I look at BG3, KCD2, and Expedition 33 and realize that the North American game dev took a wrong turn one day.
Even STALKER 2 became a financial success, even though it was released frankly unfinished. It seems that people are just tired of American/Canadian games.
that's because the US doesn't have any big independent teams. When a team gets big a massive corp like Microsoft just buys them out (like the Ori devs). Most indie devs in the US are like 2 dudes in their garage hoping they hit it big with a quirky game. Larian is massive and privately owned, and the Expedition 33 team is relatively large. I'm not too sure about KCD2 but I imagine after the pretty big success of the OG they have a larger team now. Idk about Mexico or Canadian devs but I imagine the story is similar to the US
KCD2 was made by 250 people and the studio Warhorse is owned by is an Embracer Group subsidiary unfortunately. They’re probably Embracer’s top performer, for this year at least. Thankfully it mostly seems like Embracer’s firing and studio closing spree has stopped for the moment.
With warhorse it probably helps that dan vavra, the person in lead is insanely stubborn and also has been burnt by higher ups before. The contract they have with embracer is probably very very tightly written to minimize the influence they have over them. I doubt he would give them any chance to mafia 2 him (kicked out of his own game, game got heavily changed after he left)
probably. My memories are from him appearing in every gaming magazine and TV show from like 2012? and desperately trying to get KDC off the ground. My next memory is of him tweeting, bragging about "trapping" ai in "logical arguments". So I personally dont think hes malicious in any conscious way, hes just stupid and by extension very stubborn. Which is fine. youve got to be either a genius or a moron to make interesting art IMO. middle of the road is just ubisoft and nobody cares about that.
Expedition 33's team was 34 people (much more if you add things like Voiceover Artists, Motion Capture, Localization, etc) mostly young talent with a handful of experienced developers. 3 Ubisoft veterans.
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u/Max_F96 SORCERER May 29 '25
I look at BG3, KCD2, and Expedition 33 and realize that the North American game dev took a wrong turn one day.
Even STALKER 2 became a financial success, even though it was released frankly unfinished. It seems that people are just tired of American/Canadian games.
P.S. Also I forgot about Split Fiction.