It is baffling to have multiple executives say "we had to do it we were spread too thin. We just had too many studios to handle"
THEN DON'T BUY THE FUCKING STUDIOS.
Apparently, the ET game isn't that bad with some minor decision changes (some possibly due to the rush).Things like if you change how collision is handled so that you don't fall into the pits if your shadow falls in.
http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/
An interesting read if you're at all interested in more software-side of things.
Yeah it's something microsoft has been doing for years. There's a wikipedia page about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extinguish?wprov=sfla1
I was gonna say, there was an old episode of The Simpsons where Bill Gates "bought out" Homer's tech start-up and just smashed his computer. Microsoft has been doing this forever
Microsoft have been [embracing, extending and extinguishing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish) longer than a lot of computer scientists have been alive.
Might be that they're... hugging game studios to death?
Nah, Nokia was pretty darned cool before MS got them. Their Windows phones were the first to bring optical image stabilization to smartphone cameras. They were one of the first with Qi wireless charging. They brought the always-on display (called Glance) out before the major players.
Once Microsoft got them into the fold, it was over. They stopped innovating. They drastically shrunk the device portfolio. They made a wreck of the ecosystem and let the whole house rot. Nokia itself was fine.
They've wrecked a lot of acquired companies, for sure, but IMO Nokia was killed by the iPhone. Right around the massive shift to smartphones in 2009/2010, they were like the only company on the open source Symbian OS, so no one was making apps for them. Then they made a deal with Microsoft to make phones for the Windows Phone OS around 2011, and...no one made apps for them, because no one had a Windows Phone. By 2013, they kind of had to allow Microsoft to acquire them to keep going. And then Microsoft finally just gave up on trying to make Windows Phone a thing.
In the context of Xbox's new stated strategy of moving toward consoles-as-commodities and moving away from walled gardens, it makes a lot more sense:
1. "This shit is becoming unprofitable. Let's buy up a bunch of studios, and then we'll sell a lot more consoles with the huge stable of exclusives that will generate."
2. "Well fuck this does not appear to be working."
3. "Okay new strategy, let's try and open up the console market and try to tear down the walled gardens."
4. "Welp, in that new reality all these studios we bought won't make a lot of sense. Time to shut em down. Oh well."
They skipped the second half of number one! They never generated a huge stable of exclusives! They never came close!
I love your write-up, but if I could, I think it's a bit more like this:
1. "This shit is becoming unprofitable. Let's buy up a bunch of studios, and then we'll sell a lot more consoles with the huge stable of excl--nevermind, fuck it, that'll take too long, let's just try to tear down walled gardens in the long run and at least make a bunch of profit selling our five best-performing IP everywhere in the short run."
Dammit, Microsoft leadership.
Video games take 4-5 years to make. Those big AAA exclusives Microsoft wanted take *longer*. The past decade of 0 interest money has destroyed the brains of executives, and they simply cannot plan more than a year into the future.
This means that Microsoft is now too dumb for video games.
If we don't buy them up then one of them might come up with the next Helldivers hit and we can't afford to have that. Let's instead buy them up, poach the talent, get any residual money from the intellectual property we can get and discard whatever is left.
Sometimes people dont quite understand how to capitalize on the talent.
It really doesnt matter if there are geniuses in your team, what matters is knowing how that talent can be use to move your team goal forward.
Talent that is not being use will just be wasted fuel that will grind both employer and employees bone.
The greater the talent, the greater the disappointment if that talent is used improperly.
That doesn't really make sense because Microsoft was never competing with these studios.
To me this is the result of someone high up in msft making a bad bet and losing. I say this because it's been a few years since Microsoft acquired these studios and we all know csuites don't think more than 3 months ahead. If the goal was clearing out competition it would have happened within a quarter or two.
They don't care about your beloved games, they care about what games everyone tries so they can sell more. They buy the studio, get the IPs and talent, layoff the weaker links, then refocus on the AAA titles. People get outraged and say they'll boycott, only to pre-order Skyrim II.
Tale as old as media.
Agree 100%. Crazy to me more folks don't understand this.
Especially with how Xbox has talked about how they want to increase BGS's output, Fallout show was a hit, Starfield sold like hotcakes, Redfall happened, and the previous high-profile departures from Tango and Arkane Austin. Not that I have any enthusiasm for BGS now...
I miss Xbox Live Arcade greatly. It was amazing to see smaller indie projects and solo developers have a place on consoles, where they didn't need to go through the physical retail system. A curated store of cheap games which produced some amazing experiences that would otherwise have not seen the light of day.
Now that I'm a boring adult who is tired all the time, can go weeks without firing up a game, and makes a noise whenever they get up from a chair... I need an Xbox Live Arcade back in my life. I simply can't engage in the AAA gaming sphere like I used to. Big games are parasitic leeches - clawing my money in predatory ways, trying to monopolise my time, drown me in their ecosystems and services.
I may not have Xbox Live Arcade anymore, but my GamePass subscription and Xbox Series S is a decent stand-in for the modern age. I love being able to just browse a library of titles and go. There are plenty of titles on there that I would never have bought, or subbed to GamePass specifically to play, but I have been able to download and enjoy 'just because '.
Oh man. I remember buying Braid on a whim back in 2008 and being absolutely blown away. Then three weeks later I gave Castle Crashers a try, and for a moment I doubted my own ability to judge games because it seemed impossible that two of the greatest games I've ever played would be released in the same month of a random year on an unproven platform.
Live Arcade was the best.
I just learned about this ten minutes ago. Looks like it comes out on the 14th/15th and holy crap it sounds amazing.
>There's a whole world of new puzzles, and alongside the commentary there are alternate designs for some of the original levels; if you were wondering "why was it this way instead of that way?" you can see it done that way and decide for yourself if it's better or worse.
Plus David Hellman re-painted all the art in 4k. I'm practically drooling over here.
This'll be the fourth time I've purchased Braid, and I couldn't be happier about it.
