Category: News

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Los Angeles, California

Yacht Club Games is working on a new 3D project and is building out our 3D team (and custom engine) to complement our existing 2D team. We are on the lookout to hire a capable mid to senior level gameplay programmer with a desire to build great gameplay experiences in a small, team-centered environment!

Responsibilities

• Work collaboratively with designers, artists, musicians, programmers to implement and improve upon game designs with efficacy and efficiency
• Write and extend tools and gameplay systems
• Optimize runtime performance and team productivity

Qualifications

• Deep interest in playing and making games
• Self-motivated and curious with a willingness to continue learning
• In-depth knowledge and understanding of game design
• Proficient in C and C++ programming languages for creating 2D and 3D games
• Strong 3D math skills (linear algebra, vector math)
• Applied problem solving abilities – in particular related to game design and developing gameplay systems
• Good oral and written communication skills; ability to work and contribute in a collaborative environment

Bonus

• Experience with multi-threading
• Experience with low level debugging and optimization
• Experience writing multi-platform code
• Experience with GPU programming (graphics shaders, compute)
• Experience with network programming
• Experience with UI programming
• Experience with build systems
• Experience playing products from Yacht Club Games

Benefits & Perks

• Working in a collaborative environment where you are a core part of the team and are welcome to contribute to any aspect of the company that interests you!
• Creating fun and challenging games that tug at heartstrings and delight with charm
• Robust medical and dental insurance for you and your dependents
• Generous Profit Sharing and Bonus plans
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan with 4% company match
• Unlimited discretionary vacation and sick days that we want you to use!
• Working in our beautiful office located in Los Angeles!

Yacht Club Games is an Equal Opportunity Workplace

The team at Yacht Club Games is committed to diversity and inclusion and we wholeheartedly encourage candidates of diverse backgrounds and voices to apply for this position!

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

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If there’s anything that defines Valve’s Team Fortress 2, it’s the game’s commitment to change.

Compared to its launch in 2007, the game has become almost unrecognizable, as it’s grown from a traditional team-based shooter into an ever-evolving free-to-play service with persistent loot, myriad new game modes, and much more.

The game’s ongoing content updates have practically become the lifeblood of the hit shooter, as they’ve given Valve the opportunity to experiment with new ideas and add new content that helps the game stay in line with the latest market trends.

Very few online shooters continue to grow five years into their lifespan, yet Team Fortress 2 has proven itself a rare exception. We recently got in touch with the game’s lead designer, Robin Walker, and he said that much of that success can be attributed to his team’s unique approach to post-launch content.

The real trick, Walker explained, is to make sure that the core dev team is responsible for all aspects of a new game update — that includes design, marketing, and even community outreach. During our interview, Walker detailed how he and his team craft their updates for Team Fortress 2, and offered a number of tips to help other developers better support their online games.

The first step to creating an interesting game update, Walker said, is to determine how it will be presented to your players. Team Fortress 2 updates tend to revolve around a specific idea or theme, and Walker has found that it helps the design team identify what makes a new release interesting and unique.

“After each major [Team Fortress 2] update, our team gets together and sketches out a general framework for the next update,” Walker said. “The team spends some time discussing what combination of these various goals makes sense for the next update, and then we try to find a customer facing wrapper around it.”

In the past, these “wrappers” have been specific character classes, new game modes, and even real-world holidays. By giving the update a single focal point to work around, it becomes much easier to give the release an identifiable label that will grab players’ attention.

“Sometimes we’re forced to fall back on something more abstract if the update includes a wide ranging set of disparate features (like the Hatless Update). Occasionally it works the other way around, where we’ve got a customer facing update wrapper already (like Halloween or Christmas) and we can derive team member’s work from the wrapper.”

Once the “wrapper” is in place, it’s time to determine exactly what the update will entail. And for Walker and his team, designing an update isn’t just about creating new content; it’s also about creating content that’s marketable.

“We think that marketing is a game design problem, and that means we need to ensure each update is easy to market. So once we’ve know what an update’s public face is, we start trying to sketch out how the release will work,” Walker said.

“If we don’t think [an update] is exciting enough, or we find the messaging is hard to write, then we know the update needs more [content]. Sometimes that means adding new features to the game; other times it means adding more content outside the game, like a movie or comic that drives our narrative forward, or a meta-game like the Soldier vs. Demoman war,” he said.

“The important thing is that the development team itself is responsible for figuring out how the update will generate excitement. That way, these things get properly rolled into the update itself, and don’t end up feeling like a tacked on marketing ploy.”

Even once the update is ready to go and the marketing plan is in place, however, the team’s job isn’t over. Once a new update goes live, the dev team needs to determine how their new content has affected the game. To do so, Walker said developers should remain in close contact with their community, as qualitative human feedback can be far more nuanced and valuable than numbers or metrics alone.

