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

81–90 of 233 posts

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#81

Post by maxrecursion »

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…

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 other end but gameplay that hasn't changed in over a decade.

I'm just waiting for any AAA studio to provide something new with the AAA games. Maybe AI to improve NPCs in an open world game? Anything besides the same old gameplay with new skins on it.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#82

Post by somenameforme »

troupo wrote: post #48
127 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really worry about it because indies are making better games than ever.

Not for XBox though. Mine has turned into an expensive paperweight we occasionally use to play the same 2-3 local co-op games we played 4 years ago.

It's pretty easy to convert your TV to a PC console. Just grab a HDMI/DisplayPort cable and some USB cables for controllers. Wire your TV up, start Steam Big Picture mode, done. You now have a console with a zillion awesome games in the exact same place you had the console connected.

Here's [1] the Steam page for split screen games. Currently there are 934. Can't go wrong with Earth Defense Force! And no you don't need a "gaming PC." That term doesn't even make any sense in modern times, because if you have a computer from within the past decade or so, you can run the overwhelming majority of games with no problem. And I mean that literally - for instance GTA V requires an AMD HD 4870 card. That card was released in 2008!

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Split%20Screen

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#83

Post by wredue »

troupo wrote: post #48
127 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really worry about it because indies are making better games than ever.

Not for XBox though. Mine has turned into an expensive paperweight we occasionally use to play the same 2-3 local co-op games we played 4 years ago.

I mean. The writing was on the wall there TBH.

Microsoft has been consistently failing to support and engage game developers since early in the 360 cycle, then the doublespeak crook Spencer took over, and it got even worse.

This whole shitting on AA was bound to happen with Xbox fanboys saying that “it is good that Microsoft is buying studios to give Sony a taste of their own medicine!”

Except MS is still not giving Xbox gamers a taste of Sony medicine, because Sony gets out there and gives games chances, funds loads of “trial” titles, supports developers and studios, etc.

I don’t like that Sony just does this better, as I am a PC gamer and Sonys PC game is awful.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#84

Post by utensil4778 »

vel0city wrote: post #67
utensil4778 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#85

Post by pixl97 »

sumtechguy wrote: post #56
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firing an entire sports team after a loss. Although in Tango's case, not even a loss, just not a big enough victory.

Game studios have always been very brutal in their hire/grind/fire cycle. Not sure they really want to change.

Most game studios don't give 2 shits about the games themselves, it's all about the MTX. They don't care if selling the game installer is a massive money loss, it's about bringing in the microtransactions and the massive piles of cash they create (generally at the expense of the users game experience).

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#86

Post by fidotron »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #75
fidotron wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Does this make them bad at business? No, and nobody said as much either. It just means they get enough out of other sales (including an increase from hardware) that they have decided hardware is still worth it. Microsoft has decided otherwise. They’re both perfectly fine decisions. > I've actually worked at a high enough level in the games industry to know about the non-public dynamics, and that includes working wi…

> Then you should very well know how hardware has always been a loss leader intended to drive people to exclusives and first party services.

Just like the number one console, the Switch? Sold at a loss? To drive people to play the exclusives?

TBH I won't engage further in this line.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#87

Post by hibikir »

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…

The hardware might be a loss leader, but the manufacturer controls access to the hardware, so every game developer for the hardware is giving them a portion of the sale price. They were Steam before Steam existed. Sony didn't make most of their money on first party games, but on third party fees. The first party games, along with the loss leaders, were there to bootstrap getting consumers to buy the console.

The reason to abandon hardware is when you aren't going to get many third party sales regardless, because you are getting destroyed: In large part because your first party games and the console experience aren't attracting enough players. Microsoft hasn't whiffed with every game they released in the last 5 years, but their batting average has been very low.

If your games aren't selling, it makes sense to abandon hardware, but it's even more important to downsize your studios that are releasing underperforming games.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#88

Post by bogwog »

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…

That's not true. Hardware gives them the ability to create a monopoly on game publishing/distribution, which is why console games have always been so expensive. The platform holder can charge high fees to developers and demand high prices from consumers. That's nothing unique to the game industry.

Microsoft has said they're trying to focus more on software, but that focus is on gamepass not games themselves. They want that monopolized platform without the burden of having to sell Xboxes (which consumers have rejected time and time again), which obviously would be very lucrative for them. It's why they've been throwing so much money at devs to entice them to put their games on gamepass, and why they spent such a ludicrous amount of money on Activision despite the Xbox business being such a dud. They believe games are destined to become like video streaming industry, and want to be the Netflix for games.

Now I'm talking out of my ass here, but I think there might be some kind of internal metric at Microsoft that rewards execs that chase monopolization. It's either that, or they're really so incompetent over there that nobody has noticed how bad Xbox leadership is at their jobs. The peak of Xbox success was the 360, and I think that was mostly because Sony got the pricing completely wrong for the PS3 at launch (and even then, lifetime sales of PS3 surpassed the 360)

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#89

Post by aamoyg »

jonhohle wrote: post #47
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.

It depends what type of game you like. There are a million AA RPGs, Metroidvanias, etc. that are enjoyable. Both RoboCop: Rogue City and Terminator: Resistance are good, budget games. Looking through recent games: Dead Cells, Bloodstained, anything from Bitmap Bureau, a lot of Way Forward titles, Altus, etc.

Robocop Rogue City was amazing. If you max out the psychology, you start giving back sassy replies to everyone and become sass cop it's great.

They really built on the Terminator Engine they used earlier.

Re: Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

#90

Post by kipchak »

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…

Hardware is not always a loss leader, with Nintendo hardware (generally, Wii U was an exception) being the largest example. Estimates were about $250[1] for production for a $300 unit at launch if I remember right, so maybe $10 profit.

Selling on someone else's hardware means they take your 30% or so storefront fee. For example selling your studio's Elder Scrolls title on Steam or PlayStation nets you $42 instead of $60.

[1]https://xtech-nikkei-com.translate.goog/dm/atcl/column/15/36...

Post reply on HN