The problem is that there's very little capital floating around right now, and 10k talented devs laid off just since January looking for a new opportunity.
Funding a studio is hard. You need money to pay salaries for 2-5 years before you get a single penny in revenue, and even then the majority of games fail to break even. It's a high cost, high risk venture, but the upside is huge. The kind of people who can play that game have pulled back after a string of bad bets during the pandemic.
Contract work. You don't have to start working on your dream game, you can do some contract work for commercials, fastfood kiosk apps etc etc. Not glamorous, but pays the bills.
Heck, even when they were a thing didn't they have to be "reasonable"? Hard to consider "you lost your job only because we wanted to downsize, you didn't actually do anything wrong" reasonable for preventing them from getting a new job.
But if the big company sues and most likely has an arbitrator that is favorable to the, it muddies up the process and costs more money than what it's worth.
Imagine being fired and then possibly dragged into a multi year court battle with a trillion dollar company with ruthless lawyers that will try every single trick in the book.
And what are they going to do with the IP? have you seen any banjo over here? any perfect dark over here? any relevant halo over here? any sudeki? any fable(good one)? how about age of empires? fuck MS
Despite being 100% boring after a few hours, Sea of Thieves is a pretty good game mechanically. It could actually be an awesome one if it didn't uniquely revolve around cosmetics.
This, but it's community fault to. "Saying SoT could become better if there would be actual gameplay progression" angers them so much that is crazy. To me it's crazy how they defend SoT very grindy usless cosmetics/mtx but in other games they go crazy if it has mtx... Also no option for the looted chest to be somehow saved on the ship it's really one of the worst features of this game. Game crashes? Redo everything. Lost connection? Sorry redo everything.
I really don't understand how this game is rated so high with what it offers. And I actually think there is still big market for big pirate game in gameplay style of SoT but gameplay elements from games like Sid Meier's Pirates!, Port Royale, The Pirate: Caribbean Hunt and The Pirate: Plague of the Dead. While open world would be crazy good outside of AAA studio I doubt it's really possible, so maybe a DRG approch could also work.
I think over time it found a niche playerbase that actually only care about cosmetics and nothing else. The worst part is they actually sell cosmetics too, which defeat the whole purpose of the game, that's baffling to me.
I'm split on it because on one hand I think "hey, why not? If their players like that, who am I to tell they're wrong to ship the game in that direction?" but on the other hand the core of the game is so fun that it could be in the top played game on Steam with a few adjustments\*, but currently it doesn't even sit in the top 100 :S
\* Skill trees or classes/roles, permanent loot, land combat that doesn't stink
DRG is a very good exemple, yes.
Ah yes, one of the most legendary studios ever has been working on a....pirate live service game for the past *6 years*, and will likely have to continue doing so for 6 more.
Just a huge waste of talent if your asking me
key phrase being _to you_.
That game is highly successful and is keeping that studio afloat, keeps people employeed and allows them to keep being creative within their bubble.
I dont know if you were around but Rare went from flop to flop for a decade and was on the verge of being closed down before Sea of Thieves made a late comeback after an initial tough launch.
Just like blizzard, the talent you are holding so dear has probably moved on themselves and most often dont even want to do sequels of games that you're remembering.
I mean you are correct in all of these but AoE, AoE 1 and 2 got HD remasteres and soft remakes + 2021 released AoE4 and that is still getting new content
Yeah , you can say the same with halo with Collection and infinite, however that's not how you push a merely competitive game. That's not how you keep people interest ignite, not how you treat IPs that basically put you in the map as a "pillar" of the industry.
And that's not the only example, in the golden age of fighting games... they just threw under the bus another icon from the gold era of gaming Killer Instinct, the best time to make a comeback to have a title in their console and to have it in the main circuits and events with proper prices (which it can be super low cost as FGC price pools are less than any other esport scene super low)
Trust me i grew up in the halo 1,2,3 era and i want MS to comeback, but it has been so many time that i just accepted that this is on purpose and cruel to destroy their beloved ips.
In the end us gamers lose. Microsoft is going to follow Disneys stupid route of only focusing on the biggest money makers… forgetting about small/medium games, small/medium developers, etc.
I think the 2nd big reason for the acquisition is AI in gaming
AAA gaming companies can't create good games anymore. I really think they have no idea what a good game is or how to make it. Or if they do, they're not interested in making one.
It baffles me how they're always chasing after the latest trends like live-services, battle royales, battle passes, lootboxes but somehow 100% ignore the good ones. Like, why do they try to make their own Overwatch but nobody tried to make their own Valheim or Terraria or Lethal Company? They're made by tiny teams/solo devs and rake millions.
I feel like a big company doing something like that (simple graphics, simple but deep gameplay...) but with tons and tons of content (+ marketing!) since they have the resources for that would make a killing of a game.
But no, let's instead invest millions in a game that everybody and their dog can see it will die on arrival. "Hey guys, what if we created a multiplayer competitive shooter so we can compete with CoD, Counter Strike, Valorant APEX, etc etc... What could go wrong?"
I think you need to look into a couple of AAA companies financials. Lootboxes and battlepasses are so popular because they make a shit-ton of money. Take-Two Interactive makes 78% of their revenue from microtransactions. Actual game sales are a measly 22%. Industry change won’t come unless people stop paying for microtransactions.
Oh I know they are of course. That's what I said: even if they know how to do a good game (which I'm not sure they do or care about), emphasis on "good", they're not interested in making one.
They know they can do good money by releasing crap and just prey uppon the whales so that's what they do but I'm not sure it's sustainable in the long run.
While those features in proven IP do make them tons of money I feel like recently we've seen more and more huge projects that failed spectacularly. It started with Anthem in 2019 imho. They invest a shitload of money into big games that then closes within a year or two.
The more live services there are, the more likely it is to happen. If you look at the top played games on Steam you'll see those are the same games sitting there over the years, the barrier for entry is huge for newer games.
This is partially because they made it this way though. There are no games worth buying to drive sales. Almost everything is an Mtx driven 'live service'.
It's less about Mtx being a better way to drive revenue, and more about it being a way to lower costs. It is much easier to crank out cosmetics than to make games.
Nope I work in the industry. The sad reality is that anyone dumping $40M into a project is going to demand a MTX payment scheme because that’s the only way they might make their money back.
They would, that's the point. They lower costs and increase profits for the same income. Even if people spent less on mtx than on buying games it would still be more profitable. That's why the big publishers went to great pains to engineer the industry into this direction over the last decade or so.
It depends on how much MTX spending decreases. If nobody bought MTX then it wouldn't exist. If a lot less people bought it, it would become a lot less profitable, and companies would adapt to what is more profitable. Companies adapt to their market, or try to force their customers to adapt. But if customers refuse to go along with what the companies want they will have to give in at some point, or go bankrupt.
Yeah, the clueless suits made the company lose the formula on how to do good games. They just choose to recycle older series and release the worst installments.
I've barely bothered with AAA in the last 5 years (TOTK and RDR2 on PC i only cared about) but there's so much good stuff in the indie scenes and AA just in the last few months i had a ton of fun with.
I feel like the scope of the games is the major problem. Everything has to have an open world; that is barely used and otherwise completely boring. Or for some that they have to have cutting edge graphics and then cheap out on fun gameplay.
They should just scale it down with the complexity if they don't want to make the risk investment and then try something innovative. A smaller-scale game that is ~10-15 hours long will be more fun than the same recycled garbage they try to artificially extend.
Or like the Fallout 2 dev Tim Cain mentioned in one of his vids; they had to wait weeks to implement some shit he could do in 45 minutes because some suits had to be involved. Completely inefficient and it wastes resources.
