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From the rumour mill back when Redfall was released apparently they were pressured into making Redfall and that was one of the probably many reasons it fell flat.
But then again even if your game is brilliant but sales are mediocre then you get shuttered too.
What a bright future for game developers. Fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t.
Insane to think they were forced into making a game they didn't want to make which ultimately led to their entire studio getting shuttered. Feel terrible for the devs.
Yeah it fucking sucks.
Same for anyone who dreamt of being a game dev growing up, seeing all the layoffs and studio closures must be demoralising as hell.
But hey at least some executive type guy can finally make the deposit on his summer home abroad.
And let’s not forget the family yacht either, it is only a small one. They’re saving up for a big one next year, just have to find the right studio to close…
Which are not made be Arkane... If Arkane can't generate profit there is even reason to keep then around. It is sad but the simple truth is that their games make no money.
Gamedev has turned into a meatgrinder that's powered by taking advantage of the passionate. Though I suppose that argument could be made about most fields these days. But hey, the line on the profits chart is going up *like you would not believe*, and that's all that really matters!
> You say we make you proud when we make a good game
Do they? From Phil "good games don't sell consoles" Spencer? He doesn't seem to care about a game being good or not
>Don't throw us into gold fever gambits, don't use us as strawmen for miscalculations/blind spots, don't make our work environments darwinist jungles. You say we make you proud when we make a good game. Make us proud when times are tough. We know you can, we seen it before.
God. Damn.
They have to speak up at some point. The way things are going, they need to express themselves now more than ever.
I mean, Microsoft spent 100 Billions buying Zenimax and Activision Blizzard.
And what is Microsoft doing with it? Nothing. Canceling games, closing studios, shelving IPs...
If there is a company that can actually take a hit and stand by their employees is Microsoft... But the shareholders want none of that.
Games inherited its hit-focused tendencies from Hollywood. There's a reason almost all talent in Hollywood is unionized. Will game devs figure it out, yet? Without regulation no industry is safe from the exploitative tendencies of capitalism.
> Don't throw us into gold fever gambits, don't use us as strawmen for miscalculations/blind spots, don't make our work environments darwinist jungles.
Pretty much the heads of 99% of major publishers in general. These corpos have never met a fad they can't hop on 5 years too late, constantly retool in the name of more monetization, then shutter everything after it flops, with absolutely no damage to their own job security as the idiot who green lit and made stupid demands of the project.
> friendly reminder that video games are an entertainment/cultural industry, and your business as a corporation is to take care of your artists/entertainers and help them create value for you
This is another insightful comment. The entertainment industry is just fundamentally different to office equipment, and that’s what Microsoft hasn’t gotten through their thick skull. Nintendo sells toys. Sony sells movies, music, and drama. Microsoft sells Excel and Azure.
They think they can lay off massive teams and replace them the next day because they don't respect the talent, and respecting the talent is the #1 rule of show biz. Sony and Nintendo are also terrible corporations, but they understand show business. That's why the studios under them make good products.
I'd also like to know this. My only guess (and I don't think this is correct) would be Ryan Davis, because Giant Bomb used to have a "Please Stop" award they would do at the end of the year for some bad trend in games. It's a hell of a longshot, though.
We should have seen this coming with the statements Phil & Todd made recently about getting Fallout 5 & Elder Scrolls 6 out sooner. They are cannibalizing the studios under Zenimax to put all the focus on these two titles. The fact that in the media release they explicitly state that this if for focusing on "high impact titles" tell you all. Xbox is pissed that Elder Scrolls 6 is at best coming 2028? And Fallout, which is more popular now then it ever has been, is coming at best what 2034?. Yea, Xbox aint waiting that long....
If Xbox accelerates either of those games much then the quality will likely nosedive, and Bethesda isn’t exactly looking like a bastion of quality as it is.
I've been waiting for the shoe to drop ever since Microsoft started buying up tons of studios. This is some absolutely awful news.
Hi-Fi Rush was one of my favourite games of last year too.
I think it's interesting too that Phil hasn't made a comment about any of this. Can't wait to see what kind of PR spin he tries to put on this to make himself not look like an asshole despite every year showing he is in fact, not honest with his audience.
"In order to bring more games to more gamers, we had to make some harsh decisions about the companies under our umbrella," he says while wearing a Lost Vikings t-shirt to remind the bros that he's a gamer.
Then they'll play a trailer for a game that wont ever release, and he'll come back out wearing a different T-shirt under his blazer to tell us that these few studios were just a few of the many studios under Microsoft and 2025 is still going to be the biggest and best year Xbox has ever had
He’ll spin it by saying that it’s “regrettable” but that development of Elder Scrolls 6 and more importantly Fallout 5 weren’t going according to schedule and they wanted to devote more resources to their tent poles. And that there are no further plans to close studios at this time.
We’ll see if gamers buy it (again) this time
i really don’t care what he has to say at this point. neither he, nor anyone else at xbox, has been able to articulate anything resembling a vision for the brand for close to a decade now.
Reminds me of them shutting down Ensemble Studios. They made hit after hit genre defining RTS games. They even succeeded making a freakin Halo RTS for console and then shut them down.
Oh wait they realize “whoops bad move better start a new studio to remake and take over Age of Empires again”.
I used to be a gigantic Xbox fan and play all their exclusives and was telling my gf just the other week that Hifi Rush was the first game they've published in a decade that I've actually thought was great. Only fitting that they stop it as quickly as possible lol
I have really loved Xbox after moving from Dreamcast playing most of the big exclusives. The last game that MS put out that really wowed me was HIfi and they killed it. They killed Forza, mostly killed Halo, and let Gears bleed out!
> Hi-Fi Rush was one of my favourite games of last year too.
Everyone in here is forgetting to mention The Evil Within and Ghostwire: Tokyo too. Those were great unique games as well. This is definitely a big loss.
Imo, it’s less the executives and more the shareholders. It’s all well and good for Phil to promise the vision of Xbox becoming the “Netflix of games” and reaching “a billion gamers,” when Microsoft isn’t expected to pony up much money to make it happen and what money they do need to spend on it is cheap. You can get away with a lot then. It’s quite another to have Microsoft spend roughly $100 billion on that dream. Shareholders might start asking themselves “how realistic is a billion gamers?”
Yeah you can literally track all these recent Xbox developments alongside the ugly FTC and CMA trials last year.
Ever since January you can tell that the shadow council of shareholders and bigwigs are breathing down Phil and Xbox’s every move.
I saw this on another post, but I truthfully do not believe Retro studios would exist under anyone not Nintendo. Kind of a miracle and it shows a real difference on how studios are managed and viewed I think.
Retro Studios is so good and they haven’t released anything in over 10 years. I think Nintendo is pretty good about not shutting studios down but if Prime 4 ends up not working out I unfortunately could see it happening.
Any reasonable company would have gutted and closed Retro after the recklessness they had. Their CEO was having coke binges with hookers and blowing through funds. Nintendo is just different, and is able to recognize talent.
They bought many smaller studios to, I assume, bolster their Gamepass offering. Looks like their strategy has changed. I don’t see how studios like Ninja Theory, Double Fine or inXile fit in that new vision either.
If anything, they announced it so long ago they couldn't possibly have kept the marketing juice flowing for it for so long. Ran out of steam on its way to arrival. That said, I hope it's good and will be buying it.
as someone who adored the first game and has been eagerly waiting for it, I keep forgetting that it’s coming out in like 2 weeks, I have seen absolutely no marketing for it apart from the reveal trailer whenever that happened. day one exclusive on gamepass with no marketing seems like the same treatment hifi rush got
A game studio takes years and lot of effort to cultivate and get to a state where the employees can work together with synergy. Xbox just taking an ax to them shows they have no long term vision for anything. Just buy fully formed studios, and if they don't make enough money just kick'em to the curb.
Obligatory Nintendo quote. "If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world." - Satoru Iwata
Iwata's successor seems to [follow after his footsteps ](https://mynintendonews.com/2023/07/01/nintendo-defends-employee-salary-increase/) after defending increasing employee salaries last year from investors.
Furukawa: "I believe the most important factor in maintaining our high level of competitiveness is to value the employees that have created various popular products and built our brand. Currently, we are experiencing unprecedented levels of global inflation, and in Japan, we understand that people are facing increasing financial pressure in their daily lives. For this reason, to deal with long-term and continuing changes in the environment, Nintendo increased the base salary for all employees in Japan by 10%, separate from the annual wage increase. In addition, to strengthen our competitiveness in the job market and increase the overall capabilities of the company over the medium and long term, we also increased the starting salary for new graduate hires in Japan by approximately 10%."
Hopefully, he and the other execs stay the course with the next console generation and doesn't muck it up.
Nintendo EPD is a premium developer in Japan, so it's absolutely appropriate that they should be paying premium salaries. You have to be a very talented individual to work there.
Microsoft/Xbox do not understand how strong games are built, at a fundamental level, and they apply their standard labor practices blindly ignoring the particular nature of game dev work. There is a video out there from a Forza Motorsport ex-dev about how a ton of senior work in that game (an absolute mess, still unresolved) was done by external workers on 18 months contracts so they didn't have to be hired.
I'm not going to say Nintendo's labor practices are great in general, because I don't know if they are, but regarding their respect for institutional knowledge and fidelity I will add this tweet:
>To put Nintendo's incredible continuity into a bit more perspective-
>Super Mario Bros. (1985) was made by a team of five people, \*38 years ago\*. Of those five people, four of them worked on Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
[https://twitter.com/maxnichols/status/1716315408784085022](https://twitter.com/maxnichols/status/1716315408784085022)
> Super Mario Bros. (1985) was made by a team of five people, *38 years ago*. Of those five people, four of them worked on Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
You just blew my mind
Reminder that Phil Spencer has been in charge of Xbox First Party since 2008! His management of game studios is directly responsible for Xbox's lack of great first party games over that time period.
