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.
BL:TPS (Score:3, Funny)
Viability nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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Harry Potter (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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We don't have a 'viable [domestic] market' for big budget movies/games because of our tiny population, nothing to do
Re:What's a "Kokatu Australia"? (Score:5, Funny)
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It's spelled "cockatoo" [wikipedia.org]. HTH!
Re:Viability nothing (Score:4, Funny)
First off, he's referring to the Australian government's draconian policies regarding videogame content, so even if your definition of censorship was correct, his example would fit. However, your definition is not fucking correct:
censor
noun
1. an official who examines books, plays, news reports, motion pictures, radio and television programs, letters, cablegrams, etc., for the purpose of suppressing parts deemed objectionable on moral, political, military, or other grounds.
2. any person who supervises the manners or morality of others.
3.an adverse critic; faultfinder.
4.(in the ancient Roman republic) either of two officials who kept the register or census of the citizens, awarded public contracts, and supervised manners and morals.
5.(in early Freudian dream theory) the force that represses ideas, impulses, and feelings, and prevents them from entering consciousness in their original, undisguised forms.
verb (used with object)
6.to examine and act upon as a censor.
7.to delete (a word or passage of text) in one's capacity as a censor.
To explain more succinctly, you're a goddamn moron who most likely has been corrected many times for crying "OMG what about teh frist amendmentz!!!!?!!?" when discussing an issue that did not involve the US government, and instead of learning the actual text of the first amendment, you lost your understanding of the word censorship. Because you're a goddamn moron.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Steal has a definition. Specifically "the wrongful or willful taking of money or property belonging to someone else with intent to deprive the owner of its use or benefit either temporarily or permanently." Downloading without permission is not stealing, as you have no intention of depriving the owner of the use or benefit of the property. It is a copyright violation. That's why it's charged under the DMCA.
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Why the fuck would illegally using the internet, I guess by driving and operating a mobile device, or perhaps being on probation with the condition of not using the internet, make downloading music, something that is always usually legal, make it stealing? And does that make reading /. stealing as well?
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The illegal taking of property is stealing.
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On the contrary, it fits definition 2 perfectly, definition 3 slightly, and definition 1 not at all. Copyright infringement is appropriation without right. It is not taking property.
I think that the confusion is that it's more-or-less correct to call it "stealing", but it is not correct to call it "theft". "Theft" is a legal term, and "stealing" is not.
Dammit! (Score:2)
I just prepaid for Kangaroo Hero 5!?!? Now what am I going to do?
Re:Dammit! (Score:5, Funny)
Well, you grab a Foster's, throw a shrimp on the barbie, and say to your mates "well strewth, that went to the shithouse".
Then you grab your missus and 9 week old, and go camping at Ayres Rock for a holiday.
Shrimp on the barbie (Score:2)
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What if a dingo took your baby?
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What if a dingo took your baby?
That's exactly why the above poster wrote "9 week old".
Why was the dingo in the courtroom?
To bring up evidence.
In before JERB-KILLITAXES AND REGULATIONZ (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:In before JERB-KILLITAXES AND REGULATIONZ (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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
That's life in a telegraph/telephone/internet worl (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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US tax rate is 34% or 35%. It's a complex behemoth where the tax brackets are used to guarantee that businesses above $348,000 pay a flat 34% tax (i.e. they pay 34% of their total income, not X% of 1-348k and 34% of 348k+), and businesses above some short millions pay a flat 35% tax. It's ridiculous.
AU corporate tax rate is 30%.
You can imagine the rage when these companies use Ireland-based subsidiaries to collect the profits they make selling to EU states, instead of paying taxes on EU income to AU or
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Australia has been hostile to businesses for years and is just starting to pay the price. Holden left along with other manufacturers. The remaining domestic manufacturers are military contractors or mining related. Australia started to believe their own BS that they could compete in something other than digging resources out of the ground and selling it to china. Now that china has their african resource chain setup & running, they are dropping australian contracts.
tldr: australia partied it up like an
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Seriously who the fuck wants to compete with China's wages. Hostile to business, damn fucking right hostile to business. Keep pushing that B$ 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
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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
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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.
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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.
Good (Score:2)
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I dunno, that game sounds kind of incredible. I'd probably buy it.
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Homer: But that game sounds AWESOME.
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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
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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.
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Or Anywhere (Score:3)
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.
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Re: Or Anywhere (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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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)
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.
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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. :(
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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.
