Reference. Don’t bash me pls. I’m hoping the insider leak gets investigated.
Key Points to digest:
1) EA frontline employees taking 50% hit to annual bonuses
2) EA Executives taking only a 25% hit to annual bonuses
3) EA continues to lay-off people and cut bonuses to prevent layoffs at critical studios such as BIOWARE.
4) If EA can’t stave off its losses, critical studios like BIOWARE could lose people. This delays contents and fixes. Created another ME: Andromeda
Quick Take
Let’s just say that this rumor becomes reality. I think it will be very interested to see what the future has in store for Relic. My guess would be that the company becomes a studio dedicated to the Age of Empires franchise, especially if this other tweet by Klobrille is true. It’s already an extremely popular IP and they are developing the fourth game in the series. Relic’s developers are also veterans of the genre, having created quite a few excellent and extremely popular RTS titles. I know that I’m very excited to see what Age of Empires 4 has in store, and with Relic at the helm that’s even better.
So, looks like no coh 3 anymore guys.
CoH3 leadership?
The majority of CoH2 leads and veterans have either left or working on AoE4.
I'll post an updated list within a week or so.
CoH3 will either be delayed until they finish AoE4 or created by new team leads. Blackbird Interactive is rumored to be working with MS as well and they have many Relic vets.
I have more consumer confidence in BBI's leadership than Relic. BBI seems to have no trouble attracting top talent so they are expanding without the same growing pains as Relic.
The radio silence from CoH+AoE teams seems to suggest MS and Sega have been in contract negotiation for several months. We can expect big news after E3 this year or Gamescom at the latest. It fits in with AoE2's 20th anniversary.
Based on recent Relic job listings (see below), Sega is gearing up to publish at least one more Relic IP.
It's possible Relic will be sold to MS without the CoH IP, but that's not necessarily a bad thing in terms of marketing. MS and Sega America has stronger ties to EA marketing than Sega Europe/Sega Japan.
CoH2 & EA marketing
EA business models with gaming as a service (gaas) and loot boxes was the inspiration for CoH2's five-year plan . This was later canceled to focus on cosmetics only.
The CoH2 marketing team used consultants from “your digitallife” (now defunct) with very close ties to EA.
Quote yourdigitallife; "Behind the scenes at World War 2 event we put together for Company of Heroes 2." https://www.instagram.com/p/b0gmOXkaH4/ (Darin Perfonic had rejoined EA at this time)
Darin Perfonic, co-founder yourdigitallife https://www.linkedin.com/in/darinperfonic/ (EA marketing to this day)
James McDermott, founder https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-mcdermott-29603716/ (former Relic marketing & EA)
Company of Heroes 2: War Spoils Skydive Event, 2014
Anyone that think Relic would implement this loot drop system for "free DLC" really need to understand the EA business model from sport franchises such as FIFA (also core inspiration for Starwars Battlefront 2 & several Bioware games).
Unfortunately for Relic/Sega money suits, the CoH2 loot drop system with "rare commanders" was so broken that it was never fully implemented with the in-game shop. Good riddance.
Who will save Relic from themselves?
MS money alone can’t save Relic nor CoH3. If this studio flops with AoE4, the talent bleed will kill this studio inside out. AoE4 is a "make or break" for Relic.
Whatever happens to Relic, I'm 99% sure the AoE+CoH IP will continue with or without Relic. Sega/MS are both decent publishers that will use those two IPs to corner the RTS market.
Except for mobile, Blizzard (owned by Activision since 2013) and EA RTS is RIP.
*SNIP*
Do you believe that marketing for games is not only about creating hype for products but also providing the design team with critical player-driven insights?
Lead the strategic brand management of our titles from inception through to live operations to long-term brand health & consumer engagement
Make sound business recommendations to the Executive Producer and the SEGA publishing group to enhance agreed marketing programs
Guide SEGA’s media briefing and planning process through close collaboration with SEGA’s Marketing team
And this job seems related to new studio leader/executive producer (3 total). Unless someone is leaving, Relic is working on 3 games, very risky IMHO.
