Category: News

ProbablyMonsters has opened an unnamed next-gen studio led by a group of former Borderlands and Torchlight developers. The studio, whose name is still being kept under wraps, is currently working on a next-gen co-op RPG. 

Although we don’t know the mystery studio’s moniker, we do know it’s being led by four veterans of the genre including Runic Games co-founders John Dunbar and Marsh Lefler, former Borderlands lead level designer and Runic studio head Patrick Blank, and former Runic CEO Allen Fong. 

All four helped bring the Torchlight franchise to life, and will now work on an all-new RPG with the help of ProbablyMonsters.

ProbablyMonsters chief exec Harold Ryan, who founded the multi-studio game company in 2019 with the remit of creating triple-A titles within a non-traditional business structure, explained its new acquisition is still in the incubation phase. 

“A major component of exiting this phase is finalizing a go-to-market plan where we’ll build the projected team final size,” he said. “Our first priority is building a team and establishing a healthy culture while being mindful of the game the team wants to build. We focus on the people first, and we have a timeline and budget to establish the team and culture.”

Outlining how the deal came about, Ryan said it became clear after a few early conversations that the Runic quartet could become the beating heart of a new “people-first” studio. 

“I’ve known Allen Wong for years, and we’ve always mutually shared information and ideas. Through Allen, I got to know the other leaders, John Dunbar, Marsh Lefler, and Patrick Blank, and I knew the four of them would fit in perfectly at ProbablyMonsters,” he continued. “Eventually, it came to the point where it was the right time for the leadership team to come join ProbablyMonsters so we could form a studio around them.

“Not only do the four leaders have a passion for crafting original co-op RPG games, they’re people-first developers who have a decade of collaborating on successful original RPG franchises. With ProbablyMonsters resources and support behind them, I’m confident they can fulfill their vision of creating outstanding next-gen co-op RPG games.”

Alongside the acquisition, ProbablyMonsters also revealed it is moving to a new, larger home in Bellevue, Washington. Its new 76,000 square foot headquarters will support the ProbablyMonsters team and its entire family of studios, which also includes Cauldron Studios and Firewalk Studios, while providing plenty of room for expansion.

Remnant: From the Ashes has been out for a year now. Its simple pitch of “Dark Souls with guns” was certainly enough to capture attention in September of 2019, but it came with an additional unusual pitch: thanks to its random level seeding and online community, it had the effect of becoming a live game supported by DLC as well.

That’s turned Gunfire Games from the house that made Darksiders II into a new kind of live game studio, one that relies on support for a single game with some paid DLC, rather than microtransactions, to keep the doors open. After a year of successfully keeping players hooked in its grim, moody world, we wanted to know what’s gone right for the folks at Gunfire, and what other developers might be able to learn from their success.

David Adams, creative director and president of Gunfire Games, joined us for a quick conversation last week, to explain how the Texas-based game developer was able to break away from the broad standards of live games and woo players with a different kind of shared online world.

First, some tablesetting. Remnant: From the Ashes is comparable to Dark Souls in that it’s a linear hardcore action game with a monstrous setting that rewards player reflexes. But one of its core differences is that online co-op takes a more dominant role in the game, and that the levels players pass through are uniquely generated for each player, giving them independent access to different zones with different loot.

So if a player wants a particular item, they need to work with their friends or the online community to figure out who has access to a particular room with a particular boss that needs slaying. And since items are designed to be more unique than the “make numbers and colors go up” method other online RPGs use, the incentive to explore those areas is strong.

Adams says this model has worked for Gunfire over the year in part because the company has pushed far away from the idea that players should need to grind for loot. “The emphasis of Remnant was to make a game that you could play over and over again, and get different content,” he explained. Because content is so expensive to produce, many live games (justifiably so!) rely on a grinding loop to extend previously-made content while new players work on that.

What’s interesting about Adams’ perspective on this model is that it actually strays away from the “forever game” that’s attracted developers to the online RPG genre of late. Adams said there was some desire to make a game that players could walk away feeling satisfied from, with the hopes that new content would lure them back in to capture something like the original experience.

It’s shaped how DLC has informed the team’s long-term success. Since one player, on their own, can’t see all of the bosses or weapons a content has to offer, they have an incentive to not just clear an area, but check in with other players to get access to everything else Gunfire has made.

Factoring in that “away time” from Remnant has helped informed Gunfire’s post-launch decisions. “I fully admit that…we didn’t really design the game to be like, ‘you’re gonna play this literally forever,’ because we didn’t want a game built around the idea of grinding the same content. Once you’ve seen all the random content, and gotten all the cool collectibles and figured out all the secrets and puzzles, we’re totally okay with [players] saying ‘alright, cool, I played Remnant.”

This apparently has borne out in Remnant’s sales numbers as well. Adams explained that releasing DLC for Remnant over the last year hasn’t resulted in what he would call the most “financially optimized” formula for the value of each DLC pack, but continued support for Remnant by way of DLC has attracted new players to the base game. “You get a lot of people on the fence, and they see you’re advertising all this new content, you can bundle the base game with all that DLC and it gets to be a better value proposition for a player,” he pointed out.

Remnant’s unique social situation (players hunting for certain “rooms” to get certain “drops”) raised an interesting discussion about the game’s social factor. Cross-play has been apparently difficult to implement (it only exists between Epic Games and Steam currently), and Adams admits the fact that there’s no way to look for specific instances within Remnant creates a small communication barrier between players.

