it's fucking unbelievable how these morons can gut dev studios when the product that came out of them is to the scale of Doom 2016, Eternal and Dark Ages. Ridiculous.

I hope they band together and start their own company.

Speaking of which, if you know a way for me to find games made by devs that were once part of larger studios that were gutted, I'm interested.

Apparently these devs are treated the same way as Mick Gordon

Lighting a bowl and playing Quake and Doom wads and mods only this weekend. Let's see 'em off right, lads.

https://www.slipseer.com/index.php?resources/quake-brutalist-jam-iii.549/

I swear to god if the next Doom game uses Unreal I'm gonna lose it

I'd argue since the beginning not just 20 years.

without id, gaming as we know it wouldn't exist today. FPS games, competitive shooters, hell even Valve itself likely wouldn't exist without id software. goes even beyond that. you could even go as deep as the modding community and all the games that have come from that. the majority of modders got their start with id games. Many rockstar game devs got their start at id or via an id product.

They released Wolfenstein 3D in 1992 - 34 years ago. And pretty much everything they've released since has been great.

I'm going to go sit down now because my bones hurt thinking about that fact.

that don’t hold their own

It never was like that. Studios that do badly are never gutted, not as far as I've seen from online reports.

I think the reason why studios are gutted after success is that it's almost guaranteed that the money will keep flowing even after they are fired, BECAUSE of the success.

If you make a game and it sucks the company can't afford to fire you because they don't have guaranteed cash flow regardless if you're there or not.

There isn’t any money out there, and a production team trying to run their own studio typically doesn’t work out. „Just go indie“ is not a realistic option. More than likely a handful of these people might be picked up (though likely will have to uproot their lives to do it) but the rest will leave the industry. It’s an incredibly destructive thing MS has done, because id folks often did a lot of knowledge sharing at conferences.

The arrogance with which Gordon was treated soured me on the whole franchise which is a shame because Doom 2016 is one of my all time favorites. No small part due to his soundtrack.

Weren't they bought back in the early 2010s? Doom 2016 was great and Doom Eternal has also a great reputation (I own it but haven't played it). So they made good games even after being bought by ZeniMax.

It sold like 4.5M copies so I'm not sure it was a failure per se

It's come for everything. Everything from components used in factory lines to the ingredients bought by restaurants, it's all going to shit. The games industry just happens to be both heavily consolidated and highly public in nature.

Appropriate game title.

Stupid fucking "we have money" mentality so the best way to make one look better is siphon up successful developers and expect gold.

Do you have the money to buy out id software and pay all the payroll for its coders?

Well there's different groups of folks. There's a group who aren't going to tolerate this and won't give them another cent, and another group who will look past it until it destroys their favourite series completely, and I guess another, enormous group who are entirely oblivious to any of the goings on behind the scenes and just buy game play game

They're not interested in sales from the product. They want the IP, the patents, and a few of the talent, perhaps if they're particularly good.

You spend years making a large game, all negative profit. Then you launch, make most of the money you'll ever see off that title and go back to hibernate.

They buy the studio, own the ip, flip the crunch switch to on and wait for attrition. If anyone survives that, they put them somewhere else to make them money.

I don't know what the landscape is like in the gaming industry these days so I can't say if it's the case here, but often that kind of pattern is about eliminating competition (i.e. market manipulation rather than innovation).