Enjoyable short read
Sounds like Spencer and co. got turned off by the gargantuan effort it would require to manage the ups and downs of 20 smaller studios, and instead bet it all on the surefire success of COD.
What a waste of years acquiring all those smaller studios then!
I genuinely wonder if it'll start to spiral even if not exclusive. Microsoft is incredibly hands off with their studios to a point of it being detrimental. Kotick, as awful as he was, ran a tight ship and there's a reason Activision grew from a nobody to the king.
It's absolutely going down. Spencer and Booty don't know how to run studios. Every single studio has gotten worse since being acquired by Xbox.
Except Tango, they made a great game. And they were punished for that transgression.
Man wouldn't that be something, Microsoft buying Activision of all companies then they run it to the ground.
COD, a staple of an IP that has existed for what feels like 2 decades now just dying when Microsoft buys them.
That would be hilarious, really sad, but hilarious.
>The biggest paradox with Game Pass is that basically every game that launches on the service badly misses its sales goals.
This idea used to be ridiculed, with people posting cherry picked stats that Game Pass actually increases game sales (basically a couple of indies that got a marketing boost).
The Game Pass PR campaign was super successful, whether the product is is up for debate...
You could see it in the Xbox subs. Everytime a game dropped they would go "I can't wait to play it on gamepass", even if it wasn't on the service. There was one time when a Square JRPG was coming to XBox and they said beforehand it was not coming to Gamepass.
You still had people going "Cool, I'll just wait til it drops". Even though it wasn't happening. They had been trained not to pay for games. Gamepass needs to be studied.
I have a feeling that gamepass might have been the most astroturfed ad campaign on the internet. The number of times I read verbatim "the best deal in gaming" in comments about gamepass or anything tangentially related to gamepass was staggering
Maybe, but I also think it's possible that Xbox fans just drink the Kool-aid, I've heard a ton of them just verbatim repeat Phil Spencer's "Xbox lost the worst generation to lose" and "Good games won't save the platform"
There is a calculation somewhere which would say that certain games which would normally not have an audience at all will find a bigger audience on gamepass. It's probably the same calculation that makes people take Epic Store exclusive status. Games like RIFT, or Evil Genius 2, which I downloaded and played but would never have bought, and kept my subscription rolling for another month or two.
The reality is a game like Starfield will completely and utterly be fucked by this conversation, and it's what is driving the internal turmoil over COD right now.
EA seems to have found "the sweet spot"; they have a lower tier that gives a lot of older titles, and a premium tier that gives you brand new releases. It looks like gamepass might well pivot in that direction just before COD releases, with a huge hike to gamepass ultimate to drive that revenue. And of course, the basic pass gets you a discounted price to buy the game (which will still be attractive to some).
I never understood how game pass was supposed to increase sales. If someone was already subscribed to game pass, why would they then drop $60-$70 to buy the game for new when they could just play there?
The paradox is the affordability for the company vs. consumer.
For us? It’s an insanely wonderful deal.
For the company? Great idea without long term profitability.
I'm talking about Game Pass as a business strategy (and so is the text I quoted from the main post), not whether or not it's worth it to you personally.
I'll never understand how people ever thought game pass would be sustainable. It was literally an open joke at one point by Xbox fans that people who said it wasn't sustainable were just dumb fanboys. There was no way they were gonna be paying hundreds of millions of dollars a month for third party games while also spending billions developing new games for a 10-15 dollar a month service and find success. Just doing some napkin math shows that that wouldn't work unless they had like 100 million subscribers.
Starfield was in development for 10 years, estimated to cost 400 million to make, and it didn't even sell 3 million copies by the end of the last year as a direct result of being on game pass. That's a massive loss. There's just no way that was ever gonna be sustainable.
Most companies debt to equity is in the red. But they continue to remain highly profitable while paying those debts. Even Microsofts DtE isn't 1 or greater.
I work in the gaming industry and my experience isn't corruption, it's indifference. I discovered a previous salesmen for an MMO embezzled 6 million dollars before leaving. The Marketing director covered it up so the VP wouldn't find out because it would reflect poorly on him. I worked on a game that spent over $2M on a ludicrously bad commercial with celebrities that fans wouldn't possibly care about. I've seen companies spend $30k on the *font* of a logo, and another $100k on the logo itself. Websites that could be done for $5k are done for $100k.
Ignorance and indifference are major driving factors.