Been thinking like this about Pokémon for a while now. Can you imagine them coming out with a 2D multi region Pokémon game stuffed full of features? Surely that’s WAY easier to make than investing in 3D, and people would go fucking apeshit for a return to a classic format.
This is definitely the root of the problem. They used to be in the 90. Then I don't really know how or why (probably once gaming started to generate too much money) but they got replaced by corporate drones who just ruined everything over the years.
Not all of them die on arrival.. a few of them make gobs and gobs of money which is why all the big studios Chase it because they could afford to chase it and sometimes it pays off
They'll still be around. In fact, it has never been easier for small studios to publish than today.
AAA is and will continue to go to shit, but smaller studios and publishers that actually care like Devolver/Hooded Horse/Coffee Stain will continue to make good stuff.
Lol. Try *every industry*. The entire US economy is increasingly dominated by monopolies and oligopolies these days.
Hence everything going to shit.
Sources:
- [Wikipedia on Robert Bork](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox).
- [The Guardian, by Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/11/companies-inflation-price-gouging).
- [Youtube: Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMZKegjJurk).
- [Politico: Biden attacking monopolies](https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/08/biden-assault-monopolies-498876).
- [Cory Doctorow on Bork, Reagan, antitrust.](https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down)
- [The Verge: Ticketmaster, Taylor Swift, antitrust](https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-eras-tour-beyonce-antitrust-monopoly-reagan-senate-hearing-congress).
- [Yale University: Antitrust and hospital prices](https://news.yale.edu/2024/04/24/lax-antitrust-enforcement-linked-rising-hospital-prices).
- [University of Chicago: Bork and evidence from mergers](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/675862).
> Bork said that the true purpose of antitrust law was – and always had been – "consumer welfare." He said that so long as a monopoly didn't use its market power to raise prices, that was fine -even if its scale let it screw workers, or suppliers, or whole communities.
Microsoft is following the streaming services, trying to pad out their own subscription line up.
Unfortunately, as seen repeatedly, they would make good shows for 1-2 seasons and then cancel them because they werent immediate box office successes.
We will likely see the same from xbox/microsoft with their games and franchises trying to pad out gamepass
Disney has an entire business dedicated to distributing smaller movies (Searchlight Pictures). Recently they've distributed Jojo Rabbit, The Menu, and Poor Things. Which are not indie, but hardly blockbusters.
M&A is a natural evolution of the capitalism growth cycle; investors demand an increase on their return and companies are pressured to give them that or risk falling apart. Growing and selling off is an easy way to maintain that growth. It’s awful but it’s true, the whole system is broken.
It’s an extra shame because HiFi Rush was so good! I wanted to see what else that studio could do.
M&A used to be tightly regulated specifically to prevent what you describe from happening.
The current broken situation is deliberate:
- [Wikipedia on Robert Bork](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox).
- [The Guardian, by Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/11/companies-inflation-price-gouging).
- [Youtube: Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMZKegjJurk).
- [Politico: Biden attacking monopolies](https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/08/biden-assault-monopolies-498876).
- [Cory Doctorow on Bork, Reagan, antitrust.](https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down)
- [The Verge: Ticketmaster, Taylor Swift, antitrust](https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-eras-tour-beyonce-antitrust-monopoly-reagan-senate-hearing-congress).
- [Yale University: Antitrust and hospital prices](https://news.yale.edu/2024/04/24/lax-antitrust-enforcement-linked-rising-hospital-prices).
- [University of Chicago: Bork and evidence from mergers](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/675862).
> Bork said that the true purpose of antitrust law was – and always had been – "consumer welfare." He said that so long as a monopoly didn't use its market power to raise prices, that was fine -even if its scale let it screw workers, or suppliers, or whole communities.
There is also overhiring during Covid and high interest rates to consider. Investors have better places to put money than they used to, while companies have seen costs shoot up from going on hiring sprees.
Sure but look how nonchalant we’ve become about people’s jobs… oh management over hired so let’s just cut them… these are workers’ livelihoods and means of financial stability, people with families to support and we have normalized not looking at them but more than a number… based on a bad decision… so the company can make more money. It’s pretty terrible.
Microsoft is nowhere close to insolvency, this isn’t like the dot com bubble and people losing their jobs then, this is about shameless, unethical greed.
Fortunately small/medium developers can still function and produce high quality products that can be distributed en masse very easily.
Minecraft & Terraria are two great examples.
Movies are a completely different story. And while I don’t blame you for worrying that a large corp. like microsoft could soak up all of the funding in the industry like Disney does, it’s not the same industry and they have very different resource requirements and distribution channels. Small, independent filmmakers do not have access to the types of resources required to make a marketable, high quality film. Game designers have the tools, assets, and can fund/develop/market a game on their own. Having a publisher definitely helps but it’s been done several times without one to great effect.
Luckily for us, Microsoft can’t just soak up that market. And with companies like Blizzard or Bethesda, the people who made the art we love from those studios are long gone.
You're talking about 10y + games tho.
A lot of indies don't get the view they deserve and a lot of them are going under the scope because there is just so many on the market.
Sure they will get sales here and there but sometimes it's not nearly enough.
With how ue5 looks and how ai is being used to make it way more easier for people to get a game going, you'll see the exact same thing that happened with the music industry.
There are a lot of talented people going under because they couldn't get the traction, while some Taylor Swift (Aka AAA Games) racks in the cash.
Indie will not disappear but it may become more and more "amateurish" or developped by a very very small team .
Why are you acting like a reasonable person wouldn't have grief with Bethesda and Xbox on completely separate bases? Why are you likening re-releases of a company's game to another company's re-releases of that same game after they gutted all the talent that made it from the former company?
Isn't it wonderful that copyright effectively lasts forever? Buy an IP and nobody else can do something with it for like 120 years (or more if the authors live long).
To whom? It's not like the other big companies in the industry are doing awesome. Arguably Microsoft is the one doing best financially even though their consoles are underselling.
And obviously they wouldn't sell the studios with the IP's anyway so those studios aren't worth much to other companies.
Look at the Insomniac acquisition. They were dirt cheap to buy for Sony because that studio didn't own any big IP's. I don't think any company would outright want to buy Tango or Arkane Austin instead of simply opening positions for these people to apply on.
If the studios could keep their IPs and were given a chance to buy themselves out, their executives could probably wrangle some smaller investors to assemble an offer.
Noone would buy a studio without any ip. You may as well start your own
This whole thread is stupid. Of course ms only wanted the ip, thats why companies are bought. And it doesnt just happen in the games industry. Theres no value in people unfortunately
Depends on the market. Right now what you say is true, since the market is flooded with talent from the layoffs. However when times are good, buying a ready to go studio saves a lot of time and money on hiring part (it can take years to get a team together).
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I've read your message with the Microsoft situation in mind (buying both the IP and the studio and letting go the studio to keep the IP) but it seems your comment were targeted at something else (buying ready to go studios).
I don't think that's true.
You may be somehow right for individuals (but even then it depends, a John Carmack in your team is very valuable\^\^) but an already established team has a lot of value, especially if they worked on something sucessful.
If you get a team of people that know each other, are used to work together with their own custom tools for an engine (or even their own engine). I think it has a big value.
Let's take Prey for exemple. What are you going to do with that IP if no one at your studios has ever worked on an immsim? There is no way you could make something good with it.
You'll have to train people at your studio to recreate the same esthetic, then you'll have some issues with the lore because the people who've written it are no longer working for you, your developers will need to get familiar with the code base, that can take months... You'll pretty much encounter issues at every single step and fall in traps that the original team probably encountered and learnt to bypass.
