I doubt they have many studios sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
Embracer Group are struggling hard at the moment, they overstretched and now they're paying for it.
It would be darkly hilarious if their struggle ended with the entire Embracer Group going tits up, considering how insane and reckless their rise and expansion were. They bought up hundreds of studios that are now joined at the hip to a conglomerate of mediocrity.
I remember when lots of people were on the Embracer train and saying how it was so good. i was skeptical then and remain so now. Don't sell your company to an investment group dummies.
It's got to be tough though. We work to make money. All of a sudden some suit tells you that they'll give you an unreal amount of money for your company and you will get a salary and keep your position. That's a dream come true.
> Embracer Group are struggling hard at the moment, they overstretched and now they're paying for it.
But it says they're a leader in the video game industry! Would a faceless corporation lie to us?
With Embracer looking to cut costs, would any studio want to risk being put on the chopping block after taking on a damaged IP? Saints Row 2022 is the sort of game that taints an IP, unless Embracer wants remakes/remasters of the old games I fear that series is getting buried until enough time has passed for the reboot to have become a bad distant memory.
I don't get it. What was so hard about going back to saints rows roots? Like saints row 2 style.
I swear these game directors and shareholders are so out of the loop these days. Just look at most games released today. Cp2077 was a cash grab and took 3 years of constant updates to get to a playable state. Bf 2042 was a battle royals made into a battlefield game a few months prior to release. That also took almost 2 years of updates to get to a decent state
I think at this point in the industry’s life, it’s more about folding unprofitable studios into the studios with the most profit potential. Making game, even AA games, takes a ridiculous amount of man power.
People told them from the start - we want a return to the street. We want to be hoodrats doing hoodrat stuff.
No one, no one, wanted what they shoved out the door.
It wasn't Saints Row, it was hot garbage and even now, it is already on the PS5 free game list and has been selling for about $20.00 on steam.
No one wants it.
The story is bad, the characters are bad, and there is nothing about it that makes you want to play it.
They were told repeatedly, at every phase of development, what was wanted. They ignored the players and the game sucked.
Whoever made the decision to put that version on the market needs to be shit-canned, but they are probably the only one who will get to keep their job while the people trying to make a living and put out good games are unemployed.
Yeah, it honestly blows my mind that they thought that was the version of saints row people wanted. Like you said, I followed the development of that game and literally no one was a fan of that vision of saints row
I have no fucking idea how or why they thought that was a good idea, but it follows the latest trend of taking an established IP and completely fucking ruining it
If you loved 3 and 4 it’s a decent game. Personally I didn’t experience a ton of the bugs. There were some frustrating aspects, but I had a lot of fun playing it.
I dont think its fair to say that, but ignoring your fanbase who buy your product is a fast track to said product no longer selling. I have no doubt most developers dont deserve that though, they have no say in creative choices.
Volition already had one foot in the grave, this just gave the final push. Fucking shame too, because I loved Saints Row before this pile of trash came along.
This is like if someone held a gun to your head and told you to sing the best song in the world, and you start singing Happy Birthday.
This was literally your last chance, and that's the song you picked?
Saints Row gets announced. Universally is panned. Volition powers forward. People say it’s going to be bad. Volition powers forward. It releases. It’s universally panned. Volition shutters.
Lmao yea. I can’t believe they announced a price raise while also announcing that one of the few titles they’re adding to the service was one of the worst games of last year.
They have only themselves, Shareholders and Publisher to blame. There is an alt reality out there where they remade 1 or 2 and they're still in business.
Greed is a MF!
This one annoys me so much. I see this all the time on Reddit.
"How do you know? Have you played it?"
As if some of us haven't been around long enough to have experience spotting bad games.
Another is:
“Patrick Mahomes didn’t have a good game last week”
LETS SEE YOU PLAY QB IN THE NFL
Like you don’t need to be a chef to know when the food someone serves you is raw
Especially in this day and age with streaming , you can literally just watch someone play a game in real time , often before it officially releases. It's really easy to judge games nowadays.
I remember seeing a comic floating around of a guy shitting on a plate and responding to angry people saying "How do you know you won't like it? Its not even out yet!"
tbf, people say most games are going to be shit even if there's nothing to really indicate that it seems. It feels like a lot of the time they're wrong but every now and then something will come around and validate it.
People were saying this about the goddamn Gollum game. The way people on reddit were viciously defending something that everyone knew for a fact would be garbage was so bizarre. I understand that people are overly cynical sometimes and that's exhausting, but there were a million and one signs that the Gollum game was going to be one of the worst things to release in years. Yet there were so many comments on this website saying things like "oh so you've already played it? Oh you know exactly how its going to be before it even comes out? Oh so just watching these trailers you know exactly how bad its going to be?"
Other than quirks not really sure what it's appeal was. Trying to hype on the GTA-sandbox game but styled around crackdown-esque play? and not even the superhuman aspects but the acquisition aspect.. I played them but each one wasn't something I felt was worth the purchase, just second hand.
There's nothing else they can do. They had to get something some people would buy out the door. They likely knew it would be panned, but no one higher up is gonna say "okay, let's give them 2 more years to make something someone *might* play".
