Former heads of The Tetris Company and Square USA have announced the formation of upstart studio Honolulu-based Avatar Reality, Inc, as well as the company's first title, the massively multiplayer Terraformed Mars.
The company will be headed by Henk Rogers, founder of Blue Planet Software, Blue Lava, and The Tetris Company, famous as the man credited with bringing Tetris to Nintendo for release on its then-launching GameBoy.
Joining Rogers is Kazuyuki Hashimoto, former vice president of technology at Electronic Arts and chief technical officer of Square, where he oversaw CG development of such titles as Final Fantasy VII and the Final Fantasy film.
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.
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.