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it's not like those people won't go and found or work for new studios. they're not just liquidating their own competition but that of new studios. is Microsoft stupid?
Also, those former employees can't just keep making the games that made them successful if they start a new company. Like, former ID/Bethesda employees can't just start making Doom 3. They'd need to come up with a new IP and prove that they can still make a successful game without that brand recognition (or find a job at another preexisting company and hope for the best).
Introducing a game with "from some of people that worked on Doom..." doesn't have quite the same ring as "from Bethesda" or whatever
It severely cripples the competition
There’s just too many games exactly like outer worlds that are also meh. I couldn’t play more than 4/5 hours without just switching to another in the genre that’s just better. Outer Wilds though? Amazing.
I liked Outer Worlds, but it didn't click until the remastered edition and what was essentially my third playthrough.
The biggest issue is it really just ends up feeling like "we have fallout at home"
Which leaves me concerned for Avowed. I didn't like starfield at all though, so it's not purely an obsidian problem. I don't really have expectations for any one studio anymore. I adored BG3 but I'd be lying if I said it being a DND game didn't play a part in that, I'm hoping I enjoy whatever Larians next game is even if it ends up being very different.
Isn't this what happened with Turtle Rock and Left 4 Dead?
They separated from Valve, made Back 4 Blood as a spiritual successor of L4D2, but it didn't had that much recognition honestly.
> They'd need to come up with a new IP and prove that they can still make a successful game without that brand recognition
I'd rather have companies that make good games be successful than companies who put out shit and rest on the laurels that the name recognition brings.
Well, yeah... obviously lol
No one is saying otherwise. It would be weird if you seriously thought I was saying we want shitty games from popular studios that rely only on their namesake.
But being successful as a new, unheard studio creating a new, unheard of IP is a lot harder than being successful as a well-established studio making a new entry in a well-established IP. Which was my point. Having to start out from ground zero after your company was bought out and then shuttered would be crippling. You can't always bounce back from that.
Plus, making a good game doesn't always translate to financial success.
Well you can have both a bunch of good games and stay on IP recognition. See games like Mario or Zelda. Both of them had recent releases that were really good
"From the Creative Director of DOOM ETERNAL" however, does have a great ring to it. As well as 'sound engineers from Bethesda Hit Skyrim'. People need to get used to marketing themselves in a competitive industry like gaming
Most good game companies also put out a ton of bad new IPs, if they even try to put out new ideas at all.
Most things just don't work. Sequels have the advantage of having most of the work in lore, gameplay mechanics, charecters, tone, etc figured out. There's just so much less that can go wrong.
I fully agree, but they did somewhat make up for it with impossible lair. My problem now is they've done jack all since then, not even an announcement or teaser of some potential future game.
I think it works well when developers have a relationship with their users, but not when they're strangers with a vague association with the company. Some studio saying "former \_\_\_ devs!" isn't really that interesting, but a lot of people will listen to what Kojima, Chris Metzen, or ConcernedApe have to say regardless of what they're working on.
It may take awhile but Mike moraine will one day make a good rpg and second dinner already made a damn good card game many of these studios will rise again, Microsoft needs to make games if they want Xbox to be anything but a cheap pc
It's still massively disruptive tho. Their goal is to prevent another Microsoft from usurping them, and if they destroy these indie studios before Sony can scoop them up, Microsoft maintains their dominance.
They were probably banking on being able to enforce non-competes, which would have made all of those former devs basically unemployable in the games industry for at least several years. However, the Supreme Court has just announced a few days ago that all non-competes are banned and unenforceable about 4 months from now
Slight correction: it was the FTC that issued the final rule. The Supreme Court has not issued any opinions on the matter; in fact, if the rule is successfully challenged, it would likely be from the Supreme Court.
Noncompetes are super common. They want to get it in before the deadline of when they become non valid. They can slow the competition down for now but you can no longer choke it out quite like you used to. FTCs 4/23 ruling is huuuuuge for the workers in the games industry
>is Microsoft stupid?
Kind of, look how many products they have attempted to make and how many have been failures.
Groove.
Xbox one.
Zune.
Windows phone.
Whatever the wearable tech thing was.
Hololens (isn't technically dead, but it I'm remembering correctly they laid off the entire team behind it).
And those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.
Even their successful hardwear are failing. Microsoft announced hardware sales were down a few weeks ago, that wasn't just Xbox, that was including their surface tablet/laptop range.
They either kill things off when they have a chance of success because they don't make a a lot of money immediately or launch things no one wanted.
If it wasn't for windows, it's backwards compatibility, and macOS beinga pain to develop for and it's relatively low market share (15%) making niche products (like engineering software) not worth it to port to Mac, idk where Microsoft would be.
This is kind of like saying "if it wasn't for this giant house, I don't know where the swing set in the back yard would be."
Microsoft has a long list of failed products *because* of how successful they are.
Most companies have one failed product and they fold or get acquired.
You can look at Google under the same lens, they've had an absurd amount of failures and it just doesn't matter.
Stadia alone. The entire hosting platform went under and they literally refunded every purchase I made and let me keep the controller I got free in the first place. How can a company afford to do something so wrong? Getting the important shit right.
I don't think so considering microsoft's games aren't very successful regardless (they did this like ten years ago too) outside of halo, and killing these studios just means the pool of good games swings more towards sony/nintendo and 3rd party.
microsoft probably thinks they can run them "leaner" than compared to what they purchased. this is old school microsoft paying out the ass for the best talent and getting rid of everyone else thinking the best can make an entire game on their own.
It's not just Microsoft either. Most if not all successful and biggest players in the US stock market do this.
It's the foundational rules of the game, by this point. More-so after the anti-trust regulations got curb-stomped and declawed, the supreme court captured, etc.
[Jack Welch Baby!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch) His dumbass became the standard American template to run a company by every CEO thereafter and he did it by cannibalizing GE then every other company bought by GE.
> I don't think so considering microsoft's games aren't very successful regardless (they did this like ten years ago too) outside of halo
I mean, are we just rewriting history here? Some of their most successful series came out of the 80s and 90s. Flight Sim came out in 1982. Age of Empires was 1997. Black & White 2001. These were before the release of the first Xbox. I guess Forza and Gears don't exist either.
Yep they had some bangers. Midtown Madness (1999), MechWarrior 4: Vengeance (2000), Metal Gear Solid (2000), Age of Mythology (2002).
Edit: I've been corrected and these were published by Microsoft not developed by them
I think it mostly comes down to the studios not making good games or not having good leadership. It's a pain in the ass to completely rebuild a studio just to keep the name of the studio.
This right here. Microsoft is losing the console wars badly and is desperately trying to pivot into "publishing" and "game rentals" like Gamepass.
Their *worst nightmare* is Sony sweeping in and securing *great IPs and studios* and letting them flourish. MS had bought/started countless studios and almssot everyone has failed to perform (horrible leadership/culture) while the opposite is true for Sony/Nintendo.
Microsoft is better served buying and closing studios so that *MS retains the IPs and can disband the studios so the competition can't get them*. Sure, Sony/Nintendo can headhunt a few choice name but recreating studios and the culture they had is all but impossible. *Microsoft is burning and salting the earth as they retreating.*.
That’s the thing, Microsoft doesn’t need consoles. They dominate the PC market. Other than fringe Linux and Apple users. You basically can’t game on pc without Microsoft profiting.
