They absolutely will feel the pinch. Even Insomniac was the subject of layoffs.
The part of the narrative I’m seeing building in some places online this morning I disagree with is essentially the one where people explain these layoffs by saying “Microsoft is a tech company, not a customer facing entertainment company”, i.e. which implies MS doesn’t know what it’s doing with its entertainment division whilst Sony does.
I’m sorry but no. That’s a stereotype born out of seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses.
Sony will execute order 66 on its biggest devs studios if & when it has to. PR or entrainment savvy has got nothing to do with it. I mention Naughty Dog because Druckmann has run them into the dirt over the past 8 years, i.e. excessive budgets (like TLOU Part 2), a revolving door hiring process which has seen a brain drain & a failed multiplayer project. The writing is on the wall.
If that’s true I wonder if Double Fine are regretting not doing Psychonauts 3 right away, I don’t know if that is a huge seller or not but hopefully the games they’re working on now are small and cheap enough to get them through, we’ll just have to see what happens in the future you never really know what games can randomly become a hit or not.
I forgot that they already ended 4 studios since 2020 and based on leaked documents, we can expect more on the horizon. It doesn’t help that the brand don’t even have an official CEO. Gaming industry is in a wild crisis.
Yes, he could have. Microsoft has literally closed studios repeatedly in the past. To the point where they had almost no first party studio apparatus. He wasn’t some incompetent babe in the woods. He got flashed a bag of cash and chose it over everything else. He saw the writing on the wall and didn’t want to be the one to make hard choices, so he sold out and let MS do it.
Yeah, it’s my main issue with everything. As a publisher, it’s awful to set out a game to fail. What were they expecting by shadowdropping a new IP? You can’t just shadow drop a new IP and expect sales. A lot of sales in video games is based off of hype. Shadow dropping mainly works for live service games because you shouldn’t expect people to spend on a single player game they don’t know much about. That is all on Microsoft imo because hifi rush should’ve had a hype cycle to build interest and anticipation.
Now, if we’re expecting sales targets, then doesn’t the whole rollout of Hi-Fi Rush contradict all of that? It’s a damn shame they didn’t at least allow them to release what they’ve been working on because I view Tango as a studio to build interest to the brand because they create games that you aren’t getting from big publishers
I can somewhat understand Arkane, but I still feel it’s unfair because like Tango they’re able to create games that you can’t find with other big publishers. As a publisher, you should’ve saw writing on the wall with Redfall to cancel production early and pivot to something they’re familiar with like Prey or Dishonoured. A verteran studio like that not getting the chance due to publisher making bad decision doesn’t sit right with me.
I think the common factor in all of this is Microsoft and mismanagement because there’s always something shaky with development. Like there’s perfect dark rumors now and I am sure other games we haven’t heard much about most likely they have issues.
I just feel we as consumers need to know what’s the important metric because right now we know it’s not about critics and fan raitngs, doubt it’s gamepass, and I also doubt it’s engagement. This leads me to believe the metrics they care about is revenue, and if so gamepass contradicts that imo
Well Bethesda’s latest and greatest isn’t so great and is years and years behind other open world games, clearly “the Bethesda magic” isn’t important anymore or Starfield just isn’t that great and failed to capture people like Skyrim did, I think it’s the latter because Starfield just isn’t that great and I started seeing the glaring issues soon after the honeymoon was over for me, not surprised either, 1000 planets with 99.9% of them empty and you can’t even get to them seamlessly flying there before having to go through some annoying menus first, I was actually surprised to see it ended up scoring over an 80 meta score in the end.
Bro I know people who bought a console for like 3 of the games announced in 2020 and Hellblade 2, and 4 years later is when he’ll finally play Hellblade 2.
I think they were initially fine with taking a loss by shadow dropping but things have changed and the normal workers are usually the first to be impacted by internal shifts in expectations.
The lack of hardware sales is impacting the growth of gamepass and if gamepass growth is slowing down, you suddenly need to rely more on sales to subsidize the sales loss you take on gamepass. Hence experimenting more with third party.
The signs have been showing for a while but it’s clear now that the exclusive model is not healthy for the business and that it’s even more magnified when you’re the platform with the smallest console base.
They should go third party asap, try to work out a deal for Game Pass on PlayStation and Nintendo, maybe one that only includes XGS and not Bethesda or ABK or third party games, I’d be surprised if these talks aren’t happening right now.
You’re probably right but honestly it’s more of a hopium of mine so I have an easier time jumping ship to PlayStation.
The evil corpo wins again
Didn’t Perfect Dark have a similar theme back in the day? About evil corporations, at least the trailer from the 2020 reveal mentions corporations, gonna be funny if Perfect Dark also is about taking down some bad corporations.