“I said I would love to come back,” Baker started. “They [Gearbox Software] said I’m not coming back.”
Baker continued, “Their timeline tells an interesting story. I think it’s interesting that Randy Pitchford tweeted out that I turned it down, and then he said he heard that I turned it down. I would fact check before I tweeted out to the internet.”
*SNIP*
We know large rodents helped determine the name of game companies. We now also know that Randy Pitchford vanquished Gabe Newell in a poker match on a riverboat to win the name of the house of Borderlands. [UPDATE: Valve denies.]
So reports Joystiq, in a new series that looks at the secrets behind the names of video game studios. To learn more, the site asked Randy Pitchford co-founder of Texas-based Gearbox to explain how his company got his name.
[UPDATE: 6:17 PM - A Valve spokesperson cast doubt on this story today, saying Pitchford and Newell did not meet until after Valve shipped Half-Life, meaning this poker match couldn't have happened. Kotaku has contacted Pitchford for clarification. UPDATE 2: Pitchford informs us that this was a "tall tale." Kotaku regrets the error.]
*SNIP*
Few people outside of Valve are more intimately familiar with Steam’s inner workings than Galyonkin. He has always described the Steam data-gathering mainstay, used by major developers and publishers to take stock of Steam and justify their games’ existence, as a “side project.” His main gig? Director of publishing strategy for Epic’s new store, as it turns out. He announced yesterday that he’s been working on the project for “the past several years.”
*SNIP*
“I’ve learned a lot about how games are tracking [week] over week, how effective are sales (not as much as people think, exposure is more important), and more importantly, I got to talk to hundreds of developers to learn what they want from a digital store and what they like and don’t like about existing ones,” he said.
I've created SteamSpy - a service for gaming analytics and audience research for PC games developers that is used daily by over 25,000 professionals over the world.
I was included in the lists of the most influental people in Russian games industry by both VC.ru and Kanobu.ru.
Since Epic started taking a 12 percent cut of sales revenue generated on its new Games Store, much has been made of whether Steam's baseline 30 percent revenue cut is justified. But a new analysis shows that Valve sometimes receives much less than that headline revenue percentage for some of the most popular games on Steam.
*SNIP*
When the revenue Valve is missing from these Steam keys is taken out, the company's average cut across these popular games hovers around 20 percent of all sales revenue rather than 30 percent
Steam Marketing & Steam Retail Cards
Examples where Valve invests in global marketing to the benefit of Steam game developers;
Source from Valve Business Development, Marketing: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-giardino-8a741161/
https://twitter.com/tomgvalve/status/1109257799173730304
Customers want and need different things, and behavior from one place to the next is wildly different. Our job is to help you reach more users in more places, so we have to invest accordingly. Payment methods are an easy example…
Conventional wisdom is, standard payment methods like credit cards and Paypal cover most of the pie. Not if you want to reach emerging markets or make the opportunity bigger for devs. Players buying your games in Asia in 2018 actually used 87.5% “non-standard” payment methods!
Cash is important. Our cash cards are available in 50 countries. They’re much more expensive than standard payment methods, costing Valve 10-15% of the price, but that's fine with us- it's the level of investment necessary to grow emerging markets for your next game.
Sometimes the access barrier is technical or cultural, so we've invested heavily in PC Cafe support as well. This makes it super easy for your games to show up in the PC cafes of Manila or Lima- literally just a couple of clicks. Reach out if you want more info on this program!
And if you're operating an online multiplayer game, we have your back. The new networking APIs solve problems for your game on Steam and off. DDoS protection, less latency, and better matchmaking pools.
*SNIP* https://www.fortressofdoors.com/operation-tell-valve-all-the-things-3-0/
The goodwill is spent. People used to stick with Valve because they honestly felt it was the best platform for both customers and developers. Now they stick with Valve because of power. And the second they have an alternative, they will jump ship.