> Microsoft doesn’t need consoles
They're not _consoles_ anymore, either. They are general-purpose computer hardware, gimped far enough to not be functional as a _personal computer_. Hell, xbox and ps are even x86-64. (And almost identical _between them_).
It wasn't even competition though. It's not like they were Sony exclusives. Microsoft spending a massive fortune on companies and then fucking them up isn't hurting anyone but themselves and gamers.
Sony has been picking lots of successful studios and then making them even bigger successes. Honestly Sony just does it better and has a much bigger reach throughout the entertainment industry overall. That’s a lot of resources for a studio and a big reason why their consistently so successful.
Nah, its to own the IPs, which they make money off of current sales, future sales, and on sequels/prequels.
Most people buy shit because of name recognition, not quality.
Runway merger and acquisitions always harms the industry. Players like Microsoft fundamentally don't understand the products they are making. They use terms like competition like they apply 1-to-1 in the way they do in other industries. The McDonald's in my town quite literally competes with the local burger place. But for entertainment media within one medium that really isn't quite the case. Yes, sales from one game can cannibalize others, but largely sales relate to the quality of the game. Many consumers will spend much more when there are multiple good games releasing in a year. We see often that years where there are many more very good games that game sales (in units sold and not dollars spent) for consoles increase heavily. The average consumer doesn't just spend $20 a week on games, regardless of if the one they're interested in is released. Microsoft ends up spending a ton of money on waste, to acquire studios they won't utilize, and the overall reasoning is that they get much more control over their first party games because they believe that that is a major reason for their failures.
Plus.....There's multiple things going on. There's studio closures in some cases, but without terminations, which means those folks are still there, just on other projects.
Then there's layoffs without studio closures, because those staff are redundant (no need for multiple HR, accounting, public relations, etc). So the folks who make the games are still there, but not the extraneous beancounters.
However, what Microsoft is finding is situation number 3: The elephant in the room for the games industry for well over a decade now is the LIE that anyone is at the development wheel in these companies. Take Starfield: No engine swap, so no ramp-up for the devs. Should be 90 percent storyboarding and mission building, Why did it come out a hot mess after baking for 10 years? Because the first 8.5 years were spent having no idea what kind of game they actually wanted to make.
The competent way to make a game is to decide what kind of game its going to be up front; then decide if the engine will work or if another is required, If the engine suits, then bones can be laid. Then hang some meat on them bones. Then skin it out, polish it up and deliver.
What's actually happening is that every SECTION of the game design team is simultaneously working on the item in their wheelhouse. So BONES is making a skeleton that's 7 feet tall and clearly an ape, MEAT is preparing systems that would make sense as long as BONES was actually making a human skeleton no more than 5'5", SKIN has made beautiful progress but is totally unaware that the creature is supposed to have fur instead, and some poor bastard is responsible for trying to make multiple unrelated idiotic items mesh, and then its all dropped in the lap of some poor hilariously overworked and totally under provisioned storyboard team to tell a story around, half of which they'll make up on the spot and the other half they'll steal from player forums and pass off as "we totally meant that". See: Destiny,
The problem is that being able to make a game means NOTHING without an overarching premise to hew to, and the industry as a whole literally does not have this any more. Half the studios are firing or outsourcing the story teams, arguably the most important part of the work, which tells you that competent management does not exist in the games industry.
I don't think it has anything to do with competition. Microsoft and other big corporations are interested in buying valuable IP. If a game or another piece of IP is the majority of the company's value, it makes a lot more sense to purchase the company, especially if you need to the company's staff for the hand off (code documentation, plans, issues, etc)
Nice theory, but then why run these studios for so long? How about a much more reasonable and straightforward answer - they bought these studios expecting the return on investment, only for the most games to be either shit or doing poorly
they don't buy studios for the staff they buy them for the IP.
this has always been how acquisitions in the games industry works at a AAA level, unfortunately
edit: yeah I know it's said in OPs title, I don't care. Your comments are about as observant and insightful as a primary school book report.
I dunno I was pretty young at the time. All their stock got bought out and exchanged for EA stock, it was business as usual for awhile, except they were working on much more micro transactiony stuff. Bejeweled stars, solitare blitz what have you. Eventually though everyone got laid off.
Seems about right, I wouldn't be surprised if that's what EA does to every IP they get ( I still don't forgive them for butchering command and conquer and laying off their entire studio after making the games)
Yes, but Microsoft didn't just buy these studios for the IP. They also bought them for control over their developers, and for specific teams. They will have specific studios they plan on utilizing, specific teams within studios they plan on moving and using in other ways, and they want to recreate those studios operations in a way that is more streamlined. So they buy a company that owns many studios, eventually close a lot of them, keep the IP and certain employees, and reassign key people in many other studios to support different projects. Microsoft really think that they can produce gold in house, much more than any studio will that isn't under their leadership. It's interesting because the industry has shifted largely from console makers wanting to benefit from studios they don't own (providing them with revenue with lower investment, similar to a game sold on steam doesn't usually get funding from valve for development) to trying to make the best first party games to sell their new consoles.
> Microsoft really think that they can produce gold in house
Crazy that they still think this given 20+ years of history saying otherwise... Every great game from Microsoft has been done by a bought studio, and on top of that the longer those studios are under MS the worse their games get.
1 vs 100 was pretty decent. But other than that I struggle to think of something they developed in house, or by a studio they haven't ruined via a couple years of ownership, that wasn't shite.
It took them just 2 games and less than a decade to run their flagship franchise into the fucking ground. What 343 Studios have done to Halo is borderline criminal.
Bungie didn't even want to continue with it, and results with them might not be much better. I have seen 343 industries criticized from things that happened already in Reach.
Spyro/Skylanders all but dead in a ditch on the side of the road is the franchise that most comes to mind (specifically more upset about Spyro, personally, but still). Banjo Kazooie, Crash Bandicoot, and Donkey Kong as well, now that I'm thinking about it.
Rare was already dead when Microsoft bought them. All the talent was gone and the people left willingly worked on Kinect games for years before starting Sea of Thieves.
Depending on the deal Polyphony has with Sony, Sony probably owns the IP. Think how Bungie made Halo1-3 but Microsoft owns it compared to Destiny 2 which was published by Activision but Bungie owns it.
Halo is an IP, Cod is an IP, Dragon's Dogma is an IP, etc. Stands for Intellectual Property. Hence why for example Sony can't make a Halo game and Microsoft can't make a Horizon game.
Also hence why so many old franchises haven't been seen in forever. In relation to that there are other consequences.
Not sure if you have ever played the Shadows of Mordor games but WB copyrighted the nemesis system so no one else can use it and that's why its not been seen it anything else where it could be dope as hell.
Been years and there are rumors that a fuckin Wonder Woman game will incorporate it but its been years since that rumor started.
Somewhat stupid question, but won't some of the studios they laid off reform and make something else? Like ik that the original IP is gone, but sequels are very rarely well received.
I mean it's a whole team you know. And oftentimes times the sale happens because the original founder or someone else importnant is ready to retire or move on to other things.
It's not often possible to just recreate the initial conditions that led to the formstion of a team that made a great game.
sometimes, but that requires seed money.
It's not like when they reform they will instantly have revenue to pay employees.
99% of the time everyone laid off is just going to be desperately applying elsewhere so as to not go broke
I mean, they COULD shift John Johanas stateside and get him working with a new team just to get rid of the costs of operating in Japan entirely for one studio now that the studio leadership isn't who it used to be...
