Corporate prioritization is the ultimate cookie cutter, doomed to produce the most generic thing possible.
Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios
11–20 of 233 posts
Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios
#12What is extraordinary about the Microsoft games unit and Xbox is how immune their senior staff are to the repercussions of their bad decisions. They're certainly not taking responsibility for the failed gamepass experiment, trashing the Xbox brand, or the acquisitions they now regret since successfully closing Activision. Failing upwards has never been so conspicuously obvious as it is in modern corporate America tha…
I don't play games at all so I'm very out of the loop but gamepass was a failure?
I have friends at Microsoft who worked on it and they all seemed to think it was going well last I checked (about a year ago).
Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios
#13"Thanks for the widely acclaimed mid-budget surprise hit, Tango. Now polish up your resumes, pack up your stuff, and get out." It's like AAA publishers have no notion of a game studio as an organic thing that can grow. It's all just pieces on a board.
It's like destroying a factory when the chips it produces do not sell.
Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios
#14What is extraordinary about the Microsoft games unit and Xbox is how immune their senior staff are to the repercussions of their bad decisions. They're certainly not taking responsibility for the failed gamepass experiment, trashing the Xbox brand, or the acquisitions they now regret since successfully closing Activision. Failing upwards has never been so conspicuously obvious as it is in modern corporate America tha…
In what regard has gamepass failed? I keep hearing nothing but excitement about it? Does it lose a lot of money?
Similarly, how did they trash the Xbox brand? I've always been a PlayStation or Nintendo user so my view is quite tainted here.
Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios
#15Hi-Fi Rush was a fantastic game, won major awards, showed off the promise of XBox Game Pass… and for their efforts their studio has been shut down. There have multiple instances of this in just the past few weeks; are publishers really going to just bet on their prime AAA titles (Call of Duty, Halo, GTA6, etc) and nothing else? And those games either take a lot of rotating studios and a long development cycle to rele…
A single big live service game like Fortnite captures the player time that would have otherwise gone into a dozen AA games, per year.
So there is no gap in available player time, as it's impossible for there to be more than 24 hours of demand per day.
Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios
#16Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios
#17Looks like Shinji Mikami left Tango before he had to watch it get shut down.
Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never played Prey 2017?
Theyve released 5 bad games since prey
Arkane Austin only made Redfall since Prey, the rest were Arkane Lyon (which didn't close). Allegedly (based on some articles) Redfall started as a pure singleplayer game ala Prey 2017 (and their older titles) but Zenimax and Bethesda wanted to add multiplayer and Games-as-a-service elements because they thought it'd increase the company's value back when they were looking for buyers
Essentially the studio was forced to make a game very different from what they were known for (not just as Arkane but even people who worked there) and wanted to make for reasons outside the game's own merits, which in turn introduced a lot of production issues (they did not have the staff or know-how and had to expand in size) and predictably ended up a mess.
Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios
#19Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios
#20What is extraordinary about the Microsoft games unit and Xbox is how immune their senior staff are to the repercussions of their bad decisions. They're certainly not taking responsibility for the failed gamepass experiment, trashing the Xbox brand, or the acquisitions they now regret since successfully closing Activision. Failing upwards has never been so conspicuously obvious as it is in modern corporate America tha…
I don't play games at all so I'm very out of the loop but gamepass was a failure? I have friends at Microsoft who worked on it and they all seemed to think it was going well last I checked (about a year ago).
> gamepass was a failure?
I'm amazed that this is a question. Gamepass is essentially so low cost as to be an incredibly costly giveaway, only it has proven that this devalues everything that touches it.
For context, Hifi Rush had 3 million players on Gamepass last August, and today they shut the studio. So even when they get a break out hit they cannot justify keeping the studios around to try and do another; that's not a success.