Rockstar Acquires Ruffian Games, Rebrands Rockstar Dundee

Aside from Rockstar North and Rockstar San Diego, none of their studios even make games anymore. They are all just support studios that do patches and ports.

I imagine the title is supposed to say "Rebrands" instead of "Rebands?"

Interesting how Rockstar is becoming like Valve in terms of sticking to revenue based business vs the creative end.

I don’t understand how it takes that many studios to make GTA online content plus work on (presumably) one game at a time. Unless the studios are insanely tiny.

I'll forgive them the 5 year gap for RDR2. Well worth it!

Shame my sister’s moved down from Dundee now after graduating, I used to go up all the time and it’s a lovely (sort of) city! They have a thriving game development scene too and a rich history!

When do we expect gta6 and will it mostly be built around online gameplay rather than single player?

Holy crap!!! Oni!!! I completely forgot how much I used to love that game!

I'd forgive their slow trickle of games if they'd offer the GTA3 trilogy and its Stories spin-offs on Switch, fully remastered and updated with some QoL-type changes like better saves and whatnot. GTA on the go would be fantastic. Even the PSP got GTA love, but the Switch doesn't? It's baffling to me.

Honestly, Rockstar are a massive disappointment. They were my favourite developer on PS2, and even on PS3, everything they put out was gold, but the productivity is outrageous now. Look i know the games they make continue to be brilliant, but their focus has completely shifted to their online platforms, and that is where their heart appears to be these days. Such a shame

I just can't wrap my mind around this generation of gamer that plays one game for years and years. I dont care how much content they put out. This is still a PS3 from 2013. Ive played multiple live service games i.e. Destiny, The Division, Apex Legends, and where I had a decent time with all three. After a few months I was ready for something new and moved on.

You know if they were to not focus on GTA Online so much we'd probably have more games from them.....

Dear God. That image is simply sad.

Awesome. Good to see Rockstar back to its spiritual home. For a wee city Dundee does good quite proud to say.

Man, it's good for financial stability for those guys but working as a GTA online content developer sounds depressing.

Back to its roots of dma designs and og gta and lemmings. Great news for Dundee and hopefully they take on some abertay students from the games designs course.

Pretty sure that image did the rounds when RDR2 was announced aswel. Still a sad sight tho. Would love more max payne games or hell a new IP but i get it. Its hard for someone to pitch new ideas to the bosses over all the piles of money the offices are stuffed with

I'm still pretty disappointed RDR2 never saw something like the "Undead Nightmare" RDR1 got. Undead Nightmare was one of my favorite experiences on the X360.

Hunting down Bigfoot and el chupacabra while taming a unicorn (with loads of zombies to boot)? Yes please.

Actually DLC in general was great around that time. Far Cry: Blood Dragon was also awesome as was the "Artorias of the Abyss" DLC for Dark Souls.

Good times.

Ruffian is now cursed to just patch GTA V for life, a fate worse than death.

Rockstar combined all of the studios to make RDR2. That's why they don't makes as many games

Stop buying more copies of GTA and stop spending money on GTA online. You're literally paying them NOT to make GTA6.

@nessisonett Indeed, it’s the city where GTA was born in fact. It’s well known for design, hence why it was chosen for the V&A design museum. 😉

Seems like a waste of money for such a talentless studio, I guess they get cheap grunt labor out of them so...

@VeldinX The V&A’s pretty cool, I went not long after it opened!

@nessisonett Yeah, same. I’ve been twice: not long after opening and then again when the video game exhibition was running. It detailed the making of The Last of Us which was cool!

Not surprising when a single hat in RDRII looks like it took a week to design. The detail on outfits is insane! And then there's the revolutionary HAIR. So yeah like @ApostateMage I give them a pass.

I've never understood this does everyone collectively just think it takes like 1-2 years to make a ground breaking game? Its so confusing to me

Depressing sight indeed.

No wonder Dan Houser left the firm, as he worked as a writer for their games. Guess he saw where things were heading ...

@UsernamePassword29 Nobody thinks that but its a massive company. Square Enix doesnt release just one game every 5 years? Its not like its one studio.

@gamer_since_83 yeah I've pondered whether he has quit making games for good or after a break might decide to start all over and create another studio. It will also be interesting to see if his absence is noticeable in Rockstar's future games seeing the important role he played in them.

I looked up ruffian, they were pretty mediocre. I don't really see the value in purchasing them other than the fact they wanted a presence in the area.

@NomNom It could be R* sees potential in sertain technical areas within Ruffian which they can hone into something good for further R* projects. I believe there exists talent within Ruffian for sure.

@gamer_since_83 I guess, it's always easier to build up an existing studio over making a new one. And I'm sure they didn't have a massive asking price. Hopefully they contribute to Rockstar making games a bit faster 😅

@Boxmonkey Thats where the big money is.

A game typically makes the vast majority of its money in the first 3-6 months. After that, the value of a game to a developer/publisher is practically zero. If, instead, you played on a gamers need to collect, or be the best, and continually sold them the same digital goods over and over again, you could stretch this revenue stream out for years with very little effort and risk.

I'm dundee born and bred. Great to see us making news 😂

my favorite studio has lost its soul & it pisses me off big time!

I'd certainly hope the next game controls better than GTAV and RDRII though.
It's sad but understandable that a new R* game takes so much time to be completed, seeing all the details they put in there (especially RDR), bur maybe next time make the game playable, please.

