Supermassive doing layoffs is somewhat surprising. Not owned by a giant megacorp looking for short-term shareholder value increases. Their games are generally via the traditional publisher route, so budgets agreed in advance and continued based on milestones. Plus the founders left last month. Don’t have good answers for their layoffs.
So many businesses operate on debt and investments. “If you’re going to gamble, do it with somebody else’s money.” A lot of opportunities to acquire funding for developing video games have just dried up.
The publishers acquire funding this same way. Sony, 2K, and Bandai Namco have all operated as the publishers for their games, and they’re all publicly traded companies. They pay the upfront cost for development that both partners in that deal wish to make a return on, and right now, the publishers or other investors (which may still exist regardless of a publisher deal) are scared of throwing money at lots of game pitches these days.
Supermassive doing layoffs is somewhat surprising. Not owned by a giant megacorp looking for short-term shareholder value increases. Their games are generally via the traditional publisher route, so budgets agreed in advance and continued based on milestones. Plus the founders left last month. Don’t have good answers for their layoffs.
So many businesses operate on debt and investments. “If you’re going to gamble, do it with somebody else’s money.” A lot of opportunities to acquire funding for developing video games have just dried up.
Yeah, but supermassive don’t seem to go that way, which is why I was pointing out the publisher thing.
The publishers acquire funding this same way. Sony, 2K, and Bandai Namco have all operated as the publishers for their games, and they’re all publicly traded companies. They pay the upfront cost for development that both partners in that deal wish to make a return on, and right now, the publishers or other investors (which may still exist regardless of a publisher deal) are scared of throwing money at lots of game pitches these days.
Public companies don’t take private investment without issuing new shares. Which is not a common thing.
If you think publicly traded companies are taking investment like privately traded companies then I think you are likely somewhat uninformed.
It’s not too surprising, their recent games haven’t been doing too well from what I can see.