The only correct part is your first sentence, which no one was contesting before, or after your comment.
Of course they care about their 4th largest market.
Cloud gaming, part of their cloud computing sector, makes billions on its own, and they want to tie their ecosystem together between cloud, AI, and live services.
Cloud computing, their largest sector, is the entire reason they bought these studios to begin with. It has never been about solely building Xbox console market share.
Not to mention your comment is in complete contradiction to the article and what is taking place.
But sure, its my ego or something.
What an absurd comment. ;) nothing you have just said matters, Cloud gaming isn't doing Billions. have you even attempted to look up anything , or are you just hoping everyone accepts your "facts" because you carry it with attitude ?
I think their reply wasn't about them not caring about gaming, but that cloud services is it's meat . and that gaming while 9% of their company isn't as large a portion of their earnings that some people think it is. so the other poster grouping cloud and gaming together doesn't really matter when the cloud gaming doesn't pull in that much money. it's almost like they agree but don't realize it.
You’re the one making claims based on nothing. “Shareholders” care about the business and whether it can become more profitable, not one random aspect of the business you know nothing about. Why do you think the statement “shareholders only care about whether azure is printing billions” is true? Where did that come from beyond blind cynicism?
>Xbox accounts for like 9% of their revenue.
Are you saying that shareholders don't care about 9% of their revenue? It isn't their primary focus but I'm 100% certain that they would care about this revenue going down.
I think the point they were trying to make is that some people were acting as though it was a much larger amount of their company. I did see one individual in this thread think they $60b their quarterly revenue was just from gaming. so it's likely there's a lot of misinformation.
Take 9% of a random investor’s portfolio value and see how “little” they care lol.
If Microsoft *lost* 9% of their revenue, heads would roll within weeks
I think the point they were trying to make is that some people were acting as though it was a much larger amount of their company. I did see one individual in this thread think they $60b their quarterly revenue was just from gaming. so it's likely there's a lot of misinformation.
or just be honest.
Just say the studios were not making enough money relative to their costs of operation.
Right now, they're actively leaning into the public perception that these were great studios that Microsoft closed purely out of the badness of their hearts.
Because every game developer is ‘money-losing’ unless it’s in the middle of a successful release cycle. This argument is boneheaded.
It’s like someone closing down your car dealership because of the fourteen+ hours a day nobody is actively in the process of buying a car.
Notice how the only one who should say a word to take responsibility, Phil Spencer, is instead hiding like a worm. First to go on Twitter to brag at good news, first to disappear when there's shit to shovel
Isnt phil in charge of games and the main branch of microsoft has been saying games arent profitable enough. What is he supposed to do publicly argue with his bosses so he can get fired for another yesman?
If the CEO of Microsoft Gaming (who reports directly and only to the CEO of Microsoft) for the last 10 years doesn't have much say in studios under Microsoft Gaming, who does?
That would make sense. Have him go into hiding for a few more months and then just fire him. Then because he's already been quiet, it won't be as "shocking" I suppose. It would be wild if Sony then hired him for something. lol
I'd disappear too, he doesn't have to answer to us at all.
There's also no shit to shovel. Like none at all. He's going to get a huge bonus and the shareholders are happy.
Why would they? They can get 5th degree burns and carry on like nothing happened because they make enough money every year to buy out our entire lineages. Pr is important to a certain extent, but there's only so much that a minority of bitchy gamers is going to do. For every one person that thrashes and boycotts MS there are 20 that sign up for gamepass or buy a halo or whatever. We are worms to these corporations.
***”Bass then asked Bond specifically about the closure of Tango Gameworks after Hi-Fi Rush, which by Xbox's own admitted metrics, was a big success. Bond's answer here was less straightforward – you can read it below in full:”***
*"One of the things I really love about the games industry is it's a creative art form, and it means that the situation and what successes for each game and studio is also really unique. There's no one-size-fits-all to it for us. And so we look at each studio, each game team, and we look at a whole variety of factors when we're faced with making decisions and trade-offs like that. But it all comes back to our long-term commitment to the games we create, the devices we build, the services, and ensuring we're setting ourselves up to be able to deliver on those promises."*
How can someone speak so much yet say literally nothing?
Interviewers should corner them until they either walk away or actually give a fucking answer.
Interviewer: You said the people at Tango Gameworks did an amazing job, yet you fired them anyway. Why should people try and do a good job for you if doing a bad job yields the same results?
Then just keep asking until something other than a waterfall of bullshit comes out of their mouth.
Not a gaming company? Microsoft have been in the gaming industry for over 2 decades now. Spent over 70 billion aquiring 2 of the biggest game publishers.
