This Week’s Topics:
- Rundown Preamble Ramble: Inefficient Crunch Time Continues…
- Eidos Montreal Cancels AAA Project After 7 Years (Eidos Montreal Continue to Crumble in Chaos)
- Shift Up Acquires Shinji Mikami’s New Studio (Do I Blame Him For Selling? NO!)
Rundown Preamble Ramble:
Inefficient Crunch Time Continues…
As per usual, this time of year is PEAK crunch time for me. The type of crunch time that destroys game studios, kills the spirit, and should probably be illegal. Alas, the life of a tax accountant is one of crunching for immovable deadlines— or so says my 68-year-old boss. Normally, this is bad, but this past few weeks have been me putting in some Origin Systems hours in. I’ve been working from 10:00 to 2:00, only breaking to do the dishes, exercise, and to take a shower. 60 hour weeks have become the norm, and this past March I cranked out a fucking 250 hour month.
Why do I do these insane hours? Well, it’s not for the money. I make $72,000 a year as my base salary, and because I’m salaried, I do not get paid for overtime, let alone make time and a half. Instead, I do what I do out of a sense of personal responsibility and the awareness that unless I do this, that, and the other thing, then nobody will.
I have spoiled my boss as he’s grown older and fatter and taken on more and more of the work, to the point where he barely even touches any of the crypto tax returns I prepare. There are no co-workers I can share duties with, as it’s just me and the self-appointed “God Emperor” (real term) of this boutique accounting firm. Which especially pisses me off, as he likes to wax about the glory days of when he worked 68 hour weeks in his 40s, but has developed such a lazy disposition and become a genuine procrastinator.
There are so many bespoke inefficiencies in our practice, so many things that do not work. We could try to simplify or streamline things, but I am just one person trying to accommodate for a self-described fuck up who does things whenever he wants to however he feels like it while being committed to servicing some clients sometimes throwing others under the bus. Why? He just vibes that way, and I’m expected to go along with it.
Now, the devil’s advocate—
Akumako: “You call for me?”
Nope! Get outta here, ya stinky!
Akumako: “I only stink because you won’t pay to dry-clean my jumpsuits…”
The devil’s advocate would highlight how I also have very little work other months. During the late winter months, when we are doing planning and cleanup work, I sometimes don’t even work 100 hours a month between the mandatory holiday breaks. This is not by choice, but by the fact that there is no work for me to do. However, does that make crunch time FAIR? Hell no!
I should not need to bounce between a dozen clients. I should not need to rack up 14 working hours in a single day. I should not need to remind my boss for the THIRD TIME that he needs to send an email before doing it myself, because that’s the only way it will actually get done. And I should not be routinely blindsided by how my boss wants to take a different approach on things. Sometimes he wants to focus on getting things out the door and NOTHING else, other times he wants to focus on one pet project. …Or he overworks himself by fucking around until midnight and needing to “sleep” for half a day, because he’s an old man with sleep apnea.
It almost makes me want to run his practice myself while he plays chess all day and sits in his beat-up chair. Except I KNOW I would HATE running my own practice, needing to meet with clients, and running emotional support on my clients, needing to CARE about over 200 people and understand 200 situations. Sorry, but it’s hard enough for me to care about dozens of people, and remember who they are. When you start quoting hundreds, you’ve lost me. You’ve exceeded my mental capacity of humans I can pretend to care about.
For YEARS I have been hoping for an escape. I have been hoping that my boss will sell the practice, and me, to one of the few fabled good and organized companies out there. A place that wouldn’t leave me high and dry, that would have good workflow and tools, and where I am not responsible for what sure as hell feels like MOST of the work for the entire bloody company.
Who drafts over 90% of the returns? Me. Who updates the task log? Me. Who is in charge of logging billable time for clients? Me. Who goes through cryptocurrency platforms, flags problem items, adds wallets, addresses dataset issues, and creates uniform Form 8949 substitutes to report capital gain activity to IRS? Me! I want to do the work, I want to get it done, I want to help these people comply with Fascist Law. Yet I do not enjoy feeling as if I am in charge of MOST of the company’s operations while being unable to finish anything without God Emperor’s blessings. He’s not a bad person. He’s just a scatterbrained mess who needs to lie down and let someone new take over or push him around.
…At least I don’t need to spend hours a month assembling tax returns anymore. So there’s that.
Eidos Montreal Cancels AAA Project After 7 Years
(Eidos Montreal Continue to Crumble in Chaos)
I don’t think any set of studios have been taken for a ride worse than the sister studios of Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics. Both are studios with a number of high quality titles behind them, both were led in bad directions at the behest of the bozos running Square Enix. Both were bought by Embracer for the budget of a single AAA game. Both have a lasting history of collaborations and probably more than a few shared staff members. And both have closets full of the skeletons of canceled projects.