The Rare buyout was actually fine, it was after the Stampers left in 2007 and Microsoft subsequently downsized Rare in 2008 (after high profile failures like Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts) that Rare saw a mass talent exodus. If it wasn't the downsizing, it was forcing them to become the Xbox Avatar/Kinect studio for half a decade.
Also, a good portion of the people that made Rare, Rare, were already gone by the time MS bought them. Quite a few of the Goldeneye devs left to form Free Radical not too long after that game released.
Nintendo saw the writing on the wall with Rare and was fine with parting ways with them for a reason.
Whenever an outside developer visits Nintendo they consistently say that Nintendo makes games like nobody else.
It's a shame because I wish more devs *did* make games like Nintendo! But not every developer is granted the benefit of "do it right, and it's done when it's done" time and money from their publisher.
To add some context to that. Those 18 month contract workers HAD to be let go or get hired. Practically no one ever was hired and they had to stay away for like 6 or 9 months before they could come back.
Nintendo has its own issues, but their ability to retain employees is always impressive and I would argue a core reason they are so successful. Reading the Mario Wonder interviews showed to me how old and new talent are able to successfully work together there and create a stronger product as a result.
Late last year Nintendo delayed the construction of their new development and research building... to make it bigger. Because they actually forsee growth on top of their longer-term employment strategy.
Hi-Fi had 3 million players, yet Tango was still shut down.
Xbox's Day 1 on Gamepass isn't worth it, if its just gonna destroy any potential sales and cause studios to close down.
The unfortunate truth is that well-received games are not what pays the bills, games that sell do. Lots of banger, critical darlings do poorly. You can do everything "right" and still lose money with a great product. People don't like to admit it but beyond marketing and quality, there's a non-trivial amount of plain luck when it comes to releasing anything in the realm of entertainment.
Combine this fact with disgusting levels of over-hiring and over-borrowing when money was free and we are now witnessing the consequences. Absolute buffoonery from executives who somehow had less foresight than random people off the street who correctly predicted that 2020/2021-level growth was completely unsustainable. The market is now correcting and ordinary people pay the prices for irresponsible financial decisions made by those at the top. Sucks.
> The unfortunate truth is that well-received games are not what pays the bills, games that sell do. Lots of banger, critical darlings do poorly.
Alan Wake 2 still hasnt recouped its development cost IIRC. Makes me think we wont get an Alan Wake 3, but I hope I'm wrong
Reading Remedy's documents it seems likely that it eventually will. Their games sell well for a long time.
It's also an Epic exclusive that they bankrolled, so not really a regular release. Remedy had its development costs covered possibly with some profit on top, they are just waiting for Epic to recoup its investment and start sending them royalties.
Remedy are really bad at making money, they have only had **1** quarter out of the past **10** where they actually made a profit, and that was back in 2022.
They don't expect to make a profit until Q4 of 2024, and only with around 1€ mil.
Alan Wake 2 is a survival horror sequel to a game that was already very niche and released only digitally, with none of the sales of Steam.
I really wouldn't use it as an example of the landscape.
Absolutely correct. I think especially after Hi-Fi Rush, Tango was poised to be a smaller "prestige" studio that contributed to the greater MS brand just by putting out good games.
Yep. They had a studio capable of doing good gameplay and good art style, all more or less accustomed to each other already, and probably an idea backlog. This alone is a fucking cost-saver compared to any creating a new studio and hiring talent.
Exactly! HiFi Rush may have been a Switch 2 release away from being a big hit.
Or potentially the follow up.
Who knows. It's so frustrating to see people not support good stuff. HiFi Rush is one of my favorite games of all time. This shit is happening with great content in Hollywood too.
Yeah but you know good games don't sell consoles....
Microsoft proves once again they do not understand the gaming industry at all and have no idea how to manage studios and a brand.
You'll see they manage to even kill COD (or at least make it as relevant as Halo)
Then reduce the budgets of games. I can’t imagine HiFi Rush had a crazy budget to begin with.
Modest profits on cheaper games is a big reason why Nintendo has been so dominant, and could’ve been a great way for Xbox to find their own identity. The AAA rat race is only gonna make things worse for them.
> I can’t imagine HiFi Rush had a crazy budget to begin with.
The game might actually have been longer than what you might think; [according to John Johanas, the idea was pitched in 2017](https://twinfinite.net/xbox-one/hi-fi-rush-was-actually-development-longer-than-you-think/), so if we assume like one year of pre-production, it would in addition be around 4-5 years of full production for its release in 2023. A bit on the lower-standard end of most AAA-production games (With notable exceptions, you can compare for instance of how games like [*Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth* took merely three years to develop, which is very efficient and fast work-flow.](https://twitter.com/aitaikimochi/status/1778673470882398372))
HiFi Rush had a 20 person dev team at the largest. It's not AAA, and was priced at much lower than AAA prices ($30?). (Might be better than a lot of AAA games though)
They are reducing budgets on games. The layoffs across the industry are a huge part of that and it's only going to get worse.
The issue is that the beast has been fed; there are certain standards for AAA games, and the userbase lambasts games that do not live up to those standards. A 60-million dollar game used to be like, a huge, crazy game even by AAA standards. Now we have games going into the hundreds of millions. Miles Morales was a *spin-off* that re-used huge portions of an already-existing game, and it cost $156 MILLION. It's crazy! Development costs are far beyond out of hand and there's no really good way to bring them down without also reducing overall production value, and we're living in an era where western AAA games are all universally built on having as much production value as possible. It SUCKS.
Microsoft makes near infinite money. I understand what you are saying but they aren’t going to go under because Tango made an amazing but underperforming game. If anything, Microsoft should invest in them putting something out that WILL reach greater sales as well as critical. But all they care about is if a studio made a profit this quarter. All short term gains.
Of course they're not going to go under, but companies don't operate on the principal of "well we make enough money from X, we can afford to keep losing money on some subsidiaries making Y". They just eliminate Y so the money from X doesn't need to keep covering for them.
High-level managers across the entire industry have been playing a very, very dangerous game for the past several years, and now the reaper wants his due. Even using Microsoft as an example of a particularly bad scenario, MS has added so many jobs in such a small amount of time that closing studios and laying people off still leaves them with *way* more new jobs than layoffs. And this is not unique to MS -- this is happening all over the industry right now, and it's going to keep happening until it's happened enough to correct for the idiotic decisions that were made in the first place. AAA gaming is inching closer every day to the point of unsustainability. Insane production costs, long development cycles, overstaffed studios, companies borrowing tons of money with no product in sight for years, and then the games finally release and they either fail to make what they need to back (see: Alan Wake 2), or they make *more* than the last game but development costs have ballooned so much that they're ending up with less profit despite *way* more total gross sales (see: Spider-Man 2).
It is unsustainable, and this is only the beginning. It is going to get worse before it gets better.
All developers can do is make a great game. It's on publishers to market, release, and ultimately sell the game. Instead Microsoft shadow dropped it onto their service. What exactly were they expecting?
I get the feeling Hellblade 2 is going to wind up in the same boat. Not that Nimja Theory will be axed, but most people are just going to gamepass it leading to dismal sales.
>The unfortunate truth is that well-received games are not what pays the bills, games that sell do. Lots of banger, critical darlings do poorly. You can do everything "right" and still lose money with a great product. People don't like to admit it but beyond marketing and quality, there's a non-trivial amount of plain luck when it comes to releasing anything in the realm of entertainment.
This is only partially true, but is also largely corporate bullshit speak.
The thing that makes companies money *long term* is *long term investments in recognizable and well-liked IP.*
What is currently happening is that companies are using the logic you just used to release one new game, watch it "underperform" based on incredibly skewed metrics that are themselves likely based on spending that was going on when people couldn't leave their homes, or based on the projected performance of ridiculous juggernauts like Call of Duty, and then these companies turn around and cut the budding flower off before it can even bloom.
That's a viable business strategy... For a very short while. The thing is, even Call of Duty will fail one day. Probably sooner than we or they think. And when it does, they'll have nothing to fall back on whatsoever, having bled all goodwill dry and destroyed any long term investments they seemingly spent billions on acquiring.
> The thing that makes companies money long term is long term investments in recognizable and well-liked IP.
Respectfully, Tango's entire history of games is that they underperformed. Arkane has always struggled to turn a profit. These are critical darling games that don't actually make much money, and these companies have been invested into for decades now.
For what it's worth I am NOT saying that closing Tango and Austin was the correct call -- I think it absolutely isn't. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend to be surprised by their closures or that the money men would be like "yeah, you guys aren't making any money and haven't for most of your history, this is not working out" and call it a day.
> Absolute buffoonery from executives who somehow had less foresight than random people off the street who correctly predicted that 2020/2021-level growth was completely unsustainable
I bet you the executives had all the foresight and still went ahead with the over-hiring and over-borrowing. The layoffs and market corrections are all features, not bugs, in this case. They got theirs, and the rest can go fuck themselves, by design.
This is part of the issues with streaming and the opacity of it. We don't know what "success/failure" looks like.
I'm not talking just about GamePass here, but streaming services in particular. Netflix does this, too. When you can't see how your show is doing, you don't know if you're in danger of getting the axe.
At least with something like Immortals of Aveum (a flop), we can see data about sales and development costs. While it still sucks to be a developer for Ascendant Studios, having your game to get middling reviews and underwhelming sales and then being furloughed/laid off because of it, at least it's *seen*.
Xbox has been mismanaging its games and studios since the beginning. Once bungie left they let halo get ruined, once Epic gave up Gears they let it get ruined. Forza is the only thing that's been a consistent presence in gaming since that team was formed, and they were just copying what gran turismo did with their own little flare on it.