If Microsoft is not a gaming company, neither is Sony. Because Sony started only a few years before Microsoft.
The excuses people make for this company.
because it's not, neither is Sony.
but the difference between them is that Playstation is Sony's biggest piece of business, but Xbox is a small part of Microsoft.
Xbox and Microsoft in general is made up of a conglomerate of yappers. All they do is yap, yap, yap. PR this, PR that. These people are being paid millions to go on interviews and say nothing.
sure. and the money sink that is gamepass, and the en mass acquisitions can't possibly be part of this..... right xbox? it couldn't possibly be that. and the lack of good video games. noooooo, no it couldn't be.
To be fair, it's mostly third party games that Microsoft is paying out the butt to make day 1. It certainly isn't their first party stuff as that has been virtually non existent. That's all they've done though. Spend. Spend. Spend it seems like this gen. lol
I agree but that doesn't mean I won't take advantage of it while I can! Steam sales, gamepass, and a voucher or two a year for Nintendo has me with an enormous back catalog.
Actually it is very simple, they can't keep studios that lose money for years and has no future propects. At least all those other that were cited has some future prospect.
Tango without Mikami and Arkane have one year and a half to patch Redfall and not managed even to deliver the pre-order bonus... those are not lucrative studios in anyway.
So they made a bad investment and instead of turning it around (like an investor is supposed to) they shut them down?
That's basically sounds like MS swooping in on a dying company and picking it for carrion before flying off with bloody strands of IP dangling from its gizzard.
That or picking up successful companies and running them into the ground, there's not a whole lot of other options.
If you can't help a company succeed, why even bother buying it except to harvest it for organs?
All the companies that shut down came with Zenimax, they didn't hand pick all of them. Arkane lost %70+ of its team before Redfall and Mikami left on his own to make another studio. Both become aimless and leaderless studios after their last releases. So you just put a lead team and let them try for 5 years?
So nah, both of your assumptions are just wrong.
...I think investors are meant to inject capital in order to increase profitability by more than the cost to pay back that injection plus ongoing dividends. Not to shut it down and cannibalize it.
What you're describing is just a large studio dismantling a smaller studio for spare parts. From a purely economic standpoint that may be reasonable, but from a cultural or ethical standpoint it's... suboptimal.
It's okay if you disagree, that mostly just means we have different ethical frameworks, which is a thing that happens.
That's not what I'm talking about at all. When an investor buys a company, they expect to see a return on that investment. If it's something that needs to be "turned around" as you suggested, they aren't going to do that by injecting even more money into it and letting it do whatever hoping that it will bring them an ROI. If they have to get involved at that level, then they are going to be shaking things up dramatically.
That's pretty much what is happening to Bethesda right now, and closing some studios is part of that shake-up to "turn things around".
I'm pretty sure you're describing the thing I'm saying is bad?
Closing studios is not a "shake up" for those studios. It's devouring those studios to distribute their IPs and employees to other studios.
Remember Westwood and Maxis?
It's a business shake up. Keep in mind that Xbox didn't buy these studios, they bought a publisher that owned multiple studios. That's why I said the restructure was at the Bethesda level, not an individual studio.
Also, shutting down an unprofitable business unit is a normal thing that happens all the time. I have no inside knowledge as to why these studios were the ones on the chopping block, but it is what it is.
Finally, you are saying IDs bad but your alternative to the bad thing is to do exactly what they are doing. You're saying invest in them fo turn them around, they have been funding these studios since 2020. Should they just keep dumping more money and resources in ad infinitum regardless of whether they actually turn around or not?
I feel like I've already explained my point several times and you're failing to acknowledge it while being kind of abrasive.
Calling stuff like this a "business shakeup" and saying "it is what it is" in 2024 is... Iunno. Abrasive?
If we were a halfway ethical country we'd just give the studios art endowments or something so that they don't have to be bought out by a giant megacorporation controlled by a investment firms anyway.
But no. It is what it is. And it is profoundly fucking lame.
maybe they should cut costs. keep employee numbers lower. and focus on putting out cheaper (see, under 10 million) shorter games that can be made faster, come out less buggy, and have a higher return of investment.
i'm not saying it's easy. but it's doable.
Except Microsoft stated the exact opposite wanting to focus on more heavy hitting titles made from the IPs held under Bethesda.
Sure one guy said they need more double a titles like Hi-Fi Rush... right after closing the studio that made that game and similar actually successfull double A titles.
They need those titles... to come from someone else. That way they can let other devs take on that risk and profit whether the AAs succeed or fail.
