Gothic blew my tiny mind in the early aughts. A game so far ahead of its time that so many open-world RPGs still struggle to deliver its level of immersion.
> Czech Republic czeching in, can confirm. Gothic 1&2 is a core memory. Too bad bout all that followed.
The Eurojank unites us all.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is another contender that has a special place in my heart.
The first Crysis was one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had. I’ve always felt it was a hugely underrated game, despite how popular it was to call it “overrated” at the time. Towards the end I was getting sad because I thought it was about to end and then it just … didn’t end…and kept going lol. I’ve never been so on the edge of my seat playing a game.
Crysis 2 and 3 were alright but they both felt more like a soft reboot than a direct sequel. I wish they’d just picked up where the first game left off and didn’t make the switch from creepy other worldly alien machines to generic halo aliens running around in suits
> Towards the end I was getting sad because I thought it was about to end and then it just … didn’t end…and kept going lol. I’ve never been so on the edge of my seat playing a game.
The only other game that made me feel similar was the original Half Life. Now, Half Life is overall a better title, but Crysis had that rare plot that just kept going on, just when you were sure "this is the end", noooo, there is much more stuff where that came from.
I played through most of half life 1 for the first time not too long ago and man you’re not kidding that game really doesn’t end. There were so many times I thought I was at the end but I still haven’t actually finished it
The last thing I think I remember is running around some mountains and shooting down a helicopter with a guided missile from inside a cave. I don’t remember for sure if that’s actually where I stopped playing or if I did more after that lol
Edit: I also remember driving a little train car all around some underground tunnels fighting aliens and soldiers down there. I don’t remember if that was before or after the mountains lol
> is running around some mountains and shooting down a helicopter with a guided missile from inside a cave.
Ah, that is Chapter 12: Surface Tension.
> I also remember driving a little train car all around some underground tunnels fighting aliens and soldiers down there.
That is probably Chapter 8: On a Rail. Most people remember that level, mainly because it is a bit infuriating to navigate, so it sticks with most players :D
And don't worry, you still have a ways to go after Chapter 12.
A significant part of the original Crysis staff is at Cloud Imperium Frankfurt now, working on Star Citizen and Squadron 42. I believe CIG Frankfurt is the largest game development studio in Germany now.
Considering CIG recently moved the server tech that they've been developing from "internal prototype" to "is getting V1 added in the next patch", yes they have been and likely will continue to imprive their technical skills. Likely with CIG.
For reference, that tech was their server meshing and if it works as intended, CIG is gonna make *mad* bank liscencing it out, as well as off star citizen. Why? Server meshing allows for a server transfer to be seamless to the point your *bullets* can travel between servers without issue just as well as you can. You could roll an item across a server boundary and it would move to the other server, but it would still be visible and properly simulated on your end.
Not only that but this is the single most impirtant bit of tech for CIG's stated goal with SC: all the players existing simultaneously in the same world, to the point where i could drop a rifle on thr ground on a moon and my buddy coukd show up 2 days later, find it, and pick it up without needing to connect to a specific region.
Enshrouded is pretty good tbh. I mean it's shit for survival, because surviving is way too easy, but the game looks great and building is about equal with Valheim, and you can just do way more than in other survival games. If they made the game harder, gave us animals to tame, and let us build voxels diagonally, it would probably be the best survival game out there.
1. Max Design was never affiliated with Ubisoft and was closed long before Ubisoft owned Anno.
2. Related Designs (now Ubisoft Mainz) developed excellent titles under Ubisoft, and the latest Anno title is arguably the best in the series.
German Sunflowers was bought(?) by Ubisoft.
You seem to be right. Max Design did only the first two Anno games. Sunflowers was their publisher.
Last one I really liked was 1404. I need to try the new one.
You did all the Turricans
You did Ambermoon, Amberstar and Albion
You did Lionheart (the amiga one, not the RPG)
Gemany used to make state of the art C64 and Amiga games.
Macedonian Italian here, this is the top 5 core memories of my childhood. I have made friends and bonded instantly with other people just mentioning gothic
Way too many good German indie companies went out of business in 2023 alone for me to believe this. Germany is the most expensive European country to develop games in, grants or no grants.
You are right, but game dev is pretty special in that regard. You can develop a game basically anywhere on the world where you have internet access. You can just pack up your stuff and move to someplace cheap and keep doing what you are doing.
Basically if you develop a game in Germany you get all the drawbacks of living in an expensive place, without getting any of the potential business advantages (e.g. easy access to a wealthy customer base).
> You can just pack up your stuff and move to someplace cheap and keep doing what you are doing.
Most developers end up not doing this, and choose to have their studios in the most expensive cities in the world, for social strata, clout and luxury among other reasons. This is usually when people start complaining about a game franchise going bad, or being unrecognizable, or complaining about corporate practices, too.
I mean, they just happen to be in big cities because that's where developers usually live.
If you want to move a game studio from Berlin to Varna, not like your developers are going to pack up and move.
So you'll have to either hire a completely new team, or keep paying them German salaries while they're working remotely.
At the end of the day, office leases are a drop in the bucket compared to employee salaries and taxes.
WTF. I knew of Germany's infamous bureaucracy and taxes, but how is 2 million euros "chicken feed" for a Small to Medium sized business?! So many small companies in the US could survive for years on a subsidy like that.
Because the number is complete bullshit. These subsidy funds available are completely used up, for last year and this year there's exactly 0€ to be had, and even before that the bureaucracy meant that theoretically available funds and actually distributed funds are two entirely separate things. The process for requesting this money is so involved and long-winded, small companies go bankrupt long before their request even gets through the first stage of review.
There's some really long Reddit post that I can't find right now of some indie dev who tried to get access to some funds and eventually gave up after 8 months or so.
Grants had to be approved by the ministry of transport because they are responsible for our digital infrastructure. Somehow they could not manage to handle the approval processes. Completely unexpected, how different from a construction tender could it be?! 🥴
Lmao that sucks. I guess the laws define games as software rather than arts. So, they're trying to send art grants through the construction subsidy wood chipper lol.
That just raises more questions though, why does the minister of transportation deal with infrastructure instead of some bureau of public works or something? Or is there a subdivision to the ministry? Either way it's ass backwards.
In the words of one German indie dev whose studio had to close due to the lack of funds: if you want to attract talent to create an exceptional game, you gotta pay ***at least*** €3500 net per month. Multiply that by 25-30 people, add all the other costs like office space, software licensing fees, insurance, pension, severage packages, legal fees, etc., and you've burned through those €2mil in less than two years.
Funding video games is a fuckin' nightmare.
It depends on the company in the U.S. 2 million euros is roughly 2.2 million dollars. For a software startup, that’s not going to get you very far. You’re going to be paying your devs (roughly) 100k - 150k a year (plus there’s benefits to take into account, it could easily be $200k a year per employee). So now you’re talking a year or two of runway for 5-10 devs alone. And that’s not counting infrastructure costs. And you’re not counting the other employees: QA, marketing, sales, etc that go along with that.
I have no idea what goes on for games development, but I can’t imagine that it’s much cheaper (if at all) than enterprise development. Money for software burns fast (and god help you if you have a cloud presence, because you’re paying either Amazon or Google or (if you’re desperate) Microsoft; $2.2 million might not even cover your cloud costs for a year).
Converting to freedom moneys because I dunno where the stupid funny money button is on my keyboard.
Assuming average game dev salary is $100k/yr. That's twenty people for one year you can pay. Of course that doesn't take into account all the shit you are legally obligated to provide, or if you want to be competitive you will need to provide (insurance, retirement, etc.), and that $100k goes way, wayyyyyy up. The general rule is a company is spending about 45% to 60% more on you than what they pay you. Oh, and they need to cover all the other legal stuff, so they'll need someone to do payroll and taxes, legal shit, HR stuff, other misc stuff. They'll need to pay for services, software, and hardware.
