The dev clearly said it was not a small project and it took nearly five years to make. Let’s not twist his words because it doesn’t tie in your narrative.
Phil dyes his hair??
The narrative that the director of the game is stunned at the quote that Xbox needs more small games with prestige when his studio gets axed?
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you know i’m talking about this blatantly false statement:…"So a dev talked up their project in an interview to make it seem more significant than the zero marketing, shadowdropped release made it seem to be. That doesn’t mean their project wasn’t small. "
The dude just lost his job, of course he is going to react.
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Yeah, Hi Fi Rush was probably a big game. That’s why MS launched the game at 30$. Right after they had raised the prices of their games to 70$, and hey, they made this huge game cheaper than Grounded, too! But nah, not a small game.
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It wasn’t a big game, it was mid tier by the end of development. It started small and grew.
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The dev who just lost his job is clearly lying (s)
It is weird though, Matt Botty has had a long tenure, surely people are looking at him sideways.
Maybe they had previews with select audiences and their early impressions was that it felt AA and MS priced the game accordingly. Considering the low sales, I’m guessing at full price it would have done even worse. Unfortunately, while it’s a cool game and I’ve played through the whole thing at release, in the industry at large, due to the cartoony graphics, it will be seen as low budget by the majority of the gaming populace unfortunately, that’s just reality.
As for what Matt Booty said to be on topic, even a game like grounded, made by a team a fraction the size of HFR, has managed to get several times more players and sell a lot more copies. This is the kind of small game I think he alludes to, and while they like awards, they most likely prefer cash, as cash keeps studios alive and running, not awards.
People tend to call anything without “bleeding edge” photorealistic graphics a “small game” these days. Anyone who played HFR could see the quality and polish of a AAA game and it’s cell shading is up there with the likes of Guilty Gear Strive!
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Maybe, but I think that would be quite a reach to make that assumption. That’s besides the fact that if Hi Fi Rush was indeed more expensive than assumed, than it is simply not financially responsible to launch such a game with zero marketing or buildup at a price where the game would need to move a insurmountably considerable amount of units to break even. Besides, Psychonauts 2 is IMO even more childishly cartoony in dialogue and look than HFR but was still 60$.
As for the Matt Booty quote, we can only go with what he said, and not add things that he did not say. As of now he said :‘’ We Need Smaller Games That Give Us Prestige and Awards’'. He did not say ‘‘small’’, he said ‘‘small*er*’’, and he did not mention players or any other metrics besides ‘‘prestige and awards’’.
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There’s a lot going on with this news & a lot of rumors flying around, i.e. some of which really are problematic (stuff like a GPU prices hike & no COD day one on the service). If that happens then it’s a strategy course-correction which doesn’t exactly benefit the consumer who bought into Xbox based on the previously stated strategy & marketing of Gamepass day one first party titles.
But, I reiterate the fact there’s a hell of a lot of performative console warring going on around the internet whereby this is all getting weaponized by people who live inside the ‘war bubble’. I mean I almost spat my coffee out when I read a comment on other era inquiring as to whether it’s legally possible for Sony to ‘rebirth’ Tango now… i.e. like they’re philanthropists or something!
It all reeks of “my team is noble & good, yours is evil & bad”.
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It really is a cess pool and is completley unmoderated. No wonder there are barely any Xbox fans left over there.
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Well, Pentiment was 2022 and Palworld was a real lightning in a bottle situation, it’d be a pretty difficult plan to implement “just make the game return thousands of times more than it cost to make, if you can make it reach millions of players with largely zero budget for marketing like they did, then we’d consider that a bit of a success.”
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You think after all the layoffs and studio closures to come at the end of it all Phil leaves. Better to have him take the heat and start fresh with someone new
When people make posts like this do they realize whoever replaces him will follow the same strategy he’s enacting? The need to see someone “punished” is so weird. It doesn’t matter if he’s fired or not, those studios, jobs, etc. are never coming back.
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Yes, I agree, we’re in peak “Xbox are bad guys” territory to some degree, but analysing what’s said it’s hard to not have overwhelming sympathy for the studios that have closed and agree. Let alone if you weren’t all that fond of Xbox in the first place.
Yes, Redfall was terrible, Yes, Hifi Rush might not have been the biggest selling game (no idea - I thought it did quite well though?)
But the fact remains that Microsoft bought them and closed them down relatively quickly, and that the public perception is that the money they’ll save is tiny in the context of the corporation.