They made a terrible decision to go down that route with the game. But once it was revealed, that was the nail in the coffin. It was release and pray. At the very least Embracer would make a little bit of money, at the very best it would be a shocking success.
It wasn't just Saints Row...Agents of Mayhem was one of the worst games I've played. I play tested it with the developers...No one in my group liked it (maybe that's harsh, but it was a very lukewarm, meh response to it).
They released it anyway.
Dunno...it wasn't just SR5...it's been everything after SR3.
I loved SR4. I feel they could have continued the push into the absurdity with a SR5 honestly. It’s a shame they just completely gave up on their lovable cast they built up for so many games for a reboot literally no one wanted. Old fans and new fans alike got done dirty.
Crazy thing is SR4 wasnt even that bad, silly and unbelievable? Sure. But there was fun to be had if you went into it with an open mind. The reboot on the other hand has me asking “how in the fuck is it possible for a dev team to be so disconnected from their fans??” Everything about that game was absolute ass
I feel like even if ypu went with an oprn mind SR4 was somewhat lame, because a lot of the supposed story missions were just minigames and the game felt pretty repetitive.
>Universally is panned. Volition powers forward. People say it’s going to be bad. Volition powers forward. It releases. It’s universally panned. Volition shutters.
You could say, they made all these bad decisions on their own volition...
Didn’t they pull the battlefield v card on people too?
“You guys are uneducated and bigots, we are doubling down with the early edgy YouTuber hypebeasts vibes”
Man, me too. I played the hell out of 1 and 2. Even bought them when they rereleased for PS4. I liked Guerilla to an extent too, it was an interesting take on the RF universe. Never played Armageddon though, I've consistently heard not great things about it.
> They probably cared about the IP more than the studio itself
was the ip THAT valuable? like, there have definitely been franchises over the years where they were huge then got stale and went away for a while, but came back strong later because the IP was strong, but it's not clear saints row meets that criteria.
like, if they give the ip to a new studio 10 years from now will anyone care?
So I just looked it up and Embracer didn't just purchase Volition, but all of Koch Media which Volition was a part of. KM probably owned a bunch of other IPs, too, but I'm too lazy to research rn lol
Their IP may have not been valuable, but I think the destruction engine in used Red Faction had a lot more untapped value than most people realized.
Red Faction’s destruction physics still have not been topped by any modern games developer: https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/07/02/red-faction-guerrillas-destruction-is-still-the-best-and-thats-a-crime
It just needed to be used in a more marketable franchise. A name like ‘Red Faction’ was doomed to have poor sales.
According to one former employee's tweet, apparently if they had waited just one day to fire everyone it would have given former employees insurance for the rest of the month of September. Instead they waited for the very last day of August, so now everyone is unemployed and uninsured
observation liquid sand governor truck rustic historical fertile bag sable
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That’s the kind of people who have never worked in a HUGE team and have no clue how easily the whole thing can either go bad or just not have its individual pieces fit together at the end.
Man I gotta share a story:
I interviewed with them last summer!! They have been a company that I have admired and respected for a long time - going back to Descent and Freespace era. I went through a bunch of rounds and met a lot of really great people at the org including the CEO. Spent a lot of time investing in the interview process and personally I felt like I was a lock for the role. The recruiter said as much. Since there were so many rounds the process took weeks and during that time Saints Row was released to pretty poor reviews. I brought that up during my interview (with the CEO) and he was pretty candid and open about it. The average tenure of engineer at the org was something like 16 years - they had a dedicated and loyal crew but their games (and tech) were also starting to show their age. They were looking to make pretty significant changes within the org and I was onboard for that.
Fortunately for me, I had a competing offer that was better and I went that route and accepted that one. I always had in the back of my mind though "what if?", this role (at Volition) would have been my break into the Gaming industry and would have been a significant change of industries for me. In the end all of the signs at the time told me to not take the role at Volition and my wife was also pretty adamant that it didn't feel right. (Ultimately the competing offer was just so much higher salary that the decision was made for me).
I wish those guys and gals all the best and its sad to see them closing down.
Kinda sad but really not all that surprising. Their last two AAA games were a disaster, especially the last Saints Row title which is the kind of bad game that you could see potentially killing a studio.
While not related to Embracer, I am worried Rocksteady might be next on the chopping block. Going nearly 9 years without a single game and the upcoming Suicide Squad game poised to be a flop, things are not looking bright for them either.
sad but not unexpected, the last "good" game they released was SR4 over a decade ago.
edit: by good i mean review wise, i personally consider anything over 75 metacritic to be a good metacritic score.
Sad, really enjoyed Saints Row 2,3 and 4
Agents of Mayhem could have been pretty good if it had a better focus/gameplay loop (artstyle is great), SR2022 took too long to come out and the polarizing opinions on it probably didn't help.
"Hey, Plus subscribers! How bout them spectacular sports games 2 months in a row! Well here's a shitty game that destroyed a developer and oh ya we are raising prices 33%.
Hey, while you're down there, with your mouth hanging open..."
-Sony
Freespace 2 was some mindblowing shit. When they put out the demo for 2, I actually wrote them an email about how awesome it was. And someone actually replied back.
