I think they would allow an EA Play version of gamepass where they can offer their old catalogue, but have to put games 6-12 months after launch. There’s no way they would allow day one Microsoft games because all parties would want the first 6 months sales revenue
And why is that?
Their multiplayer team got gutted really bad. Trust me, while it’s not guaranteed, no one and I mean no one is safe.
All it takes is one major bomb with the level of budget these games are getting.
It’s why they’re probably going to double down on TLOU/Uncharted.
Yeah. Hell if Gamepass growth continues to slow, they might have to do it to our gamepass that exists on Xbox.
You can’t rely on going viral on gamepass with titles that aren’t major blockbusters. It’s way too random and unpredictable.
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For the record, next week is Sony’s Earning Call. They released all of their big titles already, including the third party exclusive. If they still feel in danger, then you know this industry is in a dark place.
I’m active on another forum and there someone said that the world is changing. He means the new generation doesn’t care much for the games we “boomers” do care about. It certainly explains why a game like Prey wasn’t a big success or really a lot of AAA games nowadays. It’s true.
I see it with my ten and twelve year old nephews. When they are chilling at my place we have fun with cool co-op games but at home they mostly play Fortnite, Minecraft, maybe some CoD (barely) and that’s probably about it. The oldest wants to have those games looking and playing the best, so it’s Xbox and PS for him. The youngest is fine with a small Switch screen.
You’d think that we boomwortels DO buy the games we love, but apparently it’s not enough? 
Man… This won’t be a popular post here but I care very little about how Phil feels, he is also to blame for all this and he’s been running this division for a decade, 6 years of those 10 years with the full financial support of Microsoft, they kept making bad decisions which he is a big part of why this is happening, I don’t see him differently than any of the other Microsoft executives.
Ok… the multiplayer team of a studio that hasn’t released a game with multiplayer in it since when? They’re not 343i or The Coalition, their job is to make quality AAA single player games and that’s what they’re doing and will continue to do, I actually think there’s a bigger chance of Microsoft pulling the plug on The Coalition and 343i in the next 10 years over Naughty Dog disappearing, and I’d be careful if I was running those 2 studios right now, I doubt this current Microsoft will accept another failure from 343i, it won’t be just layoffs anymore, they’re not afraid of shutting down studios, I wish The Coalition good luck with Gears 6.
It may not have hit for you, but it being the most played SP game of 23 and its player-base averaging 40 hours, kinda suggests it still captured people.
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You honestly believe everyone is safe at Sony? Because I hate to tell you, but they’re not. Even Insomniac suffered a layoff after coming back from delivering what they called it a hit. There’s a reason why Media Molecule is considered the next target, even after introducing what once an icon Sackboy. They’re basically Tango of Sony in terms of creativity but not profitable.
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Yeah, its wild. I bought my nephew spiderman 2, and he barely touched it. Meanwhile, the lad is addicted to Roblox, Fornite, and Fifa. The lad also didn’t really care much for the switch games except mario kart, but he still ended up mainly using it as a fortnite machine.
That moment right there, pretty much signaled to me this new generation gaming habit is vastly different than ours. Even when I was a university 2 years ago the students didn’t really play much console games, but played mainly stuff like LoL, Valorant, Overwatch, but didn’t care much for COD compared to those games.
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I was relieved to see your second sentence follow the first here, because this consumer expectation of transparency from corporations is bizarre and seemingly widespread among nerds like us - maybe spectator sports fans too. Why would Microsoft ever feel compelled to share its genuine criteria for product success with mere customers? Like, how important do you think we are to these people? Sure, from a company’s perspective I understand the need for PR (i.e. sweet-talking customers to keep them spending) but recognize it for what it is.
Our little pasttime has somehow cultivated a completely mythical intimacy between businessman/businesswoman and customer, where each apparently cares about the feelings and intentions of the other. It serves to put a friendly, compassionate, relate-able face on the brutal, repugnant reality of corporate ruthlessness. It’s gone on too long in this industry and it should be rejected by everyone involved, employee and customer alike. Enough of the executive-presenter conferences. Enough of the shelves and fucking T-shirts.
It is also outright weird - seriously: weeeeeeeeird - to read my fellow peasant consumers referring to these executive suite employees by forename with such familiarity and, sometimes, borderline affection. How did it ever reach the point where we knew or cared about who these scumbags were? Not one of these people is a creative, not one of them deserves any credit for the wonderful games their underlings create. The hanging on their every word needs to stop.
