Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

ign.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 233 posts

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#211

Post by mattgreenrocks »

badsectoracula wrote: post #196
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current tech meta seems to be coalescing around this notion of "even high-performance isn't enough to spare you from layoffs, be afraid!" It wasn't that high-performance always guaranteed your job would continue, but at least there'd be the idea that you'd get moved to a new team if you were a great performer. To me, that just reinforces the notion that these layoffs are mostly about sending a message to workers…

> To me, that just reinforces the notion that these layoffs are mostly about sending a message to workers and Wall St more than anything else. What message?

The message seems clear: "we call the shots"

The value of we probably differs a lot from company to company. But it sure doesn't include workers.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#212

Post by FractalHQ »

etempleton wrote: post #127
lupusreal wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Microsoft plans to bring a lot of new people into a Bethesda game, I hope they invest in new engine tech and QA. Old Bethesda fans know what to expect by now, but newcomers with any modern game experience are going to be in for a rude surprise if the next Fallout game ships with typical Bethesda quality. They've had this problem with their last several releases too, but I think the TV show will make it a lot worse…

Starfield was much better than past Bethesda releases, but I agree.

It’s the same old shitty engine that needs to be sent to the recycle bin if they hope to have any chance of making a modern AAA game that doesn’t feel like it’s stuck in 2015.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#213

Post by etempleton »

laylower wrote: post #208
etempleton wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starfield was much better than past Bethesda releases, but I agree.

No it was not. It was bland, linear, empty and it felt like an asset flip of fallout 4. At least fallout 3 and NV had some great RPG elements. Fallout 4 and Starfield were not great. The graphics engine was dated 10 years ago, it's now comically underwhelming.

QA was better. The game was released with significantly less bugs than their previous entries.

And you can say what you will about the engine upgrades, but they are there.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#214

Post by johnnyanmac »

DannyPage wrote: post #3

Hi-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…

>are publishers really going to just bet on their prime AAA titles (Call of Duty, Halo, GTA6, etc) and nothing else?

I guess so. I don't fully understand it either. An indie-ish scoped game won GOTY in 2022, Helldivers costs half as much as a AAA title and is probably selling better than any of the other dozen GaaS Sony was trying to break into, Take Two has (had) several breakout hits under their wing. But they seem so hellbent on being the Fortnite, instead of just "really damn good (and presumably making money)"

It's strange that we know super successful "indies" can sell millions and be just as acclaimed as any AAA title but those metrics don't matter to a company that should be trying to foster a full portfolio.

>What’s going to fill the gap?

GTA has shark cards and COD us a yearly releases rotating around 4 or more studios now. Those will be fine. Halo? No idea, I don't think the battle pass format can sustain these levels of budget. it juse seems to all be a mess.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#215

Post by johnnyanmac »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #211
badsectoracula wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me, that just reinforces the notion that these layoffs are mostly about sending a message to workers and Wall St more than anything else. What message?

The message seems clear: "we call the shots" The value of we probably differs a lot from company to company. But it sure doesn't include workers.

We call the shots... to our own feet.

Seems like studios are forgetting that you can't just drag some random person off the street and get them working on the next "Quadruple A" experience. Even a talented new grad would struggle with that scale. This is really going to come back to bite the industry long term.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#216

Post by johnnyanmac »

phone8675309 wrote: post #143
hbn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AAA basically just means nice graphics at this point. You can't dump more money into a piece of art to make it better, that's why all the innovation comes from indie games. Look at Balatro, a guy made a poker roguelike and became a millionaire overnight. I think if big game studios, rather than dumping their copious amounts of money into single, giant-scope games, dealt it out amongst a variety of smaller teams for s…

I'd rather see studios make 100 games that each cost $2 million to make than one $200 million game.

Thing is 2M doesn't quite get you as far as you think. You get 10 devs (let's say, 4 programmers, 4 artists, 2 designers), pay them 100k each (which is lowballing it in med/high COL areas), and work 2 years. That's 2.4m just from labor, before advertising and other duties like community outreach. Sell for $30 (which is basically the top end of an "indie) and you need 80k copies to break even, more after platform cuts.

