I post on a few forums, here I got banned recently for “rage baiting” for posting what I thought about the 3rd party plans and execution and at roughly the same time on another forum got accused of being an “Xbox Shill” for being too positive about Xbox. So, I’m not sure how the following will land.
I think that’s a shame and if I’m honest, a bit rash. I think it’s ok to be disappointed with Xbox at the moment. I think that closing Tango seems like a worse and worse decision the more time goes by. There’s far less sympathy for Arkane Austin (mainly because their most recent game sucked, unfortunately), but really the closures are the same thing - either studio could turn out a top quality title that would capture the hearts and minds of gamers. They’re the same thing as when Sony closes a studio, and if I’m honest, I think Jim Ryan posing for a photo with staff at a party PlayStation’s London Studio threw for him 6 days before he fired everyone, and at a time when he definitely knew that was the plan, is shockingly bad form. As bad as these closures on a human level. But London Studio didn’t have a game that people liked a lot to contextualize that closure, and Sony had Stellar Blade and Helldivers for PlayStation fans to talk about. So it passed with a lot less scrutiny.
As I said earlier in this thread, Microsoft’s consistent problem is a lack of games. Despite hundreds of studios, their release schedule seems sparse and so many titles seem to be in development hell or at least heavily delayed (Perfect Dark) or announced seemingly never to be heard from again (Contraband, Everwild). …Who knows, perhaps at this upcoming showcase?
But, if you had faith last week that Xbox were going to get it together then not much has changed really. They still have plenty of teams, all staffed by enthusiastic, passionate professionals with lots of things in development.
I can of course respect not wanting to reward a company who’s taken actions you disprove of, and if you want to take a stand I applaud you for it. But if you’re going to buy into another eco system, you might find the same things are happening, because it’s something that happens with giant corporations. And most people in gaming now are at least linked to giant corporations, if not part of one. So at some point, you might want to weigh up if you’re going to jump ship if the platform holder you buy into next will do the same and if you’ll feel compelled to move on then too.
I’m not saying it’s ok because someone else is doing it as well, but I am saying that to some degree it’s worth weighing up what’s best for you, even if you don’t like some things about the choice you land on.
Are you saying that people feel compelled to voice outrage now because they had previously said HFR was GOTY material?
Related: I can’t quite parse my thoughts yet, but there’s some kind of irony about anti-Xbox people shitting on Xbox games and studios, then sharing their “shock and dismay” when the studio is closed because it didn’t make enough money.
Yep. There’s a huge element of that. It goes further as well, i.e. the perception & discourse surrounding the economics of gaming & the decisions made by corporate have become heavily influenced by ‘politicized’ arguments. It means gaming companies are now subject to abuse based on the same ‘moral’ standards as political leaders & parties. I mean reading the news you’d think Xbox is the new Trump because they closed down a game studio. Or worse. I’m seeing Spencer get labelled all manner of stuff.
I’d like to say some of it is genuine (& respect goes to those who really do walk the walk in terms of their anti capitalism) but seriously, I wasn’t born yesterday. Places like other era & youtube have flared up with performative outrage from bandwagon jumpers who couldn’t give an actual damn about the rights & wrongs of layoffs & simply take the opportunity to dump on Xbox in the ongoing circlejerking.
Who remembers London Studio or Japan Studio? No one. It’s all very convenient.
Unreal how we went from “boy, Xbox is looking super promising this gen.” when they started acquiring studios to now people actually strongly considering quit being a Xbox gamer and move to PC. I remember the excitement so well when the Zenimax news appeared.
Wtf man. I’m staying till the end and there is zero sense in getting rid of a console I have tons and tons of unfinished and unplayed games on. And call me naive, but I still hope things will pick up. They didn’t just shell out ridiculous amounts of money to buy ABK and now be like…nah, it’s over. What will happen to the core studios remains to be seen though. Hopefully it isn’t as dire as some clearly think.
I wish PC was not the way it is, because then I’d definitely make that my main.
I do not think that moving on PC solve the problem of studio closures.
Clsoing RoundHouse (which is fact is consolidated into Bethesda) is not a surprise. They were always an unknown quantity and they already started to be a support studio. Having a name or not is not deal beaker to me.
Alpha Dogs seems a csualty of the buyout of King. MS is probably thinking all its mobile efforts should be managed by King and the cost of having a separate small studio is not worth it to them.
Austin Arkhane has been on death menace for many years since Prey, Redfall was a last chance to exist and it fails. Also a large part of the studio already left if reports are correct. Redfall was a death kiss to them. I regret they did not end up the final update to the game as promised, but probably nobody really cared in the gaming community, the game is probably dead by now.
The only real problem is Tango. There is no real excuse to the closure of this interesting studio. They brought revered games and japanese touch to Xbox. My concern is that it announced a severe turn to GAAS games at MS (also add the instant simultaneous success of Sea of Thieves on ps5 …)
I think people at Tango will find new host and start over, Mikami already left, so we do not really know the state of affair there.
You don’t need to get rid of your console. I still play my games and my Xbox consoles and continue to work on my backlog but I buy stuff on other platforms.
Maybe with Proton and Steam jumping off the Windows train is a real possibility in the future.