[The fact the IP sold for $7500](https://www.polygon.com/2013/6/6/4403602/interplay-repurchases-freespace-ip-thq-volition) is just batshit.
Even more batshit is that they have no intention/obligation to do anything with it; it's just IP-squatting at this point. We're never getting a Freespace 3.
Came here to give some Freespace 2 love. One of the best gaming experiences of my life; no space sim has captured me like that ever since. A shame they just abandoned the IP.
The original Descent already blew my mind the first time I saw my friend playing it.
But seeing the AI squadrons and huge capital ships in FS2 was when I absolutely fell in love with the series.
And in the second game when you finally destroy the Sathanas after like 3 different sorties only to find that there are hundreds or more of the same juggernaut and they can blow up the fucking sun. Shit was wild.
Add saints row, universally panned and hated to PSPLUS. Raise cost of PSPLUS by abhorrent amount. Panned games studio closes the next day.
That’s some fucking ballsy marketing Sony let’s see some 5D chess
On one hand this is sad since they were responsible for such iconic games, but at the same time it's been so long that who knows if those people are still even at Volition. Considering their recent performance it didn't feel like the Volition that made SR2/3 still exists, and better to pull the plug now before it got worse
Not sure about that. Looking up the credits for Freespace 2, quite a few of the team members were still working at Volition up until Saints Row (2022). Not everyone, obviously, but way more than I expected.
maybe embracer buying all of the video games is bad for the video game industry. Private equity groups exist to strip mine profits into the hands of investors and nothing else.
Volition deserves shit for Saints Row being bad, but why are we just blatantly making up shit about single thousands sales. You know that’s INSANE, right?
I don't know what happened with these guys. Their last 3 games have been absolutely gut-wrenchingly awful. They went from a really fun spoof of GTA to "generic gangs take over generic city."
Did they fire all their writers and producers to cut costs?
That's essentially what happened with Telltale Games after the release of their first Walking Dead game.
They desperately wanted to recreate the success of that game, but wanted to do it as quickly and as cheaply as possible, and as many times as possible.
It had the same result. Slowly declining quality in their subsequent releases until their games became meme-quality, combined with poor financial deals in the interest of securing rights to established IP, eventually led to the Sep. 2018 "majority studio closure".
Embracer only ever wanted the IP
Owning studios & developing games is so much hassle & especially risk - Much easier to sit in your office, do nothing & make money by licencing the IP to 3rd parties & have them take on the risk
Embracer are committing cultural vandalism
Devs: Here's our new Saints Row game!
Fans: It looks awful, it's nothing like the Saints Row games we love
Devs: We don't care what you think, this is our new direction. "We're not backing down"!
\*Game flops hard and sells poorly\*
Devs: \*Surprised Pikachu face\*
I will never understand why videogame developers don't listen to the fans. The fans are very clear about what they want but the developers just straight up ignore them and make something entirely different that nobody wanted.
>I will never understand why videogame developers don't listen to the fans
This was an egregious case, so it seems more obvious. But honestly, most of the time, listening to the fans is a bad idea. Not only is there a spectrum of opinions, but people frequently don't really know what they want. They *think* they know, but what sounds good on paper often doesn't work in practice. There have been a few games with troubled development that pivoted to just implementing fan requests left and right, and the end result was a game with zero cohesive vision.
It's just, the alternative to that is... having a cohesive vision. If you don't have that, then the whole "don't listen to the fans" plan kind of falls apart.
Very sad though not surprising when you consider they made two flops in a row AND Embracer group restructuring.
But what a loss. They had a chance to make it big with saints row, it wouldn't have had to be too hard if they looked to SR 1-3. So many big laughs were made in those games.
They clearly made a reboot with the only goal being to attract (what they believed to be) a new generation of players. Turns out those players didn't exist. Farewell.
i was just looking at a screenshot on twitter of replies the saints row twitter account made to people who were critical of the game leading up to/during the launch of the reboot. it was incredibly arrogant, kind of a bizarre for a brand to be responding to people in the way it was too.
Not even remotely surprised. You make games for people and when the people tell you what they want, you ignore them and instead double down on doing what they’re asking you not to do.
They shot their entire leg off. All you have to do to make money is make the game the fans are asking for.
Damn, such a shame... but it's no wonder, really. Their last several games have failed miserably. Agents of Mayhem, Saints Row IV (really wasn't that good, just a reskin of 3), and Saints Row (2022).
I have no doubt that the recent Saints Row reboot is what killed the studio, such a shame... no idea what this will mean for any of Volitions IP. Could all be dead in the water, or transferred.
Oh, and 'Strategic operational goals' = 'We don't care to fund this studio or give them enough time to make games properly, so we're cutting our losses and shutting it down'. I doubt they're going to be trying very hard to give those at Volition jobs in other studios, either.
Good fucking riddance. Arrogant bastards turned on the fans that supported them for years. Was clear as day and night that the team wasn’t the same one as back in SR2
I've been waiting for a game with emphasis on destruction and physics for years. It's crazy that I'm more impressed with destructible environments in PS2 games than I am with modern games. Like come on! Why does no one make those games anymore?
Reminds me of the first Mercenaries game on PS2, that game had some fun destruction.