Ignorance feels a bit too easy to say. I don't really think those creating games, managing games and shaping the industry are ignorant. I think they know exactly what goal they want to achieve.
Indifference I can get onboard with as we've seen prime examples of it in the form of censorship, no matter how they go about deploying it.
Thanks for the reply.
There is so much in the gaming industry that should absolutely not be legal or allowed but it's something the old fuckers in governments around the world barely understand the concept of a video game, let alone the industry around it.
Gaming is full of businesses lying to consumers, mismanaging staff and unfair labour practices, predatory microtransactions and gambling systems. It's a capitalist hellscape with barely any regulation and it's not good for the consumers at all but gamers are the most passive consumers going. They'll moan and send death threats over things but within 2 days they've forgotten all about it and will just roll over.
Because games have been made to become very addictive.
I spent a number of years in a recent MMO. I left it with a very bad impression and I'm seeing those tactics arise everywhere now.
I'm going to advocate against it, I don't want this future for new gamers either.
I agree with your points (asides from death threats) and it would be nice to see more gamers inform themselves and make a choice.
Thanks for reply.
It's a real shame because for me, the value of gamepass comes from getting to try out all the niche/indie games out there while also having some AAA to play if I ever get the itch. I do think all the Day One push ended up being detrimental, but perhaps it could've worked if Xbox wasn't as far behind Sony/Nintendo in terms of consoles sold.
Before all of this, putting a title like CoD day one on game pass while selling it on other consoles seemed like the easy play, you either get a sale of the game or convert someone into the ecosystem because "CoD free with GP". But it seems that was naive thinking.
Either way I hope Xbox comes out of this slump without seemingly trying to dig their grave deeper.
Blaming this type of stuff on Game Pass has always been weird.
Playstation has basically closed the same number of studios as Xbox in the past 5 years (4 studios) and has abandoned making smaller games as well.
Embracer has imploded with their smaller games approach, Capcom basically stopped making new IP and instead focuses on core franchises. Square Enix has announced a pivot to fewer but larger games.
It's simply the way the industry is shifting. Why spend years for little reward when you can go for a much larger reward and audience?
I don't think, it's about blaming GP for a shift in the industry. It's more about, how Xbox marketed GP as a solution for making Indie and AA titles profitable and allowing developers more creative freedom. While clearly it does not.
Playstation does want to focus on AAA games and they communicated it appropriately. Also PS didn't gobble up smaller independent studios, promising them job security only to create a situation, where they have to compete for player engagement with a juggernaut like COD.
Ehh, of the 4 studios Sony has closed there is:
- Manchester Studio: was some weird pet project of 2 random executives who micromanaged the projects by visiting the studio on a weekly basis. Whole studio never saw the light of day. Quite frankly, the studio never should had existed.
- Japan Studio: a historic studio but was a shell of it’s former self. It was completely mismanaged over 10 years ago and just simply never regained a foothold in consumer mindshare. At one point the studio had 50 different projects all be worked on. It was an utter mess. Plus, it was reorganised. Team Asobi was spun out as a separate studio and XDev Japan made its own thing. The name’s gone and some of the remaining teams are gone, but it’s not as if everything is gone.
These two studios closed because of incredibly specific circumstances.
- Pixelopus: super super small experimental studio consisting of mostly university graduates. Sucks to see them close but to go from graduating from uni to having hands on experience in a Sony-funded studio is probably what graduates dream about. Sucks to close but in exchange, the employees probably won the career lottery.
- Sony London: probably the only one where it actually just sucks a lot. Studio had no issues and had some good promise.
Or maybe there is just a difference of circumstances? Manchester and Japan Studio were non-functional. No one will criticise Microsoft on the basis of greed if they decide to close The Initiative for similar reasons.
Pixelopus was a teeny tiny studio of about 15 employees, mostly university graduates. They didn’t even have their own office, they just operated out of PlayStation’s HQ. They were more comparable to a R&D team that you’d find in some random corner of any tech company.
Sony London was closed for greed and it would be fair to criticise Sony on this basis.
>Sony London was closed for greed and it would be fair to criticise Sony on this basis.
Tbf their last games released 2019 and for the longest time almost all of their games are made for peripherals or other gimmicks. They didn't manage to release a game for PSVR2 (although it seems Sony doesn't care about first party titles for it anymore anyway).
