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Australia Businesses The Almighty Buck Games

2K, Australia's Last AAA Studio, Closes Its Doors 170

beaverdownunder writes 2K Australia, the Canberra studio that most recently developed Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, is closing its doors. The entire studio is closing, and all staff members will lose their jobs. "All hands are gone," said a source for Kotaku Australia. 2K Canberra was the last major AAA-style studio operating out of Australia. The costs of operating in Australia are apparently to blame for the decision. This raises questions as to the viability of developing major video games in Australia.
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2K, Australia's Last AAA Studio, Closes Its Doors

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  • BL:TPS (Score:3, Funny)

    by gimmeataco ( 2769727 ) on Thursday April 16, 2015 @11:59AM (#49486811)
    I blame Pickle. I friggin hate that guy.
  • Viability nothing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Khyber ( 864651 ) <techkitsune@gmail.com> on Thursday April 16, 2015 @12:00PM (#49486817) Homepage Journal

    When you censor out so much potential subject material for use in a game, you think you're going to have as viable of a market base?

    • And charge $70AUD for one lousy game.
    • When you censor out so much potential subject material for use in a game, you think you're going to have as viable of a market base?

      Well, Harry Potter is really GTA4 cleaned up and put into a book.

    • When you censor out so much potential subject material for use in a game

      What are you dribbling on about? The game censorship in Australia has absolutely no effect on the local producers and is a local restriction on sale only after the game has been produced. In this regard 2K Australia is affected the same way as any other company located anywhere else in the world.

    • AFAIK the only thing that is censored in an R18 rated game/movie is explicit sexual violence (rape porn), CP, explicit beastiality, etc. For a long while there was no R18 rating for games, they were assumed to be for children so the highest rating was MA16. Game studios would deliberately get a "banned" for publicity reasons, but unrated games have always been legally available on the net.

      We don't have a 'viable [domestic] market' for big budget movies/games because of our tiny population, nothing to do
  • I just prepaid for Kangaroo Hero 5!?!? Now what am I going to do?

  • Australia has corporate tax rates that are in general lower than those in, say, the United States. The US has lower tax rates for corporations with income less than $100,000, but I would very much assume that this studio made more than that. Regulations for this sort of industry are essentially the same around the world as well.

    The cost of doing business in Australia is negatively impacted because of major time zone differences from other English-speaking nations, and the significantly higher costs of trans

    • by kamapuaa ( 555446 ) on Thursday April 16, 2015 @12:18PM (#49487015) Homepage

      WTF? How much does it really matter for a somewhat independent game studio to be on the same time zone? This isn't finance or news. And the significantly higher cost of transportation? Really? That hasn't held back China from shipping to the US (shipping prices are miniscule), and anyway of course this is all being sent over the internet.

      Australia has a small population (23 million, less than metropolitan Shanghai) and higher education is lacking, of course it would be more difficult to have a competitive software company there.

      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        WTF? How much does it really matter for a somewhat independent game studio to be on the same time zone?

        Clearly you've never worked with someone in a different time zone.

        It's difficult enough working with people in the eastern states (I live in Western Australia) as there's a 3 hour time difference so realistically there is only a 5 hour period where you can do business.

        The US west coast is -10 GMT, the Australian east coast is +8 GMT. This means when someone gets to work in Sydney at 8:30 AM it's 3

        • Clearly you've never worked with someone in a different time zone.

          Deal with enough stuff and it doesn't matter where you are, somebody you want to communicate with is going to be in a different time zone.

        • by AdamHaun ( 43173 )

          The US west coast is -10 GMT, the Australian east coast is +8 GMT. This means when someone gets to work in Sydney at 8:30 AM it's 3:30 PM yesterday in LA, if the head office is in Washington D.C. then all the execs have already gone home as it's 5:30 PM.

          That's better than the U.S./India time difference.

    • US tax rate is 34% or 35%. It's a complex behemoth where the tax brackets are used to guarantee that businesses above $348,000 pay a flat 34% tax (i.e. they pay 34% of their total income, not X% of 1-348k and 34% of 348k+), and businesses above some short millions pay a flat 35% tax. It's ridiculous.