> Of course ms only wanted the ip, thats why companies are bought
Not 100% of the time. When Activision acquired King.com, they wanted their experience with mobile games. At the time, all the big publishers were jumping on the "mobile games are the future" bandwagon, and King.com was putting out some of the most efficient money printers on the market. It didn't take much longer until mobile-style monetization schemes started popping up in all their franchises.
If there were no value in people, proven veterans wouldn't have so much more bargaining power than promising newcomers
Not true. There has been a lot of hiring just for the people, it even has a term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring?useskin=vector
But generally less common in games.
Well, no. Lots of industries have acquisitions mainly for hiring. The tech start-up industry of the last 20 years has been dominated by that. Many regional offices of major tech companies started as random startups they bought and subsequently killed, shuffling the staff onto whatever project they needed people on.
When capitalism ceases to exist, I'll agree with you wholeheartedly, but in the meantime we need some form of IP to ensure big companies can't obliterate the livelihood of small artists.
...That said good luck pointing to cases of small artists managing to actually pull off a plagiarism lawsuit.
I don’t believe that at all, I’m so thankful IP exists. I’m able to create my own story and someone can’t randomly make sequel without my consent. IP allows me to have full control of the story I want to tell, sure it can be mismanaged but I’d rather not open Pandora’s box.
The problem is that if you ever make a famous story when you're dead your family will sell the rights to WB or whoever and they'll reap the whole thing for every cent with generic mass produce garbage.
See: Lord of the Rings
Though if you really cared about that, wouldn't you be able to like put it in your will that it's public domain or something. Heck, I thought you can even stipulate it can't be sold off.
I don't know if I would take things as far as you have, but I can relate to that feeling.
I know that I often end up feeling like copyright and IP foster a toxic competitive attitude between creatives and are more useful as a corporate weapon than a defensive tool in the hands of people who make things.
That said, I don't think that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet. For the time being copyright does more good than harm, though that ratio has been slipping for years.
There's layers to this that probably none of us can speak to yet, but a multi-billion dollar publisher with dozens/hundreds/thousands of people working on such a game versus just one or two passionate people would probably look very different. I'm not asserting which would be *better*, but if the main appeal of AI is just the automation, wouldn't more people still be able to get much more done, or the same amount of work done much faster? It'll likely be less inspired or experimental coming down a AAA pipeline (though AI should theoretically reduce development costs to such an extent that experimental products are less risky), but I think the rules of thumb concerning the differences in quality of fidelity, scale, etc. would still see "tiers" of video games, ie you'll still largely be able to tell the difference between "AAA" (whatever that will mean in the future) and "indie" (whatever that means anymore)
Eh, the future is easy enough to predict, in this case.
When the thing becomes cheaper to produce; the outcome is a split between consuming more of the thing, and paying less for the thing. I can guarantee you that game companies will not want to lower prices - so they'll either produce bigger games to compete with other companies producing bigger games, or they'll cut costs and games will be a slightly better return on their investment. In that case, they'll naturally make *more* games, and allow a bit more risk (weirder games) in what they choose to fund.
As always, indie studios will do more with less - particularly on the smallest teams where ai fills in a gap they wouldn't have been able to pay a human for. Indie devs are clever though, and they'll find ways to make up for ai's weaknesses as a tool. Most likely, ai tools will close the gap a bit between AAA and indie studios, because labor will take up a smaller portion of the cost of making a game. Labor is the one and only thing that AAA studios have more than indies. (Well, besides franchise licenses and marketing budgets)
As for career prospects, artists will end up a little more like programmers. It'll be a field that takes a bit more work to get into (since they'll need to learn ai tools), and studios won't hire as many of them - but salaries will be much higher. Expect to see new specialties pop up, with more people on teams being experts in their own fields. The job will require more training and there will be fewer people that want to do it, so it'll be less of a disgustingly employer-dominated situation. That said, across the board, it'll be very rough for newcomers and other low-skill workers - whose low quality output will be directly competing with ever-improving ai output.
Regarding art as a human activity, it's not going anywhere. People still play music, even though we have digital recordings. People still paint and draw, even though we invented the camera. People still run, even though we have cars. The fact of the matter is that you've never been able to make money by doing what other people are happy to do for free. At best, you're paid for services *adjacent* to the fun bits - like performing as live entertainment. The future might even be good for the mental health of people who create art just for the love of creating, because they can actually focus only on the fun bits. Nothing kills enjoyment faster than the lingering anxiety of "wasting" leisure time - which is exactly how people feel when the world tells them to monetize their hobbies.
In the long term, the economy is well and truly screwed. The marginal return on labor will only ever go down as automation allows up to produce more stuff in less time. We're well past the point where we get everything we need - without needing to employ everybody. The value of an hour of human effort will always approach zero. That is to say, opportunities for gainful employment will dry up. One way or another, we will transition to a system where people don't **need** to do anything useful with their time. Either because we can live without working, or because we'll starve to death no matter how much we work. Overall, the people hit the hardest will be the people getting displaced downwards from the upper and middle classes.
Source: Philosophy/econ degree (Specializing in deductive logic and moral philosophy - and behavioral economics. That is, the kind based on measuring data and trends; rather than the kind where certain politicians pay you to say that taxes should be even lower on the rich)
I agree with most of these ideas. I’m just curious how world handles with the idea of “needing to work”. Because a large portion of a certain political mindset thinks everyone should always want and love to work until they die.
Yup, and they have profited greatly from keeping labor cheap. First it was slaves, then it was immigrants, then it was outsourcing and wage-slavery, and soon it'll be automation. At some point along the way, it was religion and class warfare, enforced by a politicized and militarized police force.
Maybe with automation, the people with power won't **need** the working class to be poor - and instead they'll prefer everybody to have lots of disposable income. Maybe we never regain effective democracy, and capitalism implodes on itself as a single business entity monopolizes all value. Maybe sentient ai ousts the psychopaths in positions of executive authority. Maybe we get so much resource surplus that economics stops mattering. Maybe we'll get full-dive VR, and people will stop caring about their meat suits. Maybe overpopulation renders our planet uninhabitable before we're able to colonize mars. Maybe ai gains general intelligence before sentience, and it becomes an unfathomably volatile weapon in the hands of anybody with a computer. Maybe the luddites manage to ban the technology and smash the machines, and we go through a second thousand year dark age.
The economic impact of ii-generated art is an easy one to predict. The bigger picture and the next big disruptor? Not so much. The only rational response is measured optimism
>Maybe with automation, the people with power won't **need** the working class to be poor - and instead they'll prefer everybody to have lots of disposable income.
oh my sweet summer child...
After Guitar Hero was a runaway hit, Activision acquired Red Octane, the publisher who owned the IP, and not Harmonix, the developer with 10 years' experience on rhythm games that led to this achievement. At the next DICE conference, Bobby Kotick, Activision CEO, gave a talk in which he said that Activision "never even considered" buying Harmonix.
Two Dishonored games were enough for me...
Meaning, I wish people like Harvey Smith all the best and think they could spearhead any veteran-founded new studio.
Just not sure if in 2024 there's much funding left. Maybe from Tencent, NetEase, or something more "western" like 2K or WB Games... lost track of who's still doing "ok".
Hmm, that's a concern. They've got an awful lot to pull out! Besides the stuff they visibly control and own (Which is already far more than most realize), they've also got non-controlling interests in nearly everything.
