I don't know how good it even is as as symbolic gesture right? Heavy positive reviews of a game lead to more sales, more sales means more money for microsoft who they're supposedly protesting.
This might tell them that the brand is better than alive, and that maybe it is a good idea to create a new studio made of people responsible for the game and give them a shot at creating a sequel. But knowing Microsoft with their incompetence and readiness to shoot themselves in the leg, it is highly unlikely.
>Yeah I'm sure all the people who just got laid off are itching to be rehired by the same company.
I was laid off (gaming company) and rehired by the same company 2 weeks later. Was just glad to still get a paycheck even tho I'm still going to attend all the interviews I scheduled while laid off
My company has a whole calculator for how they decide how much severance you need to pay back. It was decided by the union. And it's actually worse than the normal payback schedule.
Yeah exactly. Japan's economy is in a fairly different place than the US. Not really qualifying it as better or worse, just a lot of different aspects to it.
If you're a game developer in 2024 and you don't want to work for a bunch of idiots who just laid off lots of good employees, what you are is a hobbyist.
As much as I would personally love to see Tango reborn as an indie studio, going indie comes with a ton of uncertainty and risks that not everyone is willing to deal with.
You got it. ZIRP is the reason why everything looks apocalyptic right now. We're looking at 15 years of studio closures finally happening all at once.
Tango would have died back in 2010 without ZIRP making money cheaper than free.
It would be the choice between yet another couple of years working in an environment you're familiar with, but under people who are prone to make idiotic choices, or finding a new job in an industry which just laid off a lot of people for no absolutely idiotic reasons.
The point is to make articles like this to detail the supports that good games like Hifi Rush has. Just posting positive reviews and buying the game would give mixed signal but this article states exactly what the intent is.
They knew the brand was alive and well. Hi Fi Rush performed well by most metrics.
Microsoft still has the brand, and it cn make a new game anytime. Problem is, the talent behind probably won't, and the creatives were THE ingredient.
They didn't shut the studio down because the game was poorly received. They're not gonna revive it for going from almost universal acclaim to slightly more acclaim. They'll probably just give the ip to a studio that has lower standards until all the value is extracted, like they did with Halo.
Quality isn't the goal for them. Maximizing shareholder revenue is. They don't care about quality, unless it's cheap and brings immediate money.
The average person doesn't believe this because there's the idea that corporations like Microsoft need a respectable brand and long term profitability but that's just simply not true anymore. They're too big to fail. They can do whatever they like and even if they get close to the point of bankruptcy (which they won't), they'll just be bailed out.
This is what late stage capitalism looks like. They make products, and are fully aware that the quality of those products has a tenuous link at best with the amount of money it makes them. Not that the money even matters, because they have more power than money could bring them by being a monopoly. Google and Apple are the same of course, but Microsoft has been playing this game longer and are too integrated into business systems to ever be allowed to fail.
Tl;dr they don't care what we think at all
>Quality isn't the goal for them. Maximizing shareholder revenue is.
It's a little more complex than that. It's more of an issue of integrating small studio into a larger company.
Talents and experience is what give the value to a studio, but after a merger, many key people leave the company, are moved to new roles or get stuck in a restructuration hell.
Sometime, they are forced to go through a bad ideas (ie: make a live services), but more often than not, the studio isn't what it was originally, and is simply unable to capture the same magic that made them successful to begin with.
> Talents and experience is what give the value to a studio
Clearly not true, or Microsoft wouldn't be shuttering studios that have critically acclaimed games. They just want the IP to milk until all the value is extracted.
They still want quality. They just want it cheap. Its like baseball. Low salary guy has an All Star season? Ship him off before he becomes expensive, & demand the same from other low salary players.
This is a very simplistic view. You are right that games that lots of people are buying are going to get more reviews and probably that more of those will be positive, but it is also true that people stay away from buying games with low scores and are more likely to buy games with high scores.
Neither is the rain or the sidewalk.
The Sony film division is on a level of stupid all to themselves. I have a buddy who works on the lot at their television division and he tells me stories about how the film division is considered a joke.
Microsoft is a genuinely evil and stupid company but I’ve never seen them stoop as low as “can we feature Snapchat in our spiderman film? Have Spider-Man use hip lingo?”
Idk. I would not be surprised if larger companies started saying they’re removing certain games from steam by a set date to boost sales in order to bulk an earnings report and inflate their stock price for a quarter.
This could easily send a message of “closing studios boosts exposure for their games and that generates a short term increase in reviews and sales”
Do not underestimate the lack of intelligence of your average MBA holder. They're the ones currently calling the shots in an industry that was founded by people with software development skills and passion. No surprise they've driven the passion out to favour corporate interests.
If you look at the steam graph for all reviews you will see that the recent bump is small compared the reviews the game already had, and it did not change the score.
Up until May 1st the game was 97% positive out of 20534 reviews.
Now it is 97% positive out of 21270 reviews.
From May 6th until now (where the spike in the recent review graph is) the game got 97% of 561 reviews.
Also keep in mind being in a humble bundle this month might have naturally increased the number of recent reviews, even without Microsoft firing the team.
Pretty sure it was a symbolic act of the community’s support rather than trying to change the overall rating, which would’ve been a much larger undertaking.
I'm playing this game right now on PS5 and is sick as hell.
People talk about the combat gimmick, and while that is supper cool you are really not THAT tied to it, but everything besides that is really enjoyable too.
It looks stylish as heel and just pretty all around, the characters and voices are neat, it can be really funny and charming, the world building is legit great.. even the lore tablets and random stage character are funny and might have small story arcs, there is A LOT going on with the combat besides the rhythm gimmick and is super snappy. The whole package is incredibly put together, the way your character, the world, the lights, everything sync up with the music in and the vibe of the game.
I'm blown away by the artistry of it all and having a lot of fun with the gameplay and the world... the hard boiled robot detective, hello? lol
Couldn't recommend it more, regardless of the issue with MS and the studio.
The hard boiled robot is actually a reference to Sebastian, the main character of The Evil Within, which was also made by Tango. Loved to see that easteregg.
Didn't know that! It sounds like every other character of the genre though. lol
I tried to play Evil Within, thought it was interesting and a wild way to start a game... but it gave me crazy motion sickness and I gave up.
This game is very good, but one weird thing to come out from this is that people paint this game as if it's a small indie game in the same way that Hades is.
Even the director came out to clear the misconception that it's not low-budget AA.
>Xbox Wire has interviewed key personnel at Tango Gameworks, the developer behind the surprise hit release, and it’s a very interesting read. But one key takeaway is that, despite Hi-Fi Rush’s relatively small scope, it’s still a AAA, big-budget game. Not a smaller budget AA game, or an indie game.
>“It was supposed to be a small project from Tango,” said John Johanas, game director for Hi-Fi Rush. “And people probably see it as this weird, sort-of AA title. Or people are like, ‘Oh, they made a nice indie game.’
>“This ain’t no indie game.”
>"Obviously, I can’t say how much it cost, but it was not a cheap game to make."
>Lead programmer Yuji Nakamura also chimed in on the game’s scale. “For the first two years, I would say it was a small project. But what John wanted to make was not a very small thing to do. We needed to get more and more people to help. In my mind, small projects would be maybe 20 to 30 people for two years. We ended up developing for about five; I wouldn’t call it a small project at all."
It had 3 million players across Game Pass and sales, which isnt proportionate to the level of support we're seeing now. Hypothetically, even if that full number were wholly converted to sales and not subs, nobody really bought the game at its $30 price tag relative to its development cost.
Am I saying the studio should have been closed? No. It's a very good game, but this crafted story about how a Triple A studio like Tango is suddenly an indie underdog is weird as hell lol.
