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Cozy MMO Palia Developer Singularity 6 Has Suffered Layoffs | MMORPG.com
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Cozy MMO Palia Developer Singularity 6 Has Suffered Layoffs | MMORPG.com
Layoffs continue to rock the industry, as the latest round comes from Singularity 6, the developer responsible for the cozy MMO Palia.
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There have been plenty of layoffs for *non-Cozy* games so don’t really think the *cozy* naming is a factor in the layoffs. For that matter there have been layoffs for games doing well and games doing poorly, just a chance for these businesses to clean house using each other as cover fire.
But I did learn something new today from one of these layoff tweets. Someone looking to be hired who “loves Content Creation, Creators and is a general goblin”.
Being curious I had to look this up as I had never heard the term before outside of fantasy games or seen it on any resumes submitted to our department.
The 2022 word of the year from the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary is “goblin mode”. Voted by the public and coming in at 93%, “goblin mode” – a phrase, rather than a word, to be precise – expresses a state of being or mindset.
The official definition is:
a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.
Some examples of goblin mode include:
• Drinking straight out of a container instead of pouring your drink into a glass.
• Wearing pajamas all day long and taking a more relaxed approach to getting ready for the day.
• Going unshowered or wearing the same outfit a couple days in a row.
• Leaving your bed unmade, dropping clean clothes on the floor or letting take-out boxes pile up on the dining room table.
• Binging your favorite show for hours on end.
• Working remotely from your bed instead of your home office.
Just in case anyone else was curious as well
90% of startups fail. I first quit my good corporate job in high tech to go to a startup in 1981. It failed after a few years and was absorbed by GE. Part of the problem is that the market changes; Palia was probably thought up years ago, and it's one of many that have come out. Also, the developers usually have to paint the rosiest of pictures about sales and ROI to get investors, and those rosy projections rarely come true.
"Cozy" games is a legitimate market segment to go after. "Woke" has nothing to do with it and has no real meaning anyway.
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2025: 48 years on the Net.
What even IS a cozy game, anyway? If you put 10 people in the same room and ask them that question, I assume you'd get several different definitions.
That aside, sucks to hear about the layoffs. I tried the game out, and it was okay. A bit disappointed they originally advertised it as an MMO, then they backtracked and said it was not an MMO. I guess it operates a bit closer to games like Guild Wars 1 and Sea of Thieves.
I'm personally more bothered that your crops don't grow if you aren't online. Seems like an odd decision on their part.
I'm one of those who like Stardew Valley and the crop system is participation based - which requires you to be online. It's not an idle game. No, it's map is still too small (yet) to qualify as an MMO but there were signs that it would expand in the future and might finally be able to call itself an MMO. I think they needed to release before they reached the planned scale.
The crop system being "participation based" makes little sense to me, because at the end of the day both systems put in the same amount of effort/input. The only difference is that you require to be online for the crops to progress to the next stage. You can also just leave the game running for hours while you do other things, as pointless as it is.
In other words, you can already mimic an "idle game", as you put it. In what manner does the game benefit from not having the crops progress offline?
I would be more inclined to agree with you, if the process of farming was a bit more involved than just sowing your seeds and waiting a few hours. You don't even need to water them if you crossbreed them correctly.
By your logic, the housing upgrades shouldn't progress while offline, but they do. Same with the crafting queues to make pickles, planks or ingots; those also progress while offline. Farming is the only system that doesn't, which seems like an inconsistency in design in my eyes.
As for the MMO comment, if I recall correctly, they released a statement saying that the game was not an MMO. I sincerely doubt they have many plans besides that, beyond the occasional event or some random flow trees in the wild.
Straight up VERY EZ mode difficulty. Not even talking about QOL either. This game has no fun factor.
Game is completely free and still only getting 6k on steam.
No suprise its having problems.
The player base for this game loves cosmetics and they put all of those behind a paywall cashshop. Maybe next time just charge a base price for the game and let the customers earn the cosmetics while they play.
Games need to appeal to customers. There is obviousy not enough player market for this game. If they want to compete for Stardew Valley customers then they need to make a better game than Stardew Valley.
Lessons Learned:
Make a better game, with a better payment model.
Palia's devs just failed to add fun to their game.
Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013
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1. During COVID there was a massive overstaffing across the industry because developers thought that the huge uptick in play time and dollars spent on gaming was going to forever trend up and to the right. Now that we're past that they are finding out rather painfully that they were very wrong.
2. Inflation has made borrowing money very expensive. That hit a 40-year peak in 2022 and the Fed has been trying to reel it in by increasing interest rates. The effect of that in the gaming industry has been that it dried up a lot of investor money. Combined with #1 it starts to make for a bit of a perfect storm scenario.
3. The game-as-a-service effect has meant that hit games stay around much longer than before. That means the hits are huge hits that suck up a lot of the now limited time and money people are willing to spend playing games for much longer leaving less of those resources for other games. If a game can't get traction in the market it's easy for a new game to get run out of the market by the gaming juggernauts. See also the recent article on MMORPG stating that 60% of game time is being sucked up by 6 games and they're all 5 years old or older. New games have to compete with that. Good luck.
This is basically what's happening across the board and has nothing to do with the type of game or the stupid casual vs hardcore gaming arguments. That's completely irrelevant to these layoffs so maybe don't make an ass out of yourself trying to build an argument around it.
- Nonfarm payrolls advanced 303,000 last month following a combined 22,000 upward revision to job gains in the prior two months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics report showed. The rise exceeded all expectations in a Bloomberg survey of economists.
I suspect the overall Technology industry is suffering a downturn for similar reasons to the above as new jobs in March were in different industries.(Perhaps related to the Three Body Problem?
- Job growth was led by faster hiring in health care, leisure and hospitality, and construction, while a measure of the breadth of job gains increased. Manufacturing employment was unchanged in March after a downward revision to a loss of 10,000 jobs in February.
Which probably also explains the slower wage growth rate despite more people working.- Average hourly earnings were as expected, rising 0.3% from February and 4.1% from a year ago, the slowest annual pace since mid-2021. The participation rate rose to 62.7%, the first advance since November, while the rate for workers age 25-54 ticked down to 83.4%
Not to get political but one comment from the Bloomberg article stated:"The Make America Great Again PAC supporting Donald Trump focuses on the number of multiple job holders increasing 2.7% last month and 27% since the former president left office:
If true, (not the alleged cause, just the outcome) lower employment numbers aren't necessarily good news.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/live-blog/2024-04-05/us-employment-report-for-march
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
As for Palia... well.. at the end of the day they failed to create a product that folks thought was worth the money the company needed to sustain itself. Whether it's because of them being "woke", because of their monetization, their target audience being wrong, or a poor product. At the end of the day, all that matters is that money in does not exceed money out.
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Or did you just see the "T" word w/o actually reading fully what was posted?
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
You even quoted the hyperbolic and specious statement 'Americans are needing multiple jobs to afford Joe Biden’s America.”
You don't think that's political?