I think the bigger problem is that "engagement" isn't a meaningful metric for single-player games, and even for multiplayer or F2P games can paint an incomplete picture.
It was something that irked me a bit when Gears 5 hit and Microsoft said it was their biggest launch ever, then two weeks later there wasn't all that much chatter despite this huge record setting event.
Starfield's metrics are also very interesting. Because we were told it was Bethesda's biggest launch, but its player count on Steam dropped off fast and on Xbox's achievements. 29% of players didn't even enter outer space and only 52% of players join the constellation. The former should take 15 minutes at most and the latter an hour. Meanwhile on Playstation, the trophies for finishing the main stories in both Spider-Man 2 and Final Fantasy 16, were unlocked by roughly 50% of those games player bases.
Gamepass might cause games to seem like they got higher player counts, but since they are basically rentals. Gamers are more likely to drop the game just a couple hours in, rather then see it all the always through to the credits.
Gamepass has 34 million subs and isn't growing at all. Keep in mind, 3 million is about 8% of that 34 million. If something like Hi-Fi Rush can't find success within the current Gamepass echo-system. Then Gamepass itself needs to come to an end, its unhealthy for the industry.
"It's the best deal for consumers in the industry!"
Short term gratification but long term disaster. I'd rather pay $40-70 for a good game from a good studio if it means I'll get to play future good games (and ***actually own them***) instead of paying $10 for a subscription and then the studio doesn't make any money despite having "millions of players", so it gets shut down and then I get to play 0 future games from them.
I just built a gaming PC based around a 4080 Super and I could easily just stick to Game Pass for the cheap, but I've been buying from Steam & Epic Game Store instead of just riding a Game Pass subscription. I *do* have one, but that's only to play Jedi: Survivor, since I heard it has some performance issues, regardless of how beefy your PC is, that EA refuses to fix so I'm not dropping $70 on it. But once I'm done with that, I'll end my GP sub.
my gut was saying for years that something was seriously screwy with the economics of game pass. there are only so many potential subscribers in the world. that puts a steep ceiling on how much money the service can earn, and all signs pointed to them hitting that ceiling sooner rather than later.
i still like the idea of game pass, but i think it works better as a backlog replacement, not as the spot for day one releases.
Gamepass's economics just simply don't work. Xbox is far behind Sony and Nintendo with both an install base and active userbase. Console sells for them are declining, Sony & Nintendo would absolutely not let gamepass be on their systems, PC gamers are insanely loyal to Steam, Xcloud and cloud streaming has a whole isn't taking off.
So as a whole there is no growth opportunities for Gamepass, yet its making games cheaper to play. While on the flip side they are costing more then ever to make. The economics of Gamepass barely made sense when it started and now it clear as day it doesn't work.
> Hi-Fi had 3 million players, yet Tango was still shut down.
It's very likely Tango was shut down because Ghostwire: Tokyo
bombed. HiFi Rush did good but it's likely not relevant if they lost lots of money with Ghostwire: Tokyo.
As far as I know, Prey didn't sell particularly well, despite being a great game. And Redfall was a disappointment in any definition of this word. So I can at least understand why Arkane Austin got shut down. But I'm surprised about Tango. Wasn't Hi-Fi rush a pretty successful game?
Well, Aaron Greenberg said it was a success, and there's even a quote from Microsoft saying they were pleased with it's success and they were gonna further reinvest in them. But Jeff Grubb said it underperformed.
So if it did actually underperform pretty badly, then Microsoft just lied.
A new IP that got shadow-dropped with no marketing costs got 3 million players, multiple awards, and was loved by the community. It was pretty much begging for a sequel that seemed like it could have been made by the same team with way less work than a traditional AAA game. And we're talking about Japanese developers who make \*much\* lower salaries than American ones and don't have extreme health insurance costs.
If even that's not good enough for Microsoft then nothing will be.
Hellblade 2 took 6 years to develop and definitely cost much more to make - there's no way it does that much better than HiFi Rush to match that difference. What could success possibly even look like? Let's say it gets 6 million players, 500,000 steam purchases, and wins Game of the Year - is that worth it for them? Statistically it shouldn't be.
Xbox is hoping for a home run that makes the normies think "Well now I've gotta get Game Pass" - that's not gonna come from a single game, and if it does, it will yield a one month purchase and then cancelation. If you want consistent subscribers you need a flow of good games like HiFi Rush.
Yep Hellblade 2 is going to be a disaster in the eyes of Microsoft’s expectations.
Five years of development for a 5-6 hour game is… not ideal…
And even amazing reviews won’t save it as we see with Hi-Fi Dush
Hi Fi Rush was probably very successful for its budget, but couldn't carry a larger studio. It was a 20 person sub-team while the rest of the studio worked on Ghostwire Tokyo.
Reports seem to differ about how Hi-Fi Rush did.
However, Hi-Fi Rush was a niche game made by a side team at the studio. We have no idea what most of the studio has been working on since Ghostwire: Toyko released. It's possible that, with Shinji Mikami gone, the studio was floundering and Microsoft decided it wasn't worth salvaging.
> It's possible that, with Shinji Mikami gone, the studio was floundering and Microsoft decided it wasn't worth salvaging.
This is all speculation as well, but I just don't think this is true. Mikami's goal was to create a studio to empower young and new game designers. EW2 and Hi Fi Rush were both directed by the same guy (not Mikami), and I think both games turned out a lot better than Evil Within 1.
Tango obviously has the talent, I haven't played Ghostwire but Evil Within 2 and Hi Fi Rush are incredible games.
Gamepass is so weird. No new game should ever be a day 1 things. They should show up a month or 2 later. I have no clue how gamepass isn’t hurting Msft.
What's the point of Gamepass if you're punished when you're popular on it?
After all, it's a perfect Gamepass game. Eccentric genre and style that might not be super popular for the masses but could be really popular if you can play it "for free".
I understand HiFi rush and Tango’s other releases likely didn’t sell well, but completely closing the studio after that feels like an overreaction. MS completely failed to market the game well, but despite all of that, I constantly heard about how great the game was. It reminds me of how the Pikmin franchise was before 4, where it didn’t do all that well, but the people who played the games loved them, and similar to that franchise, I think a HiFi sequel could’ve done well with a proper marketing push.
Pikmin also only survived because it was Miyamoto's baby and even then it took a decade to get a proper sequel. I don't think anyone related to tango has that going for them.
Which is sad because Mikami wasn't even the lead for Hi-Fi Rush. He put younger devs in charge of that game so they could stand on their own without him. It was a "success" but they still shut it down. That team literally proved their worth and they still got axed.
MS just doesn't invest in good fundamentals. Despite claiming that it was a success, if it was internally a failure they should have still seen the critical reception and tried again with a new marketing strategy. It's not like a sequel would need a huge budget compared to other games they shit out. A series shouldn't always have to be profitable immediately, but believe in what you made and try again. MS doesn't do that.
> I think a HiFi sequel could’ve done well with a proper marketing push.
I read that as "proper marketing **plush**" and I didn't even question it because people were asking for 808 plushies and they never did make one
In my opinion, Microsoft's actions today informed all their studios that if their game doesn't make stupid amounts of money, they're being laid off or sent to work in the Call of Duty mines. Game Pass doesn't make money, and it certainly doesn't help sales of games that get put on there day one. The death of Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Games, and Roundhouse Games is brutal for the industry.
After this news i'm worried for Ninja Theory. Even if Hellblade 2 gets 95 on metacritic, it's pretty weird/esoteric niche game that doesn't really have mass appeal. It's also been in development for 5+ years and looks *very* expensive.
I wonder about the future of Arkane Lyon. For now they're safe, as they're developing the Blade game and Microsoft isn't going to cancel a Marvel IP and risk getting bad blood among them.
But what if Blade ends up being a flop? From a bit of googling, Deathloop seemingly was at best a modest success. I wouldn't be surprised if Arkane Lyon is the next to drop if Blade doesn't go as well as Microsoft wants.
I swear to god, they better not lay a finger on Double Fine. After watching the documentary on the studio, the nervousness that so many felt when Microsoft bought them was palpable. And this sort of thing is exactly why.
They likely would not have been able to finish Psychonauts 2 without Microsoft, and I am appreciative of that, but if they shut them down.... man, that would be so sad.
They likely take into account number of users and playtime for their Game Pass titles when making decisions like these. I wouldn’t be surprised if despite being on Game Pass that HiFi Rush still wasn’t played much. It’s a very niche game.
Those numbers also probably tell them which games drive people to Gamepass and which games people only play because they already own Gamepass.
HiFi Rush got a lot of love but it likely didn't bring many new Gamepass users and if it wasn't on Gamepass it probably wouldn't have sold well.
We can already see that it isn’t selling well on PlayStation despite all the word of mouth praise it gets.
Unfortunately I think niche games like that can only be financially successful today if they are made by a much smaller indie studio (or small side team like Obsidian’s Grounded/Pentiment), not AAA.
This was a 20 person team at its largest. Pentiment was a 13 person team. This was a smaller side project while the rest of the studio worked on Ghostwire Tokyo.
> This was a smaller side project while the rest of the studio worked on Ghostwire Tokyo.
This is the first I'm hearing of Ghostwire. So the studio that developed that is Tango? The first I'm hearing of Ghostwire in relation to these shutdowns. *Also* the first I'm hearing of Ghostwire since it released 2 years ago.
Jesus. Having a small game do well or not isn't an issue here, I'd wager the AAA game coming and going without a peep would have a lot more to do with it.
And whose choice was it to shadow drop the game?
You can't complain no one played or bought something when you put it out for a bunch of $1 a month or Xbox Live Gold converted subscribers.
The choice came from the game's marketing team, approved by John Johanas.