*SNIP*
I know a lot of people are talking about the Epic store. Epic is making a really strong developer-first push, offering 88% revenue share across the board, and reportedly giving out money by the truckload to buy exclusives and free game giveaway deals. It's a strong offering. I can say for a fact that it's VERY popular among developers right now, and the survey results bear that out. Now, let's be honest here. Epic is not a threat to Steam... today.
So You Want To Compete With Steam: Epic, Discord, Kartridge, and RobotCache https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-steam-2/
Competing head-on with an entrenched market leader is called Red Ocean strategy, because it's like a feeding frenzy of sharks all tearing each other apart to get at the same piece meat. Now, I'm not saying nobody should compete against Steam. What I am saying is that taking on the top shark is fraught with peril, and nearly every company that's tried so far has repeated the same fatal mistakes. Steam has reigned supreme for over 15 years for a reason, but recent rumblings suggest things are about to change.
*SNIP*
Piracy
Did I say there were only four contestants? Looks like a secret fifth contestant has snuck onto the set when we weren't looking.
Those of you who have read Piracy and the Four Currencies or the rest of the series know where I'm going with this -- you are always competing against piracy, and the "price" of your service is measured not just in money-dollars but also time-dollars, pain-in-the-butt-dollars, and integrity-dollars. Piracy charges zero money-dollars, but has a certain time and pain-in-the-butt cost, not to mention an integrity cost for those who are scrupulous or just afraid of getting in trouble with the law. If your service can't compete on the time and pain-in-the-butt costs, or you piss of your audience so much that they see you as the bad guy (raising your integrity cost), they'll become "customers" of Piracy instead.
As the exclusivity war between Netflix and its competitors heats up, we're starting to see a surge in video piracy after years of decline. When faced with the cost and hassle of having to maintain several different subscriptions, or not being able to access content at all due to regional licensing scuffles, more and more customers are opting to just pirate their content.
The parallels between streaming video services and the digital PC games market aren't perfect, but any competitor seeking to bank on subscriptions, paywalls, and DRM should be wary, lest they succumb not to Valve but to the Jolly Roger.
Check Point Research provides leading cyber threat intelligence to Check Point Software customers and the greater intelligence community.
*SNIP*
In the last few weeks, however, Check Point Research discovered multiple vulnerabilities in Epic Games’ online platform that could have allowed a threat actor to take over the account of any game player, view their personal account information, purchase V-bucks, Fortnite’s virtual in-game currency and eavesdrop on and record players’ in-game chatter and background home conversations.
Check Point Research informed Epic Games of this vulnerability and a fix was responsibly deployed, ensuring their millions of players can continue their gameplay in a secure environment.
“The truth is that most developers make a lot less than a 30 percent profit margin on a game. So the difference between 12 and 30 is not just a little bit of money. In many cases, it’s more than a majority of the profit already,” Sweeney told The Verge during an interview at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last month. “It’s about economic efficiency when you have these stores sucking out a huge fraction of the profits from games. Valve, Apple, and Google make more profit through there storefront fees than the devs make off their own games.” Sweeney has also expressed distaste for how Apple and Google operate their mobile app stores. And in the case of Fortnite for Android, Epic bypassed the Play Store and its revenue cut altogether.
*SNIP*
Despite the pushback, Sweeney says the company will continue this strategy, either until Epic’s store becomes popular enough to stand on its own or Valve acquiesces to more developer-friendly terms. “Epic is open to continuing to sign funding / exclusivity deals with willing developers and publishers regardless of their previous plans or announcements around Steam,” Sweeney said on Twitter at the beginning of the month.
“In many ways, Valve has had the kingdom to itself for well over a decade.
For a long time, as a PC game developer, Steam was the only place to go. You couldn’t go against them and it was in [Valve’s] benefit to hardline that conversation because Valve has so many players on Steam.” In January of this year, Valve said Steam had 90 million monthly active users.