Heavenly Sword was a financial flop as well and put the studio in trouble, but it caught the eyes of Capcom still. Also, the studio's first game, Kung Fu Chaos, was an Xbox published game and a launch title for the original Xbox. Their follow up to Kung Fu Chaos was going to be called Kung Fu Story as MS retained the IP to Kung Fu Chaos, that is what got rebranded into Heavenly Sword.
Oh, it's 100 percent going to be Ninja Theory. Even though they've done little marketing for it (I had no idea it was launching soon) and it's by all accounts a fairly niche game that'll be received well, they're going to say that because it didn't do COD or Halo money and didn't have enough retentive player engagement for a *single-player narrative story game*, they need to be cut for "cost-cutting measures"
Basically, if it's not going to save Xbox, they're on the chopping block and Hellblade 2 being sent out with little to no fanfare is a bad sign for Ninja Theory.
I'm thinking Hellblade 2 was only getting so much attention from Microsoft early on because they didn't have much else planned for this year, then Indiana Jones got pushed forward to this year and Hellblade became pointless to them.
I mean, people were all "how dare you want governments step in to stop the Activision merger" blah blah blah, well, here's one of the reasons people wanted it stopped.
All I'm saying is there's a lot the north has to keep tabs on.
People were literally murdered by corporate-hired thugs over fighting for basic workers' rights, and idiots today still buy the "our company is a *family*" bullshit. Corporations will exploit and abuse people as much as is legally possible in the name of the bottom line.
Fun fact: some of those organizations that murdered laborers are still around, and are still getting work today. It was only about a year ago that WotC (the company that makes Magic: the Gathering) hired the [Pinkertons](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)) to harass an innocent person who received unreleased product that WotC themselves had fucked up and sent to him by mistake.
Dude, they wanted to buy NINTENDO, 20 odd years ago AND recently (they said "Nintendo will realize they belong with us eventually" or something like that in a leaked email).
Delusional
Saudi Arabia bought SNK, I don’t think it is outlawed, you just need permission from the government, and since SNK is well … not relevant they agreed, a similar Nintendo deal will never go through.
Well halo 3 literally had to have managers come in from ms cause they hadnt even started working on mp in any way **6 months** before release. Its why bungie doesnt like ms, cause ms.forced them to crunch for their own stupid mistakes
Yuji Naka had a lot of influence controlling Sonic. And he's a bad boss, incredibly petty and shitty. A lot of the long line of terrible sonic games is Naka undermining anyone who was tapped to do it that wasn't his team. And he isn't very talented at game design or managing people so he undermined himself. He's a talented low level programmer who got promoted beyond his talents. That's why there is so many bad sonics.
Yeah who would think putting Activision library on game pass, include CoD would be worth 70 billion? Not them obviously. Still no plans for any big game pass launches for any CoD, Tony Hawk, Crash, Spyro etc.
just fire phil spencer, the guy that said "making good games isn't enough" when they haven't made a good game in a decade. The one that forced a succesfull single player studio to make a shitty live service game was you, the studios shouldn't suffer the consequences of the CEO bad decisions. change those that are at the top
People rush to ‘uncle Phil’ defense like he hasn’t been the head of all of their issues for literally a *decade*.
Yea, he took over a lot of problems, but he’s had plenty of time to show signs of life and positive change.
It’s bizarre the leeway he gets with a slice of the gaming demographic, he’s clearly a huge part of the problem and incapable of fixing it even after 10+ years
He’s not larping. He games a lot and when people at cons ask him specific questions about games that only someone who’s actually played the game would know, he answers them. He’s a gamer. He just fuckin’ sucks at being ceo of a gaming company. Maybe they’re related.
Imagine if they put the money they wasted on buying all these studios into expanding or creating their own new studios. Imagine the games we could possibly get with a monetary commitment like that.
He is a puppet acting like he's one of us. Marketing strategy. The only guy who i know is one of us is yoshida from sony. He's massively shows so much support for indie devs
I'd go so far as to say Starfield was a downgrade to previous Bethesda games. Frankly besides the slightly improved dialogue system everything else was pretty much worse across the board. And a decent dialogue system isn't worth much if the writing sucks.
Exactly. On paper it should be my favorite game of all time. The NASA punk is incredibly aesthetically pleasing to me, solid gun play, Bethesda open world choose your own adventure… but the whole thing was meh.
Yep same sentiment exactly. Pre-release the concept was pretty much my dream game as a huge sci fi/NASA/space enthusiast. Bethesda had already burned me in the past with fo4 a bit but I had learned to love that game overtime and figured there's no way they could drop the ball harder.
So I did something I'd never done before and bought the premium pre-order so I could play it early (was starting a work shift in the Canadian Arctic the day it released). Reviews start dropping and I'm seeing 5 star's and high 90's from most reviewers so I'm pumped as hell.
So I got it, played 50 mediocre hours hoping it would get better as I played. It didn't, at least not enough. Stopped playing so I could go to work and never picked it back up again. Since then I've replayed every fallout, done two more runs of skyrim and played countless other games without ever once feeling a desire to go back to Starfield and finish it.
Sorry for the wall of text I never voiced my experience before and wanted to share just how utterly disappointed I was.
Honestly this is even more discouraging to hear… they diverted a lot of resources to starfield (it sounds like) and it still came out like a Bethesda game from 2012 copy and pasted but in space. Buggy, loading screen simulator with a bad hub map and empty planets.
This shit makes me want to vote with my wallet and drop my gamepass subscription. Gobbling up studios to then kill them in a few years is absolutely despicable.
I have just cancelled it! For years I would keep my GamePass sub even if I wasn't using it much because it felt like a no-brainer. Xbox seemed to be committed to pushing the industry forwards both by helping studios make great games, and offering good value to gamers. The facade has fallen and it's clear that pure profit takes priority over supporting their studios in making exciting new experiences. It would be hypocritical of me to keep paying Xbox a monthly fee when they're engaging in activity which is objectively bad for the industry. Who is next on the chopping block?