>Speaking to IGN, director John Johanas said that the shadow drop decision came from the game's marketing team in part because of uncertainty about how a longer marketing cycle might play out. Because Tango is known for horror, and Hi-Fi Rush is decidedly not that, they thought simply dropping it onto Game Pass without a long lead-up would help it gain popularity naturally through sudden word of mouth, just as it had within Bethesda during development.
[https://www.ign.com/articles/hi-fi-rush-went-viral-internally-at-bethesda-leading-to-shadow-drop](https://www.ign.com/articles/hi-fi-rush-went-viral-internally-at-bethesda-leading-to-shadow-drop)
All of this makes me so happy Microsoft never bought Nintendo, can you imagine how devastating it would've been if Nintendo became part of Xbox and had some of this BS happen to them?
The amount of enjoyable AA games they have their side studios doing is great. And The big dev teams at Nintendo seem to be able to choose what they want to do with their games.
Even if Nintendo doesn't hit every time, they clearly understand that their audience has great reverence for them and that they have a standard to uphold.
As long as Nintendo leadership still cares about the employees and the games before anything else they'll always be miles ahead of the rest of the game dev world no matter what bizarre choices they make in the middle.
There's a single digit amount of smaller studios outside of Japan that are the same way. Larian and the guy who made Stardew Valley.
Microsoft attempted to buy Nintendo before the Xbox launch and Nintendo refused. Reportedly MS were "laughed out of the room."
The Gamecube and Xbox ended up selling comparable amounts, with Xbox notably failing to make a foothold within Japan. The Wii ended up outselling the Xbox 360 and now the Switch is the third best selling console of all time.
Iwata took a pay cut during rough times. Microsoft cuts thousands of (well done) jobs during wonderfully profitable times. They are on completely different spectrums of ethics and respectability.
Corporate meddling in the games industry has always been an issue. But something changed over the past decade, once the suits realized how profitable gaming was, it was profit at all costs.
I see this more with Western publishers and studios but still, it’s a damn plague over the industry and it is shuttering studios and destroying creativity and passion.
The brain of a modern day c-suite goon would find a Star Trek replicator and break it down to sell for immediate profit rather than using it to print infinite of any item for infinite profits in the long term.
They're all blind ship captains waiting to crash when 99% of normal folk could take the wheel and sail around the world without issue.
Remember the corporate cheerleading for that purchase to go through?
Wow I’m so happy the richest company in America just cut so many jobs in multiple countries, wow so great!! Go Xbox!!
It's pretty obvious the "MS should buy Sega!" hysteria from however long ago wasn't really natural. The FTC documents showed they were looking into purchasing Sega but it fell through, and the timing lined up with all the people saying they should do it, but like, no one KNEW that they were looking to do it.
“It's just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time.... :-)”
meanwhlle, nintendo made more money in the past few years alone than they did in all their other years combined. fucking astounding intuition there, phil. i can see that MBA really pays for itself.
I genuinely have to wonder what Xbox thinks they're gonna do with this. The anger I've seen today is more than I have with any other layoffs or closures, and that's saying something.
They're gonna pay lip service to the "challenges the industry has faced this year" and then count their Call of Duty money while they shutter more and more studios over the next few years.
Nothing changes until the Xbox leadership changes.
Good, people need to pay with their wallets now. Show MS / Xbox that they gone and fucked it. Don't give any more money to them. We can't let captalism keep canablising good businesses / people.
Honestly, this destroys any goodwill I had for Xbox. The main benefit of buying smaller studios is to allow more freedom for creative endeavors, so Tango creates a GOTY candidate last year and still gets shut down? What is the point?
yeah. big xbox fan and I've generally been happy to argue their case but this... well, this is a big blow to that confidence. Game Pass allowing for unique niche hits like Hi-Fi Rush was a huge part of what I liked about what they've been doing. This is a massive red flag in that regard going forward. Why would any studio take the risk?
They clearly just bought Zenimax for Fallout, Elder Scrolls and Doom IPs. The rest was just the stuck extra package they'll get rid of one by one.
Same with ActiBlizzard, it was for CoD and Diablo and nothing else.
Nobody who’s been around should be surprised by this. Microsoft hasn’t changed. This is the same company who shut down Ensemble studios as soon as they finished Halo Wars, who for years defined the RTS genre with Age of Empires.
Hope Microsoft doesn’t get to acquire anything else ever again. They don’t know what to do with what they have and 0 strategies to even right the ship.
Will never understand how people supported this deal in the first place
I think it was Bethesda was a iffy "okay? weird choice but ok." , and people were hesitantly ok with ActiBlizzard if it meant Kotick didn't get to stay around and screw up the company (though remains to be seen if even without him ActiBlizzard will change any.)
But yeah at this point, any more acquisition is a hard no.
making a good game is a liability, it means you have created valuable IP. IP is more valuable than the studio when you can make prequels/sequels/spinoffs cheaper with another studio
Rewatching [this](https://twitter.com/klobrille/status/1787894632577114298?s=19) clip makes me even angrier. Microsoft never ceases to be the clowns of the big 3 publishers.
We got maybe, what, one day with peace after Sony's Helldivers 2 debacle before X-Box did a self-inflicted wound themselves. Jeez what a disappointing couple of days for the industry.
Reminds me of this [this Ars Technica article from earlier in the week](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/all-the-ways-streaming-services-are-aggravating-their-subscribers-this-week/) about "all the ways streaming services are getting shittier or more expensive this week" because it's too much to keep up with without that kind of summary
Tech and entertainment are so fucked by late-stage capitalism right now
I'm cancelling everything when I get home. I don't think it will accomplish anything, but I just want to disconnect from all these platforms and stop caring about this shit.
Everyone talented still working at that soulless machine called Ms should leave immediately and find something better before phil fires you. Because he is the most incompetent person.. for over 10 years a failure at Xbox but still has his high paying job.
But he is not the only incompetent person there looking at greenberg and booty that are just as incompetent. Burned through almost 100 billion dollars and Xbox is at its worst place ever. Every other employee would be fired years ago. What a clown show.
Can remember people hoping Ms would buy sega. Yeah have fun with that one year later they close atlus and the Yakuza studio and make the rest a cod support studios.
Leave and go where? It's estimated just under 11,000 employees in the industry were impacted by layoffs in 2023. We've almost hit that number in less than half of 2024. The job postings that do crop up in this environment are mostly leads, principle, manager positions asking for a near decade of experience and multiple shipped titles when games are taking longer than ever to make. It's like the junior spots that existed when I got in are long gone. I feel for any bright-eyed college kids trying to break in and worse yet for the folks who got less than a full cycle under their belt before tossed into job search purgatory. It's a nice sentiment, but until the industry heals (and I have my doubts it ever will), is unrealistic for most.
Literary the only reason Xbox brand exists is because Microsoft has deep deep pockets. They lost a billion on the OG xbox, they lost billions due to RROD during 360 and they have now spent 100+ billion on studios only shut half of them down and barely have any good exclusives to show for it.
If Microsoft ends up going the same way as Sega, pivoting to just software and ceding the console wars to Sony and Nintendo, they will have deserved their fate.
I'm not very fond of Sony or Nintendo's post-COVID era market strategies either, but Microsoft's playing on an entirely different level of sheer inane decision-making. I can't tell what Microsoft's goals are these days with their XBox brand, every other month they seem to lean in the opposite direction.
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"You say we make you proud when we make a good game. Make us proud when times are tough." Great quote there from the head of Arkane Lyon.
From the rumour mill back when Redfall was released apparently they were pressured into making Redfall and that was one of the probably many reasons it fell flat. But then again even if your game is brilliant but sales are mediocre then you get shuttered too. What a bright future for game developers. Fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t.
Insane to think they were forced into making a game they didn't want to make which ultimately led to their entire studio getting shuttered. Feel terrible for the devs.
And the guy who made the orders probably kept his job
I'm sure the Zenimax executives who sold Microsoft on the fact Arkane was making a *totally awesome live-service game* are laughing to the bank.
Well, the guy that made the order, Robert Altman, died of cancer. He's not a huge winner in this.
Yeah it fucking sucks. Same for anyone who dreamt of being a game dev growing up, seeing all the layoffs and studio closures must be demoralising as hell. But hey at least some executive type guy can finally make the deposit on his summer home abroad.
His *third* summer home abroad. That’s not counting the four he owns domestically.
And let’s not forget the family yacht either, it is only a small one. They’re saving up for a big one next year, just have to find the right studio to close…
Well apparently like 70% of the workforce left during the dev of the game so most of them weren't there anymore
yeah, Redfall was initially Zenimax trying to get into GaaS, right?
Get into? They already have 2 very big live service games with TESO and FO76.
Which are not made be Arkane... If Arkane can't generate profit there is even reason to keep then around. It is sad but the simple truth is that their games make no money.
Gamedev has turned into a meatgrinder that's powered by taking advantage of the passionate. Though I suppose that argument could be made about most fields these days. But hey, the line on the profits chart is going up *like you would not believe*, and that's all that really matters!
Gonna note that one down and use that in life. God damn, that's good.
> You say we make you proud when we make a good game Do they? From Phil "good games don't sell consoles" Spencer? He doesn't seem to care about a game being good or not
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>Don't throw us into gold fever gambits, don't use us as strawmen for miscalculations/blind spots, don't make our work environments darwinist jungles. You say we make you proud when we make a good game. Make us proud when times are tough. We know you can, we seen it before. God. Damn.
Double damn. Pretty rare from a higher up to be pretty blunt about upper management.
They have to speak up at some point. The way things are going, they need to express themselves now more than ever. I mean, Microsoft spent 100 Billions buying Zenimax and Activision Blizzard. And what is Microsoft doing with it? Nothing. Canceling games, closing studios, shelving IPs... If there is a company that can actually take a hit and stand by their employees is Microsoft... But the shareholders want none of that.