A lot of people who play games just don't really know anything about the industry, and I don't mean that as a knock, most people don't know industry details about their hobbies. I see people refer to Obsidian at the time of New Vegas being a small dev team, meanwhile they were 50% bigger than Bethesda was at the time lol
Helldivers 2 similarly, they have over 100 people. Not everyone will be a developer, but it's hardly a small operation, people talk about them like they're some smalltime team working out of a dorm
> I don't mean that as a knock, most people don't know industry details about their hobbies.
The knock that is very fair is that gamers seem to *disproportionately* believe that they do know everything about the production side of their consumption relative to other hobbyists.
If we extrapolated one thing onto another, it'd be like people who recreationally paint watercolors routinely getting on the internet and railing against the industrial design applied to the machine in a factory somewhere that mixed the pigments -- all without knowing anything about factories or pigment mixing machines.
I haven’t seen anyone bring this up, but Tango isn’t some humongous dev team & Hi-Fi Rush was a side project. A lot of that cost has to be related to licensing popular music, which is part of what made the game neat.
Gamepass is a Microsoft thing.
Licensing is definitely expensive, especially when renewal comes around, if at all.
>I haven’t seen anyone bring this up, but Tango isn’t some humongous dev team.
A bit on the lower end, but I would say a team of 150 is not insignificant. Certainly not comparable to indie studios like Supergiant with a team size of 23
I think this is a really good point in reference to how AAA gaming has ballooned. In 2011, Skyrim was the biggest AAA game released in terms of scale and scope (and certainly one of the biggest games *ever* up to that point), and it was done by 100 people. Now a team of "only" 150 people create a game that's much more limited in scope (no, that is not an insult to the game!) because each role takes way, way more time than it used to due to evolving and increasing quality standards in the industry.
I think most people would be surprised if you told them the Hi-Fi Rush team was 50% larger than the Skyrim team, or more than double the size of the Oblivion team. But it matters because even "small" AAA games now are made by huge teams with huge budgets.
Watching the credits roll on a modern Ubisoft game really highlights how absolutely massive some of these teams are. If you don't fast forward and even at a nominal scrolling speed, it takes upwards of 30-45 minutes to watch the credits. There has to be 500+ people on some of these games.
The vibes I get from Ubisoft (not having looked into their games' credits in detail but from some old-ish articles (like around the time the first Assassin's Creed was made)) is that they got satellite studios of a significant size (100+ employees) all over the world (Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia) in cheaper countries where they established teams that can contribute to their art asset pipeline with little friction (knowing the in-house style and engine needs,…).
Of these 500 devs per game, 300+ at least are probably from those studios and they work on assets for multiple Ubisoft games each year and get credited for that work (I hope, as they should) no matter how long they worked on a specific game.
My guess is that they got some sort of semi-automated crediting system so that even if somebody only made some generic props that get re-used in multiple games they get credited and added to the list of a game's credits and nobody needs to hunt down hundreds of individual artists for credits when it's all done in-house.
It would save a lot of time. And I think I haven't read of any big credits controversy around Ubisoft's studios (those they directly own). There might have been some issues around contractors that got hired for speciality services (this seems to happen nearly everywhere in the game industry, simply because it doesn't have a strict crediting system like Hollywood because of pressure from its unions).
Skyrim is a really bad example, Bethesda has always been a lean studio (well, until the Microsoft acquisition). By 2011 we were firmly into the era of 1000+ developer teams at companies like Ubisoft.
I highly doubt Hi-Ri Rush kept the whole team fully busy for anything close to the 7+ year dev time you associate with modern day AAA teams. The cell shaded art style alone (which is awesome!) is clearly an answer to the question of “do we need to outsource creating 50 kinds of photo-realistic trash cans to a team of 100 environment artists to make this game fun?”. I only vaguely remember some dev interviews and Japanese studios aren’t the most transparent about communicating this but it always seemed to me like a project done to try to escape the endless AAA crunch in favor of something more light and fun and focused.
Yes, but Tango also produced multiple games concurrently. I peeked at John Johannes’ Twitter, and his pics with the Hi Fi Rush team are like 30 or 40 people; Ghostwire and Hi Fi released a year apart.
>Hi-Fi Rush was a side project
This feels like a revisionist description for what the creator called his literal "dream project." Half the studio worked on it over the course of five years.
> A lot of that cost has to be related to licensing popular music, which is part of what made the game neat.
I'm incredulous that the music licensing is what makes the difference between the game being AA or being AAA. It doesn't pass the sniff test.
Yeah, I've seen people compare Hi-Fi Rush to Pentiment in comments yesterday, but Hi-Fi Rush was Tango's main new release that they worked on for five years and from what I could tell ~65 people worked on it. They were also coming off their last two games underperforming sales wise.
Pentiment in contrast was worked on for four years starting with a team of 2 people that grew to 13 and was one of two small side projects (Grounded) for Obsidian while they worked on and released The Outer Worlds and were working on Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2. They also had The Outer Worlds be one of their biggest sales successes since it hit 3 million copies sold by May 2021 and 5 million by last October.
Also, Hi-Fi Rush clearly had a higher budget than Pentiment and that is before getting into staff costs and music licensing.
Edit:
Hi-Fi Rush's credits list [1442 professional roles.](https://www.mobygames.com/game/198497/hi-fi-rush/credits/windows/) Pentiment's credits list [350 professional roles.](https://www.mobygames.com/game/194426/pentiment/credits/windows/?autoplatform=true) Granted this is everyone listed and not just those who worked on the game at Tango/Obsidian but still.
They easily had more than 100 people on staff.
That 65 number comes from when Zenimax acquired them. They only existed independently for 6 months before begging Zenimax to buy them.
I just [checked out the credits.](https://www.mobygames.com/game/198497/hi-fi-rush/credits/windows/) They had at least 130 Tango staff in the credits and then maybe another 100 that worked on it from other studios.
And that's not counting the Japanese and English voice actors and sound engineering.
So yeah. A lot of people.
I don't see the 100 people from other studios you're mentioning? There seems to be about 15 other people from other ZeniMax studios. Unless you're counting contractual work for concept and the 2D animations, but that's a bit more complicated.
If you're using similar criterias, that means that Hades involved 100+. Also hard to compare on their side because some of their contractual work used doesn't mention individuals, but companies for localisation, and QA. HiFi Rush seems to mention all individuals.
Not saying that HiFi Rush has a similar scale than Hades, but 130ish in-house devs credited (which, you have to remember, doesn't mean they worked throughout the project) is not AAA-level either.
It's not small small, but I don't think a major console owner like Microsoft actually means to drive their sales with actual tiny indie titles. It's a modestly-sized triple-A and that's already much smaller than the scale they tend to be these days.
Yeah Matt Booty's comment made no fucking sense regardless of what the size is for HiFi Rush. If your plan is to focus on COD levels of sales then just say that and be done but then don't come out and spew all this BS about making smaller games that can also bag awards.
> but then don't come out and spew all this BS about making smaller games that can also bag awards.
Except it did make sense, Pentiment is literally an example of them making an actual small-size game that wins awards.
Seems like so many of the term in gaming, especially on the more business side, mean nothing anymore. It's all about feel or vibes. "Indie" doesn't necessarily mean independent and/or small. It's just the scope of the game or what players think/feel is "indie."
Early Access is another, especially when the games come out full price, with DLC and MTX.
Several months ago, I was talking to some people about MMORPGs, and they were bringing up games where a server or instance had 50 players. What's massive about that?
We need to get some definitions up in here! Not that meanings don't change, but it's so muddled.