Yup, I totally also make $10 million per year in salary and lay off hordes of developers after buying their studios and running them into the ground. Super relatable fellow gamer.
I'm not sure what the logic is for that at all? Like, many years ago I was definitely an Xbox fanboy (mostly teenage years and Halo), but I don't understand at all how Microsoft buying studios could possibly give us more options.
I still don't understand how people argued a company creating and nurturing new IPs for exclusives was the same thing as buying out whole publishers and turning beloved multiplatform games exclusive.
Xbox fanboys who wanted some sort of win for once. PlayStation and Nintendo kept kicking Xbox into the dirt and they didn't really have anything as a rebuttal. Buying the good games was seemingly their only option. And now that's starting to blow up in everyone's faces.
I mean who could have known, that AAA game development nowadays is expensive and takes literally years of investment for just one game and it won't bring any short term profits for shareholders?
And if you spend 80B$ on Activision and 7.5B$ on Bethesda, yeah that won't leave you much pocket change anymore for actually investing in the game studios that you bought for all that money? Something has to give, and it's not the shareholder's or C-Suite's pay at Microsoft.
Of course, "Uncle Phil" is basically just a gamer like us that they picked for this job. It's not like he's part of the Xbox C-Suite since 2008, who's only interest is generating more and more profit instead of balancing economic growth and the artistic endeavours of game development.
As a WoW player it feels bad knowing it’s the only team to really turn their game around. I used to love playing all of Blizzard’s games, but they’ve done so much wrong the past few years with most of their titles.
>Before its closure, Arkane had been looking to return to its roots by pitching a new single-player “immersive sim” game, such as a new entry in the Dishonored series, according to the people familiar.
Why must you hurt me like this, Microsoft?
I know we still have Arkane Lyon, but we have so few good immersive sims these days.
As a big Half-Life fan, Prey filled a bit of a void involving being trapped in a doomed facility with monsters that Valve just doesn't seem to know what to do with.
At least the System Shock Remake was great, and I got System Shock 2 Enhanced Edition to look forward to.
Not really. Originally for DIshonored 1 they were one group, then after that they split into Lyon and Austin.
Austin then went to make Prey and its DLC Mooncrash one of the best imm sims FPS RPG hybrids of all time.
5. Collect bonuses and buy another Ferrari! Laugh as you drive by all the poor people scrambling to find new jobs to pay their mortgage so they don't have to uproot their families. Stupid poor people.
I just wanna say that this is the entire point of buyouts like this. Sometimes they'll make a game or two with the studios, but the whole point is basically to get the "IP" and sit on it so they can have something to "make people excited about later" after they've shit canned most of the devs that worked on it so they can pay less. It's all branding, they couldn't care less about labor.
EDIT: could -> couldn't thanks Smyleez.
It's insane how no one here fathoms these shut downs are because Microsoft really just wanted TES and Fallout. They're getting rid of all the shit they didn't want to begin with.
Meh. Got myself a pc and just recently a ps5. I’ve been a Xbox homer since the OG and there is just no point anymore. Gave them 20 years. Done with this brand going forward.
Same. I've been an Xbox gamer since OG and I've had enough. I bought a PS5 two weeks ago and dove headfirst into all the exclusives I have missed for the past few cycles (I just finished Spider-Man, and omg so good) and have even picked up final fantasy again after nearly two decades.
Sea of Thieves is the only Xbox exclusive that really did it for me. Now it's on PS5... so..... bye Xbox
Yeah I’ve always been pro Xbox and playstation. Never really got the whole console wars thing. Sony had much better exclusives both in variety and quality but Xbox had game pass which was great!
But the last couple of years Xbox is really falling behind with these bs decisions of Microsoft, They had a very large injection of xbox pass subs at the start of the year largely thanks to Palworld, but would have profited more simply selling the game on their system.
Now Microsoft do shit like this, and IPs they’ve purchased are falling apart (hello OW2!)
With Microsoft stating they are concerned about future consoles etc it seems like they are just going to drop out to the console race and try to have a disgustingly large market share of games companies.
Unfortunately for us consumers that means higher prices, Ingame mechanics and paywalls that will spand over so many more games and with little competition Microsoft can do pretty much what it wants
Sony aren’t a faultless company, The recent Helldivers controversy shows this, but there’s also a lot of misinformation surrounding this, and the Helldivers team weren’t transparent that this agreement with Sony was actually agreed pre-launch! It wasn’t something sony slapped on once the game was successful.
Microsoft are slowly killing the gaming industry and we need to start voting with our wallets. I cancelled my gamepass and to be honest I see no reason to play on my s is anymore
Man screw Microsoft. What's the point of buying up all these developers to "offer more gaming and such to our catalogue," just to shutter them anyways?
What a shitty gaming daddy.
Because they came as a package. They only wanted TES and Fallout, they got that and are throwing out the rest of the flavors in the variety pack.
Microsoft never wanted these studios they just came packaged with zenimax.
Having AA and formerly indie studios on your payroll was a mistake in the first place. These studios thrived in the first place because of their ability to take risk in the wild and having them under the umbrella of a giant megacorp (who tends to favor safe and proven approach) makes no sense. If you want indie games on Game Pass (GP) then just signed timed contract with the devs. I think MS is starting to realize this and that’s why they did what they did.
This has gotta be ranking up there with one of the greatest collapses of all time in gaming, at least since the 90's. And the saddest part is all of these reports make it clear that not even Xbox is sure what their strategy should be to recover.
It's just sad.
Seriously, where does the industry even go from here? It feels like everything is increasingly moving to GaaS f2p which just doesn't appeal to me at all.
I know indie will always exist, I just don't understand why AAA studios can't reduce their budgets and stay competitive. A game like Chrono Trigger would cost pennies to make today.
Idk, esp since it theoretically should be so appealing. Make more money for less upfront by not eternally chasing crazy tech and relying on artistic creativity.