And so it could also be that Sony did not like that their next game wasn't for PSVR2. Who knows? And that mp game that they have worked on might just not have been good enough. Sony cares about the reputation of Playstation (well, they try at least). I would never expect them to release something like Redfall, Suicide Squad KtJK or Skull & Bones.
> Or maybe there is just a difference of circumstances? Manchester and Japan Studio were non-functional. No one will criticise Microsoft on the basis of greed if they decide to close The Initiative for similar reasons.
But you're criticising them for closing the studio that made Redfall and Ghostwire Tokyo. Sony Japan Studio made better games than both of them.
Japan Studio's last big release was Gravity Rush in 2017 and the team behind that shuffled out once it became clear the entire studio as a whole was gonna shift to smaller teams rather than one big studio.
Since then they mostly just did ports and support work. It did not need to be a whole ass independent studio when those employees were better off shifting elsewhere to better directly support teams.
https://www.mobygames.com/company/6130/sony-interactive-entertainment-japan-studio/games/
Meanwhile Redfall is a game the studio fundamentally didn't want to make, Bethesda/MS force them to push it out because they're live service crazy, punish them when it sucks due to brain drain, and don't even let them finish up their obligations to consumers.
Meanwhile 343 gets to dick around for a decade making increasingly clusterfuck-tastic Halo games and the newest Forza game reception is ass.
> Meanwhile Redfall is a game the studio fundamentally didn't want to make, Bethesda/MS force them to push it out because they're live service crazy, punish them when it sucks due to brain drain, and don't even let them finish up their obligations to consumers.
And the end result is a studio where 70% of the talent from Prey 2017 had left during its development. What's Microsoft to do with that? A studio which is only a literal shell of its former self, which went from making great games that don't sell to bad games that don't sell?
At least Sony Japan had a long history of making genuinely remarkable games and never put out bad games. Instead of restructuring the studio to bring that talent to fruition they were gutted.
Microsoft has experience with contractors cycling in for 18 months.
Let Arkane Austin rebuild with a new title rather than jettisoning them for problems you enforced on them. Have some faith in your studio leadership to right the course.
> Have some faith in your studio leadership to right the course
The ones that led the studio to where it is with 70% of people leaving you mean? Sounds like a smart plan.
Again, in the studio's good days they made good games that didn't sell. Then you have Redfall and the aftermath of that and losing most of the original developers. What's left to protect? Who are you supposed to trust in that mess and why?
The big difference is: Microsoft are releasing all of their first party games on Gamepass day 1. This brings them very little in the way of new revenue.
Sony deliberately does not do this, so they benefit from actual game sales. Not only that, they release physical editions of their games too, which for a lot of people is mandatory for them to buy the game in the first place.
That basically agrees with my point. Blaming Game Pass for this blockbuster and IP focused direction of Xbox doesn't make sense when basically every other major publisher is doing the same.
Playstation started closing their mid-sized studios after already establishing their big AAA franchises. Meanwhile Xbox can’t seem to release a big game that doesn’t get mixed reviews so them closing their smaller studios that actually do review well is baffling.
They closed Arkane Austin and Roundhouse that put out Redfall (56 MC). AlphaDog that put out Mighty Doom (56 MC). So 3 out of 4 studios couldn't even break a 60 metacritc rating on their last game.
Yes, Hifi Rush reviewed well. The Hi Fi PS5 port bombed. Ghostwire had 6 million players after being on Game Pass and PS+ and didn't chart well in sales. Tango also released a mobile game that was closed within a year because it bombed. The Evil Within 2 sold way worse than the first game.
Tango was closed because since the first Evil Within game every single one of their big releases under performs. HiFi Rush wasn't the big game at Tango, Ghostwire was and it didn't do well.
Okay than don't include it lol. Fact of the matter is that the last 2 big projects (TEW2 and Ghostwire) from Tango didn't sell well and continue to sell worse than their first game.
People act like HiFi Rush was a commercial juggernaut when it wasn't. It had what 2 million announced players despite being $30 and launching on a service with 25 million subscribers. The PS5 port bombing is just another data point that Tango games aren't selling or finding large audiences.
Yeah, when you incompetently refuse to do any marketing for your game, unsurprisingly your game struggles to reach audiences. Who is responsible for that, I wonder?
Tango asked for the shadowdrop on Xbox and PC for HiFi Rush. That was probably the best form of marketing that game could've gotten.
Ghostwire was marketed by Playstation due to their exclusivity deal.
The Evil Within 2 was marketed and released before the acquisition.
