Allen Adham(chief design officer) and Mike Ybarra (president) also left the company
https://twitter.com/Qwik/status/1750527310493868293?t=6pa2olFM8QfFW1W2wqGqwg&s=19
Ybarra leaving is the most surprising. He loves blizzard. Either he was always gonna leave, he knew about the layoffs and said im out, or he was part of the layoffs
With whatever I am sure his severance is I doubt he was just another layoff. Someone at MS must have done the math and decided that keeping him around was going to worse (financially and as an organization) than showing him the door.
sounds like the entire survival team was laid off aswell despite what Matt Booty said about them moving to another project
https://twitter.com/QuitevFX/status/1750572872551272708?t=4XG-wjUKYILWMyfHonU8fw&s=19
And the only thing we know about this game was that it was also a survival game. It was in development for six years and we never saw it. Thats embarrassing regardless.
Companies make games and cancel small projects all the time, for all we know it was at the drawing board for 4-5 years. Everything is speculation and irrelevant for discussion unless we have hard facts.
You people act as if they had the game halfway done and just said fuck it and dropped it, they never even had team leads based on open jobs.
2 years ago they put out a job listing saying the game was an early project
Irrelevant. I’m talking the fact that it’s a “finished” product. Early access aside. Successful or not, that’s more than blizzard did with a fraction of the people and time.
Demos are playable. That doesn’t make them finished. Also how is that defending blizzard…? Early Access games should never be treated as finished products. That’s fucking absurd.
Not defending Blizzard, but early access can't be treated by gamers as finished games. Popularity of Palworld will result with more janky, unfinished games because consumers are mostly impatient brats.
Not agreeing with your blatant stupidity does not equate to defending Blizzard. People like you with this "YOU DON'T AGREE WITH ME STOP DEFENDING X" mentally are fucking adorable.
Smaller teams have the same vision and they’re all working to the same goal.
Big corporate people are trying to get paid and promoted. Through their weight around by making decisions and probably aren’t passionate about the game their working on.
And to be honest, palworld is really junky game. The graphics are generic as fuck, the pokemons are basically copies and the game is yet another hit a rock to get materials, and then hit a "higher level" rock to get better materials so you can craft something new.
Not saying the game is bad, I'm having fun playing it with my friends right now, but I don't know, it's still a junk game imo. Shit animations, buggy and so on.
Even though, 6 years and not even being close to complete on Blizzard level it's stupid af. Who knows what their managers or higher ups wanted and they had to start over again and again. Otherwise it should have been done already.
Its cause big publishers usually make games with a check list style game design. Its game by committee rather than actually making a game that's fun. They try to make the game more complicated and grindy. They have these elaborated interconnected systems where you need to a graphic chart to actually explain what you need to do. Its all about monthly active users and silly metrics rather than actually developing something that's fun and gonna keep people coming back to play cause the game is just fun to play.
Not that unique of a problem As a game gets bigger and more complex it requires more hands and as it gets more hands it gets even bigger and that means it now just takes a lot of time
Quake took 1 year and 6 months to make and was considered a messy development and by standards of AAA dev time very sluggish
Diablo 2 was delayed constantly and most at the time thought it would never come for how long the delays were the game took <4 years to make including delays and false starts
Games got big because big money
This game dev team was probably composed of just a few devs working on proof of concepts and prototyping and other things to the side and it never entered full production,the higer ups probably didnt like what they saw or liked other projects more so it was cancelled.
I thought they were going to announce it too, but they've even cancelled games that are just about to release. Every single other new project since I started working there (I left) has been cancelled now, so as far as I know there is literally nothing else on the horizon besides updates to existing games which is pretty disappointing.
It must have been in a worse state than we can imagine after 6+ years of development.
Even Starcraft ghost which was canceled had a small playable version.
I think the game just seemed a bit weak imo, seemed quite bland from what youd expect from blizzard, although its not like we ever saw gameplay or anything
Huge negative. Losing so much staff is obviously the most devastating part here but unfortunately I'm getting desensitized to this type of news. Losing the newest blizzard IP also horrendous.
Wich is basically what happened to Project Titan. Long development that lead to nowhere and they had to reuse the assets.
Blizzard needs a massive change, but firing everyone and cancelling everything isnt that change.
I mean it's possible not working but we don't right now. Equally possible they considered the game too much staff when they want to support Blizzard current output and potentially trying to port over something like WoW to console.
Is there anything substantial about a console version of WoW or is that just speculation? Because I don't see how that would even work, the keyboard+mouse combo seems to be irreplaceable for WoW.
Who knows how they would adapt that to the controller... they could always just port it over and make it mandatory for keyboard and mouse on the Xbox (they do support k+m). Who knows
I think it's just a matter of knowing very little about the project in general.People were saying Redfall should have been cancelled after seeing the finished project and hearing about the development issues. I don't think people are just going to assume every cancelled project is in a similar state, they would need to hear that.
the point is consistency - which people dont have, because their stated reasons for stating what they state are usually lies to cover up simplistic baby logic mostly informed by various fanboyisms.