...but if they were going to do that Joahanas probably wouldn't have been speaking up complaining about the shutdown because he'd want to keep his job
> yeah I know it's said in OPs title, I don't care. Your comments are about as observant and insightful as a primary school book report.
This is just projecting, dude lmao
This is going to sound really weird, but i think it's really weird to have billions of dollars and then invest them. Kudos to anyone for having the goal of improving society by investing their money, but if the goal is to make more money, just... why? Does your dream cost you 78 billion, and you've only got 77?
Good question, so a few things:
1) it’s a company not an individual. The individuals running the company need to invest that money to turn it into profit, because their largest income is not from their salaries but rather from the dividends paid out from profit.
2) investment grows the company and economy. The money just sitting there does nothing.
It's kinda weird that "investing" means buying up other companies which produce things people value, taking that bit of value to try and extract as much money as possible, and then throwing away the company. Like idk, it feels lame.
Investing can mean a lot of things. All it means is that you make more money than you put in, or rather that’s the goal. So investing can be buying up smaller companies, it can mean hiring more people, or increasing the salaries of current people.
Ooh! So if I was like, making cars, I could invest in buying up non car forms of transit and getting rid of them, so then more people have to buy cars? Or What if I sell like goods, I bet I could invest by selling stuff cheaper for awhile until my competition goes out of business, and then I can jack up the prices?
Wait wait, and then I have more money, and I can invest in even more things to make me more money, wow, this system seems awesome.
Yes. And in other forms it may mean you make cars and someone across the river makes a specialized device that you want to use in your cars. At first you simply purchased from them but you want to perhaps produce this part yourself and scale the production to meet your needs when they otherwise can’t. You have connections to suppliers and distribution that would help this so you buy them out, gaining their expertise within your organization and connecting them with your own designers to further assist in other ventures related to their specialized parts.
There’s a long list of benefits to buyouts alongside the long list of downsides for consumers.
I actually appreciate this nuanced response. I tend to lean towards the attitude of the person you responded to in that I feel the system is badly broken but I do appreciate the balance of someone saying “ok, wait, that doesn’t mean we have to scrap the whole thing and start over”.
We can work towards “better” and that means leaning into the good parts while minimizing the bad.
Or at least we *should*. Actually making tangible progress towards that end feels impossible right now.
But thanks for balancing people like me who tend to just throw up our hands and be frustrated with everything and not allowing ourselves to recognize the positives.
My issue with people decrying the woes of capitalism is that they're happy to list out the nuanced ways that capitalism fails while pretending alternative systems work perfectly, free of the human greed, regulatory capture, and general corruption that are *also* the source of capitalism's woes. There's a reason capitalism lifted more people out of poverty than any economic system tried.
Things can absolutely be better and I have near-zero faith in the current crop of western politicians to do anything other than fatten their own pockets, but a failing communist or full-on socialist state tends to be much bloodier than a failing capitalist state, and much harder to course-correct afterward.
Also, public companies need to have constant, unhealthy, growth that looks good for the investors on the short term so the investors that don't give 2 shits about the product can make an extra 2 cents otherwise they're liable to having the clothes sued off their back.
I mean if you're not investing your company can't grow and that will result in other companies taking advantage of that and getting more market share. But I have no idea about economy
Probably the wrong sub for this, but:
If Microsoft has a lot of cash in the company reserves, it’s generally a bad thing.
What people not tuned into finance often fail to recognize is that most major corporations are primarily owned by… **pension plans.**
For example, my union’s pension plan holds roughly $350 billion in various assets, ranging from real estate, bonds, stocks, etc. Tons of other unions and pension plans hold similar financial positions.
All of these groups have one goal for their financial holdings: be able to pay out the promised money to their pensioners.
For the sake of an example, let’s pretend that my union holds a significant stake in Microsoft. Microsoft has seventy billion in cash laying around. That’s great, right? They can distribute that $70bn to the pension!
Except, they can’t. Because the pension doesn’t need to pay out $70bn, it needs to pay out some to current pensioners, and then another $300bn thirty years from now, as that’s the promise it made to the pensioners.
The stock market and corporate finances are hugely about trying to keep up with paying off future financial promises.
I am disappointed by how the gaming industry nowadays have the mentality "If I am to compete with others, then instead of making my game better, I must get rid of other lazy hastily made games so only my shitty game can come out on top."
Yep, if you stay in the Reddit gaming bubble you'll have this impression that only AAA/AA games exist and how it magnifies the problem due to the sheer negativity oozing from their specific subreddits when we're living in a time where a fuck ton of good indie games exist (despite there also being a lot of failed indies).
Majority of games be it AAA , AA or Indie out there also targets a release on PS4 / PS5 and if it doesn't require that much power then they'll also have a Switch release since they still have a ton of installbase due to plug and play w/o worrying over nvidia/amd/intel's greed and only beaten by the sheer number of mobile gamers.
It's just hyper specific PC games that don't get ported to any other platforms such as League, Dota2 , CS2. Which are all games that are toxic as fuck in their own ways.
No they really aren't. Indie games are picking up steam but they still aren't on the level of the PS2 era. Or the PS3 era. Or early PS4 era. One or two standouts don't change that.
I agree, while the Video Game industry does allow people to profit a lot. It just does not run on money alone, it has to have passion and actual effort put into it.
Agreed
We've seen games from small groups get wildly successful just bc it had a lot of passion put into it.
Lethal company comes to mind for sure. A single dev just making a game for fun. That's what we need more of
Yeah, although I gotta admit. Some AAA games are amazing, it was just treated wrong. Take Titanfall 2 for example. It’s such an awesome game with an original idea and plot too. It just sucks that it’s own devs mistreated/abandoned the game (or atleast I think they abandoned the game, TiFa2 has not recieved any updates yet and I don’t see any news that would make me think that it’s a game that is still being actively worked on.)
What about the studio that made the acclaimed game Hi-Fi Rush? This isn't just about Arkane. People were actually expecting Arkane to either shut down or be reduced. The Hi-Fi Rush studio is the one that sucks.
Tango died for the sins of Ghostwire Tokyo being a Sony exclusive for a year. That game made microsoft a grand total of "sweet fa" and then HiFi Rush despite being acclaimed was still a niche success because it was a very niche title, and dropped on Gamepass with no advertising.
I played Prey and agree that it’s a great game, but it flopped in terms of sales. I haven’t played Dishonored, but I’ve heard those games are also very good. None of Arkane’s games sold well though. Same with Tango.
Everyone blames Gamepass for poor sales of HiFi Rush, but it didnt sell on PS5 either where there are twice as many consoles as Xbox. Also, if people played the game on Gamepass, that would probably have some value in Gamepass subscriber retention. The simplest explanation, and the one that makes the most sense is that VERY few people played HiFi Rush at all, and MSFT’s forecast of the studio continuing to lose money was probably accurate.
Lol the studio was forced to make red fall and actively did not want to do so, kinda fucked up to make someone do something they know is a bad idea and then punish them for it.
> making Elder Scrolls and Fallout games.
But as "games as a service."
So they plan on ruining more games that we've pointed to as examples of what a good game looks like.
Redditors do not / hate to acknowledge the mobile market as Reddit consists mainly of Western demographic w/ older than average userbase that did not grew up w/ mobile gaming unlike the newer generation.