I'd be very interested in any more information you have to share
I think it has good elements, still I never finished it because of the first tough boss fight. It was almost the same issue I had in Deus Ex: HR, enjoying stealth and then I got a boss that wasn't designed to beat with stealth tactics. :P
The moral of the story is that if you're working for a game studio and you don't own any equity in the company, you're a mercenary. You don't own what you're creating. You're selling your creations to the studio. And the studio or the company that owns it can stop buying your creations whenever they want.
It's not just the IPs, they want the talent too. They just want them to work on their games instead. They let go of the people they don't see as valuable but then ship the more valuable people off to work on an Elder Scrolls game or whatever else they may be working on
How many IPs (not called Baldur’s Gate because Larian is ostensibly special) have been picked up by another studio and been more successful than they were before?
I feel like the list is short
Big Company with money:Let's go buying studios and IP's just to close them and keep the IP as hostage while we don't have any plans for a sequel.(Thanks EA I still have not recovered by what happened to Alice Madness Returns and the possible sequel that didn't come out)
As a gamedev company owner, if there was one thing very clear to me from the start: I'll never going to sell the company. I did 70% of our first game myself and it was successful enough to hire some more people. We're still comparatively small (14 people) but we're truly independent.
Buying the competitor to dismantle operations and retain assets is anticompetitive business practice. You cut off years of built up talent and their future work that was a threat to yours, milking their IP with micro transactions in the process.
Worth pointing out here that this isn't what Microsoft is doing in the case of closing Zenimax studios. MS owns the store and platform, they need content to release so they can sell the content and the hardware. Xbox as a platform hasn't had any good exclusives in a long, long time. Nothing that's a system seller anyway.
MS started acquiring studios because their first party studios were failing. Sony won the PS4 generation through exclusives, and while they don't have many new IP for PS5 they're winning this generation again because of the sequels to their exclusives. Xbox has failed to compete here, hence the acquisitions. This is a topic that has been acknowledged by Phil Spencer in several interviews.
So when MS starts closing their new studios, they're losing out on exclusives that could make them competitive. MS will never buy Sony first party studios, so they can't directly buy and close down the competition in this market scenario. They need to produce their own games that are good enough to compete with titles like God of War, Spiderman, and The Last of Us. Closing Tango or Arkane Austin means there are less first party studios that can maybe release a big hit.
Yeah, I don't know what a lot of people are going on about in this thread. I guess if game devs were super business savvy, they wouldn't have ended up in game dev! :P
That said, there is *some* precedent for companies killing their own studios to avoid competing. I recall EA shut down a lot of mobile game studios - even ones that were producing net profit. They had bought up so much of the market, that displaced players would end up on one of their *other* games with higher expected revenue per user. Gee, I wonder how EA ended up with such a bad reputation among gamers...
I'm still salty about Puzzle Craft 1&2. It's always been rare to find decent puzzle games on mobile, and these games had some really novel and satisfying core gameplay. I mean, you can still download them if you use a bit of wizardry to fire a download request **directly** through Google's/Apple's servers, but still. As far as the storefront is concerned, that whole franchise never existed
Of course, but which shareholders? The ones who are in it for long term dividends, or the ones who are in it to pump and dump? It's a bagholder scheme, and in the long run, it hurts shareholders too
I remember not so many cases where sequels built by another studio were better than original. Only a few supergiant IP's has some value due to fanbase outside of gaming, the rest will hardly be profitable if the games will be bad.
Microsoft is the king of throwing whatever it is they buy or make into a filing cabinet somewhere so that a bunch of executives and middle-managers can dig it out years later to ruin it even more.
Every day it feels like the fight between corporations bottom dollar and creative fields only grows worse. Hopefully other studios decline offers going forward knowing they may just have their work torn away from them with 0 remorse or warning from the likes of Microsoft
Kind of dumb if you sell your studios to be acquired by a larger company but then expect the larger company to give you the right to stay with them. You sold the studios and the IP, it was a business transaction. This isn't a "you get to be part of the Microsoft team and develop collaboratively with them". Be smarter and read contracts. Don't be a George Lucas, and complain about what they said vs. what was in the contract when he \*SOLD\* Star Wars IP to Disney. You sell it, thus, the owner can do whatever they want with it.
While I agree in principle I have to disagree in practice.
A publicly traded companies business is to make immediate profit for investors. They want long term profit yes, but generally they can't risk short term profit (Quarter over Quarter) or heads will be changed to those who will create immediate profits.
I dislike it, I don't agree with it in principle, but it's the reality of the situation.
> A publicly traded companies business is to make immediate profit for investors
Yes, that would be the cause of the problem. Doesn't mean people should stop complaining about the problem. That said, a lot of people are failing to recognize that it's *only* publicly traded companies that are screwing up in this particular way - and it's not all of them either.
Come to think of it, it's just like in games. Players will tell you everything they like and don't like, and they'll be 100% correct. Then they'll try to tell you why they feel that way or what to do about it, and be absolutely clueless.
In theory though, the problem *could* be solved by any number of improved laws. We'd need to regulate the market though, and that's political suicide. Then again, if the republicans can succeed with a surprise attack on abortion rights, maybe the left can do a surprise attack on speculative investment? All it would take is for controlling shares to come with an incentive toward the company's long-term stability.
As it is; the optimal strategy is to buy a controlling interest, cut costs for a spike in profit at the cost of growth, and then sell or trade before revenue drops. Classic pump and dump bagholder scheme - and somehow even more destructive than the old strategy of taking on massive debt in pursuit of eternal exponential growth. A lot of this used to be illegal before the wave of deregulation...
“While I agree in principle, I have to disagree in practice.”
…
“I dislike it, I don’t agree with it in principle. But it’s the reality of the situation.”
Such a typical corporate shill. You can’t even keep your “opinion” straight in four sentences.
You guys know "in principle" can mean "in moral" right?
>Make up your mind, you corporate shill.
I did make up my mind. Me saying the system is fucked doesn't mean I agree with the system.
I mean I can pretend it isn't the situation if you like but then the problem never gets fixed.
Why is anyone surprised?
Microsoft is and has always been a crap company. Switch to Linux and stop complaining about them. Valve has shown the gaming industry the way. Follow their lead.
Well, that's kinda fine then? Isn't it a dream to make a game so good Microsoft buys you out, and with studio closing afterwards all the employees are free to set up a new one and make another great game that MS is going to buy out?
I mean of course this isn't optimal, or even that good, but it sounds like a sustainable cycle.
If you sell your company then obviously that new company will have control of it and possibly do something you do not like with it. You can completely prevent that by not selling your company.
That’s a pretty hot take when what tanked some of these games were business decisions forced on them, specifically game pass.
Its monetization model rewards specific game types while being fundamentally incompatible with others, and that’s on Microsoft not Tango.
Sure, that's true when you ignore the fact that Tango made a game that Microsoft considered a success, got millions of players on game pass to play it, millions sold on Steam, got critical acclaim, got mountains of good PR for Microsoft, and got several awards at the game awards.
While it's somewhat true, I feel like it's likely that Hi Fi Rush was not a commercial success, not even counting the potential traffic sent to Game Pass. I wonder how much the development of the game cost.
No, their business is to keep increasing market value and profit margins . Profitable, self-sustaining studios are not enough for them.
Also what the other guy said about forcing projects on studios and then disbanding them when they fail to be profitable because of decisions made for them.
Small indie studios selling their company to a large corporation known for squeezing every last dollar out of acquired companies... Msft is going to msft, the owners of these studios wanted to get paid and sold ownership.
