very sad to see them both leave.
Personally i would like Xbox to do less big budget experiments and be faster and leaner in their execution on new studios and projects. There is no good reason a rather standard game like Perfect Dark needed this much time and effort. And when you fail (and you will, its a creative industry after all) fail much faster.
They should honestly go back to their old franchises instead of being stubborn and absolutely needing to do new stuff.
Theyâve failed miserably with Everwild even though it did look awesome Iâll give them that.
Now maybe itâs time for a Kameo sequel! Or maybe a sequel to Conker which I think could prove successful if done right, or maybe even the long awaited Banjo-Kazooie sequel. That thing would make a killing on Switch 2 and probably put Rare back on the map again! Even Kameo would do great there considering it started as a GameCube title so itâd be full circle. And Conker having roots on N64 could be released alongside Conkerâs Bad Fur Day on Virtual Console on Switch.
Gotta play it safe to get in Satyaâs good graces and live to fight another day! Also maybe a quick and dirty Sea of Thieves port on Switch 2 for that extra income!
as someone who has been fired from multiple jobs in my own life through the years it always sucks ass to hear of people losing their jobs, lives being upended etc (im personally not going to comment on whether you can just âmove people to other studios/gamesâ cause i dont know how easy or hard that is - i will say that any sort of situation whether now or in the future where we are getting rid of people just so they can use AI to save money is absolute trash though)
That being said, i dont think its fair to give studios so many years and money when theyâve already been around for multiple years and all they have is a fake vertical slice of a game or whatever. So many popular IP games with devs with the best intentions have worked on games where for whatever reason it just doesnât work out, and sometimes you just gotta let it go
(as an aside, i gotta laugh at all the âthis happened cause of gamepass and gamers being cheap, gamepass devalues gamesâ blah blah stuff i keep seeing on other sites, social media etc. How is that any different from all the people who go âwill get the game when its on a cheap Steam sale for $5 and later on down the line when it has been patched?â. I mean i guess i could not devalue you your gameâŚby not buying it cause im fucking poor, lol. I mean theres only so much of my money and time /attention i can give games nowadays and i either buy/play your game, or i dont.
Some people have been âpoor shamingâ folks who play video games for years and years now in order to tacitly put pressure on players to support the hobby and industry by splurging $70 (now $80) on games. Repeatedly. I believe the guy in charge over at Sony Bend went on a rant a few years ago claiming itâs the playersâ fault Days Gone didnât get a sequel because they didnât support the game day one.
Those sorts of comments are beyond the pale. Forget the talk of âvalueâ in games ( Shuhei Yoshida made comments about dollar per minute of gameplay ratio). Thatâs absolute nonsense. What matters is the level of fun and engagement you get out of a product. I can tell you this much: this industry has been so samey with everything for so long (game design, AI in terms of actual NPCâs and enemies in games, character movement, immersion in terms of living breathing worlds with physics etc.) that Iâve been playing the same game with different coats of paint since the 360 generation. To varying degrees. But itâs all so similar that I can pretty much pick anything up and play it with my eyes closed, with the only head scratcher often being the levelling up system or skill tree (which is usually by and large totally convoluted, like the car upgrade menus in Codemastersâ f1 series).
Thereâs a thread on a certain other forum titled âcancel your gamepassâ.
Yes, cancel that affordable gaming subscription folks and get with the times. Show those evil corporations whoâs boss by throwing $80 at Sony or Nintendo instead.
My favourite part is all the people showing support for this who have never, and would never, use GamePass to begin with.
Of course, Playstation fans coming in to concern troll over Xbox/MS is a tale as old as time, but this time it feels targeted in a way Iâve never seen; 10+ threads about the same subject when any other topic is allowed 1 and 1 only. A still-pinned hitpiece by BDS who have since come out against every other player in the industry but the thread remains open exclusively to bash Microsoft. The same tired users with the same tired tirades over and over again creating an atmosphere where Xbox fans are uncomfortable to be fans of Xbox.
Layoffs arenât good. Studio closures arenât good. Games cancelled arenât good. The Xbox Series X is amazing but these people never supported it, then when inevitably the whole thing has to be scaled back they cry foul.
So, theyâve come out against Sony/Playstation and Nintendo?
I rarely visit that place, but it is funny to come back and see the same terminally online power users trolling in every âneutralâ thread. The mods in that place are beyond useless.
