Post by Lone Wanderer on Sept 13, 2019 5:35:09 GMT
Inside The Ghosting, Racism, And Exploitation At Game Publisher Nicalis
Mismanagement at Nicalis has also cost external developers like the people behind Enter the Gungeon a lot of time. A second independent developer, The Game Bakers, shared another ghosting story with Kotaku. In 2017 they wanted to port their boss-battling gauntlet game Furi to Switch, and started talking to Nicalis about putting together a port as quickly as possible. It was important to strike early; they knew that within the next year or two, the Switch eShop would be oversaturated with indie games and that getting noticed would be tough.
“We sent the project, they evaluated the cost, sent a first contract draft that we sent back with changes,” said The Game Bakers co-founder Audrey Leprince in an email. “But then they started ghosting us. Not answering emails, Skype calls. We waited three weeks, tried to contact them several times… Finally they answered that they were sorry and would send us a mail the next week. Time passed. We were going at E3 (they were there), offered to see them there. We reminded them how acting fast was important. So eventually we sent a message saying the deal was off considering the communication breakdown.”
Leprince added that they didn’t lose any money, only a few months of potential sales—”annoying but not a major deal”—and that they did eventually release the game on Switch in January 2018, without Nicalis. “We thought they must have had good reasons on their side, it’s not always easy,” she said. “But considering the problems we heard from other developers, we are starting to think we were not the only unlucky ones.” On Twitter in July of this year, the company’s other co-founder, Emeric Thoa, posted vague words of caution about Nicalis. “If you are a small indie and consider working with Nicalis and want an opinion about them, please don’t hesitate to DM me,” he wrote. “It’s a small industry. Actions have consequences.”
A number of public stories corroborate the pattern of Nicalis failing to communicate with other developers who work with the company. In February of 2018, the makers of the platformer Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap said on Twitter that they had submitted a Switch patch to Nicalis but been ignored. (Rodriguez publicly denied this, saying he hadn’t received any emails from them.) Earlier this month, the developer of a Game Boy-styled platformer called Save Me, Mr. Tako told a similar story, writing on Twitter that he’d submitted a new patch for his game that added an easy mode and fixed some of players’ complaints. “But it’s up to Nicalis to decide when it will come out,” he wrote. “It’s ready, and I guess it will come out on Steam first. Really hope it will be soon because it’s frustrating to see people complaining about issues I fixed a while back.” In response, Rodriguez wrote on Twitter that Tako hadn’t sold well enough to justify implementing the patch. “Unfortunately, the game did not yet make back what we put into it,” he said. “We have a policy of stringent QA testing before pushing releases, and we do not have the space in our budget to QA test the patch so we can push it out.” Similar controversies have swirled around previous Nicalis-published games like La Mulana, whose Wii version Nicalis canceled after a long period of silence, and the crowd-funded ‘90s Arcade Racer, which has been MIA for years.
When I mentioned this pattern of ghosting to one former Nicalis employee, they suggested that it was all a matter of prioritization. “Nicalis have a history of taking on more development projects than they have time for,” they said. “I think this comes down to favoritism and unpredictably shuffling development priorities. When it comes to development, they always prioritize their specialty games such as Binding of Isaac and Cave Story over other developers’ ports.” Others have confirmed as much, saying that when they worked at Nicalis, their projects on any given day would be based on what Rodriguez told them to prioritize.
Source
-- kotaku.com/inside-the-ghosting-racism-and-exploitation-at-game-p-1838068522
More
-- www.pcgamer.com/the-binding-of-isaac-developer-halts-work-with-nicalis-over-allegations-of-racism-and-abuse/
Mismanagement at Nicalis has also cost external developers like the people behind Enter the Gungeon a lot of time. A second independent developer, The Game Bakers, shared another ghosting story with Kotaku. In 2017 they wanted to port their boss-battling gauntlet game Furi to Switch, and started talking to Nicalis about putting together a port as quickly as possible. It was important to strike early; they knew that within the next year or two, the Switch eShop would be oversaturated with indie games and that getting noticed would be tough.
“We sent the project, they evaluated the cost, sent a first contract draft that we sent back with changes,” said The Game Bakers co-founder Audrey Leprince in an email. “But then they started ghosting us. Not answering emails, Skype calls. We waited three weeks, tried to contact them several times… Finally they answered that they were sorry and would send us a mail the next week. Time passed. We were going at E3 (they were there), offered to see them there. We reminded them how acting fast was important. So eventually we sent a message saying the deal was off considering the communication breakdown.”
Leprince added that they didn’t lose any money, only a few months of potential sales—”annoying but not a major deal”—and that they did eventually release the game on Switch in January 2018, without Nicalis. “We thought they must have had good reasons on their side, it’s not always easy,” she said. “But considering the problems we heard from other developers, we are starting to think we were not the only unlucky ones.” On Twitter in July of this year, the company’s other co-founder, Emeric Thoa, posted vague words of caution about Nicalis. “If you are a small indie and consider working with Nicalis and want an opinion about them, please don’t hesitate to DM me,” he wrote. “It’s a small industry. Actions have consequences.”
A number of public stories corroborate the pattern of Nicalis failing to communicate with other developers who work with the company. In February of 2018, the makers of the platformer Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap said on Twitter that they had submitted a Switch patch to Nicalis but been ignored. (Rodriguez publicly denied this, saying he hadn’t received any emails from them.) Earlier this month, the developer of a Game Boy-styled platformer called Save Me, Mr. Tako told a similar story, writing on Twitter that he’d submitted a new patch for his game that added an easy mode and fixed some of players’ complaints. “But it’s up to Nicalis to decide when it will come out,” he wrote. “It’s ready, and I guess it will come out on Steam first. Really hope it will be soon because it’s frustrating to see people complaining about issues I fixed a while back.” In response, Rodriguez wrote on Twitter that Tako hadn’t sold well enough to justify implementing the patch. “Unfortunately, the game did not yet make back what we put into it,” he said. “We have a policy of stringent QA testing before pushing releases, and we do not have the space in our budget to QA test the patch so we can push it out.” Similar controversies have swirled around previous Nicalis-published games like La Mulana, whose Wii version Nicalis canceled after a long period of silence, and the crowd-funded ‘90s Arcade Racer, which has been MIA for years.
When I mentioned this pattern of ghosting to one former Nicalis employee, they suggested that it was all a matter of prioritization. “Nicalis have a history of taking on more development projects than they have time for,” they said. “I think this comes down to favoritism and unpredictably shuffling development priorities. When it comes to development, they always prioritize their specialty games such as Binding of Isaac and Cave Story over other developers’ ports.” Others have confirmed as much, saying that when they worked at Nicalis, their projects on any given day would be based on what Rodriguez told them to prioritize.
Source
-- kotaku.com/inside-the-ghosting-racism-and-exploitation-at-game-p-1838068522
More
-- www.pcgamer.com/the-binding-of-isaac-developer-halts-work-with-nicalis-over-allegations-of-racism-and-abuse/