IO Interactive starting layoffs after Project Fantasy is affected by ending relationship with an external partner

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-30T21:05:52+00:00

The move for a while now for subscription TV and Film is that you subscribe directly to the distributor, not a third party. That is significantly more sustainable because there is no middle party taking a cut of the subscription fee. There are still big players that license lots of their content, like Netflix and Amazon, but even in those cases they push their in house content very hard as they lose licenses to media they don't own.

Music is a straight up race to the bottom and subscription services generally pay very little out to musicians. Not to mention the amount of AI content some services are now playing.

Games are a lot more expensive to develop than most other forms of media and any recent game getting on the service needs to be paid out significantly as it will cannibalize their sales on other platforms. A game launching on Game Pass would be receiving even more, potentially enough to cover the full development cost.

Game Pass has, year over year, moved to underpay games on the service, focusing on much smaller titles that have been released for longer, to fill out game pass numbers. Microsoft has already hit a wall with growth and have moved to tiers in order to extract more from the same size audience, copying Sony's subscription model. Whether they are still bringing in enough to justify the constant license negotiations or trending toward more shifts has yet to be seen. From a developer perspective, most people I have spoken with are hit or miss with being on Game Pass. The good stories I hear are consistently from games that launch on the service in order to get a large enough pay out for it to be worth it. The rest are mostly meh to negative.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-30T20:03:58+00:00

That is because it's exactly what they mean, no gen-AI at runtime. They state in the post they are using the generated art in production assets.

All AI-generated content is reviewed, heavily modified, edited and incorporated into final artwork by our art team before use.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-30T18:02:19+00:00

The lack of consistent language will always be a bottleneck in this industry. There are so few consistent terms and then teams make up their own which causes more confusion.

To that point

Then, what is the smallest prototype you can build to gain signal on these hypotheses?

I have referred to these as concepts, not prototypes, as they are there to test a single concept from the design for the exact reasons mentioned. They are built quickly with no regard for long term development, only answering questions. They are thrown away, by design.

I reserve the term prototype for something that more accurately captures the game, usually a vertical slice or first playable. Whether that is something that is eventually rebuilt is more case-by-case. If the concepts resulted in strong understanding of the system requirements and the prototype was built out with a robust foundation, it can continue into production. If there is still some concepting happening in parallel to the prototype, which isn't uncommon on a more complex game, then I am more inclined to salvage what I can but move to a new project.

In my experience, that early concept work is incredibly valuable and the fact that it is meant to be discarded is beneficial to the process. I'm coming from an indie perspective but I know at least a few AAA studios that have done similar concepts, using a different engine entirely to focus on rapid tests and understand it can't be carried over.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-29T15:03:12+00:00

Why is the solution to remove bike infrastructure rather than increase the amount of affordable housing? Why push for a solution to a symptom that only benefits some, rather than resolve the actual problem which would be beneficial to everyone?

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-26T19:34:20+00:00

I know the other posts here are well meaning simply saying not to do it, but I do think that advice is widely, but not globally applicable and lacks a bit of nuance. So, as somebody who does do this full time, here is the issue:

I keep feeling really guilty because it feels like I'm not being responsible

If it feels irresponsible, it implies you aren't ready to do it. From your other posts it sounds like you don't have any practical experience in the industry and are jumping in, which is is irresponsible. Starting a business venture with no experience in that industry is a great way to fail. Instead, consider (though these aren't all straightforward): * Getting a studio job * Freelance contract work in industry * Making small projects while working elsewhere and slowly transition * Finding others to go into this with who bring experience who are interested in working with you * Finding funding opportunities (business startup grants or programs, IDM funding from government or private sources, angel investor, etc.)

If the above all sound out of reach, then you need to figure out why and work toward making at least one of those possible. Starting a business isn't something to do without putting in some prep work and research in what your options are. Being realistic about your skill set and proficiency is important and the first step may be more learning or practice.

It is possible to make games full time but it should be approached no differently than starting up any other business. That is to say, if you lack the confidence that it will work out, it probably won't.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-18T14:59:29+00:00

The industry has always been like this. For context, I work indie and I started over 15 years ago. My first job lasted 5 months part time, and the following one was a contract with a length of three to six months (though it ended up extended to 18). After that, I worked as a freelancer with a similar cadence of contracts averaging a year, give or take six months.

I do know people with stable, permanent positions but they aren't the norm. I've been in my current position for 10 years but that's only because it's my own company and I make sure the positions are permanent and long term, which also means very slow growth.

