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Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

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Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#61

Post by utensil4778 »

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…

Consumers have been signaling for quite some time that they're perfectly content buying Skyrim and Counterstrike every six months forever.

Why even bother producing anything at all when you can just put a fresh coat of lipstick on the same pig and sell it all over again?

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#62

Post by ang_cire »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #44
lelandbatey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many of my most favorite games have been AA games. Though "what counts as AA" is probably a big question. Hi-Fi Rush, was a delightful game that earned every $ I spent, but didn't feel like a AAA title. Hades is a delightful game that earned every penny but which wasn't a "AAA" title. I wouldn't call either games "indie", as they both had dozens of people on the teams that made them. But I'd also guess that b…

I get that "indie" is often viewed as the 3rd option alongside AAA and AA but I don't think that's the right definition. For me AAA and AA is about scope of the project. The 3rd option is "small", not "indie". Hades (I don't know Hi-Fi Rush) is by all means a small game, regardless of how many developers worked on it. Same for Minecraft, or many of the games that other commentors posted. You want a good measure? Chec…

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 corporate cooption.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#63

Post by mynameisvlad »

fidotron wrote: post #27
ajmurmann wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I refer to my other answer about gamepass. For the Xbox brand they have failed to release quality versions of every major Xbox franchise bar Forza Horizon (Halo Infinite, for example), and this mismanagement has been ongoing for so long the sales figures of the Series consoles are dire. (And the Series X is not bad by any stretch). Now they are having to release their games on their major competitor, the PS5, making…

They’ve already expressly said they’re shifting from a hardware-focused business to a software-focused one. Did you miss that and think they’re just bad at business?

Hardware has always been a loss leader used to sell games, nothing more. If they can sell the games just as well on their “competitiors platforms” then why bother spending time and exorbitant amounts of money building your own hardware?

Exiting the hardware space looks like a loss only if you don’t understand the dynamics of the game industry.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#64

Post by gizmo385 »

utensil4778 wrote: post #61
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…

Consumers have been signaling for quite some time that they're perfectly content buying Skyrim and Counterstrike every six months forever. Why even bother producing anything at all when you can just put a fresh coat of lipstick on the same pig and sell it all over again?

I get the point you’re trying to make, but Counterstrike is a free to play game. You might be thinking of Call of Duty?

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#65

Post by everforward »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #44
lelandbatey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many of my most favorite games have been AA games. Though "what counts as AA" is probably a big question. Hi-Fi Rush, was a delightful game that earned every $ I spent, but didn't feel like a AAA title. Hades is a delightful game that earned every penny but which wasn't a "AAA" title. I wouldn't call either games "indie", as they both had dozens of people on the teams that made them. But I'd also guess that b…

I get that "indie" is often viewed as the 3rd option alongside AAA and AA but I don't think that's the right definition. For me AAA and AA is about scope of the project. The 3rd option is "small", not "indie". Hades (I don't know Hi-Fi Rush) is by all means a small game, regardless of how many developers worked on it. Same for Minecraft, or many of the games that other commentors posted. You want a good measure? Chec…

Isn’t AAA vs AA about the funding of the project, and AA vs indie is about the publisher?

I don’t care for scope as part of this because scope is so heavily influenced by the type of game. Eg Call of Duty is the poster child for AAA games and has a pretty unimpressive scope compared to virtually any RPG. Even indie RPGs tend to have a broader scope; CoD has basically nothing outside of combat mechanics.

Then there’s weird questions about what counts as scope too. Tabletop Simulator has a much broader scope than MTG Arena, but Arena is far closer to AAA or AA.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#66

Post by burnte »

I don't even know why this makes news anymore. It's so rare for a game studio to last a decade, most don't, and even successful ones will be shut down after launching a huge title in order to keep more profits for the publisher. Publishers are slave masters in the games industry.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#67

Post by vel0city »

utensil4778 wrote: post #61
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…

Consumers have been signaling for quite some time that they're perfectly content buying Skyrim and Counterstrike every six months forever. Why even bother producing anything at all when you can just put a fresh coat of lipstick on the same pig and sell it all over again?

Condition Zero and Source released in 2004. Global Offensive released in 2012, eight years later. Counterstrike 2 released in September 2023, eleven years later. Counterstrike isn't the game to point to for re-releasing the same thing over and over.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#68

Post by fidotron »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #63
fidotron wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I refer to my other answer about gamepass. For the Xbox brand they have failed to release quality versions of every major Xbox franchise bar Forza Horizon (Halo Infinite, for example), and this mismanagement has been ongoing for so long the sales figures of the Series consoles are dire. (And the Series X is not bad by any stretch). Now they are having to release their games on their major competitor, the PS5, making…

They’ve already expressly said they’re shifting from a hardware-focused business to a software-focused one. Did you miss that and think they’re just bad at business? Hardware has always been a loss leader used to sell games, nothing more. If they can sell the games just as well on their “competitiors platforms” then why bother spending time and exorbitant amounts of money building your own hardware? Exiting the hardw…

I've actually worked at a high enough level in the games industry to know about the non-public dynamics, and that includes working with some of the people involved in this story.

> Hardware has always been a loss leader used to sell games, nothing more. If they can sell the games just as well on their “competitiors platforms” then why bother spending time and exorbitant amounts of money building your own hardware?

By this logic Sony and Nintendo are completely wasting their time making hardware, yet they persist in doing so. Does this make them bad at business?

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#69

Post by jncfhnb »

jicea wrote: post #40
iLoveOncall wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Housemarque hadn't released any AAA games before launching Returnal on PS5, which is, in my opinion, still one of the best games on this platform. Smaller studios can innovate on gameplay and stories before creating a hit. Another example is FromSoftware. They kept iterating on their games going from KingFields to Demon Souls, Dark Souls, etc...You can't have Elden Ring without all this earned experience.

Elden ring was the shitty mainstream version of dark souls. The open world was just a big forgettable grind of annoying mini dungeons that you probably had to look up and then didn’t enjoy, collectible items that you were never going to use 95% of the time, shitty quests that were difficult to engage in without external guides, and powerful buffs that were very useful but guarded by enemies that don’t scale; leading most players to follow the main quest to the first boss and then just run around the entire map exploring for the warp points/permanent buffs ignoring every enemy possible and then basically forgetting it was an open world game and just hitting the highlights.

The memorable parts of the game are the bosses which are generally cool but very gimmicky, and the legacy dungeons. Which is… the dark souls bits. The open world was stinky garbage that made the game much worse.

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