Embracer canceled a new Deus Ex game. Like five Legacy of Kain games were canceled over the years. Tomb Raider 13: Catalyst has taken so long that I’m guessing it was rebooted thrice. The Perfect Dark reboot developed (mostly) by Crystal Dynamics was canceled. Eidos Montreal has been on support studio work for YEARS. And, shit, neither has developed an original game since the one-two punch of Marvel Avengers (2020) and Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy (2021). And the layoffs? I’m surprised that Embracer has not just shat the bag and closed down both studios with how many heads keep rolling out their doors. …But wait, it gets worse!
This past week Insider Gaming broke the story that Eidos Montreal canceled a new AAA project that has been in development since 2019. This project, dubbed both P11 and Wildlands, was an open world third-person action adventure affair that struggled across four different engines and ate up “several hundred million” dollars of funding. The game involved a group of teenagers warding off evil spirits with the power of magic staves and the help of rideable mythical creatures. Not the most original concept, but seems workable enough, and the game was deemed worth pursuing for years and years, reaching a state of being “almost complete,” even planning a release later this year. Instead… it was canceled.
After 7 years of work, and who knows how many iterations, Embracer did not think it was worth finishing this game, marketing it, or trying to salvage it any further, so now the game will never be. All that work, all that effort, and all of those years of impassioned labor, it now amounts to NOTHING because some executive did not believe this game would do well. They believed this so much that they fired 124 Eidos Montreal employees, presumably the team behind Wildlands, which is beyond cruel.
These people spent nearly a decade working on this project, and rather than release it to recoup something, to give them something to show and demonstrate their skills, they are being given nothing. Nothing but a firm boot to the ass, laid off right before the end of the fiscal year, without a job, without the ability to find one in this TERRIBLE economy. This is an act of indulgence, of cruelty, on behalf of the managers responsible for this decision, and I wish for them nothing but the worst.
I wish that I could say that is the only bad thing that happened to the twin developers of Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics but, uh, no, that’s not quite all. Insider Gaming also revealed that Crystal Dynamics is working on a new Lord of the Rings game. Which… makes sense, as Embracer still owns the Lord of the Rings IP, and while we are far from its mid 2000s cultural ubiquity, LotR is still pretty popular. Hell, Amazon felt that it was popular enough to fund one of the most expensive TV shows of all time based on some flakey footnotes of the original work. I would almost expect Amazon to jump in to fund it to eventually gobble up Crystal Dynamics and maybe even Embracer to finally “get into gaming” and absorb all of their lucrative IPs.
Instead, the mastermind behind this project appears to be… Abu Dhabi Investment Office. They’re an investment company from the United Arab Emirates who apparently wants to “compete with [Hogwash Legarthy]” by funding a AAA action adventure game based on another highly popular 2000s film/literary property. Or, at the very lease, they are co-funding it, as the purported $100 million investment would only cover like a third of dev costs. …Okay, but why is a damn Middle Eastern investment company funding a game like this? Are they trying to compete with Saudi Arabia and— wait, no, that’s exactly what they’re doing, isn’t it?
Uh, how can this get even more depressing and confusing—
Akumako: “NATALIE! You remember that Legacy of Kain game that was announced earlier this year? The 2D platformer?”
Yeah? Legacy of Kain: Ascendance? It came out and was overseen by Crystal Dynamics, wasn’t it? How’d the game shape up?
Akumako: “How does a 27% Steam user rating and a 57 on Metacritic sound?”
Ah… so was it bad in terms of both gameplay AND story?
Akumako: “Apparently. Maybe so bad it’s hilarious if you ask some people.”
Well, that sucks! People got a genuinely great remaster of the last game with Legacy of Kain: Defiance Remastered, one that completely recontextualized what the original did and addressed its biggest criticisms. It felt like things were finally going right for this series! Then they get the first new game in twenty years, and it’s not very good. Are these studios just DOOMED to be tied to disappointment?
Akumako: “At this rate… they just might be.”
Shift Up Acquires Shinji Mikami’s New Studio
(Do I Blame Him For Selling? NO!)
After leaving Tango Gameworks in early 2023, acclaimed game director Shinji Mikami went out into the world to form a brand new studio by the name of Unbound and began work on a AAA game project. This was a pretty logical trajectory, as Mikami is still a creative force and after fostering Tango, likely wanted to embark on one last major journey. Unfortunately, AAA games are virtually impossible to fund without investors, and it’s not like Mikami has a spare $300 million so he can fully fund a project himself. At least, I don’t think he does.
