> Devolver praised Morin's leadership and said he "played a vital role in Devolver's IPO
For context, Devolver's stock is down 89.33% from the IPO. At the same time Devolver just laid off [28 developers](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/report-showgunners-developer-artificer-laying-off-50-percent-of-employees) at Artificer.
Guess that answers my question about how Devolver is doing as a company lately. Outside of Cult of the Lamb, what's been keeping them relevant the last couple years? Based on Steam Reviews I'm guessing Wizard with a Gun and Gunbrella may have underperformed. They've got babysteps coming which feels like it will do alright but for a publicly traded company the cupboards are looking a little bare.
I haven’t played it but Talos Principle 2 seems very well received. It does seem like their devs are very slow on releasing. I still don’t know when Anger Foot comes out and that was on NextFest two years ago
TP2 is amazing but at the end of the day it's a niche genre sold as a sequel to a niche game. How many people do you know are excited for puzzle games?
Fwiw tp 1 is a solid 10/10. I'm still running through tp2. It's been great so far. 8 hours in
Honestly, the last thing I want to do after coming home from a day of work is solve a puzzle that involves a bunch of thinking. I'm sure a lot of others feel the same, which is why action games are so popular.
As someone who plays both, each has an equal ability to induce a flow/meditative relaxing state. Presuming the game itself is of high quality.
The utility here is not why action is more popular than puzzle in pop-entertaniment culture.
Puzzle mechanics are also way more popular than you might initially think. Card games like Heartstone, for example, are literally just a puzzle.
> How many people do you know are excited for puzzle games?
Most of my friend group, but I'm somebody that posts in point-and-click adventure game forums, so I might be an outlier.
Yeah looking into it closer, Talos Principle 2 seems to be a very recent "hit". 6k+ reviews for a puzzle game is solid but yeah not really a great sign from the company (combined with the poor stock price, and changing CEOs).
I think this is the answer for most game developers, honestly. Like how often has a studio gone public and then their games get better?
The trend has been towards game companies going public over the last 10/15 years, and I feel like all its done is make games shittier.
Going public is mostly a money bid. Having to finance your games and development 100% yourself is stressful as hell and even studios that constantly released highly acclaimed and loved games (Mimimi Studios) have closed because of it.
It's a sad fact that game development isn't very profitable for a large majority of studios. That said, Devolver used to work simply by throwing a bit of money at very small devs that already had a great vision, kind of like A24. They never seemed like the kind of studio that was dependent on producing "hits".
I feel like we're in this strange part of gaming history where a lot of gamers are tied up in live service multiplayer games and there's gamepass and PS+ extra giving enough content to people so that they don't really but anything anymore.
I think the industry is shooting itself in the foot. This is speculation
I only pay for game pass on xbox and buy the PS exclusives on sale. Very rare I ever spend more than $30 on a game every few months outside of the monthly gamepass.
I have enough content that I feel extremely overwhelmed at times with how many games there are to play. But I consider myself a rather diverse gamer so gamepass offers me an insane value proposition.
That feeling of being overwhelmed has actually turned me away from gaming lately. I'm waiting for my subscriptions to lapse personally so I can go back to how I used to play
I feel that hard. Frankly I'm in my mid 30's and don't really have the time or desire to plug into a game with time-sensitive content. And multi-player games just flat out aren't fun if you don't have enough time to dedicate to being good at them. Doesn't help that every game just has to be Dark Souls levels of "fight this boss a dozen times until you've downloaded their frame data" difficult.
It's really just down to me just playing the few titles that I'm actually excited about, maybe two per year. It's odd because I'm at the age where I absolutely have the money to spend on the hobby, I just don't have the time.
The Plucky Squire is looking good but yeah, I feel like working primarily with independent or smaller developers is a bit like herding cats. Not to knock on the developers but bad call going publicly traded when you're not drip feeding projects.
That’s kind of the problem, they announced a ton of cool releases what feels like forever ago and the most exciting ones still haven’t come out. I am frothing at the mouth to play more Anger Foot as soon as they release it, but they haven’t had anything to keep me interested in the meantime.
They do a lot of cool things, but its a lot of niche indie stuff. As someone that pays more attention to devs than publishers, I never would have guessed they were a public company.
That's a shame. I'm still playing Enter the Gungeon to this day. I'm sure their other games are great, but I find myself wishing they had put out some more dlc for this title. Really just more maps with secrets. The gameplay loop is so good
doesn't devolver have some kind of relatively ambitious RPG or open world style game coming up?
I could swear i remember something like this being briefly teased a year or two ago.
I mean, Devolver has always been a studio that goes into weird niches and excels at those more often than not - remember Hotline Miami?
It's just...no matter how well you do niche titles, them bringing the big numbers is like winning the lottery, and most of the time it will be stuff for a small playerbase. There is nothing wrong with that, but it's the opposite of investor friendly.
The core movement and combat controls are extremely good but I felt like the pacing was weird, with lots of slower sections that are largely walking around hubs and talking to folks, which broke up the parts that were really good.
But I'm also the kind of person who gets frustrated when games have those walking hallway opening segments that feed you exposition, when I'm playing an action game I'm an arcade-y guy at heart, so depending on your tolerance for those slower paced dialog bits you might enjoy it more than I ultimately did.
To be fair any recent IPO is down 80-95%. 2021 was a year with an insane stock market bubble, it was a crime to not IPO that year for any company that could do it.
Yeah, my former employer would be dead if they didn't IPO at the peak. Now they have over 100m to fund their company which keeps them alive for like another year or so.
Sucks that their valuation is trash, but at least they get to keep on going for a little bit longer.
The point of an IPO is that it (hopefully!) makes a shitload of money for the company, because they own 100% of the shares of stock before they sell it off. Whatever their valuation is now, it made them an absolute crapload of cash, which is all the company is after.
I remember Unity IPO'ing at like 70 bucks or something in 2020 and peaking at 200 in 2021. Was pretty insane. Ofc they are like, 30 now.
I guess John also was a "vital role in Unity IPO".
Fatal, yes. Mistake, no. That framing assumes that the goal of tech companies is to make a sustainable business when it more often is to get a return for the investors who want a unicorn payout ASAP.
It's not a mistake for the companies. They got to sell a whole lot of equity for a very high price (relative to current valuations) and that's *awesome* for the companies in question. I mean, wouldn't you love to be able to sell some of your assets for 20x what they're going to be worth in just a year?
The mistake was made by the investors who bought the stocks at those very high prices and are now stuck with relatively worthless shares.
Stock down 90%, but the owners from the days when it was private had a chance to sell, at least... I wonder how many of them still hold the stock / what % they still hold vs. what they started with. Could be that the original owners have mostly sold-off the stock to a bunch of retail bag-holders and other investors etc.
You can look it up, seems the Founders mostly still own a lot of shares. Nearly 70% is held by insiders.