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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.
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True. Multiplayer might have been OK.
Otherwise, it just felt like Borderlands 1 with most of the fun removed.
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Yeah. I know a lot of people with a backlog of games they've bought but haven't played.
My personal backlog is around 80 games. Most of those came as part of indie bundles, but I rarely spend more than £10 on a game because it's just not worth that much to me.
Most of my time goes into non-AAA games, so I give them the same £5-10 of investment I put into the AAA games. As the indies are often the innovators and the incubators of the industry this assures a healthy and vibrant market, e
thats not it (Score:2)
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
Steam Greenlight is the worst thing to happen (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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If you look at the list of MAME ROMs you'll see you are also describing a big chunk of arcade game history.
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Curious. I find there's a massive and vibrant PC gaming scene, with almost all of the console games available on PC and a far broader range of games also easily acquired.
Some of them are mobile game ports. Some of them have had several years investment by a team of 40 people. Many of them fit somewhere in-between.
PC games are at best mediocre, and the price of a game (assuming one factors all DLC that isn't new levels) has tripled or quadrupled.
What would you class as being "not mediocre"? I can download (legally free) or purchase games that are identical or substantially the same as 90% of the games released on any platform in the last 3
The Presequel was kind of a letdown (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Well (Score:2)
Boom and bust of Australian gamedev (Score:2)
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
Very Sad (Score:2)
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.
Welcome to Australia (Score:3)
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.
Re:AAA studio? (Score:4, Informative)
That would be a very well known term meaning a blockbuster game. AAA games are games that cost hundreds of millions to produce, and hope to make those hundreds of millions back based on stunning quality levels.
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Commander Data: "AAA game? Ahhh, high-profile franchise game. A blockbuster. Star Wars: The Old Republic. DC Universe Online. The new Tomb Raider. Lord of the Rings Online. The Elder Scrolls Online. Guild Wars..."
Captain Picard: "Data, stop."
Data: "2."
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Riker: ::eye roll:: ::sigh::
2K Studios Battleship Commander: "Picard, we will not stand for this outrage! We acted according to our laws and traditions; the developers that have defected *must* be returned to us so they may be given their exit interviews. Release them to us at once!"
Worf: "Captain, the battleship has powered up their phasers."
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Game companies have been shrinking too. Eidos Montreal shut down by the mother ship, too expensive to make expensive games. And when they complain about not getting tax breaks then it's clear that the market is a bit screwed up, an industry should not have to rely upon special concessions that no one else gets in order to survive.
Much of the game industry has become like Hollywood. So expensive that they must guarantee a blockbuster or else. Investors place demands that neither the developers nor the co
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Fixed that for you.
(half-joking, I'm sure there's some good AAA-titles, but the ones I've tried the past 10 years or so have been disappointing and boring.)
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it was never an AAA studio to begin with by anyone's standards.
Borderlands pre-sequel is kind of an expansion pack, not a fresh AAA title as such - if they spent even near 5 millions on making it, then they fucked up baaaaaaaaaaaaaadly.
and it seems it just had shitty management.
Re:AAA studio? (Score:4, Insightful)
WTF is AAA?
It means "overpriced."
Actually I'm honestly curious how the hell "AAA studio" became a meme. It implies that there are at the very least AA and A studios as well. I assume it's based on bond credit ratings [wikipedia.org] but I don't think anyone honestly ranks game studios like that.
Except a studio is either "AAA" or it isn't. What's the difference between a AAA studio and one that isn't? The amount of money they spend, as far as I can tell.
It certainly isn't based on game quality or anything like that.
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It could also be related to the ranking of minor league affiliates to Major League Baseball teams. A teams are typically rookies, or veterans well past their prime who are looking for a way to move into coaching or some non-playing role (but they're still good enough to show off some skills). AA teams are sort of Purgatory. If a prospect doesn't move through this level relatively quickly, statistics say he probably never will. AAA teams are where the replacement-level Major League talent is being held in re
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It's more of a concept than an actual hard and fast definition. A company with a solid reputation, whether or not that reputation is earned, plus high production values, plus the ability to take on new projects. In practice it means that company had enough marketing or visibility that people outside of the small niche have heard of them. Ie, Borderlands is a huge franchise thus 2K as the producer becomes AAA since their logo is prominently visible.
Just like "Indie" it is a vague term that's hard to pin d
Re:AAA studio? (Score:4, Informative)
WTF is AAA?