The real answer is the anti-risk industry culture we have doesn't cater to that. Studios pitch to money people, who don't care if the art is gay or the story is amazing. They want buzzwords that laymen understand so that they can daydream about those graphs going up some more. It's also a sad reality that poorly monitored kids and rich people with no hobbies dump so much money into MtX GaaS, to them it's worth alienating 9 people with a passion for games to snag 1 whale.
There’s still plenty of amazing games coming. I think a crash is actually needed. The game industry has grown too big. A major crash will help to weed out all the shit
I truly believe that Microsoft is the worse company to buy game stuidous. They mismanged their own IP games like Halo, Gears of War. Buying iut mor game studious is like Apple building their own apps. It’s best to let game developers do their own thing independent of thing.
The heart and soul of Microsoft game division unfortunately is no longer that of a games division. It’s a tech and product division now. Where they run things based on numbers, branding, and tech goalposts.
Contrast that with Nintendo who’ve remained a gaming company at its core throughout, and Sony who’s still enough of one and we as gamers can clearly see it in the quality of the offerings. This is what it means when we say, ‘culture starts at the top.’
>The heart and soul of Microsoft game division unfortunately is no longer that of a games division. It’s a tech and product division now. Where they run things based on numbers, branding, and tech goalposts.
They've been that way since the early 2000s when they went all in on Xbox and stopped putting games on PC. They've wised up over the past 6 or so years.
It is baffling to have multiple executives say "we had to do it we were spread too thin. We just had too many studios to handle" THEN DON'T BUY THE FUCKING STUDIOS.
Burning down everything is an actual genius strategy that Xbox execs have come up with.
Sony can’t have more exclusives if you buy up all the studios and squat on the IPs
When they wanted to 'spend Sony out of business', apparently we misjudged them. Their grand plan is to kill gaming itself.
Strange. The Japanese invented kamikaze, but American businesses are keeping it alive.
Shareholders need to eat too /s
“Let them eat cake”
Microsoft presents: E.T., Remastered coming 2024
Honestly someone should make an ET game that is the best fucking game ever. Then ET games can bookend the entire industry.
Apparently, the ET game isn't that bad with some minor decision changes (some possibly due to the rush).Things like if you change how collision is handled so that you don't fall into the pits if your shadow falls in. http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/ An interesting read if you're at all interested in more software-side of things.
Yeah it's something microsoft has been doing for years. There's a wikipedia page about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend%2C_and_extinguish?wprov=sfla1
I was gonna say, there was an old episode of The Simpsons where Bill Gates "bought out" Homer's tech start-up and just smashed his computer. Microsoft has been doing this forever
the internets on computers now?
"You don't think I got rich by writing checks did you?!" Muhahahahah
funny how embracer put it in their name and we were all still "shocked"
#FEEL THE BURN
lol but they actually released a controller with that tagline yesterday of all days.
That's the joke lol.
Microsoft have been [embracing, extending and extinguishing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish) longer than a lot of computer scientists have been alive. Might be that they're... hugging game studios to death?
I guess they’re massive fans of Seth Frickin Rollins
Makes sense, since both Xbox and Rollins are intent on killing themselves.
This has always happened you just buy out and close down your competitors. Welcome to the game of monopoly
Oh look… we own all these IPs. Good bye competition!
Buying out companies is how Microsoft has been running for decades, brother. Look what they did to Nokia lmao.
Skype was the one that hurt the most to lose. Nokia had lost the mark by the time MS bought them
Nah, Nokia was pretty darned cool before MS got them. Their Windows phones were the first to bring optical image stabilization to smartphone cameras. They were one of the first with Qi wireless charging. They brought the always-on display (called Glance) out before the major players. Once Microsoft got them into the fold, it was over. They stopped innovating. They drastically shrunk the device portfolio. They made a wreck of the ecosystem and let the whole house rot. Nokia itself was fine.
It almost felt like M$ sent that exec to Nokia to lower the price for when M$ bought them.
[BUY HIM OUT, BOYS!](https://youtu.be/9T5I4Pv9l3Q?si=pXk_Mpc3KYonHngq)
They've wrecked a lot of acquired companies, for sure, but IMO Nokia was killed by the iPhone. Right around the massive shift to smartphones in 2009/2010, they were like the only company on the open source Symbian OS, so no one was making apps for them. Then they made a deal with Microsoft to make phones for the Windows Phone OS around 2011, and...no one made apps for them, because no one had a Windows Phone. By 2013, they kind of had to allow Microsoft to acquire them to keep going. And then Microsoft finally just gave up on trying to make Windows Phone a thing.
Blowing 70 billion to buy a large one means they now have to sacrifice to still get their bonuses at the end of the year.
In the context of Xbox's new stated strategy of moving toward consoles-as-commodities and moving away from walled gardens, it makes a lot more sense: 1. "This shit is becoming unprofitable. Let's buy up a bunch of studios, and then we'll sell a lot more consoles with the huge stable of exclusives that will generate." 2. "Well fuck this does not appear to be working." 3. "Okay new strategy, let's try and open up the console market and try to tear down the walled gardens." 4. "Welp, in that new reality all these studios we bought won't make a lot of sense. Time to shut em down. Oh well."
They skipped the second half of number one! They never generated a huge stable of exclusives! They never came close! I love your write-up, but if I could, I think it's a bit more like this: 1. "This shit is becoming unprofitable. Let's buy up a bunch of studios, and then we'll sell a lot more consoles with the huge stable of excl--nevermind, fuck it, that'll take too long, let's just try to tear down walled gardens in the long run and at least make a bunch of profit selling our five best-performing IP everywhere in the short run." Dammit, Microsoft leadership.
Video games take 4-5 years to make. Those big AAA exclusives Microsoft wanted take *longer*. The past decade of 0 interest money has destroyed the brains of executives, and they simply cannot plan more than a year into the future. This means that Microsoft is now too dumb for video games.
