This is a fantastic question
What are you looking at in an acquisition that is consistently is blowing up in your face and requiring them to be shut down?
Xbox is shutting down Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, and Alpha Dog Games. Roundhouse Studios absorbed by ZeniMax Online Studios.
- Thread starter Helix
- Start date
This is a fantastic question
What are you looking at in an acquisition that is consistently is blowing up in your face and requiring them to be shut down?
I take issue with this because there is nothing wrong with being there to just collect paycheck. No one wants to live to work. I think that idea is why so many people in pretty much any industry get taken advantage of. Especially in the gaming industry.
It was on Gamepass though! 3 Million people played it! I was told the "sales" didn't matter!
...I'm going to be angry about this for a long time.
Unfortunately it was pointed out to me that even that cod studios were downsized recently. So not even they are safe.
What in the actual fuck. Man this industry sucks so bad right now. Really feel for the devs and hope as many people as possible land on their feet.
I am going to assume Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 are going to make or break them. Same probably holds true for inXile and Clockwork Revolution. There is some strong RPG talent in those two studios. It would be a shame to lose them.
I predict more of their studios will follow. They now have ABK, a cash cow, and all these devs who have been working on stuff for years without a game released or aren't big enough will go.
When they made these acquisitions they thought GamePass would continue to grow and the strength of Bethesda/ActiBlizzard would propel the Series X/S to significantly eat into Sony's marketshare. Neither of those things happened, in fact their hardware is performing worse than the Xbox One, and these are the repercussions.
People have built this idea up in their heads about Hellblade II being some GoW-style hit game, and it's just not gonna be. The original game was a linear story affair with lots of walking segments and some isolated combat scenarios. It's not gonna be a mainstream success. So RIP I guess.
I don't think the point is about the IP being new or old, loved or hated, but being the center of marketing. HFR launch could not be decoupled from Game Pass, for example. They want you think of buying the game before thinking about their service. That's what I think Zhuge is saying.
You would think having Gamepass would feed into having smaller / "AA" type games rather than chasing the blockbuster titles. But I'm guessing if they are really pushing into the 3rd party narriative, they want to be big Triple A 3rd party developer.
AA is truly dead if gamepass can't even push AA Development.
Didn't the head of the studio also left recently, like Shinji Mikami did?
I think that's worse.
Actively showing up to a studio to attend a party knowing everyone there is about to lose their job is a whole different tier of evil or cowardice.
this even bets due to game pass it wont seel over 1.5 million. Hellblade is a game that would have benefitted from NOT being on game pass.
You think a multibillion dollar corporation would just make something up like that to increase $$$?
/s
"Phew - we almost started making critically acclaimed games there for a second!"
But for real - Jesus Christ MS what are you doing lol.
I know these are first party, but I basically use my Xbox as a Game Pass and third party machine (latter due to BC/FC ideology) but they are making it increasingly harder to justify sticking with them.
They are like my local NHL team (who just yesterday did the opposite of what fans wanted lol I'll let the hockey peeps on Era guess) just management dropping the ball at every possible opportunity lol.
But for real - Jesus Christ MS what are you doing lol.
I know these are first party, but I basically use my Xbox as a Game Pass and third party machine (latter due to BC/FC ideology) but they are making it increasingly harder to justify sticking with them.
They are like my local NHL team (who just yesterday did the opposite of what fans wanted lol I'll let the hockey peeps on Era guess) just management dropping the ball at every possible opportunity lol.
Also, while not unsuccessful, it didn't exactly set world on fire with its sales either.
Yeah, just look at Insomniac. They released Spider-man 2, it was successful and well received but still the studio had lay offs. The industry is fucked, especially the AAA space.
Ugh. I can't really form a coherent thought about this. It sucks. I used to be hopeful that Microsoft's reliance on a subscription service meant they would let their various studios continue to put out smaller and quirkier games, such as Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment. But this tells me that they don't really care about those types of games. I can't imagine Double Fine and Undead Labs (among others) are long for this world, which would be a real shame.
Then why didn't they fucking market it instead of shadowdropping onto Game Pass on day one? HFR launch couldn't be decoupled from Game Pass because of their release strategy. So they punish the devs for their fuck up?
Being honest, I totally expected a person of her status to know about something as big as this. But fair enough if it's common for someone in her position to not know about something like this.
If that's the case, she should still show some character and apologise though.
I get that, but I'm not going to assume people hate working on COD, just because that's a narrative on this site from somewhere? I'm sure a lot of people that work on the COD games are satisfied with their jobs.
For example. I'd love to be the sound designer or the graphic designer for the COD games. Imagine testing the real life weapons daily, fine tuning etc. Or as a designer myself I'd love to do the graphics for it.
Ahhh fuck.
Especially given what we know now, it looks like it was one last "Hail Mary" attempt for Tango.
Tango is baffling but honestly arkane doesn't deserve a fucking shutdown either. "One miss and you're out" is BS, Microsoft failed them as a parent company overseeing Redfall and now the studio is paying that price
They're at very high risk of getting shut down for sure. Hellblade 2 is the game that is at the very opposite side of what MS is prioritizing right now.
All of this is happening because of GamePass and Xbox console struggles. This is less about consolidation and more about GamePass/Xbox console imo.
That's it. There's a reason this isn't happening at Nintendo and it's because they're firing on all cylinders with every franchise breaking records.
Microsoft had set an expectation for GamePass to reach 100 million subscribers by 2030. That's just radically unrealistic but they were investing in the service like it would happen.
Can't keep spending billions on content if you don't see the same billions coming back in the form of increased revenue. That's why subscriptions are such a rough business. Look at everybody in media struggling outside of Netflix as they try to make subscription services work.
Hifi Rush is an amazing looking game and clearly it had a good number of players, but that generates what? If there's no increase in subscribers does that even matter?
That's it. There's a reason this isn't happening at Nintendo and it's because they're firing on all cylinders with every franchise breaking records.
Microsoft had set an expectation for GamePass to reach 100 million subscribers by 2030. That's just radically unrealistic but they were investing in the service like it would happen.
Can't keep spending billions on content if you don't see the same billions coming back in the form of increased revenue. That's why subscriptions are such a rough business. Look at everybody in media struggling outside of Netflix as they try to make subscription services work.
Hifi Rush is an amazing looking game and clearly it had a good number of players, but that generates what? If there's no increase in subscribers does that even matter?
It comes with some of the worst crunch in the industry, as keeping that shit on a yearly release cycle is not really sustainable, but Acti aren't going to willingly stop, so it's pretty bad, but probably good pay and very good for the resume.
Last edited:
You reduce spending on unprofitable/slightly profitable games (your Hi-Fi Rush, Double Fine games etc…) and funnel that into investments with better opportunity costs (your Call of Duty, Diablo, Fallout etc…).
That all of this happened because seemingly Xbox execs refused to look at the history and numbers of pretty much any streaming service in existence and having unrealistic expectations of their subscription model makes this situation so much worse.