      AU corporate tax rate is 30%.

      You can imagine the rage when these companies use Ireland-based subsidiaries to collect the profits they make selling to EU states, instead of paying taxes on EU income to AU or

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Australia has been hostile to businesses for years and is just starting to pay the price. Holden left along with other manufacturers. The remaining domestic manufacturers are military contractors or mining related. Australia started to believe their own BS that they could compete in something other than digging resources out of the ground and selling it to china. Now that china has their african resource chain setup & running, they are dropping australian contracts.

      tldr: australia partied it up like an

      • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Seriously who the fuck wants to compete with China's wages. Hostile to business, damn fucking right hostile to business. Keep pushing that B$ and you'll see how hostile it ends up and we are not just talking Australia but the whole 'western world'. If paying for imports is a problem, well, Australian just needs to smarten up and stop importing anything, it not like it is really necessary and that the capability of producing everything it needs can not be achieved (primary resources being the key, those wit

    • by T.E.D. ( 34228 )

      Don't really see how timezone differences come out as a "cost". It would be pretty expensive to fly marketing people out to trade shows in your bigger market areas, but given than the two biggest markets are currently on different continents (one of which spans 4 timezones), everyone has that issue.

      Product transport costs should only be an issue if they were also manufacturing in AU. I doubt that, but even if they were that's solvable by using the same manufacturers everyone else does.

      If your whole team i

    • by Burz ( 138833 )

      It probably has something to do with letting Rupert Murdoch and his cronies run the country, too. Seriously, he controls about 70% of the media there and Abbott would not be in power now if Murdoch hadn't declared war on the Labor party.

    • by dbIII ( 701233 )

      The cost of doing business in Australia is negatively impacted because of major time zone differences from other English-speaking nations

      Trolltech used that to their advantage so that they could have fully awake people available to deal with things 24/7 from Norway and Australia - as well as having a carrot of Norwegians going directly from a cold winter to summer at the beach with cheap and plentiful beer.
      Also CHINA, JAPAN, KOREA are close to the time zone.

  • We need new blood in this stale gaming industry to grace us with new games other than Call of Battlefield Raider Evil Kombat: Special Edition 9846545 (2015 Gold Premium Collector's Edition GOTY re-release).
    • by Fwipp ( 1473271 )

      I dunno, that game sounds kind of incredible. I'd probably buy it.

      • Marge: Not now Homer, a new violent video game has hit the streets, and we need to get rid of it before it warps any children with its bloops and bleeps!

        Homer: But that game sounds AWESOME.
    • Well then play Shovel Knight, Stick It To The Man, and Elliot Quest. (Elliot Quest is a pile of good ideas meshed in bad polish: the game is poorly designed, leaving the player lost and confused, giving inconsistent visual cues, and requiring the use of non-movement-altering to affect movement. For example: the wind ability doesn't affect your movement in horizontal wind; an hour after you get it and an unrelated set of WINGS, you're expected to intuit that the wind ability makes you fly in vertical wi

      • by gl4ss ( 559668 )

        I don't want to play NES games.

        I want to play games like Ultima Underworld, System Shock and other innovative titles that had great stories, atmosphere and gameplay and felt alive.

        Skyrim comes close but it doesn't really feel like 20 years of advancement to be honest.

        the retro fad is.. well, it's lazy, from game design perspective almost as lazy as cod.

        • From an art perspective it's lazy, maybe. Depends. Sprite design vs 3D model design... some people find 3D easier than 2D. Game design is more complex than visual style.
  • by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Thursday April 16, 2015 @12:10PM (#49486941) Homepage Journal
    Game studios all over the world close pretty regularly. Seems like the only way to make it in that market is to churn out vast quantities of game, most of which will be complete shit. If any of those does accidentally end up being a good game, make a franchise out of it and pile sequel after sequel on it until you've extracted every last penny of possible value out of it. You can only really do this so long as you can keep the hype machine churning and you keep astroturfing all your titles.

