News from the lovely world of the Games Industry.

[garbon]

You can't patent or copyright a concept for a game that has companion animals that you train and fight, Pokemon style.  As long as they aren't using actual Pokemon creatures, I don't see the case here. 

Multiple game sites reach out to lawyers to get their perspectives.

The two places I saw where they said there might be a claim was:
1) It has been suggested that the proportions for many of their creatures match exactly to pokemon creatures and that it would be impossible for that to be the case unless they had directly copied the Nintendo models
2) Reputational harm to Pokemon via the gun angle making people associate that with Pokemon

Here's one link that looked at both of those.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/does-palworld-break-pokemons-copyright-we-asked-a-lawyer

[garbon]

What Nintendo did go after (and got modder scared) was modder who put out video saying they had created mod with Pokemon creatures replacing Palworld critters in game.

[The Minsky Moment]

1) It has been suggested that the proportions for many of their creatures match exactly to pokemon creatures and that it would be impossible for that to be the case unless they had directly copied the Nintendo models

Maybe . . . there was a similar case involving one of the Street Fighter games, where some of the models were copied and the developer docs referenced the SF models, and the claim still wasn't sustained.

The key concept in these cases is the idea/expression dichotomy; you can copy the idea but not a particular expression  of it.  Looking at the games as a whole from the preview images and video I've seen for palworld, the expression as a whole looks different.

I'm not sure what to make of the claim "the proportions for many of their creatures match exactly to pokemon creatures and that it would be impossible for that to be the case unless they had directly copied the Nintendo models".  Admittedly I know nothing about computer graphic design but it's hard to see why copying proportions would be that hard. And I don't think copying proportions alone would be enough in any case if the creatures have other significant difference.  You can't copyright a body proportion of a fictional animal, just the expression of the particular fictional animal as a whole.

[garbon]

1) It has been suggested that the proportions for many of their creatures match exactly to pokemon creatures and that it would be impossible for that to be the case unless they had directly copied the Nintendo models

Maybe . . . there was a similar case involving one of the Street Fighter games, where some of the models were copied and the developer docs referenced the SF models, and the claim still wasn't sustained.

The key concept in these cases is the idea/expression dichotomy; you can copy the idea but not a particular expression  of it.  Looking at the games as a whole from the preview images and video I've seen for palworld, the expression as a whole looks different.

I'm not sure what to make of the claim "the proportions for many of their creatures match exactly to pokemon creatures and that it would be impossible for that to be the case unless they had directly copied the Nintendo models".  Admittedly I know nothing about computer graphic design but it's hard to see why copying proportions would be that hard. And I don't think copying proportions alone would be enough in any case if the creatures have other significant difference.  You can't copyright a body proportion of a fictional animal, just the expression of the particular fictional animal as a whole.

They cited those graphic designers in there. I guess idea is less about the proportions but that it is evidence of the idea they took pokemon models and then just distorted them...so something akin to issues right now with art and generative AI?

[The Minsky Moment]

They cited those graphic designers in there.

I saw that but it was a lot of this anonymous guy commenting on what some other anonymous guy said. 

I guess idea is less about the proportions but that it is evidence of the idea they took pokemon models and then just distorted them...so something akin to issues right now with art and generative AI?

If they directly copied the models, that would create two potential issues.  On copyright, the question would be whether what they copied was protectible expression, and that would go back to idea/expression dichotomy.  If all that got copied into the game were the proportions, then we go back to the earlier analysis.  The other issue is that Pokemon's titles are licensed software and if the Palworld people did that, it would certainly be a breach of the license agreement. 

[Syt]

https://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-survival-game-cancellation-news/

Blizzard's canceled survival game had been in development for over 6 years, was highly praised by employees
By Tyler Wilde published about 15 hours ago
"Many" of the survival game's devs have now been laid off with no shipped game for their resumes, and very little public information about the project.

Blizzard's unnamed survival game had already been in development for over four years when it was announced in early 2022. Its team doubled in size that year with plans to grow even more in 2023. Now, after over six years of total development time and positive responses to the project from current and former Blizzard employees, the game has been canceled by Microsoft and its developers are out of jobs.

"I've been let go from Blizzard, along with many many others on the Survival team," wrote Matt London, the game's former associate narrative director, on X today.

Other Blizzard survival game developers who announced their departures include senior concept artist Marby Kwong, designer Ates Bayrak, senior software engineer Renato Iwashima, gameplay programmer Michael Dale, character technical artist Matheus Lima, VFX artist Rachel Quitevis, and producer Megan Embree, who had worked at Blizzard for 13 years.