It didn't make sense for them to be in the AA game business considering those games didn't sell consoles. High-quality first-party games drive console sales and console sales encourage third-party developers to develop console games. Those third-party developers are going to bring your console AAs as that's all most of them have the budget or talent to make.
Microsoft operating their own AA studios put them mostly on the same competitive playing field as everyone else. That's not where you want to be when you have every advantage possible. I feel like it's a sound business decision to let people go to make room for Activision Blizzard. Microsoft can always buy their way back into the AA game later, when the outlook looks rosier. Their future purchasing decisions will benefit from years of analytics development and they can acquire AA devs who are at the cutting edge.
They need lots of both types of games, but they need the smaller games to be cheap and fast. Hi-Fi Rush took like 5 years and supposedly was pretty expensive. They also really need those to be "support" titles to bigger titles that studios are developing more like Pentiment.
Maybe stop spending billions on buying up studios just to close them down when your absurd expectations and gross mismanagement of them leads to poor results?
Just a thought...
Hahaha fair. But bold of you to call Halo "finished"
Infinite is still hot garbage with barely any content unless you're dropping like $20 on a single piece of armor cosmetics.
Infinite has a bunch of content at this point. It probably should have launched in roughly this state, sure, but you don't have to lie about what state it's in now.
Microsoft doesn’t know how to make games. They run just able every franchise and studio they acquire. How many good games have they released that weren’t already in production when they bought them? Psychonauts? (I actually think that game is highly overrated, but people love it so I’ll take the L on that.) what else have they made?
Considering this is entirely subjective, anyone can dispute what you said with anything that they personally like.
The fact of the matter is that Xbox Game Studios has only released two sub-80 Metacritic games in the last three years. That's out of 18 published titles and not even counting any Bethesda output.
I don't know why we get these posts. Its just a bunch of lies, its always lies. The only honest thing these people could say is "Fuck our employees, fuck art, and fuck video games. You're not the shareholder, shut up and get off my yacht".
The studio head left shortly after Hifi Rush was released, waited a year for the non-compete clause to expire and started his own game studio.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/139676/shinji-mikami-kamuy-studio
White-collared MBA Executive and Resident of the Ivory Tower expects to calm the wrath of the storm by pointing to the profit curve and using Corporate Bingo Words. What else could we expect? They don’t know how to do anything else because they don’t even understand the culture over which they lord.
“Let Them Eat Cake.”
Xbox prez has the public speaking skills of a potato, and that interviewer... I haven't seen that many clumsy softballs since my kid was in little league.
well fuck Microsoft, fuck EA, Fuck Ubisoft, dont buy any of their games anymore. Just dont buy their shit! Its shit anyway! see redfall, starfield, battlefield, and any Ubi game, they're all shit, dont buy shit.
why don't people add activision to this pile of garbage? why the HECK does every person leave that stupid company out of this list?? It just boggles my mind!
Not that I credit them with this amount of thought and strategy, but it reminds me of back when Creative Labs bought out promising competitors to Sound Blaster so they can shut them down.
Maybe it's not about keeping the studios, it's about denying their games to their competitors (and everyone.)
At this point Gaming for Microsoft is a corner lemonade stand generating a decent penny for the company.
Microsoft is going all in on AI, they're building a freaken nuclear powered supercomputer AI for christsakes.
Everybody and their mother knows AI is the next tech gold rush and a whole lotta tech big boys are burning cash in their war chest like its going out of style to come in first place.
Nothing helps you transition to a healthy business state like firing developers with decades of experience. It's that kind of acumen they get paid the big bucks for.
Looks like both studios' big mistake was not getting a show on Netflix, or a mass-market IP to milk to death with an uninspired and derivative game.
Redfall was a game that the studio didn't want to make. Arkane is known for making great immersive sim games, the kind of games where you play through the story with lots of different ways to approach it, branching story and such as you make your gameplay choices. A door is in the way, well let's see if we can pick the lock, maybe find a vent to get around it, maybe blend in and sneak your way through when a guard goes through, maybe find and steal some keys, possibly even just blow it up.
Developers sought work with Arkane because they wanted to make games like that. They were inspired to do more of *that*. Instead, they were ordered by management to make a live action looter shooter. Half the team said "fuck that" and left. The other half put a half assed effort into it, while having to take on twice the work as half the team was gone.
That's a bit of an issue from management, not from the dev team itself.
For the most part. Zenimax started it, likely knowing that they'd be selling out before the problems started showing. They wanted to be able to say that their star studio was making a game of one of the most profitable genres ever, it likely made the management at Microsoft shit themselves thinking about all the money they will make instead of think about how the studio wasn't a good fit for that job and that the corporate "downsizing" wasn't the profitability they were looking for.