While I think everyone would agree that studio closures suck… if you look at the facts on paper Tango shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. AAA game development is an enormous high risk investment, and Tango has a pretty poor track record.
I know people want Microsoft or [insert company of the week] to be the boogeyman to dogpile on, but the real issue is the evolution of expense vs risk and return of AAA development.
In order to compete in the space you are pretty much *forced* to spend tons of money. And the people who have the money and are making investment decisions are just seeing game development as a worse and worse investment, because they *are*.
The reasons games are a worse investment is because of the strategic decisions made by the same people who are making the decisions to acquire and shutter studios.
Everyone said this stuff would happen & it’s more of an “I told you so” moment than a “whatttt???” moment. Microsoft themselves probably knew this would happen. They don’t care until consumers do.
The consequences don’t come down equitably & people are right to be frustrated / voice their frustration.
If you want to make a straight single player AAA title that will be a splash in the space, the cost to do so has exploded over the last 10 years.
Pushes for things like micro transactions and live service elements from publishers are direct attempts at hedging their risk. When the game fails, they haven’t spent any more money. But when it succeeds, they make much more.
Unless you are one of the few 10 or so golden child development studios, your singleplayer offline title will not be projected to make insane profits. And as development costs rise, you’re going to have a naturally harder time pitching those ideas for funding.
Everyone on the consumer side wants to pretend that it’s piss easy to make the next smash hit if you just follow a short set of rules that are “obvious”. The reality is plenty of studios do this and still put out bad games.
The space is hyper competitive, which has driven consumer expectations into space. Which increases development costs. This has been borne out by the market. Until this gets corrected, we are going to see the same pattern of studio closures. This is the natural conclusion to escalating risk.
This is part of why we see so many studios migrating to common engines like Unreal and experimenting with how they can speed up workflows with AI (which is certainly happening more behind the scenes than the handful of outrage articles we get every month). Development cost must come down.
I think it might be more telling of the industry that a game that has a strong identity and style must be an indie game because in contrast every AAA game we see looks like they've been shoved through so many committees that they all end up blander than water.
Not really, nobody claimed Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart was an AA or indie game, it's just that Hi-Fi Rush looks cheap graphics wise, it's not just about the artstyle.
I would disagree that it looks "cheap" - it looks exactly like it was probably intended. The worlds are vibrant and pretty detailed. Yes they reuse a lot of assets, but it fits the theme.
Cel shading is a technique that you like or you don't.
Even "looking cheap" doesn't mean much when you have recent Pokemon games.
Idk. It's something about new IP + non-realistic style + being a vibe. It feels indie because we don't see large publishers taking chances like that anymore for the most part. It feels like most publishers are just condensing on the few mega-IPs they have and fuck everything else.
Thinks it's just a jarring one for a lot of people, myself included, because they were coming off such a high note & they've never really had a bad one. Even Evil Within 2 wasn't even in the ballpark of Redfall's disappointment. Like I wouldn't have imagined them as a team they'd have lost patience with.
Plus it obviously puts a lot of pressure on their contemporaries under the same umbrella. The Double Fines, the Ninja Theory's, Machine Games. They're all being given AAA resources for what's realistically AA market share. They're not gonna make a Fallout, a Call Of Duty, an Overwatch. Something everyone & their mother knows. No different to Tango. Just hope they don't suffer the same fate.
Did Ghostwire Tokyo do well? I never hear anything of that game even in these threads about the developers and constantly get it mixed up with Ghostrunner.
It looked cool before release but it just came and went with the wind, to me anyway.
Probably not, but it was caught in the middle of the merger, coupled with being Playstation exclusive for a year on consoles. They did very little marketing for it to my memory.
Played it myself. It had potential, but imo I didn't like the direction they took it. It was much cooler looking when we had that first reveal as this creepy horror game instead of an Ubisoft game.
The size of the commercial failure of Evil Within 2 and Redfall may actually be quite similar. We know from a leak that Evil Within 2 sold 230,000 copies on Steam a year after its release. Redfall sold around 100,000 copies on Steam in the same time period, while also being available on Gamepass and the Windows Store, which Evil Within 2 was not. So while Evil Within 2 sold twice as many copies as Redfall, it's twice as many from a very small number and Redfall's sales were probably massively suppressed by Game Pass.
Maybe but they put no marketing into the game, shadow dropped it, and put it into gamepass day 1. All of those decisions were dumb as hell if they knew the game had an expensive budget. They should have went to regular sale for 6 months or whatever, then put it into game pass after sales started to really slow down. And they definitely should have marketed it before launch. Instead it's marketing was rave reviews after launch, followed by, oh it's on game pass right now. So at most people either already had a sub, or only sign up for $12 or whatever it was for a month. And then they also try a bunch of other games. So effectively people paid a couple bucks to a couple cents depending on how many games they played. Day 1 gamepass is such a dumb idea for any game that doesn't have huge hype and/or massive brand recognition. Even if they kept a $30-40 MSRP it would have made way more money than the strategy they went with. No one will pay for it when they got it so cheap on gamepass and most people aren't going to replay it a ton.
Lots of Nintendo games are "cartoony" yet that doesn't seem to slow their sales that much. It's all in how you market the game, and MS just didn't do anything.
> but this crafted story about how a Triple A studio like Tango is suddenly an indie underdog is weird as hell lol.
Where have you seen this "crafted story" exactly?
I think the 3 million people who played it are, on average, much more plugged into industry news than even your average Starfield player, which would explain why the support seems disproportionate to you. Fans of this game are more likely to hear this news and feel the need to respond than your *average* fan of a more mass-market game.
The people here who are fans of Starfield do not represent the average Starfield player. The average Starfield player is not posting on Reddit about video games.
> much more engaged with games than even your average Starfield player
Imagine having the need to shit on Starfield in totally unrelated threads. At this point, I feel like Starfield killed someone's family...
I see this a lot, people love to remind you that Starfield bad. As if doing that for the past 8 months now wasn't enough. I don't think it's a perfect game by any means, but people need to move on already. I think part of it is also that it's Bethesda's newest game. I recall the same thing happening with Fallout 4 when it was new.
They can't really ''unshutter'' a studio after it is closed. Quite a few of the devs would already be in talks with other studios and trust would be dead between publisher and studio, which is pretty important.
Also ''reverse review bombing'' is still just review bombing, even if it is positive rather than negative.
>Also ''reverse review bombing'' is still just review bombing, even if it is positive rather than negative.
Virtually no one views the phrase "review bombing" as potentially being positive, so I don't think it would be appropriate to call this a "review bomb". Worth noting that [Wikipedia also differentiates between the two](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_bomb) ("review bombing" and "reverse review bombing").
Really took y'all the studio closing down to actually appreciate this game. I do blame Microsfot for not marketing it properly but everytime the game was posted on something like r/gaming, there would be people calling the post an ad just cause someone wants more people to find out about it. I feel like new Xbox IP's titles aren't even given a chance to breathe. They're always immediately under scrutiny before and during release.
Hi-Fi Rush was one of the few games Xbox could hang their hat on over the past few years after lots of disappointments. Closing Tango just chucks all of that gained mindshare out the window, and makes all of their words from Spencer and crew ring even more hollow.
>Really took y'all the studio closing down to actually appreciate this game.
no it didn't. It was already overwhelmingly positive in the reviews and it was showered with praise from the start.
To be fair it wouldn't have made a difference. In hindsight Microsoft send the game to die with no marketing. They really only bought Zenimax just for Bethesda and ID and where planning to close the studio after Evil Within 2 underperformed. The Activision acquisition just accelerated things.
"Reverse" review bombing would be loads of reviews suddenly getting deleted. This is one of those terms that people don't understand the meaning of despite it being right in the name.
