No, they shouldn't have. The work required to make something halfway decent in Dreams would have still been enormous and very few would have bothered. They should have just made a game that had a established aesthetic and easy to understand gameplay foundation for casual users to build off of while hardcore users could still bust it wide open. They could have even had a customizable player character to serve as a constant for players to get attached to. Unfortunately no such thing exists so they just had to make a game where you make everything yourself from scratch out of clouds
SPBP. I'm sick of seeing redheads replaced by diversity and having trans sex scenes in my video games. Went PC master race and pro Nintendo years ago, and I criticize Nintendo A LOT.
>Targeting a headcount of 115 employees, this is a significant reduction from the roughly 135-strong workforce.
Eh, they can still make something good with that many employees.
Media Molecule are making a new game so it's probably just laying off staff that worked on Dreams and aren't needed. But Mark Healey the founder left this year so no guarantees they'll be able to make another 'creator' game instead of slop
They didn't make Sackboy a big adventure, Sumo digital was the developer. Dreams was their last game and Tearaway unfolded before that which flopped. They're making an unannounced game.
It isn't dying, you have no idea how much money they have.
They just don't need 3rd rate coders sitting around doing nothing. Waste of money for shareholders and saving some money makes quarter look better.
Educate yourself troony
What the frick is happening at playstation? All these people leaving, all the price hikes, naughty dog and other studios MIA. This year playstation had one fricking game. One game. Something is going on because this isn't the playstation we know.
>What the frick is happening at playstation?
more like what is happening with the world, everything is on the brink of collapse.
They didn't make Sackboy a big adventure, Sumo digital was the developer. Dreams was their last game and Tearaway unfolded before that which flopped. They're making an unannounced game.
>Sumo digital was the developer
i didnt know that.
is the game even good?
They published VR games, Horizon DLC, MLB the Show 23. It's down to a lot of games getting delayed because they fricked up going hard on live service and also game development times taking longer now. Next year should be Rise of the Ronin, Stellar Blade, DS2, Wolverine. Naughty Dog could be as late as 2026.
Yes but DS2 uses Decima engine (Sony) and is a timed exclusive to PS5. The other two games have development support from Sony (XDev) and also going to be at least timed exclusive
Sure but we're not talking about 3rd party games. Where are the playstation studio games that people have become accustomed to. They're either radio silent or we hear from 3rd party sources they're in development trouble like factions 2. There's an uneasiness around playstation studios right now.
I don't think Sony are ever going to lay out a Marvel style roadmap like Xbox and show all their cards. They want surprises for game shows. If you dig around you'll have an idea of what's being worked on. Factions is on the shelf because of bad design for player retention, they have an original IP and Last of Us 3 also in development.
Hard to see where Media Molecule fits in Sony's portfolio these days when Sony only wants AAA moviegaems or GAAS Slop. They'll probably be shunted to some GAAS game that will have a bad reaction in beta and be shut down after that.
I had a feeling that this was going to happen after Dreams flopped. They're easily the best Studio that Playstation has left, so I hope that they can turn things around without having to forsake their soul.
Games are better when there aren't a million people working on them. The biggest problem with Bethesda games since Oblivion has been the sheer number of artists and writers making a more than superficially cohesive product impossible and it's only getting worse, so layoffs might not be the worst thing in the world, assuming they don't just outsource or shuffle staff from other teams who don't know or care about the project.
Dreams flopping is the game industry entering a bad timeline. It was the most technologically significant achievement of the 7th gen and nobody gave a shit about it. Dreams was amazing, to the point where it should have been built into the PS5's operating system.
It was great but the creator thing wasn't such a novelty after LBP, Mario maker and they needed a way for it to generate more revenue so it wouldn't matter if it was niche
Dreams is a cute idea but anyone with the creativity and skill to make their own game knows they're better off just actually making their own game instead of just paying sony to steal their ideas.