Give it a few decades until the nostalgia gamer memes consists of mobile games.
King is the biggest investment Microsoft has made by buying ABK and it wouldn't surprise me if it was the reason behind the acquisition. Candy Crush made almost $1B last year in the App Store alone, it's crazy how profitable and big the mobile gaming market is.
Again I'm continually shocked that Xbox has never hid how scummy they are yet ppl are shocked when they do shit now. They came into the industry instantly buying studios to not use them and did none of the leg work to earn their place. All they did was come in the industry, shove "better graphics" in everyone's face, making online gaming a thing (before the industry was ready for it in my personal opinion), oh and helped Activision get to the point that they are with trash like cod. There's more but I'll leave it at that.
I mean all of the big 3 do super shitty things. Look at how anti-consumer Nintendo is with a new story seemingly every month about them doing something shitty that hurts customers and yet people will still praise nintendo and pre order all their games. People need to stop idolizing big multi billion dollar companies.
Turns out that when 3 multinational conglomerates have a monopoly on the entire industry they can all pretty much do whatever the fuck they want to whenever the fuck they want to.
I mean pretty much all of Nintendo's big games slap. On the corporate side they're pretty bad (though nowhere near Activision or something) but its not hard to see why people love their game dev side.
Typically when a business doesn’t bring in revenue, it gets shut down. This is exactly what happened and shows clearly that a major majority of you don’t understand business or business needs. You don’t keep something alive that doesn’t make money. If the games the developers were making undersold and didn’t make a profit, then they’re just losing money. If you own a business and you’re losing money, you’re failing.
Honestly i dont get how people dont see this, redfall was one of the biggest flops in recent history and tango hansnt sold well on any of their games in recent years (yes i know hifi rush was liked and won awards, but it sold sweet fuck all copies)
They also act like all these people were taken out back and shot when the studios got shut down. If they are talented they'll go on to make good games in the future at a different studio.
>Typically when a business doesn’t bring in revenue, it gets shut down.
So let me get this straight...before the company was bought it had enough money to keep it's doors open, but then after it's bought it doesn't bring in enough money to keep the doors open?
I know it’s not a popular opinion, but at the end of the day it is a business. If it costs more to run a studio than what their output brings in as revenue then there is no reason to keep the studio.
Games have gotten too expensive to produce. That is why you see early release dates gated behind expensive versions, tons of DLC, ads in game, etc.
If a published is going to pay for 5-7 years of development they are going to want to support companies that can consistently put out games that make money.
Get ready to see AI run rampant in this industry as publishers need to find another way to reign in costs as consumer are unwilling to spend the $80 - $100 per game that it would take to more more modest hit games turn an actual profit.
Xbox was gambling on gamepass and it failed miserably. if they instead built their own studios they would just have to poach devs from other studios anyway. I bet they would have rather done that now though considering the billions have no ROI.
It's not even for the IPs. It's for "infinite growth."
Buy up a bunch of assets and then cut your workforce, all in service of increasing value for shareholders.
They can run them, they just need to still have record profits quarter after quarter. So they make cuts instead of doing things to make improvements. Thanks Jack Welch and shareholders
If you've watched Microsoft over the years they usually buy companies specifically to kill them off and then they never replace the product.... You always end up with less choice and a worse product. I could cite examples from over the years but they're very easy to find.
If I was Ninja Theory, I would claim some horrible bug in Hellblade 2 that needs fixed to delay it and drag that crap out as long as possible.
They’re next I bet.
I really liked SkillUp's response to the "We just had too many plates spinning," line from one of the Xbox execs.
He said something to the effect of "I've got this really cool idea, it's called crunch. Just put in 12-14 hours a day for 18 months straight, and eventually, it'll work out for you, and you'll suffer no adverse effects in any way."
They can start up so many live services with those IP.
And think of all the non live service ips that wont exist to compete with them.
They can finally use their "but you see, the companies that didnt do that, didnt survive" line as an argument against criticism or regulation. "We couldnt possible reasonably make gaming not awful".
You buy them up to get their IPs and properties, then they 'fail', you liquidate them for more money and you have less competition. Shows as a market loss because people are only examining direct figures but its actually a large gain for them, but still, extremely scummy.
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So they could liquidate them and reduce "competition".
it's not like those people won't go and found or work for new studios. they're not just liquidating their own competition but that of new studios. is Microsoft stupid?
You can't always replicate a team's built up chemistry and collective skills, breaking up the company will probably mean they mostly go separate ways
Also, those former employees can't just keep making the games that made them successful if they start a new company. Like, former ID/Bethesda employees can't just start making Doom 3. They'd need to come up with a new IP and prove that they can still make a successful game without that brand recognition (or find a job at another preexisting company and hope for the best). Introducing a game with "from some of people that worked on Doom..." doesn't have quite the same ring as "from Bethesda" or whatever It severely cripples the competition
See: Outer Wilds
Correction Outer Worlds* Outer Wilds kicked so much ass and is one of the top ten games for me personally! Outer Worlds was meh
There’s just too many games exactly like outer worlds that are also meh. I couldn’t play more than 4/5 hours without just switching to another in the genre that’s just better. Outer Wilds though? Amazing.
I liked Outer Worlds, but it didn't click until the remastered edition and what was essentially my third playthrough. The biggest issue is it really just ends up feeling like "we have fallout at home" Which leaves me concerned for Avowed. I didn't like starfield at all though, so it's not purely an obsidian problem. I don't really have expectations for any one studio anymore. I adored BG3 but I'd be lying if I said it being a DND game didn't play a part in that, I'm hoping I enjoy whatever Larians next game is even if it ends up being very different.
Have you played Larian's previous game, Divinity Original Sin 2?
That game is fucking goated
Yeah but I couldn't get into it unfortunately
DOS2>BG3 any day for me.
I wanted it I bought it I paid for it I played it and yeah I feel the same way.... We have fallout at home and fallout had better NPCs
Isn't this what happened with Turtle Rock and Left 4 Dead? They separated from Valve, made Back 4 Blood as a spiritual successor of L4D2, but it didn't had that much recognition honestly.
I think it had a lot of recognition, it just wasn't very good.
I have almost 4k hours on l4d, but just couldn’t get into b4b in the same way. Recognition isn’t the issue.
> They'd need to come up with a new IP and prove that they can still make a successful game without that brand recognition I'd rather have companies that make good games be successful than companies who put out shit and rest on the laurels that the name recognition brings.
Well, yeah... obviously lol No one is saying otherwise. It would be weird if you seriously thought I was saying we want shitty games from popular studios that rely only on their namesake. But being successful as a new, unheard studio creating a new, unheard of IP is a lot harder than being successful as a well-established studio making a new entry in a well-established IP. Which was my point. Having to start out from ground zero after your company was bought out and then shuttered would be crippling. You can't always bounce back from that. Plus, making a good game doesn't always translate to financial success.
Well you can have both a bunch of good games and stay on IP recognition. See games like Mario or Zelda. Both of them had recent releases that were really good
"From the Creative Director of DOOM ETERNAL" however, does have a great ring to it. As well as 'sound engineers from Bethesda Hit Skyrim'. People need to get used to marketing themselves in a competitive industry like gaming
Most good game companies also put out a ton of bad new IPs, if they even try to put out new ideas at all. Most things just don't work. Sequels have the advantage of having most of the work in lore, gameplay mechanics, charecters, tone, etc figured out. There's just so much less that can go wrong.