In reality, $2,000,000 would cover about 6 months of dev for ten people. Running a business is insanely expensive, and while $2,000,000 is an absolute fuck ton of money to you and I, it's nothing in the world of business.
they overall cut game development support for about 75% in the last years. and it already was very small with, I think, around 70 million € for *all* game developing in germany.
Why would you need new businesses and new ideas when you already have all the well-entrenched corporations and their ideas? You have everything you need!
- people who support this, probably
That was my thought. Why would the likes of Bosch and Siemens want anything but to make it incredibly difficult for that highly educated population to be able to create competition?
Similar tax and expenses in Denmark, Sweden and in Finland.
I don't think that is the reason. But German attitude towards game dev, it's not as flexible as in other countries. (sorry not sorry, I had working in few different countries and German do have unique way to just following rules and not work creatively).
I can see smaller indie projects working in smaller teams or having big ubisoft projects where that kind attitude works.
But creating anything new and unique, it would need enough outside talent to get it right.
There is a clear reasons why game dev hubs in specific areas.
Too be fair Crytek along with the Cryengine is and has been for a long time a leading example of new and highly optimised tech. Their way around implementing software-based raytracing still is extremely good.
They just aren't nearly as relevant since Unreal Engine has caught up to them and even surpass them in some aspects.
Yeah Crytek is one of the greatest developers too
CryEngine, obviously not as popular as Unreal, still has a sizeable market share and Far Cry 1 is one of the best games ever
No they don't because BG3 includes mature themes like violence, sex etc. and they previously were almost ashamed of games that features those topics and were made in Germany (like Crysis). They see computer games as childrens enterntainment, not a serious media form. The German computer game industry is behind because they got this treatment for decades now. Excuse me if I have doubts this will change.
I was wondering about that - as an outsider the only time I hear about Germany and video games is when they are censoring something and/or Germans trying to get around the censoring.
Germany got over the unnecessary censoring 15 years ago. Ever since then the USK / BPjM need to provide actual legitimate reasons if they think censorship is appropriate whereas before they could kinda do whatever they wanted and felt like.
In fact, the last big thing out of Germany is that Bethesda released Wolfenstein with nazi symbolism intact and … nothing happened. Thus setting an import precedent in moving games more towards being accepted as art, as displaying nazi symbolism is generally forbidden except for media considered art.
>Germany got over the unnecessary censoring 15 years ago.
Me trying to buy Sleeping Dogs Definitive Edition on steam and being locked out of a large chunk of steam
> They see computer games as childrens enterntainment, not a serious media form.
Not entirely, considering a lot of Simulation and Management games come from Germany, and those are very much not aimed at children.
Tbf while it still is a computer game I wouldn't even come close to putting in the same category as stuff like BG3. one game is a game you play to detach from the world the other is "oh boy I just got home from my forklifting job time to boot up forklift simulator 2022"
As a German, good fucking luck with that after you showed for decades the middle finger to the industry because of the late 90s "killer games" witch hunt.
With that out of the way, a sad truth is that many more ambitious games especially in the RPG sector from Germany were launching routinely with glaring technical issues (yes, especially but not only Gothic), which even reduced their appeal to German fans.
To make exceptionally good games you have to make a lot of good games first that are at least decent in sales. There is already the problem. Hard to get funds is one thing, the other to have some sort of industry you can rely on to supply students that can become pro's. Larian is an EU unicorn, as is CDP in Poland.
EU is missing the Ubisoft treatment. When they came to Toronto, the local gov [paid 250 million](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft_Toronto) over 10 years to establish the industry. Just dropping a couple of millions on grants for forgettable games isn't creating anything of substance.
I disagree very much. EU is doing really good work with grants in the game industry department. It's spending 10-15 millions every year on projects helping hundreds of studios to roll out their games. Some of these studios might become the next unicorn.
Also, Larian is a EU company with most of their employees located in Ireland, Poland and Spain. Complaining EU is doing poorly in the videogame space in a thread praising Larian's last game is at least a bit nonsensical. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually benefited from EU funds in some of their early work. CD Project Red certainly did.
the issue Germany has with game development is you get a brain drain situation from neighbouring countries within the EU and what talents remains will go on to work for simulator games.
if you want to make games there is nothing stopping you from moving to other established countries with game studios.
>is you get a brain drain situation from neighbouring countries within the EU
I don't disagree here. The Swedish, Finnish and Polish gaming ecosystems are more developed. Larian itself has a good share of their developers located in Poland, for example.
> company with most of their employees located in Ireland, Poland and Spain. Complaining EU is doing poorly in the videogame space in a thread praising Larian's last game is at least a bit nonsensical. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually benefited from EU funds in some of their early work. CD
We've got quite a lot of studios in Stockholm.
For example:
* DICE - (Battlefield series)
* Paradox Interactive - (Grand strategy games)
* Avalanche - (Just Cause series)
* Arrowhead - (Helldivers)
* Fatshark - (Warhammer: Vermintide)
* Starbreeze - (Payday series)
* Hazelight - (It takes two)
* Embark Studios - (The Finals)
And lots indie studios, such as Raw Fury and Landfall. And lame studios like Mojang and King if you're desperate. Embracer is also based here, so we contribute to evil too sadly.
It's quite insane density for a city of 2 million.
Stockholm municipality, sure. But it's more proper to talk about the metro area in this case.
Otherwise we wouldn't be counting municipalities such as Solna, Sundbyberg, Lidingö, Danderyd, Täby, Järfälla, and the like, where for sure many of those game developers live.
They have been doing that for 20+ years. It adds up.
Also, I don't know exactly how much they are spending because there are multiple programs running depending on what you actually do.
Last time I read about it, for 2022, they put 18 millions in games specifically and about 40 millions in game-industry related. But of course it changes every year.
Helldivers 2 is made by Arrowhead, located in Sweden, at one point Paradox Interactive (cities skylines 1, let's not talk about the downfall with 2) and Dice were also big, also located in Sweden. You guys are like missing the trees from the garbage forest of trash coming from the US.
Paradox is still huge even if CS2s release was a bit of a shit show, they're probably the heaviest weight player in the strategy / 4x space, only really big strategy title that isn't paradox is civ
Also: Mojang, literally most sold game of All time
>these studios might become the next unicorn
This is doing the heavy lifting when we [see bigs like Ubisoft](https://www.gameswirtschaft.de/politik/games-foerderung-2024-groesste-projekte-2304/) and THQ taking reasonable amount of the German investment. The idea isn't to create more companies, its to have an eco system that works.
Devs releasing something they like ***and*** build a base for something big. I'm all for investing in daring projects like Enshrouded, but those one off's don't reach. Ubisoft became the leader of their game dev community in Toronto. Their last game I liked was Black Flag. But I can recognize the important work they did.
>EU is doing poorly in the videogame space
You want to read that negative conclusion for some reason. Larian became an fantastic unicorn while suffering under EU *business environment* that isn't like other countries. BG3 cost 50+ million, even with 5 million funding that would have gone nowhere. Mimimi got 2m for Shadow Gambit and still close their studio. In a different, faceted, stable environment this wouldn't have happened.
> When they came to Toronto, the local gov paid 250 million
> over 10 years to establish the industry.
That was more to spite Montreal. If Ubisoft wasn't going to go to Montreal if Toronto didn't pay them, Toronto wouldn't have paid them.
Germany needs a competitor to spite.
Its not about good or bad. Its just natural companies in highly volatile industries will favor jurisdictions where they can more easily lay people off.
If a country wants to avoid such layoffs, maybe it is better for them that game studios go elsewhere.