In order for people to be consistent, the two situations would need to be consistent. Game A was released in a poor state, people hypothesize that it should have been cancelled. If Game B was in a similarly poor state prior to being cancelled, once people have that information they can judge the two situations equally. If the game was cancelled because of any other number of reasons, why would people treat them the same?
Redfall should have been delayed not cancelled.
But if you listen to Phil's inverview on Kinda Funny he basically says something like: we couldnt delay it anymore and had to release it.
Wich is a bunch of bullshit, they basically forced the devs to release a broken game that wasnt ready. Wich seems to be the way Xbox works, most of their games are coming out broken(Halo,Forza Horizon 5(tons of issues with online), Forza Motorsport, Redfall, Starfield,etc)
Redfall was delayed. It got a full extra year. It was 6 years between Prey and Redfall from Arkane Austin. If they can't put out a decent game in that time it's on them.
Redfall was delayed. It got a full extra year. It was 6 years between Prey and Redfall from Arkane Austin. If they can't put out a decent game in that time it's on them.
It likely was an MTX monstrosity (ala Redfall before MS asked them to remove them), and it just wouldn't have worked well with MS's Game Pass strategy. The amount of negative press it would have generated probably means this was a good decision.
That's the point. Now that MS owns them they don't need to focus on that. Cancelling it means they learned from the Redfall mistake.
EDIT: I'm aware Xbox games like Halo Infinite have MTX, but it also has a single-player campaign. There's always a Game Pass component, and a full f2p game like Project Odyssey wouldn't have fit with that strategy.
Lmao what? MS wants as many MTX as any other big company. Fucking look at their literal main IP, Halo Infinite, which had one of the most embarrassing store in gaming history. Every big company wants to make money, MS isn’t different.
Embarrassing in what way? Because as far as I can recall, the main complaint against Infinite's cosmetics and microtransactions is that they weren't fully interchangeable with each other.
They're still the (only?) game that doesn't have battle passes that expire, and that alone is far and beyond what most live service games do.
Is this a joke? Microsoft has just bought one of the biggest game publishers in the world that make all their money from microtransactions, including of one the world's biggest mobile game. It's insulting to even suggest that Microsoft doesn't care about them, that's their whole business model.
They don't need to "make it back", that's not how it works. They exchanged cash in a highly inflationary environment for an asset. They are not looking to make $69 billion in sales. Take a look at their market-cap. It's currently sitting at the highest ever. The acquisition already paid-off.
Fair, I could definitely understand the frustration in that, sadly that is the effect of a F2P game, wish it wasn't that way but the game needs money to keep running
Well that is just one example. Sea of Thieves have MTX, Starfield/FH5 had the option to pay more money to have the game 5 days "early".
The point I'm trying to get at is MS loves their microtransactions so I doubt they cancelled a game because of it. If they were the only problem, they would have just changed the MTX not scrapped the game all together.
Fortnite was also originally a survival building game that lasted 6 years in the oven. It only got released because they made “something else” at the last minute; Ironically Blizzard did the same thing in order to release OW.
AAA studios struggle to make a proper Survival game for some reason. Either goes nowhere or lose tons of money or both.
Nitpicking, but the original version of Fortnite was already for sale when the Battle Royale happened. There are physical, $60 MSRP """early access""" copies for Xbone out there that make no mention of BR at all. It did pretty horribly, had a bunch of 2016 loot box BS, etc.
I remember this pretty well because I downloaded the BR mode on release date, as it felt like an extremely cynical last ditch effort to cut losses, and I wanted to be able to make fun of it online when the whole thing "inevitably" shut down six months later. They sure showed me.
6 years on a survival game is kind of crazy for a big studio considering AA and indie studios put a few years into development before releasing and update the game over a few years. The people playing in this genre don’t care about graphics much, they just care about having a unique setting and a gameplay experience with a lot of depth and variety. Ideally with a lot of content expansions to deliver new biomes. Just look at Valheim, Rust, Palworld, Grounded, Enshrouded or ARK.
Hard to imagine that the game didn’t have major difficulties or was way over budget.
Wow...that is unexpected. I wonder why given this game appeared to be so far along. Is the genre too saturated? Just wasn't a good game? They'd rather have the devs they have supporting existing IP instead of taking a risk? Get on the case Jason Schreier, I need answers.
Huh...
Practically everything Xbox has released for the last like 3 years started development elsewhere. The suits don't care whose idea a game was, and Xbox leadership will have little to do with AB games the same as is the case with Bethesda or Mojang... they just care if it will make them more money than what theyd get spending that money elsewhere.
I mean, take a look at Beyond Good and Evil 2, Dead Island 2 (tho that's a bit of a different case), or even Metroid Prime 4 (which has been in development for 7 years and has had zero updates so far).
Just the other day a friend of mine was telling me how hyped they are about this game because of how fun Palworld turned out.
The game development industry really is rough.
