It's a lot easier to get hired back (as a contractor or not) with a former employer with which you have a good and established relationship. The contractor already knows the dev team, already knows the kind of games they make, already has experience with the franchise, pipeline, tools, and workflow so there's very little ramp-up time. If the cost of contracting the leader's company for the work is reasonable and within the game's budget, there's little to be lost by hiring them on. This also helps establish legitimacy for the lead's contracting company - having a list of established and satisfied clients looks good to other potential clients, which makes it easier for the contracting company to get hired by other companies in the future.

Contracting at that level also pays a lot more than a salary job working for the studio. A lot of things are open for negotiation when it's company to company, including a percentage of the game's revenues. In many ways, it allows the contracting company to change the risk - reward ratio. The contractor can also take on more risk (e.g. less money paid up front) for more reward (a larger cut of the game revenue once it ships). Masahiro Sakurai of Sora Ltd. does this - he takes no money up front and gets paid entirely based on how well the game he contracted on sells.

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Voice acting has a lot of associated costs. Specifically, getting the voice acting requires us to pay for:

• The voice actor's time
• The recording studio time
• The voice director's time
• The developer time

These can add up - we pay union voice actors about $2000 per day each according to the current [SAG-AFTRA interactive media contract rates], and we spend at least that much for studio time. We also need to factor in the time the developers are away from the development studio and are at the recording studio because they aren't doing their normal tasks while taking care of this. It isn't uncommon for voice recording to cost over $10,000 per day, all things considered.

In addition to this, voice actors are often quite busy. They often have many roles already scheduled that they have committed to. This means that they might have only one or two days they can commit to recording, then be unavailable for months after that. In such cases, it means that we can't make any modifications or changes to the script after the recording is done because the voice actor isn't available to do those lines anymore. For example, take a look at [Aleks Le's IMDB page]. He did a lot of voicework for games like Persona 3 Reload, Street Fighter 6, Octopath Traveler 2, etc. I count 18 separate projects he recorded for in 2023 alone. If he's one of my voices, I probably wouldn't be able to get him back in the recording studio for several months since his schedule is so packed.

SWTOR is especially difficult to record for because player voice lines need to be recorded once for each character class. That means aligning eight different actors schedules before a hard deadline, and that can be extraordinarily difficult. Anyone who's tried to schedule events knows this - things happen, people change, agreements fall through, things get pushed back. As such, it's a small miracle they're able to keep putting out fresh voiced content like they do.

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I think you have the wrong idea about what game designers do. We're not project leads that pitch entire games, we're [content creators] that build the bits of specific content in games - the spells, the monsters, the fights, the classes, the races, the quests, the environments, the stats, the companions, and so on. Your typical AAA dev team has hundreds of developers, including dozens (or even hundreds) of designers there to create the items, quests, abilities, enemies, fights, crafting recipes, and other content that players engage with.

There are times when studios will solicit pitches from the rank and file, but these are few and far between. Everybody from the oldest of the old to the newest of the new have their own game ideas that they want to get made. Only those who have amassed sufficient experience and influence with publishing executives are typically given this opportunity, often because anyone who leads a new game's development is being trusted with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.

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Steam could do that, but that would make it a much more strongly-curated platform similar to the game consoles. This would ultimately result in games that had a higher quality bar, but also a lot fewer games in general because there's no way to automate testing games like that. Further, it would also significantly raise the cost of publishing games due to needing workers to do the vetting and quality assurance - they would have to test every game that gets submitted to make sure they comply with Valve's theoretical regulations and either pass or fail those games. Paying for those costs would have to come from somewhere, either cutting into Steam's margins or raising Steam prices.

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Any company that wants to release a premium game console basically needs to make an enormous investment that will probably not pay off for years. There are three major requirements for this process.

First, the company must develop gaming hardware. This is generally an expensive process - building anything physical is costly, time-consuming, and is a moving target because competitors aren't stopping either. The hardware must be manufactured and factories equipped and set up for mass production.

Second, they must develop software development tools for both themselves and for external developers to use in order to build games for that console. This requires a significant internal development team to build drivers and software interfaces. Beyond this, they likely need to develop their own flagship game (or more) to launch with the console. That generally costs at least $50 million for a AAA-fidelity game and at least two years of lead time to build alongside the hardware development.