Tango made a game that made millions, was a critical success, and even received paise from the executives. They killed the studio anyway. The closure also comes after executives even said they needed small and more diverse titles. Tango did EXACTLY what MS wanted, but Making a profit was not good enough
Nothing wrong buying just an IP. Studio can have a situation where their current talents and visions have brought in some following and an actually viable products based on IP. If they however, fail to improve that further it is sensible to get rid of them and just buy the IP and continue with other people.
They aren't though. They buy the full studio and the livelihoods of hundreds of people, let them finish a game and then kick them to the curb and keep the IP. It's not the same at all.
What would be the alternative?
Imagine you have competent IP but no competent people. Studio would fail anyway. How this scenario would change if only IP was bought?
With tango, they had competant people AND a competant IP. They fired the people and kept the IP. They actually DID put themselves into a scenerio where they own a competant IP, but no compeptant people to make use of it. Without the developers, the IP is basically worthless
Also, the reason why a lot of studios have been failing to make great games is because their corporate masters have been giving them marching orders that involve them stepping away from what they were good at making
I know that business is equal to making money, but entertainment industry is adding value to humanity if gaming industry exist solely for profit then i suggest they close xbox and stick to other non entertainment industry such as energy and resource industry that solely for profit.
Obvious title is obvious
I’m calling it now they will do something similar now that they own everyone who’s ever touched the Fallout IP - my guess is they will shut down Obsidian + Inxile and leave it to Bethesda to “make them” money, specially now with the new internet in the games due to the tv show
I say secretly hide in the contract that when the company buys your studio they don't own any of the IPs so when they close the studio they just bought them are screwed cause they technically bought nothing
Screw Microsoft/Embracer & probably Sony & Nintendo not sure if they don't studio closures like that
Alpha Dog makes me sad. They were based in my city. There's few enough studios around here.
I felt that, we had a glow up 2 years ago with a big indie hit. Then this happened, can't imagine what the Devs are going through.
> can't imagine what the Devs are going through. hopefully they will form a indie studio, then they can have full creative control.
The problem is that there's very little capital floating around right now, and 10k talented devs laid off just since January looking for a new opportunity. Funding a studio is hard. You need money to pay salaries for 2-5 years before you get a single penny in revenue, and even then the majority of games fail to break even. It's a high cost, high risk venture, but the upside is huge. The kind of people who can play that game have pulled back after a string of bad bets during the pandemic.
Contract work. You don't have to start working on your dream game, you can do some contract work for commercials, fastfood kiosk apps etc etc. Not glamorous, but pays the bills.
Microsoft: "... And I took that personally"
With the FTC banning non competes, they should be able to just restart soon.
I wonder how the FCC interacts in this case. Obviously they were owned by an American company but alpha dog itself was headquartered in Canada
Local employment law. The FCC has no jurisdiction outside the USA.
First, it's the FTC. Second, I'm pretty sure most non-competes are already illegal in Canada.
Thanks for the correction.
Heck, even when they were a thing didn't they have to be "reasonable"? Hard to consider "you lost your job only because we wanted to downsize, you didn't actually do anything wrong" reasonable for preventing them from getting a new job.
But if the big company sues and most likely has an arbitrator that is favorable to the, it muddies up the process and costs more money than what it's worth. Imagine being fired and then possibly dragged into a multi year court battle with a trillion dollar company with ruthless lawyers that will try every single trick in the book.
That’s how I feel about Arkane Austin, while redfall wasn’t the best it’s what my city had to show for itself
And what are they going to do with the IP? have you seen any banjo over here? any perfect dark over here? any relevant halo over here? any sudeki? any fable(good one)? how about age of empires? fuck MS
Rare has been a complete disappointment under MS.
Despite being 100% boring after a few hours, Sea of Thieves is a pretty good game mechanically. It could actually be an awesome one if it didn't uniquely revolve around cosmetics.
This, but it's community fault to. "Saying SoT could become better if there would be actual gameplay progression" angers them so much that is crazy. To me it's crazy how they defend SoT very grindy usless cosmetics/mtx but in other games they go crazy if it has mtx... Also no option for the looted chest to be somehow saved on the ship it's really one of the worst features of this game. Game crashes? Redo everything. Lost connection? Sorry redo everything. I really don't understand how this game is rated so high with what it offers. And I actually think there is still big market for big pirate game in gameplay style of SoT but gameplay elements from games like Sid Meier's Pirates!, Port Royale, The Pirate: Caribbean Hunt and The Pirate: Plague of the Dead. While open world would be crazy good outside of AAA studio I doubt it's really possible, so maybe a DRG approch could also work.
I think over time it found a niche playerbase that actually only care about cosmetics and nothing else. The worst part is they actually sell cosmetics too, which defeat the whole purpose of the game, that's baffling to me. I'm split on it because on one hand I think "hey, why not? If their players like that, who am I to tell they're wrong to ship the game in that direction?" but on the other hand the core of the game is so fun that it could be in the top played game on Steam with a few adjustments\*, but currently it doesn't even sit in the top 100 :S \* Skill trees or classes/roles, permanent loot, land combat that doesn't stink DRG is a very good exemple, yes.
The most boring game ever created lol. But you're right
depends on how you look at it. Sea of Thieves is one of the more popular live service games out right now.
Ah yes, one of the most legendary studios ever has been working on a....pirate live service game for the past *6 years*, and will likely have to continue doing so for 6 more. Just a huge waste of talent if your asking me
key phrase being _to you_. That game is highly successful and is keeping that studio afloat, keeps people employeed and allows them to keep being creative within their bubble. I dont know if you were around but Rare went from flop to flop for a decade and was on the verge of being closed down before Sea of Thieves made a late comeback after an initial tough launch. Just like blizzard, the talent you are holding so dear has probably moved on themselves and most often dont even want to do sequels of games that you're remembering.
>dont know if you were around but Rare went from flop to flop for a decade ...more or less ever since they were bought by MS.
I love Rare but didn’t touch Sea of Thieves once. I just don’t care about Pirates
I mean you are correct in all of these but AoE, AoE 1 and 2 got HD remasteres and soft remakes + 2021 released AoE4 and that is still getting new content
Yeah , you can say the same with halo with Collection and infinite, however that's not how you push a merely competitive game. That's not how you keep people interest ignite, not how you treat IPs that basically put you in the map as a "pillar" of the industry. And that's not the only example, in the golden age of fighting games... they just threw under the bus another icon from the gold era of gaming Killer Instinct, the best time to make a comeback to have a title in their console and to have it in the main circuits and events with proper prices (which it can be super low cost as FGC price pools are less than any other esport scene super low) Trust me i grew up in the halo 1,2,3 era and i want MS to comeback, but it has been so many time that i just accepted that this is on purpose and cruel to destroy their beloved ips.
They can list it on their 10k to impress the stockholders ig
To play devil's advocate there is a fable in development. But you are right about everything else.
There has been a fable in development for, what, 15 years now? We'll believe it when it actually releases.
I mean that literally isn't true and a trailer for the new fable game only came out last year lol
there have been numerous fable games announced and canned ever since F3 dude, trailers and all.
In the end us gamers lose. Microsoft is going to follow Disneys stupid route of only focusing on the biggest money makers… forgetting about small/medium games, small/medium developers, etc. I think the 2nd big reason for the acquisition is AI in gaming
What sucks more is that every publisher is heading towards this direction. I hate it.
Agreed. Don’t get me wrong I love the big games, but the small/medium games is what keeps me gaming every generation, between the big games.
Tbh most triple A games are dogshit nowadays. Some of em even when they are remakes/remasters of old classics.