This. The amount of effort required for Dreams was the equivalent of learning Unity engine. At that point you have to ask if is it worth learning a closed sandbox or learning a skill in Unity that you could make money out of. Dreams is a great concept, but Sony and MM didn't really get that they would be competing with game engines this time around instead of not really competing with anything on the market with LBP.
Woke games, and the handful of Snoys left here spend their time trying to defend and handwave the woke shit away instead of rightfully criticizing it in the interest of preserving whatever drop of game making blood Sony might have left from the ps1/ps2 days
They're the only ones still making interesting games for Sony, so of course they gotta cut their funding.
Snoys don't deserve Tearaway and Dreams if they aren't going to buy them..
I don't know what the frick happened with LBP3 but all they had to do was make the same game with more tools like they did with LBP2, but no they decided to crash and burn instead.
It took fricking forever to come out right? I remember thinking it looked neat and having high hopes because I liked LBP, Tearaway, and Media Molecule in general but then we didn't hear anything for like 4 years. Then suddenly it was here and it really did turn out to be a janky game engine, certainly more ambitious than shit like Project Spark but a few hours in I realized I might as well learn an actual game engine for the effort it was asking for. Maybe I just crossed the threshold of too old in that time. Still can't believe we live in a world where The Last Guardian managed to come out, and that we're 7 years after that point
Any video game based on a licensed IP is inherently lesser to me, no matter how good it is. If a third party can pull it from shelves if/when the license expires its shit.
Well said anon, there's a reason none of my favorite games are licensed despite some of them being serviceable mechanically. I make an exception for LOTRO and LOTR Two Towers/Return of the King though.
It's just soul ripping listening to the Ratchet & Clank developer commentary knowing that these people and their contemporaries aren't the people working at Insomniac anymore, and even if they were it wouldn't matter with Sony making them milk Spiderman anyway. I don't blame them personally, it's just sad that they're a non factor for me now. Same with Naughty Dog after dude raider and Last of Us
I'm more surprised that they haven't been shuttered for not making games at all? They aren't the ones making the latest LBP games, there was a significant gap between Tearaway and Dreams, and nothing for 4 years since dreams and (honestly without looking anything up) I don't feel Dreams performed particularly well; it came and went. Despite that the studio has only gotten bigger, and Dreams didn't get much post launch support did it? It never even got a performance upgrade for PS5 like that other anon mentioned
They added PSVR1 support to it a few years back. I'm pretty sure they never added multiplayer like they promised and if they did then it was way too late for anyone to care.
That's just pitiful, feels weird thinking back to the page of job listings they'd had opened on their website ~4 years ago when I was a little depressed and thought shifting gears from enterprise software to game development would give me a spark. Genuinely can't imagine what they've had any of those people doing. Also thank God I didn't actually jump careers and that it was just an emotional phase brought on by ignoring other problems I was letting into my life.
I'd say I'm not surprised but honestly, Media Molecule has really held on for dear life and I'm shocked this kind of shit didn't plague them a decade ago after something like Tearaway. They've generally been more based than profitable.
>Starfield, the saviour of Xbox turned out to be a meme with ugly models and boring gameplay, 0 chances of winning goty >Halo Infinite flopped >Everwild in development hell >Perfect Dark in development hell >Fable confirmed to be pozzed and woke, also in development hell >Gears 5 flopped and Gears Collection is nothing more than a rumor >Redfall is a soulless always-online open world co-op shooter made to meet diversity quotas also flopped >No Shinji Mikami kino because he left shortly after Bethesda/Tango acquisition >removing emulators >removing $1 gamepass >miss 80% of all Japanese games unless Microsoft pays for a gamepass port >goypass missing it's target every finacial quarter >hardware revenue down >dashboard littered with ads >no offline achievement support >storage upgrade only available through expensive proprietary solutions through selected vendors >physical next gen disc games only contain the Xbox One version of games, requiring you to connect to the internet to download the Series X version
>Starfield, the saviour of Xbox turned out to be a meme with ugly models and boring gameplay, 0 chances of winning goty >Halo Infinite flopped >Everwild in development hell >Perfect Dark in development hell >Fable confirmed to be pozzed and woke, also in development hell >Gears 5 flopped and Gears Collection is nothing more than a rumor >Redfall is a soulless always-online open world co-op shooter made to meet diversity quotas also flopped >No Shinji Mikami kino because he left shortly after Bethesda/Tango acquisition >removing emulators >removing $1 gamepass >miss 80% of all Japanese games unless Microsoft pays for a gamepass port >goypass missing it's target every finacial quarter >hardware revenue down >dashboard littered with ads >no offline achievement support >storage upgrade only available through expensive proprietary solutions through selected vendors >physical next gen disc games only contain the Xbox One version of games, requiring you to connect to the internet to download the Series X version
>LBP was actually pretty good from a creative aspect >they dropped the ball with LBP3 and it was palmed off to some nobody devs >LB3 was shit, barebones and lazy as a means to peddle DLC >Make dreams >Dont put dreams on PC, the literal only platform its suited for and wouldve done well on, instead of a shitty underpowered box with a controller.