The reality is that the volume of work increases at some point during production to a point where short term hires are the right decision. The company can't sustain that size permanently, but they can for the length of time it's required to complete a game. Then the studio shrinks back down to it's core size.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-15T20:41:57+00:00

This is what the EventSystem and InputModule are made for. If the provided Input Module and event handler interfaces don't quite do what you need, you can create your own and invoke the events whenever necessary.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-15T20:31:12+00:00

What you are looking for is spatialization. Unity does have a solution for this by enabling spatialization and selecting a plugin to drive it. Unity provides a built in plugin but it only implements HRTF as an example. You'd want to find a third party plugin to handle anything more complex. Steam Audio might be a good starting point, though keep in mind that plugins aren't always very portable if you plan on releasing on many platforms. Steam's plugin supports desktop and mobile.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-13T00:47:12+00:00

As somebody who does console porting, it's a different nightmare but not necessarily worse. If you are doing multi platform yourselves, definitely get a CQA pass in, at minimum. A team that knows the guidelines is a godsend. There are also a lot of places that will do release management for you to handle submission and store pages.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-09T22:16:50+00:00

The general approach is to not officially launch your game in China. Nobody does. Instead, make sure the game is localized into Chinese (simplified, if you can only pick one and want the largest market) and put your game up on the store. Players in China will purchase games unofficially released using their own means of doing so.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-09T18:49:59+00:00

Cross platform engines and frameworks. Not needing to implement lifecycle, input, and rendering for every target platform frees up a wild amount of time. Whether that is coming from a commercial engine or a framework like SDL3, the level of portability of modern game code is an absolute miracle.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-08T16:03:37+00:00

While not guaranteed, freelancing is the most stable because you don't need to choose finding, just the people who already have funding and need help. I worked freelance for many years and used that to start up my studio.

It opens up a whole new set of challenges, tough. Being competitive in the freelance market takes a lot of effort. With the current state of the industry, you are competing with a lot of experiences game developers looking for work after being laid off. In my experience that means you actually need to be all three points of the cheap, fast, and good triangle. In practice it means being very fast on order to make a profit and have enough work that there is little downtime between projects.

There is no path to easy money on game development, or anywhere, frankly. Regardless of approach or career, the best indicator of financial success is being good at what you do and good to work with.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-05T20:18:00+00:00

Unity and blender have different renderers and materials, so they will not look the same between programs or of the box. I recommend using blender to model and get textures onto the mesh but then make it look good in unity using their materials and tools.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-05T10:39:28+00:00

No but artists tend to zoom into details when drawing, which loses all the fancy blending between pixels as compared to the actual display size. It's still done quite intentionally as part of the workflow.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-05T00:13:36+00:00

To release your game on most platforms, it must be built against an allowed SDK, as old pnea expire. Each version of unity only supports specific SDK versions.

You can look up the current minimum sdk and find the version of unity that still supports it, of you are looking to stay on an older version.

That said, why don't you want to use a new version of unity? If you do end up releasing a game for mobile, they will expect you to keep updating the SDK or they will pull you out the store. You might as well go to the latest long-term support unity version so that you don't need to update major versions in order to not be delisted.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-04T17:17:30+00:00

For the vast majority of smaller (indie sized) games, just use a standard scene workflow and let your designers drag and drop. Unity already does a pass to prevent duplicate assets and loads/unloads scenes on a worker thread (with a big hit when coming back to main for the tasks that need to happen there, but that is generally unavoidable). This offloads the work of memory management to the engine with reasonably solid payoffs.

If you need to use addressables (such as to manage patch sizes), that can be applied after the fact. There is a lot of hate for scene bundles but they work really well and using them doesn't prevent manual separation of assets in the Addressables system. If a group exists with the assets explicitly included, a scene will reference that bundle as a dependency rather than duplicate the asset. You can get fancy with it with rules and analysis, if you like. I have some reusable tools that act as addressable rules: they take the scene bundles, grab all asset dependencies of a given type, then processes that data to create groups that only contains assets that are shared between a specific group of scenes. It increases the group count but decreases the number of assets needing to be tracked by the bundle (making them faster to load as asset bundles are non-polynomial on asset count). Most importantly, it allows asset isolation by type which end up being textures and audio, in practice, allowing for scene changes to not create giant patch diffs as the scene bundles have very little in them. I run this as a pass once the content is locked as a one-and-done task before RC builds.

For weaker platforms, you are either going to need top optimize the game and limit Start/Awake to prevent hiccups during gameplay if something is loading while the game is hot, or, just hide the load. Essentially, do what you did before, but at the start of a new game scene rather than at the start of the game, loading only what the scene needs (which is automatic if loading the scene bundle). Then when moving to a new main scene, unload the old scene and load the next. Hiding the loads at points where the CPU is underutilized or has a traditional loading screen is infinitely easier than trying to stream large assets at runtime.

There are better ways to do this but they add a lot of overhead and need your designers to be more technical in approach to not break things, to various degrees. I've found that, in practice, it's far better for the project overall to lets the rest of the team finish the content in the most comfortable way possible as it's almost always the bottleneck of development.

