Hopefully people can stop with the “I bet Bethesda will take down skyblivion!1!!” comments now. It’s very clear there’s good will between modders and the devs.
Hopefully people can stop with the “I bet Bethesda will take down skyblivion!1!!” comments now. It’s very clear there’s good will between modders and the devs.
“We beat you to it bitches. And while you’ve spent 9 years on your labor of love and and made nothing from it, we will make tens of millions. Here’s a couple copies of our shittily optimized remaster just to rub it in :)”
Sincerely Todd
Yeah they spent years working on a remaster just to dunk on a small mod team. Next time, Bethesda should ask for fan’s permission to work on the franchise they literally own! /s
Yes, that literally is what they did.
If Skyblivion had released first, even for free, far more people would be going… wait, why would I pay for yet another Bethesda remaster… when a free one already exists?
This is the company that routinely releases broken buggy games, because they can’t figure out how to actually fix their engine, their games routinely have to be fixed and patched by modders… who keep trying to figure out how to monetize mods or any kind of additional content the way record labels monetize artists.
At this point, it is difficult for me to think of a game company that is more absuive and exploitative of its most truly dedicated fans… aside from Roblox.
I mean, I’m sure they couldn’t charge for Skyblivion in the first place. I get that it’s a huge undertaking and all, but they’re still using someone else’s assets and engine that they didn’t get the official license for unlike Obsidian with Fallout: New Vegas.
Fallout: London didn’t charge, I’m sure for exactly the same reason.
Its kind of ironic that all you’re thinking about is money while these modders are doing it for the love of the craft. Sure everyone would love to see a paid release of Skyblion on Steam like Valve allowed with Black Mesa, but the modders are building this regardless.
Bethseda certainly wouldn’t love to see that, they’d sue them into… ahem, well, Oblivion, if they tried.
Isn’t that just unnecessarily cynical. Can’t Bethesda appreciate what the Skyblivion people are doing, knowing that they’ll appreciate the gesture?
Oh, well, ‘Bethesda apprectiating what the Skyblivion people are doing’ would look something like hiring the mod team to complete their work in house, as an actual official product.
… So that they could be, you know, paid for their passionate work.
Passion doesn’t pay bills.
Does… did everyone just now not remember how that was a thing that used to happen? Mod teams actually getting hired, paid?
Particularly with Valve, back in the late 90s through 00’s?
I’m just saying they could appreciate something in a “hey that’s pretty cool” way, and at the same time have no interest in them actually being part of Bethesda itself. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ok then, keep paying all your favorite artist’s bills with ‘appreciation’.
It’s ironic that you’re looking at this from the same angle that you accuse Bethesda of. The Skyblivion team didn’t start this “labor of love”, as you correctly put it, to earn money. Yet all you can think about is how much money you think they’re missing out on. It really shows what your values in life are.
… They call it a labor of love, without the stated goal of making money…
Because if their stated goal was to make money, Bethesda would sue them into poverty induced early graves.
Yep, its a massive corpo style flex, ‘kill them with mandated kindness’ type of move, grin for the cameras as we demean you.
The Skyblivion devs are almost certainly in mental shambles right now, but they have to put on the happy face.
Anyone who doesn’t understand this has either never worked in software, or for a large corp, or both.
I mean:
1.) It’s Bethesda’s IP
The “remaster” was not just a paint job. That took a whole damn team, a very hard working team, to rebuild the game in UE5.
Skyblivion will probably continue development despite it.
None of that changes or even addresses what I said in the comment you are replying to.
Yes, a corpo flex often involves throwing a ton of money and manpower at something…
Yes, Skyblivion development will probably continue… doesn’t change the fact that Bethesda just did a giant corpo flex on them.
The… whole … point of a corpo flex … is to showcase that you have a disproportionate amount of legal and monetary power, and you can use that to humiliate upstarts, show others how insignificant they are.
Have… you never worked in a large corp? Or… studied how they make business decisions?
Have you ever worked in software development?
… never even picked the corpo background for cyberpunk 2077?
I’ve done all three: worked in corps, am a dev, and have done some games dev early career.
When you dev something, it’s a miracle anything works. All modern software is a giant Jenga pile. When a large project rolls out the door, the feeling is never “oh wow let’s flex on these peasants”, it’s more like “my shit sucks oh god when will it break but try it out and see what you think”.
If I was on the Bethesda team, I would actually be very interested in trying to get feedback from the only other group of devs that remotely know what it’s like to do something similar. What approaches did they take? What’s similar? What’s different? Did the choices that other team make lead to a better product? How much more elegant is their code?
The only people who ruin goodwill like that are overzealous IP lawyers.
… And why didn’t Bethesda do this with the Skyblivion team?
Why didn’t they offer to at least pay them temporarily as contracted consultants?
Because management is full of themselves and maniacally, socio/psychopathically profit driven.
You can’t say they weren’t aware of the Skyblivion project, they literally coordinated a publicized action with them as part of their release schedule.
…
Game dev in particular, and even software dev generally, in America, at least… is absolutely chalk full of situations where one person or team or whatever’s work is either stolen, or fought over, or someone claims credit for a whole bunch of stuff they didn’t actually contribute nearly anything to, or make a whole big show of some streamlining effort that actually just cripples or eliminates the proverbial one dinky jenga block from the xkcd comic, and then all the blame for a whole bunch of other idiots’ plans, who never even consulted with the jenga block maintainer, well that guy or gal gets utterly blamed for all of it.
As well as of course all the NDAs and IP type bullshit where nothing even resembling what you did as a contractor or for another company can be used elsewhere, and become massively succesful, without a massive legal and financial threat.
… The actual devs, yes, did their work most likely without ‘lol lets fuck over these upstarts’ in mind.
That was in the mind of upper management and c suite though, guaranteed.
They don’t talk about that infront of the servants, I mean employees, I mean, who cares really, we’ll drive them nuts with crunch OT and then lay them off anyway, gaslighting them for the entire development cycle that that won’t happen.
…
Your instinct as a senior dev to reach out comes from a reasonable and good place.
But upper management and c suite is concerned with maximizing profit and business strategy, and in game dev, these folks have a long, stories history of routinely being as ruthless, cutthroat, duplicitous as possible.
It is warfare to them.
…
And I am not just pulling my credential check out of my ass here as some kind of gotcha style rhetoric, I also have worked in game dev, in software dev, in db admin and data analyst roles, for large corporations.
Though I do truly appreciate that you actually have the relevant credentials, and are talking from your own actually relevant experience, so I want to thank you for that, for actually having the conversation.
My experience has been almost entirely upper managers and VPs and the Board consistently doing the exact opposite of what actual developers suggest, request, or warn about, and then just slyly or sometimes quite brashly blame everyone else for causing the fuckups they were warned their plans would cause.
They think they are Gods and everyone else is a contemptible, digusting, unfortunately unavoidable part of doing business… and if a truly royal fuckup happens, they’ll turn on the people that built the corporate ladder they climbed without even a blink.