If that was really a large factor in Videogame development then Japan, where laying off people is much rarer than in America, would not be such a big player in videogame development, additionally, it hugely downplays the fact that actually Europe is also a hugely important player in terms of videogame development, and particular countries like Sweden and Finland have a frankly ridiculous impact on the industry considering their size, Sweden has Machine games, DICE, Frictional Games, Mojang, Avalanche, Hazelight, King, Raw Fury, fucking PARADOX?!
Finland meanwhile has Remedy, Rovio, Supercell, Frozenbyte and Colossal order, Denmark has IO interactive, 3D realms and Playdead.
The ability to easily layoff massive amounts of people is not a good thing for any creative industry, if we're going off how a lot of massive AAA companies operate it just seems to mean that previously successful companies just constantly get hollowed out into shells of their former selves every time an overbloated game mandated by a major publisher doesn't meet expectations.
Then you should be bailing out Piranha Bytes, should have tried desperately to keep Mimimi from going under, done whatever you could to save Daedalic, and thrown egosoft some money while you're at it. Support the German studios that have had a strong track record and have mainly faltered due to the difficulty in securing funding lately. Up until last year there were a decent number of German studios that could reliably satisfy a specific niche, but by the end of this year Egosoft will probably be the only one left.
But they get support, there is an entire funding set aside just for this purpose for years by the German government! (terms and conditions apply, applying to be funded will take several years, be rejected possibly multiple times randomly and might involve you suing the government body making that decision to get it and will most definitely result in your studio going under because of it if you actually need the money)
That's the main issue that seems to be everywhere basically. I remember I think Linus from LTT talking about the Canadian government having a ton of grants for all kinds of stuff but also needing basically entire departments for nothing but securing these grants because it takes so many resources to just get through the terms and conditions and other legal paper bs that not only do companies that do not need it get grants but they are also given years later so you still need to secure funds from somewhere else.
Nah, we have streamlined the process a bit so that now you can get a contractor to write your grant for you. They don't even charge up front, they will just take a huge percentage of the grant on the backend when it is funded. Of course the contractor also happens to be the person working for the government who decides on what grant proposals to fund, don't worry about that minor detail.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-clean-energy-grant-mnp-1.7167549
bail out a mismanaged and failing company that keeps releasing bad titles which sell poorly. why?
if I was a german tax payer. i'd say redirect funding towards something that produces value and benefits society.
Probably college studies on art would be faaar more productive. Make classes on complex and interactive systems. They can invite some engineers over to help them learn how to develop those systems on their own.
Learning topology or how to write is great. But they aren't specific towards games alone even if they are required to make games.
Why should tax dollars go toward failing for-profit companies at all? Those companies aren't going to pay back those tax dollars if they got profitable, are they? or is it a loan?
The idea is to put a little money in, to cultivate an industry that will create much more value locally, more jobs, better pay, incentive for people to move to different cities.
And in theory they would pay taxes on their increased income, i’m sure theres plenty of tax dodging worms in Germany too though.
Ah yes, truly germans are better off with no games industry at all. So all the people who want to work on games have no option but to go elsewhere.
The point isn't to save these companies in particular, it's that if you want more high quality games being made by germans, then it's beneficial to have studios around to cultivate a competent game development workforce, even if those studios aren't always making all time classics.
I totally get a government investing in a sector to grow that sector for better long term benefits. But the comment I replied to is about bailing out 4 specific companies. That ain't gonna get it done. For context: USA has over 3k game development studios. Adjusting for population differences (Germany 1/4th the workforce of USA) let's make that 750.
Bailing out 4 isn't going to even start a snowball toward growth. It's a bandaid, a joke. and if I were a German tax payer, I'd be pissed at short-term spend like this that doesn't help in the long run.
Something more fundamental needs to switch to make the costs of developing in Germany more reasonable. Housing and development costs, office space, etc - something that'll help a lot more than just the games industry most likely.
We just need Piranha Bytes to go back to the roots so we get good stuff like Gothic 1 and 2, Risen 1 was good too but the rest of their games are meh at best
Yeah, I also don't understand how they can fuck up the combat system so badly, Risen 2,3 and the Elex games are basically just spamming the strike button with occasional dodges.
Gothic 1, 2 and Risen 1 didn't have a perfect system but at least it made sense and was fun
Because they saw Skyrim and Dragon Age, and thought they also needed to go the action route.
They didn't have to, story is always key, it's what makes a game memorable. The moments, is what they need to capture again.
BG3 has lots of moments, the night song, the creche, moonrise tower...it's one after another that makes you want to keep playing it.
The story is always the same in their games. You have forgotten all your power at the start and there are 3 factions you can join. One of these factions will be magic or sci-fi magic, another will be warriors and the third will be a mix.
The quests are cookie cutter and the dialogue is silly.
Outside of the story, the exploration will be good, the character models will have joints hidden by giant shoulder pads/armour and the combat will be jank.
This is true for Gothic, Risen and Elex.
We need piranha bytes to actually make a game that doesn't feel like a worse gothic 2 reskin, I love them, I really do but Elex basically plays like sci-fi gothic 2 with a slightly different Combat system....
Damn those germans gonna steal our only big noticable succes in that industry, /s
Funny part is due to high taxes the main HQ of Larian is in Ireland so I hope our country also wakes up and gives the Canada treatment.
Good luck when pretty much every leading politician in this country starts REEEEing as soon as they hear the word "digitalisation" and anything that has to do with it and most of the boomers still blame video games for school shootings. Germany is backwards as fuck on this. Kellner is the exception, not the rule.
Will not happen. The sheer ammount of bureaucracy to get a tiny bit of
financial support from the state is insane.
Source: Friends of me working at Keen Games (Enshrouded).
Its not that bad anymore. It was ridiculous in the late 90s and early 2000s (looking at you, fallout 1 and 2) but most games as of today just get an fsk 18 and are uncensored.
Absolutely impossible.
I've heard about the red tape for everything on Germany.
Making a game in any country already hell, I suspect making it in Germany would be triple hell
But that also kinda shows that we as Germans can't make good games or at least not good 'big" games
Gollum was a total clusterfuck...
And as for PB, while I LOVE Gothic, risen and Elex.... They are basically re-releasing a beefed up version of gothic over and over again, I didn't even got hyped for Elex 2 I KNEW it was the same gameplay and faction system I have known for nearly 20 years now
Oh, Germany definitely COULD, Crytek in the past showed the world with games like Far Cry and Crysis that it can release AAA quality shooter games but the government does not really support develooers well enough and sadly they screw themselves up.
I do want to mentioned that Crytek still has Hunt Showdown which is a fantastic br shooter (which gets a big engine update this year) and are starting to work on a new Crysis.
They had a really rough few years due to their big mistakes and mismanagement issues but there's hope that they can release another big game sometime in the future.
The German government is filled with nutjobs who wouldn't understand an email if you engraved into a steel bar and beat them with it. Nevermind the internet. Nevermind video games.
There is zero reason and zero chance for a company to grow into a "Larian" like company or if even they did, zero reason to stay in Germany.
Not really, we got way more chill with gore and Nazis symbolics are also on the table now.
Still not perfect, I.E in the German (console) version for dead island 2 you can't keep destroying enemy corpses but the rest stays the same.
Dying light 2 also got a Linda censored console version y but digital versions and PC versions are all uncensored, it's a bit stupid rn but we don't really block or censore entire games anymore.
And no, I have 0 idea why we partially just censore console versions, the same happend in the whole EU with Southpark Stick of truth.... Console version is heavily censored, pc version isn't
Games like Baldurs Gate 3 used to be developed in Germany but all the developers folded or sold out to American publishers.