“Valve had 15 years to develop and build Steam. The newcomers have a lot less time. In order to send your rocket into space, you need to overcome gravity. It costs a fortune,” van Dreunen says. “Epic now, with its success from Fortnite, suddenly comes into all this money. Suddenly, you have a player in the market sitting on a pile of money who says, ‘Let’s go after that.’”
“Epic is doing is the Amazon thing. [Amazon CEO] Jeff Bezos is always fond of saying things like ‘your margin is my opportunity,’” van Dreunen says. “Well, Epic realized the situation – the one thing it could go after is Valve’s margin.”
“The idea of a fragmented library on PC has been around for a decade. You could have a dozen of these shortcuts on your desktop, and every time you want to play a game you have to remember which of these buckets did I leave it, where does it live,” van Dreunen says. He’s unconvinced that Epic has all of the ingredients to fix this issue, instead of just making it worse.
“You can talk about the match that started the forest fire, but it’s really about the drought that occurred for three months that led to that forest fire,” van Dreunen says. Fortnite was very clearly the match, sparking a huge transformation at Epic and earning it enough money to transform its run-of-the-mill game launcher into a genuine Steam competitor.
But it’s not clear how long that game’s success will last or how much of a threat Epic will pose to Steam in the long run if it doesn’t set out a clear vision of what it wants its store to become and to what end Valve fits into that vision. “Two years from now, are you just going to have two Steams?” van Dreunen adds. “Or do we have a group of people who outsmarted one of the smartest monopolies in the industry?”
"And so we’re going to swallow the Epic Games Store pill with Borderlands 3. And some of you guys are going to hate it and scream bloody murder and you’ll even blame me, personally, for it. And you can bitch and moan and brigade and stalk my shit, but at the end of the day when we look back at this moment we’ll realize that this was the moment where the digital stores on PC became unmonopolized."
Wargaming have their own.
Blizzard (which now holds activision games)
Hmm...
Those storefronts aren't trying to compete with Steam. PC stores like Origin, Battlenet, Bethesda.net, Wargaming and Uplay sell first-party titles for the purpose of not having to pay Valve the 30% fee.
It’s fine Epic (includes chinese Tencent), GoG/CD Projekt and Microsoft store wants to compete with Steam.
But Epic is brute forcing themselves into the steam market. This is not pro-consumer as Randy tries to claim.
Kaz Hirai has served as President and CEO of Sony since 2012, but his tenure will soon be over. With less than a week left before Kaz turns the company over to its next leader, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford decided to make a last-ditch effort to try to convince Sony to be more open on the subject of cross-play with Xbox. Unfortunately, Pitchford's request was directed to a parody account.
Twitter user @KazHiraiCEO has been amusing gamers for years with his antics, and he's acquired a following of over 120,000. One of these followers is Pitchford, who has been following the account for months and "thinking Kaz is so much cooler than I actually thought he was." A quick glance at the account's bio shows the phrase "PARODY ACCOUNT" in unmissable all-caps. Whoops.
Randy one year later; "Console wars" coming to PC is good!
Fortnite has reached its peak within a saturated market and Epic are trying to re-invest before a big decline in Battle Royale.
If Randy had a problem with Epic exclusivity it wouldn't happen with BL3.
Unfortunately for Randy the BL3 fan base don’t blindly go along with his/2K greed to maximize profits.
IMO, both Epic and Valve are planning for subscription-based services. The question is whatever Valve/Epic will launch their own service or work with big tech such as Microsoft/Google/Apple.
Mike Rose @RaveofRavendale 6. feb. 2019 https://twitter.com/raveofravendale/status/1093167950360690691
Little thread of potential horror:
I am getting very, very worried about the future of Netflix-like subscription models. In the last 6 months, I have been contact by over a dozen different services, who all want to put No More Robots games on their upcoming platforms.
