In mid-2016, a few months before the release of their first game, Mafia III, the developers at Hangar 13 in Novato, California gathered for an all-hands meeting. There, according to two people in attendance, Christoph Hartmann, president of the game’s publisher, 2K, told employees that their bonuses would be tied to…
Over the past few months, BioWare has essentially transformed into a single-game studio as it harnesses its teams to work on the ambitious multiplayer action game Anthem, sources say. There are still small teams maintaining Star Wars: The Old Republic and piecing together the next Dragon Age, which was recently…
It seemed like a surefire hit: a Star Wars take on Uncharted, published by Electronic Arts and developed by the longrunning studio Visceral Games. But nothing is sure in the video game industry, and on October 17, 2017, when employees of Visceral were told that the company would be closing, some who had worked for the…
In 2012, as work on Mass Effect 3 came to a close, a small group of top BioWare employees huddled to talk about the next entry in their epic sci-fi franchise. Their goal, they decided, was to make a game about exploration—one that would dig into the untapped potential of the first three games. Instead of visiting just…
There’s an old commercial for Westwood College that’s become something of a running joke in the video game world. Two young men sit at a couch, hammering away at PlayStation controllers. A woman walks in. “Hey guys, finish testing that game yet?” she asks. “I’ve got another one I need designed.”
After a year of financial hardship, Crytek is closing its studios in Hungary, Bulgaria, South Korea, China, and Turkey, the developer said today. Crytek says they plan to “refocus on its core strengths of developing innovative games and game-development technology.”
A former Crytek artist wants to sue the company for not paying its staff—and he’s crowdfunding a lawyer to make it happen.
The game company Crytek is again facing financial trouble and hasn’t paid many of its employees in months, according to a number of people who work there. Paychecks have been missing or late throughout most of 2016, Crytek employees say.
In February of 2011, fresh off nine months of 80-hour work weeks, Jessica Chavez took a pair of scissors to her hair. She’d been working so hard on a video game—14 hours a day, six days a week—that she hadn’t even had a spare hour to go to the barber.
For close to a decade, details about the multiplayer game that Blizzard called Project Titan have remained secret and elusive. Today we’d like to change that.
Video game development studio Red 5, best known as the company behind the online game Firefall, missed payroll last week and could not pay its staff on Christmas day, according to several people familiar with goings-on there.
One day in March of last year, video game writer Andrew Dice wrote out a check for all of his company’s money. He stuck it in the doorframe at his business partner’s apartment in Portland, Oregon, then went back to his own place. (They live in the same complex.) He closed all the windows. Then, as he tells it, he laid…
In the summer of 2013, months before they were supposed to ship their next video game, the game developers at Bungie went into panic mode.
One week in early February, three top employees from the independent game studio Darkside Games flew to Redmond, Washington for a secret meeting with Microsoft.
In June of 2011, then-LucasArts president Paul Meegan spoke publicly about his plans for turning the company around.
One morning late last year, not long after Guillaume, a developer at Ubisoft Montreal, had finished working on his newest game, he was told he'd be moving offices. This was not particularly unusual for Ubisoft Montreal, a company that employs close to 3,000 people and works on upwards of ten new video games at a…
As Crytek continues to face financial difficulties, we're hearing of more departures at the troubled company. This week, Homefront: The Revolution game director Hasit Zala resigned from his position at Crytek UK, according to three people familiar with goings-on at the studio.
There's still trouble at Crytek, the independent game developer behind games like Crysis and Ryse. And as of yesterday, the bulk of employees at Crytek's UK office are no longer going to work, according to people familiar with the situation.
Crytek, the developer behind Crysis and Xbox One launch game Ryse, is having trouble paying employees, and the company has been bleeding staff since March, according to people who work there.
The people who run Trendy Entertainment want you to know that things are better. Or maybe they want you to think things are better. Maybe they just want you to play their game.