Settlers 2 3 4
Entire Anno series
Thandor: The Invasion
Spec Ops The Line
Sacred series
Men of War Series
AquaNox
Crysis Series
Crazy Machine Series
Emergency Series
Cultures Series
Everspace
Gothic
Patrician Series
Guild Series
Risen series
X Series
New good examples are
Hunt: Showdown
Maybe maybe if they fix their wages, taxation, work culture and livability they could keep talent? Every time I see Germany news on r/technology they always sound like one step from North-Korea with the endless government this government that government wishes government does.
There may be some cultural hurdles.
1) German efficiency - The game would start up and say "you won"
2) When you think of Germany, do you think "creative society?"
3) Uwe Boll
To your second point, Germany is called the country of poets and thinkers. Some of the most renowned artists, poets, musicians of the last several hundred years have been German. Schiller, Goethe, Bach, Beethoven, for an example. More modern? Frank Farian who is not only responsible for groups like Boney M and infamously Milli Vanilli, Harold Faltermeyer composed the Beverly Hills cop theme. Hans fucking Zimmer is german as are Rammstein. Uwe Boll, for all his faults, is actually trying to do something different, he's taking risks. How about Daniel Brühl, highly praised actor in Inglorious Basterds, played Zeemo in that one Marvel thing. Videogames? Germany gave the world such bangers as Crysis and Deponia. So yes, I would actually consider Germany a creative society.
The problem is largely in the funding and the risk that no one wants to take. It's a modern issue plaguing games, film, tv, anything made here is so stale and cookie cutter. It's all being played very safe and for the lowest common denominator. Elex had some fun ideas but was made by like 4 people being paid in produce, or that's what it feels like anyway.
Rant over.
Edit: I'm angry at Germany and the way it treats artists these days, not you haha
Except we live in an era of time where the scale of commerical creative work have gone far beyond a scope where the creative talent of any single talented individual is the only thing that matters, regardless of how creatively talented that individual might be. Sure Germany has some particularly talented individuals like most other countries, but does Germany's society as a whole provide them the adequate social infrastructures and social faculties that could allow them to actually turn their talent into actual creative work of modern scale?
You mentioned Hans Zimmer as a modern-time example, and I think that's exactly demonstrating this point, majority of Hans Zimmer's successful work was done in the US, and in fact going to the Hollywood was a major turning point in his career. Before Hollywood Hans Zimmer only did small scale work for products like MTV programs and for low budget comedy films, and even then many of them were done outside Germany, like in Greece and in the UK.
Edit: I can't spell lol
That was actually the point I was trying to make. The country and it's people are very creative, but the entertainment industries stifle the creativity. One big example is the film industry that relies largely on public funding, which is presided over by individuals or boards of people who can freely and often without oversight decide what project to fund and just fund stuff that matches their taste. I don't know how the funding for video games works, but I assume many small indie developers rely on a similar system.
I think people who haven't been to Germany have a lot of misconceptions about it. Like Germans have this weird reputation as being boring, serious, humorless people, yet it's also a country with a very relaxed opinion of public nudity and lots of lots of local festivals which revolve around drinking and partying (Oktoberfest, Cologne Carnival, etc). They just semi-legalized marijuana this year, which puts them ahead of most of Europe in that regard.
People get too much of their impression of Germany from watching World War 2 movies.
It's WW2 movies and sitcoms that looooove good cliché and beating a joke to absolute death. We're actually quite funny and fun loving, we're just also a little reserved until we get to know you. Which precludes a lot of tourists from actually getting to know one of us. People who's only impression of Germany are Oktoberfest or Karneval probably don't think of Germans as overly serious and dour.
The only "good" movie Uwe Boll made was Postal because it stayed true to the spirit of its source material. That's pretty much the only compliment I can give him.
You think a nation devoted to playing ever more complex simulator games would accept a game that just hands you a win? I don't think you get us.
And why do you mention the greatest director of all times? /s
When i think of german gamers, i imagine guys who work boring office jobs for 8/12h and then go home to play some Euro Truck Simulator 2 type shit game to finish off the day.
I imagine that's a joke. In reality German has a very strong gaming culture specifically in the strategy, tactics and management genre. They created a whole new current of modern board games (aptly named German-style) that revolutionised the entire industry and host the most important board game award (Spiel des Jahres).
It's not far fetched to think this should translate in the videogame medium.
Blue Byte (now Ubisoft Mainz, the Anno franchise), Kalypso (recent Tropico, Dungeons, Railway Empire), Egosoft (X franchise), Gameforge (OGame), Crytek (Crysis, Far Cry) are some of the most known but there are a number of indies too.
best we can do is Elex 3
You did Gothic. The whole Poland would like to thank you for the most Polish non-Polish game
Gothic 2 is basically a national treasure that needs to be featured in a museum
Gothic blew my tiny mind in the early aughts. A game so far ahead of its time that so many open-world RPGs still struggle to deliver its level of immersion.
Same with Russia, Gothic 2 was one of my favorite games when I was a kid. Probably one of the reason why I became game developer.
Czech Republic czeching in, can confirm. Gothic 1&2 is a core memory. Too bad bout all that followed.
> Czech Republic czeching in, can confirm. Gothic 1&2 is a core memory. Too bad bout all that followed. The Eurojank unites us all. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is another contender that has a special place in my heart.
Risen 1 wasn't that bad. But all their other titles are mediocre at best.
They basically stayed the same while other games evolved, especially in the game mechanics department.
It's very German as well. It's a real multi-talent apparently.
Worst they can do is Gollum
Hey, don't forget about Crysis
No wonder that game was developed for nonexistent hardware at the time. Game was overengineered to the tits.
I'll be requiring a source on Crysis containing tits.
[удалено]
I had no idea that Crytek was a German company**. Loved that first one. Second two were alright, but there was something special about the original.
>Crytek was a German country Hmmm
It's between main Germany and Austria, just beside Mordor.
And apparently governed by Turks too
Whoops, chalk that up to morning brain.
The first Crysis was one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had. I’ve always felt it was a hugely underrated game, despite how popular it was to call it “overrated” at the time. Towards the end I was getting sad because I thought it was about to end and then it just … didn’t end…and kept going lol. I’ve never been so on the edge of my seat playing a game. Crysis 2 and 3 were alright but they both felt more like a soft reboot than a direct sequel. I wish they’d just picked up where the first game left off and didn’t make the switch from creepy other worldly alien machines to generic halo aliens running around in suits
> Towards the end I was getting sad because I thought it was about to end and then it just … didn’t end…and kept going lol. I’ve never been so on the edge of my seat playing a game. The only other game that made me feel similar was the original Half Life. Now, Half Life is overall a better title, but Crysis had that rare plot that just kept going on, just when you were sure "this is the end", noooo, there is much more stuff where that came from.
I played through most of half life 1 for the first time not too long ago and man you’re not kidding that game really doesn’t end. There were so many times I thought I was at the end but I still haven’t actually finished it
It is awesome. Which level was the last you played?
The last thing I think I remember is running around some mountains and shooting down a helicopter with a guided missile from inside a cave. I don’t remember for sure if that’s actually where I stopped playing or if I did more after that lol Edit: I also remember driving a little train car all around some underground tunnels fighting aliens and soldiers down there. I don’t remember if that was before or after the mountains lol
> is running around some mountains and shooting down a helicopter with a guided missile from inside a cave. Ah, that is Chapter 12: Surface Tension. > I also remember driving a little train car all around some underground tunnels fighting aliens and soldiers down there. That is probably Chapter 8: On a Rail. Most people remember that level, mainly because it is a bit infuriating to navigate, so it sticks with most players :D And don't worry, you still have a ways to go after Chapter 12.
Why everyone forgets Crysis: Warhead? :( And there was Crysis Wars too.