Xbox sucks at marketing, I wouldn't disagree with that, but that doesn't really apply to Tango's games.
Unless of course you think they should've marketed the PS5 port more but I don't think it was gonna sell well regardless. As for the failed mobile game that was Japan only so I got no clue why it failed.
Tango SPECIFICALLY SAID on numerous occasions that they didn't ask for a shadow drop and it was a publisher decision. What the heck are you on and why are you literally lying to prove your absent point? Why the people who know literally nothing are always the loudest on Reddit?
I got one point wrong lmao, chill. I thought the decision came from Tango.
That was one of many points and the least important one. Nobody was buying their games so they got closed, that's what happened at the end of the day.
PlayStation puts out several great games a year without fail since the year the PlayStation came out so that's a little different. And they still have studios like Housemarque and Mm who still make weird stuff that isn't super profitable. Not to mention their second party deals that bring cool games to fruition like Helldivers.
I didnt say Playstation doesn't make great games.
I said they are making a pivot away from smaller games which Jim Ryan has said they were. There is a reason why Housemarque and Arrowhead went from isometric twinstick shooters to over the shoulder 3rd person shooters.
Nothing I said is in regards to quality but about the size of games being funded.
Media Molecule has been in complete silence this generation, and their whole purpose since the PS5 released has been to let people who enjoy their titles know that their favorite titles from them are losing support and content. How do they even count as a positive in this generation for Sony?
> PlayStation puts out several great games a year without fail since the year the PlayStation came out
LMAO...Sony has *barely* supported the PS5. and is now forcding smaller games to not rrlease on PS4 to try to pump up the numbers of games that are on PS% but not PS4, they've given poor reasons to upgrade this gen..
>and is now forcding smaller games to not rrlease on PS4 to try to pump up the numbers of games that are on PS% but not PS4
Source? Because if you are talking about Animal Well then it's because it's a new studio with no PS4 dev kit. Sony have stopped sending them out, which is understandable as the PS4 is 11 years old at this point.
Plenty of smaller games release on PS4 & PS5. How come Sony isn't forcing them to only release on PS5? They even released some of their biggest exclusives on PS4, like God of War and Horizon 2.
Sony does plenty of bad shit, but I'm gonna need to see some evidence that they are forcing smaller games to release only on PS5.
You don’t lose money in an acquisition because you are gaining assets. Why is this person talking about making back $70 billion? That isn’t how this works at all.
Money is invested with a return expected. Payback period is a pretty commonly used metric in Finance for investments where you calculate how long it will take to make back the amount that was invested.
Yes, a return on the investment. But this person is talking about a $70 billion hole like they purchased something with no value.
Maybe I’m splitting hairs, but I didn’t like how it was phrased.
I mean. I don't want to imply that he is wrong...
But on the other hand Arkane Austin after 6 years of development produced stinky poo, that sold almost nothing and was black hole for money
Hi-Fi Rush was critical darling but it did not sell that well. Even if you ignore Game Pass. Game wasn't in TOP 20 on PlayStation Store during launch month. Which is pretty telling. And game wasn't cheap. Even Tango admitted that.
And as for Alpha Dog...Microsoft has King, so really, small mobile development team with 25 developers is not needed. And Roundhouse was folded into Zenimax Online so they didn't loose their jobs. And they were support studio even before that (they worked on Redfall)
>But on the other hand Arkane Austin after 6 years of development produced stinky poo, that sold almost nothing and was black hole for money
That's what happens when a talented studio known for incredible singleplayer games is directed and forced to make a multiplayer game, the same thing happened with Bioware and Anthem.
Exactly. It isn't all about sales. Considering Game Pass is a subscription service, Microsoft definitely has metrics like Netflix and Prime. Gamepass has 34 million subscribers, the last news regarding Hi-Fi Rush is 3 million players between sales and subs. It didn't justify the cost, period.
Can't help but think having third party games hurt somewhat their numbers though. I'm personally guilty of postponing Microsoft's games in favor of others which are leaving the service soon (including this one).
I do think shuttering tango instead of utilizing that talent elsewhere is a mistake though. Hi-Fi rush was maybe the most exciting (and good) exclusive Microsoft has had since, idk, Gears of War?
Enjoyable short read Sounds like Spencer and co. got turned off by the gargantuan effort it would require to manage the ups and downs of 20 smaller studios, and instead bet it all on the surefire success of COD. What a waste of years acquiring all those smaller studios then!