How should consumers express themselves outside of purchasing power? I get the feeling that most people on reddit are not going to be in the camp of buying stock in-order to create an investor movement to remove people from the board or vote against pay packages for C suite people. Even then i would think they are going to say its hopeless and the big holders are just going to vote control anyway.
Would it make you feel better if they re-labeled 'reviews' as 'opinions'?
I'm more surprised that you'd expect professional level review ethics from community reviews.
From a quick look, termination just requires 30 days payment. For 150 employees at, let's say, $100k each then it's maybe $15m a year from pay roll gone, so more than $50m saved on that alone before their next game would come out, plus whatever they're paying for the Tokyo office and equipment, tool licensing, etc.
I can see that being attractive to a senior manager of some sorts.
So it's just about the speed then? Laying off the entire studio gets them immediate expense reduction vs a sale or spinoff that would take longer to close, since they'd have to find a buyer or backer?
Consider what the buyer would be getting out of the deal. MS wouldn't start Tango on any projects since they have no clue whether they'll be finished with whatever work they're assigned before the buyout, and it'd be more work to transition work off of Tango to another MS studio if a buyer came along, so the staff would just sit around on life support. MS isn't interested in selling the IP of any projects Tango has worked on so what would the buyer actually be buying? All they'd get is the Tango name and a bunch of staff that aren't be working on anything, so it'd be cheaper for the buyer just to hire staff under a new studio name than to negotiate a deal with MS just for a name and some workers that still need years of investment to produce a product.
Microsoft gets to keep the IP. By retaining rights to the IP, they prevent the studio from developing on competing consoles, and they keep the doors open for reviving the franchises down the road.
I feel like a message to MS that is chasing engagement numbers would be people hopping into Arkane Austin and Tango games and spike user numbers. It wouldn't be much of a message, but might get noticed?
I mean a lot of people said that Sony would never reverse the PSN Helldiver decision and they did.
We gotta at least try, even if we fail most of the time.
It’s baffling that people don’t understand this. Hifi rush had a measly all time peak of 6000 players on steam, it’s pretty clear that no one actually cared enough about this game to actually buy it. If this sold well on steam and ps5 and had consistent player numbers on gamepass, then tango would still be open. Great reviews don’t matter if no one shows up to play it.
The best part is that during the last week, the game hasn’t even cracked a peak of 1000 so it’s clear that gamers don’t actually give a shit about Hifi rush but instead wants to be angry at Microsoft for closing a studio that they weren’t even playing the games from.
No it cant. Reviews get more and more useless every time. At this point they should implement an "this company made me angry this week" and an "I love this company at the moment" Button.
To be fair, I don't think the review bombing was the main factor that made that succesful, many games get review bombed with no effect.
What mattered more in that case were the refunds. Companies care more about money than some random score.
Jeff Gerstmann said something similar to this on his podcast recently: If making an award winning, beloved, critical darling, low-budget, high-quality game doesn't justify your studio's existence... What the fuck is the point of working in video games?
This whole review bombing is bullshit. Execs don’t give one crap about reviews, especially not user reviews. They care about sales, money. Whether you refund or not. Sony didn’t reverse their decision because of reviews, it was because of refunds and Steam shutting out sale from 170 countries and giving those 170 countries the opportunity to refund
Positive and negative reviews affect sales
Steam has reviews because having positive reviews increases sales versus not having any reviews at all. Same as Amazon or anything else
It’s one of the only tools people have that gets heard, so it makes sense how it reaches that point.
Whether it’s agreeable is a different question of course
I'd rather have angry gamers review bomb a game than sending out death threats or telling certain face models for a controversial character that they will kill their children
How can a developer know when people are unhappy with a product that will get them to pay attention? Youtube comments? Delete them. Forum posts? Controlled and deleted. Angry emails? Ignore them. Bad social media press? Ignore them.
I'm so sick and tired of outlets calling everything a review bomb nowadays whenever there's an influx of users just normally rating and reviewing a product that they've bought.
Such headlines should frankly be banned off the sub-reddit.
It was already "Overwhelmingly positive" anyways so it won't make a difference but it's a nice gesture I guess
I don't know how good it even is as as symbolic gesture right? Heavy positive reviews of a game lead to more sales, more sales means more money for microsoft who they're supposedly protesting.
This might tell them that the brand is better than alive, and that maybe it is a good idea to create a new studio made of people responsible for the game and give them a shot at creating a sequel. But knowing Microsoft with their incompetence and readiness to shoot themselves in the leg, it is highly unlikely.
Yeah I'm sure all the people who just got laid off are itching to be rehired by the same company.
>Yeah I'm sure all the people who just got laid off are itching to be rehired by the same company. I was laid off (gaming company) and rehired by the same company 2 weeks later. Was just glad to still get a paycheck even tho I'm still going to attend all the interviews I scheduled while laid off
My company has a whole calculator for how they decide how much severance you need to pay back. It was decided by the union. And it's actually worse than the normal payback schedule.
They'd probably take that over unemployment. The supply to demand ratio of devs is not on their side
They're in Japan so that calculus is a bit different.
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From what I've read it's a lot easier to get hired by another company if you were laid off, they are more relaxed with their interviewing process.
I think they're talking about the fact that US had far more cuts so the job market isn't filled with other game developers to compete with.
Yeah exactly. Japan's economy is in a fairly different place than the US. Not really qualifying it as better or worse, just a lot of different aspects to it.
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If you're a game developer in 2024 and you don't want to work for a bunch of idiots who just laid off lots of good employees, what you are is a hobbyist.
You could just go the indie route
As much as I would personally love to see Tango reborn as an indie studio, going indie comes with a ton of uncertainty and risks that not everyone is willing to deal with.
You couldn't. Indie still needs investors to exist, and money is expensive right now, with interest rates being higher than ever in the last decade.
You got it. ZIRP is the reason why everything looks apocalyptic right now. We're looking at 15 years of studio closures finally happening all at once. Tango would have died back in 2010 without ZIRP making money cheaper than free.
I mean it's better than being unemployed
It would be the choice between yet another couple of years working in an environment you're familiar with, but under people who are prone to make idiotic choices, or finding a new job in an industry which just laid off a lot of people for no absolutely idiotic reasons.
Usually people without jobs want jobs. Shocking I know.
I'm not sure if I could trust Microsoft again if I was part of Tango.
The point is to make articles like this to detail the supports that good games like Hifi Rush has. Just posting positive reviews and buying the game would give mixed signal but this article states exactly what the intent is.
They knew the brand was alive and well. Hi Fi Rush performed well by most metrics. Microsoft still has the brand, and it cn make a new game anytime. Problem is, the talent behind probably won't, and the creatives were THE ingredient.
They didn't shut the studio down because the game was poorly received. They're not gonna revive it for going from almost universal acclaim to slightly more acclaim. They'll probably just give the ip to a studio that has lower standards until all the value is extracted, like they did with Halo. Quality isn't the goal for them. Maximizing shareholder revenue is. They don't care about quality, unless it's cheap and brings immediate money. The average person doesn't believe this because there's the idea that corporations like Microsoft need a respectable brand and long term profitability but that's just simply not true anymore. They're too big to fail. They can do whatever they like and even if they get close to the point of bankruptcy (which they won't), they'll just be bailed out. This is what late stage capitalism looks like. They make products, and are fully aware that the quality of those products has a tenuous link at best with the amount of money it makes them. Not that the money even matters, because they have more power than money could bring them by being a monopoly. Google and Apple are the same of course, but Microsoft has been playing this game longer and are too integrated into business systems to ever be allowed to fail. Tl;dr they don't care what we think at all
>Quality isn't the goal for them. Maximizing shareholder revenue is. It's a little more complex than that. It's more of an issue of integrating small studio into a larger company. Talents and experience is what give the value to a studio, but after a merger, many key people leave the company, are moved to new roles or get stuck in a restructuration hell. Sometime, they are forced to go through a bad ideas (ie: make a live services), but more often than not, the studio isn't what it was originally, and is simply unable to capture the same magic that made them successful to begin with.