Third, they must secure investment from third party developers to build games for that console. Using that $50 million price tag for a game, we'd need at least four or five additional games to launch with in order to entice players to buy in - no one buys a game console without games to play on it. If they want four launch titles to go along with the console launch, that requires at least $200 million in investment from others.

There are only a handful of companies in the world that have the kind of money, technology, and resources needed to make such a thing happen and some of them already have game consoles. The others look at the market, at the cost of entry just to compete (not necessarily even to pull ahead), at the expected returns on investment, and it's no surprise they choose to invest their money in other opportunities that seem more likely to bear fruit.

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You're correct about how developers getting promoted or moving to other studios can affect things, but it goes further than that. Honestly, it is because whole teams and individual team members change over time. People age and grow, life priorities shift and move. Becoming a parent, for example, radically shifts a person's priorities. Any of the game's major decision-makers becoming a parent can drastically alter the direction of the game. The longer a game or franchise runs, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the singularity of vision.

If we hire somebody completely new to take over, we lose that singularity of vision because the new leader will bring a new perspective. Even if we hire longtime fans of the game to work on it, the ascended fans' decisions will emphasize what they liked about the game and de-emphasize what they didn't. This can take a game in a direction that portions of the playerbase dislike - the players who don't share the same likes as the ascended fan. Think of what would happen to the Dark Souls franchise if the new leader was only a fan of the difficult boss fight aspect and chose not to spend those resources on the ambience and world building aspect of the game.

To some extent, yes - developers and influential stakeholders will move around as part of their careers or lives. Developers will grow and change over time, they'll take new jobs, retire, have kids, and their lives and priorities will change. New decisionmakers will join the team and will have different visions for the franchise than their predecessors. Beyond this, even player tastes will grow, change, and evolve over time as well. The old stuff that was super popular before won't cut it again if there isn't anything new to offer. If the directional changes meet the collective players' (both new and returning) tastes, the franchise will continue to see success. If they don't satisfy, the franchise will struggle.

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• Spend money on paid DLC and microtransactions if they have any.
• Talk to your friends about the game
• Post about the game and any new content that comes out on social media.
• Engage with fan and official posts on social media.
• Leave a user review of the game.
• Draw and post fan art and/or fan fiction.
• Make and post cosplay.
• Play the game a lot

Basically, what every dev is looking for are players who will spend on the game and players who will continue to engage with the game content outside of the game itself. The more people the game can reach organically, the more likely they'll get more players, more paying players, and more overall success.

PS. Conversely, if you want to do your part to kill a game, just don't engage with it at all. Let it rot, pay it no mind, and don't engage with it even if you hate it. Hate posting is still engagement. The only way to win is not to play at all.

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For developers in the trenches like me or my team, it's a fairly common occurrence that individual contributors will not be able to finish certain tasks by a given deadline. Sometimes the estimates and the actual work needed are nowhere near congruent, sometimes there are dependencies that took longer to work out than expected, sometimes there are unpredictable events like system outages or developers needing to take a medical leave of absence. In such situations, we adjust what we're delivering for this milestone and that task and any of its dependencies usually gets "punted" to the next milestone. Individual tasks can often shift back and forth without affecting the overall milestone too much.

It is actually possible for an entire milestone to slip as well - if the mission-critical deliverables for the milestone aren't done in time for whatever reason, the milestone isn't going to be accepted by the money people. Remember, the milestone schedule is originally pitched by the studio and agreed to by the publisher. It outlines exactly what the studio needs to deliver and demonstrate at each milestone and when each milestone should be there. Independent developer studios are often paid by the milestone, so missing or delaying a milestone delivery can mean that we don't get paid until we deliver.

When studios start missing milestones, the publisher often steps in to "meddle". Missing an entire milestone by a significant time frame is a big deal and often means the entire delivery schedule needs to be re-negotiated and re-planned. It's a sign of development hell and a project in a lot of trouble. From the publisher perspective, this is saving the project - things are already off the rails and need fixing or the entire project will need to be cancelled and the studio cut loose.