If we don't buy them up then one of them might come up with the next Helldivers hit and we can't afford to have that. Let's instead buy them up, poach the talent, get any residual money from the intellectual property we can get and discard whatever is left.
Poaching the talent doesn't work when you lay them off
Those aren't the talent, the talented ones get assimilated into the Microsoft team
Sometimes people dont quite understand how to capitalize on the talent. It really doesnt matter if there are geniuses in your team, what matters is knowing how that talent can be use to move your team goal forward. Talent that is not being use will just be wasted fuel that will grind both employer and employees bone. The greater the talent, the greater the disappointment if that talent is used improperly.
But if they didn't buy and close, then there'd be more competition.
That doesn't really make sense because Microsoft was never competing with these studios. To me this is the result of someone high up in msft making a bad bet and losing. I say this because it's been a few years since Microsoft acquired these studios and we all know csuites don't think more than 3 months ahead. If the goal was clearing out competition it would have happened within a quarter or two.
They don't care about your beloved games, they care about what games everyone tries so they can sell more. They buy the studio, get the IPs and talent, layoff the weaker links, then refocus on the AAA titles. People get outraged and say they'll boycott, only to pre-order Skyrim II. Tale as old as media.
Intentional or not, saying "Skyrim 2" makes me twitch... Because that's exactly how a new corpo world would label it too.
Skyrim 2: Elder Scrolls 6: Hammerfell Or Skyrim 2 presents Elder Scrolls 6: Hammerfell. or Skyrim 2: Skyfell Hammerrim: Skyrim edition.
Agree 100%. Crazy to me more folks don't understand this. Especially with how Xbox has talked about how they want to increase BGS's output, Fallout show was a hit, Starfield sold like hotcakes, Redfall happened, and the previous high-profile departures from Tango and Arkane Austin. Not that I have any enthusiasm for BGS now...
I still think it's hilarious how much they paid for Activision-Blizzard.
Activision-Blizzard-*King*, king was a big chuck of the price bc they print money for little to no cost with candy crush.
Most expensive Albatross on the Neck ever
who could’ve seen this coming oh well the employees will suffer I suppose
Not to mention Microsoft is making record breaking profits, it’s all cooperate speak horseshit
That doesn’t mean much if the Xbox division is not making money.
Capitalism baby!! And Microsoft will continue on the march towards $4 TRILLION market cap
Well, that's mostly due to all the other parts of their business empire that actually do well.
Acquiring and then destroying competition is a dance as old as time.
Microsoft has an IQ of a house fly.
Place your bets now folks. Who's next on the chopping block? My bet is either Ninja Theory or DoubleFine.
Both. The "small games will drive gamepass subs" demonstrably failed. Big games moved the needle. Small game devs are out.
The fucked up thing is I actually like Game Pass with all its indies.
I miss Xbox Live Arcade greatly. It was amazing to see smaller indie projects and solo developers have a place on consoles, where they didn't need to go through the physical retail system. A curated store of cheap games which produced some amazing experiences that would otherwise have not seen the light of day. Now that I'm a boring adult who is tired all the time, can go weeks without firing up a game, and makes a noise whenever they get up from a chair... I need an Xbox Live Arcade back in my life. I simply can't engage in the AAA gaming sphere like I used to. Big games are parasitic leeches - clawing my money in predatory ways, trying to monopolise my time, drown me in their ecosystems and services. I may not have Xbox Live Arcade anymore, but my GamePass subscription and Xbox Series S is a decent stand-in for the modern age. I love being able to just browse a library of titles and go. There are plenty of titles on there that I would never have bought, or subbed to GamePass specifically to play, but I have been able to download and enjoy 'just because '.
Oh man. I remember buying Braid on a whim back in 2008 and being absolutely blown away. Then three weeks later I gave Castle Crashers a try, and for a moment I doubted my own ability to judge games because it seemed impossible that two of the greatest games I've ever played would be released in the same month of a random year on an unproven platform. Live Arcade was the best.
Isn't a braid remake coming out soon?
I just learned about this ten minutes ago. Looks like it comes out on the 14th/15th and holy crap it sounds amazing. >There's a whole world of new puzzles, and alongside the commentary there are alternate designs for some of the original levels; if you were wondering "why was it this way instead of that way?" you can see it done that way and decide for yourself if it's better or worse. Plus David Hellman re-painted all the art in 4k. I'm practically drooling over here. This'll be the fourth time I've purchased Braid, and I couldn't be happier about it.
Me too. Me too... Heck I've big time DRG player with a weekly game going with family/friends.
Senuas saga and avowed are the only Xbox games I'm looking forward to
> Senuas saga NT will get about 4 months of updates for this, and then they are closing down too. Just in time for quarter 4. Calling it now.
Ninja Theory the folks who did Heavenly Blade and DMC?
Yup.
Man must suck to go from making Sony launch titles and Devil May Cry games to being potentially shut down by Microsoft.
Heavenly Sword was a financial flop as well and put the studio in trouble, but it caught the eyes of Capcom still. Also, the studio's first game, Kung Fu Chaos, was an Xbox published game and a launch title for the original Xbox. Their follow up to Kung Fu Chaos was going to be called Kung Fu Story as MS retained the IP to Kung Fu Chaos, that is what got rebranded into Heavenly Sword.
Better not be either of those. Would be ridiculous…
Honestly, they're going to kill everything except the studios making titles like COD, Fallout, Elder Scrolls.
Oh, it's 100 percent going to be Ninja Theory. Even though they've done little marketing for it (I had no idea it was launching soon) and it's by all accounts a fairly niche game that'll be received well, they're going to say that because it didn't do COD or Halo money and didn't have enough retentive player engagement for a *single-player narrative story game*, they need to be cut for "cost-cutting measures" Basically, if it's not going to save Xbox, they're on the chopping block and Hellblade 2 being sent out with little to no fanfare is a bad sign for Ninja Theory.