To be honest I don’t want to spend more money just to play the same games (roughly the same games…hopefully) plus I don’t care about higher graphical fidelity and frames so changing platforms right now to PC is a no go plus I want to buy the Switch 2 next year. That being said going forward I am definitely going all in on PC gaming next gen, I won’t be happy going to PC as I’ve tried it in the past and I wasn’t the biggest fan (I completely understand Mort) but I am done with the MS and Sony shenanigans…not that PC gaming won’t be affected by the BS that MS and Sony does (and will do) but at least I won’t give them my money/support their ecosystems.
Also from now on I will minimize my digital purchases on Xbox even more and I’ll try to buy as much as I can physical copies of 3rd party games which won’t be easy since the retail presence of Xbox here is abysmal right now (way worse than the Xbox One era). It’s gonna be a headache-second half of a generation but it is what it is.
There’s no escaping the ‘beast’ that is capitalism, i.e. not if people want to continue playing video games. There’s no ‘good guys’ in this industry if we approach it from a social justice moralist angle.
Going PC means buying AMD or Nvidia cards, Sony is Sony (they’ll nickel-and-dime you with their hardware, services & games until your eyes bleed & your wallet cries), Nintendo is Nintendo (their stuff is expensive for what it is as well, i.e. with prices never coming down for older games) & every major publisher out there is starting to get more & more creative with ways to monetize you (like EA talking about in-game commercials or Ubisoft wanting everything to be subscription based).
Better the devil you know, i.e. I’ll always have a Microsoft account because I’ll always be using Windows. Xbox is simply an extension of that so I don’t overthink the ‘problem’.
This is not comparable to London Studio or Japan studio.
Bethesda is a beloved publishers that was acquired on high promises and Microsoft and Xbox are already butchering them.
Let’s not forget what they said :
Like us, Bethesda are passionate believers in building a diverse array of creative experiences, in exploring new game franchises, and in telling stories in bold ways. All of their great work will of course continue and grow and we look forward to empowering them with the resources and support of Microsoft to scale their creative visions to more players in new ways for you.
Our goal is to give these teams the best foundation for doing their greatest work and to learn from them as we continue to build Xbox into an inclusive platform for all players.
As we shared previously, it’s vitally important that Bethesda continues making games the way it always has. We look forward to empowering Bethesda’s creative teams to reach even more players around the world, helping make future Bethesda titles the biggest and most popular games in their history.
We would also like to honor the life and memory of my close friend Robert A. Altman, founder of ZeniMax Media. Robert believed deeply in the power of gaming and we are privileged to be able to continue his work by joining forces with the teams he built and led for many years. I will miss the opportunity to work directly with him on the future of our combined teams but I know that his spirit will live on in the shared work we do and motivate us to make this partnership all he envisioned.
That was complete bullshit. “vitally important”… Yeah.
It feels like some people are annoyed those closures are taking dramatic proportions like never before and it’s bizarre.
I’m definitely not going to, but in the scenario that Xbox does go away, which I really hope not, I’m gonna have to make PS my main, I rather not. I want Xbox to thrive. Really hope things will pick up, they have to, come on.
As I said, the first 3 studios closures could be defended. Tango closure is a self-beating Xbox move. It will poison everything they will do this year (HellBlade launch, Xbox summer event, etc)
Yes, that’s the thing that sucks. Lotta folks worried now for the other studios, I do get it. Hopefully Xbox proves us wrong. This should be a time to look forward to their first game this year, being Hellblade 2 but here we are.
Game Pass really needs to include third-party games still to charge that much - while the ABK, Bethesda and XGS back catalogues and new games are impressive, Ubisoft+ is an outlier in how much it charges (despite having all the DLC) and to charge more than them they would need to sort out their release cadence which while there’s loads of games in development I’m still not seeing signs it’s definitely sorted (as I thought it would have been by now but we’ve just had 6 months with none).
I understand it’ll have to lose third-party stuff to appear on other consoles, and even CoD I think could stay on it as I suspect Sony makes more from it via MTX than actual sales - but they couldn’t go too silly on price.
I do think it’ll stay around for PC and Xbox (as they’d still make hardware even if it was niche like Surface) as-is - third party games have to be cheaper to put on it than PS Plus given the lower potential user base, and it justifies staying subscribed in the lull between first-party games.
One thing they may stop doing (I hope, as if you’re looking forward to both games it becomes a pain as one has to take a backseat) is releasing their biggest games of the year within a month of each other coming up to the holiday season - FH5 and Halo Infinite, Starfield and Forza Motorsport - as surely that just encourages someone to buy a 3 month GP card and play both then leave it?
My price prediction may sounds exaggerated but I ve considered the inclusion of giants games like Call Of Duty and that this would happen in some years time, so the price would go up naturally.
Regarding your last point, I know this may sound crazy, but I think they ideally should have a cadence of one “first party” game a month (not all ought to be superbig mind you) to keep folks engaged and subscribed. At the moment, we couldnt be further from that though.
I told last year that the shift to Microsoft Gaming was not innocent, they will go third party or mostly 3rd party (in terms of revenue, their big hitters will not be exclusive), and at the end, completely 3rd party. It does not excuse Tango closure.
Bethesda wasn’t exactly the best run publisher before MS purchased them. The rest (the quotes post merger) are just PR as well.
I’m not excusing this, I’m simply understanding it. There’s a difference. The moment MS actually starts punishing consumers with prohibitive price increases or subtracted value in GPU or canning the next hardware is the moment I change my tune.
That hasn’t happened yet. Bottom line the consumer really is king i.e. no matter how much people might disagree with the business practices behind the scenes, the most vital part is how the company treats its paying customers. So far (& quite ironically despite the discourse) it’s not so bad this gen.