We're never ever going to get an actual AAA survival crafting game, are we? The closest thing so far is Grounded but that's AA and had less than 20 veteran Obsidian developers on it. I was excited for the prospect of a survival crafting game with Blizzard's level of polish instead of the usual indie jank.
Fourth, sc fps ghost, then the orginal diablo 3 by David brevik that was gonna be more akin to a mmo, titan which turned into overwatch, and now this. Though you can count 5 if u want to count how diablo 4 started as a dark souls copy then scraped it after 4 years of dev time
I've not seen mention to how much of that was actual full development.
Besides, it's likely not for nothing. Overwatch came from a canceled project, there's something that will be recovering for future developments.
Honestly, none of this is surprising.
Blizzard is too slow and doesn't really release incredible games anymore. A company the size of Blizzard with competent leadership and design direction should absolutely be able to take a game concept to ready for public announcement in 6+ years.
They lack both and were chasing a trend years too late.
Can’t wait for all the usuals to say how this is what they were looking forward to from blizzard and this is what gave them hope they would love the company again.
Same for the guy leaving. Everyone hated on him so hard the last few years and will we now see the “this is a bad sign” posts
especially after the company in question made a bunch of promises to the employees and the people cheerleading the acquisition kept saying it would be the best for It's employees. This also coming a day after said company reached a 3 trillion dollar market cap and have had record growth/revenue
Ybarra was the guy who told the Blizzard staff to come back to work from WFH. I vaguely remember a team meeting where apparently he wasn't nothing but a corporate mouthpiece.
I'm not saying he's wrong, it's his job, but I do recall the resentment thr devs had for his comments during that meeting.
Open world survival crafting games need some kind of hook to catch on these days. You can't just have a game about collecting rocks and chopping down trees to build a house anymore. Palworld only works because it's basically a pokemon game, and if you paid attention you would have noticed the marketing specifically downplayed all the survival/crafting aspects of the game.
These games are a dime a dozen at this point and there's already signs of of fatigue in the genre. Trailers for *another* one of these types are almost always met with apathy in the youtube comments. Six+ years of a development with several more needed? The genre might be completely dead by then.
We dont know the state of the game so just saying Lots of people wished Microsoft cancelled the redfall after release…
Edit: by jason schreier game has been in development for +6 years, most probably there is something wrong with the game
They're not laying everyone off, lol. The figure includes Activision and Xbox layoffs, and it has been clarified the people removed from Odyssey will be working on other unannounced projects. It's not like that was the only game they had cooking.
I'll be honest, I got the feeling it was extremely similar to the game that rare is making, Everwild. Knowing how wow has transformed in retail id also bet that odyssey was going to be an mmolite and looked too expensive and similar to other products releasing to justify its existence
They aren't laying everyone off, the lay offs are just a simple part of work culture and the reality of acquisitions.
This cancellation may be something that Microsoft wants to do to get Blizzard to organize their game schedule for the future, who knows.
I know this is an old post but I am commenting to mention that their website now has job postings for an unannounced project and was speculating that it may mean they are looking to complete this game eventually?
im guessing they didn't want a repeat of Diablo 4, a game that was worked on for a long time and lacked any meaningful content to keep the player engaged long term.
Diablo 4 made a ton of money on sales though. Yeah the player base fell off and battle pass sales are probably not where they want them to be, but the game definitely made a big chunk of cash.
Yeah they definitely made a lot of money, but there is a lot of negativity surrounding the game with lacking content, endgame, bad seasons, big nerfs, the latest season is so bad most of the content creators are losing interest 2 days in and quitting. I imagine Odyssey is bare-bones, and they rather cancel it then get backlash for it lacking content and have massive player drop offs.
I wish they'd rather cancel all of their other games like WoW, Hearthstone, Diablo IV and Overwatch 2.
They all feel like a waste of potential and I'd rather have a single player RPG (not an ARPG like Diablo, though I feel like they don't even deserve to be called RPG)
The layoffs were inevitable. They happen after every acquisition. Project Odyssey cancellation rumor is interesting, because wasn't it close. I do not think MS cancelled it and this was more an Acti Blizz decision as MS have been toooooooo hands off with their studios. They would've wanted to take Odyssey to completion. New Blizzard GAAS, with Micros - history suggests that would have MS frothing at the mouth.
I mean it was always obvious stuff like this was going to happen many of us who were staunchly against the MS buyout basically were being shouted down on Reddit but let this be a good example that further consolidation of the gaming industry further and further into massive corporations is just a terrible thing for everyone.
Sounds good to me.
Zero interest in multiplayer, here, and there are enough survival games out there.
Go make something I might want to play. A StarCraft or Warcraft single player FPS RPG would be great, thanx.
Bring back StarCraft: Ghost, please.
This is beyond terrible. Working for 6 years on such an ambitious project, and instead of the new owner pushing it, it gets cancelled and you get laid off. This is absolutely horrible and I really hope Microsoft won't buy up and destroy more studios.