It's useless to have facial hair grow in real time and have single animations for everything, if the character still plays like a chunk of wood from the PS2 era and is expected to traverse dozens of KM walking at the speed of a slug or, worse, has the player destroy a button like it's 2002 all over again.
Wait...hair growing in real time is just useless, period.
They sure got their priorities straight, at R*.

The mission design is horribly outdated, the shooting is terrible, the design is barely existent.
At least driving in GTAV still holds up nicely for a 2013 open world game, but if all they care about is the story, they should just make movies then, not games, and especially not open world games.

@Darten dude 🙄
Do you seriously think my point is that R* should start making movies? C'mon.
I'm just hoping they catch up with what other devs have implemented in their games during the last 2 console generations, cause I think it's pretty sad to see them focus so much on story and graphics (which are certainly important, and R* know how to make better than almost any other dev), but also inconsequential things like growing hair, shrinking testicles, and unnervingly slow animations instead of, you know, modernizing their incredibly outdated mission design and gameplay in general.

I don't think wanting the "game" part of videogame to be good is such an unreasonable request.

Honestly, it would be nice if they took the online part of things so Rockstar could make other games that isn't GTA Online again. RDROnline is alright, but honestly kinda overly grindy and repetitive. If GTA Online is like it I'm not sure why it's so popular. The SP is miles above anything the online has to offer in RDR2. Let's have single player games instead of Online modes that almost feel likey they are a FTP model.

@clvr The mission design aside from story missions almost always ending in a shootout feels more varied in RDR2 than almost any other game. It's heavily story focused game a lot of what it has grounds you in the world. I think the horse testicles was a publicty stunt honestly. The animations makes the games story so much better and helps great your own little stories in the world. The variety the missions has is incredible and the depth of the story that drives them and how it all ties together is what makes the game so great. Those slow animations are a very intentional part of the game that can be seen in its entire design philosophy.

@Jaz007 yes, I know the slow pace is part of the identity of the game, I'm not saying I want it to be as fast-paced as a Platinum game for example.
I know that RDRII strives to be a more meditative experience, and I appreciate the clarity of that kind of vision, but I simply don't find it as engaging as it could be. I haven't finished the game, I've only played part of it on my roommate's copy, so the day I try it again and play it to completion I might change my mind completely, but for every immersive animation, I found at least one element that took me out of the experience.

I'm not against this style of game per se, I'm just saying that a better compromise can and should be reached by now. As I said, the narrative is several cuts above most games so we agree on that, but you seem to have missed that my problem is with the clunky controls and outdated mission design which goes against everything an open world game should stand for.
I'm not talking missions from a narrative standpoint, but from a mechanical standpoint. Hope it's clearer now 😃

Make a game for online that everyone plays and spends money on and just dwindle content out from time to time no need to rush.

Or

Make a game with a budget maybe go over and have a deadline to meet with potential CRUNCH to get it done as it maybe delayed and suffer from long nights, stress working weekend don't see the family much potential split family

Which would you choose?

@BearsEatBeets.... It will be noticeable..... It's a like startup company once it goes public and goes the IPO route then the soul of the startup dies, as it's now owned by the investors..... Rockstar and its games were the Houser brothers....... We will see and feel it in games that Dan is gone.................

Somehow I wish he can start a new studio and work with Sony on 2nd party dev basis and revive "The Getaway" franchise..... That would be a pipe dream with.....

@clvr...... Well everything you mentioned about RD2 is as modern as game development gets..... Maybe the other devs should catch up to R*........ After playing RD2 most games and especially open world games are not cut from the same cloth as RDR 2........ The game is one of the games of the generation for a reason.......

@Darten realism is the most overrated word in videogames. Nothing is realistic about them as they constantly employ gaming conventions that we now take for granted, and games like RDRII have shown that committing too much to realism for the sake of realism can make a game overly repetitive and slow, when at the end of the day we want to have a good experience with a game. I don't find any of that to be more immersive, the opposite is true to be honest.
If you keep me immersed in the mechanics, I won't even know I'm holding a controller; if you keep halting my progress to show mw how good your animations are, I groan.

And to really drive home how the realism point is completely moot, how many games with the same "super high fidelity" graphics exist? Basically every AAA game cause a good art direction is not sexy anymore to tge eyes of the execs, unfortunately, but it doesn't seem to me that they all abide by R* incredibly dated controls.

Hitman 2016 is "realistic" and your character moves slowly, but he's not a pain to control for various reasons, such as the maps being small enough for that slowness to not bother me, and the fact that you can hold a button to run instead of mashing X 2002-style.

Just Cause 3 is "realistic", yet zipping from one place to the next with the wingsuit is the most fun activity in the game.

Far Cry 4 is "realistic", but you can sprint and jump pretty much indefinitely and you're not slow.

It's cute how realism is the ultimate shield for R* games and only those, if anyone made them I'm sure they'd get way more flack.
But you know, they're huge and GTA is the most popular franchise, so it must always be perfect, right?
Being popular =/= being good.
I'm not saying GTAV is not good, but the fact that the controls suck is objective. They're the same controls from GTA3 basically, and that was unacceptable in 2013, let alone 2020.

The mission design also hasn't changed is incredibly obtuse and restrictive, defeating tge purpose of being set in an open world.

R* has made 2 games in the last 10 years, and both are incredibly outdated in the mechanics department; do we really need another relic of the past in the next 5 or can we realize this simple concept before that happens?
Cause, you know, Bethesda has gone from gods to frauds in very little time, so it is possible to change an opinion on a company.