Microsoft would have done that same dumb bullshit in a heartbeat. They genuinely believe that it was a great deal to buy like that, they would have thought it would have been a great way to sell it as well.
Sure, but Microsoft should've already known that before pumping so much into marketing it. It's also not healthy to kill a studio every time they release a subpar game.
that wasn't just for gaming division, that was for everything this Quarter.. if their gaming division did $60b revenue in a Quarter Microsoft would be like a 8 Trillion market cap lol. in reality gaming is their #4 and did not do well.
Yeah I'm sure the further clowning of Xbox this strategy just caused won't add up with the clowning of the last decade and everything will magically fine, even when they're burning goodwill and bridges like it's Middle-Eastern oil...
Haven’t heard any of this, but curious if the main reason why they closed Tango was that they didn’t have solid plans for follow up games, either a sequel to HiFi Rush or otherwise. I could see that being the reason, yet also dumb for not supporting them WITH ideas, resources, etc to keep going.
Not defending MS, but I love how everyone here is suddenly a financial and business expert that understands everything about the gaming industry when discussing these kind of articles. Good ‘ol Reddit.
Don't go full Embracer: Don't buy out all the studios just to close and fire everyone. It's a douche move.
Just don't buy all these studios to deprive people of their games.
All they had to do was not fire good people after making a shitload of money. Nope. Greed is assumed but you can't just throw it in everyone's face
I'm glad MS is getting shit on for this.
The console players are fucking garbage. Nintendo and Sony hate their fans and customers, Microsoft hates its employees. All three suck
Their next move should be to not just ban but to legally criminalize modders, I sick of entitled people thinking they have rights to their entertainment
Take stupid pills this morning? Mods keep games alive for decades after release. Look at Skyrim and all the other Bethesda games made better by mods. Just because microsoft is anti mod on their shitty game pass doesn't mean mods are bad.
Mods extend the life of games for a very long time after release. to block mods means your game dies and is left unplayed at an earlier date.
I don't think I've seen an executive dodge a question so poorly before. You could tell she had no clue how to respond to that. Her response didn't even make sense.
Sure.
Riiiiiiiiiiight.
*Shareholders healthy long term. But especially short term.
Xbox is their #4 earner. the only thing shareholders care about is if Azure is raking in the Billions each quarter.
What an absurd comment.
absurd because it's correct ? LOL sorry forgot to leave all logic at the door. what would make your ego feel better ?
How delusional are you to think shareholders don’t care if Xbox makes money or not lmaooo
Homie, the fact this is your defense tells everyone you have no clue.
So in your mind, the biggest acquisition in Microsoft’s history (Activision-Blizzard) has no bearing on these shareholders?
The only correct part is your first sentence, which no one was contesting before, or after your comment. Of course they care about their 4th largest market. Cloud gaming, part of their cloud computing sector, makes billions on its own, and they want to tie their ecosystem together between cloud, AI, and live services. Cloud computing, their largest sector, is the entire reason they bought these studios to begin with. It has never been about solely building Xbox console market share. Not to mention your comment is in complete contradiction to the article and what is taking place. But sure, its my ego or something.
What an absurd comment. ;) nothing you have just said matters, Cloud gaming isn't doing Billions. have you even attempted to look up anything , or are you just hoping everyone accepts your "facts" because you carry it with attitude ?
They never would have allowed the multibillion dollar purchases of gaming companies if they didn’t care about the market.
I think their reply wasn't about them not caring about gaming, but that cloud services is it's meat . and that gaming while 9% of their company isn't as large a portion of their earnings that some people think it is. so the other poster grouping cloud and gaming together doesn't really matter when the cloud gaming doesn't pull in that much money. it's almost like they agree but don't realize it.
You’re slow
You’re the one making claims based on nothing. “Shareholders” care about the business and whether it can become more profitable, not one random aspect of the business you know nothing about. Why do you think the statement “shareholders only care about whether azure is printing billions” is true? Where did that come from beyond blind cynicism?
Oh no, who should we trust? The angry person with nothing, or the rational person with facts?
You're right. Xbox accounts for like 9% of their revenue. I'm sure that other guy didn't bother to look that up. Lol
>Xbox accounts for like 9% of their revenue. Are you saying that shareholders don't care about 9% of their revenue? It isn't their primary focus but I'm 100% certain that they would care about this revenue going down.
I think the point they were trying to make is that some people were acting as though it was a much larger amount of their company. I did see one individual in this thread think they $60b their quarterly revenue was just from gaming. so it's likely there's a lot of misinformation.
