Naughty Dog is a huge first party studio that keeps making the same type of game.
Remedy is far more interesting than Naughty Dog to me. They are able to make mistakes and get really weird.
Naughty Dog is trying to be respected as story tellers akin to big Oscar films in Last of Us and big blockbuster type movies in Uncharted, Remedy says you can have Spielberg we are David Lynch fans. Let’s get weird.
Games don’t have to be perfect. They don’t have to be seen by focus groups and approved. Sometimes games can just be fun and weird. Remedy is about as weird as a bigger release can get.
If I were ranking studios, Remedy would be up above some of MS internal studios - some are selling them short. They certainly have done more than a studio like Compulsion has, and IMO they make better games than one of MS “premier” studios as well.
And Moon made Ori - MS best original IP in years. I will now buy anything they make on release date going forward, which is high praise
Considering that the 15 studios they have now couldn’t produce a single game for a console launch, yes they need a lot more studios going forward…
Game Pass needs more first party content going forward too, soon enough the competition will grow and securing third party titles will be harder. To get those big games in a steady flow from first party, a lot more is needed. It’s time to go big.
Where’s the rumors of Farm 51 coming from? Either way, strategies will differ based on the territory. Name on the door isn’t the end of it. I can see them eager to find a foothold in Poland which has an expanding talent pool. Lots of surrounding studios to poach talent from. The rate at which some of those Polish studios have taken steps from 1 game to the next seems to be ahead of the curve. Starting with a less established studio may be a better answer than starting from scratch.
Yes the output have been nice quantity wise pre console launch this year. But no big games since Gears 5 a year ago. And still, 0 games for launch is kinda bad.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been really pleased with the smaller games and the variety is great. However you also need the big ones. I know some are coming, but I don’t think the stable of studios they have are enough to support Game Pass in the future.
Yeah I would agree with your frustration on the lack of “big” mainstream games since gears 5, although I would argue that while not mainstream, Flight Simulator is a big game.
As other posts have suggested, if they want to be the Netflix of gaming, they will need more studios. The 20-25 figure would be a solid number, especially if they have multiple teams.
Flight Simulator is big, but it’s also very niche yeah. Even though a lot of people will play it, and it will be a great showcase for the Series X once that version is released, it’s still a sim. It is however a great addition to Game Pass indeed.
I think Bungie leaving had more to do with them wanting to own their own IPs than not wanting to make Halo. I mean if they really hated making the same game for years so much, why sign a ten year deal to make one game for Activision of all publishers?
@Jez and @RandalThor19 keep hinting at a reunion. Perhaps they know more than us? Insomniac back to Sony would be similar to this although Bungie clearly is the bigger studio.
There was a recent Marty O’donnell interview where he pretty much says Bungie thought about coming back to MS to have them Publish Destiny but decided against it because they may want the IP.
Speaking of Bungie. I never got into Destiny 2 at all and I’m playing through the original campaign. Why did no one tell me they Added a ton of platforming elements? This feels like Doom (2016). I would love to see Bungie do something third person with a lot of these platforming elements.
I still feel like Bloober Team makes a lot of sense
I believe its last 4 games have had different publishers which is sure to create a lot of uncertainty during the development process that im sure they would like to avoid
They have a long standing relationship with microsoft, layers of fear was one of the first Game Preview games as well as the medium now being a launch exclusives
horror is something that is both missing from the current xbox first party portfolio and Horror games as a genre possibly have the most to gain in launching with the little to know barrier to entry that gamepass provides
However, I feel like the optimal time to announce it would have been the xbox games showcase… maybe they are waiting to see the response to the medium, possibly an XO20 announcement? either way I think they make the most sense at this point in time.
Odds are we’d know because Bloober Team is public. It’s hard to keep these kinds of acquisitions from the general public. Microsoft has only ever purchased private developers.
Bloober and Asobo are definitely the low hanging fruit. They both feel like they are already part of Microsoft.
I’m playing Blair Witch now and it’s pretty interesting but jeeze is it dark. I can hardly see anything. It’s a good concept and some good tension but it definitely could have used some polish.