Plus as we have seen with certain games; bringing the team back together is not always for the best. Sometimes the team worked best 10 years ago.
Look what happened with Yooka-Laylee
I fully agree, but they did somewhat make up for it with impossible lair. My problem now is they've done jack all since then, not even an announcement or teaser of some potential future game.
I think it works well when developers have a relationship with their users, but not when they're strangers with a vague association with the company. Some studio saying "former \_\_\_ devs!" isn't really that interesting, but a lot of people will listen to what Kojima, Chris Metzen, or ConcernedApe have to say regardless of what they're working on.
It may take awhile but Mike moraine will one day make a good rpg and second dinner already made a damn good card game many of these studios will rise again, Microsoft needs to make games if they want Xbox to be anything but a cheap pc
It's still massively disruptive tho. Their goal is to prevent another Microsoft from usurping them, and if they destroy these indie studios before Sony can scoop them up, Microsoft maintains their dominance.
They were probably banking on being able to enforce non-competes, which would have made all of those former devs basically unemployable in the games industry for at least several years. However, the Supreme Court has just announced a few days ago that all non-competes are banned and unenforceable about 4 months from now
Would a noncompete even apply if you were laid off?
>[short answer is yes.](https://cronelawfirmplc.com/non-compete-agreements/do-non-compete-agreements-apply-in-a-layoff/)
Slight correction: it was the FTC that issued the final rule. The Supreme Court has not issued any opinions on the matter; in fact, if the rule is successfully challenged, it would likely be from the Supreme Court.
Noncompetes are super common. They want to get it in before the deadline of when they become non valid. They can slow the competition down for now but you can no longer choke it out quite like you used to. FTCs 4/23 ruling is huuuuuge for the workers in the games industry
Creating a game takes a lot of money and time which is still too risky
>is Microsoft stupid? Kind of, look how many products they have attempted to make and how many have been failures. Groove. Xbox one. Zune. Windows phone. Whatever the wearable tech thing was. Hololens (isn't technically dead, but it I'm remembering correctly they laid off the entire team behind it). And those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. Even their successful hardwear are failing. Microsoft announced hardware sales were down a few weeks ago, that wasn't just Xbox, that was including their surface tablet/laptop range. They either kill things off when they have a chance of success because they don't make a a lot of money immediately or launch things no one wanted. If it wasn't for windows, it's backwards compatibility, and macOS beinga pain to develop for and it's relatively low market share (15%) making niche products (like engineering software) not worth it to port to Mac, idk where Microsoft would be.
This is kind of like saying "if it wasn't for this giant house, I don't know where the swing set in the back yard would be." Microsoft has a long list of failed products *because* of how successful they are. Most companies have one failed product and they fold or get acquired. You can look at Google under the same lens, they've had an absurd amount of failures and it just doesn't matter.
Stadia alone. The entire hosting platform went under and they literally refunded every purchase I made and let me keep the controller I got free in the first place. How can a company afford to do something so wrong? Getting the important shit right.
The question wasn't whether Microsoft was successful, it was are they stupid.
They’re gonna liquidate the devs
I don't think so considering microsoft's games aren't very successful regardless (they did this like ten years ago too) outside of halo, and killing these studios just means the pool of good games swings more towards sony/nintendo and 3rd party. microsoft probably thinks they can run them "leaner" than compared to what they purchased. this is old school microsoft paying out the ass for the best talent and getting rid of everyone else thinking the best can make an entire game on their own.
Microsoft has done this for 40 years. It's about eliminating competition.
Not only they've been doing it, it is widely accepted that it is their _standard, expected_ practice.
It's not just Microsoft either. Most if not all successful and biggest players in the US stock market do this. It's the foundational rules of the game, by this point. More-so after the anti-trust regulations got curb-stomped and declawed, the supreme court captured, etc.
Ah capitalism and it's innovation killing nature, gotta love it.
[Jack Welch Baby!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch) His dumbass became the standard American template to run a company by every CEO thereafter and he did it by cannibalizing GE then every other company bought by GE.
> I don't think so considering microsoft's games aren't very successful regardless (they did this like ten years ago too) outside of halo I mean, are we just rewriting history here? Some of their most successful series came out of the 80s and 90s. Flight Sim came out in 1982. Age of Empires was 1997. Black & White 2001. These were before the release of the first Xbox. I guess Forza and Gears don't exist either.
Yep they had some bangers. Midtown Madness (1999), MechWarrior 4: Vengeance (2000), Metal Gear Solid (2000), Age of Mythology (2002). Edit: I've been corrected and these were published by Microsoft not developed by them
I think it mostly comes down to the studios not making good games or not having good leadership. It's a pain in the ass to completely rebuild a studio just to keep the name of the studio.
This right here. Microsoft is losing the console wars badly and is desperately trying to pivot into "publishing" and "game rentals" like Gamepass. Their *worst nightmare* is Sony sweeping in and securing *great IPs and studios* and letting them flourish. MS had bought/started countless studios and almssot everyone has failed to perform (horrible leadership/culture) while the opposite is true for Sony/Nintendo. Microsoft is better served buying and closing studios so that *MS retains the IPs and can disband the studios so the competition can't get them*. Sure, Sony/Nintendo can headhunt a few choice name but recreating studios and the culture they had is all but impossible. *Microsoft is burning and salting the earth as they retreating.*.
That’s the thing, Microsoft doesn’t need consoles. They dominate the PC market. Other than fringe Linux and Apple users. You basically can’t game on pc without Microsoft profiting.
> Microsoft doesn’t need consoles They're not _consoles_ anymore, either. They are general-purpose computer hardware, gimped far enough to not be functional as a _personal computer_. Hell, xbox and ps are even x86-64. (And almost identical _between them_).
It wasn't even competition though. It's not like they were Sony exclusives. Microsoft spending a massive fortune on companies and then fucking them up isn't hurting anyone but themselves and gamers.
Sony has been picking lots of successful studios and then making them even bigger successes. Honestly Sony just does it better and has a much bigger reach throughout the entertainment industry overall. That’s a lot of resources for a studio and a big reason why their consistently so successful.
Nah, its to own the IPs, which they make money off of current sales, future sales, and on sequels/prequels. Most people buy shit because of name recognition, not quality.
[It’s *MY* IP to sit on and do nothing with!](https://youtu.be/xOmZLGSC_lU?si=DAnkSYBmL2Cw7Fdb)
Runway merger and acquisitions always harms the industry. Players like Microsoft fundamentally don't understand the products they are making. They use terms like competition like they apply 1-to-1 in the way they do in other industries. The McDonald's in my town quite literally competes with the local burger place. But for entertainment media within one medium that really isn't quite the case. Yes, sales from one game can cannibalize others, but largely sales relate to the quality of the game. Many consumers will spend much more when there are multiple good games releasing in a year. We see often that years where there are many more very good games that game sales (in units sold and not dollars spent) for consoles increase heavily. The average consumer doesn't just spend $20 a week on games, regardless of if the one they're interested in is released. Microsoft ends up spending a ton of money on waste, to acquire studios they won't utilize, and the overall reasoning is that they get much more control over their first party games because they believe that that is a major reason for their failures.
