Yep I am getting pretty sick of games releasing, me playing them then updates adding loads of quality of life features months after.
So I’ve often paid the most and got the worst experience - it’s really not a good advert for £70 games!
Some AA and indie games have issues too, but I have noticed in general they release in a far more polished state - it’s mainly the AAA publishers that seem to push them out to hit their sales windows…
How long should they ethically keep open studios that have never made money? Isn’t that unethical to their owners?
Good gods man, this is indefensible whether it’s Xbox or any other multi-billion dollar company laying employees off when they’re hitting record profit/revenue numbers. Could you stop trying to sugarcoat this and let people understandably vent?
From my perspective a lot of this stems from the Xbox leadership’s practice of : “hey, y’all, its just your regular gaming pals from MS here, making the world a better place”.
No one gets quite as upset by ghoulish tactics when conducted by faceless corporate automatons. But the outrage is amplified when you are out in public telling everyone about how friendly you are and your intentions to bring about gaming utopia. If you are going to be ghouls, go be ghouls, just don’t blow smoke up our asses first.
This is one aspect of the business that Nintendo and Sony get right (not the ghoulish actions, just how they conduct them). If that makes any sense.
Capitalism isn’t exactly having a winning streak in the games industry at the moment so it’s probably not a hill to die on…
Maybe have some sensitivity, people are upset about their favourite developers losing their jobs so it’s a bit ghoulish to hang around trying to provoke arguments…
True - Sony act like bastards a lot of the time so no one is surprised when they do bad things 
Whereas Xbox maybe need to chat to Obsidian, the Outer Worlds did capture the whole “we as a corporation want to be your friend, we’re good, honest!” vibe that Xbox has gone for which doesn’t sit well with many of the hard-nosed business decisions they’ve made - and yep it’s why they get a harsher backlash from fans when they do
The brand is done. The final nail in the coffin. I wish Bethesda could regain their independence. They’re trapped in this mess now.
One of the really frustrating things is we will likely never see what Roundhouse was working on, for years now it’s been rumoured to be Prey 2.
Given how much MS is leaning on GamePass, how do you determine whether an individual game studio is “making money” or not? I thought the vision was a wide selection of varied content to drive subscriptions.
You do know they were in worse mess than this, right?
Wait, wtf. Roundhouse was rumored to be making a sequel to Prey 2017?
No, he’s referring to the original Prey game.
Oooh, I see. Wasn’t aware of this at all.
It probably wouldn’t have been like the canceled one, right? It was quite a shame Bethesda canceled that.
I get the frustration, but I’m not sure you could be more wrong. Bethesda was stuck under ownership that forced them into live service which destroyed their talent base as people left. You don’t know what a group of thousands “want” and the Xbox brand will be fine as most consumers will not care about this news in two weeks let alone a month after their showcase.
We’re a visual people, we can feel terrible for people who lose their jobs but will quickly forget unless we know them personally. It happens every single time.
I mean we don’t really know if that was the case. It’s a rumor and perhaps forever one.
It all hurts IMO, but Tango really was a gut punch.
As a smaller Xbox studio I would be really worried about my future. I wouldn’t be surprised if all their studios now start monetising their games heavily but I’m not sure how someone like Ninja Theory or DoubleFine would do it.
It seems it’s not sufficient anymore to make a fantastic highly acclaimed game even if it does turn a profit, it also has to be a consistent money generator. I think it will lead to less creative ‘average’ games sadly.
Yes it’s well documented that they started and stopped development on Prey 2 multiple times under their previous name (Humanhead).
It’s not clear if the game would have been a sequel to their Prey game from 2006 rather than a sequel to Arkanes game from 2017.
absolute shit news
god damn