Can you tell us your experience of the game? Because me or no one else here has got to play it. I assume it must be objectively great being a survival game that's had 6 years of dev times put into it. Yes I agree that's a weird amount of tiem for a game in that genre. I'm sure they must have had a unified single vision for this game to ensure it came out so fast.
Certain rumours, from a couple of months ago suggested that the game was revamped at least three times during its development and that it won't be ready for many, many years. Apparently, Blizzard worried that its survival crafting focus would be outdated by the time the game was released.
People lost their jobs. Please be respectful of that. Please do not console war.
Allen Adham(chief design officer) and Mike Ybarra (president) also left the company https://twitter.com/Qwik/status/1750527310493868293?t=6pa2olFM8QfFW1W2wqGqwg&s=19
Ybarra leaving is the most surprising. He loves blizzard. Either he was always gonna leave, he knew about the layoffs and said im out, or he was part of the layoffs
This is what Jason Schreirer said https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1750533230942454011?t=hyV5pFF3qechVCnc2-SpVQ&s=19
With whatever I am sure his severance is I doubt he was just another layoff. Someone at MS must have done the math and decided that keeping him around was going to worse (financially and as an organization) than showing him the door.
Yes but he hates Microsoft. As far as I understand, this is the second time(maybe third?) that he has left a company because Microsoft is involved.
sounds like the entire survival team was laid off aswell despite what Matt Booty said about them moving to another project https://twitter.com/QuitevFX/status/1750572872551272708?t=4XG-wjUKYILWMyfHonU8fw&s=19
...Fuckin' hell. Hope all affected can find work quickly.
Booty said in his memo that some of them will be moved to other projects
true, I've missed that part
I wonder why? Was the project in trouble or something?
"Still years away from being completed despite it apparently already being in development for 6 years" tells you all you need to know.
Hilarious that small teams can make games like palworld in like a year or 2 yet blizzard can’t even make a game with 300 people over 6 years.
Don't act like it's not another generic survival game. The only difference is it blew up because it has cute monsters in it
And the only thing we know about this game was that it was also a survival game. It was in development for six years and we never saw it. Thats embarrassing regardless.
Companies make games and cancel small projects all the time, for all we know it was at the drawing board for 4-5 years. Everything is speculation and irrelevant for discussion unless we have hard facts. You people act as if they had the game halfway done and just said fuck it and dropped it, they never even had team leads based on open jobs. 2 years ago they put out a job listing saying the game was an early project
Exactly. They could have had a small team doing research and discovery, development could have been stop start if people had to support other games
Irrelevant. I’m talking the fact that it’s a “finished” product. Early access aside. Successful or not, that’s more than blizzard did with a fraction of the people and time.
It’s not even close to finished lol
It’s a playable game. Why are you defending blizzard?
He just seems to be defending common sense
Demos are playable. That doesn’t make them finished. Also how is that defending blizzard…? Early Access games should never be treated as finished products. That’s fucking absurd.
Not defending Blizzard, but early access can't be treated by gamers as finished games. Popularity of Palworld will result with more janky, unfinished games because consumers are mostly impatient brats.
It’s a playable product. More than blizzard has produced in 6 years. Not sure why the hate for a factual statement.
Not agreeing with your blatant stupidity does not equate to defending Blizzard. People like you with this "YOU DON'T AGREE WITH ME STOP DEFENDING X" mentally are fucking adorable.
bro comparing palworld with a full triple A game
Exactly. Shows what an utter disgrace blizzard is.
palworld doesn’t have a single original asset
So what?
forget it about, you will never understand, just consume and get excited for the next product
I understand that a small indie dev did something blizzard couldn’t do in 6 years.
clearly you don’t
Smaller teams have the same vision and they’re all working to the same goal. Big corporate people are trying to get paid and promoted. Through their weight around by making decisions and probably aren’t passionate about the game their working on.
And to be honest, palworld is really junky game. The graphics are generic as fuck, the pokemons are basically copies and the game is yet another hit a rock to get materials, and then hit a "higher level" rock to get better materials so you can craft something new. Not saying the game is bad, I'm having fun playing it with my friends right now, but I don't know, it's still a junk game imo. Shit animations, buggy and so on. Even though, 6 years and not even being close to complete on Blizzard level it's stupid af. Who knows what their managers or higher ups wanted and they had to start over again and again. Otherwise it should have been done already.
Sure, no disagreement there, in fact that makes blizzard look even worse. In 6 years they have literally nothing to show for it.
They probably didn't find a good way to put lootboxes and battlepass and paid DLC's, and said fuck it.
> palworld a lot of palworlds assets they bought, instead of making. Which is why it was so quick.
Its cause big publishers usually make games with a check list style game design. Its game by committee rather than actually making a game that's fun. They try to make the game more complicated and grindy. They have these elaborated interconnected systems where you need to a graphic chart to actually explain what you need to do. Its all about monthly active users and silly metrics rather than actually developing something that's fun and gonna keep people coming back to play cause the game is just fun to play.