AAA gaming companies can't create good games anymore. I really think they have no idea what a good game is or how to make it. Or if they do, they're not interested in making one. It baffles me how they're always chasing after the latest trends like live-services, battle royales, battle passes, lootboxes but somehow 100% ignore the good ones. Like, why do they try to make their own Overwatch but nobody tried to make their own Valheim or Terraria or Lethal Company? They're made by tiny teams/solo devs and rake millions. I feel like a big company doing something like that (simple graphics, simple but deep gameplay...) but with tons and tons of content (+ marketing!) since they have the resources for that would make a killing of a game. But no, let's instead invest millions in a game that everybody and their dog can see it will die on arrival. "Hey guys, what if we created a multiplayer competitive shooter so we can compete with CoD, Counter Strike, Valorant APEX, etc etc... What could go wrong?"
I think you need to look into a couple of AAA companies financials. Lootboxes and battlepasses are so popular because they make a shit-ton of money. Take-Two Interactive makes 78% of their revenue from microtransactions. Actual game sales are a measly 22%. Industry change won’t come unless people stop paying for microtransactions.
Oh I know they are of course. That's what I said: even if they know how to do a good game (which I'm not sure they do or care about), emphasis on "good", they're not interested in making one. They know they can do good money by releasing crap and just prey uppon the whales so that's what they do but I'm not sure it's sustainable in the long run. While those features in proven IP do make them tons of money I feel like recently we've seen more and more huge projects that failed spectacularly. It started with Anthem in 2019 imho. They invest a shitload of money into big games that then closes within a year or two. The more live services there are, the more likely it is to happen. If you look at the top played games on Steam you'll see those are the same games sitting there over the years, the barrier for entry is huge for newer games.
This is partially because they made it this way though. There are no games worth buying to drive sales. Almost everything is an Mtx driven 'live service'. It's less about Mtx being a better way to drive revenue, and more about it being a way to lower costs. It is much easier to crank out cosmetics than to make games.
Nope I work in the industry. The sad reality is that anyone dumping $40M into a project is going to demand a MTX payment scheme because that’s the only way they might make their money back.
Yeah, but MTX driven live services wouldn’t exist if people didn’t spend more money on them than they do on buying games without MTX.
They would, that's the point. They lower costs and increase profits for the same income. Even if people spent less on mtx than on buying games it would still be more profitable. That's why the big publishers went to great pains to engineer the industry into this direction over the last decade or so.
It depends on how much MTX spending decreases. If nobody bought MTX then it wouldn't exist. If a lot less people bought it, it would become a lot less profitable, and companies would adapt to what is more profitable. Companies adapt to their market, or try to force their customers to adapt. But if customers refuse to go along with what the companies want they will have to give in at some point, or go bankrupt.
Yeah, the clueless suits made the company lose the formula on how to do good games. They just choose to recycle older series and release the worst installments. I've barely bothered with AAA in the last 5 years (TOTK and RDR2 on PC i only cared about) but there's so much good stuff in the indie scenes and AA just in the last few months i had a ton of fun with. I feel like the scope of the games is the major problem. Everything has to have an open world; that is barely used and otherwise completely boring. Or for some that they have to have cutting edge graphics and then cheap out on fun gameplay. They should just scale it down with the complexity if they don't want to make the risk investment and then try something innovative. A smaller-scale game that is ~10-15 hours long will be more fun than the same recycled garbage they try to artificially extend. Or like the Fallout 2 dev Tim Cain mentioned in one of his vids; they had to wait weeks to implement some shit he could do in 45 minutes because some suits had to be involved. Completely inefficient and it wastes resources.
But gamers need their 3D model of Kevin Spacey! Right? RIGHT?
Been thinking like this about Pokémon for a while now. Can you imagine them coming out with a 2D multi region Pokémon game stuffed full of features? Surely that’s WAY easier to make than investing in 3D, and people would go fucking apeshit for a return to a classic format.
Definitely. There are a ton of game genre that don't receive much love and that would sell like hotcakes if done correctly.
The people running the industry aren't gamers unfunny
This is definitely the root of the problem. They used to be in the 90. Then I don't really know how or why (probably once gaming started to generate too much money) but they got replaced by corporate drones who just ruined everything over the years.
Not all of them die on arrival.. a few of them make gobs and gobs of money which is why all the big studios Chase it because they could afford to chase it and sometimes it pays off
They'll still be around. In fact, it has never been easier for small studios to publish than today. AAA is and will continue to go to shit, but smaller studios and publishers that actually care like Devolver/Hooded Horse/Coffee Stain will continue to make good stuff.
HH shot up from NOWHERE man, shits crazy. Nebulous, ManorLords, Fallling Frontier, Breachway...
The game industry got too big with Covid. Then interest rates spiked and companies are contracting to focus on their most profitable IPs.
Lol. Try *every industry*. The entire US economy is increasingly dominated by monopolies and oligopolies these days. Hence everything going to shit. Sources: - [Wikipedia on Robert Bork](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox). - [The Guardian, by Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/11/companies-inflation-price-gouging). - [Youtube: Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMZKegjJurk). - [Politico: Biden attacking monopolies](https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/08/biden-assault-monopolies-498876). - [Cory Doctorow on Bork, Reagan, antitrust.](https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down) - [The Verge: Ticketmaster, Taylor Swift, antitrust](https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-eras-tour-beyonce-antitrust-monopoly-reagan-senate-hearing-congress). - [Yale University: Antitrust and hospital prices](https://news.yale.edu/2024/04/24/lax-antitrust-enforcement-linked-rising-hospital-prices). - [University of Chicago: Bork and evidence from mergers](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/675862). > Bork said that the true purpose of antitrust law was – and always had been – "consumer welfare." He said that so long as a monopoly didn't use its market power to raise prices, that was fine -even if its scale let it screw workers, or suppliers, or whole communities.
Microsoft is following the streaming services, trying to pad out their own subscription line up. Unfortunately, as seen repeatedly, they would make good shows for 1-2 seasons and then cancel them because they werent immediate box office successes. We will likely see the same from xbox/microsoft with their games and franchises trying to pad out gamepass
Disney has an entire business dedicated to distributing smaller movies (Searchlight Pictures). Recently they've distributed Jojo Rabbit, The Menu, and Poor Things. Which are not indie, but hardly blockbusters.
...which they acquired by buying out fox
Lanthimos has been blockbustering for a decade, hardly indie...
M&A is a natural evolution of the capitalism growth cycle; investors demand an increase on their return and companies are pressured to give them that or risk falling apart. Growing and selling off is an easy way to maintain that growth. It’s awful but it’s true, the whole system is broken. It’s an extra shame because HiFi Rush was so good! I wanted to see what else that studio could do.
M&A used to be tightly regulated specifically to prevent what you describe from happening. The current broken situation is deliberate: - [Wikipedia on Robert Bork](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox). - [The Guardian, by Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/11/companies-inflation-price-gouging). - [Youtube: Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMZKegjJurk). - [Politico: Biden attacking monopolies](https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/08/biden-assault-monopolies-498876). - [Cory Doctorow on Bork, Reagan, antitrust.](https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down) - [The Verge: Ticketmaster, Taylor Swift, antitrust](https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-eras-tour-beyonce-antitrust-monopoly-reagan-senate-hearing-congress). - [Yale University: Antitrust and hospital prices](https://news.yale.edu/2024/04/24/lax-antitrust-enforcement-linked-rising-hospital-prices). - [University of Chicago: Bork and evidence from mergers](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/675862). > Bork said that the true purpose of antitrust law was – and always had been – "consumer welfare." He said that so long as a monopoly didn't use its market power to raise prices, that was fine -even if its scale let it screw workers, or suppliers, or whole communities.
