Things are dire in the game industry at the moment. Which is, unfortunately, a sentence I've been writing for a lot of moments—two years of moments, actually. I am now writing it again, wincing in sympathy, as former Riot executive Greg Street has taken to LinkedIn to have an (understandable) moan about his studio's lot.
For context, Street worked on World of Warcraft (you might know him as Ghostcrawler) as well as Riot's still-fermenting League of Legends MMO, before heading out to form his own company in 2023. Fantastic Pixel Castle has been working on Project Ghost for a minute, before having the funding rug pulled out by NetEase earlier this month.
The studio's been on the hunt for money, but having a hard time, as per the post itself (thanks, GamesRadar+). "Please indulge me in feeling salty for a moment. I understand that almost nobody in the video game business is making deals right now, and those that do happen are very small.
"There are many reasons for this state of affairs, but one of the least excusable ones is some of the gigantic investments in games or studios in the previous few years that didn't pan out. A fraction of that could have created a lot of smaller games."
As our own resident MMO-knower, the cynic in me does understand that MMOs just aren't really in vogue anymore, and I'm tempted to lean towards saying well, what do you expect? But it's not as if Street is wrong, here. I mean, it's hard to believe that all those execs pumping out huge live service games are justified when Concord and Suicide Squad exist. Every so often you get a Marvel Rivals, but it's not a surefire thing.
"I'm not blaming every game that didn't hit big," Street continues, "Making games is very hard after all. But when you hear about projects where the team was burning money because the game vision kept changing, or the build was never stable, or playtests just weren't fun, or the leadership team was a revolving door, then you know that game was unlikely to ever deliver a good experience for players."
I mean hey, sometimes the playtests even were fun. Phil Spencer loved that MMO Zenimax were developing, before Microsoft decided to take it 'round the back of a shed with a 12-gauge. I don't know if Project Ghost would've hit big, but I'm already exhausted with the capriciousness of the gaming industry, and I report on it second-hand.
All of this, Street says, "can make it slightly frustrating when you do have, as we do: A team with a proven track record, that works well together with very high morale, without any leadership drama, that has taken a game halfway through development, whose vision has not strayed and whose tech is very stable, which hard data suggests players love and will play.
"And yet," Street says, "There is still no available funding." Rough.
