Agreed. We’re seeing bullying and attempts to jumpstart a broader hate mob online into a witch hunt against Xbox and gamepass, i.e. inserting current events elsewhere in the world into the conversation as a shield as well in order to hide their bias and console warring.
It’s pretty terrible, as afar as communities go. A new low, basically, i.e. where basically saying “f*ck Xbox let them burn” is heralded as pro-industry and moral whilst questions about the thousands upon thousands of other devs who still depend on MS for their livelihoods are dismissed entirely with a flippant “they’re probably getting laid off anyway so who cares”.
The Avowed thing above is a great example of gamers crossing streams, imo.
Was Avowed ‘massively hyped’? By what metric? Vibes?
It was based on a teaser that had a dungeon. Excuse me, if gamers haven’t learned that teasers aren’t 100% reliable and expressive of an entire game, that’s on them // later videos were CLEAR on the aesthetic.
Outside of hobbyists, who the fuck was giving a shit anyway?
The hobbyists have to hand a range of tools to evaluate ‘success’, and that’s further split between ‘critical acclaim’ and ‘money’ (exclusivity also plays a role here, the dumbest of the lot). We’re happy to elide vibes on forums and social media with metacritic with sales when it works, but we’re also happy to do it when they don’t. Suddenly elements of our critical toolkit are shown to be fundamentally uesless/only useful in speciifc terms but because the vibes dominate, we say whatever we want. Sales=quality=fame=hype (change the order as you like), but when one or more of those fall down, we somehow don’t change our thinking. We just keep jamming games into this narrow discursive channel and acting as if We Know Something. This is then hilariously juxtaposed with ‘Only the latest news means anything’, as if these massive corporations are collapsing helter-skelter rides that will fall apart any second and so the latest piece of news is 100% definitively and exhaustively indicative of future news, and there’s no chance of a change: ‘the wheel has fallen off’ > ‘we’re likely dead’.
Except the next week there’ll be some ‘hype moment’ and half the hobbyists will have palpitations.
Can someone tell me Fortnite’s metacritic, and why it matters one jot? Can someone tell me why the lack of sales experienced by Avowed means it’s a bad game? Can someone tell me why mobile gaming is vast and yet we somehow assume every ‘gamer’ is as news-hungry and immersed in this as we are? Can someone ever recall why even super celebrated games always sell to a minority of any given platform’s ownership?
Gaming discourse is simultaneously rooted in elitist, myopic, nerdy ‘criticism’ and hysterical, superficial reactionary idiocy. I wish I could just ignore it but if I want to talk about games I like, I have to encounter it all the fucking time.
And none of this is a jot compared to people losing the security and power of a job, because MS don’t quite make enough**** money.
Avowed’s problem is it just didn’t appeal to many people, for various reasons. That’s the responsibility of Xbox’s leadership but also Bethesda and the creative leads behind the game. There’s a point where these people need to read the room and release stuff that catches the eye and generates hype.
And let’s be real here, i.e. game ‘quality’ or lack thereof is always a sketchy metric to go by, even more so in this era where legacy game reviewers are pretty much pointless and youtubers and streamers have taken over. Dragon Age Veilguard was a ‘return to form’ according to reviewers and it probably bombed harder than Avowed, at least based on perception.
Yeah if anything being this ruthless in cancelling games that are troubled / potentially going to flop, while starting to get a proper pipeline going of games coming out regularly is exactly what people have been asking for and very much shows a long term plan.
Layoffs suck, but when everyone wanted them to be as ruthless and focused on delivery as PlayStation at its best, this is what that tends to look like
No, wasn’t talking about the quality of the game, but about the difference of the reception the teaser had vs the gameplay trailers. The hype diminishing was a fact, back in 2021 it was the most hyped game from Xbox for many people, after 2022-2023 it was for some but not even remotely the same, the gameplay trailers never had a great reception on the internet, which is a big reason for the numbers it did sadly.
