Humans are inherently selfish and the deal sadly showed this once more.
I am very disappointed with Jason Schreier, who fights for developers and called out multiple toxic companies. To then look at the Activision deal and seemingly only be concerned about a imaginary monopoly. He shouldn’t call regulators, he should call Microsoft to get reassurance they’ll take care of the unbelievable toxic work environment.
The new graphic engine developed by Blizzard for all their new games, starting from Diablo IV, it’s really Amazing.
In an interview with AusGamers, Blizzard confirmed that Diablo 4 will be using a new game engine. While the team did not reveal any specific details, it did state that the game now uses Physically Based Rendering. What this means is that the team can…
Est. reading time: 2 minutes
Blizzard is recruiting an Associate Software Engineer to work on its new ‘shared game engine’ and they require DX12/Vulkan/Metal knowledge.
Est. reading time: 2 minutes
Diablo 4 Brand New Gameplay, Combat Improvements, Lighting, Weapon Buffs and More (Quarterly Update)
Now, Imagine all this beautiful graphic engine used for next Warcraft and StarCraft or next future AOE titles.
This Is the new generation: realistic and optimized Graphic
Was watching a stream by Griffin where he calls into or joins “Amazing” Lucas stream and it was…well it was something. Griffin was barely able to speak because Lucas and his goons kept interrupting him and insulting him, Jesus, lol.
Lucas calls the whole deal a nothing burger because nothing has come off of it yet, just like all the other acquisitions by MS he says. CoD may have seen its biggest decline last year, it was still the best selling game of the year, but I guess that’s a nothing burger. He claims Phil said this deal was done to make new IP, but we haven’t seen any of that he says. Duh, the deal isn’t even closed yet. Also to my knowledge Phil never even said that.
God I can’t wait until we start to see the results of the acquisitions, starting with Starfield which has the potential to be humongous. And from 2023 on it should be where we really keep seeing momentum and the results of these acquisitions.
I’m not a fan of Sea of Thieves, but its success can’t be dismissed, even if that wasn’t at launch. But sadly it’s not going exactly smoothly with their next game, so people aren’t entirely wrong, we haven’t yet seen big results. But with everything we know that is coming and the track records of these studios I can see nothing but a very promising future for Xbox.
This is a post from reddit I agree with 100 %
Sony have been signing exclusivity deals relentlessly all last generation, and they’ve done them largely unanswered as a result of both Xbox having a weaker market position making it cheaper for them to do, but also because the practice of signing them is widely accepted for them, but not for MS.
There’s a reason why something like Final Fantasy sells so disproportionately on PlayStation… it’s because these exclusivity deals reinforce (or in some cases disrupt) audiences on a given platform, and as time goes on that becomes more difficult to undo. Sony’s had Final Fantasy in their corner for a long time now, going back to Final Fantasy 7, but the series DID eventually come to Xbox day and date beginning with Final Fantasy XIII, and was starting to cultivate an audience within that ecosystem that had a desire to play JRPGs. That Final Fantasy 7 Remake got moneyhatted (for what is still an uncertain length of time in regards to Xbox) isn’t a random coincidence. This type of moneyhat is a precisely targeted one to cause an entire genre of game not be viable on the platform.
There are some IP that within their sphere carry so much weight that they cause ripple effects across the genre. Sony’s Street Fighter V moneyhat effectively buried the entire fighter genre on Xbox, because nobody invested in that genre was going to opt for a console that lacked Street Fighter… and as a result other titles that weren’t (or at least I’m not aware of being) moneyhats would start to skip the console also, because if nobody that’s invested in that genre is opting for that console, why should the smaller, more niche IP target that console either, right?
So yes… timed exclusives very much can be used to push a competing platform out of the market, and Sony was routinely targeting games that would be the most crippling across the spectrum. Whether that be Final Fantasy (and possibly Persona?) in the JRPG space, Street Fighter in the fighting game space, the year (or two) long exclusive content deals for Destiny, and the exclusive map content for COD in the FPS space, etc… the goal was to make it so Xbox as a platform wasn’t a viable choice for the majority of the market. And quite frankly, it was working and working well… hence the situation in 2016 where MS bowing out of the market entirely was a very real possibility.
When that didn’t occur, Sony looked to land killer blows right away at the start of this generation. Hence the announcement of Final Fantasy XVI’s timed exclusivity ahead of the consoles being released, and the murmurs of a whole slew of others to be revealed in time. And the general response here was just that it was a foregone conclusion that PS5 would just continue to build on PS4’s momentum largely unimpeded. And considering the shit MS took back in 2015 when they dared to land a single comparable exclusivity deal with Rise of the Tomb Raider, that avenue of retaliation was clearly not available to them. Look how quick the clarification of the duration of exclusivity of RoTR was forced out of MS and SquareEnix, and then contrast that with Crash N’Sane Trilogy, Nier Automata, Final Fantasy 7R, KOTOR remake… or any of countless other deals where their eventual Xbox release was happily left vague as hell. That’s how we’re here today, because MS were either gonna commit fully and land some true heavy blows that made a real difference to the current landscape, or they were inevitably going to see their platform marginalised to the point where they had to drop out.