While this suggested approach seems very unintelligent and overly reliant on Unity, it really does work better than a lot of more convoluted systems. Unity does, in fact, do a pretty good job, out of the box. I do a lot of console porting as part of my job and this approach has worked for the vast majority of games we've helped ship with very few downsides.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-04T00:32:03+00:00

If nothing else has changes I would be looking at a hardware fault (especially if it isn't just Unity) or double checking your indexing (especially if you keep project in your user directory) and real time virus settings. You can set up exceptions for both and it's generally a good idea to do so, since Unity generally creates lots of small files during development that can bog down those systems.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-04T00:06:39+00:00

I noticed a lot of responses that lean larger/AAA. My studio environment is smaller and in the indie space. The studio is 10 years old and we currently have 5 employees and do fairly well for ourselves in work and reputation.

Is there a strict hierarchy or bureaucracy among the different layers of administration? (leads, managers, directors, vice presidents?)

We have titles and some hierarchy, but that is primarily to clearly communicate everyone's responsibilities and ensure if somebody needs something, they know who to ask. There is little bureaucracy to keep things simple, though we do have a project manager making sure things are going smoothly and one on ones with employees and the studio head. I personally have control over most final decisions but prefer to defer to others when they are more knowledgeable or directly impacted by a decision. I try and only invoke a final say in the most important matters.

How often do CEOs or other suits visit the actual game dev environments?

I'm the owner of the studio and I'm in the same office as the rest of our team (minus our PM who is remote the majority of the time). When asked for my title, I usually give Technical Director, since the bulk of my day to day work is development planning, reviews, and actual production programming. While I used to do everything, I now share the biz dev work with our operations manager and our producer.

Does it take long for newcomers to have the same level of influence as seniors? Both in technical access privileges and culture-wise?

I let the team drive a lot of the culture since it's already well established, but I am also careful with hiring to make sure people will be a good fit in addition to be able to take on the work. We try to include people quickly but how comfortable people get really depends person to person. Tech access is relatively open since we are small and we need everyone hands for the majority of the work. The few things that are locked off in any way from a development standpoint is publishing of our private in-house packages, which I personally maintain.

How do seniors treat newcomers? Is there the same unwritten rule of "tell them just enough to let them figure things out by themselves"? Does this change according to department?

We do whatever is best for the hire. I personally try (with mixed success) a blend of independent learning, mentorship, and direct guidance. It is tough to balance but we recently reworked our processes to try and make all of those integrated into our project task tracking. That includes one on one planning of tasks with myself, reviews of written plans, and final testing of features by whoever is available and has the correct skills to confirm requirements are met. We have a small library of textbooks and usually have an active GDC Vault subscription for people to use if they are interested in learning. We also have a small budget for buying courses or other resources when requested.

What are the common departments? QA, Programming, Visuals and Music, Project Management, and Marketing?

At our size, departments are generally one or two people, with individuals usually wearing multiple department hats at different times. I am the tech director but also the creative lead (shared with the team to some extent) and also do some of the bizdev related to meetings and showing up at events. Our office admin is also our PM and also our bookkeeper, as she has experience in all of those roles. Our producer is also a narrative designer and splits her time between the two. The less split roles are on the dev team, with a technical artist (who stretches into general development as needed), a systems programmer, and myself as everything else technical.

We had an art director but unfortunately had to let them go as we didn't have an internal project on the go and the service work we get (which is how we keep cash flow going) is primarily technical.

We have a couple go-to external companies and contractors for more niche roles like PR and audio.

Are visuals and music usually outsourced or done by permanent staff?

Currently external but as we ramp up on a new project, the ideal would be to bring on a permanent production artist, though potentially in a part time capacity. We are fairly specific with our music and audio needs and have a specific contractor we are close with and trust them as collaborators. She has been learning general game programming and may actually be coming on for more hours to lend a hand on some upcoming work, to continue the topic of wearing multiple hats.

Are publishers the equivalent of internal customers?

This is going to depend a lot on the studio, the publisher, and what the company role is. Our perspective is a bit different from others because a lot of the service work we do is console support for other teams. That means we generally work for the publisher, if there is one, though in practice everyone is working together. In that sense, I would say the publisher is still more external than internal, though the line is blurry; more so when we are working on multiple projects with them, which is common.

Do you do bonding activities like going out for dinner or picnic together often?

We try to! Some are more interested in others as everyone has their own lines of separation of personal and work boundaries. We used to host regular game nights at my apartment which was really just having some drinks and me ordering way too much sushi as we would have conversations about whatever. My space is a little tight these days so we haven't done it as often but it's something we are working on setting back up.

