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[–] 20 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Has it ever worked out when a big studio buys the rights to a game from an indie?

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    That's practically Valve's entire catalogue other than Half-Life itself. They don't just buy the rights, though. They hire the independents that originally made the thing.

    Although back in the day, Gearbox was actually a good dev. They did the standalone expansions for HL1 (Opposing Force and Blue Shift) and also made Borderlands. I think Randy is getting too involved these days instead of letting the talent in the company cook.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)
  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Isn't Minecraft still mostly original devs though? I thought Microsoft basically paid notch to fuck off and then basically told Mojang to keep doing what they were already doing; as long as papa Microsoft gets their cut, they're happy kinda thing.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    From what I understand that's basically the gist of with the exception that the elite developer was transferred over to a new person, the only real conditionals is of course Microsoft has say if they decide to do something they want. Thankfully that has only been in regards to moderation and of course the shitty account management so far,

    their main problem currently is that Community mostly ran off of modding support, and with every big game mechanic change they lose more mods due to people moving on/no longer interested in the game. But considering the game itself is 13 years old now it's impressive that it's still going as strong as it is.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    The amount of people upset with the game's direction has somewhat increased after 1.9's combat changes and markedly increased after 1.19 was a huge disappointment. No real competitor has emerged, but the amount of people disgruntled with the game has never been higher.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    IIRC didnt gearbox work with the original devs before on ror2? Not defending them, if anything that makes it even worse that they dropped the ball this hard.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Yeah they worked on the last DLC, which was really good. I think they mainly were involved in the level design though, which even this DLC has down well.

    It's just everything else that makes a game being fucked. No idea why the original devs/designers weren't aquirehired and kept onboard. Maybe they didn't like what ol' Randy had planned.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    They probably just wanted to move onto making other games and with the offer of buying that IP they cashed in so they could have more capital for their new projects by offloading something they no longer had any plans for whatsoever.

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