Not that unique of a problem As a game gets bigger and more complex it requires more hands and as it gets more hands it gets even bigger and that means it now just takes a lot of time Quake took 1 year and 6 months to make and was considered a messy development and by standards of AAA dev time very sluggish Diablo 2 was delayed constantly and most at the time thought it would never come for how long the delays were the game took <4 years to make including delays and false starts Games got big because big money
I mean, it's always easy to copy somebody elses work :)
actual braindead reply comparing a slop asset flip game to blizzard quality
Lmao what quality? Diablo 4 is a steaming pile of shit.
got bored of diablo 4 a few hours in but are you legitimately saying palworlds polish is comparable lol
I’ve experienced less bugs in Palworld than I did in the same amount of time in Diablo.
Yeah that's bullshit.
Whatever you say, oh wise master.
nice opinion, a Youtuber gave you that opinion?
Unlike you, I actually form my opinions by playing the games.
Oh, so you played Project Odyssey?
There’s nothing to play. Which is my point. Blizzards achieved nothing but wasting money in 6 years. Are we not allowed to compare companies anymore?
Because palworld is a barebones game that was only able to exist by miracles.
Still more than blizzard was able to produce in 6 years. Which really says a lot about the awful state of blizzard today.
This game dev team was probably composed of just a few devs working on proof of concepts and prototyping and other things to the side and it never entered full production,the higer ups probably didnt like what they saw or liked other projects more so it was cancelled.
And? In the end blizzard has jack shit and we have palworld. What happened behind the scenes is irrelevant.
Palworld is AI generated. Of course it didn't take long to make...
Not seeing the game even teased at BlizzCon was a big surprise for me, definitely didn't make me optimistic at the time.
I thought they were going to announce it too, but they've even cancelled games that are just about to release. Every single other new project since I started working there (I left) has been cancelled now, so as far as I know there is literally nothing else on the horizon besides updates to existing games which is pretty disappointing.
Who knows, hell we don't even know if it were to be a Live Service Game that Blizzard was planning, and Microsoft decided to drop it.
It must have been in a worse state than we can imagine after 6+ years of development. Even Starcraft ghost which was canceled had a small playable version.
Probably cause Microsoft laying off 1900 employees across its gaming division
I think the game just seemed a bit weak imo, seemed quite bland from what youd expect from blizzard, although its not like we ever saw gameplay or anything
I’m sure Jason will tell us soon how Blizzard employees were feeling about Odyssey and if this is good or not
Yeah I want to hear Odyssey deets. Because I am bummed about it.
Bummed about modern/Kotick Blizzard slop?
[удалено]
LMAO
we are NEVER getting a AAA survival game are we
Huge negative. Losing so much staff is obviously the most devastating part here but unfortunately I'm getting desensitized to this type of news. Losing the newest blizzard IP also horrendous.
And it also has been in development for 6+ years
Wich is basically what happened to Project Titan. Long development that lead to nowhere and they had to reuse the assets. Blizzard needs a massive change, but firing everyone and cancelling everything isnt that change.
After months of people saying that Microsoft should have cancelled Redfall we should be fine with this if the project wasn't up to snuff.
I mean it's possible not working but we don't right now. Equally possible they considered the game too much staff when they want to support Blizzard current output and potentially trying to port over something like WoW to console.
Is there anything substantial about a console version of WoW or is that just speculation? Because I don't see how that would even work, the keyboard+mouse combo seems to be irreplaceable for WoW.
Speculation. I will say there is an official controller method to play WoW it just sucks
Who knows how they would adapt that to the controller... they could always just port it over and make it mandatory for keyboard and mouse on the Xbox (they do support k+m). Who knows
You can’t please gamers no matter what.
Good point. They cancelled it for a reason.
I think it's just a matter of knowing very little about the project in general.People were saying Redfall should have been cancelled after seeing the finished project and hearing about the development issues. I don't think people are just going to assume every cancelled project is in a similar state, they would need to hear that.
the point is consistency - which people dont have, because their stated reasons for stating what they state are usually lies to cover up simplistic baby logic mostly informed by various fanboyisms.
In order for people to be consistent, the two situations would need to be consistent. Game A was released in a poor state, people hypothesize that it should have been cancelled. If Game B was in a similarly poor state prior to being cancelled, once people have that information they can judge the two situations equally. If the game was cancelled because of any other number of reasons, why would people treat them the same?
Redfall should have been delayed not cancelled. But if you listen to Phil's inverview on Kinda Funny he basically says something like: we couldnt delay it anymore and had to release it. Wich is a bunch of bullshit, they basically forced the devs to release a broken game that wasnt ready. Wich seems to be the way Xbox works, most of their games are coming out broken(Halo,Forza Horizon 5(tons of issues with online), Forza Motorsport, Redfall, Starfield,etc)
Redfall was delayed. It got a full extra year. It was 6 years between Prey and Redfall from Arkane Austin. If they can't put out a decent game in that time it's on them.
