561–570 of 981 posts
Scott Miller on X said that many, if not most of ID was also let go. https://x.com/ScottApogee/status/2074198967550685268
Entire post text: > This post was about the insider news I got this morning that a majority of Id's studio is being laid off, including most (if not all) coders.
“Resetting Xbox” Gross and classless title. There was a time where people at least had the sense of shame to not do this kind of thing when firing people
This is a total mess IMHO. - The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter - The problem according to them is profit margin - around 150-160 million So first of all, they are big! Secondly they are not at a loss. They just have a "thin, non-growing margin". So to fix all this they are trimming down, so they can "return to growth" (which I think is ridiculous). Some points - - They are huge business even now - 5 bi…
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Xbox around 2021 had around a 12% profit margin and the gaming industry as a whole was around 17-22% . In 2023 the target for the division was put to 30% . We see this new restructuring because the target was put this high. Microsoft really wanted Game Pass to be a steam competitor which is pretty much what everyone in the industry tries to do and fails. The push for Game Pass prices to be higher was to get the 30% m…
Being a Steam competitor involves making a store that's actually good. All the other major stores/platforms don't really seem to give a shit, to be frank. Steam has like 20x their feature set, and the gap appears to be still growing. If anything, it should be easier to make cool new features when you own the hardware side of the platform experience too, but no, it's Steam that has stuff like remote play together, not…
They really should make a choice between xbox as separate platform and xbox as windows pc. I has been like 10 years where they were kept advertising it as some kind of single ecosystem, while it was not
At some point, the games industry decided it wanted to be interactive Hollywood, and the consequences are entirely predictable. Meanwhile, Nintendo just quietly shipped 3.8 million units of Tomodachi Life in two weeks, and 4 million of Pokopia in five. They're making actual games. Sony's obsession with prestige cinematic bloat, like Xbox, has also put them in a slow-motion death spiral that's going to become painfull…
Things are not that black and white. Nintendo also shipped Metroid Prime 4, with massive delays and unsatisfied customers, following the same "interactive Hollywood" philosophy which disappointed Metroid fans. Same thing goes for Star Fox, a remake of a remake of a remake, with poor visual and dialogue choices. And meanwhile, the same silent push for digital-only, forced upgrades and the like...
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150M at 5B revenue is not great: that's 3% margin! The bigger issue is that console manufacturer revenue is highly cyclical. This is hard to see in e.g. Xbox and Sony since they are both part of a larger conglomerate, but really obvious for nintendo. You generally have a cycle of - "Launch": high marketing costs, low/negative HW margins - "Mid-cycle": lowering manufacturing costs, large game sales, high margin DLCs -…
> 150M at 5B revenue is not great Considered as a raw percentage in a vacuum, sure, I guess, but we're talking about... - A company which has undertaken a concerted, long-term effort to consolidate the industry under its umbrella (something they themselves call out as a problem in this post), reducing consumer choice - A company which has captured a significant chunk of the console market. They're one of the big thre…
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> There hasn't been a time when developers have been more disconnected from their audience than now. There are studios that routinely put out games that people love. For example, my wife and I will happily pre-order the next co-op game from Hazelight Studios. FromSoftware, Ghost Ship Games, and others fall into the same boat for many people. The difference, in my opinion, is that games from these studios don't focus…
At one point you could have said the same thing about Blizzard, that everything they did was gold. It’s hard to pinpoint where they went wrong, but it’s not clear to me that it was business model or game format related. Like, WoW was a fabulous success from day 1 and it was a live service game.
"Minecraft and CoD are now Xbox exclusive".
Microsoft is today's IBM.
And elephants cannot dance...