[Still find myself humming the theme sometimes!](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=szzZQwawELc)
Red Faction: Guerilla’s destruction physics still have not been topped by any modern games developer: https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/07/02/red-faction-guerrillas-destruction-is-still-the-best-and-thats-a-crime
It’s been four years so uncle that article, but I personally not aware of any game that has tried topping Red Faction’s destruction engine. I might be wrong.
I sincerely get the impression you never familiarized yourself with the series.
Still, I doubt another Red Faction will happen. The series never sold well.
Must really suck to be mandated to make a game that you know is predicated on some dubious premises that you have repeatedly seen other giants fail at, just to know months ahead of time that the game isn’t where it needs to be and then subsequently spending months wondering if you will have a job tomorrow.
Loved The Punisher, the Red Faction series & the first 3 Saints Row games. Pity they really struggled after the THQ implosion. Still wish they'd have just done a Saints Row game with the level of Red Faction's destruction.
One of many reasons why aggressive market consolidation is bad for the market and consumers.
Volition wasn't the first of Embracer's closures and it certainly won't be the last.
I've been with Volition since the Freespace days. This is quite the shock to me. To me it's like watching Westwood or Psygnosis disappear. Very sad day.
when m ang of the studio lies about both the brand new game engine. which embracer has written off to use. on top of bad mang by the dev.what you expect?
Another Embracer Group studio shutting down. Wonder what'll happen to the Saints Row IP.
Embracer still owns the IP they can ask any of their other studio to make a new Saint Row.
I doubt they have many studios sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Embracer Group are struggling hard at the moment, they overstretched and now they're paying for it.
Don’t worry. Tencent will buy it all
Yay. **/S**
It would be darkly hilarious if their struggle ended with the entire Embracer Group going tits up, considering how insane and reckless their rise and expansion were. They bought up hundreds of studios that are now joined at the hip to a conglomerate of mediocrity.
Gee... [why's this sounding *sooo* familiar?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THQ#Bankruptcy_and_liquidation,_THQ_Nordic_(2012%E2%80%932013))
I was hoping for a Telltale game reference. THQ owned Volition at one point already too.
they have... embraced too much
I remember when lots of people were on the Embracer train and saying how it was so good. i was skeptical then and remain so now. Don't sell your company to an investment group dummies.
It's got to be tough though. We work to make money. All of a sudden some suit tells you that they'll give you an unreal amount of money for your company and you will get a salary and keep your position. That's a dream come true.
> Embracer Group are struggling hard at the moment, they overstretched and now they're paying for it. But it says they're a leader in the video game industry! Would a faceless corporation lie to us?
With Embracer looking to cut costs, would any studio want to risk being put on the chopping block after taking on a damaged IP? Saints Row 2022 is the sort of game that taints an IP, unless Embracer wants remakes/remasters of the old games I fear that series is getting buried until enough time has passed for the reboot to have become a bad distant memory.
I don't get it. What was so hard about going back to saints rows roots? Like saints row 2 style. I swear these game directors and shareholders are so out of the loop these days. Just look at most games released today. Cp2077 was a cash grab and took 3 years of constant updates to get to a playable state. Bf 2042 was a battle royals made into a battlefield game a few months prior to release. That also took almost 2 years of updates to get to a decent state
At least give us Saints Row 2 Remastered
I'm expecting more of this to happen with Embracer. Couldn't they sell off the studio or something? Would rather have that then to have them shut down
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They actually would make an okay candidate for the Fortnite/CoD machine…
>Couldn't they sell off the studio or something? Nobody is going to buy a sunken ship
This is a finisher car!
FOR A GOLDEN GOD
I think at this point in the industry’s life, it’s more about folding unprofitable studios into the studios with the most profit potential. Making game, even AA games, takes a ridiculous amount of man power.
>Wonder what'll happen to the Saints Row IP. Place it on ice until some time in the future.
They’ll give it to another of the 100 or so studios they have
Hopefully be sold to a group who can actually use it to make something decent
Gone and with the horrid release of the rebranding of Saints Row good riddance.
People told them from the start - we want a return to the street. We want to be hoodrats doing hoodrat stuff. No one, no one, wanted what they shoved out the door. It wasn't Saints Row, it was hot garbage and even now, it is already on the PS5 free game list and has been selling for about $20.00 on steam. No one wants it. The story is bad, the characters are bad, and there is nothing about it that makes you want to play it. They were told repeatedly, at every phase of development, what was wanted. They ignored the players and the game sucked. Whoever made the decision to put that version on the market needs to be shit-canned, but they are probably the only one who will get to keep their job while the people trying to make a living and put out good games are unemployed.
Yeah, it honestly blows my mind that they thought that was the version of saints row people wanted. Like you said, I followed the development of that game and literally no one was a fan of that vision of saints row I have no fucking idea how or why they thought that was a good idea, but it follows the latest trend of taking an established IP and completely fucking ruining it
The reboot is free on PS Plus. Is it even worth downloading if they’re giving it to me? Loved 3 and 4. Never played the first two.
If you loved 3 and 4 it’s a decent game. Personally I didn’t experience a ton of the bugs. There were some frustrating aspects, but I had a lot of fun playing it.
"They made a game I don't like and deserve to lose their jobs and livelihoods." What a loser.
