Insomniac, the dev team behind the wildly successful Spider-Man games just had a leak. In the leak, it’s discovered that they were strong-armed by Sony (who owns Insomniac) to downsize staff despite exceeding sales targets and hitting goals. They needed to downsize to help balance Sony’s books, who have acquired a slew of failing or underperforming studios.

Sony owns Studio A, and Studio B. Studio B have underperformed for the last few years, whilst Studio A has outperformed their targets. Because of the shortcomings in Studio B, Sony are now out of pocket, even accounting for the earnings of Studio A. Studio A are forced to eliminate staff roles to make up for Studio B’s mismanagement. A well oiled and well performing Studio have to butcher their teams to balance their parent entity’s books. It’s so fucking short sighted and stupid.

This isn’t just a Sony/Insomniac issue either, I guarantee this goes on throughout the industry whenever there’s a parent company. It’s just how it will always be in those circumstances.

Each to their own, sometimes a cosy game scratches just the right itch

Window open, door closed; window closed, door open. I do what I can to prevent unnecessary door slamming in the night caused by a draft from the window

Looks like Blank Check did itself dirty!

Yeah it’s great - I think they’re ramping up to the full 1.0 release soon, so that might be a good point for you to jump back in - they’ll be adding a story too, with a bunch of other things that they’ve been keeping quiet about.

It’s not fundamentally different from Update 5, but it’s on Update 8 now and there’s lots of changes, lots of quality of life changes, entirely revamped areas, new technology behind it (Upgraded to Unreal Engine 5.1), and lots more updates to tech trees and milestones. You won’t be getting a new game by jumping into Update 8, but you’ll get a much more streamlined and enjoyable experience.

One of the main improvements is Blueprints, you can now build modular factories in the blueprint designer and easily build much larger factories without so much of the ‘busywork’ of setting everything up.

This particular structure is a simple copper facility producing Wire, Cable and Copper Sheet, but I love how it’s framed by the trees here

I shop in Lidl, and it’s full of brands that are decent in their own right but design packaging clearly meant to evoke the big name brands. Most of them taste better than the big brands too

I’m not sure but the iPhone bubble colour debate seems so US centric. In the UK, I’ve never heard of anyone bringing it up

When a creator releases something into the public, they no longer control how it’s used, they can influence, sure, but not control. It’s the wider community’s decision now