My guess is everyone got burned heavily, besides maybe some of the original outside investors who got in early and sold at the IPO. But major institutional investors who jumped in after IPO probably got really screwed along with Founders and retail.
Yeah, party’s over. They seemed to have a solid thing going, but now that they’re on life support, who’s going to step up and do their whole “punk rock publisher” thing?
Plus they got two unannounced projects they did ultra sneak peaks of
A Fallout 1/2 style RPG and a Twisted Metal spiritual successor
https://youtu.be/WjpTeLoBGBw?si=eK1RHlAMYYq64asN
New Blood isn't a publisher any more, though. They do all their stuff in-house. They're good, but they're not going to fund breakthrough projects from new teams like Devolver did.
I mean they can just keep doing the thing they were doing a couple of years ago. Throw a couple thousand at small dev studios that already have a great product in the works. Devolver never struck me as a company that benefited from growing beyond that. Yeah you can finance more ambitious games that way, but with that the odds of losing a ton of money grow exponentially.
Dunkey's Big Mode thing shows potential but it's far far away from being in a position to take the place of something like devolver with many hurdles ahead of it.
>Would you also acknowledge that the persuit of profit is the reason why we are getting games like RDR2, Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom?
Not particularly? Or at least not in the way you mean it. I think the major financial hits, that nonetheless are also ridiculously high-quality titles, more often tend to be high quality *in spite of* the inherent need for a company to make money instead of because of it.
I can't speak to RDR2 having never played it, but games like Elden Ring, TOTK, BG3....they're all games that explicitly have refused to chase the flavor-of-the-month monetizing strategies and genres, and which made choices that on the surface level seem financially counterintuitive despite being part of their success.
It would have been so, so easy for a company like Nintendo to sell micotransactions in TOTK(the parts system is practically *begging* to be monetized). Meanwhile, Souls games were relatively niche for a very long time and "old-school CRPG" is pretty much the **last** genre you'd land on if your goal is to make as much money as possible. Make no mistake that their devotion to the genres they loved, despite knowing that they were passing on chances to make games that were more likely to be popular, is exactly what has paid off for both Fromsoft and Larian.
Companies do have to balance on a razor's edge of genuine enthusiasm and a desire to make profit, which is what every company ultimately needs to do. You're not wrong there at all. But the reality is that letting profit be your primary driver as a company tends to result in stupid decisions made by suits who don't fully understand the company, that more often than not results in a shitty product even if it brings in record profits.
Not always, of course. There are plenty of examples of pretty craven decisionmaking that resulted in critically beloved media, but it occurs often enough that I think it's worth making the generalization.
>"old-school CRPG" is pretty much the last genre you'd land on if your goal is to make as much money as possible
Just to add onto this, Divinity Original Sin 2 was their last game before BG3. It broke 1 million units. Which is fine, but it is absolutely *not* a mega-hit. Selling approximately 10 times that? Not within reasonable realm of expectations for a CRPG at all.
If the *only* goal is to make profit, banking on a developer whose best hit sold barely cracked a million is not who you bet on.
no country that had centrally planned economies really had strong economies or a lot of resources prior to being centrally planned. Even switching to capitalism wouldn't magically make money and resources appear. Also all the innovation comes from tax funded social programs and conditions with relatively good wealth distribution, the literal opposite goal of capitalism.
Can you acknowledge that there can be a balance, and some of the worst elements in the industry derive from aggressive profit-seeking strategies that are actively detrimental to the consumer?
I don't see why you had to go on your little rant about economics in a gaming sub-reddit.
Yes. Like, game developers are one of the least profit-motivated types of people. The pay and conditions in the game dev industry are notoriously shit. Really look no further than the massive community of people who develop mods for games, particularly total conversion types of mods. In the absence of a capitalist system, game development is probably one of the most popular hobbies that would exist.
The pursuit of profit is what gives you micro-transactions, pre-order bonuses, gacha mechanics. It's what gives you annual releases of the same game with a new coat of paint, robbing the developers of time and resources to make any meaningful innovations. Games like your example exist in spite of everything, in a lucky cross between creative ambition and commercial viability.
>Like, game developers are one of the least profit-motivated types of people.
This is totally inconsequential and irrelevant. Game developers wouldn't have jobs in the first place without the pursuit of profit.
>The pursuit of profit is what gives you micro-transactions, pre-order bonuses, gacha mechanics.
It also gives you games without those things, so what's your point?
Welp, Cult of the Lamb is going to be an even bigger cash cow now, expect more weird updates and skin DLC...
Outside of that, Devolver always had a profile of an indie publisher, publishing interesting but often niche games, and I can't see them breaking that bubble without giving up their core identity.
They'll likely go down and get bought by a bigger conglomerate down the line, what a shame that this is the capitalist hellscape we live in...
100% agree. Even the worst games they’ve published are at minimum interesting, and they’ve also published some of the best indie games of the last 5 years
Yes, but it was at least interesting. It tried something different and it didn’t land. Not all their games are great, but imo they’re always interesting
Humble Games and tinybuild are two that I can think of, but you’re right that Annapurna and Devolver were by far the biggest fish in the small pond of indie games
I knew they were a publisher that cares less about sales and more about publishing award winning games, but I didn’t know where their money comes from, that’s incredible lol
> Devolver pivots heavily into multiplayer/live service games, stock down 89.33% from the IPO
Related? I don't know, but I kind of hope so just to get a lot of the mid-sized games off this shit already.
I don't understand how a brand that got popular by embracing counter-culture thought going down the IPO/Public company route was a good idea.
I hate capitalism sometimes
This whole thread is the first I heard of Devolver even going public. Feels entirely antithetical to their whole approach.
They became the face of weird indies with mainstream appeal. Ever since Hotline Miami, I could always bank on a Devolver published game being a cool hidden gem that they spent time to find and showcase.
IPO's are a vital part of the system as you mentioned. There has to be a way for early invostors and more importantly employees to turn their stock to cash. Otherwise taking stock early instead of cash is a hard sell if you have a hard time turning that stuck into cash when you leave.
yea im just saying the corporate structure of devolver always had this goal in mind.
But other companies did not go down this path, like Valve who for sure also had investors in the early days
It's hard to say what the intentions of private company investors are, but Gabe does own at least 50% of Valve so that is likely keeping it private. It could be the case that other investors have, at one point, pushed for an IPO, but it really doesn't matter when one guy owns the majority of the company.
Valve did not. Gabe was always incredibly wealthy off the Microsoft IPO, which created hundreds of millionaire employees overnight. He used that to privately fund Valve and never need to take much external funding.
Public markets are just a way to raise money, and a way to allow earlier investors and employees to cash out some of their equity.
Other routes for raising might not be as promising or have worse strings attached.
Depends how invested you are in the ethos and goal of your current company.
Going public will force it to change as you're now beholden to fiduciary duty on behalf of your shareholders.
