I 100% agree on the 2 years. The only reason I don’t talk about any gameplay when a game is announced is that gameplay tends to get a lot of scrutiny and 2 years out most games don’t look very good. I remember when Ninja theory showed hellblade 2, they did say they had just made a polished vertical slice to test out things but in most cases this isn’t the case
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Xbox doesn’t utilize enough of its IP currently. Expand studios and create new studios if they can’t get Activison|Blizzard down. We could always have more of what we currently have, the studios have remained the same under Microsoft. Maybe they need to increase team sizes? Maybe they need to create new AAA studios like The Initiative?
Time seems like its running out fast right now and I expect that they already have a plan B if this merger won’t go through. It sucks that we’ve waited so long for Starfield only for it to get delayed. it sucks that we never seem to get enough updates on what’s currently in development.
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Agreed, and also acquire or create support studios, not just studios that develop actual games but ones that can help each one of their first party developers.
Right now the future is quite uncertain, will they try to go for other publisher like Sega, will they go back to X360 days and stop being friendly good guys?
I think they’ll simply stay kinda silent while appealing for this deal block until 2024-2025, but at least with games coming now
I don’t feel like they really need to acquire a support studio. Support studios will always exist and pop up because its needed in the industry. Microsoft has the money to pay to use their services, what’s the point in owning a support studio when it doesn’t really bring in a profitable product along with the acquisition such as IP or ideas for new IP? Certain Affinity being an exception because they are currently working on a second party Xbox Game Studios project as per rumors.
Bro no time is running out. You are just freaking out unnecessarily. Tomorrow they will buy CDPR, SEGA or Ubisoft. Would you react the same? Just calm the fuck down. Its not some real life crisis going on. MS would have thought about all the possibilities, they don’t run a trillion dollar business just like that.
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I’m pretty calm right now. I think they need to go back to check up on their first party studios is all. Ask them what their employees needs are, what they could do to fix problems, maybe give raises so that employees don’t leave Bethesda’s studios and 343, stop overutilizing the contractors within 343 etc.
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There is only one studio which needed a check up and that was 343. And they already change the leadership team. Every other studio is doing good.
The Initiative as per reports seemed like they had quite a few disgruntled employees last year.
LOL. Employees leave all the time. On an average an employee changes company in 2 years. And the whole industry utilizes contractors. Its a normal phenomenon. Majority of the game production heavy lifting is done through the contractors/outsourcing in Asia-Pacific countries, like India, Malaysia, Singapore, China. even south american countries and to a greater extent Russian companies provide these services.
The problem with 343 was not the talent but the management. Why Playground games is working flawlessly when majority of the Xbox studios has the same contractors and outsourcing companies to help them.
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Still a growing studio and we can’t really judge them without a released game.
Up until the hiring freeze pretty much all of the studios had been growing. What are you talking about?
And the solution is to build more studios from the ground up as opposed to their plan of acquiring existing studios?
Giorgio is just mad and freaking out.
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They already have a good amount of studios with ideas for new IP’s, and a lot of existing ones too.
But maybe by having support studios, games like Forza Motorsport wouldn’t have taken so long to release, or games like Redfall wouldn’t have been delayed or released at 30 FPS.
I mean yes they can pay external ones for their services, but that doesn’t always happen and having internal ones is more reliable.
People might not know the biggest Rockstar Studio is not in USA or UK but in India. All the heavy lifting and asset creation happens there.
And you know how they achieved it. By buying India’s biggest outsourcing company who used to provide services to MS and Sony and making it their inhouse team.
Apparently the Rockstar Team had a goal of expansion of certain amount of employees but were finding it hard to expand it quickly. So they just came in and swooped the talent and made it in-house.
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I agree. This ain’t no doom and gloom. It’s just wasted time. MS will appeal take another year, If fail again? will be 2 years of basically wasted time. Mean while Ubi, Sega, etc… are there, especially Ubisoft.
Ubisoft would be blocked by the CMA for the same reason as ABK. Don’t expect a reasonable decision from them, the goal is clearly to prevent Microsoft from having a chance to compete in the industry. The cloud? Seriously ? What joke. Sony has more power than it looks and it’s really scary for the industry.
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Much to the delight of Gaming Media and pundits. They like monopolies so long as it’s Sony.
There no way they can block that. Ubi is small under 5 billion.
They’re determined to get people to buy Horizon 3 full price at launch, without ‘pesky’ competition from cheaper alternatives.
i have heard from a friend that there’s a big space game coming in sept. and it is xbox exclusive. i think xbox need to start talk and market it asap despite the recent bad news from UK land. 
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