As i said earlier cannot excuse Microsoft for any of this but so many especially on that forum would be frothing at the mouth to use this as an excuse to really shit on Xbox. Again Microsoft have given them this opportunity so they have no one to blame but themselves but yeah, i can imagine they can go full unmask now and probably come out with threads like âhow can we get Xbox out of the industryâ. I mean whatâs next, telling people to sell their Xbox and then shaming them when they donât? All the while forgetting that in a few months Sony will no doubt come out with more layoffs and sadly as will many many other companies.
Iâm not sure whatâs substantively different between any publisher layoffs, other than scale. They all suck, theyâre all product of value extraction, and gaming is more fun, expansive, fucked and varied than any one publisher/platformâs success and failures.
Thereâs a terrible shitty melange of Metacritic worship (except where the next things supersede), platform worship, company worship et al. Itâs all shit. Itâs all dumb. Then you have ruthless business, built on awful anti-human principles.
What a wonderful world we celebrate/hate.
I believe thereâs three conversations taking place right now. Thereâs one conversation which correctly lays the blame on Xboxâs mismanagement. Itâs true. They should never have reached this moment with proper forward thinking plans - which is ironic considering how data driven MS as a corporation is but itâs not the first time they misread the room, i.e. Xbox Oneâs TV TV TV also derived from misinterpreting the number of people using their 360 as a Netflix box and extrapolating that data into a selling point for the Xbox One that simply didnât resonate. In this instance it stands to reason that adding thousands of more developers onto the books via acquisitions with a userbase of 30 million or so Xbox owners and gamepass subscribers was probably the equivalent of fitting a square peg in a round hole. Something had to give. So it resulted in exclusivity being tossed out the window and downsizing the workforce. All very predictable outcomes.
The second conversation ties into the first, i.e. Xbox fans with not enough self-awareness. Weâve been watching our console tank in the sales charts and Xbox games suffer bomb after bomb on this system for years now, i.e. whilst attempting to deny reality. Avowed, Doom The Dark Ages, Forza Motorsport, South of Midnight, Hi-Fi Rush to name a few. All suffered on steam and in sales. Yes, people claimed âgamepassâ exists so numbers didnât matter but that doesnât stop other titles from being a hit in sales (like Oblivion Remastered). But thereâs also the very real fact this isnât an exclusively Xbox problem either. Big games are suffering. Ubisoft, EA, Embracer etc. all of these mega publishers have serious, serious problems. Fans cry when devs get laid off and studios shuttered but the numbers donât lie, i.e. games are tanking, hard. Take Dead Space Remake for example: lots of praise, people enjoyed⌠and the franchise is dead. Will we ever get another Mass Effect from Bioware? Itâs anyoneâs guess. The list is endless. The market for this level of investment and number of releases just doesnât exist anymore.
The third conversation is Sony Ponies doing what they enjoy the most: hysterical rage baiting and sh*tting on Xbox whilst pretending to have the moral high ground. Theyâre a lost cause and a noisy vocal minority. Just ignore them.
A very sad day. The more I learn about its impact on society, the less I like this brand of American capitalism and its hire and fire mentality. You couldnât layoff people here in Germany with a memo that âweâre doing better than everâ, youâd have to find other ways and then there would be worker unions to negotiate for you, and much longer dismissal protection.
Regarding the games cancelled, I wonder how Matt Booty mismanaged Everwild and Perfect Dark. Both games were under his supervision and I question what milestones were set and hit there for those games to be cancelled now and not in, say, 2022. Both were among my favorite announced Xbox first-party games besides Fable, too.
Overall I think ABK was acquired on the wrong premise back in the Covid bubble when everyone was gaming and investors expected infinite continued growth. That on top of the good but not great enough exclusive games like Halo Infinite and Starfield really put Xbox under too much pressure, and it doesnât feel like a sustainable business right now. I wish ABK hadnât happened.
Microsoftâs plans for hardware still sound interesting and Game Pass continues to be great, but their overall strategy, business culture and studio management are something I really have come to dislike. Letâs see where this all leads usâŚ
The âGamepass will allow studios to go for more creative ideas since games donât need that much when they appear thereâ was some copium that even i said and thought
The new reality since last year already is that either your studio makes profits or you are in serious danger, and the problem is that thereâs been absolute zero management of these studios, itâs cool that Compulsion could create the game they wanted, but South of Midnight was in troubles since the first gameplay video. Itâs a 90 employees studio, this was their first game in almost a decade and Steamdb marks itâs sales at 60k copies, letâs say it did 100k counting Xbox, so around 3M dollars in revenue versus the costs of maintaining all these developers for years⌠and their next game is several years away, so whatâs going to happen now?