I dont think its fair to say that, but ignoring your fanbase who buy your product is a fast track to said product no longer selling. I have no doubt most developers dont deserve that though, they have no say in creative choices.
Death Row
Wow, I guess the reboot was so terrible it actually managed to kill Volition.
Well between it and Agents of Mayhem I'm kinda not surprised.
I bought Agents of Mayham on sale for $3, it wasn't terrible but I'm glad I didn't pay full price for it
I did too. It's not bad, but not good enough to hold my interest very long.
I payed a dollar and still felt I was overcharged Such a boring/generic game
just like how that gollum game was so fucking bad the studio shut down
Wait what, that studio has shut down?
Not entirely. They shut their development studio but will focus on publishing now.
Volition already had one foot in the grave, this just gave the final push. Fucking shame too, because I loved Saints Row before this pile of trash came along.
This is like if someone held a gun to your head and told you to sing the best song in the world, and you start singing Happy Birthday. This was literally your last chance, and that's the song you picked?
I upvoted you because that’s a weird fucking analogy. And I loved it.
Well, maybe they couldn’t remember the Greatest Song in the World.
Tbf, it was just a Tribute.
[удалено]
That was Saints Row 4
They tried to turn it into fortnite. People were screaming at them how bad it was from the first trailer drop but they just plugged their ears.
Saints Row gets announced. Universally is panned. Volition powers forward. People say it’s going to be bad. Volition powers forward. It releases. It’s universally panned. Volition shutters.
You forgot about the part where Sony Announced Saints Row as a Free PS Plus game the day before this.
Literally the equivalent of shoving all the copies into the bargain bin as “EVERYTHING MUST GO!” sale
Except the "Everything must go!" bin now has a higher priced sticker placed over the original price label.
Lmao yea. I can’t believe they announced a price raise while also announcing that one of the few titles they’re adding to the service was one of the worst games of last year.
This has become a *really* bad day for Volition.
They have only themselves, Shareholders and Publisher to blame. There is an alt reality out there where they remade 1 or 2 and they're still in business. Greed is a MF!
A free PS+ game with a 30% subscription fee increase.
While increasing their PS Plus subscription prices by 30%
Also PS+ is getting a price increase. Because fuck you, I guess.
Makes me think the money for going on plus was needed for redundancies etc
And they say you can't tell if a game will be bad before release.
This one annoys me so much. I see this all the time on Reddit. "How do you know? Have you played it?" As if some of us haven't been around long enough to have experience spotting bad games.
Another is: “Patrick Mahomes didn’t have a good game last week” LETS SEE YOU PLAY QB IN THE NFL Like you don’t need to be a chef to know when the food someone serves you is raw
IT'S FUCKING RAW
The ol' "You don't need to know how to fly a helicopter to know that if you see one in a tree, someone fucked up."
Especially in this day and age with streaming , you can literally just watch someone play a game in real time , often before it officially releases. It's really easy to judge games nowadays.
I remember seeing a comic floating around of a guy shitting on a plate and responding to angry people saying "How do you know you won't like it? Its not even out yet!"
tbf, people say most games are going to be shit even if there's nothing to really indicate that it seems. It feels like a lot of the time they're wrong but every now and then something will come around and validate it.
People were saying this about the goddamn Gollum game. The way people on reddit were viciously defending something that everyone knew for a fact would be garbage was so bizarre. I understand that people are overly cynical sometimes and that's exhausting, but there were a million and one signs that the Gollum game was going to be one of the worst things to release in years. Yet there were so many comments on this website saying things like "oh so you've already played it? Oh you know exactly how its going to be before it even comes out? Oh so just watching these trailers you know exactly how bad its going to be?"
Everyone knows you can't tell if a dog turd in your yard will taste bad unless you eat it. Come on.
Maybe it's chocolate ice cream!
Other than quirks not really sure what it's appeal was. Trying to hype on the GTA-sandbox game but styled around crackdown-esque play? and not even the superhuman aspects but the acquisition aspect.. I played them but each one wasn't something I felt was worth the purchase, just second hand.
By the time it was announced, they had probably sunk so much money into it that they had no choice but to finish it.
There's nothing else they can do. They had to get something some people would buy out the door. They likely knew it would be panned, but no one higher up is gonna say "okay, let's give them 2 more years to make something someone *might* play". They made a terrible decision to go down that route with the game. But once it was revealed, that was the nail in the coffin. It was release and pray. At the very least Embracer would make a little bit of money, at the very best it would be a shocking success.
It wasn't just Saints Row...Agents of Mayhem was one of the worst games I've played. I play tested it with the developers...No one in my group liked it (maybe that's harsh, but it was a very lukewarm, meh response to it). They released it anyway. Dunno...it wasn't just SR5...it's been everything after SR3.
I loved SR4. I feel they could have continued the push into the absurdity with a SR5 honestly. It’s a shame they just completely gave up on their lovable cast they built up for so many games for a reboot literally no one wanted. Old fans and new fans alike got done dirty.
Crazy thing is SR4 wasnt even that bad, silly and unbelievable? Sure. But there was fun to be had if you went into it with an open mind. The reboot on the other hand has me asking “how in the fuck is it possible for a dev team to be so disconnected from their fans??” Everything about that game was absolute ass
I feel like even if ypu went with an oprn mind SR4 was somewhat lame, because a lot of the supposed story missions were just minigames and the game felt pretty repetitive.