But here's the catch:
None of these platforms want to pay anything upfront. Instead, they want to pay us "per number of hours" that their users play our games, compared to how many hours their users are playing games overall. Which is obviously going to be *shit* for indie devs.
Now here's the real problem: If bigger studios begin adopting this style of platform -- which they already kinda are with things like Xbox Game Pass, Discord Nitro etc -- it forces smaller devs into a position where they may *have* to start being a part of these platforms.
So let's say in 5 years, if Netflix-style subscription models have become the norm, and no-one is paying for games anymore, a la what happened with both music and TV... how are indie devs even making money anymore?
They're not, is the horrible answer.
So yeah, I'm honestly super worried about this upcoming trend -- and this is coming from someone who owns a publisher, and can potentially maximize sales by selling multiple games at once.
If this trend takes over, I don't know how dev studios are even going to survive.
To clarify: From a consumer standpoint, I *love* sub models. I currently use Netflix, Now TV, Amazon Video, Spotify, Xbox Game Pass...
It's not that I'm rallying against them -- I just think we could do with having a real conversation about how they should be implemented best.
*SNIP*
As @rje has pointed out, if you are currently subscribed to PlayStation Plus, Xbox Games With Gold, Twitch Prime, and Humble Monthly, you have already received *28 free games* in February alone.
Fast-forward three years. Can you honestly say you'll still be buying new games?
Big changes are coming to PC/Console with these subscription-based services.
It's critical for the future of gaming they are implemented correctly.
Don't forget his love of barely legal porn. Which perhaps explains the two women wearing school uniforms in the pile of **** that was Duke Nukem Forever.
I did some more research into this Gearbox mess which is quite fascinating.
The sexual allegations in this lawsuit are a sideshow due to lack of evidence (for now).
The crux of the two lawsuits is Randy and Wade Callender are in for a big money fight.
For an entertainment industry, which makes their living from creating art and retaining loyal customers? The greed from upper management is out of control.
In-depth analysis of the two lawsuits (Randy vs Wade Callender) and CEO Randy Pitchford of taking secret $12 million bonus;
Ramifications? Randy and Wade are old friends, so I suspect they have a lot of "financial dirt" on each other which could result in Gearbox top leadership falling apart. Or they will reach a legal settlement.
Money & power corrupt and it’s hard to tell who the “good guy” are in this mess.
Also related to this Wade lawsuit is a personal assistant Randy suid but then went missing.
So in late 2018, Randy sued Callender first to defame him and then Callender made a counter lawsuit. Randy are trying to portray himself as “the victim” that was attacked by his “greedy” friend.
He also used deceptive PR tactics to defend against Sega allegations and the Colonial Marines Class Action lawsuit.
Bottom line? Current state of the AAA game industry
Below is a good insider commentary/quote from a lower-tier developer (Plamen Todorov) that work on big franchises such as Assassins Creed.
Unfortunately, it's not just Gearbox that is falling apart due to greed and leadership incompetence.
The gaming industry is failing apart.
The wrong people are in charge and all they care about is money.
The good people that care about making good games are leaving and are getting replaced by people that do not care.
AAA for the most part at this point is how much money is thrown at a game not quality.
More and more games will fall victim to bad management and sloppy execution. The state of some studios is horrible. The game industry is bleeding talent and is taking unqualified developers that will not question the status quo or bad decisions. The Bioware that made great games is gone. The people that made it what it was are gone.
The biggest waste of money is not graphics or things of the sort. It's incompetence and poor decisions by people who have no idea what they are doing or talking about.
For the most part it's because someone did not do the job they had to do or did not listen to someone that knew what they where talking about. Most studios will push out a broken product that is not working instead of scrapping it to get some money back. That's on the executives not the developers. The top level management also meddles in game development often to the detriment of the game. And it's a strange occurrence but sometimes some people invest more time and energy in finding reasons not to work instead of just getting the job done. For the most part the big studios are not what they started out as anymore. Blizzard is full corporate now so is Bioware. And corporate studios are a (I hate to use that word but it fits perfectly) toxic environment. Talent gets crushed and "yes man" thrive. That's why good people are quitting.