If people didn’t want to see the level of escalation we’re seeing now today… well, they shouldn’t have been so comfortable commending the ever increasing frequency and severity of deals Sony was making to cripple their primary competition. “Final Fantasy sells 80%+ on PlayStation anyways, so they may as well” and by extension “of course it makes sense for game X to skip Xbox, because the audience is all on PlayStation”. Well, congrats… now they won’t all be. The rampant desire for the glory days of PS2-era domination has led us here, and so cries about how unfair it is ring hollow.
It’a not the sole reason, but I agree Sony thug tactics backfired badly this time, lmaooo. Trying to reach PS2 levels of “glory” was too much for any competitor, let alone MS which has the means to end their dreams.
If anyone wanna see how audiences react to activision blizzard IP. This video shows it all.
I love the ps2. But let’s be real. That was circumstantial of ms just coming into the industry and Nintendo having brain farts of ideas thinking proprietary mini dvds was a good idea. And even then while ps2 had majority of great games my absolute fav games of that gen were the halos ninja gaidens and metroid primes no on a ps2.
You should also show the Diablo Immortal reveal to show the current state of Blizzard.
The stuff about taking away a genre I disagree with. Sony aren’t solely to blame for lack of jrpgs on xbox. Ms have to take blame for that. You went from a vast library of decent to great jrpgs on 360 to virtually 0 on the One. There’s more jrpgs than just FF and ms didn’t care enough for them.
Like PS4 was, I mean, every success is at least partially kickstarted by someone else failure (like 360 was helped by PS3 disaster), outside Nintendo post Gamecube, which chose to leave home console hardcore and went into gimmicks/portable even more, so they chose a parallel way.
I agree, I also blame MS for not even trying for a decade in Japan after initial 360 gen, but it’s equally true that Sony’s tactics undermined what was left.
PS Gamers: “It’s fine, because those games don’t sell on Xbox”
Us: “How can they get a chance to when Sony moneyhats them for years at a time? How can a company grow a franchise base?”
PS Gamers: “CONSOLIDATION. MONOPOLY. OPERATION. HUNGRY HUNGRY HIPPOS”
Reminder on Capcom leaks that Sony financial input is little and pretty much for marketing reasons and to stall reases on Gampass, even the PC version of MH World was actually stalled for months because Sony paid for it.
But how many of those JRPGs on PS4 were simply financed by the dev/pub and released o Sony’s machine because they thought it was a smarter move without the need for financial support from the platform owner? Was MS expected to pay to bring every JRPG over? I don’t think it’s fair to them and I don’t think we can put the blame entirely on MS; we can however blame them for fucking over the Xbox One’s early years though which is probably the main reason for lack of support.
While they probably helped finance a lot of JRPGs on the 360, I’m wondering if they just realized it wasn’t moving the needle and decided to quit, while right now Phil often travels in Japan and probably tries to get those deals more organically and without the need for huge wads of cash. Like PSO2 for example with that Azure support, or all those Bandai Namco games we get or the few Square RPGs on Gamepass (somewhat financed by MS I guess but more logical with their current strategy).
I think we are getting better with JRPGs, but I somehow doubt we will ever be on par with Sony or Nintendo unless they start matching PS5 sales or if xcloud and Game Pass Ultimate become so popular in Japan that devs just can’t skip Xbox.
You can add “gaming journos” alongside PS gamers, no difference.
It didn’t help they were funding all those 360 JRPGs at a time when Japanese games (at least, AA and “distinctly Japanese” ones like JRPGs) were really unpopular in the West due to not adapting to HD well. I remember journalists at the time were absolutely savage on Japanese game development and “how far behind” it was.
Honestly I lived that time, the japanese industry was in a poor position, like almost every exclusive was waaaaaaay subpar (remember Vampire Night, Bullet Witch, Slypheed and Square RPGs?) and even the best ones such as Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey were declared inferior to the PS2 days, that’s why Inafune had that “going western” vision and he had the reputation because Dead Rising was a well received game and one of the highest rated japanese exclusive Xbox 360 games. Everyone was hooked into Elder Scrolls, Witcher, Mass Effect and Dragon Age.
But I agree that the Microsoft management at the Kinect era was completely devoid of heart, they were ditching indies and japanese non huge hitters into the trash bin and when the tides turned no one supported them because one thing is supporting with a bad taste, another is when you are in a bad position with bad relationships, you lose that in a split second. Then the current administration came in and we got the best support in the Xbox history.
Yeah, their only serious japanese push was also hindered by…bad japanese games, lol. On the contrary Sony was lucky in many 3rd party deals, you cannot control their output like they were a 1st party, you can only hope.
Yeah all the better Japanese games during 7th gen were on portable… The only JRPGs that even come to mind from 7th gen home consoles are Lost Odyssey and Xenoblade Chronicles (funnily enough, the 2 not on Playstation. I don’t think PS3 HAD any super memorable JRPGs.)
PS3 RPGs of quality were Trails of, Atelier and Disgaea, basically franchises that never hit the Xbox. But even that console had a share of kusoge games.
Yes, the portable scene was so much better, I think even Wii on proportion had a great quality. The same issue with not being able to follow up at the start of the new top hardware generation also happened with the change from 16 to 32 bit, no wonder why a lot of japanese exclusive Saturn games wouldn’t be a success in the west, they were almost all 2D.
