TGO Daily | May 3, 2021 | Activision Goes All In
TGO Daily | May 3, 2021
In The News
Activision Goes All-In
You might recall that Activision has been making butt loads of money off of Call of Duty. Every title they’ve put out has been a smash hit, from their yearly releases, the battle royale Warzone, and Call of Duty Mobile. As such, it appears as though every company that Activision has as a subsidiary is fully focused on the franchise.
Toys For Bob, recently lauded for its releases of the Spyro Reignited Trilogy and the Crash Bandicoot reboots, have confirmed they are now working on Warzone. It appears as though some leadership have been let go at the studio, and the rest are pivoting away from creating original games.
While it makes sense, considering how important Call of Duty is to Activision, I really hope that’s not the end for Toys For Bob. They made some great titles. Also, is it ever good to put all your eggs in one basket?
Cyberpunk Developer Bonuses
Source: bloomberg.com
Despite Cyberpunk 2077 being the worst handled launch in recent memory, the executive staff of developer CD Projekt Red are expected to receive millions of dollars in bonuses. In contrast, the rest of the staff will be getting bonuses much lower than they expected. Despite asking for a delay in releasing the game (which would have resulted in more copies of the game being sold), staff are only receiving somewhere between $5,000 to $20,000, — while five board members are taking a combined $28 million.
Wage disparity is a major issue in many corporations, and the gaming industry is no exception. However, considering the mismanagement of this title, it feels particularly scummy that leadership is taking home all the cash. In the latest investor call, they defended their profits, but appeared to be “re-examining its practices in an attempt to keep staff from departing” (thanks, Bloomberg).
Paradox Development Studios Update
Paradox recently put out a blog post explaining how they’ve reorganized their internal development studios to handle their various games.
As it stands, they currently have split Paradox Development Studios (PDS) into three sub-studios: PDS Green (developing Stellaris), PDS Red (developing Crusader Kings III), and PDS Gold (Hearts of Iron IV). Notably, despite releasing in 2019, they don’t have a team dedicated to Imperator: Rome. Here’s what they say:
The reason for this is that on a regular basis we analyze the projects we have in development, where they are at, what they are trying to do and also what people and resources we have working on them. As part of this analysis we realized that there was a need to bring reinforcement for a couple of the projects at PDS, and given where Imperator was at in the run up to 2.0’s launch, we decided that after the launch of the update we would move people from Imperator to these other projects. Right now we’re working on plans to regrow the team for Imperator and continue development, but for the short term we needed to focus our efforts on these other projects.
With PDXCON coming up, people probably won’t see much from Imperator: Rome. Each of those teams are also invested in developing new games though, so we’ll probably hear about some of that.