In order to fund a AAA project, one either needs a lucrative publishing deal or to sell their burgeoning startup studio to a larger entity with live service money and other revenue streams. With this in mind, it is little surprise that Mikami sold Unbound before the studio has so much as shown anything, though I would have never guessed that Shift Up would be a buyer. You know, the Korean ass guys behind Nikke: Goddess of Victory (2022) and Stellar Blade (2024).
After releasing a hit gacha title and snagging a lot of attention with their big PS5 (temporary) exclusive, I have to imagine that Shift Up had money to invest. As a Korean studio that WANTS to make AAA console games their bread and beef, it makes sense for them to invest in the console space with a studio that, even if it’s not profitable, will produce something quality, and Mikami’s games have always been that.
Do I like this? No! Do I blame Shinji Mikami for taking the bag so he could fund a AAA studio? No! Would I have done anything different in his position? No! It’s better to get money from a company that respects console action games and wants to make them than a company more transparently evil. Like Bethesda. Or Microsoft.
Shift Up is still a relatively young company, so they may be a good fit for Mikami’s studio. And by good fit, I mean a quiet investor who gives money, support when needed, and lets the cooks cook. That’s what I’m hoping for, but things can change rapidly in the world of games, and the world of reality as well.
Progress Report 2026-04-05
You know, I BITCH about this work, but I do genuinely love doing things, feeling productive, and completing projects. It’s something that I learned to admire about my favorite creators, and no matter HOW MUCH I work, no matter how much I strive, I will always be outmatched by someone who can just run circles around me, like Vel here. Dude has been putting out so much stuff that I have not had the time to sit down and read it.
Actually, I should probably do a preamble about my love of work, how I consider so many things to be work, and how it mixes with my fear of committing to certain things. Gosh, at this point I am going to indulge in so many little details about myself that any dedicated biographer won’t even need to interview me to know EVERYTHING I am about. Is that a goal of mine? I don’t know at this point! I just want to be a prolific weirdo who did some cool stuff before she died! But I keep running out of time due to the bespoke inefficiencies of being a human. Aaaaaaahhhhh!!!
2026-03-29: Watched Re:Zero for almost five hours with my friends. Still a very good anime, but season two lacks the same focus as season one. Wrote like 700 words for VD2.0 Act 3 CH 7-12 before my mother pulled me out for a walk. I got back, made dinner, and four eight hours of work waiting for me. Great. So much for my day off.
2026-03-30: Worked 14 hours, go fuck yourself anybody who says I don’t work hard enough!
2026-03-31: Worked 14 hours. Again. Did my monthly finances and realized that this moronic war erased $13,000 from my investment accounts. $8,000 in retirement accounts just FUCKING GONE because of this war. Thanks Krasnov. I’m still financially comfortable. I made $14,000 in investments from January to February, but still just another reason to despise America.
2026-04-01: Wrote 2,300 words for the first three segments. Edited this shit. Worked a 10 hour day for a chance as my boss had to have a sleepover with his grandson. Also, my investments and retirement went up $1,650 today. I hate the stock market SO MUCH! But I gotta do it, ‘cos fuck the dollar. But fuck the Euro and Franc more because they KEEP GOING DOWN! FUCK YOU!
2026-04-02: Only a nine hour day, as I did all of my independent work, like a good BITCH. Now I just need to whip Old Man into shape and have him finalize things and do the social labor. Wrote 1,500 words for VD2.0 Act 3 CH 7-12
2026-04-03: Modest work day for a change, though I had family taxes to do in the morning. Found the time to write 2,700 words for VD2.0 Act 3 CH 7-12, ALMOST finishing this COT DAMN chapter before I ran out of energy. But I wrote a super-long male to male TF sequence, so… progress!
2026-04-04: Wrote the last 900 words for the first segment of VD2.0 Act 3 CH 7-12. That’s segment 17/30 done with… 87 days left to finish it. Orz. This is gonna be more of a rush job than I anticipated. But at least I am finishing up the 10k-13k word segments first. Like ten of these should be 5k words MAX. Wanted to do more, but stress is draining my drive to work on this. Latter half of April will be a writing fiesta though! Also, played more Cross Code and got to a part that made me realize that I think the designers had just terrible tastes. I backed this game like a decade ago, put off playing it, and it’s just not very fun. It would warrant an article to describe why.
Verde’s Doohickey 2.0 – Act III: Worldly Wonders
Progress Report
Current Word Count: 150,616
Estimated Word Count: 250,000
Words Edited: 0
Total Segments: 30
Segments Outlined: 30
Segments Drafted: 17
Segments Edited: 0
Header Images Made: 0
Days Until Deadline: 87