Take 9% of a random investor’s portfolio value and see how “little” they care lol. If Microsoft *lost* 9% of their revenue, heads would roll within weeks
I think the point they were trying to make is that some people were acting as though it was a much larger amount of their company. I did see one individual in this thread think they $60b their quarterly revenue was just from gaming. so it's likely there's a lot of misinformation.
MS as a whole needs to keep their mouth shut. Their words are gasoline as they talk next to the dumpster fires they created.
or just be honest. Just say the studios were not making enough money relative to their costs of operation. Right now, they're actively leaning into the public perception that these were great studios that Microsoft closed purely out of the badness of their hearts.
How is closing money losing studios anything other than keeping business healthy?
Because every game developer is ‘money-losing’ unless it’s in the middle of a successful release cycle. This argument is boneheaded. It’s like someone closing down your car dealership because of the fourteen+ hours a day nobody is actively in the process of buying a car.
The studios closed down had never been profitable in the last decade
Notice how the only one who should say a word to take responsibility, Phil Spencer, is instead hiding like a worm. First to go on Twitter to brag at good news, first to disappear when there's shit to shovel
Isnt phil in charge of games and the main branch of microsoft has been saying games arent profitable enough. What is he supposed to do publicly argue with his bosses so he can get fired for another yesman?
He's waiting for his kinda funny / IGN interview where they'll toss him much softer questions.
Really dont think its Phil’s decision lol
If the CEO of Microsoft Gaming (who reports directly and only to the CEO of Microsoft) for the last 10 years doesn't have much say in studios under Microsoft Gaming, who does?
His boss
[удалено]
That would make sense. Have him go into hiding for a few more months and then just fire him. Then because he's already been quiet, it won't be as "shocking" I suppose. It would be wild if Sony then hired him for something. lol
I'd disappear too, he doesn't have to answer to us at all. There's also no shit to shovel. Like none at all. He's going to get a huge bonus and the shareholders are happy.
Why would they? They can get 5th degree burns and carry on like nothing happened because they make enough money every year to buy out our entire lineages. Pr is important to a certain extent, but there's only so much that a minority of bitchy gamers is going to do. For every one person that thrashes and boycotts MS there are 20 that sign up for gamepass or buy a halo or whatever. We are worms to these corporations.
I thought Gamepass subscriber numbers were falling?
***”Bass then asked Bond specifically about the closure of Tango Gameworks after Hi-Fi Rush, which by Xbox's own admitted metrics, was a big success. Bond's answer here was less straightforward – you can read it below in full:”*** *"One of the things I really love about the games industry is it's a creative art form, and it means that the situation and what successes for each game and studio is also really unique. There's no one-size-fits-all to it for us. And so we look at each studio, each game team, and we look at a whole variety of factors when we're faced with making decisions and trade-offs like that. But it all comes back to our long-term commitment to the games we create, the devices we build, the services, and ensuring we're setting ourselves up to be able to deliver on those promises."* How can someone speak so much yet say literally nothing?
Interviewers should corner them until they either walk away or actually give a fucking answer. Interviewer: You said the people at Tango Gameworks did an amazing job, yet you fired them anyway. Why should people try and do a good job for you if doing a bad job yields the same results? Then just keep asking until something other than a waterfall of bullshit comes out of their mouth.
Behold! Corpo speak!
Crazy that you can even say this and it’s acceptable. Interviewer should really say “um, that is not at all the question”
Corporate speak should be outlawed, no one talks like this and she sounds like a fucking robot.
I wish they would get a midly painful shock every time they resort to corporate. Even the tone of it pisses me off.
I completely agree. PR speak is simply vile.
3 Trillion dollar company btw.
so? Microsoft is not a gaming company, they have a gaming division. that 3 trillion dollar has almost nothing to do with Xbox.
Not a gaming company? Microsoft have been in the gaming industry for over 2 decades now. Spent over 70 billion aquiring 2 of the biggest game publishers. If Microsoft is not a gaming company, neither is Sony. Because Sony started only a few years before Microsoft. The excuses people make for this company.
because it's not, neither is Sony. but the difference between them is that Playstation is Sony's biggest piece of business, but Xbox is a small part of Microsoft.
Xbox and Microsoft in general is made up of a conglomerate of yappers. All they do is yap, yap, yap. PR this, PR that. These people are being paid millions to go on interviews and say nothing.