“We’re terrified of making decisions driven only by statistics, because they may result in short term gains and long term costs (due to our current lack of hard stats for customer happiness). In the end, we care more about the general customer response to our updates than the statistical results,” Walker said.

“Don’t put anyone in-between the team and their customers. The team members must read customer conversations, support calls, and so on, because it’s all data for them to understand better how they’re doing. Each of those interactions is also an opportunity to provide novel and valuable content to their customers. Interacting with your audience outside your product is a game in and of itself, and the team should try to do that here as well as they do in-game.”

In all, Walker believes the key to updating and supporting an online game is maintaining a collaborative, unified approach to development. Even if your team is full of design, marketing, and community specialists, it’s easier to create a cohesive product if everyone is working together as a single unit.

“I’d recommend that you approach your updates holistically, so that the team members know that they must consider all aspects of releasing an update as a single problem they must solve,” he said.

This holistic approach certainly requires diligence, ample communication, and a lot of hard work, but if Team Fortress 2‘s ongoing success is anything to go by, it can pay off in spades.

Sensor Tower’s latest Pokemon Go revenue estimates surmise that the game has just exited a record breaking start to 2020 and surpassed $3.6 billion lifetime revenue.

According to the firm’s latest report on Niantic’s massive AR game, the first six months of 2020 saw Pokemon Go reap $445 million in revenue across iOS and Android, up 12 percent year-over-year. Going by Sensor Tower’s numbers, its not quite as strong of a year-over-year increase as years past, but still manages to relatively keep pace with Pokemon Go‘s pandemic-free years. 

It’s an especially notable feat considering Pokemon Go itself is a location-based AR game, and one managing to thrive seemingly despite the still-ongoing coronavirus pandemic that has, for most of the year, discouraged the sort of social adventure Pokemon Go relies on.

Niantic, like other devs dabbling in location-based AR, rolled out a series of tweaks and changes earlier into 2020 that aimed to make Pokemon Go playable during those stay-at-home orders. Though, with only revenue estimates to go on, its difficult to tell what role those changes played in the game’s recent revenues.

Ubisoft vice president of editorial Maxime Beland has resigned from his role after being accused of sexual harassment and assault.

The company also revealed that Beland’s fellow editorial vice president, Tommy Francois, has been placed on disciplinary leave pending the outcome of an investigation — although it’s worth noting that Francois had reportedly already been suspended. 

Meanwhile, another unnamed individual from Ubisoft Toronto has been fired for “engaging in behaviours that do not align with what is expected of Ubisoft employees.”

Beland’s departure, described as a “resignation,” follows a stream of allegations posted on social media accusing the Ubisoft exec of choking a female employee at a Far Cry party and several forms of sexual harassment. Ubisoft was reportedly aware of those allegations but chose not to act. 

Earlier this week, we spoke to multiple Ubisoft employees who told us how the company has enabled a culture of abuse and control that has allowed sexual harassment, abuse, racism, and homophobia to take root and flourish.

Ubisoft chief exec Yves Guillemot has since outlined a number of changes the company intends to make in a letter titled ‘Change starts today,’ including a shake-up of the editorial department, previously overseen by Beland and Francois, and the appointment of a Head of Diversity and Inclusion.

You can find the company’s latest statement, sent to Gamasutra by Ubisoft’s senior director of corporate communications Michael Burk, posted below.

Hi – I’m providing an update following the internal letter sent by Yves Guillemot yesterday, which outlined a series of initiatives aimed at improving the way in which Ubisoft operates.

Maxime Beland, Vice President Editorial, has resigned from his role at Ubisoft, effective immediately. Despite his resignation, we continue to investigate the allegations made against him. Additionally, effective as of yesterday, Tommy François, Vice President Editorial & Creative Services, has been placed on disciplinary leave pending the outcome of an investigation. One other individual in our Toronto studio has been terminated for engaging in behaviors that do not align with what is expected of Ubisoft employees. Other investigations are ongoing and will be conducted rigorously.

Ubisoft will not tolerate workplace misconduct and will continue taking disciplinary actions against anyone who engages in harassment, discrimination and other behaviors that infringe on our Code of Fair Conduct.

Mobile developer Animoca Brands has raised $4.1 million in funding to support a proposed initial public offering. 

The strategic funding round was backed by investors including M7 Asia, Mind Fund, and others, which have all entered into unsecured a convertible promissory note agreement with Animoca. 

The Crazy Defense Heroes and Beat Quest developer explained the capital will support an potential IPO, which would see it spin off the assets of nWay, Pixowl, TSB Gaming, and Quidd Inc. on Euronet or other public exchange. 

Animoca has spent the past few years expanding its business with a number of weighty acquisitions, the most recent of which saw it nab Power Rangers: Legacy Wars developer nWay for $7.69 million and digital collectibles marketplace Quidd for $5 million.