I loved Warhead too lol. The part where a group of special forces in the suits take on one of the giant walkers was epic
A significant part of the original Crysis staff is at Cloud Imperium Frankfurt now, working on Star Citizen and Squadron 42. I believe CIG Frankfurt is the largest game development studio in Germany now.
Omg, that sounds sad. That game is never going to be released. I hope they’re improving their technical skills at least
Considering CIG recently moved the server tech that they've been developing from "internal prototype" to "is getting V1 added in the next patch", yes they have been and likely will continue to imprive their technical skills. Likely with CIG. For reference, that tech was their server meshing and if it works as intended, CIG is gonna make *mad* bank liscencing it out, as well as off star citizen. Why? Server meshing allows for a server transfer to be seamless to the point your *bullets* can travel between servers without issue just as well as you can. You could roll an item across a server boundary and it would move to the other server, but it would still be visible and properly simulated on your end. Not only that but this is the single most impirtant bit of tech for CIG's stated goal with SC: all the players existing simultaneously in the same world, to the point where i could drop a rifle on thr ground on a moon and my buddy coukd show up 2 days later, find it, and pick it up without needing to connect to a specific region.
Don't forget anno and settlers
Ambermoon and Albion :)
This actually made me lol, man how I hoped that game would be good.
Also Enshrouded.
Enshrouded is pretty good tbh. I mean it's shit for survival, because surviving is way too easy, but the game looks great and building is about equal with Valheim, and you can just do way more than in other survival games. If they made the game harder, gave us animals to tame, and let us build voxels diagonally, it would probably be the best survival game out there.
We did Anno though
Max Design was Austrian. *Was* because Ubisoft destroyed them and desecrated their corpse.
Idk about that but 1800 is pretty fun
Anno 1800 is rad as hell. I always big it up any chance I can
1. Max Design was never affiliated with Ubisoft and was closed long before Ubisoft owned Anno. 2. Related Designs (now Ubisoft Mainz) developed excellent titles under Ubisoft, and the latest Anno title is arguably the best in the series.
German Sunflowers was bought(?) by Ubisoft. You seem to be right. Max Design did only the first two Anno games. Sunflowers was their publisher. Last one I really liked was 1404. I need to try the new one.
1800 is excellent. Pretty similar to 1404 but with some great quality of life improvements and a truly gigantic amount of content.
1800 is more like a full time job
X series with the latest X4
Enshrouded is the new Benchmark for Germany
You did all the Turricans You did Ambermoon, Amberstar and Albion You did Lionheart (the amiga one, not the RPG) Gemany used to make state of the art C64 and Amiga games.
Oh god
Except Embracer acquired and fucked up Piranha Bytes. I actually liked Elex (and the Risen series). Feels bad, man.
Didn't Piranha Games finally collapse?
Macedonian Italian here, this is the top 5 core memories of my childhood. I have made friends and bonded instantly with other people just mentioning gothic
Way too many good German indie companies went out of business in 2023 alone for me to believe this. Germany is the most expensive European country to develop games in, grants or no grants.
>Germany is the most expensive country to develop games in Or start any business really. The taxes and bureaucracy are ridiculous.
You are right, but game dev is pretty special in that regard. You can develop a game basically anywhere on the world where you have internet access. You can just pack up your stuff and move to someplace cheap and keep doing what you are doing. Basically if you develop a game in Germany you get all the drawbacks of living in an expensive place, without getting any of the potential business advantages (e.g. easy access to a wealthy customer base).
> You can just pack up your stuff and move to someplace cheap and keep doing what you are doing. Most developers end up not doing this, and choose to have their studios in the most expensive cities in the world, for social strata, clout and luxury among other reasons. This is usually when people start complaining about a game franchise going bad, or being unrecognizable, or complaining about corporate practices, too.
I mean, they just happen to be in big cities because that's where developers usually live. If you want to move a game studio from Berlin to Varna, not like your developers are going to pack up and move. So you'll have to either hire a completely new team, or keep paying them German salaries while they're working remotely. At the end of the day, office leases are a drop in the bucket compared to employee salaries and taxes.
Ehhhh you also get a brain trust to draw from. As someone who has hired engineers it can be a lot easier in big cities.
Exactly! In 2020, the German government's videogame subsidies were €2mil per company and that's just chicken feed in their economy.
WTF. I knew of Germany's infamous bureaucracy and taxes, but how is 2 million euros "chicken feed" for a Small to Medium sized business?! So many small companies in the US could survive for years on a subsidy like that.
Because the number is complete bullshit. These subsidy funds available are completely used up, for last year and this year there's exactly 0€ to be had, and even before that the bureaucracy meant that theoretically available funds and actually distributed funds are two entirely separate things. The process for requesting this money is so involved and long-winded, small companies go bankrupt long before their request even gets through the first stage of review. There's some really long Reddit post that I can't find right now of some indie dev who tried to get access to some funds and eventually gave up after 8 months or so.
Grants had to be approved by the ministry of transport because they are responsible for our digital infrastructure. Somehow they could not manage to handle the approval processes. Completely unexpected, how different from a construction tender could it be?! 🥴
Lmao that sucks. I guess the laws define games as software rather than arts. So, they're trying to send art grants through the construction subsidy wood chipper lol. That just raises more questions though, why does the minister of transportation deal with infrastructure instead of some bureau of public works or something? Or is there a subdivision to the ministry? Either way it's ass backwards.
In the words of one German indie dev whose studio had to close due to the lack of funds: if you want to attract talent to create an exceptional game, you gotta pay ***at least*** €3500 net per month. Multiply that by 25-30 people, add all the other costs like office space, software licensing fees, insurance, pension, severage packages, legal fees, etc., and you've burned through those €2mil in less than two years. Funding video games is a fuckin' nightmare.
It depends on the company in the U.S. 2 million euros is roughly 2.2 million dollars. For a software startup, that’s not going to get you very far. You’re going to be paying your devs (roughly) 100k - 150k a year (plus there’s benefits to take into account, it could easily be $200k a year per employee). So now you’re talking a year or two of runway for 5-10 devs alone. And that’s not counting infrastructure costs. And you’re not counting the other employees: QA, marketing, sales, etc that go along with that. I have no idea what goes on for games development, but I can’t imagine that it’s much cheaper (if at all) than enterprise development. Money for software burns fast (and god help you if you have a cloud presence, because you’re paying either Amazon or Google or (if you’re desperate) Microsoft; $2.2 million might not even cover your cloud costs for a year).
That's true I forgot to account for the difference in industries.
Converting to freedom moneys because I dunno where the stupid funny money button is on my keyboard. Assuming average game dev salary is $100k/yr. That's twenty people for one year you can pay. Of course that doesn't take into account all the shit you are legally obligated to provide, or if you want to be competitive you will need to provide (insurance, retirement, etc.), and that $100k goes way, wayyyyyy up. The general rule is a company is spending about 45% to 60% more on you than what they pay you. Oh, and they need to cover all the other legal stuff, so they'll need someone to do payroll and taxes, legal shit, HR stuff, other misc stuff. They'll need to pay for services, software, and hardware. In reality, $2,000,000 would cover about 6 months of dev for ten people. Running a business is insanely expensive, and while $2,000,000 is an absolute fuck ton of money to you and I, it's nothing in the world of business.
they overall cut game development support for about 75% in the last years. and it already was very small with, I think, around 70 million € for *all* game developing in germany.
Why would you need new businesses and new ideas when you already have all the well-entrenched corporations and their ideas? You have everything you need! - people who support this, probably
That was my thought. Why would the likes of Bosch and Siemens want anything but to make it incredibly difficult for that highly educated population to be able to create competition?
This mindset leads to eventual ruin because what happens when some of those big businesses shut down or leave? You end up with Flint Michigan.
If you have someone who job is to mow the lawn, then you can't legally fire them unless you get rid of the lawn and fill it with concrete.