The survival game's director, Craig Amai, was also laid off, and says he's now focused on helping the rest of the former survival game team land on their feet. "If you're looking for talent, the crew coming out of the Unannounced Survival Game are abnormally high quality—I cannot recommend them enough," Amai wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

Blizzard's survival game was announced as a new world "different from any Blizzard has created." Two pieces of concept art, the only material that was ever released, showed modern-day humans in a fantasy realm with a floating castle visible through overgrown forests, as well as a hooded forest ranger who wouldn't be out of place on League of Legends' roster. The crossover of this imagery suggested a premise like The Chronicles of Narnia, where ordinary children are drafted into another world inhabited by fantasy creatures.

The game was well liked within Blizzard. When it was announced in January 2022, current and former Blizzard employees publicly praised the survival game team and project—and this was at the height of mistrust and anger over allegations of sexism at the company.

This team is nuts and nice and the project is like... UGH. SO COOL," said Blizzard artist Melissa Kelly at the time.

"All I can say is it's gonna absolutely rock," said novelist and Blizzard writer Christie Golden. "Hella beautiful too. I cannot wait!"

"This is a project that will have a big impact on the industry," said Geoffrey Virtue, executive producer of Teamfight Tactics at Riot, who had formerly co-led the survival game project at Blizzard.

Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra, who also exited the company this week, said after the 2022 announcement that he'd "played many hours" of the game and was "incredibly excited about the team's vision and the brand-new world it presents for players to immerse themselves in together."

Praise for the project on social media was so enthusiastic after the announcement that some wondered if Blizzard had encouraged its employees to talk it up online. We asked, and Blizzard told us that it had not: "We have a talented team creating this game, and we're happy to see their genuine enthusiasm for their work, and others' excitement to share it," a spokesperson said at the time.

The survival game's cancellation and layoffs are part of 1,900 job cuts across Activision Blizzard and other Microsoft gaming companies.

According to a report from Bloomberg, development of the survival game was slow in part because the team switched from Unreal Engine to an internal engine called Synapse.

"As difficult as making these decisions are, experimentation and risk taking are part of Blizzard's history and the creative process," Blizzard spokesperson Andrew Reynolds told the publication. "Ideas make their way into other games or in some cases become games of their own. Starting something completely new is among the hardest things to do in gaming, and we're immensely grateful to all of the talented people who supported the project."

The former Blizzard survival game developers now face an aspect of working in games that I've heard a number of developers lament before: On top of the threat of being laid off, they face the threat of being laid off before they've been able to release anything.

A requirement often found in game development job listings is some number of "shipped games," meaning games that have been released. A current Blizzard job listing for a lead gameplay engineer requires "at least one shipped title," for example. Not only do the Blizzard survival game developers who've been let go this week get no shipped game for their resumes, they can't even talk openly about what it was they were making.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/26/tech-layoffs-jump-in-january-as-alphabet-meta-microsoft-reach-high.html

The S&P 500 is trading at a record and the Nasdaq is at its highest in two years. Alphabet shares reached a new pinnacle on Thursday, as did Meta and Microsoft, which ran past $3 trillion in market cap.

Don't tell that to the bosses.

While Wall Street cheers on Silicon Valley, tech companies are downsizing at an accelerating clip. So far in January, some 23,670 workers have been laid off from 85 tech companies, according to the website Layoffs.fyi. That's the most since March, when almost 38,000 people in the industry were shown the exits.

Activity picked up this week with SAP announcing job changes or layoffs for 8,000 employees and Microsoft cutting 1,900 positions in its gaming division. Additionally, high-valued fintech startup Brex laid off 20% of its staff and eBay slashed 1,000 jobs, or 9% of its full-time workforce. Jamie Iannone, eBay's CEO, told employees in a memo that, "We need to better organize our teams for speed — allowing us to be more nimble, bring like-work together, and help us make decisions more quickly."

Earlier in the month, Google confirmed that it cut several hundred jobs across the company, and Amazon has eliminated hundreds of positions spanning its Prime Video, MGM Studios, Twitch and Audible divisions. Unity said it's cutting about 25% of its staff, and Discord, which offers a popular messaging service used by gamers, is shedding 17% of its workforce.

The swarm of activity comes ahead of a barrage of tech earnings next week, when Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft are all scheduled to report quarterly results. Investors lauded the cost-cutting measures that companies put in place last year in response to rising inflation, interest rates hikes, recession concerns and a brutal market downturn in 2022. Even with an improving economic outlook, the thriftiness continues.