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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[Hi, I’m ‘how people find your game’ expert Simon Carless, and you’re reading the Game Discoverability Now! newsletter, which you can subscribe to now, a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

So, time for the next weekly ‘Game Discoverabilityland’ newsletter. As per normal, this round-up is going to be flitting around a whole bunch of relevant ‘summer season’ topics in a swift fashion.

I hope you’re hanging in there OK, by the way. I know there’s a lot going on in the real world. So I appreciate you taking time to read my thoughts about doing what we all love: making video games that elicit goofy, beautiful, and dumb emotions in people. Sometimes all at once. Aaand, onward to the info….

Xbox gets Summer Games Fest demos too!

Xbox is proud to reveal that our Summer Games Fest Demo Event will be live on Xbox One from July 21 to July 27. Details here: https://t.co/RoTcx957jo

— Xbox Wire (@XboxWire) July 1, 2020

As anyone who has an upcoming Xbox One game probably knows, Microsoft has teamed up with Geoff Keighley to offer an Xbox version of the Summer Game Fest demo showcase that already took place on Steam.

Sounds like there will be at least 60, and maybe 75-100 game demos available in the July 21st-27th showcase. Here’s a couple of notable points from the Microsoft write-up:

“Many of these demos are early, and some are for games that won’t be out for quite some time. We’ve never done this before… In other words, think of these as akin to “show floor demos” and not necessarily indicative of the final product.”

“These demos will only be up on the Xbox Dashboard for a week. Some might be re-published to the Demo channel later, but many will simply evaporate at the end of the week, so make sure to check them out while you can.”

One issue/quirk for console versions of this demo showcase is that it does put a bunch of extra strain on the game submission process (which you still need to clear for TRCs, etc.) So it’s actually quite a lot more work for Xbox. But I think it’s pretty darn cool, and looking forward to hearing – off the record, perhaps – how it goes.

iOS things – China blockers, Apple Arcade?

We haven’t been covering premium mobile games much, partly because the business doesn’t generally scale to Steam/console revenues. (F2P mobile game revenue scales WAY beyond Steam/console, of course, but that’s a whole different animal.)

Anyhow, there are a couple of notable updates around iOS games that it’s worth pointing out:

– Apple now requires you to get a Chinese ISBN to publish your paid (or IAP-including) game in the China App Store, starting July 1st, 2020. So you will now need a Chinese partner and to submit the game to the authorities – likely with a long approval delay. (I’ve heard that select premium mobile games, even indies, did very well in China. So this isn’t great, and a likely blocker to revenue success. Let’s hope we never get there with Steam, eh?)

– The subscription-based Apple Arcade service has scrapped a number of deals for Apple Arcade exclusives, as it reframes and looks for titles with stronger engagement/hook. The service has been giving carte blanche – and great $ deals – to independent and medium-sized devs. So it’s a shame for those affected.

Am guessing the choice of boutique-style games for Apple Arcade – high quality, critically acclaimed, ‘slightly artsy’, more than hook-heavy – has not been a subscription hit for them so far. Some say this is another bad sign for short, sweet titles. Perhaps so.

Alternatively, it may be more of a portfolio rebalancing, since Apple still has plenty of other intriguing-looking games with active deals. So we’ll see. Personally, I’d love to see a better balance of games, since the titles I played the most on Apple Arcade (What The Golf?, Cricket Through The Ages) are definitely on the shorter-play but hookier side.

Hype to sales: a logical ratio?

Following up from my recent data-crunching on your first-week Steam sales compared to launch wishlists, I did end up making an additional graph out of the data, as follows (Y axis is logarithmic, line of fit is polynomial, nerds):

New graph: here’s how 50 Steam games sold in their first week, compared to the dev’s rating of their pre-release ‘hype’/interest on a 0-10 scale. (Data via: https://t.co/M7djcx2rFu.) pic.twitter.com/jei1OjkDBS

— Simon Carless (@simoncarless) June 18, 2020

The results may seem obvious – the better pre-launch interest, the better sales on average, albeit with major outliers. But it’s interesting because some of these games rated 1 or 2 on pre-launch hype definitely had a lot (>10,000) of wishlists, but still sold poorly.

So this suggests that developers should pay attention to how much interest their game is getting, and not (solely) your wishlists. Wishlists can be highly misleading in isolation. Bottom line: you can’t sit back and relax after a bunch of wishlists, if you don’t know how convertible they are.

[And I know there’s an inherent bias in this pre-launch hype data, since devs were asked to provide it _after_ they knew how well the game had done. I’ll look for other, better metrics.]

Other things….