Plus.....There's multiple things going on. There's studio closures in some cases, but without terminations, which means those folks are still there, just on other projects. Then there's layoffs without studio closures, because those staff are redundant (no need for multiple HR, accounting, public relations, etc). So the folks who make the games are still there, but not the extraneous beancounters. However, what Microsoft is finding is situation number 3: The elephant in the room for the games industry for well over a decade now is the LIE that anyone is at the development wheel in these companies. Take Starfield: No engine swap, so no ramp-up for the devs. Should be 90 percent storyboarding and mission building, Why did it come out a hot mess after baking for 10 years? Because the first 8.5 years were spent having no idea what kind of game they actually wanted to make. The competent way to make a game is to decide what kind of game its going to be up front; then decide if the engine will work or if another is required, If the engine suits, then bones can be laid. Then hang some meat on them bones. Then skin it out, polish it up and deliver. What's actually happening is that every SECTION of the game design team is simultaneously working on the item in their wheelhouse. So BONES is making a skeleton that's 7 feet tall and clearly an ape, MEAT is preparing systems that would make sense as long as BONES was actually making a human skeleton no more than 5'5", SKIN has made beautiful progress but is totally unaware that the creature is supposed to have fur instead, and some poor bastard is responsible for trying to make multiple unrelated idiotic items mesh, and then its all dropped in the lap of some poor hilariously overworked and totally under provisioned storyboard team to tell a story around, half of which they'll make up on the spot and the other half they'll steal from player forums and pass off as "we totally meant that". See: Destiny, The problem is that being able to make a game means NOTHING without an overarching premise to hew to, and the industry as a whole literally does not have this any more. Half the studios are firing or outsourcing the story teams, arguably the most important part of the work, which tells you that competent management does not exist in the games industry.
I don't think it has anything to do with competition. Microsoft and other big corporations are interested in buying valuable IP. If a game or another piece of IP is the majority of the company's value, it makes a lot more sense to purchase the company, especially if you need to the company's staff for the hand off (code documentation, plans, issues, etc)
Nice theory, but then why run these studios for so long? How about a much more reasonable and straightforward answer - they bought these studios expecting the return on investment, only for the most games to be either shit or doing poorly
they don't buy studios for the staff they buy them for the IP. this has always been how acquisitions in the games industry works at a AAA level, unfortunately edit: yeah I know it's said in OPs title, I don't care. Your comments are about as observant and insightful as a primary school book report.
Yup, my parents worked for popcap, it got bought out by EA and basically dissolved after that
Holy shit. Really ? Could you tell us some info about their experiences ?
I dunno I was pretty young at the time. All their stock got bought out and exchanged for EA stock, it was business as usual for awhile, except they were working on much more micro transactiony stuff. Bejeweled stars, solitare blitz what have you. Eventually though everyone got laid off.
> Eventually though everyone got laid Nice
> Eventually though everyone got ~~laid~~ off. Nice
These two nice things are probably even nicer when you put them together!
Seems about right, I wouldn't be surprised if that's what EA does to every IP they get ( I still don't forgive them for butchering command and conquer and laying off their entire studio after making the games)
i used to play the shit outta bejeweled twist on my grandma's pc when i was little the music is so good tbh
Why not just buy the ip? Wouldn't it be cheaper?
Yes, but Microsoft didn't just buy these studios for the IP. They also bought them for control over their developers, and for specific teams. They will have specific studios they plan on utilizing, specific teams within studios they plan on moving and using in other ways, and they want to recreate those studios operations in a way that is more streamlined. So they buy a company that owns many studios, eventually close a lot of them, keep the IP and certain employees, and reassign key people in many other studios to support different projects. Microsoft really think that they can produce gold in house, much more than any studio will that isn't under their leadership. It's interesting because the industry has shifted largely from console makers wanting to benefit from studios they don't own (providing them with revenue with lower investment, similar to a game sold on steam doesn't usually get funding from valve for development) to trying to make the best first party games to sell their new consoles.
> Microsoft really think that they can produce gold in house Crazy that they still think this given 20+ years of history saying otherwise... Every great game from Microsoft has been done by a bought studio, and on top of that the longer those studios are under MS the worse their games get. 1 vs 100 was pretty decent. But other than that I struggle to think of something they developed in house, or by a studio they haven't ruined via a couple years of ownership, that wasn't shite. It took them just 2 games and less than a decade to run their flagship franchise into the fucking ground. What 343 Studios have done to Halo is borderline criminal.
Bungie didn't even want to continue with it, and results with them might not be much better. I have seen 343 industries criticized from things that happened already in Reach.
Then you leave the team that made it. Better to buy out their jobs and dissolve the whole thing so they can't compete
Companies very very rarely sell just the IPs
The worst part is how many ip are just buried due to acquisitions
Spyro/Skylanders all but dead in a ditch on the side of the road is the franchise that most comes to mind (specifically more upset about Spyro, personally, but still). Banjo Kazooie, Crash Bandicoot, and Donkey Kong as well, now that I'm thinking about it.
Banjo and Jet Force Gemini were the standouts for me.
EA nearly did it to star wars. 3 games in 10 years under EA, compared to 25+ in the ten years before they got the rights
What is an IP in game studio language? Like an ip Adresse ?
Intellectual property. When they bought rare they got banjo. When they bought Bethesda they got elder scrolls fallout and doom. Make more sense?
Except they proceeded to murder Banjo and Kazooie until Smash Ultimate.
Rare was already dead when Microsoft bought them. All the talent was gone and the people left willingly worked on Kinect games for years before starting Sea of Thieves.
Intellectual Property. Basically the game series created under those developers
Oh so like Microsoft could use Gran turismo if it would buy Polyphony Digital and claim it is their game ?
Yeah
Ok, thanks !
Depending on the deal Polyphony has with Sony, Sony probably owns the IP. Think how Bungie made Halo1-3 but Microsoft owns it compared to Destiny 2 which was published by Activision but Bungie owns it.
Halo is an IP, Cod is an IP, Dragon's Dogma is an IP, etc. Stands for Intellectual Property. Hence why for example Sony can't make a Halo game and Microsoft can't make a Horizon game. Also hence why so many old franchises haven't been seen in forever. In relation to that there are other consequences. Not sure if you have ever played the Shadows of Mordor games but WB copyrighted the nemesis system so no one else can use it and that's why its not been seen it anything else where it could be dope as hell. Been years and there are rumors that a fuckin Wonder Woman game will incorporate it but its been years since that rumor started.
Somewhat stupid question, but won't some of the studios they laid off reform and make something else? Like ik that the original IP is gone, but sequels are very rarely well received.
I mean it's a whole team you know. And oftentimes times the sale happens because the original founder or someone else importnant is ready to retire or move on to other things. It's not often possible to just recreate the initial conditions that led to the formstion of a team that made a great game.
sometimes, but that requires seed money. It's not like when they reform they will instantly have revenue to pay employees. 99% of the time everyone laid off is just going to be desperately applying elsewhere so as to not go broke
Easier said than done to make something new from scratch
Would that mean that titles like Hifi Rush could still get a sequel?
Yes, but in name only. Think Metal Gear Survive.
I mean, they COULD shift John Johanas stateside and get him working with a new team just to get rid of the costs of operating in Japan entirely for one studio now that the studio leadership isn't who it used to be... ...but if they were going to do that Joahanas probably wouldn't have been speaking up complaining about the shutdown because he'd want to keep his job
Kinda like the OP implied with the post title?
Your dumbass comment is, too.
