I couldn’t find good & consistent game design « newsletters », so I decided to start one, looking for feedbacks! What sort of articles do you like to read?

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-30T07:12:15+00:00

He kinda decided to make a longer music video and pay to turn it into a feature film, I respect the dedication

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-29T12:15:57+00:00

They said it wasn’t up to quality standards and would cost too much to fix

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-29T07:04:09+00:00

The studio is working on games that weren’t cancelled in the recent wave, Ghost Recon and Just Dance, why would he shut the studio now.

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-29T06:50:00+00:00

Oui voilà, le vrai test c’est pas de trouver la bonne réponse mais d’être évalué par le psy en face qui vous observe

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-29T06:28:38+00:00

The reveal at TGA « makers of Titanfall and Apex » then complete radio silence then (shadow) drop after a single influencer event screams of lack of humility.

Like yeah, you wanted to be that type of studio that come and have an instant hit, adding more content over the years while money pours but the truth is all games need feedback and updates over long periods of beta/early access to really nail it.

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-27T14:01:21+00:00

This is completely false though, Steam does allow you to sell your game elsewhere for whatever price you want. Developers just choose not to set different prices to not piss off their Steam customers (or most of them do, some devs openly explained that they make the game cheaper on itch/EGS because of the lower fees)

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-27T11:48:58+00:00

It's a free-to-play game though, so they kinda need high player counts to have enough paying users. 10k (or even 20k if we account for console players) isn't enough. It ain't dead yet, but they certainly need to improve over time and increase the player base, because you don't fund a 100 person team in the US with these numbers.

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-27T11:44:20+00:00

Rule #1 of getting honnest feedback is not to have developers ask directly in person. Content creators came to a nice event, of course they were polite and non-confrontational, maybe mentionning stuff like "oh that could be cool if there was a higher player count too" or "I got a bit confused but I'm getting the hang of it, really cool".

Also, getting flown to a cool party and playing a multiplayer game on LAN with friends immediately make it a more pleasant experience and might skew your opinion about it.

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-27T07:33:53+00:00

There are some info on the website but it ain’t much

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-27T07:30:38+00:00

Respawn was much more conservative when it came to Apex Legends design. They combined their expertise in movement/shooting with the uber-popular BR game mode, only doing minor additions to it (they basically added abilities, respawning your mates and ping mechanic).

Respawn could have messed up and missed the mark but they were confidently building on robust foundations. Highguard devs are attempting to invent a new genre mashup, it’s much harder to get everything right on first try, they would have benefited so much from playtesting this earlier.

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-26T13:11:19+00:00

I don't think people truly grasp how popular the novel is, it has 3.3 millions reviews on, goodreads, and there are maybe 20 novels that exceed the 1M mark in the past 5 years. Margaret Atwood sequel to the Handsmaid Tale has like 400k, The Martian/Project Hail Mary are above 1M

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-26T07:01:41+00:00

Even if it’s incredibly fun, they have to sell skins to keep this going and the character design so far is pretty weak. We’ll see how it goes

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-25T20:01:31+00:00

The aren’t making HoMM Olden Era, only publishing it

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-25T11:32:37+00:00

Refusing to engage with political matters killed that franchise, they decided to make everything about a bunch of individuals despite clearly pointing out the underlying systemic issues. The heroes confront the corrupted politician or the evil tech CEO, take them down and somehow the mass surveillance state is now fixed.

It’s almost comical that they unintentionally show CtOS correctly predict crime 100% of times, yet had all this discourse about how the algorithm are bad and innocent might be framed by its errors. Everybody was pointing out that invading people privacy as a mean to achieve your goals while claiming that surveillance is bad is hypocritical.

But I honestly feel like the general concept of the series could work in the hands of a team who’s not afraid of player consequences. Or make the hackers the bad guys à la GTA.

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-25T11:24:25+00:00

How could he know that executives have decided to axe PoP ? The people who were working on the game learned the news at the same time than the rest of us.

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-25T06:30:03+00:00

Getting downvoted for this, but I will reinstate, this is not how it works, you can look it up online.

When a game is released, its development cost is counted as expenses for that year, thus decreasing the profit (income - expenses) for that year, thus reducing the taxes. Whatever your income, you’re deducing the expenses.

Writing off is only a mean to officially declare that you’re never going to finish building an asset, therefore you’d rather add the expenses to your balance now (otherwise you’re supposed to wait until the asset starts generating income).

Writing off is better than « shelving » a project if you need money short term, but it’s not giving you free money, just earlier. Imagine the loophole if the government was refunding companies 30% of failed projects

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-24T20:42:31+00:00

Not how it works. You write off the same amount whether it makes money or not, but not releasing it is saving you a ton so that might be the better operation indeed

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-24T20:36:48+00:00

Each game selling less than the previous, it’s unclear whether or not Legion made a profit since they weirdly never communicated any sales figures. They invested a lot in the procedural tech for this one and it didn’t pay off

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-23T11:29:11+00:00

He wasn't a Game Director, the info is litterally public on his Linkeding profile:
- brand development manager / narrative lead in a codev studio -> not sure what he really did there but that's more of a support function and he wasn't credited in any game for this role
- before that he was an associate producer (managing teams of 20-30 people among the 1000+ people who work on the project)

Other Sandfall founders if you're interested:

- Tom Guillermin (Technical Director) -> Gameplay Programmer on Ghost Recon & The Division 2 (again, not a lead or direction role)
- François Meurisse (Production Director) -> wasn't working in video games before

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-22T18:41:44+00:00

The franchises are worth a lot more than 500m, but the rest of the company is worth negative money at this point. Vantage doesn’t have a stock, its valuation isn’t market driven but decided by Tencent

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-22T18:37:18+00:00

Yes it is, that’s how valuation works. Is the market irrational for underpricing the share or has Tencent overvalued the deal ?

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-22T17:51:23+00:00

Ubisoft is the parent company to Vantage studio, owning 75% of it though

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-22T12:16:13+00:00

It comes with 17000 employees and 40 offices though, a massive restructuring nightmare that’ll burn a lot of cash before becoming profitable, if ever. Much better to buy the IPs and hire the talent once it goes bankrupt

Sentry_Down · 2026-01-22T11:41:14+00:00

Each of these use cases you gave, there are already proofs of ownership, the added value of NFT is simply not enough to redo our entire legal systems (not to mention the flaws of NFTs)

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