Layoffs peaked in January of last year, when 277 technology companies cut almost 90,000 jobs, as the tech industry was forced to reckon with the end of a more than decade-long bull market. Most of the rightsizing efforts took place in the first quarter of 2023, and the number of cuts proceeded to decline each month through September, before ticking up toward the end of the year.

One explanation for the January surge as companies budget for the year ahead: They've learned they can do more with less.

At Meta, in CEO Mark Zuckerberg's words, 2023 was the "year of efficiency," and the stock jumped almost 200% alongside 20,000 job cuts. Across the industry, artificial intelligence was the rallying cry as new generative AI technologies showed what was possible in automating customer service, booking travel and creating marketing campaigns.

[...]

[Josquius]

Soooo tonnes of articles being suggested to me lately about mass layoffs in the games industry, how we are on the brink of a complete crash like the US in the 80s and so on.

This sounds... Over the top. The indie scene is doing very well these days.
But are the traditional games companies dying?

[Jacob]

Dunno...

I think people will be playing games for a long time, so there's going to be a market.

I think the major publishers have painted themselves into a bit of a corner on their risk and return. Everyone's gone all in on milking established franchises, but established franchises have gotten really tired. However, many of the majors have kind of lost the plot on how to make interesting new IP. Not only that, but they've lost the plot on how to do so without burning piles and piles of cash.

For the majors, the focus is the evergreen blockbuster. Spend hundreds and hundreds of millions on something that is massively popular and generates continual transaction revenue. But it's hard. So layoffs.

Indies can make good content (or fail to make good content), but can only absorb so much talent.

The Chinese majors are spending massive cash to make a play in the Western AAA market as a diversification strategy. That'll pick up some slack for a few years, but I'm ambivalent on whether they'll succeed.

IMO it's definitely the case that the massive organizations - both studios and publishers - have built up a bunch of cruft and lack of imagination. So there's a bit of reckoning happening there, which will suck for people who are directly affected.

... but I think games still have and will continue to have relevance.

IMO it's a good opportunity for indies to take some shots - if they can line up funding, so there's some scrappiness required.

But what the industry seem to be lacking right now is a nice predictable theory of how to profit for major investors. And that's going to involve some pain.

Something will come around at some point, I suppose.

[Syt]

IMO it's a good opportunity for indies to take some shots - if they can line up funding, so there's some scrappiness required.

Probably a bunch of laid off folks may look at the indie track now. Yahtzee pointed out a few months back that there was a strong indie renaissance in Australia when a number of studios there went under.

Of course there's no dearth of indies these days, and it would be a struggle to stand out/gain visibility, but still. Silver linings and all that.

[The Minsky Moment]

I think the major publishers have painted themselves into a bit of a corner on their risk and return. Everyone's gone all in on milking established franchises, but established franchises have gotten really tired. However, many of the majors have kind of lost the plot on how to make interesting new IP. Not only that, but they've lost the plot on how to do so without burning piles and piles of cash.

We've discussed this in the thread; it's a malign feedback loop.  With so much money at stake in each title, the majors seek to control risk by sticking to established franchises; but raising the bar on the franchise to keep fans happy means constantly increasing budgets.

The alternative would be spending less per title on new IP and diversifying across more projects but than you are just trying to replicate being multiple indie studios under a single corporate roof, which is a significant management challenge and sort of defeats the purpose of being a major.

This is how you get to the point where Nintendo bases its holiday push around a new Zelda and Mario game, and Sony's big new release is a remake of a 90s PS1 game.  Even Helldivers is decade old IP.

But what the industry seem to be lacking right now is a nice predictable theory of how to profit for major investors.

There isn't any.  If gaming keeps moving towards streaming subscription, which is what has happened in music and movies/TV and seems a logical endpoint, then experience shows that the content creators get squeezed. If it doesn't, tastes are too fickle and cycles to unpredictable to generate reliable investor returns.

MSFT has the right idea just throwing wads of cash to cover every base: publishing, streaming, hardware, OS, AI.  They may not make any money but they will end up with a strategic position somewhere.  It's a tougher choice for the players that don't have 3 trillion in market cap to work with.

[Syt]

Warner Brothers have said that after the high of Hogwart's Legacy last year and the low of Suicide Squad this year they want to move away from such tentpole releases and rather focus on free to play live service games with their franchises (DC, Harry Potter etc.) with constant steady revenue streams across various platforms (including mobile).

[The Minsky Moment]

Capcom has a steam sale right now and it demonstrates the point. Almost everything is a 20+ year old franchise.