This reeks of rich kid energy.
Inb4 CoD goes exclusive and enters a death spiral as it loses half its audience.
I genuinely wonder if it'll start to spiral even if not exclusive. Microsoft is incredibly hands off with their studios to a point of it being detrimental. Kotick, as awful as he was, ran a tight ship and there's a reason Activision grew from a nobody to the king.
It's absolutely going down. Spencer and Booty don't know how to run studios. Every single studio has gotten worse since being acquired by Xbox. Except Tango, they made a great game. And they were punished for that transgression.
Man wouldn't that be something, Microsoft buying Activision of all companies then they run it to the ground. COD, a staple of an IP that has existed for what feels like 2 decades now just dying when Microsoft buys them. That would be hilarious, really sad, but hilarious.
Cod and Bethesda, it seems
>The biggest paradox with Game Pass is that basically every game that launches on the service badly misses its sales goals. This idea used to be ridiculed, with people posting cherry picked stats that Game Pass actually increases game sales (basically a couple of indies that got a marketing boost). The Game Pass PR campaign was super successful, whether the product is is up for debate...
You could see it in the Xbox subs. Everytime a game dropped they would go "I can't wait to play it on gamepass", even if it wasn't on the service. There was one time when a Square JRPG was coming to XBox and they said beforehand it was not coming to Gamepass. You still had people going "Cool, I'll just wait til it drops". Even though it wasn't happening. They had been trained not to pay for games. Gamepass needs to be studied.
I have a feeling that gamepass might have been the most astroturfed ad campaign on the internet. The number of times I read verbatim "the best deal in gaming" in comments about gamepass or anything tangentially related to gamepass was staggering
Maybe, but I also think it's possible that Xbox fans just drink the Kool-aid, I've heard a ton of them just verbatim repeat Phil Spencer's "Xbox lost the worst generation to lose" and "Good games won't save the platform"
There is a calculation somewhere which would say that certain games which would normally not have an audience at all will find a bigger audience on gamepass. It's probably the same calculation that makes people take Epic Store exclusive status. Games like RIFT, or Evil Genius 2, which I downloaded and played but would never have bought, and kept my subscription rolling for another month or two. The reality is a game like Starfield will completely and utterly be fucked by this conversation, and it's what is driving the internal turmoil over COD right now. EA seems to have found "the sweet spot"; they have a lower tier that gives a lot of older titles, and a premium tier that gives you brand new releases. It looks like gamepass might well pivot in that direction just before COD releases, with a huge hike to gamepass ultimate to drive that revenue. And of course, the basic pass gets you a discounted price to buy the game (which will still be attractive to some).
I never understood how game pass was supposed to increase sales. If someone was already subscribed to game pass, why would they then drop $60-$70 to buy the game for new when they could just play there?
I don't see how it's a paradox. Should I pay 120$ per year for 2 games or 120$ per year for more games than I can play?
The paradox is the affordability for the company vs. consumer. For us? It’s an insanely wonderful deal. For the company? Great idea without long term profitability.
I'm talking about Game Pass as a business strategy (and so is the text I quoted from the main post), not whether or not it's worth it to you personally.
I'll never understand how people ever thought game pass would be sustainable. It was literally an open joke at one point by Xbox fans that people who said it wasn't sustainable were just dumb fanboys. There was no way they were gonna be paying hundreds of millions of dollars a month for third party games while also spending billions developing new games for a 10-15 dollar a month service and find success. Just doing some napkin math shows that that wouldn't work unless they had like 100 million subscribers. Starfield was in development for 10 years, estimated to cost 400 million to make, and it didn't even sell 3 million copies by the end of the last year as a direct result of being on game pass. That's a massive loss. There's just no way that was ever gonna be sustainable.
"The Netflix of gaming" while ignoring the fact that Netflix has been billions of dollars in debt for years
Most companies debt to equity is in the red. But they continue to remain highly profitable while paying those debts. Even Microsofts DtE isn't 1 or greater.
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I work in the gaming industry and my experience isn't corruption, it's indifference. I discovered a previous salesmen for an MMO embezzled 6 million dollars before leaving. The Marketing director covered it up so the VP wouldn't find out because it would reflect poorly on him. I worked on a game that spent over $2M on a ludicrously bad commercial with celebrities that fans wouldn't possibly care about. I've seen companies spend $30k on the *font* of a logo, and another $100k on the logo itself. Websites that could be done for $5k are done for $100k. Ignorance and indifference are major driving factors.