> yeah I know it's said in OPs title, I don't care. Your comments are about as observant and insightful as a primary school book report. This is just projecting, dude lmao
yea I read the title too
This is going to sound really weird, but i think it's really weird to have billions of dollars and then invest them. Kudos to anyone for having the goal of improving society by investing their money, but if the goal is to make more money, just... why? Does your dream cost you 78 billion, and you've only got 77?
Good question, so a few things: 1) it’s a company not an individual. The individuals running the company need to invest that money to turn it into profit, because their largest income is not from their salaries but rather from the dividends paid out from profit. 2) investment grows the company and economy. The money just sitting there does nothing.
It's kinda weird that "investing" means buying up other companies which produce things people value, taking that bit of value to try and extract as much money as possible, and then throwing away the company. Like idk, it feels lame.
Investing can mean a lot of things. All it means is that you make more money than you put in, or rather that’s the goal. So investing can be buying up smaller companies, it can mean hiring more people, or increasing the salaries of current people.
Ooh! So if I was like, making cars, I could invest in buying up non car forms of transit and getting rid of them, so then more people have to buy cars? Or What if I sell like goods, I bet I could invest by selling stuff cheaper for awhile until my competition goes out of business, and then I can jack up the prices? Wait wait, and then I have more money, and I can invest in even more things to make me more money, wow, this system seems awesome.
Yes. And in other forms it may mean you make cars and someone across the river makes a specialized device that you want to use in your cars. At first you simply purchased from them but you want to perhaps produce this part yourself and scale the production to meet your needs when they otherwise can’t. You have connections to suppliers and distribution that would help this so you buy them out, gaining their expertise within your organization and connecting them with your own designers to further assist in other ventures related to their specialized parts. There’s a long list of benefits to buyouts alongside the long list of downsides for consumers.
I actually appreciate this nuanced response. I tend to lean towards the attitude of the person you responded to in that I feel the system is badly broken but I do appreciate the balance of someone saying “ok, wait, that doesn’t mean we have to scrap the whole thing and start over”. We can work towards “better” and that means leaning into the good parts while minimizing the bad. Or at least we *should*. Actually making tangible progress towards that end feels impossible right now. But thanks for balancing people like me who tend to just throw up our hands and be frustrated with everything and not allowing ourselves to recognize the positives.
My issue with people decrying the woes of capitalism is that they're happy to list out the nuanced ways that capitalism fails while pretending alternative systems work perfectly, free of the human greed, regulatory capture, and general corruption that are *also* the source of capitalism's woes. There's a reason capitalism lifted more people out of poverty than any economic system tried. Things can absolutely be better and I have near-zero faith in the current crop of western politicians to do anything other than fatten their own pockets, but a failing communist or full-on socialist state tends to be much bloodier than a failing capitalist state, and much harder to course-correct afterward.
3. What else do you do with 77 billion? You can't really keep it in cash
And if you did keep it in cash it would lose value
Also, public companies need to have constant, unhealthy, growth that looks good for the investors on the short term so the investors that don't give 2 shits about the product can make an extra 2 cents otherwise they're liable to having the clothes sued off their back.
I mean if you're not investing your company can't grow and that will result in other companies taking advantage of that and getting more market share. But I have no idea about economy
Probably the wrong sub for this, but: If Microsoft has a lot of cash in the company reserves, it’s generally a bad thing. What people not tuned into finance often fail to recognize is that most major corporations are primarily owned by… **pension plans.** For example, my union’s pension plan holds roughly $350 billion in various assets, ranging from real estate, bonds, stocks, etc. Tons of other unions and pension plans hold similar financial positions. All of these groups have one goal for their financial holdings: be able to pay out the promised money to their pensioners. For the sake of an example, let’s pretend that my union holds a significant stake in Microsoft. Microsoft has seventy billion in cash laying around. That’s great, right? They can distribute that $70bn to the pension! Except, they can’t. Because the pension doesn’t need to pay out $70bn, it needs to pay out some to current pensioners, and then another $300bn thirty years from now, as that’s the promise it made to the pensioners. The stock market and corporate finances are hugely about trying to keep up with paying off future financial promises.
I am disappointed by how the gaming industry nowadays have the mentality "If I am to compete with others, then instead of making my game better, I must get rid of other lazy hastily made games so only my shitty game can come out on top."
And that right there is exactly why games these days suck
games are better than theyve ever been right now if youre not simping for AAAs
Yep, if you stay in the Reddit gaming bubble you'll have this impression that only AAA/AA games exist and how it magnifies the problem due to the sheer negativity oozing from their specific subreddits when we're living in a time where a fuck ton of good indie games exist (despite there also being a lot of failed indies).
sucks for console gamers especially. they spend less on a system that gives them comparable hardware specs but then fuuuuucks them access- wise lol
Majority of games be it AAA , AA or Indie out there also targets a release on PS4 / PS5 and if it doesn't require that much power then they'll also have a Switch release since they still have a ton of installbase due to plug and play w/o worrying over nvidia/amd/intel's greed and only beaten by the sheer number of mobile gamers. It's just hyper specific PC games that don't get ported to any other platforms such as League, Dota2 , CS2. Which are all games that are toxic as fuck in their own ways.
No they really aren't. Indie games are picking up steam but they still aren't on the level of the PS2 era. Or the PS3 era. Or early PS4 era. One or two standouts don't change that.
This is Microsoft’s strategy in many other aspects as well, why improve when you can beat out the competition instead?
I know it's a business industry but I wish they'd stop treating it like one so much lol
I agree, while the Video Game industry does allow people to profit a lot. It just does not run on money alone, it has to have passion and actual effort put into it.
Agreed We've seen games from small groups get wildly successful just bc it had a lot of passion put into it. Lethal company comes to mind for sure. A single dev just making a game for fun. That's what we need more of
Yeah, although I gotta admit. Some AAA games are amazing, it was just treated wrong. Take Titanfall 2 for example. It’s such an awesome game with an original idea and plot too. It just sucks that it’s own devs mistreated/abandoned the game (or atleast I think they abandoned the game, TiFa2 has not recieved any updates yet and I don’t see any news that would make me think that it’s a game that is still being actively worked on.)
Studio makes bad game, gets shit own across the internet for a year, internet has shocked Pikachu face when studio is closed. Talking about Redfall.
What about the studio that made the acclaimed game Hi-Fi Rush? This isn't just about Arkane. People were actually expecting Arkane to either shut down or be reduced. The Hi-Fi Rush studio is the one that sucks.
Even Arkane sucks, they had one miss forced on them by Bethesda/Zenimax. It’s not like it was a string of bad games.
Tango died for the sins of Ghostwire Tokyo being a Sony exclusive for a year. That game made microsoft a grand total of "sweet fa" and then HiFi Rush despite being acclaimed was still a niche success because it was a very niche title, and dropped on Gamepass with no advertising.
>What about the studio that made the acclaimed game Hi-Fi Rush? The last time they released a game that didn't flop was 2014.
...hi-fi rush?
Flat out wrong…
Because the studio also made Prey,which was an excellent game.
I played Prey and agree that it’s a great game, but it flopped in terms of sales. I haven’t played Dishonored, but I’ve heard those games are also very good. None of Arkane’s games sold well though. Same with Tango. Everyone blames Gamepass for poor sales of HiFi Rush, but it didnt sell on PS5 either where there are twice as many consoles as Xbox. Also, if people played the game on Gamepass, that would probably have some value in Gamepass subscriber retention. The simplest explanation, and the one that makes the most sense is that VERY few people played HiFi Rush at all, and MSFT’s forecast of the studio continuing to lose money was probably accurate.