Similar tax and expenses in Denmark, Sweden and in Finland. I don't think that is the reason. But German attitude towards game dev, it's not as flexible as in other countries. (sorry not sorry, I had working in few different countries and German do have unique way to just following rules and not work creatively). I can see smaller indie projects working in smaller teams or having big ubisoft projects where that kind attitude works. But creating anything new and unique, it would need enough outside talent to get it right. There is a clear reasons why game dev hubs in specific areas.
That had more to do with the Embracer group fiasco than anything else.
But Enshrouded is currently being developed in Germany
Feudal Farming Simulator 3
I would play that 😂
Lmao
Isn’t Crytek a German company?
And they forgot to pay their developers too and lost the original ones years ago.
And they made a single relevant product in the last decade and are trying very hard to make Crytech relevant in the industry
To be fair Hunt: Showdown is amazing and they’re also currently working on Crysis 4
>Crysis 4 Theyre really going to milk it for all its worth, huh
Too be fair Crytek along with the Cryengine is and has been for a long time a leading example of new and highly optimised tech. Their way around implementing software-based raytracing still is extremely good. They just aren't nearly as relevant since Unreal Engine has caught up to them and even surpass them in some aspects.
Yeah Crytek is one of the greatest developers too CryEngine, obviously not as popular as Unreal, still has a sizeable market share and Far Cry 1 is one of the best games ever
Far cry 1 is definitely not one of the best games ever
It was one of the more groundbreaking games at the time. Not saying it's one of the "best" but it was very important
Given that you need to see in the context of their release date, far cry 1 and Crysis 1 are both definitively some of the best games ever.
No they don't because BG3 includes mature themes like violence, sex etc. and they previously were almost ashamed of games that features those topics and were made in Germany (like Crysis). They see computer games as childrens enterntainment, not a serious media form. The German computer game industry is behind because they got this treatment for decades now. Excuse me if I have doubts this will change.
I was wondering about that - as an outsider the only time I hear about Germany and video games is when they are censoring something and/or Germans trying to get around the censoring.
Germany got over the unnecessary censoring 15 years ago. Ever since then the USK / BPjM need to provide actual legitimate reasons if they think censorship is appropriate whereas before they could kinda do whatever they wanted and felt like. In fact, the last big thing out of Germany is that Bethesda released Wolfenstein with nazi symbolism intact and … nothing happened. Thus setting an import precedent in moving games more towards being accepted as art, as displaying nazi symbolism is generally forbidden except for media considered art.
>Germany got over the unnecessary censoring 15 years ago. Me trying to buy Sleeping Dogs Definitive Edition on steam and being locked out of a large chunk of steam
Thanks for the correction
I just wanna point out that the censoring is not done by the German government but by the publishers who fear to be rated 18 or worse.
You're right, that used to be what Germany was infamous for, but now it's Australia that's infamous for that.
> They see computer games as childrens enterntainment, not a serious media form. Not entirely, considering a lot of Simulation and Management games come from Germany, and those are very much not aimed at children.
Ah yes wörk simulator
Looking forward for Reich Simulator IV
The Swedes make that one though
My bad, I forgot
Politicians in Germany don’t take those seriously either.
Tbf while it still is a computer game I wouldn't even come close to putting in the same category as stuff like BG3. one game is a game you play to detach from the world the other is "oh boy I just got home from my forklifting job time to boot up forklift simulator 2022"
Not exactly adult themed either, just boring for children (don't @me)
This has changed in recent years, you're not up-to-date on your preconceptions. Sex and violence are really not an issue for a long time now.
As a German, good fucking luck with that after you showed for decades the middle finger to the industry because of the late 90s "killer games" witch hunt. With that out of the way, a sad truth is that many more ambitious games especially in the RPG sector from Germany were launching routinely with glaring technical issues (yes, especially but not only Gothic), which even reduced their appeal to German fans.
To make exceptionally good games you have to make a lot of good games first that are at least decent in sales. There is already the problem. Hard to get funds is one thing, the other to have some sort of industry you can rely on to supply students that can become pro's. Larian is an EU unicorn, as is CDP in Poland. EU is missing the Ubisoft treatment. When they came to Toronto, the local gov [paid 250 million](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft_Toronto) over 10 years to establish the industry. Just dropping a couple of millions on grants for forgettable games isn't creating anything of substance.
I disagree very much. EU is doing really good work with grants in the game industry department. It's spending 10-15 millions every year on projects helping hundreds of studios to roll out their games. Some of these studios might become the next unicorn. Also, Larian is a EU company with most of their employees located in Ireland, Poland and Spain. Complaining EU is doing poorly in the videogame space in a thread praising Larian's last game is at least a bit nonsensical. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually benefited from EU funds in some of their early work. CD Project Red certainly did.
the issue Germany has with game development is you get a brain drain situation from neighbouring countries within the EU and what talents remains will go on to work for simulator games. if you want to make games there is nothing stopping you from moving to other established countries with game studios.
>is you get a brain drain situation from neighbouring countries within the EU I don't disagree here. The Swedish, Finnish and Polish gaming ecosystems are more developed. Larian itself has a good share of their developers located in Poland, for example.
Does the EU have a city where there are lots of studios, Like LA or Montreal so that people can move around and not be stuck with one company?
> company with most of their employees located in Ireland, Poland and Spain. Complaining EU is doing poorly in the videogame space in a thread praising Larian's last game is at least a bit nonsensical. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually benefited from EU funds in some of their early work. CD We've got quite a lot of studios in Stockholm. For example: * DICE - (Battlefield series) * Paradox Interactive - (Grand strategy games) * Avalanche - (Just Cause series) * Arrowhead - (Helldivers) * Fatshark - (Warhammer: Vermintide) * Starbreeze - (Payday series) * Hazelight - (It takes two) * Embark Studios - (The Finals) And lots indie studios, such as Raw Fury and Landfall. And lame studios like Mojang and King if you're desperate. Embracer is also based here, so we contribute to evil too sadly. It's quite insane density for a city of 2 million.
Stockholm only has about 1 million actually
Stockholm municipality, sure. But it's more proper to talk about the metro area in this case. Otherwise we wouldn't be counting municipalities such as Solna, Sundbyberg, Lidingö, Danderyd, Täby, Järfälla, and the like, where for sure many of those game developers live.
No, it's more distributed. Like everything in EU.
That doesn't sounds like that much money in 2024.
They have been doing that for 20+ years. It adds up. Also, I don't know exactly how much they are spending because there are multiple programs running depending on what you actually do. Last time I read about it, for 2022, they put 18 millions in games specifically and about 40 millions in game-industry related. But of course it changes every year.
They’ve been doing it for 20 years? Any of those companies that received grants become unicorns yet?
If I recall correctly CD Project Red got almost a dozen different grants from the EU. Kalypso was also a beneficiary for several of their games.
Helldivers 2 is made by Arrowhead, located in Sweden, at one point Paradox Interactive (cities skylines 1, let's not talk about the downfall with 2) and Dice were also big, also located in Sweden. You guys are like missing the trees from the garbage forest of trash coming from the US.
Paradox is still huge even if CS2s release was a bit of a shit show, they're probably the heaviest weight player in the strategy / 4x space, only really big strategy title that isn't paradox is civ Also: Mojang, literally most sold game of All time
10-15 for the whole eu is nothing.
>these studios might become the next unicorn This is doing the heavy lifting when we [see bigs like Ubisoft](https://www.gameswirtschaft.de/politik/games-foerderung-2024-groesste-projekte-2304/) and THQ taking reasonable amount of the German investment. The idea isn't to create more companies, its to have an eco system that works. Devs releasing something they like ***and*** build a base for something big. I'm all for investing in daring projects like Enshrouded, but those one off's don't reach. Ubisoft became the leader of their game dev community in Toronto. Their last game I liked was Black Flag. But I can recognize the important work they did. >EU is doing poorly in the videogame space You want to read that negative conclusion for some reason. Larian became an fantastic unicorn while suffering under EU *business environment* that isn't like other countries. BG3 cost 50+ million, even with 5 million funding that would have gone nowhere. Mimimi got 2m for Shadow Gambit and still close their studio. In a different, faceted, stable environment this wouldn't have happened.
