With over 130,000 concurrent players and 5 million total, Ubisoft’s squad-based tactical shooter Rainbow Six Siege is kind of a big deal. Rarely in its lifetime has it ever dipped below its spot in the top five most-played games on Steam, and its clout as both a competitive powerhouse and a spectator darling have only grown with time. It’s a game beloved by its fans, and admired by its competitors. But most people familiar with the game know that it wasn’t always this way, and it took developer Ubisoft Montreal a lot of faith and perseverance to make it the success it is today. It did something virtually unheard of among AAA games these days — it put the players first.
Wccftech checked out a presentation of Dune Awakening at GDC 2024. Creative Director Joel Bylos also revealed Funcom wants to polish this game before launch.
Workers at Sega of America, a division of Sega Sammy Holdings Inc., have became the first employees at a major North American video-game company to ratify a union contract, a move that may accelerate a burgeoning labor movement in an industry known for widespread instability among its work force.
The contract, ratified Tuesday, covers around 150 people across marketing and other departments at the division’s offices in Southern California. Workers will receive minimum yearly pay increases of 4% in 2024, 3% in 2025 and 2.5% in 2026 as well as a number of other benefits, Catalina Brennan-Gatica, a representative for the Communications Workers of America, said in an interview.
Another link
https://www.engadget.com/se...
This should bypass pay wall
https://www.bloomberg.com/n...
Worst thing that will happen is it will have a lower stock price and ceos won't get extra millions they don't really need. Other than that the company will continue on and ppl will be treated better.
GamesIndustry.biz writes: "Relic is best known for the Company of Heroes and Dawn of War games, and recently developed the new Age of Empires for Microsoft. Relic will transition to an independent studio and will no-longer be part of the Sega group of studios.
The majority of the 240 job cuts are across Creative Assembly and Sega Europe, while there will be a ‘small number’ cut from Sega HARDLight. There was no mention of other Sega UK studios, including Two Point Studios and Sports Interactive."
I do agree that Siege did a great move in shelling out content compared to most AAA games in the same sphere and its even better that they decided to actually invest in the troublesome launch to get rid of most of the issues at it's early phase. My biggest issues with the title is that it has one of the worst reward systems I've ever played in a game due to:
- paltry amounts of renown earned per match standing aside with steep prices for both operators and skins
- not being rewarded loot packs (which is already a huge problem) for raising clearance level or even winning a
match. Instead you have a random chance of getting a random chance of getting a prize which has an even lower
chance of being of use for an operator you actually use. Hell even earning a 1000 renown per clearance level can
offset the problem but nothing has surfaced.......
- Ubisoft's terrible job of balancing operators. When any of them is found to be OP to some degree after a week or so,
their knee jerk reaction is to make them almost unplayable (Lion especially). Then their is the opposite side of the
spectrum where inherently useless operators are left alone to rot in order to cash in on their "meme status" and any i
ideas given by the community to somewhat balance these characters are used to create brand new operators that has
to be paid for instead.
- Hit boxes are still terrible in this game yet cosmetic DLC are being funneled in regularly.
- Legendary skins locked behind paywalls for 1800 R Credits each ($20.00 each)
- Ranked is still a mess in terms of balancing focusing more on the chances of a team winning (random or other wise)
but not an individual player's contributions.
If the author really wants to look at a "live service" done right, use Monster Hunter World as an proper example. Siege's practices feel more akin to free to play games......except you already paid.....