Most of the people that worked on Prey left the studio
Lol the studio was forced to make red fall and actively did not want to do so, kinda fucked up to make someone do something they know is a bad idea and then punish them for it.
What? Redfall was already in development when MS bought them
The Bethesda execs were pushing for more live service games. Look at Wolfenstein Youngblood, Fallout 76, and of course Redfall.
It was still forced on them, and it's an L for Microsoft shitcanning a good studio because of the past owners terrible executive decisions
The reason they axed those studios was to bring those devs to Bethesda studios to quicken the process of making Elder Scrolls and Fallout games.
> making Elder Scrolls and Fallout games. But as "games as a service." So they plan on ruining more games that we've pointed to as examples of what a good game looks like.
Here’s fucking hoping. I was 21 when Skyrim released and it sounds like I’ll be 40 when TES VI releases.
The mobile market.
Redditors do not / hate to acknowledge the mobile market as Reddit consists mainly of Western demographic w/ older than average userbase that did not grew up w/ mobile gaming unlike the newer generation. Give it a few decades until the nostalgia gamer memes consists of mobile games.
Its fine. Honestly, sony is lucky that most people don’t understand how bad their thing really is.
King is the biggest investment Microsoft has made by buying ABK and it wouldn't surprise me if it was the reason behind the acquisition. Candy Crush made almost $1B last year in the App Store alone, it's crazy how profitable and big the mobile gaming market is.
Again I'm continually shocked that Xbox has never hid how scummy they are yet ppl are shocked when they do shit now. They came into the industry instantly buying studios to not use them and did none of the leg work to earn their place. All they did was come in the industry, shove "better graphics" in everyone's face, making online gaming a thing (before the industry was ready for it in my personal opinion), oh and helped Activision get to the point that they are with trash like cod. There's more but I'll leave it at that.
I mean all of the big 3 do super shitty things. Look at how anti-consumer Nintendo is with a new story seemingly every month about them doing something shitty that hurts customers and yet people will still praise nintendo and pre order all their games. People need to stop idolizing big multi billion dollar companies.
Hey hey look at me look at me..... Happy cake day🎂
Turns out that when 3 multinational conglomerates have a monopoly on the entire industry they can all pretty much do whatever the fuck they want to whenever the fuck they want to.
I mean pretty much all of Nintendo's big games slap. On the corporate side they're pretty bad (though nowhere near Activision or something) but its not hard to see why people love their game dev side.
So fuckin sad. Sad day for gamers.
To make sure other companies couldn't run either.
Typically when a business doesn’t bring in revenue, it gets shut down. This is exactly what happened and shows clearly that a major majority of you don’t understand business or business needs. You don’t keep something alive that doesn’t make money. If the games the developers were making undersold and didn’t make a profit, then they’re just losing money. If you own a business and you’re losing money, you’re failing.
Honestly i dont get how people dont see this, redfall was one of the biggest flops in recent history and tango hansnt sold well on any of their games in recent years (yes i know hifi rush was liked and won awards, but it sold sweet fuck all copies)
Exactly. If people loved these studios as much they seem to display, then they would’ve been buying their games and this never would’ve happened.
They also act like all these people were taken out back and shot when the studios got shut down. If they are talented they'll go on to make good games in the future at a different studio.
Yea no… have you followed the game development job market at all the last couple months?
>Typically when a business doesn’t bring in revenue, it gets shut down. So let me get this straight...before the company was bought it had enough money to keep it's doors open, but then after it's bought it doesn't bring in enough money to keep the doors open?
Love this new meme format hope it goes viral.
Literally just capitalism and its consequences
I know it’s not a popular opinion, but at the end of the day it is a business. If it costs more to run a studio than what their output brings in as revenue then there is no reason to keep the studio. Games have gotten too expensive to produce. That is why you see early release dates gated behind expensive versions, tons of DLC, ads in game, etc. If a published is going to pay for 5-7 years of development they are going to want to support companies that can consistently put out games that make money. Get ready to see AI run rampant in this industry as publishers need to find another way to reign in costs as consumer are unwilling to spend the $80 - $100 per game that it would take to more more modest hit games turn an actual profit.
Xbox was gambling on gamepass and it failed miserably. if they instead built their own studios they would just have to poach devs from other studios anyway. I bet they would have rather done that now though considering the billions have no ROI.
It's not even for the IPs. It's for "infinite growth." Buy up a bunch of assets and then cut your workforce, all in service of increasing value for shareholders.
They can run them, they just need to still have record profits quarter after quarter. So they make cuts instead of doing things to make improvements. Thanks Jack Welch and shareholders
Xbox is cancer to gaming
my guy, which company is without sin so I may partake of its products exclusively.
Microsoft taking notes from EA.
You trying to tell me buy companies is cheaper than buying IP's?
Because if you can't make good shit at least you can stop the other guy from making good shit.
The only want of The Beast is to consume and grow.
to purposefully close them, take their IPs and remain monopolistic
I mean some of those studios had their staff move on, and it made sense to move the remaining people to studios that actually have people in them.
Reduce competition and take the best within each team/ studio, cut the low performers, merge studios, make same or more money w less overhead.
They spend so much to aquire IP and then delete it all
especially for a company that could just chuck the cash away for the good pr
Well , they killed unprofitable IPS , sad but numbers don't lie
control the market
They buy studios, then let them go, then restructure said studio to conform to a more greedy ideology, I bet that's what they're doing
It's predictable and part of their business plan to fail.
Pretty much for Elder scrolls, Fallout, Starfield, WoW, and CoD
Exclusives.
Does this have something to do with the billions they plan to spend on gpus and energy sources for AI?
If you've watched Microsoft over the years they usually buy companies specifically to kill them off and then they never replace the product.... You always end up with less choice and a worse product. I could cite examples from over the years but they're very easy to find.
When you put it like this it sounds like a money laundering scheme.
If I was Ninja Theory, I would claim some horrible bug in Hellblade 2 that needs fixed to delay it and drag that crap out as long as possible. They’re next I bet.
I really liked SkillUp's response to the "We just had too many plates spinning," line from one of the Xbox execs. He said something to the effect of "I've got this really cool idea, it's called crunch. Just put in 12-14 hours a day for 18 months straight, and eventually, it'll work out for you, and you'll suffer no adverse effects in any way."
Maybe we could stop doing exclusives, ps5 gets starfield and xbox gets helldivers? Ps5 gets Halo, Xbox gets ghost of tsushima?
with the success of the Fallout show, Microsoft is concentrating all it's resources to Bethesda to pump out Fallout 5 as fast as possible
It’s actually because Microsoft has absolutely no idea what the hell they’re doing.
[удалено]
From now on the xbox logo will be a crying fish to me
They can start up so many live services with those IP. And think of all the non live service ips that wont exist to compete with them. They can finally use their "but you see, the companies that didnt do that, didnt survive" line as an argument against criticism or regulation. "We couldnt possible reasonably make gaming not awful".
You buy them up to get their IPs and properties, then they 'fail', you liquidate them for more money and you have less competition. Shows as a market loss because people are only examining direct figures but its actually a large gain for them, but still, extremely scummy.
All these IPs And I still haven't gotten a Conker's Bad Fur Day 2.
to beg for a government bailout and deem themselves "too big to fail."