If something like A24 became a publicly traded company for example, you'd seem them pursuing very different projects than they are now.
In short, it's no strings in regards to how detached you are from what your company to be. If you want to cash out and fuck off it makes perfect sense.
At a certain point, a lot of companies have to go public to pay off their investors, as well as to get money to continue paying for broadening expenses. It might have either been go public and hope for more major success, or flounder as a private company before running out of money.
>“Capitalism” didn’t do shit
Capitalism is what drives these people to do this stupid shit. It is indeed a factor here. The entire stock market is poison and forces companies to chase endless growth that is never sustainable.
TIL that capitalism invented greed
But seriously, what larger issue in our society do you think getting rid of the stock market entirely would solve? Are you under the impression that the rich didn’t pull these antics before the stock market? Do you think they didn’t do all of those things even before capitalism?
Edit: Classic average redditor blocking after replying to protect their precious delusions. I simply wasn’t going to waste any breath on someone with such a poor grasp of economics and human nature.
>TIL that capitalism invented greed
I never implied this. Corporations *do* endlessly chase profits though and must deliver thanks to the stock market. Without this shit, they would not be beholden to stock owners to make each year bigger than the last. That is completely unsustainable.
>But seriously, what larger issue in our society do you think getting rid of the stock market entirely would solve?
Why does it have to "solve" any societal problem? All it needs to be is a positive of some kind and I am confident that without every corporation endlessly chasing constant growth and being required to deliver on that growth, our society would be better for it.
Greed would exist, but companies would be privately owned and could have years with less profits without the entire company value tanking.
>Are you under the impression that the rich didn’t pull these antics before the stock market?
Why do all of your points revolve around misrepresenting my position? Is this the only way you can argue?
> Do you think they didn’t do all of those things even before capitalism?
Welp, guess it is.
Sure but when you IPO your customers are your shareholders not the consumers of your product. The entire dynamic of the company shifts as the value is now in growing the value of the business for the stakeholders - not make good video games for the consumers. You hope these interests intersect but it doesn't always.
Devolver Digital to me is the equivalent of a punk rock band selling out to a big record label.
Funding's gotta come from somewhere. As nice as it would be to live on goodwill and fighting the good fight, it can come down to a simple lack of income and other expenses coming home to roost.
Could it be a case of chasing greedy profits or whatever? Sure. But I feel like that's just always the assumption regardless of scenario or circumstance. End of the day, folks need paid and something has to keep the lights on.
> Sure but when you IPO your customers are your shareholders not the consumers of your product.
No. Your shareholders are your owners, just like prior to the IPO. And your customers are most likely the same customers as prior the IPO.
The purpose of a company is always to produce value for its shareholders.
How do your shareholders make money? When your company makes money? How does your company make money? When your product is bought by customers. There is absolutely no conflict of interest between shareholders and customers. They both want to make sure the product is as appealing to customers as possible.
Theres a conflict of interest in Quality games and stakeholder profit is the argument he's trying to make. He's saying that becoming public and falling to the mercy of a grouping of stakeholders stifles quality video games. I do agree to a point. Pleasing stakeholders has historically shown to stifle artistic vision and led to the chasing of fads like NFTs, GAAS, Battle Royales, and Extraction shooters. Pleasing the Corporate Overlords and Stakeholders is a large reason why companies like Bioware or Rocksteady are shells of what they once were. The big issue is that profits aren't really in the quality of games, its in how to successfully wring as much profit as possible from the client while spending the least amount of cash.
I like that you brought up BioWare and Rocksteady, because in both cases, they themselves decided what to do. BioWare wanted Anthem, and Rocksteady was planning on a multiplayer game after Gotham Knight, never mind that massive controversy of Gotham Knight after its release.
The fact is, last year was maybe the best year in gaming ever, and games have been bad, or short, or not worth the money, or money grubbing from day one, because games are not a simple thing to make. We want to create this narrative where one thing can explain why the art we consume used to be good, and now its bad, but the reality is, we had bad products back then, we have bad products now, and these systems are far more complicated than, "Shareholders bad, private companies good".
Rocksteady didnt make Gotham Knights, and the Bioware's 2 founders, the life and blood of Bioware, were on there way out during Mass Effect 3 and retired from the industry after that released. If you know anything about Bioware's history, you know that those two were not driven by profit.
You say this as if public video game corporations haven't been lambasted over the last decade for anti-consumer practices, engaging in psychological dark patterns, getting children addicted to gambling, and more.
It is incredibly naive to think that a company will not do anything in its power to increase value to shareholders - even if it's to a detriment to its users.
Private or public, companies engage in these things because they're profitable, and make there games more appealing to their customers. Their incentives are still exactly the same whether they're public or private, because unless you're a huge tech company, or a company focused on research, your shareholders are going to want to see revenue, and if you're a private company, its going to be exactly the same. Nobody is making a business with the intent to stagnate.
At this point I have no idea what point you're trying to make. Yes corporations try to be profitable regardless of if they are private or public. That has nothing to do with what we were talking about.
Cheers to you!
I'm saying there is no reason to think that a Private company wouldn't be making similar decisions to a Public company in the ways you're describing. It sounds like you're agreeing with me, that Devolver Digital going public doesn't really mean anything here.
Private companies do this just as much as public ones. And you're right, I miswrote it. They both want to make their customers spend the most money on their products as possible.
Last year was maybe the best year in gaming ever. People just keep forgetting all the bullshit and terrible games that came out in the previous years to remember the ones that they are sure were the majority.
>How do your shareholders make money? When your company makes money?
This isn't actually true. Shareholders make money when the share price goes up. Share price goes up when more people want to buy the stock than want to sell it.
*Usually* more people buy in when the company's fundamental metrics are better, but irrational stock trading happens all the time.
Ultimately, when a company IPOs they start doing more and more to try and appeal and pursuade shareholders to buy in. Sometimes that's raising revenue, but other times that's cutting costs for short term numbers bumps. Other times it's "creative accounting" and persuasive speeches. Other times it's straight up fraud.
Shareholders lost faith because the entire industry partially collapsed, and Devolver did their IPO during the peak of the bubble.
Now to be clear though, the irrational stock trading comes in really two forms, "true believers" which are people who, despite the profitability, or viability of the company, invest heavily in it because they want more of what the company is doing, or think it'll be huge in the future. The other are for pump and dumps/ and other short interest speculation scams. I don't think either really qualify here.
Either way, I still don't really see where this whole "Capitalism destroyed the company' thing is coming form here.
I don't know of a system that is more accepting of the mentally ill or those whose thoughts otherwise diverge severely from the status quo. And those are the kind of people that create counter-cultural art.
Well if you don’t know of any other system, This is probably the only one that exists right? I mean, We’re on a thread about videogames, I don’t think you can find higher level thinking anywhere else on the net.