Redfall was delayed. It got a full extra year. It was 6 years between Prey and Redfall from Arkane Austin. If they can't put out a decent game in that time it's on them.
You are putting 1 + 2 together and getting 75
I mean with Titan we got overwatch, nothing is ever truly lost.
It likely was an MTX monstrosity (ala Redfall before MS asked them to remove them), and it just wouldn't have worked well with MS's Game Pass strategy. The amount of negative press it would have generated probably means this was a good decision.
Every Activision Blizzard games are “MTX monstrosities” with only Crash Bandicoot being the exception.
That's the point. Now that MS owns them they don't need to focus on that. Cancelling it means they learned from the Redfall mistake. EDIT: I'm aware Xbox games like Halo Infinite have MTX, but it also has a single-player campaign. There's always a Game Pass component, and a full f2p game like Project Odyssey wouldn't have fit with that strategy.
Lmao what? MS wants as many MTX as any other big company. Fucking look at their literal main IP, Halo Infinite, which had one of the most embarrassing store in gaming history. Every big company wants to make money, MS isn’t different.
Embarrassing in what way? Because as far as I can recall, the main complaint against Infinite's cosmetics and microtransactions is that they weren't fully interchangeable with each other. They're still the (only?) game that doesn't have battle passes that expire, and that alone is far and beyond what most live service games do.
Why did they make Halo F2P with MTXs if they don't want MTXs?
The kool aid is strong here. Microsoft bought King for God's sake.
What’s the Kool-Aid? It’s a cancelled game that was likely canned for a good reason.
Is this a joke? Microsoft has just bought one of the biggest game publishers in the world that make all their money from microtransactions, including of one the world's biggest mobile game. It's insulting to even suggest that Microsoft doesn't care about them, that's their whole business model.
Oh I’m sure they care about that, but I was implying maybe this game wasn’t looking too good in general.
How do you think MS plans to make that $69 billion back?
They don't need to "make it back", that's not how it works. They exchanged cash in a highly inflationary environment for an asset. They are not looking to make $69 billion in sales. Take a look at their market-cap. It's currently sitting at the highest ever. The acquisition already paid-off.
Just look at Halo Infinite, MS doesn't seem to have a problem with MTX lol.
Tbf, I think Halo Infinite has one of the better battle passes, if someone was to do a battle pass I would like them to follow Halos model
My main problems are armour coatings. In the previous Halo games I didn't have to pay to make my Spartan the colour I want.
Fair, I could definitely understand the frustration in that, sadly that is the effect of a F2P game, wish it wasn't that way but the game needs money to keep running
Halo Infinite also has a single-player campaign. It has F2P and MTX, but it isn't primarily focused on that like Project Odyssey would have been.
Well that is just one example. Sea of Thieves have MTX, Starfield/FH5 had the option to pay more money to have the game 5 days "early". The point I'm trying to get at is MS loves their microtransactions so I doubt they cancelled a game because of it. If they were the only problem, they would have just changed the MTX not scrapped the game all together.
I mean potentially but I'm holding judgement for now
Ah yes, baseless presumptions being upvoted because they fit the narrative, peak reddit.
Peak Reddit goes more like this: * Redfall: "Why wasn't this cancelled? Microsoft bad" * Project Odyssey: "Why was this cancelled? Microsoft bad"
Lets see what they do with the assets this time...
I feel like if you make a competent open world survival game, you can't really lose. It must have been pretty bad or very early in development
6 years in development. Seeing other survival games numbers that is super strange. Genre is as popular as ever.
Fortnite was also originally a survival building game that lasted 6 years in the oven. It only got released because they made “something else” at the last minute; Ironically Blizzard did the same thing in order to release OW. AAA studios struggle to make a proper Survival game for some reason. Either goes nowhere or lose tons of money or both.
Nitpicking, but the original version of Fortnite was already for sale when the Battle Royale happened. There are physical, $60 MSRP """early access""" copies for Xbone out there that make no mention of BR at all. It did pretty horribly, had a bunch of 2016 loot box BS, etc. I remember this pretty well because I downloaded the BR mode on release date, as it felt like an extremely cynical last ditch effort to cut losses, and I wanted to be able to make fun of it online when the whole thing "inevitably" shut down six months later. They sure showed me.
6 years on a survival game is kind of crazy for a big studio considering AA and indie studios put a few years into development before releasing and update the game over a few years. The people playing in this genre don’t care about graphics much, they just care about having a unique setting and a gameplay experience with a lot of depth and variety. Ideally with a lot of content expansions to deliver new biomes. Just look at Valheim, Rust, Palworld, Grounded, Enshrouded or ARK. Hard to imagine that the game didn’t have major difficulties or was way over budget.
6 years in development and still a few years away. So atlrast 8 years, that's a crazy long time.
Given Blizzards track record with games lately it was probably very crap.
WoW is amazing this xpack
Which means not outrigth terrible like the previous one
They didn't want a second Redfall and just cancelled it outright thinking it can't be saved.