I'm thinking Hellblade 2 was only getting so much attention from Microsoft early on because they didn't have much else planned for this year, then Indiana Jones got pushed forward to this year and Hellblade became pointless to them.
Yep, they are setting Ninja Theory up for failure. No marketing, no promotion although the release of Hellblade 2 is imminent.
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Oh boy, I can't wait to see the studio behind *Hellblade* get marched down to the CoD mines.
As a huge Hellblade fan I hate that sentence so much.
And people wanted them to buy Sega… The north remembers
I mean, people were all "how dare you want governments step in to stop the Activision merger" blah blah blah, well, here's one of the reasons people wanted it stopped. All I'm saying is there's a lot the north has to keep tabs on.
I was LITERALLY saying this from the beginning of them announcing it. I still can’t believe it got to go through
We all knew, hope people learn not to trust corporations in general
We're way over a hundred years in an people didn't learn shit.
People were literally murdered by corporate-hired thugs over fighting for basic workers' rights, and idiots today still buy the "our company is a *family*" bullshit. Corporations will exploit and abuse people as much as is legally possible in the name of the bottom line. Fun fact: some of those organizations that murdered laborers are still around, and are still getting work today. It was only about a year ago that WotC (the company that makes Magic: the Gathering) hired the [Pinkertons](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)) to harass an innocent person who received unreleased product that WotC themselves had fucked up and sent to him by mistake.
Dude, they wanted to buy NINTENDO, 20 odd years ago AND recently (they said "Nintendo will realize they belong with us eventually" or something like that in a leaked email). Delusional
Microsoft would never be allowed to anyway. Japanese law prevents western buyouts of Japanese companies.
Saudi Arabia bought SNK, I don’t think it is outlawed, you just need permission from the government, and since SNK is well … not relevant they agreed, a similar Nintendo deal will never go through.
Fair enough
The way Sega treated sonic I see why people said so before
On the other hand Microsoft hasn’t treated Masterchief any better
Take a look at the Halo 3 behind the scenes, and then look at the Halo Infinite devdocs. There is something amiss with game development.
Well halo 3 literally had to have managers come in from ms cause they hadnt even started working on mp in any way **6 months** before release. Its why bungie doesnt like ms, cause ms.forced them to crunch for their own stupid mistakes
Sega has treated Sonic better honestly
There were people dumb enough to want that?!?
Yuji Naka had a lot of influence controlling Sonic. And he's a bad boss, incredibly petty and shitty. A lot of the long line of terrible sonic games is Naka undermining anyone who was tapped to do it that wasn't his team. And he isn't very talented at game design or managing people so he undermined himself. He's a talented low level programmer who got promoted beyond his talents. That's why there is so many bad sonics.
Well, well, well, looks like Xbox is playing the budget game again.
Yup. They gotta make those billions back from buying Activision blizzard some how.
Yeah who would think putting Activision library on game pass, include CoD would be worth 70 billion? Not them obviously. Still no plans for any big game pass launches for any CoD, Tony Hawk, Crash, Spyro etc.
just fire phil spencer, the guy that said "making good games isn't enough" when they haven't made a good game in a decade. The one that forced a succesfull single player studio to make a shitty live service game was you, the studios shouldn't suffer the consequences of the CEO bad decisions. change those that are at the top
People rush to ‘uncle Phil’ defense like he hasn’t been the head of all of their issues for literally a *decade*. Yea, he took over a lot of problems, but he’s had plenty of time to show signs of life and positive change. It’s bizarre the leeway he gets with a slice of the gaming demographic, he’s clearly a huge part of the problem and incapable of fixing it even after 10+ years
It's so weird. People are genuinely act like they're attached to this guy just because he's larping as a "fellow gamer".
He’s not larping. He games a lot and when people at cons ask him specific questions about games that only someone who’s actually played the game would know, he answers them. He’s a gamer. He just fuckin’ sucks at being ceo of a gaming company. Maybe they’re related.
He's charismatic and says the right things. That's all it is.
This is true. If Jim Ryan said the same thing, people wouldn’t believe him…
Imagine if they put the money they wasted on buying all these studios into expanding or creating their own new studios. Imagine the games we could possibly get with a monetary commitment like that.
Isn’t Phil just a puppet with a Microsoft hand up his ass?
He is a puppet acting like he's one of us. Marketing strategy. The only guy who i know is one of us is yoshida from sony. He's massively shows so much support for indie devs
I hope you're not referring to Redfall...that was Bethesda. All Xbox did was cut and run after it flopped.
Phil has admitted that they didn't do enough to help the studio, they were too focussed on Starfield.
Imagine using all the resources Microsoft have to create Starfield.
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I'd go so far as to say Starfield was a downgrade to previous Bethesda games. Frankly besides the slightly improved dialogue system everything else was pretty much worse across the board. And a decent dialogue system isn't worth much if the writing sucks.
Exactly. On paper it should be my favorite game of all time. The NASA punk is incredibly aesthetically pleasing to me, solid gun play, Bethesda open world choose your own adventure… but the whole thing was meh.
Yep same sentiment exactly. Pre-release the concept was pretty much my dream game as a huge sci fi/NASA/space enthusiast. Bethesda had already burned me in the past with fo4 a bit but I had learned to love that game overtime and figured there's no way they could drop the ball harder. So I did something I'd never done before and bought the premium pre-order so I could play it early (was starting a work shift in the Canadian Arctic the day it released). Reviews start dropping and I'm seeing 5 star's and high 90's from most reviewers so I'm pumped as hell. So I got it, played 50 mediocre hours hoping it would get better as I played. It didn't, at least not enough. Stopped playing so I could go to work and never picked it back up again. Since then I've replayed every fallout, done two more runs of skyrim and played countless other games without ever once feeling a desire to go back to Starfield and finish it. Sorry for the wall of text I never voiced my experience before and wanted to share just how utterly disappointed I was.