The idea that Gamepass is to blame for what happened yesterday, or with Arkane, or 343i is also ridiculous, would Halo Infinite, or Redfall, or Forza Motorsport, or Hellblade 2, South of Midnight, etc have sold much better without GP? yeah sure.
But how did a studio with over 200 employees, with over 7 years of development like Turn10 didnât manage to release a full, polished product with FM, and instead has a game thatâs sitting at under 50% positive ratio on Steam?, what happened with Halo Infinite and how was the 2020 E3 trailer greenlighted?
Why did Avowed go from a massively hyped game that was going to be a darker but smaller Elder Scrolls more focused on itâs role mechanics end up being a colourful stylish action-rpg game that lost almost all itâs hype before release? Why is MS treating Outer Worlds 2 as if it was CoD or GTA with itâs price (just like Doom) are they the only who donât see that itâs gonna flop just like IDâs game?
So many questions and the problem is that the future doesnât look better for many studios, specially the ones under the XGS section, next step is Double Fineâs game and i hope it does great but it looked extremely niche too.
Shareholder value exists in Germany too. I was at a company here where one year the financials were a bit less than the usual 30% profit margin so management assumed (!) shareholders would be upset and to keep them happy laid a bunch of people off.
Without ABK (CoD, Candy Crush) Xbox would not hit their profit goals.
I honestly think it would be worse for Xbox if ABK didnât happen. People only assume it because:
You look at other companies and they still fall without anything to owe in return. The closest I can think of is Embracer but thatâs because they basically used âloanâ money to buy studios, only to never get that actual money.
Speaking of colors, we went from the muddy brown yellowish color palette in the PS360 generation to explosive purple/pink/red/blue/bright hues in the current gen - symbolized namely in RPGâs like Avowed and Dragon Age Veilguard - with exceptions being Hellblade 2 and Starfield (desaturated).
I canât speak for others but it does matter to me. For example I cannot play The Outer Worlds in a dark room with HDR activated. At all. My eyes hurt due to the garishness. Even that doomed Perfect Dark âgameplayâ slice from last year had⌠guess what? A purple hue on the HUD.
Not sure I understand you here. Avowed was a great game, I donât remember the hype diminishing and people knew about the changes a long time before release actually.
And while I donât agree with the price hike in general, I donât think Outer Worlds 2 is going to be on the same level as the first one as you can tell the gameâs scope is several times that of the original. I still think it should have been 70$ but weâve had Nintendo just price hike everything on their console without any justification (being Nintendo isnât one) and I do believe we will see a similar move from Sony in the near future. They probably see all the same data and have similar costs and unfortunately have to adjust for the financials to make sense.
Itâs not copium per se. If a game gets 20 million players thanks to Gamepass itâll definitely be a success. It depends on scope, like a small indie title reaching 1 million players is awesome, but a triple A costing 200 million reaching 2 million on Gamepass isnât a success. Just like Netflix shuts down shows after 1 or 2 seasons when they donât get enough views, itâs really a case by case basis.
It depends on engagement, not just âplayersâ. Iâd like to know how player totals are counted. Letâs say a game gets 20 million people installing it and booting it up via gamepass, out of which only a few million actually play for more than half an hour. Is that a success? Itâs questionable.
And the proof is sometimes in the pudding. Halo Infinite was touted as a big hit but its studio was gutted and the franchise is in a difficult place now.
Mods are sleeping on this âother forumâ. I saw some incendiary reactions, some people commenting non-stop to see how far they can go, even on the dedicated Xbox thread.
They are lashing out, trying to make this the story of the year.
I bumped into a thumbnail on YouTube about no direction, no plan. Look, the event that took place yesterday sucks. But hereâs the thing that people tend to know what happens next. Life goes on. Did it suck that it happened? Of course. But if you dance around the same circle, you only going to be in a worse state than first reaction.
Now back to the thumbnail. Of course, I didnât see the video and for all I know, the texts and image could be clickbait at its (dumbest) worst, but come on, I donât need to be a suck-up to say they are still fine. The mere fact barely if not none of hardware team, the sole division to prevent the ideal of Xbox going Sega route, got hit is already telling and practically the most ironic thing coming out from it.
Another thing is, as much as it does pain me to see these projects never see the light of day, they have so many others. Literally got the big 4 next year alone. This is similar to wrestling layoff; it sucks to see some go, but if you believe the company will fall because of one or two leaving, then with all due respect and I apologize if I offend, but you are delusional.
In short, layoff happened, we reacted, now life goes on.