The Big ol' Xbox 3rd Party Releases Discussion Thread (HiFi, SoT, Pentiment, Grounded) (Part 2)

That’s why you set a baseline. MS was able to run Xbox 360 on Xbox One, a Power Pc based architecture on a crappy x86 processor. With how powerful hardware has gotten over time I have no doubt they can make it work. I’d say licensing is probably the hardest part but I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

The only worry would be to have it work in portable format. But then they were able to change older games te rendre at 4K native resolution, maybe they could make them run natively at lower res on portable hardware or dynamically adjust, who knows!

Sure do. We already knew the next Xbox would be fully BC anyway, now we’re just interested to see if it would be compatible with 40+ years of PC games. Rumors are true, it will be to quite an extent. I could play Soul Reaver again.

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Fair, but we had an xbox exec in Greenberg saying HiFi Rush hit metrics they’re aiming for, but it’s clear that was a lie. So who really knows tbh

It probably did well for shadowdropped new IP that was somewhat critically acclaimed. But nowhere near good enough for trying to pitch even bigger sequel that could take even longer in development and you needed even more people for.

True, but it feels shadow dropping that game was setting it up to fail and not hit those metrics to get a bigger sequel. A game needs a hype cycle to improve their chance of success

Also remember that the performance of Tango/Arkane was not the reason they were closed. If you believe them, and I can understand why someone wouldn’t.

I am sure great performance would have saved them, but supposedly performance was not the driving factor.

None of their games made any profit. Redfall failed, Hi-Fi Rush although reviews high but failed sales wise. Dishonored and Prey failed sales and money wise. The Evil within and Ghostwire also failed sales and money wise. Making no money while burning money has to be a part of the reason they were closed down.

This is why i believe the decision are being made by the Tops at Microsoft and not Phil Spencer.

From now on if the games are not making enough money? Watch out cause they not gone to keep a studio around just burning away money while making zero profit in return.

They also said that Tango being shut down was not performance based. It was timing, executive burnout, and location based.

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Exactly. Just because Booty said something doesn’t make it true. Or accurate. Or that they’re not hiding something.

And guess what? They did this to themselves. Everything they say is going to sound like a scrambled egg between our ears.

I’ve been ignoring this thread for the most part, but honestly if anything it seems like Xbox execs have been too open, and then things have changed & they keep being held to what they previously said. I know a pretty fair number of C-Suite & just below C-Suite level people, and for the most part they’re not anywhere near as open publicly as what we see from Xbox. Sure they’ll say stuff in private but they won’t try to be as open about what they’re thinking. If people keep on the way this thread has been going, I think the big change is that they’ll stop trying to share insights into their plans & why they do things - it just keeps getting held against them in a way that other, less open (Sony / Nintendo, pick other industry) execs don’t have to deal with anywhere near as often.

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I got the distinct impression with Matt Booty’s talk about management being spread too thin that Tango being geographically so distant and in a difficult timezone was a significant contribution to the decision.

I think there’s a good chance that if DoubleFine was based in Japan and Tango in the USA, then we’d be more likely to be seeing Hifi Rush 2.

Wonder how Sony make it work?

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Legit question I don’t know the answer to, does Sony have any studio that’s several hour (time zones)s from anything else they own?

First part to making it work is not having to make cuts in the first place lol. Once you have to make cuts you start looking at the pros and cons of each studio and weigh them against each other.

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It’s not that it can’t work, Matt Booty basically said that studios needed to be cut so they could be managed by… Management who felt they had too many studios to look after. I think that Tango were unlucky in that the management were thousands of miles away in a different time zone and they weren’t already mid way through developing a title when the decision to reduce the number of studios was made.

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Yeah, they have studios in the UK, Europe, USA Japan.

Not to mention being a Japanese company. I would imagine the distance from Japan to the US is more or less the same as the distance from the US to Japan. Probably same time zone issues as well…

I’m sure Bethesda managed to fire a bunch of the people who were communicating with Tango during that initial 1900-person layoff back in January.

That’s not what I mean. I mean do they have anything that’s isolated like Tango was, no other subsidiaries or stuff nearby? Playstation /Sony have corporate offices in Europe, the US and Japan as well as having studios there, right?

That just makes it worse.

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