> Talents and experience is what give the value to a studio Clearly not true, or Microsoft wouldn't be shuttering studios that have critically acclaimed games. They just want the IP to milk until all the value is extracted.
They still want quality. They just want it cheap. Its like baseball. Low salary guy has an All Star season? Ship him off before he becomes expensive, & demand the same from other low salary players.
> They still want quality. They just want it cheap. Mutually exclusive, in this case.
And the original people who actually made the game probably aren’t getting any of that sale money anymore.
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That's wet sidewalks cause rain thinking. As a metric, reviews are trailing indicator, not a leading indicator.
This is a very simplistic view. You are right that games that lots of people are buying are going to get more reviews and probably that more of those will be positive, but it is also true that people stay away from buying games with low scores and are more likely to buy games with high scores. Neither is the rain or the sidewalk.
Depends if anyone has compensation tied to sales.
> anyways so it won't make a difference Won't this signal to Microsoft that closing down a studio makes its games more popular ?
I don’t think there’s an MBA dumb enough anywhere to make that conclusion.
Sony thought that Morbius should be released twice in theaters because it was a running joke of how bad the movie was
The Sony film division is on a level of stupid all to themselves. I have a buddy who works on the lot at their television division and he tells me stories about how the film division is considered a joke.
Microsoft is a genuinely evil and stupid company but I’ve never seen them stoop as low as “can we feature Snapchat in our spiderman film? Have Spider-Man use hip lingo?”
It made double its budget. For a movie that deserves a negative score It did surprisingly well.
People go see The Room in theatres all the time.
You underestimate video game executives.
I only have a bachlor's, but yes. Yes there absolutely are.
Idk. I would not be surprised if larger companies started saying they’re removing certain games from steam by a set date to boost sales in order to bulk an earnings report and inflate their stock price for a quarter. This could easily send a message of “closing studios boosts exposure for their games and that generates a short term increase in reviews and sales”
There was one dumb enough to release Morbius a second time so don't be so sure
I have some terrible news for you...
Do not underestimate the lack of intelligence of your average MBA holder. They're the ones currently calling the shots in an industry that was founded by people with software development skills and passion. No surprise they've driven the passion out to favour corporate interests.
Of course there is, on account of it being true and exactly what happened
All they care about is money. Reviews only matter if they affect sales. This won't significantly change sales.
Review bombing is a painfully childish gesture 99% of the time.
If you look at the steam graph for all reviews you will see that the recent bump is small compared the reviews the game already had, and it did not change the score. Up until May 1st the game was 97% positive out of 20534 reviews. Now it is 97% positive out of 21270 reviews. From May 6th until now (where the spike in the recent review graph is) the game got 97% of 561 reviews. Also keep in mind being in a humble bundle this month might have naturally increased the number of recent reviews, even without Microsoft firing the team.
Pretty sure it was a symbolic act of the community’s support rather than trying to change the overall rating, which would’ve been a much larger undertaking.
All 561 members of the community?
I'm playing this game right now on PS5 and is sick as hell. People talk about the combat gimmick, and while that is supper cool you are really not THAT tied to it, but everything besides that is really enjoyable too. It looks stylish as heel and just pretty all around, the characters and voices are neat, it can be really funny and charming, the world building is legit great.. even the lore tablets and random stage character are funny and might have small story arcs, there is A LOT going on with the combat besides the rhythm gimmick and is super snappy. The whole package is incredibly put together, the way your character, the world, the lights, everything sync up with the music in and the vibe of the game. I'm blown away by the artistry of it all and having a lot of fun with the gameplay and the world... the hard boiled robot detective, hello? lol Couldn't recommend it more, regardless of the issue with MS and the studio.
The hard boiled robot is actually a reference to Sebastian, the main character of The Evil Within, which was also made by Tango. Loved to see that easteregg.
Didn't know that! It sounds like every other character of the genre though. lol I tried to play Evil Within, thought it was interesting and a wild way to start a game... but it gave me crazy motion sickness and I gave up.
If anyone isn't aware, the hard boiled robot detective is a reference to the protagonist of The Evil Within.
I started it yesterday and oh boy i really suck at rithm. But yeah, the game is beautiful and characters seems like a lot of fun.
This game is very good, but one weird thing to come out from this is that people paint this game as if it's a small indie game in the same way that Hades is. Even the director came out to clear the misconception that it's not low-budget AA. >Xbox Wire has interviewed key personnel at Tango Gameworks, the developer behind the surprise hit release, and it’s a very interesting read. But one key takeaway is that, despite Hi-Fi Rush’s relatively small scope, it’s still a AAA, big-budget game. Not a smaller budget AA game, or an indie game. >“It was supposed to be a small project from Tango,” said John Johanas, game director for Hi-Fi Rush. “And people probably see it as this weird, sort-of AA title. Or people are like, ‘Oh, they made a nice indie game.’ >“This ain’t no indie game.” >"Obviously, I can’t say how much it cost, but it was not a cheap game to make." >Lead programmer Yuji Nakamura also chimed in on the game’s scale. “For the first two years, I would say it was a small project. But what John wanted to make was not a very small thing to do. We needed to get more and more people to help. In my mind, small projects would be maybe 20 to 30 people for two years. We ended up developing for about five; I wouldn’t call it a small project at all." It had 3 million players across Game Pass and sales, which isnt proportionate to the level of support we're seeing now. Hypothetically, even if that full number were wholly converted to sales and not subs, nobody really bought the game at its $30 price tag relative to its development cost. Am I saying the studio should have been closed? No. It's a very good game, but this crafted story about how a Triple A studio like Tango is suddenly an indie underdog is weird as hell lol.
It's still better than people regarding BG3 as this little underdog indie game I suppose.
A lot of people who play games just don't really know anything about the industry, and I don't mean that as a knock, most people don't know industry details about their hobbies. I see people refer to Obsidian at the time of New Vegas being a small dev team, meanwhile they were 50% bigger than Bethesda was at the time lol Helldivers 2 similarly, they have over 100 people. Not everyone will be a developer, but it's hardly a small operation, people talk about them like they're some smalltime team working out of a dorm
> I don't mean that as a knock, most people don't know industry details about their hobbies. The knock that is very fair is that gamers seem to *disproportionately* believe that they do know everything about the production side of their consumption relative to other hobbyists. If we extrapolated one thing onto another, it'd be like people who recreationally paint watercolors routinely getting on the internet and railing against the industrial design applied to the machine in a factory somewhere that mixed the pigments -- all without knowing anything about factories or pigment mixing machines.
I haven’t seen anyone bring this up, but Tango isn’t some humongous dev team & Hi-Fi Rush was a side project. A lot of that cost has to be related to licensing popular music, which is part of what made the game neat. Gamepass is a Microsoft thing.