It's a grading system, based on three grading criteria, each of which can score up to an 'A':
Game success among critics/reviewers
"Innovative gameplay"
Financial success
Given the major reviewers comments on "Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel", the fact that it's "Yet Another First Person Shoot", and the company being unable to afford to remain in business, rather than "AAA Studio", it'd probably be better to describe 2K as a "BCF" studio.
They definitely get an F on their financial success, and YAFPS is hardly innovative game play, so they get a grudging C there, and the reviews at the top sites give them generally in the neighborhood of an 80% approval by reviewers (only GameStop rates them higher than 80%), so that's a B.
I really hate that people hype studios themselves as "AAA", as if that means they are going to get A's in all three categories, just because of who they are, or because of the marketing hype behind their games contributing to a likelihood of good reviews or financial success.
In reality, you are only as good as your last release in all three categories. 2K blew it in at least two of the categories, and turned in B grade work in the third, so it's no surprise they failed.
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Bogans, camping, & fishing [bcf.com.au]?
Re:AAA studio? (Score:4, Informative)
WTF is AAA?
It's a grading system, based on three grading criteria, each of which can score up to an 'A':
Game success among critics/reviewers
"Innovative gameplay"
Financial success
This is absolute bollocks.
AAA only defines the amount of money they can throw at a project.
Quoteth Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_%28game_industry%29 [wikipedia.org]
In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion
So a AAA studio is a studio with an immense bucket of money behind it. That is no indication of quality and realistically never has been.
Re:AAA studio? (Score:5, Funny)
Anytime an article acknowledges an "AAA title", this is all anyone asks. AAA ain't an acronym. Actually, it alludes to an academic grading arrangement (as adminstered in the U.S. of A.). For games, an "A" applies to advertising allotment, another "A" to amazing game play, as well as an "A" for fanancial succass. At farst, at was davalopers usang tha term, but than vidao jaurnalists, game raviewars and saftware campanaes startad ta call tham AAA gamas. Aftar a faw yaars, pablashars startad cansadaraaa gaaas ta ba AAA bafara ralaasa, whaah than jaatafaad larga aavalapaant and maraatang baaaaaa. Asaaaaaaaaaaa, an aaa aaaaa aaa aaaaaaa.
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I can only hope that hurt as much to write as it did to read. I mean raad.
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FreeBSD is a AAA Linux distro. It's the best there is.
FreeBSD isn't Linux, but it's a reasonably popular OS for gaming.
http://www.scei.co.jp/ps4-lice... [scei.co.jp]
http://www.scei.co.jp/ps3-lice... [scei.co.jp]
Re: AAA studio? (Score:2)
Mostly the asset production budget. Engine is either off the shelf or a relatively low cost for a few ubernerds. But you need a shitload of artists, musicians, voice actors, motion capture performers, and writers for a AAA game.
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no, it's the marketing budget.
why? if it's "aaa" is decided before release.
case in point, aliens: colonial marines. piece of shit with shit assets, but the pre-release marketing material was good and they had pre-release events for the press in a big way.
also, I would go further to argue that some titles some companies tried to label as "indie" were AAA titles by this standard too. like, you know, Journey etc. supposedly indie titles YET somehow they had pre-release money to send press packs to every known
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Re:Tax breaks? (Score:5, Informative)
2K Games is the publisher of Borderlands while the developer is Gearbox Software, which is based in Texas, US.
2K has several studios all over, the one from the article was 2K Australia.
Re:Tax breaks? (Score:5, Informative)
2K Games is the publisher of Borderlands while the developer is Gearbox Software, which is based in Texas, US.
That's not entirely true. Gearbox developed Borderlands and Borderlands 2 and 2K Games published both. Borderlands the Pre-sequel was developed by 2K Australia "with assistance from Gearbox".
Re:Tax breaks? (Score:5, Informative)
Fair enough, never played the Pre-sequel and just assumed. And that's always a bad idea :)
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Salaries in Australia are relatively high compared to the rest of the world, especially Canberra. Even bad devs here can happily take home 100k+, good devs more than double that. It has a serious impact on the cost of developing anything here.
Re:Tax breaks? (Score:5, Informative)
They are higher but don't be absurd. The low end of the salary range for a developer is around the $70k mark. ($65k for a JAVA developer). The high end is around $125k. The most well paid developer I know gets around $135k, is near retirement, and is a guru that would make neckbeards go weak at the knees. The most well paid IT professional I know gets around $170k and is the CIO for a company with 380 employees.
