Couldn’t the same argument be made with Hi-Fi Rush?
Both Tango and Obsidian were small teams.
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No it cannot. Let’s not be obtuse. Pentiment was cheaper, had a much smaller team, and took 3 years to make compared to five years. I don’t even know where you guys are going with this when the Hi-fi Rush devs said it was not a small game.
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Apparently they ended up having some GWT devs come on the project when they were done. This could explain why they didn’t have any pitch - if the devs were split between GWT post-launch support and finishing FHR, not many were available to work on prototypes. And then finally having HFR2 pitch that involved hiring even more people was done at worst possible moment for Bethesda.
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Direct quote from the director himself:
“It was supposed to be a small project from Tango. And people probably see it as this weird, sort-of AA title. Or people are like, “Oh, they made a nice indie game.” This ain’t no indie game. Obviously, I can’t say how much it cost, but it was not a cheap game to make.”
Obviously it’s cheaper than most of the XGS games we typically see, but it oozed high production values, throw in some music licensing costs, and it’s easy to see that it could be more expensive than what a quick glance leads one to believe.
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And don’t forget the voice acting in multiple languages.
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Matt Booty talked about smaller not cheaper.
Peter Moore was at Xbox for like 4 years. Today he would survive even less time 
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I wasn’t suggesting Moore as a candidate, I was trying to make the point that potential candidates for a Phil’s role could be in any number of industries. It doesn’t automatically follow that if Phil goes then Sarah Bond or Matt Booty get bumped up, it could be someone who works in a different industry currently unknown to us.
To be fair to Phil, his role atop Xbox, doublefine, Ninja theory, Activision, and on and on and on is an insane one. As his position has metamorphosed, I’m sure there are a lot of different things that he’s asked to oversee and do that other gaming bosses never have to think about. And really I think everyone would be mostly happy with him IF Xbox had shipped some big games that had reviewed well over the last 3 years. The problem is that there’s no good news at Xbox ever.
As for reversing decisions, I’m not sure which decisions they might be but I don’t think that’s what would happen. At this point, there’s a very real chance that Xbox will go fully third party. But they haven’t committed to it. They have committed to more hardware and I assume that if that’s expected in the next 2 years, that they’ll be a long way down that path already. They have a number of games in development.
Any change of regime at this point would be unlikely to institute big changes. Changes made today would likely be felt in 4-5 years, IMO. That’s the point at which the games that are in development NOW will be released, let alone ones started today. Some things like Gamepass being closed would be an immediate and obvious change, but I don’t see that happening before the end of the generation, and I’m also not convinced gamepass has a negative impact on Xbox finances, despite that being the prevailing wisdom.
I still think Phil’s done some good things this gen - the backward compatibility, the Series X hardware, those are both great things, there’ll be plenty of other things too.
But, they haven’t shipped games that have caught the imagination of the market, and the ones that most people are aware of, they’re aware of for the wrong reasons. And now, for buying huge parts of the industry… and then dumping it.
I maintain that shipping some good games is all they need to do. Fuck knows why they seem to find it so difficult vs other companies though.
They did.
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He did, but cheaper can also be associated with smaller titles, no? Obviously we need him to clarify what he meant, but looking at those specific titles and what went in to making them, HiFi Rush does stand out as being higher cost.
Sorry, but Forza Horizon 5 is definitely a game.
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Mainly the decisions to port certain titles to other platforms, not solely focussing growth based on console sales. Those seem to be the big ones that have riled a certain portion of the fanbase and I really don’t see anyone coming to a different conclusion that these are probably the correct things to do for Xbox at this time.
We’ll never know until years after the fact, but I think those decisions and the recent studio closures are a result of Phil Spencer doing what it takes to hold off what appears to be Nadella’s wish to make all XGS games multi-platform asap.
If Xbox’s acquisitions were done without a workable plan to make these newly acquired games part of Gamepass, then something is amiss in their strategy. I mean I actually thought COD was pretty much nailed on as the ‘killer app’ meant to finally boost GP numbers.
If MS simply wanted the IP & studios developing COD in order to make some money & don’t care about pursuing the Gamepass plan anymore (or see a future in it), then they should just quit the hardware & sub service business immediately, become a third party Activision-Blizzard-Bethesda factory & be done with it.
It’s like a Bobby Kotick clone is now running Xbox (at least if these takes & rumors are to be believed).
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I know how to fix all of this… bring back Bobby Kottick as head of Xbox!
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I will believe this when they change game pass, until then holds no water sir.
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Interesting insights. I’m biased as I’m not a huge fan of CoD, haven’t played it since the first Black Ops on the 360 and just for the campaigns, not MP. I’d be fine if they remained of Game Pass until a year or so after release, but can definitely see that causing uproar!
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Dude. Getting rid of hardware would the biggest mistake Xbox does. People have digital libraries there so think a little before talking about how thats a “great” idea.
It would not matter in the end if they so much as do that expect a lot of folks not to buy their games for the foreseeable future.
Well Cod sells no matter where is at, whether is on game pass or not i just think they should only put the old Cod games in and wait a couple of months after the lauch to then put the new game in.
Thanks I didn’t know this, I was going purely on the studio size. The music licensing did likely increase their costs significantly.
When the director John Johanas responds to the “smaller game” claim directly the way he did today I think it shows his opinion on the matter.
The situation still sucks regardless.
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