You’re not the only one paying attention - it definitely seems to me like the conditions are currently more favorable for such a thing to happen than at any point in the last 10 years.
Luckily even if they never do anything official, the XBLA build is already out there, and fans are decompiling the N64 original as we speak. I expect an unofficial native PC goldeneye port of the N64 game to launch within the next 2.5 years, no matter what the licence holders do or want.
Pretty much all of the studios MS acquired were already working on yet-to-release games, many of which have outstanding obligations like DLC.
Even in 2018, it was pretty much understood these new games wouldn’t come out before 2022. Not even the XGSP games that Phil & co were signing back in 2017 when he was promoted EVP of Gaming.
The pandemic will naturally have pushed the true deluge of games another year, but even so, 2022 is shaping up to be a very strong year for Xbox.
E3 is gonna be nuts.
That definitely wasn’t understood by a lot of terminally online people, haha. That would have been understood to the leadership at MS, however, yes.
Nah, I very distinctly recall discussions around 2022 being “the year” both on reset and in the discord channels.
I think pandemic brain is fucking us all up.
I think anybody who did the basic math would definitely have realise that 2018 → 2021 was roughly the minimum possible dates, and that a lot of projects would be more than 3 years, so 2022 or beyond. But there was ambiguity about whether some of these companies might have already been working on certain things. Fable is coming! When is fable coming? Well they announced the new studio was being set up in 2017. Senua shipped in 2017, and they were purchased in 2018, so 2020 could plausibly be a 3 year sequel turnaround if they worked fast. Or 2021 if not would be 4 years, pretty decent! Some studios were making smaller games, how soon could smaller games come out? It was a bit up in the air.
It also wasn’t totally clear if Microsoft would buy out contracts for some existing games in production. Psychonauts 2 is a game they did buy out the publishing rights for, but The Outer Worlds was not, and neither was Wasteland 3. I recall a lot of ambiguity about how soon this stuff would result in exclusives, basically. And I think it turns out the answer was longer than quite a few people expected.
Haha I even recall some people getting annoyed at like E3 2019 and E3 2020 like “they have so many studios where are all the games???” but those were not uh, the smartest folks.
Since they dropped down the UE fanmade remake, I don’t expect anything coming from unofficial sources. But I hope someone releasescat least a port with better control schema, like XBLA Perfect Dark.
But good to see other people are looking into it! Goldeneye is a great game and a good re-release will make it available for lots of new players.
If you want a cute site to keep track of the decomp status for the NTSC-U cartridge, this updates it.
~21% done at the moment. Mario 64 got decompiled and pc ported about 12-18 months ago iirc, and Ocarina of Time just finished getting decompiled about 2 days ago. The kind of work people did for Mario 64 as soon as it got subsequently ported to PC natively using this decompiled code is really really cool. Arbitrary framerates, arbitrary resolutions, HD texture packs, ray tracing, DLSS, just bonkers stuff.
I imagine 95% of people are not actually legally dumping their N64 carts to use their assets on the decompiled versions, but technically like emulators, it’s not an illegal process at least not in the US.
500 employees at Microsofts average salary per year (120,000$) for 6 to 7 years is 360 million to 420 million.
On top of this you need to factor in external support staff, contractors, studios hired to deliver segments, any resources they’re using for motion captures or other high end outsourced video work. Let’s say they use an average of 200 external personnel full time for 4 years that the game is in full production and pay an hourly rate of 125$ (which is probably way low). This would be around 200 million.
At this point, we haven’t even factored in specialized equipment, software, bonus incentives, licensing, on and on and were already well over 500 million.
Im not ruling out Redfall getting delayed past the summer either
Since E3 2018, I personally wasn’t expecting much for various reasons until 2022 and as of now, it looks good on paper and will only get stronger as 2022 progresses.
Hoping Redfall doesn’t get delayed but I wouldn’t be surprised if it does.
Whole studio isn’t working on the game the whole time.
Good thing Microsoft is a $2 trillion dollar company. 
The whole studio is in excess of 500 people. Regardless there are massive costs that aren’t even included as mentioned in the calculations, it’s easily 500+ million.
Also didn’t factor in the fact it gets worked in preproduction for like 5 extra years lol.
I believe its really early, like has just started. Machine Games and what they have been up to since Wolfenstein II is a mystery. A project seems to have been canceled
Oh they can definitely afford it and it’s a good move for them, albeit they have to nail it. This is more to point out the absurd costs to develop games and how much a year of game production costs. It’s not really reasonable to expect 5+ years of game development with entire studios for most games. Most games will need to be on shorter development styles to stay on budget and have payoff.
It’s also why I suspect they’ll focus on acquiring very shriver developers and ones that Overdrive like say Supergiant and IOI.
Also this is probably why Xbox loves the smaller scale projects ninja theory and Obsidian are working. I expect to see more of this because they’re much more viable projects in terms of budget and agile development so they can be produced more quickly.
Gof of War and Horizon had budgets in the $100 million range. Your math is wrong.
"Game development “seems to double in cost every platform,” Layden said, noting that his budgets for recent big PlayStation 4 titles each hit $100 million. “If we can’t stop the cost curve from going up, all we can do is try to de-risk it. That puts you in a place where you’re incentivized toward sequels.” He predicted that PS5 games will cost $200 million to make and that prices will continue to grow exponentially from there. "
Games like Cyberpunk are also listed at under 200 million in development costs.
You can see why MS are funding more and more platform games, services if you will. Helps when you can spend 100m and have it last 8 years.
Halo Infinite, Sea of Thieves, Contraband, AOE 4, the next Forza etc
Cyberpunk and even God Of War have less staff working on them than Bethesda does. Aside from that God Of War was not in development for 6 years. Cyberpunk was only in production for 3 years the rest was pre production.
Are you aware that Fallout 76 was also developed and maintained by BGS? Also, none of these games are in full production for 5 or 6 years.
Yes I am aware Fallout 76 was developed and maintained by BGS. They are also realigning their studio toward single player focus, so I don’t see them being the ones that maintain and support it for its full life. They also like to devote all their resources towards one project as evidenced by Todd Howard many discussions and focus almost all resources solely on the game in development with a small handful mapping early preproduction on their next project.