Month: October 2024

Tim Bender, CEO of Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse, discussed why he thinks the way we measure games' success needs to evolve.On LinkedIn, Bender highlighted a post claiming the game showed "the pitfalls of Early Access" due to its declining player base. Often, concurrent players can be used to gauge how a new (or old) game is doing at any given time.But in his view, both industry analysts and players should stop eyeing games through a lens of immediate and constant growth. That line of thinking has caused "so much trouble" in the industry, and led to a "distorted endless growth" perspective."We need to move away from takes [like these]," he said. "Not every game should be aimed at becoming some live-service boom or bust."He went on…

The Nintendo Switch is now the developer's longest-running reigning console.Per VGC, the home/handheld hybrid has been around for 2,687 days (or seven years, four months, and just shy of two weeks). The console originally released March 3, 2017, and beat out the Famicom's (or NES in the west) streak by just a single day.As the outlet notes, distance between other Nintendo consoles has gotten progressively shorter outside of those two. Using global launches, VGC determined the span between the Nintendo 64 and Nintendo Gamecube was 1,909 days, while the Nintendo Wii and WiiU had a gap of 1,892 days.Meanwhile, the WiiU and Switch had the shortest leap of the bunch at 1,566 days. It's also worth noting this just concerns home consoles; when it comes to handhelds, the Switch fall…

Free-to-play developer Scopely is bringing on on Mike Seavers to run its technology department as senior vice president.Seavers previously worked as chief technical officer at Riot Games and Yuta Labs. The press release notes his work on League of Legends and Fortnite throughout his 25-year tenure and his skill in "scaling audiences and communities."Per COO Eunice Lee, Seavers will also team with co-founder Ankur Bulsara to "shape the trajectory of Scopely’s technological expertise and ensure we’re leveraging emerging technologies to best enhance our player experiences and empower our world-class gamemakers."Scopely also notes his proficiency in cross-platform technology, which it deemed "essential" for its games on consoles. It added that Seavers comes as…

Nearly a full month after it was bought by Voodoo, BeReal has cut 28 positions.As spotted by GamesIndustry, the social platform made cuts across its engineering, QA, and marketing divisions. Per COO Roman Salzman, the layoffs were "mostly part of a refocus on France/Europe-based talents.""Not going to bore with details, keeping it simple here: these folks scaled a social platform from 200,000 to 25 million daily active users in 18 months," he wrote. "They all had to build it from the ground up and under tremendous pressure, and did it."Voodoo acquired BeReal in mid-June for €500 million (or $536.9 million), and with the express purpose of expanding into the hypercasual market. In turn, BeReal would use Voodoo to have a sustainable growth path previously unav…