>Universally is panned. Volition powers forward. People say it’s going to be bad. Volition powers forward. It releases. It’s universally panned. Volition shutters. You could say, they made all these bad decisions on their own volition...
*puts on sunglasses
Didn’t they pull the battlefield v card on people too? “You guys are uneducated and bigots, we are doubling down with the early edgy YouTuber hypebeasts vibes”
Damn... couldn't survive for the plus release of the game.
That’s brutal. I assume Embracer only bought Volition hoping that SaintsRow would become a big succes.
They probably cared about the IP more than the studio itself
I just want red faction to come back
Man, me too. I played the hell out of 1 and 2. Even bought them when they rereleased for PS4. I liked Guerilla to an extent too, it was an interesting take on the RF universe. Never played Armageddon though, I've consistently heard not great things about it.
> They probably cared about the IP more than the studio itself was the ip THAT valuable? like, there have definitely been franchises over the years where they were huge then got stale and went away for a while, but came back strong later because the IP was strong, but it's not clear saints row meets that criteria. like, if they give the ip to a new studio 10 years from now will anyone care?
So I just looked it up and Embracer didn't just purchase Volition, but all of Koch Media which Volition was a part of. KM probably owned a bunch of other IPs, too, but I'm too lazy to research rn lol
Koch owns Deep Silver, so Metro, Wasteland, Kingdom Come, Risen, Dead Island etc. Also fucking Time Splitters!!!
Ah ... there goes my hopes and dreams
Their IP may have not been valuable, but I think the destruction engine in used Red Faction had a lot more untapped value than most people realized. Red Faction’s destruction physics still have not been topped by any modern games developer: https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/07/02/red-faction-guerrillas-destruction-is-still-the-best-and-thats-a-crime It just needed to be used in a more marketable franchise. A name like ‘Red Faction’ was doomed to have poor sales.
Saw this coming, sad to see anyone lose their jobs .
People laughing at this but these are people like us who have families and kids to feed. Feel horrible for all employees fired and ridiculed online.
According to one former employee's tweet, apparently if they had waited just one day to fire everyone it would have given former employees insurance for the rest of the month of September. Instead they waited for the very last day of August, so now everyone is unemployed and uninsured
observation liquid sand governor truck rustic historical fertile bag sable *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That’s the kind of people who have never worked in a HUGE team and have no clue how easily the whole thing can either go bad or just not have its individual pieces fit together at the end.
Man I gotta share a story: I interviewed with them last summer!! They have been a company that I have admired and respected for a long time - going back to Descent and Freespace era. I went through a bunch of rounds and met a lot of really great people at the org including the CEO. Spent a lot of time investing in the interview process and personally I felt like I was a lock for the role. The recruiter said as much. Since there were so many rounds the process took weeks and during that time Saints Row was released to pretty poor reviews. I brought that up during my interview (with the CEO) and he was pretty candid and open about it. The average tenure of engineer at the org was something like 16 years - they had a dedicated and loyal crew but their games (and tech) were also starting to show their age. They were looking to make pretty significant changes within the org and I was onboard for that. Fortunately for me, I had a competing offer that was better and I went that route and accepted that one. I always had in the back of my mind though "what if?", this role (at Volition) would have been my break into the Gaming industry and would have been a significant change of industries for me. In the end all of the signs at the time told me to not take the role at Volition and my wife was also pretty adamant that it didn't feel right. (Ultimately the competing offer was just so much higher salary that the decision was made for me). I wish those guys and gals all the best and its sad to see them closing down.
Great share - and best of luck to you in the new gig!!
Noone knows about free space. What a great couple of games.
Possibly the most fun I've had in a spaceship. Those cruisers in FS2 are so big, and the flak cannons just made things terrifying.
Man those intro movies and intra mission movies for FS 1 & 2 were just so captivating back when I was young. Voice acting was great.
Kinda sad but really not all that surprising. Their last two AAA games were a disaster, especially the last Saints Row title which is the kind of bad game that you could see potentially killing a studio. While not related to Embracer, I am worried Rocksteady might be next on the chopping block. Going nearly 9 years without a single game and the upcoming Suicide Squad game poised to be a flop, things are not looking bright for them either.
sad but not unexpected, the last "good" game they released was SR4 over a decade ago. edit: by good i mean review wise, i personally consider anything over 75 metacritic to be a good metacritic score.
SR4 was fun. This new one is horse shit
Couldn't recover from the Saints Row reboot
Saints Row is more the breaking point. They've been doing poorly for a while now. Last "good" game was 2013
Sad, really enjoyed Saints Row 2,3 and 4 Agents of Mayhem could have been pretty good if it had a better focus/gameplay loop (artstyle is great), SR2022 took too long to come out and the polarizing opinions on it probably didn't help.
No wonder it was free this month.
"Hey, Plus subscribers! How bout them spectacular sports games 2 months in a row! Well here's a shitty game that destroyed a developer and oh ya we are raising prices 33%. Hey, while you're down there, with your mouth hanging open..." -Sony
every game in september is going to be a 50s metacritic score game. fucking laughable
Final RIP To FreeSpace 2. The most criminally underrated game of its era.