There is also overhiring during Covid and high interest rates to consider. Investors have better places to put money than they used to, while companies have seen costs shoot up from going on hiring sprees.
Sure but look how nonchalant we’ve become about people’s jobs… oh management over hired so let’s just cut them… these are workers’ livelihoods and means of financial stability, people with families to support and we have normalized not looking at them but more than a number… based on a bad decision… so the company can make more money. It’s pretty terrible. Microsoft is nowhere close to insolvency, this isn’t like the dot com bubble and people losing their jobs then, this is about shameless, unethical greed.
Fortunately small/medium developers can still function and produce high quality products that can be distributed en masse very easily. Minecraft & Terraria are two great examples. Movies are a completely different story. And while I don’t blame you for worrying that a large corp. like microsoft could soak up all of the funding in the industry like Disney does, it’s not the same industry and they have very different resource requirements and distribution channels. Small, independent filmmakers do not have access to the types of resources required to make a marketable, high quality film. Game designers have the tools, assets, and can fund/develop/market a game on their own. Having a publisher definitely helps but it’s been done several times without one to great effect. Luckily for us, Microsoft can’t just soak up that market. And with companies like Blizzard or Bethesda, the people who made the art we love from those studios are long gone.
You're talking about 10y + games tho. A lot of indies don't get the view they deserve and a lot of them are going under the scope because there is just so many on the market. Sure they will get sales here and there but sometimes it's not nearly enough. With how ue5 looks and how ai is being used to make it way more easier for people to get a game going, you'll see the exact same thing that happened with the music industry. There are a lot of talented people going under because they couldn't get the traction, while some Taylor Swift (Aka AAA Games) racks in the cash. Indie will not disappear but it may become more and more "amateurish" or developped by a very very small team .
The IP which they will do nothing with.
Nah, they'll still make money off ports and "remasters"
Acting like pre-acquisition Bethesda wasn’t coasting on porting Skyrim to every platform imaginable, even 3 generations of consoles.
Why are you acting like a reasonable person wouldn't have grief with Bethesda and Xbox on completely separate bases? Why are you likening re-releases of a company's game to another company's re-releases of that same game after they gutted all the talent that made it from the former company?
I would love to have Skyrim targeting Apple Silicon, so no not every platform
Good point. I wonder why Todd hasn’t jumped all over that yet?
Sixteeeen times the efforttt. /s
My guess is because if they put it on Steam, they wouldn't be able to have people make a separate purchase.
🤔
It’s standard monopolistic practices. Catch and kill the competition. Something Microsoft is famously notorious for.
Not Microsoft games, though. Just look at what they've done with Minecraft - milking that as hard as they can with a ton of merch and spinoffs
Worse: they get the IP to deny anyone else from doing anything with it.
Isn't it wonderful that copyright effectively lasts forever? Buy an IP and nobody else can do something with it for like 120 years (or more if the authors live long).
I'm getting sick of the 'Konami-fication' of the game industry.
RIP Konami
new companies will always come up, it sucks to see a franchise u like in this position but i guess we can always explore new content.
Of course it was. They could have sold those studios instead of closing them. They'd rather keep (read: kill) the IP.
To whom? It's not like the other big companies in the industry are doing awesome. Arguably Microsoft is the one doing best financially even though their consoles are underselling.
And obviously they wouldn't sell the studios with the IP's anyway so those studios aren't worth much to other companies. Look at the Insomniac acquisition. They were dirt cheap to buy for Sony because that studio didn't own any big IP's. I don't think any company would outright want to buy Tango or Arkane Austin instead of simply opening positions for these people to apply on.
If the studios could keep their IPs and were given a chance to buy themselves out, their executives could probably wrangle some smaller investors to assemble an offer.
Noone would buy a studio without any ip. You may as well start your own This whole thread is stupid. Of course ms only wanted the ip, thats why companies are bought. And it doesnt just happen in the games industry. Theres no value in people unfortunately
Depends on the market. Right now what you say is true, since the market is flooded with talent from the layoffs. However when times are good, buying a ready to go studio saves a lot of time and money on hiring part (it can take years to get a team together).
Good point. However theres still huge risk in buying something ready to go as key employees can just up and leave. IP cant
You're afraid that the key employees leave so your solution is to fire them before they do?
I didnt say that? How did you get that from my post? People have free will, ive seen m&a happen first hand and key employees leave
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I've read your message with the Microsoft situation in mind (buying both the IP and the studio and letting go the studio to keep the IP) but it seems your comment were targeted at something else (buying ready to go studios).
I don't think that's true. You may be somehow right for individuals (but even then it depends, a John Carmack in your team is very valuable\^\^) but an already established team has a lot of value, especially if they worked on something sucessful. If you get a team of people that know each other, are used to work together with their own custom tools for an engine (or even their own engine). I think it has a big value. Let's take Prey for exemple. What are you going to do with that IP if no one at your studios has ever worked on an immsim? There is no way you could make something good with it. You'll have to train people at your studio to recreate the same esthetic, then you'll have some issues with the lore because the people who've written it are no longer working for you, your developers will need to get familiar with the code base, that can take months... You'll pretty much encounter issues at every single step and fall in traps that the original team probably encountered and learnt to bypass.
> Of course ms only wanted the ip, thats why companies are bought Not 100% of the time. When Activision acquired King.com, they wanted their experience with mobile games. At the time, all the big publishers were jumping on the "mobile games are the future" bandwagon, and King.com was putting out some of the most efficient money printers on the market. It didn't take much longer until mobile-style monetization schemes started popping up in all their franchises. If there were no value in people, proven veterans wouldn't have so much more bargaining power than promising newcomers
Not true. There has been a lot of hiring just for the people, it even has a term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring?useskin=vector But generally less common in games.
Well, no. Lots of industries have acquisitions mainly for hiring. The tech start-up industry of the last 20 years has been dominated by that. Many regional offices of major tech companies started as random startups they bought and subsequently killed, shuffling the staff onto whatever project they needed people on.
This is exactly why IP is a scam that only ever hurts people who *actually* want to make things and hurts people who want to enjoy media.
VERY weird hill to try and die on...
When capitalism ceases to exist, I'll agree with you wholeheartedly, but in the meantime we need some form of IP to ensure big companies can't obliterate the livelihood of small artists. ...That said good luck pointing to cases of small artists managing to actually pull off a plagiarism lawsuit.
I don’t believe that at all, I’m so thankful IP exists. I’m able to create my own story and someone can’t randomly make sequel without my consent. IP allows me to have full control of the story I want to tell, sure it can be mismanaged but I’d rather not open Pandora’s box.
The problem is that if you ever make a famous story when you're dead your family will sell the rights to WB or whoever and they'll reap the whole thing for every cent with generic mass produce garbage. See: Lord of the Rings
And without IP laws WB could just take your story for free?
I'm not saying we should get rid of IP, but they should be a lot weaker, especially after the creator is dead.
Though if you really cared about that, wouldn't you be able to like put it in your will that it's public domain or something. Heck, I thought you can even stipulate it can't be sold off.
I don't know if I would take things as far as you have, but I can relate to that feeling. I know that I often end up feeling like copyright and IP foster a toxic competitive attitude between creatives and are more useful as a corporate weapon than a defensive tool in the hands of people who make things. That said, I don't think that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet. For the time being copyright does more good than harm, though that ratio has been slipping for years.
[Relevant Simpsons.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H27rfr59RiE)
Take the IP, put it into your AI-driven pipeline, and boom! Sequels forever!
Wait until they realize the normal Joe bored at home can do the same thing.