And about the price, i’m not talking about if it’s fair or good for us, but for the developers, Nintendo can put Mario or DK at 80$, it will move millions in days, Sony can put Ghost of Yotei or Wolverine at 80$ and they’ll sell millions in days, MS can put CoD or TES too, but ToW2 is condemned, many of the big hits from the last years, BG3, Space Marine 2, KCD2, Expedition 33, Elden Ring, Wukong, etc, were 60$ or less, some of them were more expensive to make than ToW2. Sometimes putting your game at a lower price will help sales a lot, specially for products that aren’t very popular, American companies specially don’t seem to see it this way sadly.
We’ve seen AA games with several million players but low sales ending up with the company who developed it being closed.
That wasn’t completely my point tho, what i mean is that you can go for a more creative route than Sony for example who is developing super safe sequels this gen, but you need a plan, you can’t just develop what you always wanted to, Xbox Studios need to start working on games that have decent sales potential or there’ll be more problems in the future, games like HB2, South of Midnight or even Keeper are incredibly risky projects right now.
This discussion also ignores MS repeatedly releasing games in the past 2+ years that have often done well by at least one of the above metrics, and have been less buggy etc than the XOne generation. Only the other week MS were dominating PS charts. A quite ridiculous scenario for a ‘terrible publisher’ on the home platform of ‘a great publisher’. But the narrative remains, because gamerz: exclusivity is a powerful drug for the fanboy.
There have been less successful releases, but - whisper it - point me to any publisher who has not had that.
And again, ‘good management’ in terms of releases, teams and people is not the same as ‘good management’ in terms of ‘maximising returns and sustaining eternal growth so parasites can get a return on their ‘risk’’ etc.
Yep that’s why Obsidian are so good at delivering so many games - they’re self aware enough to spot when it’s getting out of control and tighten back up while still delivering great length games that are interesting throughout and arrive when they’re meant to.
More news over at reddit, Romero Games was supposively being funded by Microsoft and that funding was cut. Someone on Shitter replied to the news to confirm it.
Not that I know of, it was just somethibg that popped up when scrolling. I didn’t checkout the xcancel link for further detail, but someone posted another link with someone confirming it/saying that it was Xbox funding the game.
There was also another thread on r/gamingleaksandrumors, that someone on gaf called SneakerOS, alledgely saw Zos’s new game and was incredible. I doubt it unless that person works at Zenimax. Even if the poster said they said that the 4 games would be more than juat that(AKA obvious stuff was obvious).
Based on the studio that’s behind and the dream millions of players had of seeing Obsidian’s take on an Elder Scrolls like ( medieval fantasy RPG )
That’s PC market, and the world for the games that aren’t known by the masses, you get the hobbyists hyped, they do the word of mouth, and the game has a big chance of exploding sales wise, as i named before, KCD2, Expedition, Space Marines 2, BG3 and others weren’t specially known by the masses around 1 year before release, but word of mouth helped a lot and they ended up being very succesful.
Yep that’s it in my opinion, same thing happened to Dragon Age, once they showed the game, the more “hardcore” players who was excited for the saga coming back didn’t like what they saw, the word of mouth spread like gunpowder and now even the more casual players say it’s bad, even tho many of them haven’t even played it, that’s how it works
IMO it’s not that hard to know which game has more or less sales potential based on how it looks and it’s genre
Why should someone who just enjoys what PD had to offer and wanted to see a new one made give a shit about any of this? New IPs don’t have brand recognition either, maybe they shouldn’t be made anymore, wouldn’t that make gaming interesting?
Being "objective " is one thing. Siding with execs who’s only concern is the bottom line over creativity is something else altogether . Perfect Dark was fairly unique even in its own time and it would have been great if it got a rivival similar to KI (another game with no name recognition to the masses outside of hardcore fighting game enthusiasts that would go onto be successful) that takes its unique gameplay and updates it. But I get it, someone needs to buy a second Yacht, cant be helped.
I have absolutely no faith whatsoever in modern development teams and their ability to make a game like Perfect Dark. And clearly it was going wrong. That’s pretty much undeniable, i.e. it’s been in literal dev hell so something wasn’t working.
Redfall should have been cancelled and the release of that game didn’t do Xbox’s brand name any good whatsoever.