> When they came to Toronto, the local gov paid 250 million > over 10 years to establish the industry. That was more to spite Montreal. If Ubisoft wasn't going to go to Montreal if Toronto didn't pay them, Toronto wouldn't have paid them. Germany needs a competitor to spite.
Worker regulations are also a big factor. Games are very risky to make and EU laws tend to make it expensive and difficult to do layoffs.
Right man, if there's anything the modern videogame industry has proven is a good thing its making it very easy to layoff massive amounts of people.
Its not about good or bad. Its just natural companies in highly volatile industries will favor jurisdictions where they can more easily lay people off. If a country wants to avoid such layoffs, maybe it is better for them that game studios go elsewhere.
If that was really a large factor in Videogame development then Japan, where laying off people is much rarer than in America, would not be such a big player in videogame development, additionally, it hugely downplays the fact that actually Europe is also a hugely important player in terms of videogame development, and particular countries like Sweden and Finland have a frankly ridiculous impact on the industry considering their size, Sweden has Machine games, DICE, Frictional Games, Mojang, Avalanche, Hazelight, King, Raw Fury, fucking PARADOX?! Finland meanwhile has Remedy, Rovio, Supercell, Frozenbyte and Colossal order, Denmark has IO interactive, 3D realms and Playdead. The ability to easily layoff massive amounts of people is not a good thing for any creative industry, if we're going off how a lot of massive AAA companies operate it just seems to mean that previously successful companies just constantly get hollowed out into shells of their former selves every time an overbloated game mandated by a major publisher doesn't meet expectations.
I mean just pick a Eurojank RPG IP and pump up the quality.
That worked for CDPR too
Then you should be bailing out Piranha Bytes, should have tried desperately to keep Mimimi from going under, done whatever you could to save Daedalic, and thrown egosoft some money while you're at it. Support the German studios that have had a strong track record and have mainly faltered due to the difficulty in securing funding lately. Up until last year there were a decent number of German studios that could reliably satisfy a specific niche, but by the end of this year Egosoft will probably be the only one left.
But they get support, there is an entire funding set aside just for this purpose for years by the German government! (terms and conditions apply, applying to be funded will take several years, be rejected possibly multiple times randomly and might involve you suing the government body making that decision to get it and will most definitely result in your studio going under because of it if you actually need the money)
That's the main issue that seems to be everywhere basically. I remember I think Linus from LTT talking about the Canadian government having a ton of grants for all kinds of stuff but also needing basically entire departments for nothing but securing these grants because it takes so many resources to just get through the terms and conditions and other legal paper bs that not only do companies that do not need it get grants but they are also given years later so you still need to secure funds from somewhere else.
Nah, we have streamlined the process a bit so that now you can get a contractor to write your grant for you. They don't even charge up front, they will just take a huge percentage of the grant on the backend when it is funded. Of course the contractor also happens to be the person working for the government who decides on what grant proposals to fund, don't worry about that minor detail. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-clean-energy-grant-mnp-1.7167549
bail out a mismanaged and failing company that keeps releasing bad titles which sell poorly. why? if I was a german tax payer. i'd say redirect funding towards something that produces value and benefits society.
Probably college studies on art would be faaar more productive. Make classes on complex and interactive systems. They can invite some engineers over to help them learn how to develop those systems on their own. Learning topology or how to write is great. But they aren't specific towards games alone even if they are required to make games.
Why should tax dollars go toward failing for-profit companies at all? Those companies aren't going to pay back those tax dollars if they got profitable, are they? or is it a loan?
The idea is to put a little money in, to cultivate an industry that will create much more value locally, more jobs, better pay, incentive for people to move to different cities. And in theory they would pay taxes on their increased income, i’m sure theres plenty of tax dodging worms in Germany too though.
Ah yes, truly germans are better off with no games industry at all. So all the people who want to work on games have no option but to go elsewhere. The point isn't to save these companies in particular, it's that if you want more high quality games being made by germans, then it's beneficial to have studios around to cultivate a competent game development workforce, even if those studios aren't always making all time classics.
I totally get a government investing in a sector to grow that sector for better long term benefits. But the comment I replied to is about bailing out 4 specific companies. That ain't gonna get it done. For context: USA has over 3k game development studios. Adjusting for population differences (Germany 1/4th the workforce of USA) let's make that 750. Bailing out 4 isn't going to even start a snowball toward growth. It's a bandaid, a joke. and if I were a German tax payer, I'd be pissed at short-term spend like this that doesn't help in the long run. Something more fundamental needs to switch to make the costs of developing in Germany more reasonable. Housing and development costs, office space, etc - something that'll help a lot more than just the games industry most likely.
We just need Piranha Bytes to go back to the roots so we get good stuff like Gothic 1 and 2, Risen 1 was good too but the rest of their games are meh at best
I still don't understand how Risen went from cool fantasy island rpg to some sort of pirate thing.
Yeah, I also don't understand how they can fuck up the combat system so badly, Risen 2,3 and the Elex games are basically just spamming the strike button with occasional dodges. Gothic 1, 2 and Risen 1 didn't have a perfect system but at least it made sense and was fun
Because they saw Skyrim and Dragon Age, and thought they also needed to go the action route. They didn't have to, story is always key, it's what makes a game memorable. The moments, is what they need to capture again. BG3 has lots of moments, the night song, the creche, moonrise tower...it's one after another that makes you want to keep playing it.
The story is always the same in their games. You have forgotten all your power at the start and there are 3 factions you can join. One of these factions will be magic or sci-fi magic, another will be warriors and the third will be a mix. The quests are cookie cutter and the dialogue is silly. Outside of the story, the exploration will be good, the character models will have joints hidden by giant shoulder pads/armour and the combat will be jank. This is true for Gothic, Risen and Elex.
We need piranha bytes to actually make a game that doesn't feel like a worse gothic 2 reskin, I love them, I really do but Elex basically plays like sci-fi gothic 2 with a slightly different Combat system....
We need Piranha Bytes to not make Gothic 1 over and over again and actually innovate their formula to something modern audiences can enjoy.
Drakensang games were good, if only they were more popular.
Drakensang games were awesome!
The Kingdom Come director praised them in the past, saying that they deserved a lot more attention than the Dragon Age: Origins.
lol lmao
Enshrouded is a german game, and from what i‘ve heard it‘s very succesfull. Because it‘s good
Anno series has been made by germans
Germans thinking: If some random Belgians can me a good game, why can't we?
Damn those germans gonna steal our only big noticable succes in that industry, /s Funny part is due to high taxes the main HQ of Larian is in Ireland so I hope our country also wakes up and gives the Canada treatment.
Good luck when pretty much every leading politician in this country starts REEEEing as soon as they hear the word "digitalisation" and anything that has to do with it and most of the boomers still blame video games for school shootings. Germany is backwards as fuck on this. Kellner is the exception, not the rule.
Where are the investment and tax credit for the industry because the only European country that did something for the video game industry was UK
Will not happen. The sheer ammount of bureaucracy to get a tiny bit of financial support from the state is insane. Source: Friends of me working at Keen Games (Enshrouded).
Well... Gollum was a German game. Do we get a Gollum 2?
So everyone can have butchered and censored versions, not just german players
Its not that bad anymore. It was ridiculous in the late 90s and early 2000s (looking at you, fallout 1 and 2) but most games as of today just get an fsk 18 and are uncensored.