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Honestly, there are only two requirements to avoid an acquisition:

1. The studio's controlling stakeholders/majority owners want the company to remain independent and do not want to cash out
2. The company remains financially stable enough not to need a bailout

If the studio ownership decides they want to retire or cash out, they will be open to opportunities to sell. This is usually something of an inevitability - we are human and life priorities change over time. Things might be good for a few years, but a life-changing experience like having children, the death of a loved one, or other life-altering events could easily change circumstances.

The vast majority of the time, it's because the company is already in dire financial straits and needs a bailout. If the company can't afford to keep things running, they'll either look for a bailout (typically in the form of acquisition) or they'll be forced to shut down and lay everybody off. If the company can't earn enough to pay its debts, employees, and overhead costs, it won't be in business for long.

That's really it. All acquisitions happen when either the first or the second requirement (or both) is no longer being met. Either the owners decide they want to sell or the company is in desperate need of money and must either sell or close. Many companies don't even get to secure a buyout, they often die because they can't find a buyer (or other new source of funding) and run out of money.

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Of course a studio can delay the launch, but a launch delay will have its own set of consequences. Remember, no game launches in a vacuum. Timing is the key factor.

The most obvious consequence goes back to the adage "Time is money". The developers working on the game need to pay rent and buy food. The studio needs to pay those developers during that time to keep them employed. Those costs don't go away when the game's launch is delayed - they will still accumulate. If the studio doesn't have the money they need to keep the lights on during that delay, it won't be able to make payroll for its employees or pay its bills/debt. In such a situation, a delay is impossible - the company will die without money from the game sales.

The second consequence is about the state of the gaming world over time. Imagine that we delay our game to dodge Hades 2. What happens after Hades 2? Will we need to dodge another big release? Will we need to dodge another competitor in our specific game genre? Will the market still be good for our game? Will the platform still be good? Remember, Facebook was a major gaming platform for years and then it wasn't. Imagine spending two years and millions of dollars to develop a major Facebook game only to have the platform die out from under you before launch. Things always change over time.

These two consequences feed into each other - every day we delay, more things change and new problems arise. Every day we delay, costs build up that we need to pay for somehow. Every day we delay release, our income on the game remains zero. At some point, the game will need to launch or the company will assuredly die.

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From an individual worker's perspective, I think that most of the people who were let go (~70-75% or so) will find new jobs in the industry within the next year or so. There are definitely studios that are still hiring if my inbox is to be believed. I still get plenty of cold call recruiter emails from both independent and well-known AAA studios, so I think there are still openings for people. I think some folks (~20%) will churn out of the game industry and quit for greener pastures. This is also normal, lots of people realize there just isn't a professional career for them in game dev and either go hobbyist or find something adjacent that pays a lot better.

Thinking about things from a corporate perspective, I think that we'll see things continue to grow, but much more slowly than before. The big game publishers (EA, Microsoft, Sony, Square-Enix, Nintendo, Take Two, etc.) are still larger today than they were was in 2020 even after factoring in all of the layoffs from 2023 and 2024 (so far). I don't think that the industry will get smaller - there's more to the game industry than AAA games after all. I think that there's going to be a bunch of indie studios get founded in the wake of the layoffs. I think AAA games will grow more slowly for a while as the big companies circle the wagons and focus on the safer bets.

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Honestly, the decision to sell to a publisher is primarily a question of stability.

Independent studios live and die on their ability to secure contracts regularly, year in and year out. This process is a constant grind, requiring the studio leadership to maintain good relationships with publishers. Financial situations are never super stable, they are often feast or famine when there are tons of opportunities that your studio can't possibly field and then there are lean times when finding work can be difficult. It's especially difficult because there's almost no way that an independent studio can bank the kind of money they'd need to keep everyone paid for any extended period of time without securing a new contract to keep the lights on. There's also the disaster of having so many opportunities that the studio staffs up in order to handle more, only to get caught in a lean period where there isn't enough work to keep everyone employed. In lean times, the independent studio is left to fend for themselves while the publisher-owned studio gets higher priority when the publisher is considering project assignments. And there's always the issue of IP ownership - often the publisher is the one who retains the rights and the studio is work for hire. There's very little room for error when running an independent studio.

