How to destroy your up-and-coming indie studio in three simple steps!
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Publicly fuck over the two people most responsible for your massively successful IP, ensuring they’ll never work with you again
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Cancel any follow-up to your massively successful IP and continue with projects nobody cares about
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Fire the rest of the staff responsible for your only successful IP
I’ve been at two startups in my career. Both venture capital financed. Even though they are completely different industries, this is the exact playbook they used.
The VCs were in the same industry both times, though: Making money by selling property.
They’re not interested in selling do-dads, or softwhizzles. They want to sell the company, and that’s making the same play in the same game every time.
So keep control of your own indie and don’t do shared ownership. Check.
Easier said than done if you are not independently wealthy and can bring your own capital with you.
It’s also a shame People Make Games lost the plot on telling that story, too. The worst thing you can do is push this false equivalency on what is obviously a rich-people-fuck-over-the-poors story.
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This studio must have pissed off someone very powerful to be targeted and dismantled like this.
Did the old guys even got to start a new studio and a spiritual successor?
I don’t think they would want to deal with this shit again, and I wouldn’t blame them. I’m just going to be content with the fact we got one good game.
Nothing of value was lost. Any content worth having couldn’t have existed without Kurvitz’ writing.
As much as I’d love for more actual, true DE content, I’m actually happy this expansion is cancelled. Doing a content release without Kurvitz, Hindpere and Rostov would just be wrong, and would create an awkward situation for new players in the future. If we can’t have more real DE content, I’m happy the existing game at least gets to remain as an intact monolith rather than be diluted by additions outside the original writers’ vision and without the inimitable art of Rostov.
Apparently they weren’t redundant if you needed them to make the expansion…
This is exactly my thought.
It’s like, ‘I have terrible news: we didn’t have enough work to keep paying the mechanics, so now we have no one to fix all the broken delivery trucks!’
I can only hope that the Disco Elysium IP somehow gets back into the hands of the original writers.
The odds of that are so incredibly low. DE is a fantastic standalone game. Arguably one of the most artistically complex and rich games ever made, and it stands alone perfectly well. It raised the bar for gaming in a way that others have aspired to but not ever really reached. The best we can hope for is that the makers of the game can make a new game in the future. One whose IP they know how to protect, this time.
Disco Elysium has been dead in the water for years now. I won’t support the publisher anymore. The only reason why I didn’t pirate the game to begin with, even at the request of the OG dev, is because I don’t trust repacks or random .exe’s.
I feel like Fitgirl is more trustworthy than any corporation of any size.
