonstrate how necessary these workers are to the industry by removing them and being sable to point and say "look how much money you lose without us".
If a streamer is sitting there playing a game in front of 10s of thousands of people essentially promoting it, it wouldn't be completely unreasonable to suggest that person is working against the interests of the Union
yeah.. sweeney went crazymode but epic DID grow a lot after fortnite BR (they hired tons and bought companies).. but the reasoning behind cutting 16% is stupid.
The metaverse is real, and everyone is behind the times. The first-mover advantage is already spent.
It's called... Roblox
And that's why unions suck.
hediki kamiya is extremely toxic, and we can only hope he doesnt keep working on games, and we get creators who aren't vile and toxic to everyone on the internet. them just laughing it off, go take a look at his tweets, you'd block him if any of that was directed at you
So tired of the comparision between Starfield and Cyberpunk.
Both are good games with their flaws and good things.
listening to them act like its all over , sky is falling reminds me of wall street guys trying to say the economy is ruined, recession blahblahblah. average people wont feel the effects at all, maybe like an increased cost of gas or something.
I think Rami put it best as to why I personally don't like unions.
Let the union think for you.
both as a company and as a person it's just sounds stupid. while yes it increases waged of their members but it just keeps pushing the budget needed for games/movies. I mean shoot, you can take what was talked about earlier in this VOD about Capcom CEO talking about game prices being to low. If I only had a budget of $1mil and I wanted to make a game today. I would pretty much not even look for Union VAs cause it would cost to much.
Sooner or later the Game industry is going to hit the same wall that Hollywood is currently hitting and that is that it's going to get harder and harder to make a profit because Game Development is just going to be to expensive.
Then what? we are going to even more reliance on microtransactions or just less games in general.
If you have ever worked in game industry you won’t say that. I don’t know how it is in US right now but back then it’s not uncommon for a studio to have ~70% of employees were contracted and were not full time. Not only that you didn’t get all benefits, after every single project you have to reapply for the job and compete with newly graduated people. It’s super abusive and no where near fair.
I get that union isn’t perfect but it’s still way better than let those companies that clearly don’t give a damn about their employees’ livelihoods have all the power to negotiate.
@@AzureFides I've been working in the industry for technically 5 years now. I've started as a contract worker making models and environments and have moved up to assistant lead making sure the work being made meets base QA before pushing it to other teams.
Have you ever thought that the reason game companies hire majority contract is because of how much it cost to hire full? There can be plenty of down time between projects that the company still has to pay employees for. When I was a modeler, I had no say as to how/when that model gets rigged and animated; how VO lines are done; or how VFX decides on what to add to it.
so when all the modeling is done and my team is just sitting there waiting for more work to come our way. I would still have to pay them if they weren't contract workers.
Major companies usually have multiple games they are working on so when the modeling work it nearing an end for one they can move people to another. But even that depends on if said person has enough experience to change their art style quickly enough to match the other game. As a company it's just faster to "hire" someone on who already has the style they are looking for than to train someone in that style.
If i'm part of a union I have no say in my pay, but if I'm not I can negotiate my Pay based off how experienced I am.
@@AzureFides and If i remember correctly both companies have had massive flops that cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. Pixar's latest movie barely made Profit and both Overwatch 2 and D4 have tanked in player counts so there isn't much coming from them. also, isn't blizzard going through layoffs right now?
You talk about how much companies "Make" yearly but do you know how much it cost to make a game? so let me give you some #s
I recently had someone apply to me wanting to make $100,000-$150,000 annual, that's roughly the cost I assume for AAA Senior Contract/Employment. If it's close to the start of the game than I'm probably looking at 4-6 years before the game is released. if the game takes long and it's closer to that 6 years mark. That ONE contract cost me between $600,000 - $900,000.
so lets say I'm blizzard, which has 13,000 employees last i checked, and lets say I have to pay them all that amount. at the lowest end it would cost 1.3Mil PER YEAR just to keep the all payed. even if I use the Median that is $88,000 it's still $1.15mil/year.
I think you misunderstood his point. In showing solidarity with the workers Rami suggested listening to the union as to what actions you should take in solidarity. So do not guess what the union members need ask and listen to them when you seek to show solidarity.
As an example the Amazon workers when unionizing never suggested a boycott. They decided a boycott wouldn't help them in their unionization efforts.
Also Unions are made up of their members. To think the union and the workers are seperate are a classic corporate line when trying to break unions. Fran Drescher, as an example, is an actor and a union rep for SAG
@@ericlesage316 but I can also point out that with the WGA strike that just ended. Even if you with them and abide by the picket line you can still get thrown under the bus. Wasn't there a late night host who tried to do just that so they didn't have to lay off a bunch of people and just got destroyed over it?
That strike probably hurt more people than it helped the writers and not on the upper levels either. No one is talking about if anyone from Lighting or Makeup needed to be laid off or had to find temp work for 4 months to pay rent.
There was a nice quote on that Tweet about Capcom arguing videogame prices haven't substantially been raised throughout generations, that Capcom has killed a series of beloved IPs like Bionic Commando or Lost Planet, or a number of older games they could set smaller studios to making new iterations of, but instead put all their eggs into-say Monster Hunter and remakes now. If they go and make the mistake of pushing for higher prices when arguably nations are under inflation it could put them in a lot of trouble.
As a big fan of Dragon's Dogma and how Itsuno is excited with the budget and little time constraint he has this time around with a sequel; I just hope this isn't the coffin for it as it seems to quite possibly take up the annual Monster Hunter slot of next year for Capcom.