Hdcase

"The closure of any team is hard obviously on the individuals there, hard on the team," Spencer said. "I haven't been talking publicly about this, because right now is the time for us to focus on the team and the individuals. It's obviously a decision that's very hard on them, and I want to make sure through severance and other things that we're doing the right thing for the individuals on the team. It's not about my PR, it's not about Xbox PR. It's about those teams.

"In the end, I've said over and over, I have to run a sustainable business inside the company and grow, and that means sometimes I have to make hard decisions that frankly are not decisions I love, but decisions that somebody needs to go make.

"We will continue to go forward. We will continue to invest in what we're trying to go do in Xbox and build the best business we can, which ensures we can continue to do shows like the one we just did."

This is a fascinating deep dive into the development of the game, with many people involved giving interviews. Instead of being in a long development hell, Lionhead knocked out the game in a stunning 18 months - which made Microsoft happy, but resulted in the cutting of a ton of content.

There are some great stories from legendary program Giles Goddard (Star Fox, 1080 Snowboarding) in this piece.

He remembers one time that he blew up a power supply in a new development PC, because he plugged it in at the wrong voltage. And Miyamoto noticed. "And Miyamoto got really angry and said, 'You need to go and apologise to blah-blah-blah now.'" But Goddard had other ideas.

Quick as a flash, he went to his desk and swapped the fried power supply for his computer's, and then - as if making a sudden, surprise discovery - announced, "Actually no it's fine - it's not broken." And it worked: Miyamoto was calmed. "But I did actually break it," Goddard tells me. "I just fixed it before he found out."

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The SGI Indy had a bonus feature Goddard was excited about too: a webcam. I know that doesn't sound exciting now, but back then, webcams were new, so Goddard started experimenting with it. He put ping pong balls on his face, because the camera picked them up well, and ended up creating a mo-capped facial animation prototype. He was impressed. Miyamoto was impressed. So much so, Miyamoto announced, "Well let's try and get a Mario face into that."

So, Nintendo did. Yoshiaki Koizumi took the prototype and added "bones and everything" for Goddard to use. "Then I just skinned all the polygons together - skinning was a new thing as well - and I got it all spongy, and then we just iterated on that to see what was fun." And that's how the famous N64 Mario face - the one you can pull around at the beginning of Mario 64 - came to be.

I can say, unequivocally, if you're starting a new game project, do not use Unity. If you started a project 4 months ago, it's worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted.

It's on developers to sort through these two types of costs, meaning Unity has added a bunch of admin work for us, while making it extremely costly for games like Vampire Survivor to sell their game at the price they do. Vampire Survivor's edge was their price, now doing something like that is completely unfeasible. Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar. As a developer who starts a game under the personal plan, because you're not sure how well it'll do, you're punished, astoundingly so, for being a breakout success. Not to mention that sales will now be more costly for developers since Unity is not asking for a percentage, but a flat fee. If I reduce the price of my game, the price unity asks for doesn't decrease.