Indie doesn't scale. You can't katamari up a bunch of tiny studios and then say "alright break into 100 teams and each make small games!", it breaks down. But that's essentially what they did #GameDev
@glassbottommeg But isn’t this move scaling down rather than up? All the studios used to be under a single company (Embracer) whereas now it will be split up into three companies. The “katamari up” happened earlier when each studio joined Embracer, not now.
@kaynSD@runevision exactly. Indie barely functions when it's a single studio. The way profit expectations and cost scale with size, that math just gets worse and worse and worse as you get bigger, and breaking into a ton of smaller "internal" teams never works as a result.
They only had a chance before because they could essentially hide behind the huge AAAA shit.
Embracer almost certainly knew that. They did this intentionally. This is "right sizing" by just cutting the indie out entirely, without them having to admit it.
@glassbottommeg@kaynSD@runevision I'd argue that a large group of indies and AAs can be very well protected. A bunch of indies doing okish, and another bunch having flops can definitely be bouyed up but the occasional Valheim, Goat Simulator, Teardown and Little Nightmares. Assuming there is a will to protect them, but that's a different story
@rtm223@kaynSD@runevision The maths don't really work out, though. AA / mid-tier is always balanced on a razor's edge, those studios are simply at risk by their very nature. They don't have the overages necessary to sustain smaller teams. Even if they did, simply by integrating smaller teams into a larger org, you make those smaller teams operate at significantly lower efficiency, and they won't be nimble enough to survive. Not to mention that they lose any semblance of community support for "underdogs", lose access to funding initiatives aimed at small studios, etc etc etc.
There's a ton of reasons why taking a large studio and chopping them into a bunch of smaller teams doesn't work for anything but loss-leaders. You could write a book on the subject, or at least a really big chapter. What they've done here, while not precisely the same, will fall victim to essentially all those same foulings.
The extremely brief explanation is that both profits AND costs tend to scale way over linear VS team size.
@glassbottommeg@runevision There's a wide, wide gulf between a company's biggest IP being "Practically all of the Gaming Rights To Lord of the Rings", "Catan (oh and also all the Board Game rights to Lord of the Rings)", and "Goat Simulator"
@glassbottommeg Is this like a McKinsey Group situation where they have never even once actually done anything of value but something that should probably be illegal funnels money into them or something? I've never heard of these people actually producing anything.
@glassbottommeg I would say... that they are trying to apply business logic to creative spaces... but this shit doesn't work out any better in non-creative spaces.
There is this great lie that when you start to refer to people as "resources" you begin to view them as interchangeable widgets in some imagined money-printing machine.
Those who have not already placed one foot out the door, will absolutely do so now leaving only a hollow shell that has a name attached to it that is meaningless
@belghast right? Like the logic barely made sense originally. They essentially acquihired a ton of indies and poured them into a massive AAAA bucket. At least there, you can dissolve them into larger entities. You lose a ton in the process, but between IP acquisition and the difficulty of hiring lately, it might work out.
But breaking them back apart into sorted buckets just. Like. Now you can't even do that? WTF are they thinking.
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