    I hardly ever go for AAA titles anymore. I'd much rather spend $20 or less on an indy title. If it turns out to be shit, I'm not out that much and my hit-to-miss ratio tends to be a whole lot better. I've gotten some remarkably good games that way. I think I've still put more time into Dwarf Fortress than the rest of my steam library combined. It has simple, nethack-style ASCII graphics and tends to bog down two or three years into one of the gigantic fortresses I like to dig out, but it's sill a ridiculous amount of fun.

    • Indy titles are great. A lot of the older games that are fondly remembered can be produced by independent authors today. Abusive publishers, going Public, "Hollywood accounting", polygons for every speck of dirt, and tight schedules are completely optional. You and your team might not do it for a living, but that might be okay.
    • Re: Or Anywhere (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If you like DF, you should check out Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, if you haven't already. Set after a zombie apocalypse, it is somewhat like adventure and fortress modes combined.

    • The game industry as a whole has more hype than reality. Being a game dev is usually a pretty crappy job as there is always at least one unreasonable deadline coming up soon. The profits are hit or miss, and there are many more misses than hits, so job security is extremely low. The big well known names in game design are very often changing companies. Investments in games companies are very risky. Game companies rise and fall and are generally short lived, you often have several game related companies

  • Not unexpected (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RogueyWon ( 735973 ) on Thursday April 16, 2015 @12:13PM (#49486965) Journal

    This is a real shame for those laid off, not least because there are so few other employers in that sector in Australia.

    But it's not unexpected. Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (BL:TPS) was a commercial flop. Borderlands 2 has done around 10 million sales across all platforms. Prior to the release of the heavily discounted "Handsome Collection" for PS4 and Xbox-One, BL:TPS hadn't even managed a million.

    That's partly because the game wasn't as good as Borderlands 2. Reviews and word of mouth were both pretty harsh on it. I've completed it twice. It actually has some decent (if unoriginal) content, but the first 6 hours or so are a miserable trudge.

    But it's also because 2k made a big gamble on the PS4 and Xbox-One being commercial failures, and hence the game launched on PS3, 360 and PC. Their gamble was wrong; both of those consoles managed strong sales. Worse, the early-adopters had a huge overlap with "people who buy a lot of games". While the installed base for the PS3 and 360 remains huge, sales for them have largely dried up, outside of Call of Duty and FIFA.

    Console transitions are scary for publishers. 2k's bet wasn't entirely unreasonable. The 3DS had a difficult launch, while the Vita and Wii-U basically flopped. The industry saw Ubisoft invest heavily in the Wii-U launch and get burned by it. But of all the major houses, 2k bet most heavily against the PS4 and Xbox-One and their first major release after those consoles launched paid the price.

    It was clear that 2k had largely given up on the game. While Borderlands 2 was supported for years post-launch with well-crafted and extensive DLC, BL:TPS was funded to deliver precisely enough DLC to satisfy the contractual requirements of the Season Pass; not an ounce more. Its inclusion so soon after launch in a cut-price compilation was another sure sign that 2k were in damage-limitation mode.

    • Awww.... That's a shame. Personally, I don't think it's that bad. It's a little buggy, and the humour comes across as more manic than sarcastic, but I still enjoyed the game.

      I was really looking forward to more DLC... I guess that's not happening. :(

    • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

      It actually has some decent (if unoriginal) content, but the first 6 hours or so are a miserable trudge.

      But, uh, isn't that exactly the same as Borderlands 2?

      Actually, I'd have to admit that I couldn't even stand it long enough to play six hours, so maybe it's even worse.

      • I did a free weekend on it, but ultimately it did seem to get a bit old. It's designed for a cooperative team but I don't have many friends who play games (and even I'm not a big fan of shooters) and I definitely won't get a randomly picked team from online strangers who like to trash talk and teabag everything. On the other hand it didn't seem as lame as most generic shooters.

        • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

          True. Multiplayer might have been OK.

          Otherwise, it just felt like Borderlands 1 with most of the fun removed.

    • CoD and FIFA mentioned in the same breath... I never thought I'd see the day.
  • Judging by the bulk of games on steam, iTunes and the android play store, there must be a massive market for low quality unimaginative copycat games that take at most 2 or 3 weeks to hack together. its seems its just more evidence that you can never understimate the level of quality that many consumers will accept and pay for.