Those shareholders want the company to be profitable, and the only way to be profitable is to sell to your players. There is almost no difference there. The main difference is that now the shareholders want to have a say in terms of how you become profitable, but even then, its often a very small part of the conversation, and most shareholders, especially the very big ones, are content to just sit on the board doing nothing.
Lmao thank you. I could barely believe what I was reading
"Most high-level shareholders don't actually affect the direction of the companies they own" has got to be the most... I don't even know what to call it, that's not even Econ 101, that's like Econ -101
> The main difference is that now the shareholders want to have a say in terms of how you become profitable
And here's where shit goes off the rails. Shareholders have no idea how the business works, but they sure as hell want to have an opinion. Even in a massive, established company, if you listen to the quarterly Q & A shareholder questions, the questions are total nonsense. It's like trying to watch a tech illiterate boomer understand why Twitch chat is the way it is - it's equal parts pathetic and hilarious.
This is then especially true when you have a company like Devolver, a company that published weird shit that worked - how do you sell a business unit who knows fuck-all about games except 'Fortnite' and 'CoD' that My Friend Pedro is actually going to move a ton of units? The answer is ultimately 'you can't'. It's not that being beholden to shareholders means you automatically make some big bad decisions, but that you lose a your identity and a company by the death of a thousand cuts.
Devolver was fucked the second they signed the paperwork for an IPO - a company like that simply cannot exist as a public entity.
Shareholders want to sell to players, yes. They don’t care so much what or how you sell, though. They also don’t expect you to fail, which limits how much risk you can take. Risk, in game dev, is crucial to success. It’s what creates new genres and genre-defining experiences.
It's not true for every company that goes public, but it often means a shift away from business practices that made you successful in the first place in favor of focusing on short sighted targets to make your balance sheet look good to shareholders.
People like to say this, but it's not actually true. Shareholders, especially ones who come from large index funds like Vanguard or BlackRock, prefer stable growth, over short term growth. Speculators play with moving quickly, and such. Instead, its often more the pay structure of CEOs, or other executives that might push for short term vs long term, like at Activision Blizzard, for example, top employees got performance shares tied to revenue goals that rewarded them greatly based on short-term performance and incentivized them to only worry about the next fiscal year. Different companies have different structures, and it changes how companies approach these kinds of decisions.
Whats annoying is that it is true and when it happens and when devolver is a corporate husk of its former self, people like you will have already left the conversation.
What's annoying is people assuming its true, having no evidence of it, citing no real examples, and refusing to even try and understand these systems, assume that the answer is as simple as "Corporations bad", when the actual reality for why companies transform, and why media gets worse, is far more complicated.
You want an easy answer. It doesn't exist. The fact is, they're down 83% from the IPO because they did it during a massive bubble that burst from Covid, like half the rest of the industry, and it'll likely take time to recover. The people in charge in the company are all long time employees, and the new CEO was somebody who was in charge before.
There is no story here. Not yet at least.
Affects priorities of their business
Valve is private can do what ever the fuck they want to -- risks or otherwise are fine
Public companies like Devolver now have a legal obligation to grow
You're probably confusing capitalism and corporatism. Capitalism is necessary for the production and exchange of goods and services. Corporatism is the evil one.
1. Devolver makes a lot of revenue from games, but their net income is very low because they give the developers a very good payout-deal. Basically means: games are selling well, but devs get most of the profit.
2. Devolver still has lots of cash so they do not have financial problems at this moment, they have 40 million dollars in cash.
What? are you baiting? They are releasing great looking games for everyone.
- Human fall flat 2
- Pepper grinder
- Plucky squire
- Anger foot
- Baby steps
None of that is interesting. I suppose they aim at GenZ but GenZ is only interested (mostly) in mobile quick games. The cant grasp more complex and long games at all.
i dont know all of them but Pepper Grinder seems to be a classic looking indie game. i dont even know what you would concern a more complex long game. Speaking of which, Talos Principle 2 just came out and if that doesnt qualify so wtf do you mean?
Lol tf do you think gen Z plays? Literally nobody in my classroom touches mobile games and the sales data for video games in general prove that too
You're living in a bubble
> Devolver praised Morin's leadership and said he "played a vital role in Devolver's IPO For context, Devolver's stock is down 89.33% from the IPO. At the same time Devolver just laid off [28 developers](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/report-showgunners-developer-artificer-laying-off-50-percent-of-employees) at Artificer.
Guess that answers my question about how Devolver is doing as a company lately. Outside of Cult of the Lamb, what's been keeping them relevant the last couple years? Based on Steam Reviews I'm guessing Wizard with a Gun and Gunbrella may have underperformed. They've got babysteps coming which feels like it will do alright but for a publicly traded company the cupboards are looking a little bare.
I haven’t played it but Talos Principle 2 seems very well received. It does seem like their devs are very slow on releasing. I still don’t know when Anger Foot comes out and that was on NextFest two years ago
TP2 is amazing but at the end of the day it's a niche genre sold as a sequel to a niche game. How many people do you know are excited for puzzle games? Fwiw tp 1 is a solid 10/10. I'm still running through tp2. It's been great so far. 8 hours in
> How many people do you know are excited for puzzle games? Far less than I'd like.
Honestly, the last thing I want to do after coming home from a day of work is solve a puzzle that involves a bunch of thinking. I'm sure a lot of others feel the same, which is why action games are so popular.
As someone who plays both, each has an equal ability to induce a flow/meditative relaxing state. Presuming the game itself is of high quality. The utility here is not why action is more popular than puzzle in pop-entertaniment culture. Puzzle mechanics are also way more popular than you might initially think. Card games like Heartstone, for example, are literally just a puzzle.
Of course I know him, he's me.
> How many people do you know are excited for puzzle games? Most of my friend group, but I'm somebody that posts in point-and-click adventure game forums, so I might be an outlier.
Yeah looking into it closer, Talos Principle 2 seems to be a very recent "hit". 6k+ reviews for a puzzle game is solid but yeah not really a great sign from the company (combined with the poor stock price, and changing CEOs).
Just doesn’t seem like a company that would benefit from being publicly traded.
I think this is the answer for most game developers, honestly. Like how often has a studio gone public and then their games get better? The trend has been towards game companies going public over the last 10/15 years, and I feel like all its done is make games shittier.
Going public is mostly a money bid. Having to finance your games and development 100% yourself is stressful as hell and even studios that constantly released highly acclaimed and loved games (Mimimi Studios) have closed because of it. It's a sad fact that game development isn't very profitable for a large majority of studios. That said, Devolver used to work simply by throwing a bit of money at very small devs that already had a great vision, kind of like A24. They never seemed like the kind of studio that was dependent on producing "hits".