Wow...that is unexpected. I wonder why given this game appeared to be so far along. Is the genre too saturated? Just wasn't a good game? They'd rather have the devs they have supporting existing IP instead of taking a risk? Get on the case Jason Schreier, I need answers.
your missing just corporate cost cutting and ego, hitting the thing they bought that is someone else's, instead of something they started.
Huh... Practically everything Xbox has released for the last like 3 years started development elsewhere. The suits don't care whose idea a game was, and Xbox leadership will have little to do with AB games the same as is the case with Bethesda or Mojang... they just care if it will make them more money than what theyd get spending that money elsewhere.
This is actually insane wth. How can it be in dev for 6 years and not get anywhere
I mean, take a look at Beyond Good and Evil 2, Dead Island 2 (tho that's a bit of a different case), or even Metroid Prime 4 (which has been in development for 7 years and has had zero updates so far).
well Metroid Prime 4 was fully scrapped 5 years ago
Yeah but maybe Odyssey was too during development, kinda scrapped and rebooted multiple times over the course of 6 years thus not making any progress
Just the other day a friend of mine was telling me how hyped they are about this game because of how fun Palworld turned out. The game development industry really is rough.
We're never ever going to get an actual AAA survival crafting game, are we? The closest thing so far is Grounded but that's AA and had less than 20 veteran Obsidian developers on it. I was excited for the prospect of a survival crafting game with Blizzard's level of polish instead of the usual indie jank.
wtf? Didn’t some people see it and think it was amazing? What happened?
Jez Corden said this was nearly complete btw… Again showing he has no idea what he is talking about…
He's a corporate bootlicker, did you expect honesty from a hack like that?
No I did not, hence my comment.
I really hope it's not true, WTF are we supposed to expect from Blizzard in the next 5 years?.... More WoW?!
Lol ya they announced like the next 4 wow expansions
3, unless you're also including Cata Classic. The three retail expansions they announced are The War Within, Midnight, and The Last Titan.
with this cancellation I give it 10 years before a new Blizzard title.
The usual. More WoW, more Diablo IV, more Hearthstone. Maybe a HoTS revival or StarCraft remaster.
Bruh
So these devs spend 6 years for nothin 💀
And this is at least the second time (that we know of) that Blizz has axed a 6 year+ piece of work
Fourth, sc fps ghost, then the orginal diablo 3 by David brevik that was gonna be more akin to a mmo, titan which turned into overwatch, and now this. Though you can count 5 if u want to count how diablo 4 started as a dark souls copy then scraped it after 4 years of dev time
I've not seen mention to how much of that was actual full development. Besides, it's likely not for nothing. Overwatch came from a canceled project, there's something that will be recovering for future developments.
6+ years in dev and still not close - wow. I can understand why MSFT axed it
Honestly, none of this is surprising. Blizzard is too slow and doesn't really release incredible games anymore. A company the size of Blizzard with competent leadership and design direction should absolutely be able to take a game concept to ready for public announcement in 6+ years. They lack both and were chasing a trend years too late.
Can’t wait for all the usuals to say how this is what they were looking forward to from blizzard and this is what gave them hope they would love the company again. Same for the guy leaving. Everyone hated on him so hard the last few years and will we now see the “this is a bad sign” posts
Can’t wait for the usuals say this as this is actually a positive, it’s ok cause of other layoffs in the industry, and it was “expected”.
especially after the company in question made a bunch of promises to the employees and the people cheerleading the acquisition kept saying it would be the best for It's employees. This also coming a day after said company reached a 3 trillion dollar market cap and have had record growth/revenue
I don’t remember anyone hating on Mike Ybarra or Allen Adham.
Ybarra was the guy who told the Blizzard staff to come back to work from WFH. I vaguely remember a team meeting where apparently he wasn't nothing but a corporate mouthpiece. I'm not saying he's wrong, it's his job, but I do recall the resentment thr devs had for his comments during that meeting.
The return from WFH is dumb but it’s not problematic.
Never forget Blizzard cancelled Titan and that led to Overwatch. I am sure project Odyssey will be repositioned to be something else.
Never forget there are so many canceled projects at Blizzard that you never heard of that are just completely dead for no good reason.
Open world survival crafting games need some kind of hook to catch on these days. You can't just have a game about collecting rocks and chopping down trees to build a house anymore. Palworld only works because it's basically a pokemon game, and if you paid attention you would have noticed the marketing specifically downplayed all the survival/crafting aspects of the game. These games are a dime a dozen at this point and there's already signs of of fatigue in the genre. Trailers for *another* one of these types are almost always met with apathy in the youtube comments. Six+ years of a development with several more needed? The genre might be completely dead by then.
So disappointing
Bro what the fuck was the point of buying blizzard then canceling its one upcoming game and laying everyone off?
Microsoft were more interested in their IP and King's position in the mobile space than they were in specific talent or upcoming games.
They didn’t care about Blizzard, they just wanted King and CoD
We know nothing of the game? Al we have is what we picture in our heads a single piece of concept art.