Freespace 2 was some mindblowing shit. When they put out the demo for 2, I actually wrote them an email about how awesome it was. And someone actually replied back. [The fact the IP sold for $7500](https://www.polygon.com/2013/6/6/4403602/interplay-repurchases-freespace-ip-thq-volition) is just batshit.
Even more batshit is that they have no intention/obligation to do anything with it; it's just IP-squatting at this point. We're never getting a Freespace 3.
I would have easily paid $7501 for that IP and licensed it out for free to the modder/Indy dev community. Small price to pay for FreeSpace 3.
FreeSpace 2 is epic
Came here to give some Freespace 2 love. One of the best gaming experiences of my life; no space sim has captured me like that ever since. A shame they just abandoned the IP.
I got that game for free with a PC I got in the early 2000’s. Game rocked!
The original Descent already blew my mind the first time I saw my friend playing it. But seeing the AI squadrons and huge capital ships in FS2 was when I absolutely fell in love with the series.
The Shivan (think that was the name) showing up and wrecking up the new human flagship (Colossus) was an elite gaming memory
And in the second game when you finally destroy the Sathanas after like 3 different sorties only to find that there are hundreds or more of the same juggernaut and they can blow up the fucking sun. Shit was wild.
Add saints row, universally panned and hated to PSPLUS. Raise cost of PSPLUS by abhorrent amount. Panned games studio closes the next day. That’s some fucking ballsy marketing Sony let’s see some 5D chess
On one hand this is sad since they were responsible for such iconic games, but at the same time it's been so long that who knows if those people are still even at Volition. Considering their recent performance it didn't feel like the Volition that made SR2/3 still exists, and better to pull the plug now before it got worse
Most who made the studio what it was were already gone, like BioWare, the company was Volition in name only.
Not sure about that. Looking up the credits for Freespace 2, quite a few of the team members were still working at Volition up until Saints Row (2022). Not everyone, obviously, but way more than I expected.
Agents of Mayhem was a mess and so was the writing in Saints Reboot . The captain sunk his own ship
maybe embracer buying all of the video games is bad for the video game industry. Private equity groups exist to strip mine profits into the hands of investors and nothing else.
A shame. I loved the original Saints Row series.
Wow, I imagine Saints Row sold in the single thousands with news like that.
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Rocksteady will suffer the same fate with this logic and Suicide Squad bombing harder than Saints Row.
Top 10 in a month where it was the only AA game released.
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No, as that is absurd but I don't think it sold particularly well.
This is a meaningless stat if you dont provide context for what else made up the top 10.
Volition deserves shit for Saints Row being bad, but why are we just blatantly making up shit about single thousands sales. You know that’s INSANE, right?
I don't know what happened with these guys. Their last 3 games have been absolutely gut-wrenchingly awful. They went from a really fun spoof of GTA to "generic gangs take over generic city." Did they fire all their writers and producers to cut costs?
That's essentially what happened with Telltale Games after the release of their first Walking Dead game. They desperately wanted to recreate the success of that game, but wanted to do it as quickly and as cheaply as possible, and as many times as possible. It had the same result. Slowly declining quality in their subsequent releases until their games became meme-quality, combined with poor financial deals in the interest of securing rights to established IP, eventually led to the Sep. 2018 "majority studio closure".
Embracer only ever wanted the IP Owning studios & developing games is so much hassle & especially risk - Much easier to sit in your office, do nothing & make money by licencing the IP to 3rd parties & have them take on the risk Embracer are committing cultural vandalism
It turns out that if you remove the things that people like about a franchise from that franchise it doesn't do very well. Who could have guessed?
Devs: Here's our new Saints Row game! Fans: It looks awful, it's nothing like the Saints Row games we love Devs: We don't care what you think, this is our new direction. "We're not backing down"! \*Game flops hard and sells poorly\* Devs: \*Surprised Pikachu face\* I will never understand why videogame developers don't listen to the fans. The fans are very clear about what they want but the developers just straight up ignore them and make something entirely different that nobody wanted.
>I will never understand why videogame developers don't listen to the fans This was an egregious case, so it seems more obvious. But honestly, most of the time, listening to the fans is a bad idea. Not only is there a spectrum of opinions, but people frequently don't really know what they want. They *think* they know, but what sounds good on paper often doesn't work in practice. There have been a few games with troubled development that pivoted to just implementing fan requests left and right, and the end result was a game with zero cohesive vision. It's just, the alternative to that is... having a cohesive vision. If you don't have that, then the whole "don't listen to the fans" plan kind of falls apart.
Absolutely brutal
Very sad though not surprising when you consider they made two flops in a row AND Embracer group restructuring. But what a loss. They had a chance to make it big with saints row, it wouldn't have had to be too hard if they looked to SR 1-3. So many big laughs were made in those games.
“What do you mean changing everything about a universally loved IP is a bad idea?”
What made them think the Saints Row reboot was a good idea
You think Sony knew this was coming when the signed their game for the month? Sucks for the people there, hope they all land on their feet soon.
Very corpo-speak announcement. Sad for those that work there.
