Very much this.
It doesn't help that the majority of Resetera at the same time despises capitalism and at the same time refuse to get a grip on how capitalism works, even if it's just a "know thy enemy" type situation. They're the people who come and watch a sports match and keep giving obnoxious commentary on the game, without knowing what the rules of the game are.
In the end, it's not that difficult. The console audience is stagnating while the demographic is aging causing the "collective free time" pool of the audience to shrink. Add the effect of f2p and live service games and that pool has dramatically shrunk for your typical games. AAA budgets have risen exponentially and there are ever more games being released. What's left is a bunch of publishers fighting each other for scraps if they don't seek alternative revenue be it letting go of platform exclusivity (Microsoft, Sony) or expanding their IP to other media (practically everyone) or subscriptions (Microsoft, Sony, EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo to lesser extent).
This means there's little room for AAA budget games that don't have potential for that media expansion. The risk is too large that you'll be spending six years of development and hundreds of millions of dollars on a game that just won't find the playerbase that it needs to make a profit. Long gone are the days where 3 million copies can be considered a success, especialy if you can't translate that game into an IP that can also spawn a tv series, or a movie, or something else.
So yeah, what do you do with a bunch of IP where the audience expects, and in the hardcore space DEMANDS, that you throw a large budget against them. You can't make Evil Within 3 for a smaller budget than you did previously. Making a HiFi Rush sequel? Sure, but just because of inflation you'll need to get at least 10-15% extra revenue from that sequel just to break even, and that's without the expectations of making it bigger and better and without higher fidelity consoles again demanding higher dev budgets.
I'd love to see the average Resetera poster put their job on the line just to make HiFi Rush 2 happen if they considered all those financial realities. Is it greed? Maybe. But you're making that game with investor money. Without investors, there would be no AAA, or even A gaming. Also, people love to forget that it's highly likely they're indirect investors as well since pension funds are a huge part of the investment pool.
Anyway, so you're a Microsoft executive and you need to allocate your budgets, which even at MS do still have a limit, and it's your job to assign the budgets to the studios with the highest potential. Tango Gameworks, a studio that's lost its main creative director and is thousands of miles away, and is solo in that timezone, and also hasn't had the type of hit that you'll need the coming decade? That's a danger. Arkane Austin, the studio that put out Prey and Redfall, makes expensive games but have failed to find an audience each time? That's a danger too.
I'm not saying I'm not sad for the people who lost their jobs. Getting fired is terrible ofcourse. But I do feel it's important to understand the financial realities this industry operates in instead of just projecting your hopes and dreams onto faceless corporations and being disappointed when those do not become reality.
And the audience is not blameless in this. That same crowd keeps demanding more and more fidelity. Your puddles lost reflections? Prepare for a backlash! You didn't time your surprise hit TV show with a game in the same franchise? Everyone calls you stupid. Redfall is a heaping dump? "Phil Spencer should've stepped in!" Microsoft lets Toys for Bob go independent? "I can't believe Phil Spencer didn't step in!" Game prices go from 50 USD to 70 USD? The sheer greed of these corporations, even though inflation has risen 80% in that same period, game development cost has risen exponentially and surprise, the audience buying your games have remained stagnant since 2008. Want to use AI to have the same output with a lower budget? That's a controversy too.
Sorry, had to get it out of my system. The evolution will inevitably be that these large publishers will push their budgets towards AAA games with recognisable, expandable IP while smaller indies will come into play and be ever more experimental with low budget games in the hopes of striking a chord with the audience and grow from there. This'll be the third or fourth time this happens in video games. And in twenty years, we can go hate Larian for mismanaging their projects and being 'anti-consumer', just like there was a time when Activision, EA and Ubisoft were promising new kids on the block.
you made good points, but you are not saying something, gamepass was the "savior" of those smaller games, the idea of gamepass is that now small games from xbox will always have a space in gamepass, developers like DOUBLE FINE said that finally they can make their special games without being worried about financials, spencer said many times that they will support tango, and this kind of smaller games, now what? they acquired activision and now of course they have to backtrack a lot of things
problem with your analysis is that now xbox is in a point of no return, where all their promises are almost gone, activision is a troyan horse that is affecting everything on xbox, as they say, they will focus on big IPs, so, ninja theory, compulsion, double fine and all other small studios that develop "smaller games" that are part of xbox should be worried (they are already), they could be closed in the future for the sake of giving resources to the "black holes games" like COD, etc...
problem is as well that thanks to "its business, they acquried activision , its business, they have to close studios with smaller games that will not find an audience" thanks to that now xbox is completly different, multiplatform approach, gamepass is signaling failure, long term nobody knows (maybe even at xbox) if gamepass will exist, hardware consoles of xbox are failing worldwide, their audience is shrinking, all of this because their "gamepass" approach and their greed into buying more and more publishers
Xbox is changing for the worse and people is starting to see it even if there were signals way long ago, xbox fans like me are still getting use to it, but is now the reality, there is a reason why PlayStation CEO, Take Two CEO, Former Activision CEO, said that AAA games with big budgets going into gamepass made no sense, what do you think other big publishers CEO are thinking? Xbox was the one trying it, and is failing in their faces
greed break the bag, and xbox is suffering it, and as the articles said yesterday, now that microsoft invested 100b in xbox, they turn their sauron eyes to xbox, and they want results, and not like before when xbox was just a small number on their reports, now they want results and I feel Xbox is going to change even more for the worse and xbox fans are starting to see it with facts and not with "this could happen" theories
