Anthony Perez of Gamer 2.0's SmashPad reports:
"During that interview, the source we spoke with talked about Free Radical founder Steve Ellis' plans for a new game development studio named Pumpkin Beach. According to our source, Steve Ellis has taken about 20 Free Radical employees with him.
We did a little research about Pumpkin Beach and found a domain registered through Whois.net for PumpkinBeach.com. The registrant? Steve Ellis. This seems to all but confirm such plans for Pumpkin Beach, and Steve Ellis' involvement with the new company."
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
Eventually they’ll realize the value is with the employee not the company. Buying an IP means nothing if the people who contributed are let go. They’ll get it one day.
tech is different because they buy threats and then kill them. Twitter bought Vine and did nothing with it. Despite people seemingly liking it. Could've had tiktok a decade before bytedance. go figure.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
INDIE Live Expo, Japan’s premiere online digital showcase series , will debut never-before-seen games & content updates across more than 100 titles on May 25th.
"The best games of the year and the creative teams behind them were in the spotlight at the grand award ceremony of the German Computer Game Award 2024." - German Computer Game Awards.
Sure buddy... You're trying to tell me it has a deeper story than goat 🐐 simulator 4000?!?!?. I wanna give bg3 a shot but my brain is burnt out on long games
Very timely update to the story earlier published. I'm glad that he was able to get onto his feet so swiftly. I wonder how long it'll be until we see anything from them. Look at what happened with Tim Schafer and Double Fine; it took them quite a while to push out Psychonauts.
I'm always happy to see a new developer pop up with some experienced people. I haven't been too impressed with the games Free Radical has designed thus far though. They've had good concepts, but haven't made them into the kinds of games they could be. I don't know if they ever will, but maybe with a fresh new company we will see some fresh new products.
I'm worried about what's coming up for the gaming industry. With the economy in all kinds of hurt, publishers are going to take even less risks with their original, creative games. So I doubt we'll be able to see really cool new stuff from Pumpkin Beach. Kind of a cool name though
Pumpkin Beach? Really? I don't know why but that's such a cool name but it is. I'm glad to see them find new work though
yes i agree that is such a coooooooooool name!!!! pumpkin Beach FTW!!