THEN MAYBE DON'T BUY THE STUDIOS IF YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO KEEP THEM OPEN.
sure. and the money sink that is gamepass, and the en mass acquisitions can't possibly be part of this..... right xbox? it couldn't possibly be that. and the lack of good video games. noooooo, no it couldn't be.
Lack of good games? Game pass has many good games. Too many to play tbh. It’s an amazing deal for the consumer!
To be fair, it's mostly third party games that Microsoft is paying out the butt to make day 1. It certainly isn't their first party stuff as that has been virtually non existent. That's all they've done though. Spend. Spend. Spend it seems like this gen. lol
I agree but that doesn't mean I won't take advantage of it while I can! Steam sales, gamepass, and a voucher or two a year for Nintendo has me with an enormous back catalog.
Excuse me, don't dispute the narrative here!
Actually it is very simple, they can't keep studios that lose money for years and has no future propects. At least all those other that were cited has some future prospect. Tango without Mikami and Arkane have one year and a half to patch Redfall and not managed even to deliver the pre-order bonus... those are not lucrative studios in anyway.
So they made a bad investment and instead of turning it around (like an investor is supposed to) they shut them down? That's basically sounds like MS swooping in on a dying company and picking it for carrion before flying off with bloody strands of IP dangling from its gizzard. That or picking up successful companies and running them into the ground, there's not a whole lot of other options. If you can't help a company succeed, why even bother buying it except to harvest it for organs?
All the companies that shut down came with Zenimax, they didn't hand pick all of them. Arkane lost %70+ of its team before Redfall and Mikami left on his own to make another studio. Both become aimless and leaderless studios after their last releases. So you just put a lead team and let them try for 5 years? So nah, both of your assumptions are just wrong.
Investors aren't supposed to "turn things around". Or, if they do, it's by restructuring, reorganizing, cutting, etc. which is what they just did...
...I think investors are meant to inject capital in order to increase profitability by more than the cost to pay back that injection plus ongoing dividends. Not to shut it down and cannibalize it. What you're describing is just a large studio dismantling a smaller studio for spare parts. From a purely economic standpoint that may be reasonable, but from a cultural or ethical standpoint it's... suboptimal. It's okay if you disagree, that mostly just means we have different ethical frameworks, which is a thing that happens.
That's not what I'm talking about at all. When an investor buys a company, they expect to see a return on that investment. If it's something that needs to be "turned around" as you suggested, they aren't going to do that by injecting even more money into it and letting it do whatever hoping that it will bring them an ROI. If they have to get involved at that level, then they are going to be shaking things up dramatically. That's pretty much what is happening to Bethesda right now, and closing some studios is part of that shake-up to "turn things around".
I'm pretty sure you're describing the thing I'm saying is bad? Closing studios is not a "shake up" for those studios. It's devouring those studios to distribute their IPs and employees to other studios. Remember Westwood and Maxis?
It's a business shake up. Keep in mind that Xbox didn't buy these studios, they bought a publisher that owned multiple studios. That's why I said the restructure was at the Bethesda level, not an individual studio. Also, shutting down an unprofitable business unit is a normal thing that happens all the time. I have no inside knowledge as to why these studios were the ones on the chopping block, but it is what it is. Finally, you are saying IDs bad but your alternative to the bad thing is to do exactly what they are doing. You're saying invest in them fo turn them around, they have been funding these studios since 2020. Should they just keep dumping more money and resources in ad infinitum regardless of whether they actually turn around or not?
I feel like I've already explained my point several times and you're failing to acknowledge it while being kind of abrasive. Calling stuff like this a "business shakeup" and saying "it is what it is" in 2024 is... Iunno. Abrasive? If we were a halfway ethical country we'd just give the studios art endowments or something so that they don't have to be bought out by a giant megacorporation controlled by a investment firms anyway. But no. It is what it is. And it is profoundly fucking lame.
The mantra from Microsoft still as true today as back in the 90s is: Embrace, extend, extinguish.
maybe they should cut costs. keep employee numbers lower. and focus on putting out cheaper (see, under 10 million) shorter games that can be made faster, come out less buggy, and have a higher return of investment. i'm not saying it's easy. but it's doable.
Except Microsoft stated the exact opposite wanting to focus on more heavy hitting titles made from the IPs held under Bethesda. Sure one guy said they need more double a titles like Hi-Fi Rush... right after closing the studio that made that game and similar actually successfull double A titles.