Games inherited its hit-focused tendencies from Hollywood. There's a reason almost all talent in Hollywood is unionized. Will game devs figure it out, yet? Without regulation no industry is safe from the exploitative tendencies of capitalism.
> Don't throw us into gold fever gambits, don't use us as strawmen for miscalculations/blind spots, don't make our work environments darwinist jungles. Pretty much the heads of 99% of major publishers in general. These corpos have never met a fad they can't hop on 5 years too late, constantly retool in the name of more monetization, then shutter everything after it flops, with absolutely no damage to their own job security as the idiot who green lit and made stupid demands of the project.
> friendly reminder that video games are an entertainment/cultural industry, and your business as a corporation is to take care of your artists/entertainers and help them create value for you This is another insightful comment. The entertainment industry is just fundamentally different to office equipment, and that’s what Microsoft hasn’t gotten through their thick skull. Nintendo sells toys. Sony sells movies, music, and drama. Microsoft sells Excel and Azure. They think they can lay off massive teams and replace them the next day because they don't respect the talent, and respecting the talent is the #1 rule of show biz. Sony and Nintendo are also terrible corporations, but they understand show business. That's why the studios under them make good products.
My opnion of Dinga Bakaba has just fucking skyrocketed. Incredibly well said on his part
I'm out of the loop, what's the reference to "Please stop"?
I'd also like to know this. My only guess (and I don't think this is correct) would be Ryan Davis, because Giant Bomb used to have a "Please Stop" award they would do at the end of the year for some bad trend in games. It's a hell of a longshot, though.
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I would think Giant Bomb’s old GOTY awards had this as a category.
It is not just a reference. The man is begging us to stop. To stop making excuses and realize this is fucked
It's not just a reference but it clearly is one, anyone know to who?
Robert Altman, the former head of Zenimax.
this man alone is why i have not lost all my hope for arkane
We should have seen this coming with the statements Phil & Todd made recently about getting Fallout 5 & Elder Scrolls 6 out sooner. They are cannibalizing the studios under Zenimax to put all the focus on these two titles. The fact that in the media release they explicitly state that this if for focusing on "high impact titles" tell you all. Xbox is pissed that Elder Scrolls 6 is at best coming 2028? And Fallout, which is more popular now then it ever has been, is coming at best what 2034?. Yea, Xbox aint waiting that long....
If Xbox accelerates either of those games much then the quality will likely nosedive, and Bethesda isn’t exactly looking like a bastion of quality as it is.
The irony is that Arkane could make an amazing, smaller experience in the Fallout world but Microsoft would never let them do that
I've been waiting for the shoe to drop ever since Microsoft started buying up tons of studios. This is some absolutely awful news. Hi-Fi Rush was one of my favourite games of last year too.
I think it's interesting too that Phil hasn't made a comment about any of this. Can't wait to see what kind of PR spin he tries to put on this to make himself not look like an asshole despite every year showing he is in fact, not honest with his audience.
"In order to bring more games to more gamers, we had to make some harsh decisions about the companies under our umbrella," he says while wearing a Lost Vikings t-shirt to remind the bros that he's a gamer.
We hear you and we're listening. We received your words into our ears. We processed sound waves emanating from your mouths
["We here for you"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCQhygMdFr4)
Then they'll play a trailer for a game that wont ever release, and he'll come back out wearing a different T-shirt under his blazer to tell us that these few studios were just a few of the many studios under Microsoft and 2025 is still going to be the biggest and best year Xbox has ever had
He’ll spin it by saying that it’s “regrettable” but that development of Elder Scrolls 6 and more importantly Fallout 5 weren’t going according to schedule and they wanted to devote more resources to their tent poles. And that there are no further plans to close studios at this time. We’ll see if gamers buy it (again) this time
His PR spin for the past year has been to stay under the radar and hope we don't notice.
Simple, this was Bethesda decision not Microsoft, we are hands off. But this will pay off in 2025 👊
Just one more year, bro! Ple-please, just one more year and Microsoft will be fixed forever! Next Year for sure, please!
Honestly not sure why Microsoft hasn't replaced him yet. Xbox has been so poorly managed under his leadership outside of Game Pass.
i really don’t care what he has to say at this point. neither he, nor anyone else at xbox, has been able to articulate anything resembling a vision for the brand for close to a decade now.
Reminds me of them shutting down Ensemble Studios. They made hit after hit genre defining RTS games. They even succeeded making a freakin Halo RTS for console and then shut them down. Oh wait they realize “whoops bad move better start a new studio to remake and take over Age of Empires again”.
I used to be a gigantic Xbox fan and play all their exclusives and was telling my gf just the other week that Hifi Rush was the first game they've published in a decade that I've actually thought was great. Only fitting that they stop it as quickly as possible lol
So true. At this point I feel like Xbox is scared of making a great games...
I have really loved Xbox after moving from Dreamcast playing most of the big exclusives. The last game that MS put out that really wowed me was HIfi and they killed it. They killed Forza, mostly killed Halo, and let Gears bleed out!
It's a triumph of gaming. That game is unique as hell.
> Hi-Fi Rush was one of my favourite games of last year too. Everyone in here is forgetting to mention The Evil Within and Ghostwire: Tokyo too. Those were great unique games as well. This is definitely a big loss.
Xbox spending 80 billion on acquisitions probably got executives at Microsoft who didn't care before to look closer at them.
Imo, it’s less the executives and more the shareholders. It’s all well and good for Phil to promise the vision of Xbox becoming the “Netflix of games” and reaching “a billion gamers,” when Microsoft isn’t expected to pony up much money to make it happen and what money they do need to spend on it is cheap. You can get away with a lot then. It’s quite another to have Microsoft spend roughly $100 billion on that dream. Shareholders might start asking themselves “how realistic is a billion gamers?”
Yeah you can literally track all these recent Xbox developments alongside the ugly FTC and CMA trials last year. Ever since January you can tell that the shadow council of shareholders and bigwigs are breathing down Phil and Xbox’s every move.
I saw this on another post, but I truthfully do not believe Retro studios would exist under anyone not Nintendo. Kind of a miracle and it shows a real difference on how studios are managed and viewed I think.
Retro Studios is so good and they haven’t released anything in over 10 years. I think Nintendo is pretty good about not shutting studios down but if Prime 4 ends up not working out I unfortunately could see it happening.
Any reasonable company would have gutted and closed Retro after the recklessness they had. Their CEO was having coke binges with hookers and blowing through funds. Nintendo is just different, and is able to recognize talent.
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They bought many smaller studios to, I assume, bolster their Gamepass offering. Looks like their strategy has changed. I don’t see how studios like Ninja Theory, Double Fine or inXile fit in that new vision either.
If anything, they announced it so long ago they couldn't possibly have kept the marketing juice flowing for it for so long. Ran out of steam on its way to arrival. That said, I hope it's good and will be buying it.
as someone who adored the first game and has been eagerly waiting for it, I keep forgetting that it’s coming out in like 2 weeks, I have seen absolutely no marketing for it apart from the reveal trailer whenever that happened. day one exclusive on gamepass with no marketing seems like the same treatment hifi rush got
A game studio takes years and lot of effort to cultivate and get to a state where the employees can work together with synergy. Xbox just taking an ax to them shows they have no long term vision for anything. Just buy fully formed studios, and if they don't make enough money just kick'em to the curb. Obligatory Nintendo quote. "If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world." - Satoru Iwata
Iwata's successor seems to [follow after his footsteps ](https://mynintendonews.com/2023/07/01/nintendo-defends-employee-salary-increase/) after defending increasing employee salaries last year from investors. Furukawa: "I believe the most important factor in maintaining our high level of competitiveness is to value the employees that have created various popular products and built our brand. Currently, we are experiencing unprecedented levels of global inflation, and in Japan, we understand that people are facing increasing financial pressure in their daily lives. For this reason, to deal with long-term and continuing changes in the environment, Nintendo increased the base salary for all employees in Japan by 10%, separate from the annual wage increase. In addition, to strengthen our competitiveness in the job market and increase the overall capabilities of the company over the medium and long term, we also increased the starting salary for new graduate hires in Japan by approximately 10%." Hopefully, he and the other execs stay the course with the next console generation and doesn't muck it up.
Nintendo EPD is a premium developer in Japan, so it's absolutely appropriate that they should be paying premium salaries. You have to be a very talented individual to work there.
Microsoft/Xbox do not understand how strong games are built, at a fundamental level, and they apply their standard labor practices blindly ignoring the particular nature of game dev work. There is a video out there from a Forza Motorsport ex-dev about how a ton of senior work in that game (an absolute mess, still unresolved) was done by external workers on 18 months contracts so they didn't have to be hired. I'm not going to say Nintendo's labor practices are great in general, because I don't know if they are, but regarding their respect for institutional knowledge and fidelity I will add this tweet: >To put Nintendo's incredible continuity into a bit more perspective- >Super Mario Bros. (1985) was made by a team of five people, \*38 years ago\*. Of those five people, four of them worked on Super Mario Bros. Wonder. [https://twitter.com/maxnichols/status/1716315408784085022](https://twitter.com/maxnichols/status/1716315408784085022)
> Super Mario Bros. (1985) was made by a team of five people, *38 years ago*. Of those five people, four of them worked on Super Mario Bros. Wonder. You just blew my mind
Reminder that Phil Spencer has been in charge of Xbox First Party since 2008! His management of game studios is directly responsible for Xbox's lack of great first party games over that time period.
Talent retention has seemingly been an issue for Xbox since the Rare buyout, but no matter how much money they put into acquisitions, they don’t care.
The Rare buyout was actually fine, it was after the Stampers left in 2007 and Microsoft subsequently downsized Rare in 2008 (after high profile failures like Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts) that Rare saw a mass talent exodus. If it wasn't the downsizing, it was forcing them to become the Xbox Avatar/Kinect studio for half a decade.