A greedy gaming empire on the rise from Apple/Google? Execute Order 66?
David Brevik @davidbrevik https://twitter.com/davidbrevik/status/1110239294264737792
I'm very worried about the future of the gaming market. All of these services where developers get paid by the minute are going to have radical impacts on design motivations and predatory practices. If you thought Free-to-play was bad, you haven't seen anything yet.
There is no way to stop this. These changes are coming. When mega-companies like Google and Apple are making this a corporate initiative, gaming is going change forever.
Marcello Lins @MarcelloLins
Care to elaborate! I'm genuinely interested in your take about this new monetization model. What exactly worries you?
David Brevik @davidbrevik
Spotify had a profound impact on the music industry. Imagine a world where authors didn't sell books, but you subscribed to a service and they got paid a penny by the page read instead. It would change everything.
Future?
Subscription services are not necessary anti-consumers/anti-indies, it's all about execution.
Gamers have the final word by voting with their wallets.
Until that happens, it's going to get worse for AAA game developers that don't have good studio leaders that are fighting for them and their fan base (think Respawn Entertainment fighting against EA greed). Respawn Says Apex Legends Was Studio’s Idea, Not EA’s: https://gamerant.com/apex-legends-respawn-ea/ EA is committed to Titanfall – "Whatever the f*** that means" Respawn CEO responds.: https://rectifygaming.com/ea-is-committed-to-titanfall-whatever-the-f-that-means-respawn-ceo-responds/
Whatever happens to Randy/Gearbox, they are the byproduct of a very greedy gaming industry.
I don't blame Randy, I believe he's doing a fantastic job exposing the AAA gaming industry for what it has become.
So buckle up or go play AA/indies/older games until the industry sorts itself out.
PS. I hope my posting doesn't cause too much headache for mods. But it's important to understand the big picture at play here. If the "bad guys" win this war, this new "gaming empire" (paid by the minute monetization) will make EA look like a pony show.
Randy Pitchford Again SLAMS Steam, Explains Support For Borderlands 3 Epic Store Exclusivity:
Epic Games CEO is defending Randy Pitchford doing PR for the Epic Store:
https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1117145708799451136
@TimSweeney
Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) wrote a great tweetstorm on the Epic Games store and Borderlands, which Redditor u/Slawrfp assembled below. Sort comments by "controversial" to see both points of view.
Randy Pitchord wrote a long chain of tweets discussing his opinions on EGS. I have reformatted it for readability on Reddit.
TLDR of TLDR: Competition good, Steam bad.
TLDR: He believes that what we are currently experiencing with EGS is only a mild annoyance towards something that is ultimately very good because Valve had a stranglehold on PC distribution and that is bad.
He believes that in a year or two, EGS will be far more developed than Steam, because Epic is not as complacent as Valve. (I would like to note that Tim Sweeney believes that Steam even has too many features, so Randy is pretty much incorrect)
He thinks that Epic will eventually beat Valve and that in about a decade Steam might be a dying platform, or at least whichever platform is the dominant it will not be Steam. Randy also thinks that the fact that Valve is privately owned is a disadvantage (lol) and compares them with Epic whose outside investors (Tencent, yup, he considers it a good thing) are insisting on constant growth and reinvestment into the business.
Finally, he believes that years from now we will look back to the day that Bl3 came to EGS as an amazing day for gaming because the ''Steam monopoly'' officially died.
Randy reacts to fan criticism in the Reddit thread:
Gosh - Many of the takes in that Reddit thread are laughable and extremely detached from reality. I don’t spend time on Reddit, but the discourse feels like conspiracy theory type thinking, which is horrifying if Reddit is being used by *anyone* to help shape their opinions.
Denmark
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Ozena
Relic Entertainment
cblanco ★ 
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