    Consequently 'm wondering if real reason for 2k closing is that the whole model of fronting tens of millions to develop a AAA game is just no longer as viable/profitable as just chucki

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Steam Greenlight in the worst thing that's happened to gaming in years. I remember when games on Steam ranged from excellent titles to just plain terrible crap that publishers shat out. I thought it couldn't get worse.

      Holy crap was I ever wrong! The shit that manages to get Greenlit is just amazing. Stupid visual novels, games that were created via "Make a Game" type programs, literal "choose your own adventure" novels done as an "HTML program", just absolutely terrible shit that previously publishers woul

    • by dbIII ( 701233 )

      there must be a massive market for low quality unimaginative copycat games that take at most 2 or 3 weeks to hack together

      If you look at the list of MAME ROMs you'll see you are also describing a big chunk of arcade game history.

  • by sandbagger ( 654585 ) on Thursday April 16, 2015 @01:01PM (#49487495)

    The thing is, BL2 was beautifully written. So much was gotten right at the story level in BL2 that the sequel was fine as a stand alone game, but not nearly as good.

    Let me give an example: the hub of the story takes place at Sanctuary. It's where you get instructions from some of the major NPCs and get upgrades. However, you aren't there until the first quarter of the game and when you do, you approach its high walls on foot and have a job defending them. A few chapters later, you're pitched out of Sanctuary and can't get back there.

    For a while at least. You can see it, it's always present but off in the distance but it's 'you can't they there from here'. Later, after (no spoilers) changes involving two major characters, the terrain changes and colour scheme becomes really dark.

    In contrast, the Presquel's story hub literally has no purpose in the plot. Sure you can buy gear there like at Sanctuary but you have no emotional investment in Concordia, and you don't even know what it looks like from the outside. Finally, there's zero, nada, third act twist. As the game takes place before BL2 we know the NPCs will fall out with Jack. Okay, but the 'reason' when it happened not only idiotic, but had no story function. Jack murders someone who gives gives him excellent advice about reducing the risk of being betrayed. Okay, no only does that make no sense but there are multiple prison cells on that very map!

    Moreover, Tassiter had no story. If the story had been that Tassiter alerts the vault hunters about what's happening to Angel, and Jack's wife is killed in the rescue while trying to get Angel to New Haven (destroyed for unknown reason after BL1) then you'd have a story.

  • Isn't that just irrational.
  • The Australian video game industry has always been a bit boom or bust. We had some great stuff going on in the late 90s and some great titles coming out, then a bit of a downturn during the dotcom bubble burst.

    But when that happened, one USD started buying two AUD, and a lot of US companies started setting up studios in Australia. They had a few good years, taking advantage of the cheap cost of labour thanks to both leveraging the exchange rate and the enthusiastic and excellent Australian staff, but once t

  • This was the studio that brought us Bioshock: Infinite. I still remember that game blowing my mind which was a pleasant change from the general crap that had been released in the past few years.

  • by Gumbercules!! ( 1158841 ) on Thursday April 16, 2015 @09:37PM (#49490791)
    Where if it doesn't involve a shovel and a hole in the ground, we're not interested!

    We have absolutely no future proofing of our economy or concept of sustainability. Everyone is 100% focused on digging up iron ore and *nothing else matters*. If the iron ore price tanks (and it has) - we just lay people off and dig more up!

    Not to be the typical IT person who only focuses on IT but I've never understood our national refusal to consider the Internet as a viable business location - it's still viewed by politicians as kind of a toy for residentials only and a place where piracy happens. We have a completely stable country, politically and geographically. We don't get tornadoes. We don't get earthquakes. We don't get wars. We have huge tracks of unused land, that has ample sunlight, low temperatures and massive amounts of wind and tide (the entire southern coastline). We could have the best datacentres in the world - and anyone who thinks there's no money in the cloud isn't paying attention. But there's zero will to even consider it because it's not about digging up rocks and paying China to smash them up for us.

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