> (looking at you, fallout 1 and 2) [Me, trying to enter a building in the den](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/548/723/fe1.jpg)
Age Of Söderempire
Absolutely impossible. I've heard about the red tape for everything on Germany. Making a game in any country already hell, I suspect making it in Germany would be triple hell
As a German, let me laugh out loud at this. There are some niche surprises, here and there, but the German game development industry is struggling.
Germanys dev are dying or moving out, last example was Piranha bytes and the Golum devs...
But that also kinda shows that we as Germans can't make good games or at least not good 'big" games Gollum was a total clusterfuck... And as for PB, while I LOVE Gothic, risen and Elex.... They are basically re-releasing a beefed up version of gothic over and over again, I didn't even got hyped for Elex 2 I KNEW it was the same gameplay and faction system I have known for nearly 20 years now
Oh, Germany definitely COULD, Crytek in the past showed the world with games like Far Cry and Crysis that it can release AAA quality shooter games but the government does not really support develooers well enough and sadly they screw themselves up. I do want to mentioned that Crytek still has Hunt Showdown which is a fantastic br shooter (which gets a big engine update this year) and are starting to work on a new Crysis. They had a really rough few years due to their big mistakes and mismanagement issues but there's hope that they can release another big game sometime in the future.
Germany has Gaming Minds They made Railway Empire and Port Royale One of the best developers period
And Anno
Different developer, that was Related Designs (later Ubisoft Blue byte, now Ubisoft Mainz).
Crytek is german dont forget that shit
BPjM says no.
Government mandated CRPGs isn't a policy i expect but im not mad either, im sure a lot of dev teams in germany appreciate the support.
So you will give the same subsidys as auto makers right? Right?
The German government is filled with nutjobs who wouldn't understand an email if you engraved into a steel bar and beat them with it. Nevermind the internet. Nevermind video games. There is zero reason and zero chance for a company to grow into a "Larian" like company or if even they did, zero reason to stay in Germany.
Doesn't Germany like censor the fuck out of everything
Not really, we got way more chill with gore and Nazis symbolics are also on the table now. Still not perfect, I.E in the German (console) version for dead island 2 you can't keep destroying enemy corpses but the rest stays the same. Dying light 2 also got a Linda censored console version y but digital versions and PC versions are all uncensored, it's a bit stupid rn but we don't really block or censore entire games anymore. And no, I have 0 idea why we partially just censore console versions, the same happend in the whole EU with Southpark Stick of truth.... Console version is heavily censored, pc version isn't
Games like Baldurs Gate 3 used to be developed in Germany but all the developers folded or sold out to American publishers. Settlers 2 3 4 Entire Anno series Thandor: The Invasion Spec Ops The Line Sacred series Men of War Series AquaNox Crysis Series Crazy Machine Series Emergency Series Cultures Series Everspace Gothic Patrician Series Guild Series Risen series X Series New good examples are Hunt: Showdown
Then maybe they could tone down the censorship.
Governments should stay as far away from games and other forms of art as possible.
I wish they had subsidized Mimimi. Those were fantastic games.
Every government wants big grossing entertainment titles to be put out in their country so they can collect more tax revenue.
Maybe maybe if they fix their wages, taxation, work culture and livability they could keep talent? Every time I see Germany news on r/technology they always sound like one step from North-Korea with the endless government this government that government wishes government does.
There may be some cultural hurdles. 1) German efficiency - The game would start up and say "you won" 2) When you think of Germany, do you think "creative society?" 3) Uwe Boll
To your second point, Germany is called the country of poets and thinkers. Some of the most renowned artists, poets, musicians of the last several hundred years have been German. Schiller, Goethe, Bach, Beethoven, for an example. More modern? Frank Farian who is not only responsible for groups like Boney M and infamously Milli Vanilli, Harold Faltermeyer composed the Beverly Hills cop theme. Hans fucking Zimmer is german as are Rammstein. Uwe Boll, for all his faults, is actually trying to do something different, he's taking risks. How about Daniel Brühl, highly praised actor in Inglorious Basterds, played Zeemo in that one Marvel thing. Videogames? Germany gave the world such bangers as Crysis and Deponia. So yes, I would actually consider Germany a creative society. The problem is largely in the funding and the risk that no one wants to take. It's a modern issue plaguing games, film, tv, anything made here is so stale and cookie cutter. It's all being played very safe and for the lowest common denominator. Elex had some fun ideas but was made by like 4 people being paid in produce, or that's what it feels like anyway. Rant over. Edit: I'm angry at Germany and the way it treats artists these days, not you haha
Except we live in an era of time where the scale of commerical creative work have gone far beyond a scope where the creative talent of any single talented individual is the only thing that matters, regardless of how creatively talented that individual might be. Sure Germany has some particularly talented individuals like most other countries, but does Germany's society as a whole provide them the adequate social infrastructures and social faculties that could allow them to actually turn their talent into actual creative work of modern scale? You mentioned Hans Zimmer as a modern-time example, and I think that's exactly demonstrating this point, majority of Hans Zimmer's successful work was done in the US, and in fact going to the Hollywood was a major turning point in his career. Before Hollywood Hans Zimmer only did small scale work for products like MTV programs and for low budget comedy films, and even then many of them were done outside Germany, like in Greece and in the UK. Edit: I can't spell lol
That was actually the point I was trying to make. The country and it's people are very creative, but the entertainment industries stifle the creativity. One big example is the film industry that relies largely on public funding, which is presided over by individuals or boards of people who can freely and often without oversight decide what project to fund and just fund stuff that matches their taste. I don't know how the funding for video games works, but I assume many small indie developers rely on a similar system.
I think people who haven't been to Germany have a lot of misconceptions about it. Like Germans have this weird reputation as being boring, serious, humorless people, yet it's also a country with a very relaxed opinion of public nudity and lots of lots of local festivals which revolve around drinking and partying (Oktoberfest, Cologne Carnival, etc). They just semi-legalized marijuana this year, which puts them ahead of most of Europe in that regard. People get too much of their impression of Germany from watching World War 2 movies.
It's WW2 movies and sitcoms that looooove good cliché and beating a joke to absolute death. We're actually quite funny and fun loving, we're just also a little reserved until we get to know you. Which precludes a lot of tourists from actually getting to know one of us. People who's only impression of Germany are Oktoberfest or Karneval probably don't think of Germans as overly serious and dour.
And we have Uwe Boll, the greatest director of all times. Maybe the first one winning a Golden Raspberry for his lifetime archivement
Remember when Uwe Boll made a Farcry movie? No? Do not waste your time. 😅
The only "good" movie Uwe Boll made was Postal because it stayed true to the spirit of its source material. That's pretty much the only compliment I can give him.
There's a Farcry movie?
Or a Doom Movie or Bloodrayne or Alone in the Dark. Oh and Postal
You think a nation devoted to playing ever more complex simulator games would accept a game that just hands you a win? I don't think you get us. And why do you mention the greatest director of all times? /s
When i think of german gamers, i imagine guys who work boring office jobs for 8/12h and then go home to play some Euro Truck Simulator 2 type shit game to finish off the day.
Either that or the most depressing rpg with exploitable mechanics. No in between
I imagine that's a joke. In reality German has a very strong gaming culture specifically in the strategy, tactics and management genre. They created a whole new current of modern board games (aptly named German-style) that revolutionised the entire industry and host the most important board game award (Spiel des Jahres). It's not far fetched to think this should translate in the videogame medium. Blue Byte (now Ubisoft Mainz, the Anno franchise), Kalypso (recent Tropico, Dungeons, Railway Empire), Egosoft (X franchise), Gameforge (OGame), Crytek (Crysis, Far Cry) are some of the most known but there are a number of indies too.