Splash Damage

I think more likely it would have probably been something like a Focus Interactive, a 505, one of those guys.

Apparently one of the two was Splash Damage.

Oh, Splash Damage.

Yeah, Splash Damage was State of Decay.

They were the ones.

They were going to buy the State of Decay

Oh, I did want to read this a little bit from Chris Deering over at Game Business on his podcast.

He was saying, he says, at one point, Undead Labs was going to be acquired by UK developer Splash Damage.

maker of our old favorite Gears Tactics.

And Brink.

You guys should definitely listen to his pod and read his sub stack.

So...

Um, man, I shocked that splash damage supposedly had the money for undead labs.

That's crazy to me.

Yeah.

It was made by Splash Damage, which I have nothing against Splash Damage, but they're kind of a B or C tier studio where the studio that made Zero Company was literally XCOM people.

Yeah,

and you can tell.

Now, they've had a few owners down the years.

They were once partly owned by Square Enix before being picked up by Splash Damage and Tencent to work on an ambitious Transformers title that ultimately didn't work out.

Then last year, Tencent decided to divest from Bulkhead, and the Derby-based studio faced potential closure.

That was before they were saved thanks to investment from Hero Capital and Team17 parent company Everplay.

Uh, basically, you would struggle in any of our marketing or messaging in the last two years to see where we say listen to feedback from the players.

You, you'll struggle to find it.

You may see, like, listen to the community or, or like observe or things like that, but we know what we want to make, and this was a problem throughout not just Tencent from Square Enix up to Tencent and Splash Damage, and even Team17 recently t- to some degree.

And what, what we've learned is each, each layer we've gone through is people have understood, like, we've got tougher, is what I'd say, in being like, "We're not listening to you.

learn thing AI versus not? Is autocorrect AI? Are you already using algorithms there? Is that ethical?

One of the things that gets me, when I worked at Splash Damage, tell me if this is a thing that happened at Paradox.

When I worked at Splash Damage, when we wanted to communicate an idea for a game, right what we would do was we would take a bunch of hollywood movie trailers and a bunch of game trailers and smash them up into a fake trailer right this is all completely stolen material but there's no harm no foul because we're not going to sell it it's never going to leave

the materials

yeah right and i look at i look at that it's like well this is effectively using you know chad gpt code or whatever to prototype your game right like what's the way For me, and maybe I'm obtuse, but I don't see a moral distinction between those two.