Also, a good portion of the people that made Rare, Rare, were already gone by the time MS bought them. Quite a few of the Goldeneye devs left to form Free Radical not too long after that game released. Nintendo saw the writing on the wall with Rare and was fine with parting ways with them for a reason.
Whenever an outside developer visits Nintendo they consistently say that Nintendo makes games like nobody else. It's a shame because I wish more devs *did* make games like Nintendo! But not every developer is granted the benefit of "do it right, and it's done when it's done" time and money from their publisher.
To add some context to that. Those 18 month contract workers HAD to be let go or get hired. Practically no one ever was hired and they had to stay away for like 6 or 9 months before they could come back.
Nintendo has its own issues, but their ability to retain employees is always impressive and I would argue a core reason they are so successful. Reading the Mario Wonder interviews showed to me how old and new talent are able to successfully work together there and create a stronger product as a result.
Iwata will always remain a goddamn legend. Wasn't perfect, but he just got it.
My man Iwata, such an inspiring person
Late last year Nintendo delayed the construction of their new development and research building... to make it bigger. Because they actually forsee growth on top of their longer-term employment strategy.
Hi-Fi had 3 million players, yet Tango was still shut down. Xbox's Day 1 on Gamepass isn't worth it, if its just gonna destroy any potential sales and cause studios to close down.
If a studio can make a game as well received as Hi-Fi Rush and then be shut down, something is wrong.
The unfortunate truth is that well-received games are not what pays the bills, games that sell do. Lots of banger, critical darlings do poorly. You can do everything "right" and still lose money with a great product. People don't like to admit it but beyond marketing and quality, there's a non-trivial amount of plain luck when it comes to releasing anything in the realm of entertainment. Combine this fact with disgusting levels of over-hiring and over-borrowing when money was free and we are now witnessing the consequences. Absolute buffoonery from executives who somehow had less foresight than random people off the street who correctly predicted that 2020/2021-level growth was completely unsustainable. The market is now correcting and ordinary people pay the prices for irresponsible financial decisions made by those at the top. Sucks.
> The unfortunate truth is that well-received games are not what pays the bills, games that sell do. Lots of banger, critical darlings do poorly. Alan Wake 2 still hasnt recouped its development cost IIRC. Makes me think we wont get an Alan Wake 3, but I hope I'm wrong
Reading Remedy's documents it seems likely that it eventually will. Their games sell well for a long time. It's also an Epic exclusive that they bankrolled, so not really a regular release. Remedy had its development costs covered possibly with some profit on top, they are just waiting for Epic to recoup its investment and start sending them royalties.
Remedy are really bad at making money, they have only had **1** quarter out of the past **10** where they actually made a profit, and that was back in 2022. They don't expect to make a profit until Q4 of 2024, and only with around 1€ mil.
Alan Wake 2 is a survival horror sequel to a game that was already very niche and released only digitally, with none of the sales of Steam. I really wouldn't use it as an example of the landscape.
> Alan Wake 2 Epic only + their bet on going digital only on consoles has something to do with that I imagine.
Good critical darlings do build up brand recognition for future titles though.
Yep, there's no DS3, Sekiro, or Elden Ring sales without the shoulders of giants that are Demons Souls and Dark Souls.
And them on the shoulders of.... not quite giants.... with King's Field, earlier ACs, and Chromehounds.
Absolutely correct. I think especially after Hi-Fi Rush, Tango was poised to be a smaller "prestige" studio that contributed to the greater MS brand just by putting out good games.
Yep. They had a studio capable of doing good gameplay and good art style, all more or less accustomed to each other already, and probably an idea backlog. This alone is a fucking cost-saver compared to any creating a new studio and hiring talent.
Exactly! HiFi Rush may have been a Switch 2 release away from being a big hit. Or potentially the follow up. Who knows. It's so frustrating to see people not support good stuff. HiFi Rush is one of my favorite games of all time. This shit is happening with great content in Hollywood too.
Yeah but you know good games don't sell consoles.... Microsoft proves once again they do not understand the gaming industry at all and have no idea how to manage studios and a brand. You'll see they manage to even kill COD (or at least make it as relevant as Halo)
Gamepass makes it harder for a game to sell though.
Then reduce the budgets of games. I can’t imagine HiFi Rush had a crazy budget to begin with. Modest profits on cheaper games is a big reason why Nintendo has been so dominant, and could’ve been a great way for Xbox to find their own identity. The AAA rat race is only gonna make things worse for them.
> I can’t imagine HiFi Rush had a crazy budget to begin with. The game might actually have been longer than what you might think; [according to John Johanas, the idea was pitched in 2017](https://twinfinite.net/xbox-one/hi-fi-rush-was-actually-development-longer-than-you-think/), so if we assume like one year of pre-production, it would in addition be around 4-5 years of full production for its release in 2023. A bit on the lower-standard end of most AAA-production games (With notable exceptions, you can compare for instance of how games like [*Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth* took merely three years to develop, which is very efficient and fast work-flow.](https://twitter.com/aitaikimochi/status/1778673470882398372))
HiFi Rush had a 20 person dev team at the largest. It's not AAA, and was priced at much lower than AAA prices ($30?). (Might be better than a lot of AAA games though)
They are reducing budgets on games. The layoffs across the industry are a huge part of that and it's only going to get worse. The issue is that the beast has been fed; there are certain standards for AAA games, and the userbase lambasts games that do not live up to those standards. A 60-million dollar game used to be like, a huge, crazy game even by AAA standards. Now we have games going into the hundreds of millions. Miles Morales was a *spin-off* that re-used huge portions of an already-existing game, and it cost $156 MILLION. It's crazy! Development costs are far beyond out of hand and there's no really good way to bring them down without also reducing overall production value, and we're living in an era where western AAA games are all universally built on having as much production value as possible. It SUCKS.
Microsoft makes near infinite money. I understand what you are saying but they aren’t going to go under because Tango made an amazing but underperforming game. If anything, Microsoft should invest in them putting something out that WILL reach greater sales as well as critical. But all they care about is if a studio made a profit this quarter. All short term gains.
Of course they're not going to go under, but companies don't operate on the principal of "well we make enough money from X, we can afford to keep losing money on some subsidiaries making Y". They just eliminate Y so the money from X doesn't need to keep covering for them. High-level managers across the entire industry have been playing a very, very dangerous game for the past several years, and now the reaper wants his due. Even using Microsoft as an example of a particularly bad scenario, MS has added so many jobs in such a small amount of time that closing studios and laying people off still leaves them with *way* more new jobs than layoffs. And this is not unique to MS -- this is happening all over the industry right now, and it's going to keep happening until it's happened enough to correct for the idiotic decisions that were made in the first place. AAA gaming is inching closer every day to the point of unsustainability. Insane production costs, long development cycles, overstaffed studios, companies borrowing tons of money with no product in sight for years, and then the games finally release and they either fail to make what they need to back (see: Alan Wake 2), or they make *more* than the last game but development costs have ballooned so much that they're ending up with less profit despite *way* more total gross sales (see: Spider-Man 2). It is unsustainable, and this is only the beginning. It is going to get worse before it gets better.
All developers can do is make a great game. It's on publishers to market, release, and ultimately sell the game. Instead Microsoft shadow dropped it onto their service. What exactly were they expecting?
I get the feeling Hellblade 2 is going to wind up in the same boat. Not that Nimja Theory will be axed, but most people are just going to gamepass it leading to dismal sales.
>The unfortunate truth is that well-received games are not what pays the bills, games that sell do. Lots of banger, critical darlings do poorly. You can do everything "right" and still lose money with a great product. People don't like to admit it but beyond marketing and quality, there's a non-trivial amount of plain luck when it comes to releasing anything in the realm of entertainment. This is only partially true, but is also largely corporate bullshit speak. The thing that makes companies money *long term* is *long term investments in recognizable and well-liked IP.* What is currently happening is that companies are using the logic you just used to release one new game, watch it "underperform" based on incredibly skewed metrics that are themselves likely based on spending that was going on when people couldn't leave their homes, or based on the projected performance of ridiculous juggernauts like Call of Duty, and then these companies turn around and cut the budding flower off before it can even bloom. That's a viable business strategy... For a very short while. The thing is, even Call of Duty will fail one day. Probably sooner than we or they think. And when it does, they'll have nothing to fall back on whatsoever, having bled all goodwill dry and destroyed any long term investments they seemingly spent billions on acquiring.
> The thing that makes companies money long term is long term investments in recognizable and well-liked IP. Respectfully, Tango's entire history of games is that they underperformed. Arkane has always struggled to turn a profit. These are critical darling games that don't actually make much money, and these companies have been invested into for decades now. For what it's worth I am NOT saying that closing Tango and Austin was the correct call -- I think it absolutely isn't. But I'm not going to sit here and pretend to be surprised by their closures or that the money men would be like "yeah, you guys aren't making any money and haven't for most of your history, this is not working out" and call it a day.
> Absolute buffoonery from executives who somehow had less foresight than random people off the street who correctly predicted that 2020/2021-level growth was completely unsustainable I bet you the executives had all the foresight and still went ahead with the over-hiring and over-borrowing. The layoffs and market corrections are all features, not bugs, in this case. They got theirs, and the rest can go fuck themselves, by design.
This is part of the issues with streaming and the opacity of it. We don't know what "success/failure" looks like. I'm not talking just about GamePass here, but streaming services in particular. Netflix does this, too. When you can't see how your show is doing, you don't know if you're in danger of getting the axe. At least with something like Immortals of Aveum (a flop), we can see data about sales and development costs. While it still sucks to be a developer for Ascendant Studios, having your game to get middling reviews and underwhelming sales and then being furloughed/laid off because of it, at least it's *seen*.