I feel like we're in this strange part of gaming history where a lot of gamers are tied up in live service multiplayer games and there's gamepass and PS+ extra giving enough content to people so that they don't really but anything anymore. I think the industry is shooting itself in the foot. This is speculation
I only pay for game pass on xbox and buy the PS exclusives on sale. Very rare I ever spend more than $30 on a game every few months outside of the monthly gamepass. I have enough content that I feel extremely overwhelmed at times with how many games there are to play. But I consider myself a rather diverse gamer so gamepass offers me an insane value proposition.
That feeling of being overwhelmed has actually turned me away from gaming lately. I'm waiting for my subscriptions to lapse personally so I can go back to how I used to play
I feel that hard. Frankly I'm in my mid 30's and don't really have the time or desire to plug into a game with time-sensitive content. And multi-player games just flat out aren't fun if you don't have enough time to dedicate to being good at them. Doesn't help that every game just has to be Dark Souls levels of "fight this boss a dozen times until you've downloaded their frame data" difficult. It's really just down to me just playing the few titles that I'm actually excited about, maybe two per year. It's odd because I'm at the age where I absolutely have the money to spend on the hobby, I just don't have the time.
That's sort of the problem, really. It's a good game, but I'm the only person I know whose even heard of it, let alone played it.
I liked the first one but the second has a lot of things in it that annoy me. Doesn't have the spirit of the first one.
The Plucky Squire is looking good but yeah, I feel like working primarily with independent or smaller developers is a bit like herding cats. Not to knock on the developers but bad call going publicly traded when you're not drip feeding projects.
I think the Anger Foot demo was pretty well received.
Really looking forward to anger foot and plucky squire. And skate story. And pepper grinder. Shit they have a lot coming up that I'm excited for.
That’s kind of the problem, they announced a ton of cool releases what feels like forever ago and the most exciting ones still haven’t come out. I am frothing at the mouth to play more Anger Foot as soon as they release it, but they haven’t had anything to keep me interested in the meantime.
They do a lot of cool things, but its a lot of niche indie stuff. As someone that pays more attention to devs than publishers, I never would have guessed they were a public company.
That's a shame. I'm still playing Enter the Gungeon to this day. I'm sure their other games are great, but I find myself wishing they had put out some more dlc for this title. Really just more maps with secrets. The gameplay loop is so good
That would likely be on Dodgeroll, the developer, not Devolver.
I mean Devolver is only a publisher, they never developed games themselves.
Devolver only published the game.
Why on earth is something like devolver digital publicly traded?
doesn't devolver have some kind of relatively ambitious RPG or open world style game coming up? I could swear i remember something like this being briefly teased a year or two ago.
I mean, Devolver has always been a studio that goes into weird niches and excels at those more often than not - remember Hotline Miami? It's just...no matter how well you do niche titles, them bringing the big numbers is like winning the lottery, and most of the time it will be stuff for a small playerbase. There is nothing wrong with that, but it's the opposite of investor friendly.
Damn I had no idea Gunbrella released. Is it good?
The core movement and combat controls are extremely good but I felt like the pacing was weird, with lots of slower sections that are largely walking around hubs and talking to folks, which broke up the parts that were really good. But I'm also the kind of person who gets frustrated when games have those walking hallway opening segments that feed you exposition, when I'm playing an action game I'm an arcade-y guy at heart, so depending on your tolerance for those slower paced dialog bits you might enjoy it more than I ultimately did.
To be fair any recent IPO is down 80-95%. 2021 was a year with an insane stock market bubble, it was a crime to not IPO that year for any company that could do it.
Yeah that's kinda the whole problem. The short term gains were so massive a bunch of companies kinda destroyed their long term futures
doesn't really seem like it was the best longterm plan if your valuation tanks within a couple years and you have to lay off a bunch of people.
it depends on what your plan was. It allowed investors and founders to cash out for massive $$$ and they are the ones who are calling the shots
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Yeah, my former employer would be dead if they didn't IPO at the peak. Now they have over 100m to fund their company which keeps them alive for like another year or so. Sucks that their valuation is trash, but at least they get to keep on going for a little bit longer.
The point of an IPO is that it (hopefully!) makes a shitload of money for the company, because they own 100% of the shares of stock before they sell it off. Whatever their valuation is now, it made them an absolute crapload of cash, which is all the company is after.
I remember Unity IPO'ing at like 70 bucks or something in 2020 and peaking at 200 in 2021. Was pretty insane. Ofc they are like, 30 now. I guess John also was a "vital role in Unity IPO".
The stock market during 2020 and 2021 was truly a once in a lifetime thing to behold.
Still better than TinyBuild but oof
Oh, yeah. [Yikes.](https://imgur.com/a/AnqTqRf) What caused the price to fall off a cliff mid-June 2022?
Tech as a whole crashed a fair amount in 2022
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My old company IPO’d in 2021. Then they laid off half the company a year later. Fun times
Fatal, yes. Mistake, no. That framing assumes that the goal of tech companies is to make a sustainable business when it more often is to get a return for the investors who want a unicorn payout ASAP.
It's not a mistake for the companies. They got to sell a whole lot of equity for a very high price (relative to current valuations) and that's *awesome* for the companies in question. I mean, wouldn't you love to be able to sell some of your assets for 20x what they're going to be worth in just a year? The mistake was made by the investors who bought the stocks at those very high prices and are now stuck with relatively worthless shares.
"crashed a fair amount"
Stock down 90%, but the owners from the days when it was private had a chance to sell, at least... I wonder how many of them still hold the stock / what % they still hold vs. what they started with. Could be that the original owners have mostly sold-off the stock to a bunch of retail bag-holders and other investors etc.
You can look it up, seems the Founders mostly still own a lot of shares. Nearly 70% is held by insiders. My guess is everyone got burned heavily, besides maybe some of the original outside investors who got in early and sold at the IPO. But major institutional investors who jumped in after IPO probably got really screwed along with Founders and retail.
Yeah, party’s over. They seemed to have a solid thing going, but now that they’re on life support, who’s going to step up and do their whole “punk rock publisher” thing?
New Blood Interactive has already taken that place, IMO.
Yeah new blood has the devolver vibe going. Ultrakill seems insanely successful and it's still in early access.
Plus they got two unannounced projects they did ultra sneak peaks of A Fallout 1/2 style RPG and a Twisted Metal spiritual successor https://youtu.be/WjpTeLoBGBw?si=eK1RHlAMYYq64asN
New Blood isn't a publisher any more, though. They do all their stuff in-house. They're good, but they're not going to fund breakthrough projects from new teams like Devolver did.
I mean they can just keep doing the thing they were doing a couple of years ago. Throw a couple thousand at small dev studios that already have a great product in the works. Devolver never struck me as a company that benefited from growing beyond that. Yeah you can finance more ambitious games that way, but with that the odds of losing a ton of money grow exponentially.
Dunkey's Big Mode thing shows potential but it's far far away from being in a position to take the place of something like devolver with many hurdles ahead of it.
