Yeah. That’s exactly what I saw. Honestly I can’t think of anything this Gen is that makes it worth it. They are very good at selling ideas. I got the console for perfect Dark. Xbox at the moment really seems to be suffering an identity crisis. Getting rid of hifi rush devs is very telling for me.
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Regarding optics, the timing of this is really bad. They have a major release in less than 2 weeks as well as the Showcase in less than a month. This is a decision they must have been mulling over for months and now they decide to do this? The Xbox executives won’t be able to hide from SM considering they will have to promote and talk about Hellblade 2 and then the upcoming Showcase. Would have been much better to make this decision earlier in the year (they don’t need Tango to port it to other platforms) or later this year after the “hype”. I can’t imagine Greenberg trying to do his job with this hanging over him, especially since he has nothing to do with these closures.
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Based on some statements here & there over the years, it looks like MS won’t invest in those AAA Sony style games anymore because they’re basically too expensive to develop.
They’ve become risk averse & Gamepass is a part of that philosophy. I mean I’m not here to judge either, i.e. we’ve yet to see how Sony’s investments will play out in the near future. Spiderman 2 had an obscene budget for example ergo the execs over there will be looking at the success of Helldivers II & probably asking themselves whether a 300 million dollar budget for a single game is worth it anymore.
I wanna come back to this, you do realize, non incorporated studios are closing down at an even faster rate as well? And stop using the term, “you people”
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It’s almost never good when a mega corp buys smaller businesses. I think any sane person has been against what they were doing. It doesn’t matter what console people own they should never be for this happening.
The reason “everyone” was for MS acquisitions was pretty straightforward: Gamepass. It was about filling the service with content. Especially day one content. Bethesda & Activision were seen as essential purchases to feed that content.
I’m not sure where any of that stands now, i.e. with the third party rumors & the fact only one game has landed on Gamepass as a result of the Activision-Blizzard deal so far (Diablo IV).
Everyone. Lol
Generally I like to judge on what is done and not what was said. The jury is still out but, they haven’t done that. Essential is a very strong term that cannot be used accurately in that sentence. I’m aware of what they said. Diablo was year one unfortunately. Wasn’t starfield not a legitimate day one. I mean real day one not a week later.
I used inverted commas for a reason. “Everyone” = most Xbox fans who wanted Gamepass to get more content.
Personally I was disappointed the moment Tango Gameworks started branching out & making stuff which wasn’t their forte or in their original DNA. They were a survival horror dev & that’s what they were good at.
We often see people praising devs taking risks or making something different but we rarely see conversations about whether that’s even a good idea to begin with, i.e. with two questions remaining unanswered in many cases: can the dev team pull it off & does the market even want the product? With Hif-FI Rush they pulled it off, but the market said no. With Ghostwire it’s questionable whether they pulled it off & the market once again said ‘no’.
In the meantime we could have had The Evil Within 3 on Gamepass already.
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It definitely looking to be that way. Players seem to be hesitant to buy new IP or lesser known games instead mostly buying games from well established franchises and studios. Look at Alan Wake 2, sold abysmally, despite GOTY shouts. Every publisher seems to be going this route to reduce uncertainty/losses.
What was the last new IP to sell blockbuster from an lesser known studio? I’m struggling to think of any recently.
Xbox is probably shifting resources into the big franchises they own, whilst reducing funding into new IP. They clearly can’t afford their current level of investment, giving studios complete freedom. More remakes, more games from big franchises and multiplayer stuff from ABK will get the all the funding. I’d be surprised if we even see more games like pentiment tbh.
I am disappointed with Tango getting closed down though, they proved they can make a critically acclaimed game, something Xbox sorely needs, maybe they could try something new. MS probably saw Ghostwire Tokyo and thought nah, they probably won’t deliver.
Every since Xbox came under ‘Microsoft Gaming’, it has felt like MS CFO has been on Xbox’s throat, giving them no leeway for short term losses. Every quarter needs to be green and should show double digit growth inline with other MS segments. Phil is powerless in all this, I have no doubt about it, he probably missed some goals laid out to him, and now has been forced to make amends.
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Both Evil Within Games didn’t set the market on fire, so why not branch out.
Unrelated edit: I find it hilarious when bad news strikes everyone is suddenly a captain of industry that knows what MS/Xbox should have done and then provide a bunch of awful ideas on top of throwing out the numbers and data that we have provided for us about Xbox’s business.
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Always chance of being wrong but I thought evil within 2 had decent sales/revenue.
No, they didn’t.
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Sure you’re not confusing it with hellblade?
Oh wow, yeah the second one had a very bad start.
No, I’m not. Hellblade probably did better. Selling over a million copies.
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With all due respect, how is it not relevant? It seems reasonable to suggest that if more people played the game, Tango Gameworks may still exist under Xbox.
Some people assume that Game Pass is some blast shield for games. Fact is, subscribers still have to engage with the content.
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Gamepass was not enough even though many people played it, if it was tango would still BE working, yeah everyone at MSFT told us that gamepass was sufficient for these games in fact it would help them to some degree, it didnt só the conclusion is that playing more on gamepass would do nothing if the subs arent already at 50M by MS own projections on FTC leaked docs.
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Evil Within 2 (as per SteamSpy) did around 1.5M since 2017. So maybe 3-4M across PC and console?
The Evil Within 2 was in & of itself a sort of reneging on the stuff which made the first game a good & unique survival horror whilst chasing some semi open world trends. The sad dad schtick was also clichéd to the point it made the narrative tedious.
“Where’s my daughter arghhh I’m angry & drunk arghhh! What’s happening here arghhh!” (despite the fact Sebastian had experienced all of that Mobius Stem stuff before).
I mean come on. The cool characters of the first game were gone & we got a highly westernized mess with better controls & performance… but worse everything else.
In any case it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or some wouldbe ‘captain’ giving MS pointers like a Monday morning quarterback) to figure out ‘why’ Tango Gameworks has been shut down. The results simply weren’t there.
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I’m a broken record but you can’t really blame Gamepass for lack of sales when there are examples of third party and first party games they did very well releasing exclusively on GP/Xbox/PC like High on Life (before being ported), Pal World, FH5, and Starfield on top of some other stuff I’m forgetting. And Pal World is the best selling game of the year by far lol.
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