What do you mean by dropped the ball with LBP3? I figured Sony just handed it off to another studio while Mm worked on something new(Dreams.. I guess), but if there's some drama I'd love to hear it
>PCeething already ITT
*long inhale*
*smooth exhale*
once again, never ever
this will be a good thing anyways
smaller studio will have a more cohesive vision, can't become something like UBI with too many cooks on the kitchen
Dreams is such a misconception that I'm surprised an entire studio took the project so far without anyone stopping them.
I feel sorry for the players who have dedicated years to this tool and will now be left with nothing because support has ended and now everyone has a limit of things to upload until finally there is nothing left. And one day some suit will pull the plug and the whole thing will disappear.
>And one day some suit will pull the plug and the whole thing will disappear.
any kind of game where the users create and share content on the game servers is typically going to end this way.
shit like brood war lasting almost 30 years is a huge anomaly
Whole tech industry is feeling it. Interest rates are high and everyone is tightening their belts. Its not just Sony who are laying people off. Its another recession
Legitimate question: am I supposed to feel bad about goyslop studios and companies going under? Haven’t we been saying the industry needs a massive correction for years? It’s not enough we honestly need more
>PCeething already ITT >*long inhale* >*smooth exhale* >once again, never ever >this will be a good thing anyways >smaller studio will have a more cohesive vision, can't become something like UBI with too many cooks on the kitchen
They should have released Dreams as a PC engine.
No, they shouldn't have. The work required to make something halfway decent in Dreams would have still been enormous and very few would have bothered. They should have just made a game that had a established aesthetic and easy to understand gameplay foundation for casual users to build off of while hardcore users could still bust it wide open. They could have even had a customizable player character to serve as a constant for players to get attached to. Unfortunately no such thing exists so they just had to make a game where you make everything yourself from scratch out of clouds
They didn't even optimise it for PS5 despite it releasing right before that system did.
Because no one likes woke bullshit
SPBP. I'm sick of seeing redheads replaced by diversity and having trans sex scenes in my video games. Went PC master race and pro Nintendo years ago, and I criticize Nintendo A LOT.
They've started on their next game.
>Targeting a headcount of 115 employees, this is a significant reduction from the roughly 135-strong workforce.
Eh, they can still make something good with that many employees.
all quirky games moved to nintendo
ps and xbox are racing, football, cod normieslop
Media Molecule are making a new game so it's probably just laying off staff that worked on Dreams and aren't needed. But Mark Healey the founder left this year so no guarantees they'll be able to make another 'creator' game instead of slop
https://www.ign.com/articles/media-molecule-co-founder-mark-healey-leaves-studio-17-years
This is the thing David Jaffe was talking about? I thought it would be a bigger studio, Media Molecule was obviously on thin ice after Dreams.
No he was talking about Connie Booth. Shes a producer he really likes and she got laid off or forced to retire.
what are they even working on?
last games i heard from them were sackboy adventures and dreams, both which no one played for too long.