Warner Brothers have said that after the high of Hogwart's Legacy last year and the low of Suicide Squad this year they want to move away from such tentpole releases and rather focus on free to play live service games with their franchises (DC, Harry Potter etc.) with constant steady revenue streams across various platforms (including mobile).

Problem with mobile FTP is that you are playing the attention economy game.  As the space gets more saturated, attention is zero sum.  It does probably have cost advantages though.

[Josquius]

The take I've heard and agree with, and also honestly sounds quite nice, is that the days of AAA games are done.
Budgets and development times are just getting ever more bloated and silly to the point where you get lots of games like Shenmue: a great game but so expensive to develop every dream cast owner would have needed to buy 3 copies or something like so.

It really leads back again to the death of consoles. Which is sad but has been a long time coming.
Ever since the PS3 era new generations of power haven't really given much in the way new generations did in the past.
It's surprisingly really that things stumbled on for another 2 generations.

Warner Brothers have said that after the high of Hogwart's Legacy last year and the low of Suicide Squad this year they want to move away from such tentpole releases and rather focus on free to play live service games with their franchises (DC, Harry Potter etc.) with constant steady revenue streams across various platforms (including mobile).

Ugh. This is what happened to so much of the Japanese games industry.
Could it be yet another case where Japan isn't weird and merely ahead of the pack?
I'd like to hope not. Surely the age of crappy mobile games is past?

[Jacob]

We've discussed this in the thread; it's a malign feedback loop.  With so much money at stake in each title, the majors seek to control risk by sticking to established franchises; but raising the bar on the franchise to keep fans happy means constantly increasing budgets.

The alternative would be spending less per title on new IP and diversifying across more projects but than you are just trying to replicate being multiple indie studios under a single corporate roof, which is a significant management challenge and sort of defeats the purpose of being a major.

This is how you get to the point where Nintendo bases its holiday push around a new Zelda and Mario game, and Sony's big new release is a remake of a 90s PS1 game.  Even Helldivers is decade old IP.

What makes sense to me is some sort of funnel:

Invest in multiple indie studios (don't necessarily own them). Take the cream of the crop of those, identify what's good, then invest in bringing them into the AA or lower segment of the AAA space. Select your major AAA bets from whichever IPs succeed in the AA / lower-end AAA segment.

The obvious disadvantage to that strategy is that it's long term, taking probably at least a decade from "indie" to major AAA bet.

The other perhaps less obvious disadvantage is that it requires executive leadership to build an organization that has the ability to identify quality and potential and is able and willing to bet on those.

There may be other disadvantages that could explain why we're not seeing majors attempt to build that type of ecosystem and pipeline... though I do think that's part of the Tencent/ NetEase strategy.

There isn't any.  If gaming keeps moving towards streaming subscription, which is what has happened in music and movies/TV and seems a logical endpoint, then experience shows that the content creators get squeezed. If it doesn't, tastes are too fickle and cycles to unpredictable to generate reliable investor returns.

When you say content creators, do you primarily mean the major studios or also smaller players like indie studios and individual production companies?

If tastes are too fickle and cycles too unpredictable to generate reliable investor returns, it makes sense that major investors pull back. That seems very logical. But content is still being produced - and the streaming networks presumably will need some volume of new content in addition to their back catalogues. Where does it come from? How is it funded?

MSFT has the right idea just throwing wads of cash to cover every base: publishing, streaming, hardware, OS, AI.  They may not make any money but they will end up with a strategic position somewhere.  It's a tougher choice for the players that don't have 3 trillion in market cap to work with.

So I'm not super plugged into the streaming TV/film industry even as a consumer, but my impression is that there are indications that we might be moving back to something like the cable model? Maybe not?

What is the model in general? Obviously audiences still want to consume content, and content is being produced. Some of it even seems innovative and interesting. What are the prevailing models in film/TV? Other than the major streaming networks, who are prospering? And is any of that potentially applicable in game dev, do you think?

[Jacob]

Problem with mobile FTP is that you are playing the attention economy game.  As the space gets more saturated, attention is zero sum.  It does probably have cost advantages though.

Yeah, I think it's a pretty cut-throat field. As long as enough people are in love with your IP, you can continue milking them.

In my eyes the problem facing the industry (or rather the major publishers, but close enough) is:

1) How not to fumble your IPs and keeping them alive.
2) What to do once your IP starts fading.

"Focusing on FTP, live-service" is not a strategy to answer either of those questions, IMO. It's a strategy to efficiently milk your IP before either 1) or 2) becomes too big a problem.