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The Daily Walkthrough would like to offer its condolences to the friends, family and colleagues of Robert A. Altman. The founder and CEO of ZeniMax Media Inc., the parent company of Bethesda, had a profound impact on the world of gaming. RIP.
The North remembers! Well, maybe not. The Nordic esports organization known as North is shutting down. The parent companies Parken Sport & Entertainment and Nordisk Film have chosen to stop investing in the esports company and instead focus on their core businesses. “It is still uncertain when a reopening after Covid-19 is realistic, so we can get customers back. There is still potential in e-sports and gaming, but the time horizon is long and uncertain, and Covid-19 has moved the time horizon further years into the future according to our assessment, as both esports and the sports industry as a whole have been hit hard financially,” says Lars Bo Jeppesen, Chairman of North. The full announcement can be found here.
In one of my favorite articles I’ve read a long while, we take a look back at how game developers were thinking about the industry 10 years ago. Spoiler alert, it didn’t turn out at all like they thought. “I see a lot of little teams trying to make simple games, and I’m a little worried…” “There are some traps in the industry now for developers — one is to grow into the size that makes middle games on console, bigger than $15 million, but smaller than $30 million.” “Last year there were only about 50 or 60 games that sold over a million units — that’s multiplatform and international. And only half only sold two million. Of course, if you spend over $20 million you want to sell a million units. And if you spend over $50 million you want something well north of two million unit sales… Frankly, the economics of the $50 million game are looking a little shaky.” Those are three quotes from three different prominent players in the industry telling you why making games is a bad business. Small games, medium games and big games. Boy were they wrong. Brendan Sinclair at Gamesindustry.biz has the full story.