They didn't make Sackboy a big adventure, Sumo digital was the developer. Dreams was their last game and Tearaway unfolded before that which flopped. They're making an unannounced game.
>Sumo digital
How does this company still exist? Literally everything they touch turns to shit
There basically the only AAA independant support studio in existence
It isn't dying, you have no idea how much money they have.
They just don't need 3rd rate coders sitting around doing nothing. Waste of money for shareholders and saving some money makes quarter look better.
Educate yourself troony
What the frick is happening at playstation? All these people leaving, all the price hikes, naughty dog and other studios MIA. This year playstation had one fricking game. One game. Something is going on because this isn't the playstation we know.
>What the frick is happening at playstation?
more like what is happening with the world, everything is on the brink of collapse.
>Sumo digital was the developer
i didnt know that.
is the game even good?
It's a forgettable 6-7/10 platformer that doesn't really understand why LBP was enjoyable.
sackboy is really fun with friends. we had unironic hours of fun trying to finish the ripsnorter without killing eachother/ourselves
They published VR games, Horizon DLC, MLB the Show 23. It's down to a lot of games getting delayed because they fricked up going hard on live service and also game development times taking longer now. Next year should be Rise of the Ronin, Stellar Blade, DS2, Wolverine. Naughty Dog could be as late as 2026.
>Rise of the Ronin, Stellar Blade
That's not Sony.
XDev (Sony) are a support studio
>Rise of the Ronin, Stellar Blade, DS2
These are all third-party titles.
PS Studios has fricking nothing lined up for the next year.
3 of the 4 games you mentioned there are 3rd party.
Yes but DS2 uses Decima engine (Sony) and is a timed exclusive to PS5. The other two games have development support from Sony (XDev) and also going to be at least timed exclusive
Sure but we're not talking about 3rd party games. Where are the playstation studio games that people have become accustomed to. They're either radio silent or we hear from 3rd party sources they're in development trouble like factions 2. There's an uneasiness around playstation studios right now.
I don't think Sony are ever going to lay out a Marvel style roadmap like Xbox and show all their cards. They want surprises for game shows. If you dig around you'll have an idea of what's being worked on. Factions is on the shelf because of bad design for player retention, they have an original IP and Last of Us 3 also in development.
>MLB the Show 23
ITS ON XBAWX
>Horizon DLC
coming to pc
wow snoys literally have nothing lmao
Hard to see where Media Molecule fits in Sony's portfolio these days when Sony only wants AAA moviegaems or GAAS Slop. They'll probably be shunted to some GAAS game that will have a bad reaction in beta and be shut down after that.
No one could get a PS5 at the start and were already halfway through its life cycle. May as well wait for ps6
>3 years is half a consoles lifecycle
bro we're still in the ps4's lifecycle that came out a decade ago
Because every game has to cost 50 million and sell 100 million so their output goes down massively.
No idea why these morons didnt port to PC, the only thing that would give it life
It would also probably have done well as a PS5 launch title instead of a very, very late PS4 release.
I had a feeling that this was going to happen after Dreams flopped. They're easily the best Studio that Playstation has left, so I hope that they can turn things around without having to forsake their soul.
Games are better when there aren't a million people working on them. The biggest problem with Bethesda games since Oblivion has been the sheer number of artists and writers making a more than superficially cohesive product impossible and it's only getting worse, so layoffs might not be the worst thing in the world, assuming they don't just outsource or shuffle staff from other teams who don't know or care about the project.
dreams and lbp were the games that deserved the most a pc port (even more than bloodborne)
but nooo, let's release more tv series by failed writers.
Dreams flopping is the game industry entering a bad timeline. It was the most technologically significant achievement of the 7th gen and nobody gave a shit about it. Dreams was amazing, to the point where it should have been built into the PS5's operating system.
It was great but the creator thing wasn't such a novelty after LBP, Mario maker and they needed a way for it to generate more revenue so it wouldn't matter if it was niche
Dreams is a cute idea but anyone with the creativity and skill to make their own game knows they're better off just actually making their own game instead of just paying sony to steal their ideas.