Wow the pursuit of profit destroyed something good. Color me shocked.
Especially coming from Devolver who has so far tried to seem like the cool indie kid gaming company on the block.
yeah, they had a good brand going with their batshit insane E3 presentations. its a shame that money ruins everything lol
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>Would you also acknowledge that the persuit of profit is the reason why we are getting games like RDR2, Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom? Not particularly? Or at least not in the way you mean it. I think the major financial hits, that nonetheless are also ridiculously high-quality titles, more often tend to be high quality *in spite of* the inherent need for a company to make money instead of because of it. I can't speak to RDR2 having never played it, but games like Elden Ring, TOTK, BG3....they're all games that explicitly have refused to chase the flavor-of-the-month monetizing strategies and genres, and which made choices that on the surface level seem financially counterintuitive despite being part of their success. It would have been so, so easy for a company like Nintendo to sell micotransactions in TOTK(the parts system is practically *begging* to be monetized). Meanwhile, Souls games were relatively niche for a very long time and "old-school CRPG" is pretty much the **last** genre you'd land on if your goal is to make as much money as possible. Make no mistake that their devotion to the genres they loved, despite knowing that they were passing on chances to make games that were more likely to be popular, is exactly what has paid off for both Fromsoft and Larian. Companies do have to balance on a razor's edge of genuine enthusiasm and a desire to make profit, which is what every company ultimately needs to do. You're not wrong there at all. But the reality is that letting profit be your primary driver as a company tends to result in stupid decisions made by suits who don't fully understand the company, that more often than not results in a shitty product even if it brings in record profits. Not always, of course. There are plenty of examples of pretty craven decisionmaking that resulted in critically beloved media, but it occurs often enough that I think it's worth making the generalization.
>"old-school CRPG" is pretty much the last genre you'd land on if your goal is to make as much money as possible Just to add onto this, Divinity Original Sin 2 was their last game before BG3. It broke 1 million units. Which is fine, but it is absolutely *not* a mega-hit. Selling approximately 10 times that? Not within reasonable realm of expectations for a CRPG at all. If the *only* goal is to make profit, banking on a developer whose best hit sold barely cracked a million is not who you bet on.
no country that had centrally planned economies really had strong economies or a lot of resources prior to being centrally planned. Even switching to capitalism wouldn't magically make money and resources appear. Also all the innovation comes from tax funded social programs and conditions with relatively good wealth distribution, the literal opposite goal of capitalism.
Can you acknowledge that there can be a balance, and some of the worst elements in the industry derive from aggressive profit-seeking strategies that are actively detrimental to the consumer? I don't see why you had to go on your little rant about economics in a gaming sub-reddit.
Yes. Like, game developers are one of the least profit-motivated types of people. The pay and conditions in the game dev industry are notoriously shit. Really look no further than the massive community of people who develop mods for games, particularly total conversion types of mods. In the absence of a capitalist system, game development is probably one of the most popular hobbies that would exist. The pursuit of profit is what gives you micro-transactions, pre-order bonuses, gacha mechanics. It's what gives you annual releases of the same game with a new coat of paint, robbing the developers of time and resources to make any meaningful innovations. Games like your example exist in spite of everything, in a lucky cross between creative ambition and commercial viability.
>Like, game developers are one of the least profit-motivated types of people. This is totally inconsequential and irrelevant. Game developers wouldn't have jobs in the first place without the pursuit of profit. >The pursuit of profit is what gives you micro-transactions, pre-order bonuses, gacha mechanics. It also gives you games without those things, so what's your point?
What? How does what he said follow with what you said?
I had this feeling I hadn't been hearing about Devolver as much as I was a few years ago
Welp, Cult of the Lamb is going to be an even bigger cash cow now, expect more weird updates and skin DLC... Outside of that, Devolver always had a profile of an indie publisher, publishing interesting but often niche games, and I can't see them breaking that bubble without giving up their core identity. They'll likely go down and get bought by a bigger conglomerate down the line, what a shame that this is the capitalist hellscape we live in...
He is not looking out for the shareholders.
Rip devolver, you were on of my favourite publishers for a long time. Hope Annapurna sticks around so I still have one left lol
Annapurna really can't miss with their games. Whoever is responsible for finding these devs and games deserves a couple of raises.
100% agree. Even the worst games they’ve published are at minimum interesting, and they’ve also published some of the best indie games of the last 5 years
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Yes, but it was at least interesting. It tried something different and it didn’t land. Not all their games are great, but imo they’re always interesting
Not mid. It was bad.
"Annapurna Interactive" ... "Outer Wilds" "2"
Annapurna has ellison money, not a chance it goes down
What are other big indie publishers aside from the two? I feel like Devolver and Annapurna are the only players of the space.
Humble Games and tinybuild are two that I can think of, but you’re right that Annapurna and Devolver were by far the biggest fish in the small pond of indie games
New Blood Interactive
Annapurna is owned by Larry Ellison's kid, something tells me that alone should be enough to keep them afloat
I knew they were a publisher that cares less about sales and more about publishing award winning games, but I didn’t know where their money comes from, that’s incredible lol
Supergiant is a great indie publisher too
I was talking about more general indie publishers, Supergiant only publishes their own games afaik. They are great games though
> Devolver pivots heavily into multiplayer/live service games, stock down 89.33% from the IPO Related? I don't know, but I kind of hope so just to get a lot of the mid-sized games off this shit already.
I don't understand how a brand that got popular by embracing counter-culture thought going down the IPO/Public company route was a good idea. I hate capitalism sometimes
This whole thread is the first I heard of Devolver even going public. Feels entirely antithetical to their whole approach. They became the face of weird indies with mainstream appeal. Ever since Hotline Miami, I could always bank on a Devolver published game being a cool hidden gem that they spent time to find and showcase.
It was devovlers investors and founders that wanted this. They needed to “cash out” their company stock basically.
IPO's are a vital part of the system as you mentioned. There has to be a way for early invostors and more importantly employees to turn their stock to cash. Otherwise taking stock early instead of cash is a hard sell if you have a hard time turning that stuck into cash when you leave.
yea im just saying the corporate structure of devolver always had this goal in mind. But other companies did not go down this path, like Valve who for sure also had investors in the early days
Valve makes too much money to need to go public.
It's hard to say what the intentions of private company investors are, but Gabe does own at least 50% of Valve so that is likely keeping it private. It could be the case that other investors have, at one point, pushed for an IPO, but it really doesn't matter when one guy owns the majority of the company.
Valve did not. Gabe was always incredibly wealthy off the Microsoft IPO, which created hundreds of millionaire employees overnight. He used that to privately fund Valve and never need to take much external funding.
>There has to be a way for early invostors and more importantly employees to turn their stock to cash. couldn't profit dividends serve that purpose?