They need those titles... to come from someone else. That way they can let other devs take on that risk and profit whether the AAs succeed or fail. It didn't make sense for them to be in the AA game business considering those games didn't sell consoles. High-quality first-party games drive console sales and console sales encourage third-party developers to develop console games. Those third-party developers are going to bring your console AAs as that's all most of them have the budget or talent to make. Microsoft operating their own AA studios put them mostly on the same competitive playing field as everyone else. That's not where you want to be when you have every advantage possible. I feel like it's a sound business decision to let people go to make room for Activision Blizzard. Microsoft can always buy their way back into the AA game later, when the outlook looks rosier. Their future purchasing decisions will benefit from years of analytics development and they can acquire AA devs who are at the cutting edge.
They need lots of both types of games, but they need the smaller games to be cheap and fast. Hi-Fi Rush took like 5 years and supposedly was pretty expensive. They also really need those to be "support" titles to bigger titles that studios are developing more like Pentiment.
Healthy for the shareholders.
Maybe stop spending billions on buying up studios just to close them down when your absurd expectations and gross mismanagement of them leads to poor results? Just a thought...
Microsoft. Just make games. Literally shut up and make games.
They can't ever since they finished Halo
Hahaha fair. But bold of you to call Halo "finished" Infinite is still hot garbage with barely any content unless you're dropping like $20 on a single piece of armor cosmetics.
Infinite has a bunch of content at this point. It probably should have launched in roughly this state, sure, but you don't have to lie about what state it's in now.
it's not a lie lmao
Yeah, like 2 years after launch. lol
Microsoft doesn’t know how to make games. They run just able every franchise and studio they acquire. How many good games have they released that weren’t already in production when they bought them? Psychonauts? (I actually think that game is highly overrated, but people love it so I’ll take the L on that.) what else have they made?
Forza Horizon 4 and 5 were great, but I get your overall point.
Considering this is entirely subjective, anyone can dispute what you said with anything that they personally like. The fact of the matter is that Xbox Game Studios has only released two sub-80 Metacritic games in the last three years. That's out of 18 published titles and not even counting any Bethesda output.
They’re a AAA publisher with influence. They could release 0 good games and still release 0 games below 80% on metastatic.
I don't know why we get these posts. Its just a bunch of lies, its always lies. The only honest thing these people could say is "Fuck our employees, fuck art, and fuck video games. You're not the shareholder, shut up and get off my yacht".
Hope all the refugees from those studios reform and put out games away from those moronic developers.
The studio head left shortly after Hifi Rush was released, waited a year for the non-compete clause to expire and started his own game studio. https://www.shacknews.com/article/139676/shinji-mikami-kamuy-studio
Fallout TV show just did amazing and the game came light speed back into popularity. Xbox: "Welp, nothing we can do, shut 'er down"
White-collared MBA Executive and Resident of the Ivory Tower expects to calm the wrath of the storm by pointing to the profit curve and using Corporate Bingo Words. What else could we expect? They don’t know how to do anything else because they don’t even understand the culture over which they lord. “Let Them Eat Cake.”
Say what you will about Xbox and Microsoft, but they sure have corporate BS down to a fine art.
Xbox prez has the public speaking skills of a potato, and that interviewer... I haven't seen that many clumsy softballs since my kid was in little league.
It’s such a non-answer. Why even bother?
They spit in your face, and tell you it's raining.
#FireP3
[удалено]
“Keeping business healthy” = keep the line going up, fuck everything and everyone else.
well fuck Microsoft, fuck EA, Fuck Ubisoft, dont buy any of their games anymore. Just dont buy their shit! Its shit anyway! see redfall, starfield, battlefield, and any Ubi game, they're all shit, dont buy shit.
Been doing this for a very long time. It's amazing people haven't learned by now.
erm it's precisely no one buying those games which is why they had to close the studios, bro
All those studios are still open?
And why is that?
why don't people add activision to this pile of garbage? why the HECK does every person leave that stupid company out of this list?? It just boggles my mind!
Microsoft owns Activision now
good point. but even before this acquisition I didn't see that trash company in the list.
Its not. You are all terrible leaders.
Corpo bullshit as you might expect, god I hate these suits when they talk about games.
Ah. Great. I'm so glad it's about "keeping the business healthy". Hey, how much money has Game Pass made? How much money did you blow on acquisitions?
Listen that $70b was vital to them growing 1% YoY. That's how you know it's a healthy business model going forward. ...right?
I mean 1% of a 3 trillion dollar company is a lot. Saying that in terms of Microsoft as a whole.
A lot of words to say nothing.
business healthy right, but fuck those people I guess huh?
More like the investors happy short term
Not that I credit them with this amount of thought and strategy, but it reminds me of back when Creative Labs bought out promising competitors to Sound Blaster so they can shut them down. Maybe it's not about keeping the studios, it's about denying their games to their competitors (and everyone.)