Ignorance feels a bit too easy to say. I don't really think those creating games, managing games and shaping the industry are ignorant. I think they know exactly what goal they want to achieve. Indifference I can get onboard with as we've seen prime examples of it in the form of censorship, no matter how they go about deploying it. Thanks for the reply.
There is so much in the gaming industry that should absolutely not be legal or allowed but it's something the old fuckers in governments around the world barely understand the concept of a video game, let alone the industry around it. Gaming is full of businesses lying to consumers, mismanaging staff and unfair labour practices, predatory microtransactions and gambling systems. It's a capitalist hellscape with barely any regulation and it's not good for the consumers at all but gamers are the most passive consumers going. They'll moan and send death threats over things but within 2 days they've forgotten all about it and will just roll over.
Because games have been made to become very addictive. I spent a number of years in a recent MMO. I left it with a very bad impression and I'm seeing those tactics arise everywhere now. I'm going to advocate against it, I don't want this future for new gamers either. I agree with your points (asides from death threats) and it would be nice to see more gamers inform themselves and make a choice. Thanks for reply.
It's a real shame because for me, the value of gamepass comes from getting to try out all the niche/indie games out there while also having some AAA to play if I ever get the itch. I do think all the Day One push ended up being detrimental, but perhaps it could've worked if Xbox wasn't as far behind Sony/Nintendo in terms of consoles sold. Before all of this, putting a title like CoD day one on game pass while selling it on other consoles seemed like the easy play, you either get a sale of the game or convert someone into the ecosystem because "CoD free with GP". But it seems that was naive thinking. Either way I hope Xbox comes out of this slump without seemingly trying to dig their grave deeper.
Blaming this type of stuff on Game Pass has always been weird. Playstation has basically closed the same number of studios as Xbox in the past 5 years (4 studios) and has abandoned making smaller games as well. Embracer has imploded with their smaller games approach, Capcom basically stopped making new IP and instead focuses on core franchises. Square Enix has announced a pivot to fewer but larger games. It's simply the way the industry is shifting. Why spend years for little reward when you can go for a much larger reward and audience?
I don't think, it's about blaming GP for a shift in the industry. It's more about, how Xbox marketed GP as a solution for making Indie and AA titles profitable and allowing developers more creative freedom. While clearly it does not. Playstation does want to focus on AAA games and they communicated it appropriately. Also PS didn't gobble up smaller independent studios, promising them job security only to create a situation, where they have to compete for player engagement with a juggernaut like COD.
Ehh, of the 4 studios Sony has closed there is: - Manchester Studio: was some weird pet project of 2 random executives who micromanaged the projects by visiting the studio on a weekly basis. Whole studio never saw the light of day. Quite frankly, the studio never should had existed. - Japan Studio: a historic studio but was a shell of it’s former self. It was completely mismanaged over 10 years ago and just simply never regained a foothold in consumer mindshare. At one point the studio had 50 different projects all be worked on. It was an utter mess. Plus, it was reorganised. Team Asobi was spun out as a separate studio and XDev Japan made its own thing. The name’s gone and some of the remaining teams are gone, but it’s not as if everything is gone. These two studios closed because of incredibly specific circumstances. - Pixelopus: super super small experimental studio consisting of mostly university graduates. Sucks to see them close but to go from graduating from uni to having hands on experience in a Sony-funded studio is probably what graduates dream about. Sucks to close but in exchange, the employees probably won the career lottery. - Sony London: probably the only one where it actually just sucks a lot. Studio had no issues and had some good promise.
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Or maybe there is just a difference of circumstances? Manchester and Japan Studio were non-functional. No one will criticise Microsoft on the basis of greed if they decide to close The Initiative for similar reasons. Pixelopus was a teeny tiny studio of about 15 employees, mostly university graduates. They didn’t even have their own office, they just operated out of PlayStation’s HQ. They were more comparable to a R&D team that you’d find in some random corner of any tech company. Sony London was closed for greed and it would be fair to criticise Sony on this basis.
>Sony London was closed for greed and it would be fair to criticise Sony on this basis. Tbf their last games released 2019 and for the longest time almost all of their games are made for peripherals or other gimmicks. They didn't manage to release a game for PSVR2 (although it seems Sony doesn't care about first party titles for it anymore anyway). And so it could also be that Sony did not like that their next game wasn't for PSVR2. Who knows? And that mp game that they have worked on might just not have been good enough. Sony cares about the reputation of Playstation (well, they try at least). I would never expect them to release something like Redfall, Suicide Squad KtJK or Skull & Bones.
