I am not completely positive Life is Unusual: Double Publicity was a good suggestion conceptually—nor was collection fan and PC Gamer author Mollie Taylor, who performed the factor and had , if “unnecessary-feeling”, time.
That does not imply I am greeting in the present day’s information with any explicit sense of pleasure. Fairly the other: The truth that no person picked up the sport’s GDC award is miserable as all hell, to me. At this level, the indicators that this trade is messed the hell up are much less warning lights and extra a claxon I’ve needed to wearily blot out with earplugs simply to remain sane.
As you may see within the video above (through IGN), Life is Unusual: Double Publicity received the occasion’s Social Affect Award, competing towards 1,000 Occasions Resist, Astro Bot, Frostpunk 2, and Neva. Launched to the occasion in 2022, the award “acknowledges a sport that advances equality, justice, intersectionality, and/or sustainability, and works to positively influence lives in a significant manner”. I am positive this can be a chilly consolation to the very fact no person informed Life is Unusual: Double Publicity’s builders that they should be round to gather it.
Stephen Totilo, a journalist who was backstage on the time, wrote the next: “Practically each sport that received had folks coming by means of, beaming with their trophy in hand. It stood out that, for Life is Unusual, which received the Social Affect award, there was nobody.”
As to why? Nicely, in line with former Deck 9 dev, narrative designer and author Elizabeth Ballou on BlueSky, it was as a result of no-one on the workforce anticipated it, as a result of, properly, “All of us acquired laid off”. She writes: “It is becoming that no person was there to just accept the GDCA award that Double Publicity received, as a result of all of us acquired laid off lol … (Do not be unhappy for me, I’m very fortunate and I work on BitLife now and I adore it).”
Ballou labored at Deck 9 for nearly two years, and was a part of the primary wave of layoffs that hit the studio in February 2024. And, respectfully, I am gonna be a little unhappy for her, and her colleagues, since her studio was hit with a second wave of layoffs in December, substantial sufficient to result in this whole state of affairs.
This complete state of affairs could possibly be all the way down to miscommunication on behalf of the occasion’s organisers, thoughts, as Ballou does observe that “a bunch of us are at GDC, however we did not know we had been even nominated so no person was ready to just accept something”.
However it’s not completely unreasonable to attract the conclusion that when you labored on a sport and acquired laid off from the studio, you won’t be notified that it is up for an award—you won’t even fathom it as a risk, particularly since Sq. Enix moderately flatly mentioned it misplaced them cash throughout a monetary assembly not too long ago. Extra grim is the implication that Deck 9 did not have anybody to ship.
Ballou would later submit a picture of the award, including: “Please rent the individuals who made this sport and acquired laid off”.
It is a grimly acceptable instance of simply how terrible it has been within the trade as an entire these previous few years. A lot in order that The Sport Awards final yr, traditionally a present with a celebratory, ‘all the pieces’s effective’ vibe, needed to throw its fingers up and say yeah, the state of affairs’s tousled.