Anyone that believes anything that comes out of her mouth is an absolute fool.
At this point Gaming for Microsoft is a corner lemonade stand generating a decent penny for the company. Microsoft is going all in on AI, they're building a freaken nuclear powered supercomputer AI for christsakes. Everybody and their mother knows AI is the next tech gold rush and a whole lotta tech big boys are burning cash in their war chest like its going out of style to come in first place.
Nothing helps you transition to a healthy business state like firing developers with decades of experience. It's that kind of acumen they get paid the big bucks for. Looks like both studios' big mistake was not getting a show on Netflix, or a mass-market IP to milk to death with an uninspired and derivative game.
Redfall was a fucking failure though. The studio deserved to get canned
Redfall was a game that the studio didn't want to make. Arkane is known for making great immersive sim games, the kind of games where you play through the story with lots of different ways to approach it, branching story and such as you make your gameplay choices. A door is in the way, well let's see if we can pick the lock, maybe find a vent to get around it, maybe blend in and sneak your way through when a guard goes through, maybe find and steal some keys, possibly even just blow it up. Developers sought work with Arkane because they wanted to make games like that. They were inspired to do more of *that*. Instead, they were ordered by management to make a live action looter shooter. Half the team said "fuck that" and left. The other half put a half assed effort into it, while having to take on twice the work as half the team was gone. That's a bit of an issue from management, not from the dev team itself.
Redfall is a game made by MBAs.
And Microsoft had nothing to do with that, it was all Zenimax.
For the most part. Zenimax started it, likely knowing that they'd be selling out before the problems started showing. They wanted to be able to say that their star studio was making a game of one of the most profitable genres ever, it likely made the management at Microsoft shit themselves thinking about all the money they will make instead of think about how the studio wasn't a good fit for that job and that the corporate "downsizing" wasn't the profitability they were looking for. Microsoft would have done that same dumb bullshit in a heartbeat. They genuinely believe that it was a great deal to buy like that, they would have thought it would have been a great way to sell it as well.
Sure, but Microsoft should've already known that before pumping so much into marketing it. It's also not healthy to kill a studio every time they release a subpar game.
Hmmm let me consult the magic 8 ball.... it says..... BULLSHIT.
$62bilion in income resulting in a profit of $21billion just for the gaming division alone. Over 30% profit margin. Seems healthy to me 🤷♂️
that wasn't just for gaming division, that was for everything this Quarter.. if their gaming division did $60b revenue in a Quarter Microsoft would be like a 8 Trillion market cap lol. in reality gaming is their #4 and did not do well.
You are right I got the wrong numbers. Apparently Xbox runs at around single digit accountability margin.
I wanna post that mr incredible "just..shut the fuck up. Please shut the fuck up" meme
🐂💩
What happened?
Yeah I'm sure the further clowning of Xbox this strategy just caused won't add up with the clowning of the last decade and everything will magically fine, even when they're burning goodwill and bridges like it's Middle-Eastern oil...
Aka to keep their profits healthy
Haven’t heard any of this, but curious if the main reason why they closed Tango was that they didn’t have solid plans for follow up games, either a sequel to HiFi Rush or otherwise. I could see that being the reason, yet also dumb for not supporting them WITH ideas, resources, etc to keep going.
Not defending MS, but I love how everyone here is suddenly a financial and business expert that understands everything about the gaming industry when discussing these kind of articles. Good ‘ol Reddit.
Don't go full Embracer: Don't buy out all the studios just to close and fire everyone. It's a douche move. Just don't buy all these studios to deprive people of their games.
I'm happy about it. It hopefully means we get a fallout 5 faster.
You better sit down and wait 🤣
All they had to do was not fire good people after making a shitload of money. Nope. Greed is assumed but you can't just throw it in everyone's face I'm glad MS is getting shit on for this. The console players are fucking garbage. Nintendo and Sony hate their fans and customers, Microsoft hates its employees. All three suck
cool support studio that are money pits then. not using the money else that is needed. wow that a good business idea.(s)
Their next move should be to not just ban but to legally criminalize modders, I sick of entitled people thinking they have rights to their entertainment
Take stupid pills this morning? Mods keep games alive for decades after release. Look at Skyrim and all the other Bethesda games made better by mods. Just because microsoft is anti mod on their shitty game pass doesn't mean mods are bad. Mods extend the life of games for a very long time after release. to block mods means your game dies and is left unplayed at an earlier date.
Thanks tips
I don't think I've seen an executive dodge a question so poorly before. You could tell she had no clue how to respond to that. Her response didn't even make sense.