But Adams says that other social design considerations within Remnant have encouraged players to go online and build their connections there, on platforms like Discord or Reddit. He said there are other ways that developers can make social design considerations to influence player interaction in their games.

“We think about socialization in a way that’s actually counterintuitive to how some people think,” he joked. “I actually think friendly fire is a really cool social mechanic that makes the game more interesting.”

This refers to Remnant’s rule that players’ gunfire can in fact, damage other players, a trait that other team-based or cooperative games have been shying away from. “It requires you to coordinate a little bit more,” he explained. It’s a feature that can be abused, but it helped shape other design choices in Remnant that kept players attached and communicating with one another.

“It just requires you to be aware of your teammates. You can’t just blindly fire and not worry about it…and you can’t just run in front of someone blasting something because you’re gonna get blasted.

If there’s one critical insight Adams has about the time Gunfire spent working on Remnant, it’s the time the team spent “wasting time” getting the initial prototype off the ground. There was a moment where while the rest of Gunfire was working on contract work or other projects, the team behind Remnant just numbered a small few working away at experiments that might not pan out.

“It’s really hard, especially as an independent studio, to resist the urge to just dump everybody [working] on it,” he said. “But we did a good job of getting other contract work and making sure most of the team was employed in other ways, so that we could really have three or four people working on [Remnant’s prototype] as long as possible.”

“That’s extremely valuable, I think.”

The legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games will be settled by a judge if both companies get their way, with the warring pair keen to avoid a jury trial.

Earlier this week, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers suggested the case should be put before a jury, and talked about the importance of “understanding what real people think.”

Since then, however, both Epic and Apple have discussed the matter, and have agreed the case should be “tried by the Court, and not by a jury.”

Both companies outlined their position in a filing submitted to the Northern California court handling the case, spotted by MacRumors, and seem to have finally found some common ground.

“Epic and Apple have met and conferred, and the parties agree that Epic’s claims and Apple’s counterclaims should be tried by the Court, and not by a jury,” reads the filing. 

“Therefore, with Epic’s consent, Apple hereby withdraws its demand for a jury trial pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 38(d). The parties respectfully request that the case (including any claims and counterclaims) proceed to a bench trial on a schedule determined by the Court.”

As it stands, Rogers has found that Apple is well within its rights to ban Fortnite from the App Store, and is estimating the case as a whole will be heard in July 2021.

Sumo Group has acquired Oregon-based development studio Pipeworks for an undisclosed fee. The deal is part of Sumo’s plan to break into the U.S. market, and includes Pipeworks’ 134-strong team and original properties like Prominence Poker. 

Based in the UK, Sumo Group is the parent company of LittleBigPlanet 3 developer Sumo Digital and others including The Chinese Room, Red Kite Games, and Lab42. 

Pipeworks was founded in 1999, and has developed or co-developed over 100 games and technology solutions for notable clients including EA Sports, Wizards of the Coast, and Google. 

It has previously worked on franchises including Terraria and Madden NFL, and is currently working on an unannounced original project. 

Commenting on the move, Sumo chief exec Carl Cavers said the purchase will help the company produce more new titles and original properties in-house. 

“This is the largest acquisition Sumo Group has made since IPO,” explained Cavers in a press release. “Our underlying market is strong, and we see good opportunities for new games, including Original-IP developed by our talented studios.”

WWE 2K series maker Take-Two Interactive Software and its subsidiaries 2K Games and 2K Sports are heading to trial over allegations of copyright infringement after a tattoo artist claimed the company reproduced their work without authorization. 

As reported by the Hollywood Reporter, an Illinois federal judge handed tattoo artist Catherine Alexander a partial summary judgement after finding that Take-Two had copied her work by recreating them on WWE 2K’s digital representation of wrestler Randy Orton. 

Take-Two claimed its use of the tattoos was authorized by an implied license, a fair use doctrine which allows for their inclusion in the WWE 2K franchise. However, because it’s unclear whether Alexander and Orton discussed permissible forms of copying and distributing her work, the judge has dismissed that defense.

The company also asserted that its use of the tattoos is ‘de minimis,’which is legalese for minimal or trivial, but because Take-Two decided to copy Orton’s tattoos in their entirety, the court has also cast doubt on the viability of that argument.

“There is disputed evidence regarding the value of the copyright tattoo works to the video games. Defendants argue the evidence establishes that consumers do not purchase WWE 2K because of the tattoos. But other evidence shows that consumers did purchase WWE 2K for its authenticity to the wrestlers’ appearance,” said the judge.

“In particular, Defendants admit that consumer response is a consideration to their development of WWE 2K and the design choices made. They also acknowledge that consumers expect there to be authenticity in the video games and that WWE would have rejected Orton’s video game persona if it appeared without his tattoos or appeared with tattoos that were different than Orton’s actual tattoos.

“Additionally, Alexander’s expert addresses the importance of authenticity to drive sales and profits. Thus, an issue of material fact exists as to whether Alexander suffered actual damages based on the value of the infringing use, defeating summary judgment.”

In short, then, Take-Two has openly admitted to copying Alexander’s work, and because their defense isn’t water-tight, it’ll now be down to a jury to decide whether that amounts to copyright infringement.