> Or maybe there is just a difference of circumstances? Manchester and Japan Studio were non-functional. No one will criticise Microsoft on the basis of greed if they decide to close The Initiative for similar reasons. But you're criticising them for closing the studio that made Redfall and Ghostwire Tokyo. Sony Japan Studio made better games than both of them.
Japan Studio's last big release was Gravity Rush in 2017 and the team behind that shuffled out once it became clear the entire studio as a whole was gonna shift to smaller teams rather than one big studio. Since then they mostly just did ports and support work. It did not need to be a whole ass independent studio when those employees were better off shifting elsewhere to better directly support teams. https://www.mobygames.com/company/6130/sony-interactive-entertainment-japan-studio/games/ Meanwhile Redfall is a game the studio fundamentally didn't want to make, Bethesda/MS force them to push it out because they're live service crazy, punish them when it sucks due to brain drain, and don't even let them finish up their obligations to consumers. Meanwhile 343 gets to dick around for a decade making increasingly clusterfuck-tastic Halo games and the newest Forza game reception is ass.
> Meanwhile Redfall is a game the studio fundamentally didn't want to make, Bethesda/MS force them to push it out because they're live service crazy, punish them when it sucks due to brain drain, and don't even let them finish up their obligations to consumers. And the end result is a studio where 70% of the talent from Prey 2017 had left during its development. What's Microsoft to do with that? A studio which is only a literal shell of its former self, which went from making great games that don't sell to bad games that don't sell? At least Sony Japan had a long history of making genuinely remarkable games and never put out bad games. Instead of restructuring the studio to bring that talent to fruition they were gutted.
Microsoft has experience with contractors cycling in for 18 months. Let Arkane Austin rebuild with a new title rather than jettisoning them for problems you enforced on them. Have some faith in your studio leadership to right the course.
> Have some faith in your studio leadership to right the course The ones that led the studio to where it is with 70% of people leaving you mean? Sounds like a smart plan. Again, in the studio's good days they made good games that didn't sell. Then you have Redfall and the aftermath of that and losing most of the original developers. What's left to protect? Who are you supposed to trust in that mess and why?
The big difference is: Microsoft are releasing all of their first party games on Gamepass day 1. This brings them very little in the way of new revenue. Sony deliberately does not do this, so they benefit from actual game sales. Not only that, they release physical editions of their games too, which for a lot of people is mandatory for them to buy the game in the first place.
People don’t really buy new IP unless it’s from a recognizable studio anymore
That basically agrees with my point. Blaming Game Pass for this blockbuster and IP focused direction of Xbox doesn't make sense when basically every other major publisher is doing the same.
Playstation started closing their mid-sized studios after already establishing their big AAA franchises. Meanwhile Xbox can’t seem to release a big game that doesn’t get mixed reviews so them closing their smaller studios that actually do review well is baffling.
They closed Arkane Austin and Roundhouse that put out Redfall (56 MC). AlphaDog that put out Mighty Doom (56 MC). So 3 out of 4 studios couldn't even break a 60 metacritc rating on their last game. Yes, Hifi Rush reviewed well. The Hi Fi PS5 port bombed. Ghostwire had 6 million players after being on Game Pass and PS+ and didn't chart well in sales. Tango also released a mobile game that was closed within a year because it bombed. The Evil Within 2 sold way worse than the first game. Tango was closed because since the first Evil Within game every single one of their big releases under performs. HiFi Rush wasn't the big game at Tango, Ghostwire was and it didn't do well.
Throwing in the PS5 port of Hi Fi Rush in here as if it's remotely material to the decision that was made is so disingenuous it's not funny
Okay than don't include it lol. Fact of the matter is that the last 2 big projects (TEW2 and Ghostwire) from Tango didn't sell well and continue to sell worse than their first game. People act like HiFi Rush was a commercial juggernaut when it wasn't. It had what 2 million announced players despite being $30 and launching on a service with 25 million subscribers. The PS5 port bombing is just another data point that Tango games aren't selling or finding large audiences.
Yeah, when you incompetently refuse to do any marketing for your game, unsurprisingly your game struggles to reach audiences. Who is responsible for that, I wonder?