The people I know is anecdotal. The salary ranges were from the AITP 2014 review.
All dollars are Australian Dollars. Multiply by 0.8 to get US Dollars.
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What a load of shit. I get 210k (been working in Canberra for last 20 years), contractors all around me are on between 120-200k. $70k is below the average salary for a resident of Canberra let alone a professional and devs are most definitely not the lowest paid professions in Canberra.
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It's far cheaper to live in the rural areas on Canberra's doorstep, or the large town next door, than in that geographically tiny city.
I've got relatives that live half an hour out of Canberra in a medium sized "hobby" farm with about 20 head of stock and a few horses, and that cost less than they made from selling a modest three bedroom plac
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It's far cheaper to live in the rural areas on Canberra's doorstep, or the large town next door, than in that geographically tiny city.
I've got relatives that live half an hour out of Canberra in a medium sized "hobby" farm with about 20 head of stock and a few horses, and that cost less than they made from selling a modest three bedroom place in outer suburbia. House/land prices and rent drop off very rapidly with distance and the roads are not congested.
What has that got to do with the topic? simple fact is the average salary in Canberra is approximately 85-90k. even public servant devs make more than that unless they are just a graduate or in the lowly APS ranks.
Very distorted environment (Score:2)
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There is no way that a public sector developer can make anywhere near $210k. Contractor, perhaps. Employee, no chance.
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Indeed not. Top pay for a scientific/technical position in the Commonwealth public service is about $130K.
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Your information is just plain WRONG
Not my information. The source is stated. Take it up with them.
And then come back and tell me where all these exciting $200k/y + jobs are at.
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The top-selling game this week in Australia is GTA V. Just because you can't buy it in K-Mart doesn't mean it's not available.
Who even buys games at K-Mart?
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There's quite a few games you can't buy from Australia at all(i.e. refused classification). For my friends who live there, they usually paypal me the money and I fire them off either a code or gift it.
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Why should they? Between making sure your dog doesn't get killed by a hissing giant spider and trying to convince your crazy daughter that boa constrictors aren't 'cute', you're practically on the edge 24/7.
Re:Bad Year at Cuck Rock (Score:5, Interesting)
Meh, most AAA publishers and studios stayed as far away from that whole shitstorm as they possibly could; it was a hysterical debate (out of which nobody on either side came out well) that came out of the indie gaming scene and mostly stayed in the indie gaming scene.
I doubt most people who buy and play games even noticed it. And I doubt a single AAA publisher changed their strategy as a result of it. It got a lot of blogs and gaming news sites very upset, generated a handful of fairly well-buried articles in the mainstream press and then the world moved on.
But most people involved on both sides were full-blown narcissists, so they didn't really see things that way.
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I have always found the bending over forwards governments do for the movie/game industry when they would rather eat hot coals than do it for anyone else due to their ideology. In NZ they *changed employment law* a few years ago (AFAIK an unprecedented move) to avoid "losing" the hobbit filming and they were already giving massive tax breaks. (and that was a right wi
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We're a country which still bans games (hotline miami 2 was recently banned). The games industry here never became anything large anyway, and we're way too far away from the game hubs. All that ends up happening here is that we spend a lot of money on games, often times, paying well above what other regions do. The government couldn't care less about games or the industry (as long as we aren't playing games that are considered bad) as the age groups that play games, aren't big enough. We have a lot of baby
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Nope. Not even close.
They are ignorant and not very open to change and thus HELP vote in the people who ARE in charge.
But in charge themselves?
DIGGER, PUUULEASE!?
The same sort of wealthy, typically white haired old white men are in charge of your country just like all the other 1st world western countries.
To pretend that all "Baby Boomers" are somehow in charge is just laughable.
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Re:It's a sad day, mate (Score:4, Informative)
The article doesn't contain any evidence that the cost of operating in Australia was a significant part of the problem, but it does contain evidence that the management pissed off a significant part of the company's talent.
Re: It's a sad day, mate (Score:2, Insightful)
And for Americans we have dumber and dumber.
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2k Australia did both. Their games were funny, thoughtful, and really enjoyable despite their big budget.
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I spoke plural you spoke singular. They made more then one game. Yeah Borderlands Pre wasn't as good as Borderlands 2. Bioshock Infinite on the other hand was critically acclaimed and in one case even rated the best game of the generation of consoles at the time.
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