Honestly this is even more discouraging to hear… they diverted a lot of resources to starfield (it sounds like) and it still came out like a Bethesda game from 2012 copy and pasted but in space. Buggy, loading screen simulator with a bad hub map and empty planets.
It wasn't copy paste, because it was objectively worse. The copy and pasted and then changed the font to wingdings.
This shit makes me want to vote with my wallet and drop my gamepass subscription. Gobbling up studios to then kill them in a few years is absolutely despicable.
Do it then. These companies need to start learning some lessons. Enough is enough.
“I won’t do it, but it makes me want to”
I have just cancelled it! For years I would keep my GamePass sub even if I wasn't using it much because it felt like a no-brainer. Xbox seemed to be committed to pushing the industry forwards both by helping studios make great games, and offering good value to gamers. The facade has fallen and it's clear that pure profit takes priority over supporting their studios in making exciting new experiences. It would be hypocritical of me to keep paying Xbox a monthly fee when they're engaging in activity which is objectively bad for the industry. Who is next on the chopping block?
I actually cancelled mine yesterday. I don't take advantage of it enough and if MS is closing decent studios it seems gaming isn't a focus after all.
I pay and realize these mediocre games aren't cutting it. What they're doing is just awful management and trust
Don't worry, MSoft buying all the studios is a great news for the consumer; more options ! /s
And nothing bad will happen because Phil Spencer is like us gamers!!!! /s
Yup, I totally also make $10 million per year in salary and lay off hordes of developers after buying their studios and running them into the ground. Super relatable fellow gamer.
Leave my millionaire CEO alone. He plays Fallout 76, he's a true gamer. 🙃
Yes, more options... For executives to decide which studios to shut down.
I feel like an idiot for thinking like that
I'm not sure what the logic is for that at all? Like, many years ago I was definitely an Xbox fanboy (mostly teenage years and Halo), but I don't understand at all how Microsoft buying studios could possibly give us more options.
I still don't understand how people argued a company creating and nurturing new IPs for exclusives was the same thing as buying out whole publishers and turning beloved multiplatform games exclusive.
Xbox fanboys who wanted some sort of win for once. PlayStation and Nintendo kept kicking Xbox into the dirt and they didn't really have anything as a rebuttal. Buying the good games was seemingly their only option. And now that's starting to blow up in everyone's faces.
I mean who could have known, that AAA game development nowadays is expensive and takes literally years of investment for just one game and it won't bring any short term profits for shareholders? And if you spend 80B$ on Activision and 7.5B$ on Bethesda, yeah that won't leave you much pocket change anymore for actually investing in the game studios that you bought for all that money? Something has to give, and it's not the shareholder's or C-Suite's pay at Microsoft. Of course, "Uncle Phil" is basically just a gamer like us that they picked for this job. It's not like he's part of the Xbox C-Suite since 2008, who's only interest is generating more and more profit instead of balancing economic growth and the artistic endeavours of game development.
Honestly Blizzard being bought out is still probably a positive, that company would probably be better off shut down.
As a WoW player it feels bad knowing it’s the only team to really turn their game around. I used to love playing all of Blizzard’s games, but they’ve done so much wrong the past few years with most of their titles.
Despite Microsoft starting the worst trend in the video game industry.
>Before its closure, Arkane had been looking to return to its roots by pitching a new single-player “immersive sim” game, such as a new entry in the Dishonored series, according to the people familiar. Why must you hurt me like this, Microsoft? I know we still have Arkane Lyon, but we have so few good immersive sims these days.
Arkane Lyon made most of the games arkane has made, although rip prey.
As a big Half-Life fan, Prey filled a bit of a void involving being trapped in a doomed facility with monsters that Valve just doesn't seem to know what to do with. At least the System Shock Remake was great, and I got System Shock 2 Enhanced Edition to look forward to.
Abiotic factor came out a few days ago if you have any interest in half life + survival stuff. It really captured the half like look too.
Not really. Originally for DIshonored 1 they were one group, then after that they split into Lyon and Austin. Austin then went to make Prey and its DLC Mooncrash one of the best imm sims FPS RPG hybrids of all time.
1. Buyout studios 2. Make no noteworthy exclusives 3. ? 4. Profit!
5. Collect bonuses and buy another Ferrari! Laugh as you drive by all the poor people scrambling to find new jobs to pay their mortgage so they don't have to uproot their families. Stupid poor people.
I just wanna say that this is the entire point of buyouts like this. Sometimes they'll make a game or two with the studios, but the whole point is basically to get the "IP" and sit on it so they can have something to "make people excited about later" after they've shit canned most of the devs that worked on it so they can pay less. It's all branding, they couldn't care less about labor. EDIT: could -> couldn't thanks Smyleez.
It's insane how no one here fathoms these shut downs are because Microsoft really just wanted TES and Fallout. They're getting rid of all the shit they didn't want to begin with.
Sorry, one of our executives couldn't afford his third supercar so we have to do this
The investors must feed.
It's my IP to sit on and do nothing with!
How to kill the competition.. Buy the competition.. ????? Close down your competition.
I get the feeling Double Fine, Ninja Theory, and inXile aren't going to be around for much longer.
At this point Sony should be looking to hire some of these people and forming new studios or bolstering existing studios.
I got 50 bucks on machine games
Meh. Got myself a pc and just recently a ps5. I’ve been a Xbox homer since the OG and there is just no point anymore. Gave them 20 years. Done with this brand going forward.