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I think the problem is that here’s just so many games coming out these days and people only have so much time and money to give. Then you add on the doubling or more of dev time and rising costs for said devs on top of that as well as charging the same price for a game that maybe sells the same amount it used to and it’s clear how the industry is starting to buckle under it’s own weight.
And that doesn’t even factor in your point about younger generations not caring about games the same way we do. The emergence of mobile and evergreen games like Fortnite and CoD make things even more challenging. For every Baldur’s gate 3 there are probably hundreds of games that don’t “succeed”.
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While Obsidian probably isn’t at risk of a shutdown just yet, they’re still not immune to layoffs, Avowed probably won’t sell all that great either unless it turns out to be a masterpiece and surprises everyone and the game has probably costed a lot of money by now, it did get rebooted at some point so it’s probably a game that was originally targeting 2022, now a late 2024 game, this is why I’m also concerned about Ninja Theory… 6 years for Hellblade 2 isn’t great, a AA game that likely wasn’t cheap, 5-6 years is big budget AAA territory for God’s sake.
Not everyone, no, but I do think they’re safer than Xbox studios, who we don’t even know what their metrics for success are, just a year ago they were hyping how great Hi fi rush did and now they closed the studio that made it, seems like s company without a clear direction, desperate to make more money, unable to manage game studios and making their employees pay the price of their incompetence.
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To be fair I think a lot of it is about playing multiplayer / co-op games with their friends.
When I was a teenager, there wasn’t really much online gaming, so I’d play single player games like Metal Gear Solid and GTA3, then later Championship Manager (which I would play hotseat with a school friend on) and AoE2: Age of Kings which I’d play online on MSN Gaming.
When I was in uni with housemates who loved gaming, we’d forever be on Halo 3 and other games we could play together online - a few of us who stayed up late might play some single player games while chatting, but only those that really gripped us like Mass Effect, Test Drive Unlimited and Fable 2.
Now I’m older and everyone’s settling down, got kids etc. it’s rare any of us have time to play at the same time - so I’m back to single player games like I was as a teenager (without the huge amounts of time I had back then!) as I don’t like playing online with strangers.
If I’d been able to play games online with my schoolmates when I was a kid, I’d definitely have played that way more than anything else - in the same way when friends were round back then we’d be playing local multiplayer.
Not even the best game stories (and Mass Effect is seriously one of the best) or experiences can compete with the memories you can make with friends on multiplayer - I’ve many fond memories of being the one who died just when we were about to finish a Halo 3 level with the “if you die you restart” skull on, of my housemate driving us off a cliff with the flag in a Warthog, and our Mongoose races on Sandtrap thanks to Forge.
Give them a few years, when friends get busy with life and they’re able to stay up late playing games, and you may find them tapping back into single player games 
But yes the online gaming revolution likely has seriously upended one of the biggest audiences for new games - younger people - as evidenced by CoD and Fortnite’s continuing popularity
That correct. Nintendo cultivated their reverence over 100 years and…what 50 years of it in videogames…and yet some rando dev from China can make Genshin Impact and its immediately a bigger game then Breath of the Wild. Better graphics too.
Closing Tango isnt a reflection on success. They shut them down because they’re the most expendible, along with a mobile dev, a dev who hasnt made anything yet and Arkanes less successful sister studio.
If Naughty Dog shuts down it will be because TloU 2 took longer to hit 10m then Uncharted 4 did on way more Playstations and cost way more to make and they’ve misfired twice on multiplayer.
Probably because I saw the episode just recently, but the atmosphere for gaming industry for us would be that soundtrack from Black Hawk Dawn.
This news obviously sucks, but some you keep jumping to conclusions regarding other studios being shut down. The reality is we don’t know exactly why these moves were made. We can all point to sales performance as the reason, but it might be something beyond that. It might also be a one time thing as MS attempts to get costs down to a level they deem as more manageable. The reality is we don’t know and we don’t know if they’ll be doing more of this in the future.
I know that FUD is the lifeforce of this forum and I’m not blaming anyone for freaking out or feeling uncertain about the future of Xbox after this news, but just know that they still have over 20 1st party games in development and a lot of those that we’ve been painstakingly waiting for are about to start dropping starting this month.
We’ll obviously see how things go going forward, but I’m looking up and the sky doesn’t seem to be falling just yet to me. 
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