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Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

gamefromscratch.com

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Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#51

Post by matt_eeee »

ndiddy wrote: post #19

I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that yo…

Sounds great until Epic realises they can charge whatever they like in licensing fees.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#52

Post by genxy »

ranger_danger wrote: post #3

q3dm17 for life.

My favorite was rail brushing people off during pad jumps. Because they died from hitting the level box, they would get a -1. At work we had a match where every other player had a negative score. That aid, they were good sports about it and I didn't do it all the time.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#53

Post by moralestapia »

bigbuppo wrote: post #45
moralestapia wrote: post #23

[flagged]

What's the development cycle of a major game? If someone worked on multiple games from start to finish for a studio, how many games would they have completed in a ten year span? Do game studios allow developers to talk about anything and eveyrthing they're working on in public or do they have them work under non-disclosure agreements?

Who cares about any of that? He was being paid. It was not a charity, it was work.

Companies don't owe you anything. (And you don't owe them anything, either.)

Work is a temporary agreement to provide services in exchange for money. That's it. Understand how the world works.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#54

Post by Hikikomori »

eightysixfour wrote: post #13

There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go. I'm not saying it didn't happen but the article is just raging at the idea of it happening without presenting any evidence of it. I can't help but think the industry will be better off in a few years after this Xbox "restructure." That's a lot of knowledge and talent that's no longer stuck in 14 layers of middle management…

What's the tweet it references then?

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#55

Post by georgemcbay »

Remember when Satya Nadella and Bobby Kotick got up in court and told everyone how all these giant Xbox mergers would be good for the consumer and went after Lina Khan for suggesting that maybe that wasn't the case?

Who woulda thunk they were full of crap...? (besides everyone who didn't have a financial stake in the deal)

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#56

Post by eightysixfour »

lenerdenator wrote: post #39
Grombobulous wrote: post #16

It’s painful to watch this because the recipe for success at Microsoft is so obvious. They’ve just been fumbling the ball for so many years that it’s catching up to them. And the thing is they’re not unprofitable. Gutting their studios and technology development isn’t going to help growth, it’s going to contract the business.

Growth over a long period of time involves two things: consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks. We do not have a market designed to reward these things, at least not for the likes of Microsoft. For them, it's far easier to simply cut people while collecting on their previous labor. Once the product of that previous labor is no longer as valuable, it can then simply be spun off or shut down permanently.

I actually think this is the wrong diagnosis of this situation. The studios in Microsoft gaming appear to have been given a lot of room to take risks under previous leadership, build passion projects, etc. while letting big franchises sit on the side. Those things ended up being anywhere from abject failures to small successes - where some players and critics loved them - but most don't seem to be commercial successes.

In the meantime we haven't seen a new Quake, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Perfect Dark, Fable, Banjo, Conker, or the myriad of other mainstream IP they owned in decades. Most of these franchises have lost a ton of value after sitting on the shelf for so long without releases.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#57

Post by dymk »

paytonjjones wrote: post #50
ndiddy wrote: post #19

I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that yo…

You're presenting this with ironic swipes like "bad things like ask for more money", but it's hard to read this description as anything but straightforwardly more efficient. If there are few downsides to centralizing game engines, and the need for engine work is inherently cyclical, why should we want engine work to be internal and non-cyclical? I really don't know much about game engines so maybe there are real down…

Efficient for who? The people who lost their jobs?

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#58

Post by tonyedgecombe »

dismalaf wrote: post #44
Grombobulous wrote: post #16

It’s painful to watch this because the recipe for success at Microsoft is so obvious. They’ve just been fumbling the ball for so many years that it’s catching up to them. And the thing is they’re not unprofitable. Gutting their studios and technology development isn’t going to help growth, it’s going to contract the business.

In my experience, once organizations have enough history and size, they can't just pivot. Whatever happens within MS the organization makes it impossible for them to become anything other than what they've always been. Their MO will always be EEE and they'll always (attempt to) abuse their monopoly power, while giving corpos and consumers just a glimmer of hope to keep them strung along... Also any company they acqui…

>Also any company they acquire will be gutted until it looks like the rest of the org.

I'm trying to think of a Microsoft acquisition which has been a success. Nothing comes to mind.

Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

#60

Post by pfdietz »

SurgeArrest wrote: post #46

Microsoft EEE at its best: gobble up all game studios and then kill them. Microsoft needs to be split, it should been split years ago, but now more than ever.

> at its best

This looks more like simple corporate incompetence. They never should have made those very expensive acquisitions.

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