Putting aside the profit and loss for departments, and that Xbox/Microsoft Gaming will have their own budget to work with, etc. Putting that to one side, the story is that Microsoft bought something that people generally had a favorable idea of, and then closed it.
Essentially because they bought Starfield, Fallout and Doom and accidentally got some other bits too.
So, when you put it like that, you can see why it might anger people.
Then it comes out that Matt Booty said the closures were necessary because the management are finding it difficult to cope with so many studios. Typically the parts of a company that people don’t love are the managers, the bean counters, etc. vs the creatives that people do love, the ones who directly make the product people like, and it starts looking worse. I’d expect this story to keep its momentum into next week, for sure. It’ll definitely be being talked about when Xbox hold their games showcase.
There will be pieces that could range from “where did it go wrong” but most will probably describe Microsoft’s rotten corporate structure and describe the failings that have persisted this generation. They’ll talk about sales figures, Redfall, Halo Infinite, Perfect Dark’s development hell, Starfield being a disappointment, studio mismanagement Etc. etc. Some will talk about the Xbox One launch AGAIN.
Essentially, a spike in bad news activity, once again. This time the bad news is bigger. The problem is that it comes after years of bad news.
Microsoft have failed to control their own narrative, and unfortunately it all comes back to one thing - not enough good games. That’s what’s made their rivals successful and to some degree bulletproof. Did you see Jim Ryan posing for a photo with PlayStation’s London Studio? The one he closed 6 days after the photo was taken - he must have known they were being closed at that time. That made waves. But it’s largely forgotten now. Because people have other things to talk about.
With Xbox, each news story seems to be a bad one and when it gets talked about, people get on a roll and remember all the other bad news stories. And they’ve still got more studios than anyone else and they’ve still not released a game in ages (not on Xbox anyway).
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Exactly the point I was trying to make, very few AAA new IP seems to break through, it’s mostly AA and indies that go viral. LIke Among us and Lethal company.
Horizon zero dawn and GoT might be the last big ones, and Sony seems to be making only sequels mostly so far.
It’s a clear trend in the industry.
This is also the side effect of buying whole publishers, you don’t get to pick and choose what to buy, and are left with things you could do without. That’s why I really preferred the older strategy of buying studios but the fact remains that it’s the publishers that own most of the biggest IPs like CoD and Elder Scrolls.
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That’s the problem with the whole industry now the 6th gen was the sweet spot for
1, people still blown away by the graphical improvement 2.cost & time it took to develop games 3.allowed for risks on new games to be taken without putting studio at risk.
Now the genie is out of the bottle, everyone is conditioned to bigger games it’ll be seen as a backward step going smaller,
What they really need to be doing is finding ways to make development more efficient, faster and much cheaper whether that’s with tools or AI they need to bring costs down until then it’ll be people that lose jobs
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These are all pertinent points.
Personally speaking I’ve had a myriad issues with Xbox for years, i.e. I simply don’t shout about these problems because at the end of the day nothing I say will make a difference. The first ‘problem’ for me is actually quite controversial IMO, which is the leeway MS gives its development teams + creative heads & the company’s hands off approach. Spencer has been quite categorical in this regard & says it’s essential.
Well… I think it’s the wrong approach. Why? Because Xbox doesn’t exist in a vacuum, i.e. it has a userbase which buys into the product with the expectation of certain experiences. Looking back over the past 5 years, there’s been a lack of first party experiences in the mould of what made Xbox so popular to begin with - namely in terms of shooters.
I’ll get scorned for this because there’s quite a few people here who love the more ‘experimental’ titles which go for something different (Pentiment, Hellblade, Hi-Fi) but if I was head of Xbox I’d have a chalkboard in the head office with the most popular genres at the top of the list & my dev teams assigned to fulfilling mass market demands.
I’d treat Halo the way Activision treated COD, i.e. several different studios assigned to making quasi yearly releases - especially with a branching narrative to keep people hooked. I’d make Xbox the Halo box for the sake of brand survival. Then the rest (& smaller titles) could come naturally & fill the rest of the library.
For me Xbox was at its absolute peak in 2010 when Reach released. We’d had Halo 3, Halo ODST & then Reach all released within a few years & I couldn’t get enough of it - in a similar way Sony has just had 3 Spiderman titles in quick succession as well, i.e. all popular & all 3 generating huge sales numbers.
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