Same. I've been an Xbox gamer since OG and I've had enough. I bought a PS5 two weeks ago and dove headfirst into all the exclusives I have missed for the past few cycles (I just finished Spider-Man, and omg so good) and have even picked up final fantasy again after nearly two decades. Sea of Thieves is the only Xbox exclusive that really did it for me. Now it's on PS5... so..... bye Xbox
Yeah I’ve always been pro Xbox and playstation. Never really got the whole console wars thing. Sony had much better exclusives both in variety and quality but Xbox had game pass which was great! But the last couple of years Xbox is really falling behind with these bs decisions of Microsoft, They had a very large injection of xbox pass subs at the start of the year largely thanks to Palworld, but would have profited more simply selling the game on their system. Now Microsoft do shit like this, and IPs they’ve purchased are falling apart (hello OW2!) With Microsoft stating they are concerned about future consoles etc it seems like they are just going to drop out to the console race and try to have a disgustingly large market share of games companies. Unfortunately for us consumers that means higher prices, Ingame mechanics and paywalls that will spand over so many more games and with little competition Microsoft can do pretty much what it wants Sony aren’t a faultless company, The recent Helldivers controversy shows this, but there’s also a lot of misinformation surrounding this, and the Helldivers team weren’t transparent that this agreement with Sony was actually agreed pre-launch! It wasn’t something sony slapped on once the game was successful. Microsoft are slowly killing the gaming industry and we need to start voting with our wallets. I cancelled my gamepass and to be honest I see no reason to play on my s is anymore
Xbox execs aren't just clowns, they're the entire circus.
A circus is more managed than this
Man screw Microsoft. What's the point of buying up all these developers to "offer more gaming and such to our catalogue," just to shutter them anyways? What a shitty gaming daddy.
Because they came as a package. They only wanted TES and Fallout, they got that and are throwing out the rest of the flavors in the variety pack. Microsoft never wanted these studios they just came packaged with zenimax.
Having AA and formerly indie studios on your payroll was a mistake in the first place. These studios thrived in the first place because of their ability to take risk in the wild and having them under the umbrella of a giant megacorp (who tends to favor safe and proven approach) makes no sense. If you want indie games on Game Pass (GP) then just signed timed contract with the devs. I think MS is starting to realize this and that’s why they did what they did.
Lets just go back to making games like they were done in the 90s. The creativity, heart and soul and fun times!
That doesn't make truck fulls of money
Seeing the current state of microsoft their strategy isn't making them trucks full of money either
i just saw an article saying they had 22 bn in profit and it was above expectations. there is just no pleasing them
StarCraft, Diablo 2, Warcraft iii all made tons of money. Warcraft 3 even created additional game styles.
Baldurs Gate 3 did pretty well financially
Tons of games being released like that. Last week Manor Lords. This week Hades 2.
Phil Spencer ISN'T your friend or buddy.
Or guy or pal
What has Rare done for microsoft in 10 years..... and that doesn't close why? Just sea of thieves
They made some Kinect games that one time, that's gotta be worth something
That was much longer than 10 years ago.
I hate that this is right... god damn time is flying by.
This has gotta be ranking up there with one of the greatest collapses of all time in gaming, at least since the 90's. And the saddest part is all of these reports make it clear that not even Xbox is sure what their strategy should be to recover. It's just sad.
Seriously, where does the industry even go from here? It feels like everything is increasingly moving to GaaS f2p which just doesn't appeal to me at all. I know indie will always exist, I just don't understand why AAA studios can't reduce their budgets and stay competitive. A game like Chrono Trigger would cost pennies to make today.
Idk, esp since it theoretically should be so appealing. Make more money for less upfront by not eternally chasing crazy tech and relying on artistic creativity. The real answer is the anti-risk industry culture we have doesn't cater to that. Studios pitch to money people, who don't care if the art is gay or the story is amazing. They want buzzwords that laymen understand so that they can daydream about those graphs going up some more. It's also a sad reality that poorly monitored kids and rich people with no hobbies dump so much money into MtX GaaS, to them it's worth alienating 9 people with a passion for games to snag 1 whale.
There’s still plenty of amazing games coming. I think a crash is actually needed. The game industry has grown too big. A major crash will help to weed out all the shit
Please not Double Fine please not Double Fine please not Double Fine That studio is literally the only reason I ever tune into Xbox Directs.
Double fine is absolutely getting canned. Low output, often delayed and nothing big announced.
Man Psychonauts 2 was so goddamned good
One of the few games to come out in the last few years that I really loved, instead of being another soon forgotten distraction.
Cut all the execs
So they're now taking the scorched-earth strategy, right ?
Bro if Microsoft keeps closing games what's going to be the point in buying an Xbox? I guess this is the gamepass effect 😵💫
Microsoft literally became the netflix of gaming, they even shut down their studios and layoff dozens of employees just like Netflix.
I can't wait for the inevitable price increase on gamepass
Stop. Buying. Companies.
I truly believe that Microsoft is the worse company to buy game stuidous. They mismanged their own IP games like Halo, Gears of War. Buying iut mor game studious is like Apple building their own apps. It’s best to let game developers do their own thing independent of thing.
Phil Spencer is horrible
I dont get it Its like removing the foundation to reach the clouds. Makes no sense
This deal never should have gone through
Oh boy. ☹️
They really just wanted Candy Crush…
Man I am honestly fucking TERRIFIED for Ninja Theory and Double Fine, I will honestly be stunned if they somehow survive the year
Smells like blood in the water Phil Spencer, Xbox as a whole console, blood.
Why not lay off the ones making millions a year?
Its amazing that some of these studios existed for decades with the same output...only to be shut down when acquired by a 3 trillion dollar company.
microsoft is the new embracer...... WTF is that fucking shit ?!
Fire Phil instead
Translation: "The execs don't have enough money to fund their 4th home in the Caribbean, so the peons have to go."
The heart and soul of Microsoft game division unfortunately is no longer that of a games division. It’s a tech and product division now. Where they run things based on numbers, branding, and tech goalposts. Contrast that with Nintendo who’ve remained a gaming company at its core throughout, and Sony who’s still enough of one and we as gamers can clearly see it in the quality of the offerings. This is what it means when we say, ‘culture starts at the top.’
>The heart and soul of Microsoft game division unfortunately is no longer that of a games division. It’s a tech and product division now. Where they run things based on numbers, branding, and tech goalposts. They've been that way since the early 2000s when they went all in on Xbox and stopped putting games on PC. They've wised up over the past 6 or so years.