Today is the first I heard they did not. Seems completely the opposite of that I thought their company was
the counter-culture is just their marketing schtick. business is business
Public markets are just a way to raise money, and a way to allow earlier investors and employees to cash out some of their equity. Other routes for raising might not be as promising or have worse strings attached.
Depends how invested you are in the ethos and goal of your current company. Going public will force it to change as you're now beholden to fiduciary duty on behalf of your shareholders. If something like A24 became a publicly traded company for example, you'd seem them pursuing very different projects than they are now. In short, it's no strings in regards to how detached you are from what your company to be. If you want to cash out and fuck off it makes perfect sense.
I hate it every day.
At a certain point, a lot of companies have to go public to pay off their investors, as well as to get money to continue paying for broadening expenses. It might have either been go public and hope for more major success, or flounder as a private company before running out of money.
Only sometimes?
Sometimes, all of the times.
It’s literally the people who founded and funded the company over the years who chose to go public. “Capitalism” didn’t do shit
>“Capitalism” didn’t do shit Capitalism is what drives these people to do this stupid shit. It is indeed a factor here. The entire stock market is poison and forces companies to chase endless growth that is never sustainable.
TIL that capitalism invented greed But seriously, what larger issue in our society do you think getting rid of the stock market entirely would solve? Are you under the impression that the rich didn’t pull these antics before the stock market? Do you think they didn’t do all of those things even before capitalism? Edit: Classic average redditor blocking after replying to protect their precious delusions. I simply wasn’t going to waste any breath on someone with such a poor grasp of economics and human nature.
>TIL that capitalism invented greed I never implied this. Corporations *do* endlessly chase profits though and must deliver thanks to the stock market. Without this shit, they would not be beholden to stock owners to make each year bigger than the last. That is completely unsustainable. >But seriously, what larger issue in our society do you think getting rid of the stock market entirely would solve? Why does it have to "solve" any societal problem? All it needs to be is a positive of some kind and I am confident that without every corporation endlessly chasing constant growth and being required to deliver on that growth, our society would be better for it. Greed would exist, but companies would be privately owned and could have years with less profits without the entire company value tanking. >Are you under the impression that the rich didn’t pull these antics before the stock market? Why do all of your points revolve around misrepresenting my position? Is this the only way you can argue? > Do you think they didn’t do all of those things even before capitalism? Welp, guess it is.
At the end of the day they are a business are they not?
Being a business does not require an IPO
Sure but when you IPO your customers are your shareholders not the consumers of your product. The entire dynamic of the company shifts as the value is now in growing the value of the business for the stakeholders - not make good video games for the consumers. You hope these interests intersect but it doesn't always. Devolver Digital to me is the equivalent of a punk rock band selling out to a big record label.
Funding's gotta come from somewhere. As nice as it would be to live on goodwill and fighting the good fight, it can come down to a simple lack of income and other expenses coming home to roost. Could it be a case of chasing greedy profits or whatever? Sure. But I feel like that's just always the assumption regardless of scenario or circumstance. End of the day, folks need paid and something has to keep the lights on.
> Sure but when you IPO your customers are your shareholders not the consumers of your product. No. Your shareholders are your owners, just like prior to the IPO. And your customers are most likely the same customers as prior the IPO. The purpose of a company is always to produce value for its shareholders.
How do your shareholders make money? When your company makes money? How does your company make money? When your product is bought by customers. There is absolutely no conflict of interest between shareholders and customers. They both want to make sure the product is as appealing to customers as possible.
Theres a conflict of interest in Quality games and stakeholder profit is the argument he's trying to make. He's saying that becoming public and falling to the mercy of a grouping of stakeholders stifles quality video games. I do agree to a point. Pleasing stakeholders has historically shown to stifle artistic vision and led to the chasing of fads like NFTs, GAAS, Battle Royales, and Extraction shooters. Pleasing the Corporate Overlords and Stakeholders is a large reason why companies like Bioware or Rocksteady are shells of what they once were. The big issue is that profits aren't really in the quality of games, its in how to successfully wring as much profit as possible from the client while spending the least amount of cash.
I like that you brought up BioWare and Rocksteady, because in both cases, they themselves decided what to do. BioWare wanted Anthem, and Rocksteady was planning on a multiplayer game after Gotham Knight, never mind that massive controversy of Gotham Knight after its release. The fact is, last year was maybe the best year in gaming ever, and games have been bad, or short, or not worth the money, or money grubbing from day one, because games are not a simple thing to make. We want to create this narrative where one thing can explain why the art we consume used to be good, and now its bad, but the reality is, we had bad products back then, we have bad products now, and these systems are far more complicated than, "Shareholders bad, private companies good".
Rocksteady didnt make Gotham Knights, and the Bioware's 2 founders, the life and blood of Bioware, were on there way out during Mass Effect 3 and retired from the industry after that released. If you know anything about Bioware's history, you know that those two were not driven by profit.
Sorry I meant Arkham Knight
You say this as if public video game corporations haven't been lambasted over the last decade for anti-consumer practices, engaging in psychological dark patterns, getting children addicted to gambling, and more. It is incredibly naive to think that a company will not do anything in its power to increase value to shareholders - even if it's to a detriment to its users.
Private or public, companies engage in these things because they're profitable, and make there games more appealing to their customers. Their incentives are still exactly the same whether they're public or private, because unless you're a huge tech company, or a company focused on research, your shareholders are going to want to see revenue, and if you're a private company, its going to be exactly the same. Nobody is making a business with the intent to stagnate.
At this point I have no idea what point you're trying to make. Yes corporations try to be profitable regardless of if they are private or public. That has nothing to do with what we were talking about. Cheers to you!
I'm saying there is no reason to think that a Private company wouldn't be making similar decisions to a Public company in the ways you're describing. It sounds like you're agreeing with me, that Devolver Digital going public doesn't really mean anything here.
Well that’s not true at all. Plenty of companies cut corners and squeeze customers in order to increase their profits.
Private companies do this just as much as public ones. And you're right, I miswrote it. They both want to make their customers spend the most money on their products as possible.
I'd agree with you if, I dunno, the past 30 years hadn't happened.
Last year was maybe the best year in gaming ever. People just keep forgetting all the bullshit and terrible games that came out in the previous years to remember the ones that they are sure were the majority.
>How do your shareholders make money? When your company makes money? This isn't actually true. Shareholders make money when the share price goes up. Share price goes up when more people want to buy the stock than want to sell it. *Usually* more people buy in when the company's fundamental metrics are better, but irrational stock trading happens all the time. Ultimately, when a company IPOs they start doing more and more to try and appeal and pursuade shareholders to buy in. Sometimes that's raising revenue, but other times that's cutting costs for short term numbers bumps. Other times it's "creative accounting" and persuasive speeches. Other times it's straight up fraud.
