The developer of our most-anticipated open-world roguelike has hit back against the "cascading effect" that recent swathes of layoffs and corporate consolidation can have on the rest of the industry.
In the latest episode of NoClip's ongoing Hyper Light Breaker documentary series, Alx Johnson, the game's creative director and founder of developer Heart Breaker, discusses the impact of Borderlands developer Gearbox's $460 million sale to Take-Two. While the publishing rights to the Borderlands series and several other games went to the new owners, Gearbox Publishing stayed under Embracer, along with the rights to Hyper Light Breaker. The publishing label has since been renamed to Arc Games.
All that change, is exactly what Johnson is railing against in the documentary. Noting that Heart Machine originally signed on to publish with Perfect World, which was bought by Embracer in 2021, he says "I don't want to depend on megacorporations doing X, Y, and Z to dictate our future in some way or another, but sometimes you get caught in that crossfire."
Johnson says "there was no expectation" that Perfect World would sell "to any other company, ever" when the Hyper Light Breaker publishing deal was signed. Now, however, the developer has its third corporate publisher in only four years. One of those companies was Embracer Group, which has been responsible for more than 1,400 layoffs and several cancelations and studio closures.
That's unlikely to affect Heart Machine directly. Johnson says that "I think [in] most of the scenarios that happen, Heart Machine will be fine regardless of how it pans out. There are scenarios that are not so great. There's a lot that's going to happen behind the scenes that we have no say or control over. These are folks that we've been working with for two-plus years now, so that alone is a stressful change of 'I don't know who I'm going to be working with in a few months."
Johnson points to "this cascading effect across the industry, where it isn't just the people who get laid off but it's the teams. Maybe that project still exists but now you don;t have the resources you once did, you have to reformat, restructure that project in some way or another, or cancel it because you don't have the people any more. And that's really debilitating in some ways, or demeaning, because you're working on this thing for a year, two years, maybe more in some cases, and you never announce it and you're really excited, and it's going well, and then it's gone."
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