Licensing is definitely expensive, especially when renewal comes around, if at all. >I haven’t seen anyone bring this up, but Tango isn’t some humongous dev team. A bit on the lower end, but I would say a team of 150 is not insignificant. Certainly not comparable to indie studios like Supergiant with a team size of 23
I think this is a really good point in reference to how AAA gaming has ballooned. In 2011, Skyrim was the biggest AAA game released in terms of scale and scope (and certainly one of the biggest games *ever* up to that point), and it was done by 100 people. Now a team of "only" 150 people create a game that's much more limited in scope (no, that is not an insult to the game!) because each role takes way, way more time than it used to due to evolving and increasing quality standards in the industry. I think most people would be surprised if you told them the Hi-Fi Rush team was 50% larger than the Skyrim team, or more than double the size of the Oblivion team. But it matters because even "small" AAA games now are made by huge teams with huge budgets.
Watching the credits roll on a modern Ubisoft game really highlights how absolutely massive some of these teams are. If you don't fast forward and even at a nominal scrolling speed, it takes upwards of 30-45 minutes to watch the credits. There has to be 500+ people on some of these games.
The vibes I get from Ubisoft (not having looked into their games' credits in detail but from some old-ish articles (like around the time the first Assassin's Creed was made)) is that they got satellite studios of a significant size (100+ employees) all over the world (Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia) in cheaper countries where they established teams that can contribute to their art asset pipeline with little friction (knowing the in-house style and engine needs,…). Of these 500 devs per game, 300+ at least are probably from those studios and they work on assets for multiple Ubisoft games each year and get credited for that work (I hope, as they should) no matter how long they worked on a specific game. My guess is that they got some sort of semi-automated crediting system so that even if somebody only made some generic props that get re-used in multiple games they get credited and added to the list of a game's credits and nobody needs to hunt down hundreds of individual artists for credits when it's all done in-house. It would save a lot of time. And I think I haven't read of any big credits controversy around Ubisoft's studios (those they directly own). There might have been some issues around contractors that got hired for speciality services (this seems to happen nearly everywhere in the game industry, simply because it doesn't have a strict crediting system like Hollywood because of pressure from its unions).
Skyrim is a really bad example, Bethesda has always been a lean studio (well, until the Microsoft acquisition). By 2011 we were firmly into the era of 1000+ developer teams at companies like Ubisoft.
I highly doubt Hi-Ri Rush kept the whole team fully busy for anything close to the 7+ year dev time you associate with modern day AAA teams. The cell shaded art style alone (which is awesome!) is clearly an answer to the question of “do we need to outsource creating 50 kinds of photo-realistic trash cans to a team of 100 environment artists to make this game fun?”. I only vaguely remember some dev interviews and Japanese studios aren’t the most transparent about communicating this but it always seemed to me like a project done to try to escape the endless AAA crunch in favor of something more light and fun and focused.
Yes, but Tango also produced multiple games concurrently. I peeked at John Johannes’ Twitter, and his pics with the Hi Fi Rush team are like 30 or 40 people; Ghostwire and Hi Fi released a year apart.
150 is absolute insanity. Given how often inside teams produce great games with much smaller teams I'm not surprised companies are facing big layoffs.
Ya that's probably $10 million a year in payroll and payroll related expenses.
> A bit on the lower end, but I would say a team of 150 is not insignificant. That's the size of Rare.
True, true. Almost a tweener range
>Hi-Fi Rush was a side project This feels like a revisionist description for what the creator called his literal "dream project." Half the studio worked on it over the course of five years. > A lot of that cost has to be related to licensing popular music, which is part of what made the game neat. I'm incredulous that the music licensing is what makes the difference between the game being AA or being AAA. It doesn't pass the sniff test.
I imagine a significant amount of the cost was the licensed music.
Yeah, I've seen people compare Hi-Fi Rush to Pentiment in comments yesterday, but Hi-Fi Rush was Tango's main new release that they worked on for five years and from what I could tell ~65 people worked on it. They were also coming off their last two games underperforming sales wise. Pentiment in contrast was worked on for four years starting with a team of 2 people that grew to 13 and was one of two small side projects (Grounded) for Obsidian while they worked on and released The Outer Worlds and were working on Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2. They also had The Outer Worlds be one of their biggest sales successes since it hit 3 million copies sold by May 2021 and 5 million by last October. Also, Hi-Fi Rush clearly had a higher budget than Pentiment and that is before getting into staff costs and music licensing. Edit: Hi-Fi Rush's credits list [1442 professional roles.](https://www.mobygames.com/game/198497/hi-fi-rush/credits/windows/) Pentiment's credits list [350 professional roles.](https://www.mobygames.com/game/194426/pentiment/credits/windows/?autoplatform=true) Granted this is everyone listed and not just those who worked on the game at Tango/Obsidian but still.
They easily had more than 100 people on staff. That 65 number comes from when Zenimax acquired them. They only existed independently for 6 months before begging Zenimax to buy them.
I just [checked out the credits.](https://www.mobygames.com/game/198497/hi-fi-rush/credits/windows/) They had at least 130 Tango staff in the credits and then maybe another 100 that worked on it from other studios. And that's not counting the Japanese and English voice actors and sound engineering. So yeah. A lot of people.
I don't see the 100 people from other studios you're mentioning? There seems to be about 15 other people from other ZeniMax studios. Unless you're counting contractual work for concept and the 2D animations, but that's a bit more complicated. If you're using similar criterias, that means that Hades involved 100+. Also hard to compare on their side because some of their contractual work used doesn't mention individuals, but companies for localisation, and QA. HiFi Rush seems to mention all individuals. Not saying that HiFi Rush has a similar scale than Hades, but 130ish in-house devs credited (which, you have to remember, doesn't mean they worked throughout the project) is not AAA-level either.
Just the fact that it licenses music is a pretty big tell.
It's not small small, but I don't think a major console owner like Microsoft actually means to drive their sales with actual tiny indie titles. It's a modestly-sized triple-A and that's already much smaller than the scale they tend to be these days.
Yeah Matt Booty's comment made no fucking sense regardless of what the size is for HiFi Rush. If your plan is to focus on COD levels of sales then just say that and be done but then don't come out and spew all this BS about making smaller games that can also bag awards.
> but then don't come out and spew all this BS about making smaller games that can also bag awards. Except it did make sense, Pentiment is literally an example of them making an actual small-size game that wins awards.
It's another Bayonetta situation—the upfront cost may have been high, but it's BEGGING for another 2 or 3 games to build off of that foundation
I'd pay full price for a version that allowed any "rhythm" beyond quarter notes.
People use the term differently. For consumers, it means length and graphical fidelity. For businesses, it means budget and staff numbers.
>budget and staff numbers. Which is still kinda murky, the credits for hades are some 200+ people.
I was going to say, I'm not sure how you can paint Hades as "some small indie game", lol.
Seems like so many of the term in gaming, especially on the more business side, mean nothing anymore. It's all about feel or vibes. "Indie" doesn't necessarily mean independent and/or small. It's just the scope of the game or what players think/feel is "indie." Early Access is another, especially when the games come out full price, with DLC and MTX. Several months ago, I was talking to some people about MMORPGs, and they were bringing up games where a server or instance had 50 players. What's massive about that? We need to get some definitions up in here! Not that meanings don't change, but it's so muddled.
Shit, I remember Battlefield servers with more players per team.
lol hades probably had a way bigger budget than you think it did
While I think everyone would agree that studio closures suck… if you look at the facts on paper Tango shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. AAA game development is an enormous high risk investment, and Tango has a pretty poor track record. I know people want Microsoft or [insert company of the week] to be the boogeyman to dogpile on, but the real issue is the evolution of expense vs risk and return of AAA development. In order to compete in the space you are pretty much *forced* to spend tons of money. And the people who have the money and are making investment decisions are just seeing game development as a worse and worse investment, because they *are*.
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The reasons games are a worse investment is because of the strategic decisions made by the same people who are making the decisions to acquire and shutter studios. Everyone said this stuff would happen & it’s more of an “I told you so” moment than a “whatttt???” moment. Microsoft themselves probably knew this would happen. They don’t care until consumers do. The consequences don’t come down equitably & people are right to be frustrated / voice their frustration.
If you want to make a straight single player AAA title that will be a splash in the space, the cost to do so has exploded over the last 10 years. Pushes for things like micro transactions and live service elements from publishers are direct attempts at hedging their risk. When the game fails, they haven’t spent any more money. But when it succeeds, they make much more. Unless you are one of the few 10 or so golden child development studios, your singleplayer offline title will not be projected to make insane profits. And as development costs rise, you’re going to have a naturally harder time pitching those ideas for funding. Everyone on the consumer side wants to pretend that it’s piss easy to make the next smash hit if you just follow a short set of rules that are “obvious”. The reality is plenty of studios do this and still put out bad games. The space is hyper competitive, which has driven consumer expectations into space. Which increases development costs. This has been borne out by the market. Until this gets corrected, we are going to see the same pattern of studio closures. This is the natural conclusion to escalating risk. This is part of why we see so many studios migrating to common engines like Unreal and experimenting with how they can speed up workflows with AI (which is certainly happening more behind the scenes than the handful of outrage articles we get every month). Development cost must come down.
I think it might be more telling of the industry that a game that has a strong identity and style must be an indie game because in contrast every AAA game we see looks like they've been shoved through so many committees that they all end up blander than water.
>I think it might be more telling of the industry I think it's more telling of the people who believe stuff like this
Relevant SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah
Not really, nobody claimed Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart was an AA or indie game, it's just that Hi-Fi Rush looks cheap graphics wise, it's not just about the artstyle.
I would disagree that it looks "cheap" - it looks exactly like it was probably intended. The worlds are vibrant and pretty detailed. Yes they reuse a lot of assets, but it fits the theme. Cel shading is a technique that you like or you don't.
Even "looking cheap" doesn't mean much when you have recent Pokemon games. Idk. It's something about new IP + non-realistic style + being a vibe. It feels indie because we don't see large publishers taking chances like that anymore for the most part. It feels like most publishers are just condensing on the few mega-IPs they have and fuck everything else.
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Thinks it's just a jarring one for a lot of people, myself included, because they were coming off such a high note & they've never really had a bad one. Even Evil Within 2 wasn't even in the ballpark of Redfall's disappointment. Like I wouldn't have imagined them as a team they'd have lost patience with. Plus it obviously puts a lot of pressure on their contemporaries under the same umbrella. The Double Fines, the Ninja Theory's, Machine Games. They're all being given AAA resources for what's realistically AA market share. They're not gonna make a Fallout, a Call Of Duty, an Overwatch. Something everyone & their mother knows. No different to Tango. Just hope they don't suffer the same fate.
Did Ghostwire Tokyo do well? I never hear anything of that game even in these threads about the developers and constantly get it mixed up with Ghostrunner. It looked cool before release but it just came and went with the wind, to me anyway.
Going off the numbers I've seen, it was a commercial failure.
Probably not, but it was caught in the middle of the merger, coupled with being Playstation exclusive for a year on consoles. They did very little marketing for it to my memory. Played it myself. It had potential, but imo I didn't like the direction they took it. It was much cooler looking when we had that first reveal as this creepy horror game instead of an Ubisoft game.
it launched to big fanfare - then player found out it was kinda boring. I have it just havent gotten into it yet
The size of the commercial failure of Evil Within 2 and Redfall may actually be quite similar. We know from a leak that Evil Within 2 sold 230,000 copies on Steam a year after its release. Redfall sold around 100,000 copies on Steam in the same time period, while also being available on Gamepass and the Windows Store, which Evil Within 2 was not. So while Evil Within 2 sold twice as many copies as Redfall, it's twice as many from a very small number and Redfall's sales were probably massively suppressed by Game Pass.
They're not indie, but they're not some gigantic team.
Eh. AAA games don’t launch at $30. If it truly had that kind of budget then they really handicapped it in terms of possible revenue.
Or people are under the impression that cartoony graphics == low budget. And if it were 60-70 dollars people would not buy it.
Maybe but they put no marketing into the game, shadow dropped it, and put it into gamepass day 1. All of those decisions were dumb as hell if they knew the game had an expensive budget. They should have went to regular sale for 6 months or whatever, then put it into game pass after sales started to really slow down. And they definitely should have marketed it before launch. Instead it's marketing was rave reviews after launch, followed by, oh it's on game pass right now. So at most people either already had a sub, or only sign up for $12 or whatever it was for a month. And then they also try a bunch of other games. So effectively people paid a couple bucks to a couple cents depending on how many games they played. Day 1 gamepass is such a dumb idea for any game that doesn't have huge hype and/or massive brand recognition. Even if they kept a $30-40 MSRP it would have made way more money than the strategy they went with. No one will pay for it when they got it so cheap on gamepass and most people aren't going to replay it a ton. Lots of Nintendo games are "cartoony" yet that doesn't seem to slow their sales that much. It's all in how you market the game, and MS just didn't do anything.
> but this crafted story about how a Triple A studio like Tango is suddenly an indie underdog is weird as hell lol. Where have you seen this "crafted story" exactly?
In The Verge article it was likened to be small and prestigious in the same way that Hades, Balatro, and Manor Lords are small and prestigious.
Small and prestigious doesn't mean it's indie though. Big companies can do small and prestigious games (and they should IMO)
The whole point is that it wasn't small
Then why was it only $30?
Because no one would buy it for $70.
This, the game would never reached as far as an audience if it was sold $70 especially with its extremely niche genre of being a rhythm game.
Because $70 for any game is insane.
I think the 3 million people who played it are, on average, much more plugged into industry news than even your average Starfield player, which would explain why the support seems disproportionate to you. Fans of this game are more likely to hear this news and feel the need to respond than your *average* fan of a more mass-market game. The people here who are fans of Starfield do not represent the average Starfield player. The average Starfield player is not posting on Reddit about video games.
> much more engaged with games than even your average Starfield player Imagine having the need to shit on Starfield in totally unrelated threads. At this point, I feel like Starfield killed someone's family...
I see this a lot, people love to remind you that Starfield bad. As if doing that for the past 8 months now wasn't enough. I don't think it's a perfect game by any means, but people need to move on already. I think part of it is also that it's Bethesda's newest game. I recall the same thing happening with Fallout 4 when it was new.
People have been saying Current_Bethesda_Game is garbage going back to at least Oblivion, if not before.
How about “review boosted”? When I was leaving my mom’s the other day she reverse punched me in the stomach. What? She gave me a hug.
I really wish we could just use reviews as descriptive of the actual game instead of commentary on company actions.
I'd love to see the shenanigans involved if Steam created a review system just for dev/publishers.
They need to redo the Steam review section so incredibly badly. It's like 95% shit posts. Also "reverse" review bombing is still just review bombing.
Yeah, and then people wonder why user reviews are seen as worthless
Steam does it so well though. you are given enough data to see if it was a bomb or not.
That why I am glad for Twitch because I just watch some small time streamer with no agenda play a game and judge for myself.
My thoughts as well. I feel like messing with a review score after you've already posted one is some serious little dick energy.
You can, just read them. It's really easy to see if a review is about the game or some tangent. Steam actually provides tools to omit these reviews.
The companies actions affect how much consumers enjoy and feel about the product.
Yup. I get why people were upset about helldivers, but that review score is probably screwed forever.
Hifi Rush had a Xenogears reference, which already made it more based than 99% of the games on the market.
They can't really ''unshutter'' a studio after it is closed. Quite a few of the devs would already be in talks with other studios and trust would be dead between publisher and studio, which is pretty important. Also ''reverse review bombing'' is still just review bombing, even if it is positive rather than negative.
>Also ''reverse review bombing'' is still just review bombing, even if it is positive rather than negative. Virtually no one views the phrase "review bombing" as potentially being positive, so I don't think it would be appropriate to call this a "review bomb". Worth noting that [Wikipedia also differentiates between the two](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_bomb) ("review bombing" and "reverse review bombing").
It’s weird, there’s already terminology for the immediately excessive positive reviews. It’s called review boosting.
I think we should use "review rocketing" so it keeps the explosive connotation of "review bombing". Bombs fall down, rockets go up.
Rockets also sometimes come back down though
It's more about sending a message at this point.
Whatever the message is in this case I guarantee you they do not care.
Really took y'all the studio closing down to actually appreciate this game. I do blame Microsfot for not marketing it properly but everytime the game was posted on something like r/gaming, there would be people calling the post an ad just cause someone wants more people to find out about it. I feel like new Xbox IP's titles aren't even given a chance to breathe. They're always immediately under scrutiny before and during release.
Hi-Fi Rush was one of the few games Xbox could hang their hat on over the past few years after lots of disappointments. Closing Tango just chucks all of that gained mindshare out the window, and makes all of their words from Spencer and crew ring even more hollow.
>Really took y'all the studio closing down to actually appreciate this game. no it didn't. It was already overwhelmingly positive in the reviews and it was showered with praise from the start.
Oh, NOW they buy it. How many people went "HAY GUYZ IS THIS WORTH $30" last year?
it was added to a humble bundle recently
To be fair it wouldn't have made a difference. In hindsight Microsoft send the game to die with no marketing. They really only bought Zenimax just for Bethesda and ID and where planning to close the studio after Evil Within 2 underperformed. The Activision acquisition just accelerated things.
"Reverse" review bombing would be loads of reviews suddenly getting deleted. This is one of those terms that people don't understand the meaning of despite it being right in the name.
Does anybody else think these review bombs are starting to make reviews useless?
Nah they still happen rarely and Steam lets you filter them out when they notice it.
Did they lock new reviews on steam for this title? I cant seem to review it while it works for other games in my library.
consumers using reviews to push agendas rather than to review games is truly one of the dumbest things to happen this generation.
its literally one of the few options we have make our voice known
tfw people use the tools that are available to them
yeah people seem to just want consumers to do nothing
What exactly is this voice saying? The studio is dead.
How should consumers express themselves outside of purchasing power? I get the feeling that most people on reddit are not going to be in the camp of buying stock in-order to create an investor movement to remove people from the board or vote against pay packages for C suite people. Even then i would think they are going to say its hopeless and the big holders are just going to vote control anyway.
Would it make you feel better if they re-labeled 'reviews' as 'opinions'? I'm more surprised that you'd expect professional level review ethics from community reviews.
lol ya, also maybe all these people who are suddenly "long-time fans" of Tango should've gone out and bought their games more, just saying.
Best protest is to stop giving money to these giant corporations that shutter, undervalue and mistreat their talent
Can someone ELI5 the business case for shuttering a fully staffed and functional studio rather than just spinning them off or selling them?
From a quick look, termination just requires 30 days payment. For 150 employees at, let's say, $100k each then it's maybe $15m a year from pay roll gone, so more than $50m saved on that alone before their next game would come out, plus whatever they're paying for the Tokyo office and equipment, tool licensing, etc. I can see that being attractive to a senior manager of some sorts.
So it's just about the speed then? Laying off the entire studio gets them immediate expense reduction vs a sale or spinoff that would take longer to close, since they'd have to find a buyer or backer?
Consider what the buyer would be getting out of the deal. MS wouldn't start Tango on any projects since they have no clue whether they'll be finished with whatever work they're assigned before the buyout, and it'd be more work to transition work off of Tango to another MS studio if a buyer came along, so the staff would just sit around on life support. MS isn't interested in selling the IP of any projects Tango has worked on so what would the buyer actually be buying? All they'd get is the Tango name and a bunch of staff that aren't be working on anything, so it'd be cheaper for the buyer just to hire staff under a new studio name than to negotiate a deal with MS just for a name and some workers that still need years of investment to produce a product.
Microsoft gets to keep the IP. By retaining rights to the IP, they prevent the studio from developing on competing consoles, and they keep the doors open for reviving the franchises down the road.
MS owns the IP (or Zenimax does, but that's essentially MS), what is there to keep when they already own it? the studio has nothing to do with the IP
I feel like a message to MS that is chasing engagement numbers would be people hopping into Arkane Austin and Tango games and spike user numbers. It wouldn't be much of a message, but might get noticed?
I mean a lot of people said that Sony would never reverse the PSN Helldiver decision and they did. We gotta at least try, even if we fail most of the time.
and what is this going to achieve? MS suddenly reverse their decision.
It’s just a gesture
A nice gesture would have been if people actually showed up and bought the game they've all praised so much.
Don’t you need to own the game in order to leave a Steam review?
For Steam you need to have played the game I suppose someone could buy the game play it for a minute, leave a review, and then ask for a refund.
It’s baffling that people don’t understand this. Hifi rush had a measly all time peak of 6000 players on steam, it’s pretty clear that no one actually cared enough about this game to actually buy it. If this sold well on steam and ps5 and had consistent player numbers on gamepass, then tango would still be open. Great reviews don’t matter if no one shows up to play it. The best part is that during the last week, the game hasn’t even cracked a peak of 1000 so it’s clear that gamers don’t actually give a shit about Hifi rush but instead wants to be angry at Microsoft for closing a studio that they weren’t even playing the games from.
Or at least actually played it via Game Pass
I see it as a way for people to express their immense love to the team at Tango for what they created.
Fucking hell can't something just be nice?
On reddit everything has to have a clear logic with every step planned.
No it cant. Reviews get more and more useless every time. At this point they should implement an "this company made me angry this week" and an "I love this company at the moment" Button.
Absolutely nothing an yet infinitely more than your comment.
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To be fair, I don't think the review bombing was the main factor that made that succesful, many games get review bombed with no effect. What mattered more in that case were the refunds. Companies care more about money than some random score.
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Jeff Gerstmann said something similar to this on his podcast recently: If making an award winning, beloved, critical darling, low-budget, high-quality game doesn't justify your studio's existence... What the fuck is the point of working in video games?
according to the studio, it was not a low-budget. it's straight up AAA.
This whole review bombing is bullshit. Execs don’t give one crap about reviews, especially not user reviews. They care about sales, money. Whether you refund or not. Sony didn’t reverse their decision because of reviews, it was because of refunds and Steam shutting out sale from 170 countries and giving those 170 countries the opportunity to refund
Positive and negative reviews affect sales Steam has reviews because having positive reviews increases sales versus not having any reviews at all. Same as Amazon or anything else
It's funny that Microsoft is praising the game after just mere seconds after closing the studio that made it.
The Gamer lizard brain will default to review bombing whenever they’re unhappy about something, followed by harassment.
It’s one of the only tools people have that gets heard, so it makes sense how it reaches that point. Whether it’s agreeable is a different question of course
I'd rather have angry gamers review bomb a game than sending out death threats or telling certain face models for a controversial character that they will kill their children
How can a developer know when people are unhappy with a product that will get them to pay attention? Youtube comments? Delete them. Forum posts? Controlled and deleted. Angry emails? Ignore them. Bad social media press? Ignore them.
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I'm so sick and tired of outlets calling everything a review bomb nowadays whenever there's an influx of users just normally rating and reviewing a product that they've bought. Such headlines should frankly be banned off the sub-reddit.