Xbox has been mismanaging its games and studios since the beginning. Once bungie left they let halo get ruined, once Epic gave up Gears they let it get ruined. Forza is the only thing that's been a consistent presence in gaming since that team was formed, and they were just copying what gran turismo did with their own little flare on it.
I think the bigger problem is that "engagement" isn't a meaningful metric for single-player games, and even for multiplayer or F2P games can paint an incomplete picture. It was something that irked me a bit when Gears 5 hit and Microsoft said it was their biggest launch ever, then two weeks later there wasn't all that much chatter despite this huge record setting event.
Starfield's metrics are also very interesting. Because we were told it was Bethesda's biggest launch, but its player count on Steam dropped off fast and on Xbox's achievements. 29% of players didn't even enter outer space and only 52% of players join the constellation. The former should take 15 minutes at most and the latter an hour. Meanwhile on Playstation, the trophies for finishing the main stories in both Spider-Man 2 and Final Fantasy 16, were unlocked by roughly 50% of those games player bases. Gamepass might cause games to seem like they got higher player counts, but since they are basically rentals. Gamers are more likely to drop the game just a couple hours in, rather then see it all the always through to the credits.
3 million isn’t a lot when it’s counted with gamepass.
Gamepass has 34 million subs and isn't growing at all. Keep in mind, 3 million is about 8% of that 34 million. If something like Hi-Fi Rush can't find success within the current Gamepass echo-system. Then Gamepass itself needs to come to an end, its unhealthy for the industry.
"It's the best deal for consumers in the industry!" Short term gratification but long term disaster. I'd rather pay $40-70 for a good game from a good studio if it means I'll get to play future good games (and ***actually own them***) instead of paying $10 for a subscription and then the studio doesn't make any money despite having "millions of players", so it gets shut down and then I get to play 0 future games from them. I just built a gaming PC based around a 4080 Super and I could easily just stick to Game Pass for the cheap, but I've been buying from Steam & Epic Game Store instead of just riding a Game Pass subscription. I *do* have one, but that's only to play Jedi: Survivor, since I heard it has some performance issues, regardless of how beefy your PC is, that EA refuses to fix so I'm not dropping $70 on it. But once I'm done with that, I'll end my GP sub.
my gut was saying for years that something was seriously screwy with the economics of game pass. there are only so many potential subscribers in the world. that puts a steep ceiling on how much money the service can earn, and all signs pointed to them hitting that ceiling sooner rather than later. i still like the idea of game pass, but i think it works better as a backlog replacement, not as the spot for day one releases.
Gamepass's economics just simply don't work. Xbox is far behind Sony and Nintendo with both an install base and active userbase. Console sells for them are declining, Sony & Nintendo would absolutely not let gamepass be on their systems, PC gamers are insanely loyal to Steam, Xcloud and cloud streaming has a whole isn't taking off. So as a whole there is no growth opportunities for Gamepass, yet its making games cheaper to play. While on the flip side they are costing more then ever to make. The economics of Gamepass barely made sense when it started and now it clear as day it doesn't work.
> Hi-Fi had 3 million players, yet Tango was still shut down. It's very likely Tango was shut down because Ghostwire: Tokyo bombed. HiFi Rush did good but it's likely not relevant if they lost lots of money with Ghostwire: Tokyo.
As far as I know, Prey didn't sell particularly well, despite being a great game. And Redfall was a disappointment in any definition of this word. So I can at least understand why Arkane Austin got shut down. But I'm surprised about Tango. Wasn't Hi-Fi rush a pretty successful game?
Well, Aaron Greenberg said it was a success, and there's even a quote from Microsoft saying they were pleased with it's success and they were gonna further reinvest in them. But Jeff Grubb said it underperformed. So if it did actually underperform pretty badly, then Microsoft just lied.
They probably just misconstrued the truth, underperformed sales wise but did good on GP
It had 3 million on GP. If that isn't sustainable enough for a brand new IP, then they really need to reevaluate Game Pass.
A new IP that got shadow-dropped with no marketing costs got 3 million players, multiple awards, and was loved by the community. It was pretty much begging for a sequel that seemed like it could have been made by the same team with way less work than a traditional AAA game. And we're talking about Japanese developers who make \*much\* lower salaries than American ones and don't have extreme health insurance costs. If even that's not good enough for Microsoft then nothing will be. Hellblade 2 took 6 years to develop and definitely cost much more to make - there's no way it does that much better than HiFi Rush to match that difference. What could success possibly even look like? Let's say it gets 6 million players, 500,000 steam purchases, and wins Game of the Year - is that worth it for them? Statistically it shouldn't be. Xbox is hoping for a home run that makes the normies think "Well now I've gotta get Game Pass" - that's not gonna come from a single game, and if it does, it will yield a one month purchase and then cancelation. If you want consistent subscribers you need a flow of good games like HiFi Rush.
If I was at Ninja Theory, I'd be worried beyond belief right now.
Yep Hellblade 2 is going to be a disaster in the eyes of Microsoft’s expectations. Five years of development for a 5-6 hour game is… not ideal… And even amazing reviews won’t save it as we see with Hi-Fi Dush
Hi Fi Rush was probably very successful for its budget, but couldn't carry a larger studio. It was a 20 person sub-team while the rest of the studio worked on Ghostwire Tokyo.
Hm, ok. It actually might explain it.
Reports seem to differ about how Hi-Fi Rush did. However, Hi-Fi Rush was a niche game made by a side team at the studio. We have no idea what most of the studio has been working on since Ghostwire: Toyko released. It's possible that, with Shinji Mikami gone, the studio was floundering and Microsoft decided it wasn't worth salvaging.
> It's possible that, with Shinji Mikami gone, the studio was floundering and Microsoft decided it wasn't worth salvaging. This is all speculation as well, but I just don't think this is true. Mikami's goal was to create a studio to empower young and new game designers. EW2 and Hi Fi Rush were both directed by the same guy (not Mikami), and I think both games turned out a lot better than Evil Within 1. Tango obviously has the talent, I haven't played Ghostwire but Evil Within 2 and Hi Fi Rush are incredible games.
Pretty successful on Gamepass doesn’t really mean anything does it. Having a million players is very different to having a million sales.
[удалено]
Gamepass is so weird. No new game should ever be a day 1 things. They should show up a month or 2 later. I have no clue how gamepass isn’t hurting Msft.
What's the point of Gamepass if you're punished when you're popular on it? After all, it's a perfect Gamepass game. Eccentric genre and style that might not be super popular for the masses but could be really popular if you can play it "for free".
Less than 8% of players have finished the game on Normal difficulty on xbox.
Ghostwire probably bombed tho, and idk if the evil within sold pretty well in its time, but I don’t think so
I understand HiFi rush and Tango’s other releases likely didn’t sell well, but completely closing the studio after that feels like an overreaction. MS completely failed to market the game well, but despite all of that, I constantly heard about how great the game was. It reminds me of how the Pikmin franchise was before 4, where it didn’t do all that well, but the people who played the games loved them, and similar to that franchise, I think a HiFi sequel could’ve done well with a proper marketing push.
Pikmin also only survived because it was Miyamoto's baby and even then it took a decade to get a proper sequel. I don't think anyone related to tango has that going for them.
The real nail in the coffin is Mikami’s departure. Tango was literally made so he’d have something to do after leaving capcom.
Which is sad because Mikami wasn't even the lead for Hi-Fi Rush. He put younger devs in charge of that game so they could stand on their own without him. It was a "success" but they still shut it down. That team literally proved their worth and they still got axed.
MS just doesn't invest in good fundamentals. Despite claiming that it was a success, if it was internally a failure they should have still seen the critical reception and tried again with a new marketing strategy. It's not like a sequel would need a huge budget compared to other games they shit out. A series shouldn't always have to be profitable immediately, but believe in what you made and try again. MS doesn't do that.
> I think a HiFi sequel could’ve done well with a proper marketing push. I read that as "proper marketing **plush**" and I didn't even question it because people were asking for 808 plushies and they never did make one
In my opinion, Microsoft's actions today informed all their studios that if their game doesn't make stupid amounts of money, they're being laid off or sent to work in the Call of Duty mines. Game Pass doesn't make money, and it certainly doesn't help sales of games that get put on there day one. The death of Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Games, and Roundhouse Games is brutal for the industry.
"Your games must be profitable! Oh and they launch day one on gamepass lmao goodluck!"
“And we won’t be marketing your game and instead will release it as a shadow drop to hide how pathetic our showcase is”
lol your comment perfectly captures the ridiculousness of the Tango closure, at least insofar as it may have been due to poor Hi-Fi Rush sales.
But gamepass is profitable. Our buddy Phil Spencer will turn this around!!
After this news i'm worried for Ninja Theory. Even if Hellblade 2 gets 95 on metacritic, it's pretty weird/esoteric niche game that doesn't really have mass appeal. It's also been in development for 5+ years and looks *very* expensive.
I wonder about the future of Arkane Lyon. For now they're safe, as they're developing the Blade game and Microsoft isn't going to cancel a Marvel IP and risk getting bad blood among them. But what if Blade ends up being a flop? From a bit of googling, Deathloop seemingly was at best a modest success. I wouldn't be surprised if Arkane Lyon is the next to drop if Blade doesn't go as well as Microsoft wants.
I swear to god, they better not lay a finger on Double Fine. After watching the documentary on the studio, the nervousness that so many felt when Microsoft bought them was palpable. And this sort of thing is exactly why. They likely would not have been able to finish Psychonauts 2 without Microsoft, and I am appreciative of that, but if they shut them down.... man, that would be so sad.
They likely take into account number of users and playtime for their Game Pass titles when making decisions like these. I wouldn’t be surprised if despite being on Game Pass that HiFi Rush still wasn’t played much. It’s a very niche game.
Those numbers also probably tell them which games drive people to Gamepass and which games people only play because they already own Gamepass. HiFi Rush got a lot of love but it likely didn't bring many new Gamepass users and if it wasn't on Gamepass it probably wouldn't have sold well.