If the studio is owned by the publisher, there isn't a need for securing contracts anymore. An internal studio almost always has priority over an external studio for being assigned a new project. The internal studio can focus on developing games and technology. They don't need to worry about securing IP rights anymore, since they're all owned by the same company. It's a huge reliever of stress from studio leadership to know that there's more of a safety net, even if that safety net is not perfect. When lean economic times hit, everyone suffers - including the internal studios, as we have seen. Large companies will often shed staff during bad times but have a higher overall survival chance than small ones.

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Chances are good that they had considered it at some point and decided against it. It's important to remember that there's both a money and a timing issue at work here. It's no coincidence that it's been almost 3 months exactly since the last round of Microsoft gaming layoffs. The accounting numbers don't look so good this quarter and Microsoft must keep its shareholders happy, so they are looking to save money in some way, but they need to change those money numbers within a specific time frame in order for it to count.

Any number of possible results could have happened, but the general decision making criteria is to choose the solution that results in the most money saved within the time frame to help make the numbers look better. Perhaps they tried, but couldn't find a buyer that was willing to commit. Maybe the prospective buyers didn't offer enough. Maybe they found a buyer, but that buyer couldn't get the money together fast enough and bailed. Maybe the studio leadership didn't want the studio to be sold. Studio founder Shinji Mikami left Tango Gameworks about a year ago after shipping Hi Fi Rush; there may have been difficulty finding studio leadership to take over.

Ultimately, this is all just speculation. Only those within the affected parties are truly privy to the details and it is unlikely anyone with real knowledge is going to spill the beans on this. I feel a great deal of sympathy for those affected and hope they are able to find something new soon.

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Despite the common myth that publishers are evil vampires who exist to make things work, publishers really do serve a legitimate purpose that makes them valuable. What publishers do is provide logistical support to the development studio. Beyond the obvious of providing funding to build the game, publishers also generally handle things like:

• Providing QA support
• Providing technical support/code/back end for console development
• Providing tool support
• Providing network/back end support
• Handling game marketing
• Handling the business negotiations
• Handling physical media and delivery

All of these things both cost a lot of money to establish and require specialized staffing to handle. Most game studios don't want to do these things because it means the studio leadership has to step away from overseeing the game development and focus on setting up all of those logistical elements. As always, there are negotiations made in the contract between a publisher and a developer - the publisher agrees to do all these things and provide X moneys to the developer over this period of time, and the developer promises to deliver a game based on this schedule with these requirements.

One key thing to remember is that attacking your partners in public is never a good idea from a business perspective. Even if the relationship was strained behind closed doors, being anything but supportive of your partners in public will be remembered - not just by the partner who may choose not to work with you again, but also by other prospective future partners who will want to avoid getting burned in a similar fashion. The temporary internet points from players for being "on their side" just isn't worth it, especially because players are fickle and will turn on you in an instant, but potential business partners have elephant memories.

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For those who haven't been following this story, Helldivers 2 multiplayer originally required a linked PSN account in order to play. The PSN back end was not ready, so the developers turned off the requirement. Recently it came back on and several players were upset because their games stopped working. There was a review bomb and a lot of angry feedback, especially because PSN accounts are not available without a Playstation console in several geographic areas. [Sony posted yesterday] to say that they would no longer be requiring a linked PSN account for Helldivers 2 Multiplayer.

The situation is strange to me because there doesn't seem to be a lot of reason for any real controversy. Sony is making all PC games that they publish on Steam require PSN accounts. That in itself isn't that big a deal - lots of publishers require similar things. EA requires Origin accounts, Ubisoft has their UPlay ecosystem, Activision has Battle.net, Microsoft has XBox Live, and so on and so forth. Helldivers was always supposed to launch with this requirement but they ran into major technical issues at launch and had to disable the requirement (temporarily). I know that Ghost of Tsushima will also require a PSN account for multiplayer.

The second thing with PSN accounts not being allowed in various countries is an issue within Sony itself and has nothing to do with Helldivers. The Helldivers team did what they were contractually obligated to do - require a PSN account to play. Sony's internal PSN team is responsible for which countries are and aren't on the whitelist for account creation via PC. Most game sales are in North America, Western Europe, and Japan/South Korea. There just aren't quite as many players in Uzbekistan or Ukraine. When your customer count in those countries is in the dozens, it really doesn't rank very high on the priority list.