This. The amount of effort required for Dreams was the equivalent of learning Unity engine. At that point you have to ask if is it worth learning a closed sandbox or learning a skill in Unity that you could make money out of. Dreams is a great concept, but Sony and MM didn't really get that they would be competing with game engines this time around instead of not really competing with anything on the market with LBP.
every single game made in dreams was a janky POS
they literally all had that weird fricking jank to them
Woke games, and the handful of Snoys left here spend their time trying to defend and handwave the woke shit away instead of rightfully criticizing it in the interest of preserving whatever drop of game making blood Sony might have left from the ps1/ps2 days
Sackboy is a gendered character and sony fans won't stand for it.
>release no products
>don't make money
wow, imagine my shock
>refusing to buy studios
>refusing to keep games exclusive
Sony needs to buy EA and either konami/capcom/square enix NOW.
lbp and dreams are the wrong games for a console, why they never went to pc is beyond me
HAHAHAHAH
They're the only ones still making interesting games for Sony, so of course they gotta cut their funding.
Snoys don't deserve Tearaway and Dreams if they aren't going to buy them..
I don't know what the frick happened with LBP3 but all they had to do was make the same game with more tools like they did with LBP2, but no they decided to crash and burn instead.
I also never played LBP3 so maybe i'm moronic.
Last I remember, LBP3 was really buggy, and the campaign was rather disappointing
>and the campaign was rather disappointing
And it's a damn shame too because they got Hugh Laurie in to voice for that one.
LBP3 was also made by Sumo Digital and not Media Molecule. Go figure.
Did dreams do well?
It took fricking forever to come out right? I remember thinking it looked neat and having high hopes because I liked LBP, Tearaway, and Media Molecule in general but then we didn't hear anything for like 4 years. Then suddenly it was here and it really did turn out to be a janky game engine, certainly more ambitious than shit like Project Spark but a few hours in I realized I might as well learn an actual game engine for the effort it was asking for. Maybe I just crossed the threshold of too old in that time. Still can't believe we live in a world where The Last Guardian managed to come out, and that we're 7 years after that point
Sony only cares about moviegames and capeslop, they are letting all their other studios rot
It's over for sackboy. Time for some monkey business.
Are Insomniac and Santa Monica the only studios that aren’t incompetent?
I loved Ratchet & Clank and Spyro so much, it's a shame they turned into the Spiderman studio and that I don't give a shit about Spiderman
Any video game based on a licensed IP is inherently lesser to me, no matter how good it is. If a third party can pull it from shelves if/when the license expires its shit.
Well said anon, there's a reason none of my favorite games are licensed despite some of them being serviceable mechanically. I make an exception for LOTRO and LOTR Two Towers/Return of the King though.
It's just soul ripping listening to the Ratchet & Clank developer commentary knowing that these people and their contemporaries aren't the people working at Insomniac anymore, and even if they were it wouldn't matter with Sony making them milk Spiderman anyway. I don't blame them personally, it's just sad that they're a non factor for me now. Same with Naughty Dog after dude raider and Last of Us
Mm whachusaaaay.
MM is a small studio. They've almost trippled their size since the release of Dreams. I guess some of those new employees didn't work out.
I'm surprised Media Molecule outlasted Studio Liverpool. You'd think modern Sony would have shuttered them for not making movie games.
I'm more surprised that they haven't been shuttered for not making games at all? They aren't the ones making the latest LBP games, there was a significant gap between Tearaway and Dreams, and nothing for 4 years since dreams and (honestly without looking anything up) I don't feel Dreams performed particularly well; it came and went. Despite that the studio has only gotten bigger, and Dreams didn't get much post launch support did it? It never even got a performance upgrade for PS5 like that other anon mentioned
They added PSVR1 support to it a few years back. I'm pretty sure they never added multiplayer like they promised and if they did then it was way too late for anyone to care.