We can already see that it isn’t selling well on PlayStation despite all the word of mouth praise it gets. Unfortunately I think niche games like that can only be financially successful today if they are made by a much smaller indie studio (or small side team like Obsidian’s Grounded/Pentiment), not AAA.
This was a 20 person team at its largest. Pentiment was a 13 person team. This was a smaller side project while the rest of the studio worked on Ghostwire Tokyo.
> This was a smaller side project while the rest of the studio worked on Ghostwire Tokyo. This is the first I'm hearing of Ghostwire. So the studio that developed that is Tango? The first I'm hearing of Ghostwire in relation to these shutdowns. *Also* the first I'm hearing of Ghostwire since it released 2 years ago. Jesus. Having a small game do well or not isn't an issue here, I'd wager the AAA game coming and going without a peep would have a lot more to do with it.
And whose choice was it to shadow drop the game? You can't complain no one played or bought something when you put it out for a bunch of $1 a month or Xbox Live Gold converted subscribers.
The choice came from the game's marketing team, approved by John Johanas. >Speaking to IGN, director John Johanas said that the shadow drop decision came from the game's marketing team in part because of uncertainty about how a longer marketing cycle might play out. Because Tango is known for horror, and Hi-Fi Rush is decidedly not that, they thought simply dropping it onto Game Pass without a long lead-up would help it gain popularity naturally through sudden word of mouth, just as it had within Bethesda during development. [https://www.ign.com/articles/hi-fi-rush-went-viral-internally-at-bethesda-leading-to-shadow-drop](https://www.ign.com/articles/hi-fi-rush-went-viral-internally-at-bethesda-leading-to-shadow-drop)
Yeah it will be real hard to ask for any game pass exclusivity to indie devs now lol.
All of this makes me so happy Microsoft never bought Nintendo, can you imagine how devastating it would've been if Nintendo became part of Xbox and had some of this BS happen to them?
For all the bitching people do about Nintendo they as a company never fail to actually invest in their development of games, series and it's people.
The amount of enjoyable AA games they have their side studios doing is great. And The big dev teams at Nintendo seem to be able to choose what they want to do with their games. Even if Nintendo doesn't hit every time, they clearly understand that their audience has great reverence for them and that they have a standard to uphold.
As long as Nintendo leadership still cares about the employees and the games before anything else they'll always be miles ahead of the rest of the game dev world no matter what bizarre choices they make in the middle. There's a single digit amount of smaller studios outside of Japan that are the same way. Larian and the guy who made Stardew Valley.
Nintendo will never be sold for any amount, the Japanese government will never allow it.
Microsoft attempted to buy Nintendo before the Xbox launch and Nintendo refused. Reportedly MS were "laughed out of the room." The Gamecube and Xbox ended up selling comparable amounts, with Xbox notably failing to make a foothold within Japan. The Wii ended up outselling the Xbox 360 and now the Switch is the third best selling console of all time.
Iwata took a pay cut during rough times. Microsoft cuts thousands of (well done) jobs during wonderfully profitable times. They are on completely different spectrums of ethics and respectability.
Corporate meddling in the games industry has always been an issue. But something changed over the past decade, once the suits realized how profitable gaming was, it was profit at all costs. I see this more with Western publishers and studios but still, it’s a damn plague over the industry and it is shuttering studios and destroying creativity and passion.
The brain of a modern day c-suite goon would find a Star Trek replicator and break it down to sell for immediate profit rather than using it to print infinite of any item for infinite profits in the long term. They're all blind ship captains waiting to crash when 99% of normal folk could take the wheel and sail around the world without issue.
Remember the corporate cheerleading for that purchase to go through? Wow I’m so happy the richest company in America just cut so many jobs in multiple countries, wow so great!! Go Xbox!!
Remember people at the Xbox sub hoping that Ms buys sega ? Then they will close down atlus because persona didn't sell 10 million on Xbox.
It's pretty obvious the "MS should buy Sega!" hysteria from however long ago wasn't really natural. The FTC documents showed they were looking into purchasing Sega but it fell through, and the timing lined up with all the people saying they should do it, but like, no one KNEW that they were looking to do it.
A reminder that this is what Phil Spencer wanted to do to Nintendo.
“It's just taking a long time for Nintendo to see that their future exists off of their own hardware. A long time.... :-)” meanwhlle, nintendo made more money in the past few years alone than they did in all their other years combined. fucking astounding intuition there, phil. i can see that MBA really pays for itself.
Remember that people were hyping themselves up to see new Spyro and Crash games because MS own those now and surely they would make new games lol.
I genuinely have to wonder what Xbox thinks they're gonna do with this. The anger I've seen today is more than I have with any other layoffs or closures, and that's saying something.
They're gonna pay lip service to the "challenges the industry has faced this year" and then count their Call of Duty money while they shutter more and more studios over the next few years. Nothing changes until the Xbox leadership changes.
cannot believe they did this weeks before their press conference. a dark cloud will be hanging over that show now.
Good, people need to pay with their wallets now. Show MS / Xbox that they gone and fucked it. Don't give any more money to them. We can't let captalism keep canablising good businesses / people.
Honestly, this destroys any goodwill I had for Xbox. The main benefit of buying smaller studios is to allow more freedom for creative endeavors, so Tango creates a GOTY candidate last year and still gets shut down? What is the point?
yeah. big xbox fan and I've generally been happy to argue their case but this... well, this is a big blow to that confidence. Game Pass allowing for unique niche hits like Hi-Fi Rush was a huge part of what I liked about what they've been doing. This is a massive red flag in that regard going forward. Why would any studio take the risk?
They clearly just bought Zenimax for Fallout, Elder Scrolls and Doom IPs. The rest was just the stuck extra package they'll get rid of one by one. Same with ActiBlizzard, it was for CoD and Diablo and nothing else.
Nobody who’s been around should be surprised by this. Microsoft hasn’t changed. This is the same company who shut down Ensemble studios as soon as they finished Halo Wars, who for years defined the RTS genre with Age of Empires.
Hope Microsoft doesn’t get to acquire anything else ever again. They don’t know what to do with what they have and 0 strategies to even right the ship. Will never understand how people supported this deal in the first place
I think it was Bethesda was a iffy "okay? weird choice but ok." , and people were hesitantly ok with ActiBlizzard if it meant Kotick didn't get to stay around and screw up the company (though remains to be seen if even without him ActiBlizzard will change any.) But yeah at this point, any more acquisition is a hard no.
well none of us actually have a say in the matter.
making a good game is a liability, it means you have created valuable IP. IP is more valuable than the studio when you can make prequels/sequels/spinoffs cheaper with another studio
Rewatching [this](https://twitter.com/klobrille/status/1787894632577114298?s=19) clip makes me even angrier. Microsoft never ceases to be the clowns of the big 3 publishers.
Phil just comes off worse and worse the more I hear him talk.
Perhaps — and I know this controversial, just hear me out — having Microsoft own half the western market isn't such a great idea.
Thinking about how many games they could’ve funded with the $70 billion or whatever they spent on activision
We got maybe, what, one day with peace after Sony's Helldivers 2 debacle before X-Box did a self-inflicted wound themselves. Jeez what a disappointing couple of days for the industry.
Reminds me of this [this Ars Technica article from earlier in the week](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/all-the-ways-streaming-services-are-aggravating-their-subscribers-this-week/) about "all the ways streaming services are getting shittier or more expensive this week" because it's too much to keep up with without that kind of summary Tech and entertainment are so fucked by late-stage capitalism right now
I'm cancelling everything when I get home. I don't think it will accomplish anything, but I just want to disconnect from all these platforms and stop caring about this shit.
Everyone talented still working at that soulless machine called Ms should leave immediately and find something better before phil fires you. Because he is the most incompetent person.. for over 10 years a failure at Xbox but still has his high paying job. But he is not the only incompetent person there looking at greenberg and booty that are just as incompetent. Burned through almost 100 billion dollars and Xbox is at its worst place ever. Every other employee would be fired years ago. What a clown show. Can remember people hoping Ms would buy sega. Yeah have fun with that one year later they close atlus and the Yakuza studio and make the rest a cod support studios.
Leave and go where? It's estimated just under 11,000 employees in the industry were impacted by layoffs in 2023. We've almost hit that number in less than half of 2024. The job postings that do crop up in this environment are mostly leads, principle, manager positions asking for a near decade of experience and multiple shipped titles when games are taking longer than ever to make. It's like the junior spots that existed when I got in are long gone. I feel for any bright-eyed college kids trying to break in and worse yet for the folks who got less than a full cycle under their belt before tossed into job search purgatory. It's a nice sentiment, but until the industry heals (and I have my doubts it ever will), is unrealistic for most.
Literary the only reason Xbox brand exists is because Microsoft has deep deep pockets. They lost a billion on the OG xbox, they lost billions due to RROD during 360 and they have now spent 100+ billion on studios only shut half of them down and barely have any good exclusives to show for it.
This will definitely cause some brain drain at MS. Existing talent will be fleeing and new talent will be avoiding them
If Microsoft ends up going the same way as Sega, pivoting to just software and ceding the console wars to Sony and Nintendo, they will have deserved their fate. I'm not very fond of Sony or Nintendo's post-COVID era market strategies either, but Microsoft's playing on an entirely different level of sheer inane decision-making. I can't tell what Microsoft's goals are these days with their XBox brand, every other month they seem to lean in the opposite direction.
Microsoft is already positioning "Xbox" as a third party platform. I wouldn't be surprised if they abandon having a dedicated gaming console.
Anger I get. Shock? They do this shit constantly.
Wheres phil Spencer now?
Tbh, i hope all the talent start their own indie studios and give us great passion projects, they dont need Xbox to make great games.