It is nice leverage and with the global trend into online community with MS investment in gaming (after they have literally hosted Xbox Live for tens of years), they can be very attractive proposition in that regard (a lot of experience in gaming related workflows). They were slower than AWS to the market, that allowed AWS solidify its position in streaming cloud, but in gaming MS is quite strong. They also use Azure for their enterprise customers (leveraging their enterprise influence) but that’s a separate matter.
Sony used their traditional approach with easy PR wins, but they - honestly - could invest more into the game. They only used it like a smokescreen for PR win and that’s it. The game itself wasn’t that great and certainly lacked budget. If Sony did what MS did with Psychonauts, it would nice, but Sony almost never invests in something that flops.
Sure. I agree there’s no need to jump to conclusions. However, I’m cool with people speculating as long as they don’t get their hopes too irrationally high without more information being made public.
I think it was just a Shenmue game, which is a game type that was novel (but still niche!) back in 2000, and is no longer fresh / interesting now.
But the broader point was that you can’t let your sense of what’s important from a big picture perspective be skewed by vocal minorities on fan sites.
So like, people who think adding DreamCast games would be a big mic-drop moment for Game Pass don’t represent the mainstream gaming market. That’s not the market you have to play to in order to grow the service.
I think the main issue was that they just made another shenmue game, when people really wanted a finale to shenmue as a series since it would be highly unlikely to get another game
And also hopefully more arcade or blue skies games. I mean even for those that do wish third person action adventures, Sega has IP like Ecco the Dolphin, a heck of a trip, especially the last Dreamcast one, which was rushed.
Correct, that was the biggest problem. I think a new Shenmue could have been fairly large, although it would have had to have been a spectacular production with incredible reviews in order for it to be a big hit imo.
I do also think that nostalgia for Shenmue and Shenmue 2 was significantly overrepresented among the gaming press. Like, I don’t think anyone is lying about saying they loved those games - I just think that statistically, the kind of people who went into games journalism in the 90’s and 00’s were the exact target audience for Shenmue. There is a lot less nostalgia in the general public, proportionally. The re-release of Shenmue 1+2 (the beloved classics) sold middling numbers.
If Shenmue 3 was fucking awesome, it would have definitely sold way better - but if there was as much nostalgia for the franchise among the public as there was ultra enthusiast circles and press, it also would have sold better. We wound up in a funny situation where it was this absolute gigatonne announcement that then went on to mega flop when it came out and even the nostalgia rereleases of the classics did just “fineish” for straight ports of 20 year old games.
I’m just spitballing, but would it make sense to bring in Casey Hudson’s team, Humanoid Studios?
I understand he worked for a little bit with Microsoft and nothing came out of it, yet now with MS being all in with games I do wonder if it would be smart to lock him up with the Xbox brand of systems.
I think he could make an interesting Shadowrun, that has a Mass Effect kind of feel.
A studio that could work would be The Farm51. I know they have been talked about in the past, but after Chernobylite, I don’t think they should be passed over on.
A genre Xbox could use more of is horror and Frictional Games knows how to really do them justice. So I happily would like to see what they could do with MS is financial backing.
I know it will never happen, but there is something beautiful about the games Vanillaware makes and seeing them on Xbox would be cool.
I also think Wayforward could be someone to look at too, because they make games that are fun to play.
Yea they should approach him, and also mike laidlaws studio yellow brick games. He was creative director of dragon age. He was in ubisofr working on a king authors knight game which got axed by the bad producer ubisoft had to fire. Whe he left he took a team with him and theynstarted their own studio, this was before casey left bioware. So many people left bioware i just don’t know if it can rebound with the people there now. They been on my list for Microsoft. to buy to save dragon age and mass effecr.
These small startups take a long turnaround. I think there is merit in investing their game, but acquistions, from this point onwards can be about development with a known pipeline - and an established team.
On one side you have talented small devs like SadSquare, Frictional and RedBarrels, and on the other side you have mature devs who might require just a nudge or a better budget to go full AAA like Supermassive and Behaviour. I would right now lean towards the latter.
I completely understand what your saying about bigger development teams and how if they can get a little bit more financial security they can be more risky with their games.
Plus you need those big games to help sell Game Pass too.
I’m just wondering if it needs to be a mix of that.
I know Netflix is a different beast and all, but I’m still curious if you need more small teams too.
Seeing as you brought up Supermassive, I can’t help but wonder what they could do with a longer game, story and over all a bigger budget.
As for Behavior seeing what they could do with a different spin on Dead By Daylight, but with dinosaurs instead would be really cool.
Take everything that makes DBD great and just change it to you trying to outrun or hide from a Velociraptor. We all know the famous scene from Jurassic Park when the Velociraptor is opening the door to the kitchen, so something like that but in video game format would be a blast.
So hopefully when Halo comes out Game Pass will see a huge explosion in popularity, so Microsoft will invest even more into it and many more games will come to the service.
My comment was just about turnaround and what some of these vets bring to the table.
A very good acquisition is usually someone who can contribute and teach all the others a thing or two. It is not necessary that everyone just falls in line with the existing dev pipeline (usually in Sony’s case) once they are in the process of making a first party game or are being acquired.
I think about this usually.
Startups are great. Some of these are definitely worth looking at. Skydance, Humanoid etc.
The reason why some of these larger devs make sense is that the delta to grow into a AAA is actually very low. Low barrier for an upgrade to a AAA studio. Plus like Phil keeps saying, there is a wealth of high quality experience in some of the larger studios that needs to be heard.
You absolutely need small teams. And some of these need to be considered for content category gaps. Whereas others can be great partners - where you fund a first party game for them.
Even by the words of the press release, it is not just hiring Azure server space like Sony is doing.
It includes ‘building a next-generation development environment’, and this is mentioned several times through the press release. At one stage it is referred to in the present tense: “and Microsoft’s cutting-edge technology and development environment”. ‘Game development environment’ would usually refer to a GDK, which raises the question why? If the ‘super games’ cloud gaming platform is PC based surely they have their own PC development environment already?
The guess I made in the other thread is that rather than just hire Azure windows PC servers to host their own cloud gaming tech, they are basically going to licence xCloud – that MS is going to provide the Xbox Seres X Server Blades to run their ‘super game’ platform on, and Xbox Series GDKs to develop the games in. It will have a SEGA skin, but underneath it will effectively be xCloud.
That would make sense to me. MS basically just rents out tech they already have. Sega gets something they know already works and the benefits of all future software and hardware developments and updates.