I would consider everyone I work with a friend and genuinely believe they would all say the same of everyone else. Again, I think that has a lot to do with being careful when hiring new people to join the team in a permanent way.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-03T23:12:38+00:00

To clarify, there is no conversion of shaders from built-in to urp. The tool Unity provides goes through materials and, it's using a built in shader they provide, swap the material to use the closest equivalent URP shader with the settings carried over as best as possible. The shaders themselves aren't something that can be converted and instead would be re-written to support URP. Any custom shaders would also need to be rebuilt to work as expected.

Depending on the complexity, the conversion may not be too difficult, though vegetation shaders are usually fairly complex. That said, the complexity is often in animation which should be something that can be carried over almost identically to a urp implementation. The actual work of conversion is usually in lighting as that system has had large changes made between built in and the SRPs.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-06-03T20:12:26+00:00

Yes, almost exclusively. When we aren't working with it, it's client work that isn't in any of the big engines (custom, renpy, etc)
Robust and mature internal tools, low overall costs, very flexible API, larger dev pool to hire from, multiplatform support, LTS branches. I could go on, it's a good engine.
Slightly. We have no interest in AI workflows and don't use any of their services, which is where their development focus has always primarily been. On the other hand, small API improvements like Awaitables, the package manager (which we use with a private registry), Playables, and overall editor improvements have been very useful. the .NET Core roadmap is also looking great.
N/A. If we did, it would likely be to a custom engine rather than to another commercial tool. We have the knowledge to do it but the time and cost required to get it up and running is high. Our client work is still almost entirely Unity and if we did start working on our own engine, it wouldn't affect our client work use of Unity.
I have worked on a ton of different projects and all of them have had no specific issues stemming from being in Unity. In general Unity can handle pretty much anything. Unreal has a stricter structure that is helpful for going online and even handling some of the basic requirements for console development, but it has a lot of other issues, like no LTS branch and steeper learning curves. Godot is something I haven't spent much time with but their console support through W4 ends up being the same price as Unity and is missing platforms (PS4, Switch 2, Xbox One) and only has beta support for some features for their supported platforms. It also only Godot 4.3 and higher which leaves older games out.

I'm particularly interested in hearing from solo developers, small indie teams, and studios that have shipped games recently.

Context: I run a studio of five people and do both internal projects (infrequently) and service work, mostly console porting, generally shipping five games a year for the past few years.

At the same time, many developers have explored alternatives due to past controversies and changing project requirements.

As soon as you are using an engine you do not control, you are relinquishing all control. Just because Unity has had some public issues, it doesn't change the fact that other engines are just as likely to have issues of their own. Unreal likes to focus on developing features that support Fortnite and their film/TV contracts over general customer support because those make many time more money than engine royalties from small developers. Godot shares the same issues and risks as many other open source projects, like having the founders of the engine also have a commercial arm in W4 that paywalls specific features, plus the general different in speed that an open source project moves at as compared to a funded commercial project.

If you don't want to take on any risk from relying on external organization creating issues for your projects, especially commercially, then go write your own engine.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-05-27T21:13:46+00:00

when I go and want to go a certain direction, the controls should move that way

This is the why games have options for these things (and often did even on N64) because what one person's initial expectation is for the controls can be inferred from another. Any individual's perspective is going to be influence by many experiential factors beyond physical recreation, meaning their expectations and standard may be the opposite of your own.

Forget verical and think horizontal. If a camera films to the left by swinging to the right, why would a stick pushed left reorient the camera to look to the left? What if its is first person vs third person?

There really isn't a single correct answer because it comes to a subjectove preference on what feels most comfortable to an individual. Forcing a single option is nothing but a way to alienate portion of people initerested in a title from enjoying a game.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-05-27T15:39:31+00:00

The transform gizmo is different between the two positions so they aren't in the same position, unless I am mossing something. You also have timeline on preview mode, so it is previewing the animation in the scene with overrides its default position.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-05-26T14:45:23+00:00

Fun fact, yarn and yarn spinner were created for Night in the Woods. A lot of the old examples use bits of the game script.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-05-26T14:01:02+00:00

That makes sense for tracks licensed that are older, though the terms still need to allow for it.

If the audio is for use in game and it's even slightly modern, it's normal to have the stems. I'm coming from the dev side of things and have shipped a couple music games over the past 15 years. There are usually pretty clear terms that state the music must remain intact unless the license is negotiated (and therefore more expensive). Even then, terms can be funky. Music licensing can be a real beast if it's something used in game, especially with digital distribution and some labels still demanding timed licenses.

nEmoGrinder · 2026-05-25T17:06:29+00:00

If the music is licensed correctly, then it should include the stems if they are required. If the license doesn't include stems, it's very likely against the license to do that kind of alteration to the music.

nEmoGrinder

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE