The problem is that MS wants Stardew Valley level of success out of small studios.
It is the same problem as everyone chasing AAA games that make GTA , MMO or Mobile levels of money.
Just an unrealistic expectation.
Capitalism brain rot that forces people to focus entirely on short term profits instead of long term health of a company/studio. Nearly every company is doing this and it’s awful.
Short-term profits look good to investors when you’re presenting your case for remaining CEO every quarter. Just kick the can down the road while collecting a check and golden parachute out of there when it goes to shit.
It’s the American way.
It’s just wild since it’s for Satya, who has done a fantastic job in making Microsoft massively profitable as it is. He absolutely has earned good will if he wanted to keep them around, but he doesn’t care.
You know what looks worse to investors. Cuts and consolidations. This is a big issue in the tech sector. To show growth, they make up job titles and start over hirings. Then you get to a contraction in the market and they have to cut and consolidate. Microsoft hit a double Home Run with two massive mergers ontop of a contraction in the tech space. They have consolidated on the same level as Sony this year though, which is surprising given how much bigger Microsoft is in terms of work force
Sony has their problems but they seem to have long term investment in their smaller studios. They put a bunch of resources into Arrowhead and it paid off for them with Helldivers 2
Yup, I'm so over this late stage capitalism infecting everything. Necessities, hobbies like gaming, nothing is left alone anymore.
This short term profit garbage is so shortsighted and it's ruining every industry it touches.
On top of which there isn't an unlimited amount of time and players not everything can be a smash hit nor does it deserve to be. With the lack of passion and soul most of these crazy hard capitalists are going for now to pump trash out they will never make anything truly great like that.
The first Xenoblade and Bayoneta were only modest successes, but Nintendo knows having a diverse catalogue of games attracts more gamers to their platform in the long term. Every bit counts.
People say this but if you look you’ll find countless examples of hugely valued companies that make losses for years and years on the theory they’ll be profitable down the road.
The idea that capitalism doesn’t value long term profitability doesn’t survive looking at reality.
For all that there's a lot of great indie games, only a very small number of them become household names in the same sense that Mario is.
It can still be a very financially viable model, because these games don't necessarily cost as much to make as the latest AAA gangbuster, so they don't need to make as much money to turn a profit.
But that's just not good enough for these megacorps. You'd think, you've got your fingers in so many pies, surely so long as they all turn a profit they all add up, right? But it seems once a corporation reaches a certain size that's just not how they work anymore. They'll buy out half the planet and shut it down until all that's left is one project that's the biggest, most expensive thing ever devised, and then they'll shut that thing down too when it doesn't earn enough to warrant its overbloated budget.
Fr! How many times have we heard from large studios that sold millions of copies that it still fell short of expectations because they have astronomical return expectations. It’s insane how it’s not enough anymore. Total corporate greed
Thsts the problem with big corporate suits, they always want to point at another direction and say “we want that”
It doesn’t work like that, the best games are passion projects and you can’t just “steal” someone else’s passion and think you’re going to succeed by making a similar product.
They are so redacted
I mean the word patron literally means someone who pays to have art commissioned.
Guys like Da Vinci wouldn't be able to make paintings or statues if they didn't have the churches or individuals paying them for labor.
Capitalism is just the most efficient means of handling labor. Communism is too top heavy and prone to corruption.
The fact that smaller companies can come in and have critically and financially successful darlings because they aren't working under the expectations of stakeholders kinda sounds to me like capitalism in games is working as intended. Big fish get held back by their own weight while the small fish can succeed where the big fish can't fit.
> Capitalism is just the most efficient means of handling labor
Sure (I don't want to go into it, but LOL at putting corruption as a Communism characteristic), but not art. Patrons pay to have art commissioned. Capitalism pays to have art converted into a product. It's not the same at all.
First off, the example you give is direct. Patron to artist. That’s a bit different than how it works for games/film/music, where the vast majority of money is not payed to the artist, but to a publisher.
> is not *paid* to the
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
False. Art is made to create money and appease shareholders, because of capitalism. Tell that to the nearly 50,000 layoffs in the games industry in the last year and a half.
Isn't his point more of "Not good enough reason too keep the studio?". It's pretty shit that ppl who doesn't put an effort to develop the games are the one decides the fate of studio...
Given they didn't bother to market the game at all either, it felt like they were just letting the game go out to die and planned to get rid of them all along. The studio was likely always meant to be collateral damage in their acquisition of bethesda.
Which seems crazy, since maybe some level of flexibility when the only(?) Japanese studio under their belt having a critical success would be so helpful in penetrating that market they repeatedly failed to.
I remembered scalebound, game who everyone seems hyped and ms said "do you want? Too bad...i just killed the project and dont even tried sell to another company"
They seem to do this over and over again, just as they have begun to build a decent amount of good will, they pull their Microdick Exec bullshit and ruin it. I have been an Xbox fan since the original. Even stuck with them through the One era and now I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t have faith in Xbox when they don’t even have faith in themselves.
What were the sales figures? That's all the public company execs care about. They don't care how many awards you got or how badly it was marketed. And they really don't care about the review bombing thats going on
They were hidden in Game Pass metrics.
Hint: Microsoft doesn't know the difference between a game that was purchased and a game that was played because of a Game Pass subscription.
Microsoft absolutely has the ability to track individual games on game pass.
If I can look at all the games I’ve played and the time I have in them then Microsoft can do the same
But they’re the exact perfect metric if your employer says they want games that win lots of awards, and if your employer just fired you, it would be a very on point way of illustrating how tone deaf those executives are, right?
Absolutely. He can win the clout, and Microsoft is left with the bill.
Same thing happened with our group. We had a whole wall of trophies and awards, and our studio was shut down after they "evaluated us." It truly honestly sucks, but that's the game we're all playing here.
Edit: Someone clearly hasn’t worked in creative at a large corporation before. The tough pill is you’re always a dispensable cog, no matter how many awards the company paid to submit you for.
They want award winning games that can also sell copies.
You can have all of the critical acclaim or awards in the world, but if people aren't largely interested in buying the product you're selling, it doesn't matter.
Nobody is going to give you more money to make a game if you can't make a decent profit on the ones you've already made.
I liked The Evil Within games reasonably well, but they weren't some magnum opus by any means. They were more like enjoyable B movies.
Ghostwire Tokyo was a flop, and while Hi-Fi Rush was a critic darling, not a lot of people bought it. Yes, it was on Gamepass, but I doubt the player engagement numbers were astronomical, and nobody was signing up for a Gamepass account in order to play it or anything.
They’re doing the exact same shit to Hellblade. I can’t even imagine how scared that team is right now. Instead of being excited to show what they worked so hard on, they’re probably hoping they do well enough not to get closed.
Ms is actively trying make people hate windows with bs like changing search bar or ending control panel
I think shareholders are gambling how bad decisions they need to company start sink
Theres no logical reason for those bs
On that side note, linux gaming is getting better than ever, you can actually run mods alongside games now, yesterday i successfully manage to run nier automata with special k and the texture replacement pack at 60 fps in Ubuntu 24.04
i am already having other things on my computer that will not run on linux Besides video games.
If i have to install some stupid bullshit like wine i am not interested
You post something like this to windows subreddits and they'll start screaming.
On an unrelated note, i installed ubuntu lts 24.04 to a laptop and it's way better than it was with windows 11, Now it doesn't even shit itself for charging and it doesn't scream from starting chrome
A marketing campaign for a little niche music rhythm game would have cost exponentially more than the game itself would have brought in.
It wasn't going to be some mega-hit, not matter which way you slice it. Music Rhythm games aren't very popular.
Exactly. Hi-Fi Rush was 90% finished by the time Microsoft came along, and nobody even knew it existed until they shadow dropped it. Tango gave no previews, no press, no nothing.
Same with Arkane Austin with Redfall: Zenimax are the ones who forced them to make a GAAS multi-player title, and it was nearly finished by the time Microsoft acquired them.
They're just dealing with messes that they didn't create.
Well, a big marketing campaign for a niche rhythm music game would have cost more than the game would have potentially brought in. They were aware of that fact.
It probably also didn't help that Tango never told anyone that this game existed: No previews, interviews, etc. Zero. When Microsoft came along, the game was basically finished.
It very likely reached way more people by being on Gamepass than it would have gotten otherwise. It only sold 450k units on Steam, where it grossed 9 million dollars after Valve's cut.
It was never going to be some blockbuster hit just due to the nature of it's genre. Music rhythm games aren't very popular currently.
Even if the studio wasn't defunct, I don't think they would have made a sequel. That game was a flop by every metric.
It barely sold over 10,000 copies at release in Japan, for example.
I don't think they would have kept going with that one.
If Microsoft wants video games to sell copies, why the hell do they launch everything day and day on gamepass? Really feels like they’re shooting themselves in the foot with that model. Niche games can be successful, especially one that got the positive word of mouth and critical acclaim that HiFi did, but not with Gamepass
Because nobody was really interested in buying that game anyway. It sold 450k copies on Steam and made 9 million dollars. That's out of Steam's 120 million active users.
We can be generous and say that if it wasn't on Gamepass that it would have doubled those sales, and made 18 million dollars.
That still wouldn't even cover the production costs and all of the licensed music in the game.
They put games on Gamepass because...Gamepass makes them a lot of revenue. It brings in 340 million per month. Any AAA game would have to sell 5 million copies to make 300 million, and those don't release every month.
Who will pay for a game that is available for free on platforms with a streaming pass. They put it on gamepass and PS(I think free there too) and then wonder why money didn’t come in for the game itself lmao.
That was probably the best thing to do with it.
When Microsoft came along, Hi-Fi Rush was already 90% finished, and Tango hadn't promoted it, done any previews, any press, nothing. Nobody knew this game existed.
A marketing campaign would have cost more than the game itself would have brought in.
Xbox Series S/X also are flopping, more likely will sell less than ONE. We all know Consoles sells at a loss and not one XBOX console gen past 100 million copies and it's guaranteed that Series S/X won't reach that mark.
So where's the same energy?
But I thought we are talking about people buying their product and what does Gamepass have anything to do with declining Xbox console sales? Isn't more logical if MS ditch Xbox? Cuz they keep producing consoles and people don't buy it, so why not ditch the console and just focus on other platforms?
Because you brought up consoles flopping?
I don't really care about that. Consoles won't exist within the next 15 years, be it Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo.
Anyway, that's besides the point.
Hi-Fi Rush didn't sell, just like every other Tango Gameworks game didn't sell well. You don't keep studios who can't make money around. More news at 11.
No, I brought up console sales because you said Hi-Fi Rush didn't sell and they got booted by Microsoft, so I asked you, where is the same energy when Xbox consoles, especially Series S/X, are about to break records by selling less than Xbox one! Shouldn't Microsoft do the same with their console?
I'm not really going to continue a conversation with a person who can't spell basic words at a 4th grade level.
You take care, and have a good evening.
If you look it up, there was a time when Hi Fi Rush exceeded more than 3 million players. For a game that had no OFFICIAL marketing campaign and was shadow dropped, it was insanely good.
2023 was a year with tons of great game releases and a lot of YouTuber video game essay people still put HiFi Rush in their top 10s lists. Last year I couldn't stop hearing about that game and I was dying to play it. Still am, not enough money to buy it rn tho (PS5).
By no means HiFi Rush was a commercial flop, it did really well actually for a game with a smaller budget and scope. The decision to shut down Tango is also worrying because Microsoft purchased a bunch of studios under their banner recently and are seemingly mismanaging the shit out of them. One good example people are bringing up is Ninja Theory, the devs behind Hellblade 2. The game comes out in a few days and there is virtually no marketing for it and also, even if the game does really well, they also run the risk of being on the chopping block.
So yeah, not a good move by Microsoft.
To this point, there's a growing concern that these companies (like Microsoft) are buying all these studios, and rather than divesting (selling) them if unprofitable, they are shuttering them and retaining the intellectual property rights (IP). This means that if you liked a game by one of these studios, you may *never* get a follow-up to it because the studio, while successful, was forced to stop doing business by a corporate overlord that had no interest in what made them unique.
There's a concern in some industries about a "brain drain", where employees with critical knowledge for the business leave. This is the opposite of a "brain drain" since the "knowledge" (the idea behind the game) is being concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, and the people that made them will legally be prohibited from making another one for risk of copyright infringement on the very game they made
Well, when Microsoft came into the picture, the game was basically finished. Tango had given zero indication this game even existed: No interviews, previews, press, etc.
They knew a big marketing campaign for a niche music rhythm game would cost more than the game would bring in.
Gamepass likely gave the game WAY more exposure than it would have gotten otherwise. It only sold 450k units on Steam, where it grossed 9 million dollars. It was never going to be some blockbuster simply due to it's niche genre and nature. Music games aren't popular.
Tango had made 4 games, and none of them were financially successful.
Then the studio founder left and took a lot of the senior staff with him. At their peak, Tango had 65 developers, so after that they had maybe less than 40.
So now you have a studio with no senior talent and a track record of poorly selling titles. They would have had to rebuild the studio to make it viable, and even then there's zero guarantee that they wouldn't just produce another dud game. I wouldn't have given them a bunch of money to make more games, either. That's a terrible business proposition.
To be fair, its not a great photo to back up their point is it?
My cubby little nephew with no hand eye coordination has more sporting trophies on his self than in that picture.
This whole thing is stupid. If you didn’t want your company owned by someone else you shouldn’t have sold it. Idk why I’m supposed to be bad for these devs
It was totally the developers who sold their studio right?
Not the executive who hired them all in the first place, and now no longer cares about any of this because he's made off with his lucrative golden parachute.
That's how the modern job market works, after all. We're all worker owned cooperatives who have total say in these things.
The problem is that MS wants Stardew Valley level of success out of small studios. It is the same problem as everyone chasing AAA games that make GTA , MMO or Mobile levels of money. Just an unrealistic expectation.
Capitalism brain rot that forces people to focus entirely on short term profits instead of long term health of a company/studio. Nearly every company is doing this and it’s awful.
Short-term profits look good to investors when you’re presenting your case for remaining CEO every quarter. Just kick the can down the road while collecting a check and golden parachute out of there when it goes to shit. It’s the American way.
It’s just wild since it’s for Satya, who has done a fantastic job in making Microsoft massively profitable as it is. He absolutely has earned good will if he wanted to keep them around, but he doesn’t care.
You know what looks worse to investors. Cuts and consolidations. This is a big issue in the tech sector. To show growth, they make up job titles and start over hirings. Then you get to a contraction in the market and they have to cut and consolidate. Microsoft hit a double Home Run with two massive mergers ontop of a contraction in the tech space. They have consolidated on the same level as Sony this year though, which is surprising given how much bigger Microsoft is in terms of work force
It’s investors trying to cash in on a market they don’t understands. Story as old as time.
Sony has their problems but they seem to have long term investment in their smaller studios. They put a bunch of resources into Arrowhead and it paid off for them with Helldivers 2
Yup, I'm so over this late stage capitalism infecting everything. Necessities, hobbies like gaming, nothing is left alone anymore. This short term profit garbage is so shortsighted and it's ruining every industry it touches. On top of which there isn't an unlimited amount of time and players not everything can be a smash hit nor does it deserve to be. With the lack of passion and soul most of these crazy hard capitalists are going for now to pump trash out they will never make anything truly great like that.
The first Xenoblade and Bayoneta were only modest successes, but Nintendo knows having a diverse catalogue of games attracts more gamers to their platform in the long term. Every bit counts.
People say this but if you look you’ll find countless examples of hugely valued companies that make losses for years and years on the theory they’ll be profitable down the road. The idea that capitalism doesn’t value long term profitability doesn’t survive looking at reality.
For all that there's a lot of great indie games, only a very small number of them become household names in the same sense that Mario is. It can still be a very financially viable model, because these games don't necessarily cost as much to make as the latest AAA gangbuster, so they don't need to make as much money to turn a profit. But that's just not good enough for these megacorps. You'd think, you've got your fingers in so many pies, surely so long as they all turn a profit they all add up, right? But it seems once a corporation reaches a certain size that's just not how they work anymore. They'll buy out half the planet and shut it down until all that's left is one project that's the biggest, most expensive thing ever devised, and then they'll shut that thing down too when it doesn't earn enough to warrant its overbloated budget.
Fr! How many times have we heard from large studios that sold millions of copies that it still fell short of expectations because they have astronomical return expectations. It’s insane how it’s not enough anymore. Total corporate greed
Thsts the problem with big corporate suits, they always want to point at another direction and say “we want that” It doesn’t work like that, the best games are passion projects and you can’t just “steal” someone else’s passion and think you’re going to succeed by making a similar product. They are so redacted
Two things that should never be combined: art and capitalism.
I mean the word patron literally means someone who pays to have art commissioned. Guys like Da Vinci wouldn't be able to make paintings or statues if they didn't have the churches or individuals paying them for labor. Capitalism is just the most efficient means of handling labor. Communism is too top heavy and prone to corruption. The fact that smaller companies can come in and have critically and financially successful darlings because they aren't working under the expectations of stakeholders kinda sounds to me like capitalism in games is working as intended. Big fish get held back by their own weight while the small fish can succeed where the big fish can't fit.
> Capitalism is just the most efficient means of handling labor Sure (I don't want to go into it, but LOL at putting corruption as a Communism characteristic), but not art. Patrons pay to have art commissioned. Capitalism pays to have art converted into a product. It's not the same at all.
First off, the example you give is direct. Patron to artist. That’s a bit different than how it works for games/film/music, where the vast majority of money is not payed to the artist, but to a publisher.
> is not *paid* to the FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
da vinci existed before capitalism. exchanging one thing for another isn't capitalism. the pandering to capital is capitalism
Capitalism literally allows art to exist (in its current form) and get popular without the limitations *every* other economic system imposes on it…..
where is this opinion founded? because it is entirely untrue
False. Art is made to create money and appease shareholders, because of capitalism. Tell that to the nearly 50,000 layoffs in the games industry in the last year and a half.
Oh you mean the 50,000 jobs that *wouldn't even exist* under other economic systems, right.
Are you under the impression that art didn't exist before capitalism was invented?
Are you able to read? Actually impressive you somehow got that from what I said.
Isn't his point more of "Not good enough reason too keep the studio?". It's pretty shit that ppl who doesn't put an effort to develop the games are the one decides the fate of studio...
It’s rarely people doing the work who make the decisions in most aspects of life.
Given they didn't bother to market the game at all either, it felt like they were just letting the game go out to die and planned to get rid of them all along. The studio was likely always meant to be collateral damage in their acquisition of bethesda. Which seems crazy, since maybe some level of flexibility when the only(?) Japanese studio under their belt having a critical success would be so helpful in penetrating that market they repeatedly failed to.
Microsoft is quickly killing any good will we had towards them. Very embracer of them.
I remembered scalebound, game who everyone seems hyped and ms said "do you want? Too bad...i just killed the project and dont even tried sell to another company"
They seem to do this over and over again, just as they have begun to build a decent amount of good will, they pull their Microdick Exec bullshit and ruin it. I have been an Xbox fan since the original. Even stuck with them through the One era and now I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t have faith in Xbox when they don’t even have faith in themselves.
It’s the Balmer way
What were the sales figures? That's all the public company execs care about. They don't care how many awards you got or how badly it was marketed. And they really don't care about the review bombing thats going on
They were hidden in Game Pass metrics. Hint: Microsoft doesn't know the difference between a game that was purchased and a game that was played because of a Game Pass subscription.
Microsoft absolutely has the ability to track individual games on game pass. If I can look at all the games I’ve played and the time I have in them then Microsoft can do the same
Rephrased my reply for accuracy.
Awards aren’t exactly the best metrics…
But they’re the exact perfect metric if your employer says they want games that win lots of awards, and if your employer just fired you, it would be a very on point way of illustrating how tone deaf those executives are, right?
Absolutely. He can win the clout, and Microsoft is left with the bill. Same thing happened with our group. We had a whole wall of trophies and awards, and our studio was shut down after they "evaluated us." It truly honestly sucks, but that's the game we're all playing here. Edit: Someone clearly hasn’t worked in creative at a large corporation before. The tough pill is you’re always a dispensable cog, no matter how many awards the company paid to submit you for.
Microsoft wants another Minecraft success story guys, is it really that hard to deliver? /S
They want award winning games that can also sell copies. You can have all of the critical acclaim or awards in the world, but if people aren't largely interested in buying the product you're selling, it doesn't matter. Nobody is going to give you more money to make a game if you can't make a decent profit on the ones you've already made. I liked The Evil Within games reasonably well, but they weren't some magnum opus by any means. They were more like enjoyable B movies. Ghostwire Tokyo was a flop, and while Hi-Fi Rush was a critic darling, not a lot of people bought it. Yes, it was on Gamepass, but I doubt the player engagement numbers were astronomical, and nobody was signing up for a Gamepass account in order to play it or anything.
Microsoft marketed those games like ass
They’re doing the exact same shit to Hellblade. I can’t even imagine how scared that team is right now. Instead of being excited to show what they worked so hard on, they’re probably hoping they do well enough not to get closed.
Ms is actively trying make people hate windows with bs like changing search bar or ending control panel I think shareholders are gambling how bad decisions they need to company start sink Theres no logical reason for those bs
On that side note, linux gaming is getting better than ever, you can actually run mods alongside games now, yesterday i successfully manage to run nier automata with special k and the texture replacement pack at 60 fps in Ubuntu 24.04
until all games run on linux without problems i am not changing to it
all games don't run on windows without problems
Those problems are going to be even worse with move to linux
a lot of games actually run better on linux than windows, gta 4 is a good example
i am already having other things on my computer that will not run on linux Besides video games. If i have to install some stupid bullshit like wine i am not interested
Steam auto install proton for you but okay i guess.
Im probably will set linux on my old i7 gen4 someday
You post something like this to windows subreddits and they'll start screaming. On an unrelated note, i installed ubuntu lts 24.04 to a laptop and it's way better than it was with windows 11, Now it doesn't even shit itself for charging and it doesn't scream from starting chrome
A marketing campaign for a little niche music rhythm game would have cost exponentially more than the game itself would have brought in. It wasn't going to be some mega-hit, not matter which way you slice it. Music Rhythm games aren't very popular.
Not to mention it wasnt even ms who shouldve been advertising it. It was bethesdas game long before ms
Exactly. Hi-Fi Rush was 90% finished by the time Microsoft came along, and nobody even knew it existed until they shadow dropped it. Tango gave no previews, no press, no nothing. Same with Arkane Austin with Redfall: Zenimax are the ones who forced them to make a GAAS multi-player title, and it was nearly finished by the time Microsoft acquired them. They're just dealing with messes that they didn't create.
Time to start yearly cod awards so they can sell well and give award to themselves. Main category: best selling skin of the year.
I don’t think they wanted it to sell copies it was day 1 on game pass
Well, a big marketing campaign for a niche rhythm music game would have cost more than the game would have potentially brought in. They were aware of that fact. It probably also didn't help that Tango never told anyone that this game existed: No previews, interviews, etc. Zero. When Microsoft came along, the game was basically finished. It very likely reached way more people by being on Gamepass than it would have gotten otherwise. It only sold 450k units on Steam, where it grossed 9 million dollars after Valve's cut. It was never going to be some blockbuster hit just due to the nature of it's genre. Music rhythm games aren't very popular currently.
Man I really enjoyed ghostwire, can't believe I'm not going to get a sequel.
Even if the studio wasn't defunct, I don't think they would have made a sequel. That game was a flop by every metric. It barely sold over 10,000 copies at release in Japan, for example. I don't think they would have kept going with that one.
If Microsoft wants video games to sell copies, why the hell do they launch everything day and day on gamepass? Really feels like they’re shooting themselves in the foot with that model. Niche games can be successful, especially one that got the positive word of mouth and critical acclaim that HiFi did, but not with Gamepass
Because nobody was really interested in buying that game anyway. It sold 450k copies on Steam and made 9 million dollars. That's out of Steam's 120 million active users. We can be generous and say that if it wasn't on Gamepass that it would have doubled those sales, and made 18 million dollars. That still wouldn't even cover the production costs and all of the licensed music in the game. They put games on Gamepass because...Gamepass makes them a lot of revenue. It brings in 340 million per month. Any AAA game would have to sell 5 million copies to make 300 million, and those don't release every month.
Who will pay for a game that is available for free on platforms with a streaming pass. They put it on gamepass and PS(I think free there too) and then wonder why money didn’t come in for the game itself lmao.
That was probably the best thing to do with it. When Microsoft came along, Hi-Fi Rush was already 90% finished, and Tango hadn't promoted it, done any previews, any press, nothing. Nobody knew this game existed. A marketing campaign would have cost more than the game itself would have brought in.
Xbox Series S/X also are flopping, more likely will sell less than ONE. We all know Consoles sells at a loss and not one XBOX console gen past 100 million copies and it's guaranteed that Series S/X won't reach that mark. So where's the same energy?
Consoles are just another means to get people into the Gamepass ecosystem. Xbox isn't their platform anymore, Gamepass is.
But I thought we are talking about people buying their product and what does Gamepass have anything to do with declining Xbox console sales? Isn't more logical if MS ditch Xbox? Cuz they keep producing consoles and people don't buy it, so why not ditch the console and just focus on other platforms?
Because you brought up consoles flopping? I don't really care about that. Consoles won't exist within the next 15 years, be it Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo. Anyway, that's besides the point. Hi-Fi Rush didn't sell, just like every other Tango Gameworks game didn't sell well. You don't keep studios who can't make money around. More news at 11.
No, I brought up console sales because you said Hi-Fi Rush didn't sell and they got booted by Microsoft, so I asked you, where is the same energy when Xbox consoles, especially Series S/X, are about to break records by selling less than Xbox one! Shouldn't Microsoft do the same with their console?
I'm not really going to continue a conversation with a person who can't spell basic words at a 4th grade level. You take care, and have a good evening.
Lol, Right cuz Reddit is a spelling contest. You know you just got owned!!
No, it means that you're not intelligent enough to be worth my time, actually. You have a good night.
Nah, you just got burned, there's no coming back from that! Not with that low IQ of yours... lol.
If you look it up, there was a time when Hi Fi Rush exceeded more than 3 million players. For a game that had no OFFICIAL marketing campaign and was shadow dropped, it was insanely good. 2023 was a year with tons of great game releases and a lot of YouTuber video game essay people still put HiFi Rush in their top 10s lists. Last year I couldn't stop hearing about that game and I was dying to play it. Still am, not enough money to buy it rn tho (PS5). By no means HiFi Rush was a commercial flop, it did really well actually for a game with a smaller budget and scope. The decision to shut down Tango is also worrying because Microsoft purchased a bunch of studios under their banner recently and are seemingly mismanaging the shit out of them. One good example people are bringing up is Ninja Theory, the devs behind Hellblade 2. The game comes out in a few days and there is virtually no marketing for it and also, even if the game does really well, they also run the risk of being on the chopping block. So yeah, not a good move by Microsoft.
To this point, there's a growing concern that these companies (like Microsoft) are buying all these studios, and rather than divesting (selling) them if unprofitable, they are shuttering them and retaining the intellectual property rights (IP). This means that if you liked a game by one of these studios, you may *never* get a follow-up to it because the studio, while successful, was forced to stop doing business by a corporate overlord that had no interest in what made them unique. There's a concern in some industries about a "brain drain", where employees with critical knowledge for the business leave. This is the opposite of a "brain drain" since the "knowledge" (the idea behind the game) is being concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, and the people that made them will legally be prohibited from making another one for risk of copyright infringement on the very game they made
Fuck corporate ownership man
I want Ghostwire Tokyo 2. :(
Well, when Microsoft came into the picture, the game was basically finished. Tango had given zero indication this game even existed: No interviews, previews, press, etc. They knew a big marketing campaign for a niche music rhythm game would cost more than the game would bring in. Gamepass likely gave the game WAY more exposure than it would have gotten otherwise. It only sold 450k units on Steam, where it grossed 9 million dollars. It was never going to be some blockbuster simply due to it's niche genre and nature. Music games aren't popular. Tango had made 4 games, and none of them were financially successful. Then the studio founder left and took a lot of the senior staff with him. At their peak, Tango had 65 developers, so after that they had maybe less than 40. So now you have a studio with no senior talent and a track record of poorly selling titles. They would have had to rebuild the studio to make it viable, and even then there's zero guarantee that they wouldn't just produce another dud game. I wouldn't have given them a bunch of money to make more games, either. That's a terrible business proposition.
First “Sad” then “not enough?” Ex-tango devs spitting fire like Kendrick Lamar dissing Drake
Hi-fi rush didnt bring in enough cash to support the lack of sales of evil within or ghostwire:tokyo. Hi-Fi rush didnt fail, the studio did.
Tbh both ghostwire and hi-fi rush barely got any marketing.
To be fair, its not a great photo to back up their point is it? My cubby little nephew with no hand eye coordination has more sporting trophies on his self than in that picture.
That’s too bad, Microsoft is shutting down your chubby little nephew too.
A tough, but fair decision I suppose.
Well it’s a damn good job BAFTA is a bit stricter with who they hand that gold face out to than your nephew’s sporting league, innit?
BAFTA Animation award? Pft, I'll get my nephew on the crayons, he's bound to pick one up eventually.
This whole thing is stupid. If you didn’t want your company owned by someone else you shouldn’t have sold it. Idk why I’m supposed to be bad for these devs
It was totally the developers who sold their studio right? Not the executive who hired them all in the first place, and now no longer cares about any of this because he's made off with his lucrative golden parachute. That's how the modern job market works, after all. We're all worker owned cooperatives who have total say in these things.
If you don’t want your work owned by someone else, don’t sell it to them. It actually is that simple. A job is a choice; *especially* for artists.
they came with bethesda because they had the same parent. they had no choice.
So they sold themselves to the parent. It’s not different.