Early on, I think it should have been communicated to players that they would (eventually) need a PSN account to play multiplayer and possibly some other "here's something for your trouble" bonus in game to help provide some value to the player. Now that it's blown up so large, the decision to step it back is probably the right one. I think that, for Ghost of Tsushima PC, the PSN linking should be a requirement for the game from the jump so that people know exactly what they are getting.

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There's a whole field called Marketing Analytics that is dedicated to quantifying the results and context of marketing efforts. It is rare for companies to spend a large amount of money (e.g. on marketing budgets) without some means of measuring what they get from spending it. This measurement generally includes things like impressions, click-through rates, time spent engaging with the content, google searches for the marketed material, visits to the websites, view counts, average and median watch time, and so on. There are a lot of key performance indicators that analysts will track in order to measure how effective a specific marketing tactic is, and those performance indicators get compared to the cost of the marketing tactic to determine overall cost efficiency.

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It has certainly happened in the past, though not necessarily specifically the narrative part of the game. Many games are pushed to launch without development being as far as they want it to be due to reasons like hitting their budgetary limit and needing to recoup some of the investment. Our estimates are only estimates after all, sometimes we run into unforeseen problems and things take longer than expected. We can't stop paying the developers when we hit snags like that, so certain features end up more costly than others, which eats into the budget that was earmarked for other stuff instead. Most games in this situation have a lot of other launch issues too for the same reason - when you're pushed out the door to make the deadline due to running out of budget, things that should have been fixed are often not.

When World of Warcraft launched in 2004, there were several entire world zones that were incomplete and (mostly) locked off from players. Some players were able to sneak in through various exploits and take screenshots of those areas. Most notable were that the zones were primarily unpopulated by anything - no mobs, no quests, empty towns and buildings, just environment geometry that had been built out. This accompanied other incomplete bits of the game like quests that still had XML code in them. It would take years before players would finally see the incomplete-at-launch zones in some form or other.

Cyberpunk 2077 famously launched after multiple delays with numerous bugs and weird issues. Notably, the dev team also completely cut the multiplayer mode of the game that they had been building in order to consolidate resources to ship the single player game. The game came in super hot and had a huge number of launch issues that were eventually (mostly) ironed out, but the multiplayer mode was never resurrected.

The most famous example of this is probably Knights of the Old Republic 2. The publisher famously moved the deadline up and Obsidian scrapped the in-development ending since they didn't have the time to finish it. Instead, the story was wrapped up super quickly to ship the game. Notably, the partially-finished original ending was left on the disc and modders eventually discovered (and later restored) it.

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I've actually worked on and shipped more than one annual sports title over my career and I want say for the record that the idea that annual sports titles are "mostly minor tweaks and roster changes" is absolutely and categorically false. Annual sports titles absolutely do not have the same scope as AAA games with multi-year dev cycles, but they do absolutely have significant breadth and depth of scope each year beyond "minor tweaks and roster changes".

The majority changes that occur each year are spread out because they must be - there simply isn't enough development time within the ~11ish calendar months between launches to rebuild everything, so decisions must be made about what gets added/updated this year and what waits for next year. That means that, besides roster updates and minor tweaks, this year we're committing to change our animation system, these eight specific stadiums/arenas, these three game modes, update the commentary system, and rework the stat simulation. Next year, we're committing to these other eight stadiums/arenas, these other four game modes, the physics system, the VFX system, and the AI logic. This sort of round-robin approach is necessary - the dev team often isn't large enough to sustain working on everything each cycle so we need to pick and choose what we can do each year within the time we have. It also means that players who only engage with some of the game likely don't necessarily see (or notice) all of the changes we make each time around. This doesn't mean that we didn't do it or that the changes aren't there, but it can certainly look like not much has changed if the player isn't playing those parts of the game.

To your main question - The primary reason that annual sports games haven't transitioned to a live service model is because of inertia. There is a well-established and financially sustainable annual sales model that works. There would need to be a significant and tangible gain to be had by switching to a live service model other than novelty - all of the current existing tools and systems are built with the expectation of delivering a new retail game each year, and all of the dev experience built up is for delivering a new retail game each year. Switching over to an ongoing service would come at tremendous cost. There must be a gain to outweigh that cost in order for the publishers to do it.

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