That's definitely a scale a AAA studio can afford, but far from what we associate "indie" with in our heads.That's where the exploitation begins.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#217

Post by johnnyanmac »

mvdtnz wrote: post #172
maxrecursion wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game development is in a really weird place. Insanely over-saturated but almost all AAA games are extremely derivative, stale, bland games with a coat of pretty graphics Indie games are awesome right now, but they don't have the budgets to produce AAA games. So there is a huge gap. Innovative indie games with cool, new gameplay concepts, but always simple or retro graphics, and AAA games with shiny graphics on the ot…

For me indie gaming is going through its own aggravating phase right now, but it seems most people aren't bothered by it. The quality of the games is better than ever, but every indie title now goes through Early Access, sometimes for several years. By the time the game is released the hype cycle has already finished. For people like me who play games just a couple of hours a week, I have no interest in playing an un…

>every indie title now goes through Early Access, sometimes for several years.

That mostly shows the realities of indie development. These games have less staff and need less sales to succeed, but they take much longer as indies lack the time (some do development on the side to a full time gig), manpower, or (sometimes) talent to get things done quickly.

>I have a library of games bigger than I could ever play

Well that proves the point. we also get more indies than ever. I don't think EA would give us more finished games. We'd just get less released games full stop. Even if you never play them I'm not sure if I'd call that a good thing.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#218

Post by johnnyanmac »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #23
Apocryphon wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as with movies, it seems like we’re witnessing the death of mid-budget (AA) games.

Honestly I think it might make sense. I can't remember a single AA game that was great. Actually, I can't remember a single AA game other than the ones I remember because of how bad they were. I think AA in games has, for a long time, meant "We want to do a AAA but don't have the money or time" and this can only end in disaster.

Standards change and game development standards have skyrocketed. the best AAA titles in 2005 would barely be AA in 2015, and by 2025 it gets to a point where a small (but very talented) team can achieve the same scope with better graphics. That's part of the reason I don't particularly like "AAA" as a nominer. It's a moving target with budget levels we usually have no clue of.

>I think AA in games has, for a long time, meant "We want to do a AAA but don't have the money or time" and this can only end in disaster.

I don't know, because we have even less idea what "AA" means. Would Demons' Souls 2009 be AA?

That the thing, a lot of the biggest AAA titles didn't knock it out of the park day one. Overwatch in 2016 may have been the last new IP that was AAA from the get go and truly nailed it in one. IDK why companies keep trying to do it that way.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#219

Post by johnnyanmac »

masklinn wrote: post #100
ang_cire wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, people use indie to mean small, rather than it's actual meaning of "independent of a publisher", and it's one of those things that I've nearly given up on fighting. It's even more sad because the only reason that change happened was big publishers wanting in on the success of indie games as a label and concept, but by definition being excluded, so they pushed their own definition, and people gobbled up their c…

> Sadly, people use indie to mean small, rather than it's actual meaning of "independent of a publisher" That is way too imprecise a description for it to possibly be considered correct. Indie is about financial and creative independence aka the publisher does not drive the game. Many indies still go through publishers because they don't have the means or knowledge to handle distribution. This was even more so back w…

>That is way too imprecise a description for it to possibly be considered correct.

It's the most objective definition. We can easily see if a game studio a) has their own publishing wing (people forget this when saying stuff like "Valve is an indie!"... It's few but they have published others' works since 2004) and b) the game has an external publisher.

But as the GP said, this definition (just like in music) was perverted over the years into CDXS2the modern, colloquial definition that you mention. Much less precise because we do not in fact know how much the publisher drives any given indie, a term locked under contracts and NDAs we'll never see. We simply need to trust a publisher's branding.

But no one is particularly interested in changing the current defintion. Publishers want to have that branding, indies want to have that branding, gamers seem to intuit what kinds of games and styles that "feel indie". So I guess it'll go by the way of the definition of "literally".

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#220

Post by johnnyanmac »

eropple wrote: post #166
utensil4778 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counternite, fort of duty, whatever. I care so little for this class of game that I can't be bothered to spend the brain space to keep them separate. Not saying they're good or bad, I'm just not interested in the slightest.

If you can't be bothered to understand the differences, then criticizing consumers for perceiving those differences and being willing to buy them is a real interesting spot to land on. I don't play those games, either, but I at least understand the proposition that they present.

Willful ignorance from GP aside, their point is valid. The most played games to this day are decade+ old games that extended their lifetime with multiple re-releases or with an online component. If that's the will of the consumers, there's not much we can do.
Post reply on HN