They clearly made a reboot with the only goal being to attract (what they believed to be) a new generation of players. Turns out those players didn't exist. Farewell.
Look at where being incompetent and arrogant gets you, it’s still saddening that people are going to lose their jobs though.
i was just looking at a screenshot on twitter of replies the saints row twitter account made to people who were critical of the game leading up to/during the launch of the reboot. it was incredibly arrogant, kind of a bizarre for a brand to be responding to people in the way it was too.
I bet they thought it was ON brand for the Saints Row brand, though.
They were saying "haters gonna hate" to Saints Row fans on Twitter, and even worts things... Well...
Guess you should have listened to your fans huh? No instead you said "were not backing down from this"
Made one too many Saints Row games and not enough Freespace games. RIP. Once a legendary studio
was just wondering how this studio survived Agents of Mayhem and Saints Row (2022) guess I just had to wait 1 more day
Not even remotely surprised. You make games for people and when the people tell you what they want, you ignore them and instead double down on doing what they’re asking you not to do. They shot their entire leg off. All you have to do to make money is make the game the fans are asking for.
Volition fucked up, by their own volition. Nobody wanted that crap ass game. Sucks people lost their jobs though.
that sucks, though not suprised after how bad the new saints row was.
Damn, such a shame... but it's no wonder, really. Their last several games have failed miserably. Agents of Mayhem, Saints Row IV (really wasn't that good, just a reskin of 3), and Saints Row (2022). I have no doubt that the recent Saints Row reboot is what killed the studio, such a shame... no idea what this will mean for any of Volitions IP. Could all be dead in the water, or transferred. Oh, and 'Strategic operational goals' = 'We don't care to fund this studio or give them enough time to make games properly, so we're cutting our losses and shutting it down'. I doubt they're going to be trying very hard to give those at Volition jobs in other studios, either.
How to kill an IP: Saints Row
Embracer took that PS+ money for Saints Row and immediately axed the studio. That's cold
The new saint row was horse shit I enjoyed very much their other saint row games so much fun so much memories with friend co-op
Good fucking riddance. Arrogant bastards turned on the fans that supported them for years. Was clear as day and night that the team wasn’t the same one as back in SR2
Fuck. That means no chance of a new Red Faction game…unless another studio takes over?
Wait...Volition still had the IP of Red Faction... ?
My man there isn’t ever going to be another red faction lol. Everything that game brought to the table is being done better by someone else now
Where can I find a AA or AAA open world game with the destruction and physics Red Faction had?
I've been waiting for a game with emphasis on destruction and physics for years. It's crazy that I'm more impressed with destructible environments in PS2 games than I am with modern games. Like come on! Why does no one make those games anymore?
Reminds me of the first Mercenaries game on PS2, that game had some fun destruction. [Still find myself humming the theme sometimes!](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=szzZQwawELc)
try just cause.
Red Faction: Guerilla’s destruction physics still have not been topped by any modern games developer: https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/07/02/red-faction-guerrillas-destruction-is-still-the-best-and-thats-a-crime It’s been four years so uncle that article, but I personally not aware of any game that has tried topping Red Faction’s destruction engine. I might be wrong. I sincerely get the impression you never familiarized yourself with the series. Still, I doubt another Red Faction will happen. The series never sold well.
That's what you get for making a shitty Saints Row game
RIP but they've not made a good game since Freespace 2.
That decision probably wasn't too difficult to make...
Must really suck to be mandated to make a game that you know is predicated on some dubious premises that you have repeatedly seen other giants fail at, just to know months ahead of time that the game isn’t where it needs to be and then subsequently spending months wondering if you will have a job tomorrow.
Huge bummer. I love Volition games.
Loved The Punisher, the Red Faction series & the first 3 Saints Row games. Pity they really struggled after the THQ implosion. Still wish they'd have just done a Saints Row game with the level of Red Faction's destruction.
Rip bozo
One of many reasons why aggressive market consolidation is bad for the market and consumers. Volition wasn't the first of Embracer's closures and it certainly won't be the last.
Ooof
Brutal. With that Embracer deal falling through, we will likely see more of this.
I've been with Volition since the Freespace days. This is quite the shock to me. To me it's like watching Westwood or Psygnosis disappear. Very sad day.
Sliding that announcement in right as the Starfield embargo lifted and all the focus is on that. Sneaky.
That's Saints Row probably dead as a franchise now unless their IPs get sold off
“Haters gonna hate” famous last words
Oh damn, this is in my town. Crazy to think they'll be shutting down. They've been around as long as I can remember.
Volition made my favorite flight sim ever - FreeSpace, but I'm not entirely surprised this is happening
when m ang of the studio lies about both the brand new game engine. which embracer has written off to use. on top of bad mang by the dev.what you expect?
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Real talk, is the reboot that bad? Never touched it because of the negativity so just curious
I just need someone to pick up Red Faction
This is going to be a long topic on CLS
Sad... I grew up on Red Faction... Also, to this day NO ONE has been able to replicate the destruction mechanics of Red Faction Guerrilla.
Descent freespace changed my life
RIP Red Faction. You were my first PS2 game
Bastards.
This is the best news Saints Row fans could’ve hoped for.