That's just pitiful, feels weird thinking back to the page of job listings they'd had opened on their website ~4 years ago when I was a little depressed and thought shifting gears from enterprise software to game development would give me a spark. Genuinely can't imagine what they've had any of those people doing. Also thank God I didn't actually jump careers and that it was just an emotional phase brought on by ignoring other problems I was letting into my life.
>stop making games
>stop making money
>get shutdown
I'd say I'm not surprised but honestly, Media Molecule has really held on for dear life and I'm shocked this kind of shit didn't plague them a decade ago after something like Tearaway. They've generally been more based than profitable.
>Dying
>Still BTFOS Xbox even with the 200 million flop starfield
Xbox fanboys are delusional kek
Enjoy importing the Saudi version of games
>Starfield, the saviour of Xbox turned out to be a meme with ugly models and boring gameplay, 0 chances of winning goty
>Halo Infinite flopped
>Everwild in development hell
>Perfect Dark in development hell
>Fable confirmed to be pozzed and woke, also in development hell
>Gears 5 flopped and Gears Collection is nothing more than a rumor
>Redfall is a soulless always-online open world co-op shooter made to meet diversity quotas also flopped
>No Shinji Mikami kino because he left shortly after Bethesda/Tango acquisition
>removing emulators
>removing $1 gamepass
>miss 80% of all Japanese games unless Microsoft pays for a gamepass port
>goypass missing it's target every finacial quarter
>hardware revenue down
>dashboard littered with ads
>no offline achievement support
>storage upgrade only available through expensive proprietary solutions through selected vendors
>physical next gen disc games only contain the Xbox One version of games, requiring you to connect to the internet to download the Series X version
Imagine what the person who typed all this out looks like lmfao
>LBP was actually pretty good from a creative aspect
>they dropped the ball with LBP3 and it was palmed off to some nobody devs
>LB3 was shit, barebones and lazy as a means to peddle DLC
>Make dreams
>Dont put dreams on PC, the literal only platform its suited for and wouldve done well on, instead of a shitty underpowered box with a controller.
People are surprised? Snoy cope I guess.
What do you mean by dropped the ball with LBP3? I figured Sony just handed it off to another studio while Mm worked on something new(Dreams.. I guess), but if there's some drama I'd love to hear it
This is what you get for snoy exclusivity, you pay the toll.
Not enough diversity, I think this is a very clear sign sony needs even more diversity.
>PCeething already ITT
*long inhale*
*smooth exhale*
once again, never ever
this will be a good thing anyways
smaller studio will have a more cohesive vision, can't become something like UBI with too many cooks on the kitchen
Dreams is such a misconception that I'm surprised an entire studio took the project so far without anyone stopping them.
I feel sorry for the players who have dedicated years to this tool and will now be left with nothing because support has ended and now everyone has a limit of things to upload until finally there is nothing left. And one day some suit will pull the plug and the whole thing will disappear.
>And one day some suit will pull the plug and the whole thing will disappear.
any kind of game where the users create and share content on the game servers is typically going to end this way.
shit like brood war lasting almost 30 years is a huge anomaly
Whole tech industry is feeling it. Interest rates are high and everyone is tightening their belts. Its not just Sony who are laying people off. Its another recession
Legitimate question: am I supposed to feel bad about goyslop studios and companies going under? Haven’t we been saying the industry needs a massive correction for years? It’s not enough we honestly need more
Problem is, these are actual games, dreams is a nice platform, while crap like Horizon keep getting sequels, that's what needs correction.
>Make a game for Playstation
>Remember you can't make game
>Make a game maker instead, people will make the games instead
10/10, would ignore again
>one shit studio lose a few employees
>"oh no no no no it's so over sony will die. No this time for sure they will die."
So tiresome.
Are all snoys newbies whose first console was the PS4?
>PCeething already ITT
>*long inhale*
>*smooth exhale*
>once again, never ever
>this will be a good thing anyways
>smaller studio will have a more cohesive vision, can't become something like UBI with too many cooks on the kitchen