this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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So it was just a take the money and run scam.
I wonder how much they really will get. As per Steam's policy, they won't receive the payments until January 30th. By then, tons of people have time to request for a refund. They are also apparently more generous on the refund window. (more than 2 hours)
They ran with their investors' money, not the money from Steam.
Uh, have you not seen how many game studios are collapsing? It's more likely an "oh crap we're bankrupt interest rates jumped and we can no longer pay our loans' carrying costs".
The interest rate jump screwed a lot of businesses that depend heavily on loans to make it to profitability.
They probably took one look at their launch-day take, compared it against their loans, and said "fuck this we're filing for bankruptcy and I'm and going to go get a regular-ass job".
Lol no, not for this one. This was scammy from the start. The weird thing is they had decent games out before this. Why would they intentionally screw up so badly idk.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
They probably started with an overambitious design, took some ill-advised short-cuts, and pivoted the to the "extraction" format after they'd already marketed it as a different concept, and made a bad gamble or two. Normal gamedev stuff. Same as every Molyneux game.
A few years back this could've been another No Man's Sky story where they fix it after launch... but that means going deeper and deeper into debt while you salvage the mess you've made. Post-COVID interest rates make that impossible. So now they're broke and the project they spent the last years on is a stinker and they don't have enough runway to fix it.
So they're done.
They claimed a 5 year development time, and what they shipped was a tutorial that lasts 2 hours (to cover the refund window) and a completely empty game afterwards, that consists of you wandering around a map they bought as an asset pack.
They used the hype about the game to make "behind the scenes" videos which were actually ads for an app they made on the side.
The last 2 games they released were abandoned in similar circumstances shortly after launch.
There's enough evidence of malice here.
I mostly agree with you, but I'm pretty sure NMS took home about $15M in the first month ($78M sales in first month). If they hadn't, they might have closed shop, too. Now, we have a small group of millionaires who can make whatever they want.
Fuck, I totally forgot about that dingus.
Touché