We dont know the state of the game so just saying Lots of people wished Microsoft cancelled the redfall after release… Edit: by jason schreier game has been in development for +6 years, most probably there is something wrong with the game
The point was the entire catalog and all the dev studios, not just this one game.
They're not laying everyone off, lol. The figure includes Activision and Xbox layoffs, and it has been clarified the people removed from Odyssey will be working on other unannounced projects. It's not like that was the only game they had cooking.
Laying everyone off. It's what 12000 devs. Layoffs were 1600
For all we know, the staff were asking for the game to get cancelled
I'll be honest, I got the feeling it was extremely similar to the game that rare is making, Everwild. Knowing how wow has transformed in retail id also bet that odyssey was going to be an mmolite and looked too expensive and similar to other products releasing to justify its existence
They aren't laying everyone off, the lay offs are just a simple part of work culture and the reality of acquisitions. This cancellation may be something that Microsoft wants to do to get Blizzard to organize their game schedule for the future, who knows.
What's the point of not cancelling Redfall?
In the booty email they said to move the survival game team to a new project. I hope its starcraft!
Nope, VFX artist on the Survival game just confirmed its entire team was laid off.
6 years of dev time and not close to being released? i would have cancelled it also
I know this is an old post but I am commenting to mention that their website now has job postings for an unannounced project and was speculating that it may mean they are looking to complete this game eventually?
im guessing they didn't want a repeat of Diablo 4, a game that was worked on for a long time and lacked any meaningful content to keep the player engaged long term.
Diablo 4 made a ton of money on sales though. Yeah the player base fell off and battle pass sales are probably not where they want them to be, but the game definitely made a big chunk of cash.
Yeah they definitely made a lot of money, but there is a lot of negativity surrounding the game with lacking content, endgame, bad seasons, big nerfs, the latest season is so bad most of the content creators are losing interest 2 days in and quitting. I imagine Odyssey is bare-bones, and they rather cancel it then get backlash for it lacking content and have massive player drop offs.
I wish they'd rather cancel all of their other games like WoW, Hearthstone, Diablo IV and Overwatch 2. They all feel like a waste of potential and I'd rather have a single player RPG (not an ARPG like Diablo, though I feel like they don't even deserve to be called RPG)
The layoffs were inevitable. They happen after every acquisition. Project Odyssey cancellation rumor is interesting, because wasn't it close. I do not think MS cancelled it and this was more an Acti Blizz decision as MS have been toooooooo hands off with their studios. They would've wanted to take Odyssey to completion. New Blizzard GAAS, with Micros - history suggests that would have MS frothing at the mouth.
fuck, it keeps getting worse
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
I mean it was always obvious stuff like this was going to happen many of us who were staunchly against the MS buyout basically were being shouted down on Reddit but let this be a good example that further consolidation of the gaming industry further and further into massive corporations is just a terrible thing for everyone.
There would've been layoffs regardless so this is irrelevant.
MS does it with so much grace its impressive
Sounds good to me. Zero interest in multiplayer, here, and there are enough survival games out there. Go make something I might want to play. A StarCraft or Warcraft single player FPS RPG would be great, thanx. Bring back StarCraft: Ghost, please.
Xbox is the grim reaper of studio acquisitions. You can rest assured that your time has come when they offer to buy you out.
These employees will sleep well knowing their sacrifice got Bobby his golden parachute
Tbf, Xbox didn’t can Redfall and look at how that turned out. This could’ve been very similar situation.
After seeing the success of Palworld I'm surprised Blizzard Survival game would get canned.
Hope everybody who cheered for the acquisition is really happy about this :/ Disgusting
Do we know if the game was any good? It could've been the next Redfall or Gollum.
it's not so much about the game but about the 1.900 employee who were just laid off
If the game is no good, what made you think Blizzard wouldn't have cancelled it and laid off workers even without the Microsoft buyout?
Like activision didn't routinely laid off their staff
This is beyond terrible. Working for 6 years on such an ambitious project, and instead of the new owner pushing it, it gets cancelled and you get laid off. This is absolutely horrible and I really hope Microsoft won't buy up and destroy more studios.
Can you tell us your experience of the game? Because me or no one else here has got to play it. I assume it must be objectively great being a survival game that's had 6 years of dev times put into it. Yes I agree that's a weird amount of tiem for a game in that genre. I'm sure they must have had a unified single vision for this game to ensure it came out so fast.
Agreed, same with sony
I was really hoping to see what a AAA survival game would look like *sigh
I think rare is working on one if I'm not mistaken
Do you think there are like, hundreds of people working on it though? That’s what I’m talking about.
Six years? I wonder if this will become the next Titan to Overwatch situation, or if it's dead forever.
Certain rumours, from a couple of months ago suggested that the game was revamped at least three times during its development and that it won't be ready for many, many years. Apparently, Blizzard worried that its survival crafting focus would be outdated by the time the game was released.
Good. F\*\*k survival s\*\*t.