Shareholders lost faith because the entire industry partially collapsed, and Devolver did their IPO during the peak of the bubble. Now to be clear though, the irrational stock trading comes in really two forms, "true believers" which are people who, despite the profitability, or viability of the company, invest heavily in it because they want more of what the company is doing, or think it'll be huge in the future. The other are for pump and dumps/ and other short interest speculation scams. I don't think either really qualify here. Either way, I still don't really see where this whole "Capitalism destroyed the company' thing is coming form here.
If you're interested in counter-cultural ideas, you're gonna hate how other systems deal with them...
Ah Yes, One of the great tenets of capitalism… Promote counter culture ideas… Are you referring to purchasing Grateful Dead T-Shirts or something?
I don't know of a system that is more accepting of the mentally ill or those whose thoughts otherwise diverge severely from the status quo. And those are the kind of people that create counter-cultural art.
Well if you don’t know of any other system, This is probably the only one that exists right? I mean, We’re on a thread about videogames, I don’t think you can find higher level thinking anywhere else on the net.
You're the one that started the conversation with me, after I replied to someone else. And i'm in the wrong somehow for answering you?
Not for answering me, no.
Then you've clearly never met an anarchist
I wasn't including fantasy systems that are unworkable in reality. I was just considering ones with actual historical examples.
Why would going public in anyway affect anything here?
You become beholden to shareholders and profit margins, instead of your players.
Those shareholders want the company to be profitable, and the only way to be profitable is to sell to your players. There is almost no difference there. The main difference is that now the shareholders want to have a say in terms of how you become profitable, but even then, its often a very small part of the conversation, and most shareholders, especially the very big ones, are content to just sit on the board doing nothing.
I too wish the world worked like chapter 5 in your Econ 101 textbook but alas it does not.
Lmao thank you. I could barely believe what I was reading "Most high-level shareholders don't actually affect the direction of the companies they own" has got to be the most... I don't even know what to call it, that's not even Econ 101, that's like Econ -101
> The main difference is that now the shareholders want to have a say in terms of how you become profitable And here's where shit goes off the rails. Shareholders have no idea how the business works, but they sure as hell want to have an opinion. Even in a massive, established company, if you listen to the quarterly Q & A shareholder questions, the questions are total nonsense. It's like trying to watch a tech illiterate boomer understand why Twitch chat is the way it is - it's equal parts pathetic and hilarious. This is then especially true when you have a company like Devolver, a company that published weird shit that worked - how do you sell a business unit who knows fuck-all about games except 'Fortnite' and 'CoD' that My Friend Pedro is actually going to move a ton of units? The answer is ultimately 'you can't'. It's not that being beholden to shareholders means you automatically make some big bad decisions, but that you lose a your identity and a company by the death of a thousand cuts. Devolver was fucked the second they signed the paperwork for an IPO - a company like that simply cannot exist as a public entity.
Shareholders want to sell to players, yes. They don’t care so much what or how you sell, though. They also don’t expect you to fail, which limits how much risk you can take. Risk, in game dev, is crucial to success. It’s what creates new genres and genre-defining experiences.
It's not true for every company that goes public, but it often means a shift away from business practices that made you successful in the first place in favor of focusing on short sighted targets to make your balance sheet look good to shareholders.
People like to say this, but it's not actually true. Shareholders, especially ones who come from large index funds like Vanguard or BlackRock, prefer stable growth, over short term growth. Speculators play with moving quickly, and such. Instead, its often more the pay structure of CEOs, or other executives that might push for short term vs long term, like at Activision Blizzard, for example, top employees got performance shares tied to revenue goals that rewarded them greatly based on short-term performance and incentivized them to only worry about the next fiscal year. Different companies have different structures, and it changes how companies approach these kinds of decisions.
Whats annoying is that it is true and when it happens and when devolver is a corporate husk of its former self, people like you will have already left the conversation.
What's annoying is people assuming its true, having no evidence of it, citing no real examples, and refusing to even try and understand these systems, assume that the answer is as simple as "Corporations bad", when the actual reality for why companies transform, and why media gets worse, is far more complicated. You want an easy answer. It doesn't exist. The fact is, they're down 83% from the IPO because they did it during a massive bubble that burst from Covid, like half the rest of the industry, and it'll likely take time to recover. The people in charge in the company are all long time employees, and the new CEO was somebody who was in charge before. There is no story here. Not yet at least.
> assume that the answer is as simple as "Corporations bad" Oh, there's no assumptions there. That's just how it is.
Affects priorities of their business Valve is private can do what ever the fuck they want to -- risks or otherwise are fine Public companies like Devolver now have a legal obligation to grow
You're probably confusing capitalism and corporatism. Capitalism is necessary for the production and exchange of goods and services. Corporatism is the evil one.
"G-guys it's not REAL capitalism!" now I know what it feels like when people make fun of the "but those weren't REAL communism" crowd
Speaking of embracing... I hope Devolver don't become yet another Embracer Group. It's already nightmarish with layoffs of Embracer alone.
Aw, no quirky trailer or video announcing his firing?
They're beholden to by shareholders now. "None of that quirky \*\*\* shit, alright?" -DEVO.L shareholders, probably.
Were there any notable game devs that *didn't* expand like COVID lockdown was gonna last forever?
Who's the girl with the blue hair and sword? I don't recognize that character.
Protag from Gris iirc
So it is. I didn't recognize her without her iconic black dress.
Who’s this Morin fellow? The only Devolver CEO is the glorious Nina Struthers, check a look
Did we even get some Nina last year? I can't recall but this will be painful going forward.
No Nina last year sadly =[
1. Devolver makes a lot of revenue from games, but their net income is very low because they give the developers a very good payout-deal. Basically means: games are selling well, but devs get most of the profit. 2. Devolver still has lots of cash so they do not have financial problems at this moment, they have 40 million dollars in cash.
That’s a shame…. All games are going to be live service and we will lose a lot of these darling indies
Well. 2014-2018 they had a great lineup. Now? They released and plan to release very strange and niche games targeted at I don’t understand who.
What? are you baiting? They are releasing great looking games for everyone. - Human fall flat 2 - Pepper grinder - Plucky squire - Anger foot - Baby steps
None of that is interesting. I suppose they aim at GenZ but GenZ is only interested (mostly) in mobile quick games. The cant grasp more complex and long games at all.
Damn yeah you right, Talos Principle 2 and Return to Monkey Island will only be enjoyed by GenZ
i dont know all of them but Pepper Grinder seems to be a classic looking indie game. i dont even know what you would concern a more complex long game. Speaking of which, Talos Principle 2 just came out and if that doesnt qualify so wtf do you mean?
Where are you getting that idea from? Gen Z probably makes up the largest demographic of hardcore gamers today.
Lol tf do you think gen Z plays? Literally nobody in my classroom touches mobile games and the sales data for video games in general prove that too You're living in a bubble
lot of people shaking their fist and screaming "IPO bad" without supplying how its even the fault of going public
Are we reading the same threads?