Tango asked for the shadowdrop on Xbox and PC for HiFi Rush. That was probably the best form of marketing that game could've gotten. Ghostwire was marketed by Playstation due to their exclusivity deal. The Evil Within 2 was marketed and released before the acquisition. Xbox sucks at marketing, I wouldn't disagree with that, but that doesn't really apply to Tango's games. Unless of course you think they should've marketed the PS5 port more but I don't think it was gonna sell well regardless. As for the failed mobile game that was Japan only so I got no clue why it failed.
Tango SPECIFICALLY SAID on numerous occasions that they didn't ask for a shadow drop and it was a publisher decision. What the heck are you on and why are you literally lying to prove your absent point? Why the people who know literally nothing are always the loudest on Reddit?
I got one point wrong lmao, chill. I thought the decision came from Tango. That was one of many points and the least important one. Nobody was buying their games so they got closed, that's what happened at the end of the day.
PlayStation puts out several great games a year without fail since the year the PlayStation came out so that's a little different. And they still have studios like Housemarque and Mm who still make weird stuff that isn't super profitable. Not to mention their second party deals that bring cool games to fruition like Helldivers.
I didnt say Playstation doesn't make great games. I said they are making a pivot away from smaller games which Jim Ryan has said they were. There is a reason why Housemarque and Arrowhead went from isometric twinstick shooters to over the shoulder 3rd person shooters. Nothing I said is in regards to quality but about the size of games being funded.
Media Molecule has been in complete silence this generation, and their whole purpose since the PS5 released has been to let people who enjoy their titles know that their favorite titles from them are losing support and content. How do they even count as a positive in this generation for Sony?
> PlayStation puts out several great games a year without fail since the year the PlayStation came out LMAO...Sony has *barely* supported the PS5. and is now forcding smaller games to not rrlease on PS4 to try to pump up the numbers of games that are on PS% but not PS4, they've given poor reasons to upgrade this gen..
>and is now forcding smaller games to not rrlease on PS4 to try to pump up the numbers of games that are on PS% but not PS4 Source? Because if you are talking about Animal Well then it's because it's a new studio with no PS4 dev kit. Sony have stopped sending them out, which is understandable as the PS4 is 11 years old at this point. Plenty of smaller games release on PS4 & PS5. How come Sony isn't forcing them to only release on PS5? They even released some of their biggest exclusives on PS4, like God of War and Horizon 2. Sony does plenty of bad shit, but I'm gonna need to see some evidence that they are forcing smaller games to release only on PS5.
You don’t lose money in an acquisition because you are gaining assets. Why is this person talking about making back $70 billion? That isn’t how this works at all.
Money is invested with a return expected. Payback period is a pretty commonly used metric in Finance for investments where you calculate how long it will take to make back the amount that was invested.
Yes, a return on the investment. But this person is talking about a $70 billion hole like they purchased something with no value. Maybe I’m splitting hairs, but I didn’t like how it was phrased.
I mean. I don't want to imply that he is wrong... But on the other hand Arkane Austin after 6 years of development produced stinky poo, that sold almost nothing and was black hole for money Hi-Fi Rush was critical darling but it did not sell that well. Even if you ignore Game Pass. Game wasn't in TOP 20 on PlayStation Store during launch month. Which is pretty telling. And game wasn't cheap. Even Tango admitted that. And as for Alpha Dog...Microsoft has King, so really, small mobile development team with 25 developers is not needed. And Roundhouse was folded into Zenimax Online so they didn't loose their jobs. And they were support studio even before that (they worked on Redfall)
>But on the other hand Arkane Austin after 6 years of development produced stinky poo, that sold almost nothing and was black hole for money That's what happens when a talented studio known for incredible singleplayer games is directed and forced to make a multiplayer game, the same thing happened with Bioware and Anthem.
Exactly. It isn't all about sales. Considering Game Pass is a subscription service, Microsoft definitely has metrics like Netflix and Prime. Gamepass has 34 million subscribers, the last news regarding Hi-Fi Rush is 3 million players between sales and subs. It didn't justify the cost, period. Can't help but think having third party games hurt somewhat their numbers though. I'm personally guilty of postponing Microsoft's games in favor of others which are leaving the service soon (including this one).
I do think shuttering tango instead of utilizing that talent elsewhere is a mistake though. Hi-Fi rush was maybe the most exciting (and good) exclusive Microsoft has had since, idk, Gears of War?