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Game development isn’t just about good leaders or even great products. You can do everything right, even making a game of the year, and still go under.

This is a hard lesson Mike Morhaime, a co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, is learning. He just had to sent a letter to staff at his new company Dreamhaven this week announcing layoffs.

One month after Dreamhaven launched Wildgate, the company had sold just 130,000 units. The company’s other game, Sunderfolk, sold just 62,000 copies since its April debut. Despite receiving positive reviews, both titles performed below expectations, Morhaime said. He’s looking for new financing for Dreamhaven, but in the meantime the company would need to retrench.

Frost Giant Studios Inc., also founded by Blizzard veterans, released Stormgate in August. Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Tim Morten said in a Linkedin post last week that the game wasn’t getting the traffic or sales he hoped for. Their SEC filing indicated Frost Giant Studios Inc. lost $11.7 million on sales of $1.4 million last year.

There are many purported causes. There’s been too many games released at once and not enough audience. Another factor may be even great games are not drawing players away from their heavily entrenchment in existing franchises. Whatever the cause, we’re clearly entering one of the worst markets for game studios in a decade.

Everyone has been going on and on about Hall effect controllers and keyboards since they made a splash on the scene just a year or so ago. I have even tried out one of the better hall effect keyboards to great effect (Corsair K70 Pro TKL with Hall effect switches). Hall effect keys can be tuned to trigger at different points in the keypress descent.

Having been using heavier brown switches in my gaming keyboard, my touch-typing was a little heavy handed at first. When I learned I could back off and even just feather the touches, my typing speed definitely went up by about 5-10wpm – going from about 70wpm to 80-85wpm. The problem was that I wasn’t really into the $179 price tag – so I returned it and am waiting for prices to come down.

But there is a new game in town: TMR (Tunnel Magneto Resistance), or sometimes called inductive switches. A few folks have been releasing TMR keyboards (Ducky OneX), but adoption seems slow and reviews seem to be scarce.

Eve Butt, however, wrote a review of a TMR game controller – the PB Tails Metal Crush Defender. She seems to think it does better than its Hall effect kin (like the 8BitDo Ultimate). She claims it gives noticeably more instant precision than the Hall effect equivalent and never suffers from the dreaded, well documented stick drift common in normal Switch controllers. Primarily, she notes much less dead space before input is registered.

I, for one, am excited about the input arms race that is delivering us some really fascinating new technology. If Hall effect keyboards come down in price, I definitely thought I’d buy one. But perhaps I should try out a TMR keyboard as well.

President of PlayStation Studios, Shuhei Yoshida shared how they decided to continue or cancel games in an interview with Game File (paywalled):

We kind of calculate how much more money we have to spend to finish this game. If the revenue seems lower than the money we need to spend to finish, we cancel the project. We cancelled lots of projects after the prototype level and no one knows in public. And that’s fine. That’s just a process

Sometimes the game is in deep production. The largest I canceled were two games, after we spent $25 million. At that time, that was lots of money. Now, not as much. I felt really bad about how we couldn’t see this.

I produced, so I was really harsh on producers. That’s what I used to do.

I think that’s one area that many startups nor big companies do enough: honest mid-dev assessments that honestly ask if they should cancel or more strongly steer projects back into scope. In my experience, startups are encouraged to give perfect and rosy projections – even to the point of firing anyone that questions obvious or serious issues. This leads to all kinds of deception and fraud.

Bigger companies, conversely, tend to plan once, and then doggedly stick with it no matter how bad the estimates were or how off-track the project becomes. Rarely do they do an honest re-plan with project cancelation being seriously on the table.

Links:

• https://www.gamesradar.com/games/former-playstation-studios-boss-shuhei-yoshida-says-he-shut-down-2-games-in-deep-production-after-sony-had-spent-usd25-million-on-them-at-that-time-that-was-lots-of-money/
• https://mattfife.com/?p=10163

LightBurn, the defacto software for hobbyist laser cutters and engravers, was built as a multi-platform solution so it could be used on a wide variety of platforms. But in a recent email announcement sent out to users, they announced they would no longer be distributing their software for Linux systems.

Why? The developers claim that too much of their time was being spent supporting and packaging Lightburn software for Linux distributions relative to the size of the user base.

The segmentation of Linux distributions complicates these burdens further — we’ve had to provide three separate packages for the versions of Linux we officially support, and still encounter frequent compatibility issues on those distributions (or closely related distributions), to say nothing of the many distributions we have been asked to support.

They’ve apparently tried multiple distribution mechanisms designed to fix these issues such as flatpack and appimage – but still encountered too many problems.

It’s a reminder that the entire ecosystem must be healthy for your software to be healthy. [Hackaday]