Look, I’m going to start this roundup by simply linking an embed of Ryan Clark’s latest Clark Tank game success/metrics stream (the archived YouTube version, since it has skippable chapters in it. But you can go to the Brace Yourself Games Twitch page to catch it live & ask questions.)

Why? Ryan’s streams are the video version of what I do here (empirical but non-moneygrabby careful analysis of the market). And his studio’s games (Crypt Of The Necrodancer, Industries Of Titan, Cadence Of Hyrule, Phantom Brigade) are proof that his well-planned business strategy actually works, and he wants to tell others about it.

[embedded content]

Moving on, here’s the rest of the goodness:

• Sony has a new PlayStation Indies initiative which is looking to highlight (and I presume give marketing/store support to!) great-looking PS4 and PS5 indies. Since publicity is oxygen to indies, this is much appreciated – full list of initially showcased games at bottom of the linked post. Also notable: “a new indie title will join the PlayStation Now [streaming] service every month.”

• Kitfox’s Victoria Tran has written a great post about using TikTok to promote her studio’s games (and generally be light-hearted). So far she thinks: “Amazing platform to engage with a new audience, maybe good for mobile games, but do not rely on it for any sort of conversion for your PC/console game.” But read the whole thing!

• There were 142 games released digitally on Nintendo Switch in June 2020, according to Thomas Bidaux. That’s the biggest ever release month for Switch with the exception of October 2019, and up nearly 40% year on year (though most of last year was floating between 100 and 120 games per month.) Interesting.

• Trailer king(TM) Derek Lieu is adding to his YouTube channel on how to make great game trailers. I dug this piece on why establishing shots are not the best way to start your trailer – even if they make you feel like an Oscar-winner.

• Did you know that Nintendo Switch games that cost 1 cent are excluded from the Switch charts in North America, but ones that cost 3 cents are not? Now you do. (Yes, I’m spending too much time staring at the Switch charts recently.)

• Micro-links: it’s not games, but here’s how you get discovered on Spotify; check out the state of game streaming platforms in the wake of Mixer’s closing announce; this deeply personal story about an indie and 10 years of game development shows a decade is a LONG time in games.

This year’s online iteration of in-person fighting game tournament EVO 2020 has been canceled after a number of sexual harassment claims were made against organization co-founder Joey ‘Mr Wizard’ Cuellar, who has since been removed from his role as CEO. 

Stories shared online accuse Cuellar, who has been involved with the annual esports series since its inception in 1996, of engaging in sexual misconduct. One person claimed that Cuellar, referred to in their account by his pseudonym ‘Wizard,’ would often bribe “young boys” to take their clothes off and jump in pools. 

“He would pay people hundreds of tokens to do things like take off their clothes and jump in the water hazard pools for certain amounts of times. 99 percent of the time, it was young boys,” reads the allegation, posted on Twitter. 

Cellular is also alleged to have paid one person, who was 17 years old at the time, $20 to reveal themselves to him in a bathroom in order to settle a bet. 

As the allegations began to circulate on social media, a number of high-profile developers and players including NetherRealm, Bandai Namco, Capcom, and five-time Evo champion Dominique ‘SonicFox’ McLean pulled out of the tournament in order to “stand in solidarity with those who have spoken out against abuse.”

Evo responded to the allegations on July 2, explaining that Cuellar had been placed on “administrative leave pending a third party investigation.” Now, just two days later, Cuellar has been removed as CEO and will “no longer be involved with EVO in any capacity.”

“Over the past 24 hours, in response to serious allegations recently made public on Twitter, we have made the first of a series of important decisions regarding the future of our company. Effective immediately, Joey Cuellar will no longer be involved with Evo in any capacity. We are currently working towards his complete separation from the company and have relieved him of all his responsibilities,” reads the latest Evo statement. 

“Going forward, Tony Cannon will act as CEO; in this position, he will take a leadership role in prioritizing greater accountability across Evo, both internally and at our events. Progress doesn’t happen overnight, or without the bravery of those who speak up against misconduct and injustice. We are shocked and saddened by these events, but we are listening and committed to making every change that will be necessary in making Evo a better model for the strong, safer culture we all see. 

“As a result, we will be canceling Evo Online and will work to issue refunds for all players who chose to purchase a badge. We will donate the equivalent of the proceeds as promised to Project HOPE.”

As for Cuellar, he appears to have acknowledged the allegations in a short tweet. “I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt anyone,” he wrote. “I was young and reckless and did things I’m not proud of. I have been growing and maturing over the past 20 years, but that doesn’t excuse anything. All I have been trying to do is become a better person. Once again, I’m truly sorry.”

These allegations are the latest in a growing number against those in positions of power within the games industry. Dying Light 2 writer Chris Avellone was recently accused of sexual harassment and assault, while a huge number of people have lambasted Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft for enabling a toxic culture that protects and emboldens abusers — many of whom held high-level positions at the company.