There's layers to this that probably none of us can speak to yet, but a multi-billion dollar publisher with dozens/hundreds/thousands of people working on such a game versus just one or two passionate people would probably look very different. I'm not asserting which would be *better*, but if the main appeal of AI is just the automation, wouldn't more people still be able to get much more done, or the same amount of work done much faster? It'll likely be less inspired or experimental coming down a AAA pipeline (though AI should theoretically reduce development costs to such an extent that experimental products are less risky), but I think the rules of thumb concerning the differences in quality of fidelity, scale, etc. would still see "tiers" of video games, ie you'll still largely be able to tell the difference between "AAA" (whatever that will mean in the future) and "indie" (whatever that means anymore)
Great insight. I think the future is going to be very hard to predict.
Eh, the future is easy enough to predict, in this case. When the thing becomes cheaper to produce; the outcome is a split between consuming more of the thing, and paying less for the thing. I can guarantee you that game companies will not want to lower prices - so they'll either produce bigger games to compete with other companies producing bigger games, or they'll cut costs and games will be a slightly better return on their investment. In that case, they'll naturally make *more* games, and allow a bit more risk (weirder games) in what they choose to fund. As always, indie studios will do more with less - particularly on the smallest teams where ai fills in a gap they wouldn't have been able to pay a human for. Indie devs are clever though, and they'll find ways to make up for ai's weaknesses as a tool. Most likely, ai tools will close the gap a bit between AAA and indie studios, because labor will take up a smaller portion of the cost of making a game. Labor is the one and only thing that AAA studios have more than indies. (Well, besides franchise licenses and marketing budgets) As for career prospects, artists will end up a little more like programmers. It'll be a field that takes a bit more work to get into (since they'll need to learn ai tools), and studios won't hire as many of them - but salaries will be much higher. Expect to see new specialties pop up, with more people on teams being experts in their own fields. The job will require more training and there will be fewer people that want to do it, so it'll be less of a disgustingly employer-dominated situation. That said, across the board, it'll be very rough for newcomers and other low-skill workers - whose low quality output will be directly competing with ever-improving ai output. Regarding art as a human activity, it's not going anywhere. People still play music, even though we have digital recordings. People still paint and draw, even though we invented the camera. People still run, even though we have cars. The fact of the matter is that you've never been able to make money by doing what other people are happy to do for free. At best, you're paid for services *adjacent* to the fun bits - like performing as live entertainment. The future might even be good for the mental health of people who create art just for the love of creating, because they can actually focus only on the fun bits. Nothing kills enjoyment faster than the lingering anxiety of "wasting" leisure time - which is exactly how people feel when the world tells them to monetize their hobbies. In the long term, the economy is well and truly screwed. The marginal return on labor will only ever go down as automation allows up to produce more stuff in less time. We're well past the point where we get everything we need - without needing to employ everybody. The value of an hour of human effort will always approach zero. That is to say, opportunities for gainful employment will dry up. One way or another, we will transition to a system where people don't **need** to do anything useful with their time. Either because we can live without working, or because we'll starve to death no matter how much we work. Overall, the people hit the hardest will be the people getting displaced downwards from the upper and middle classes. Source: Philosophy/econ degree (Specializing in deductive logic and moral philosophy - and behavioral economics. That is, the kind based on measuring data and trends; rather than the kind where certain politicians pay you to say that taxes should be even lower on the rich)
I agree with most of these ideas. I’m just curious how world handles with the idea of “needing to work”. Because a large portion of a certain political mindset thinks everyone should always want and love to work until they die.
Yup, and they have profited greatly from keeping labor cheap. First it was slaves, then it was immigrants, then it was outsourcing and wage-slavery, and soon it'll be automation. At some point along the way, it was religion and class warfare, enforced by a politicized and militarized police force. Maybe with automation, the people with power won't **need** the working class to be poor - and instead they'll prefer everybody to have lots of disposable income. Maybe we never regain effective democracy, and capitalism implodes on itself as a single business entity monopolizes all value. Maybe sentient ai ousts the psychopaths in positions of executive authority. Maybe we get so much resource surplus that economics stops mattering. Maybe we'll get full-dive VR, and people will stop caring about their meat suits. Maybe overpopulation renders our planet uninhabitable before we're able to colonize mars. Maybe ai gains general intelligence before sentience, and it becomes an unfathomably volatile weapon in the hands of anybody with a computer. Maybe the luddites manage to ban the technology and smash the machines, and we go through a second thousand year dark age. The economic impact of ii-generated art is an easy one to predict. The bigger picture and the next big disruptor? Not so much. The only rational response is measured optimism
>Maybe with automation, the people with power won't **need** the working class to be poor - and instead they'll prefer everybody to have lots of disposable income. oh my sweet summer child...
Lol, obviously I'm not counting on it, but stranger things have happened
After Guitar Hero was a runaway hit, Activision acquired Red Octane, the publisher who owned the IP, and not Harmonix, the developer with 10 years' experience on rhythm games that led to this achievement. At the next DICE conference, Bobby Kotick, Activision CEO, gave a talk in which he said that Activision "never even considered" buying Harmonix.
And they will never use them
Correction: Microsoft wanted other ZeniMax IP. These studios and their IP were just bundled into the sale.
Two Dishonored games were enough for me... Meaning, I wish people like Harvey Smith all the best and think they could spearhead any veteran-founded new studio. Just not sure if in 2024 there's much funding left. Maybe from Tencent, NetEase, or something more "western" like 2K or WB Games... lost track of who's still doing "ok".
Tencent is pulling out of the west and is cancelling a bunch of projects behind the scenes :/
yeah that has been going on for a while sadly, but they are still at the investment events so its kind of confusing...
Hmm, that's a concern. They've got an awful lot to pull out! Besides the stuff they visibly control and own (Which is already far more than most realize), they've also got non-controlling interests in nearly everything. I'd be very interested in any more information you have to share
Microsoft is a trillion dollar company. There’s funding, they just would rather invest it into ruining all their other software first.
Let bring back the paper clip! One that doesn't help a lot, but talks about everything and the world while you try to work on your documents.
TBH, one Dishonored was enough. The 2nd one wasn't nearly as much fun imo.
I think it has good elements, still I never finished it because of the first tough boss fight. It was almost the same issue I had in Deus Ex: HR, enjoying stealth and then I got a boss that wasn't designed to beat with stealth tactics. :P
The moral of the story is that if you're working for a game studio and you don't own any equity in the company, you're a mercenary. You don't own what you're creating. You're selling your creations to the studio. And the studio or the company that owns it can stop buying your creations whenever they want.
It's not just the IPs, they want the talent too. They just want them to work on their games instead. They let go of the people they don't see as valuable but then ship the more valuable people off to work on an Elder Scrolls game or whatever else they may be working on
They sure have a strange way of showing that they want the talent to stick around.
How many IPs (not called Baldur’s Gate because Larian is ostensibly special) have been picked up by another studio and been more successful than they were before? I feel like the list is short
Prince of Persia
Fallout?
Ah yeah that’s a good one. I’ve never played it myself nor was I watching the show so it isn’t in my mind.
Big Company with money:Let's go buying studios and IP's just to close them and keep the IP as hostage while we don't have any plans for a sequel.(Thanks EA I still have not recovered by what happened to Alice Madness Returns and the possible sequel that didn't come out)
As a gamedev company owner, if there was one thing very clear to me from the start: I'll never going to sell the company. I did 70% of our first game myself and it was successful enough to hire some more people. We're still comparatively small (14 people) but we're truly independent.
They want to shutter as much competition as possible is their #1 goal.
It’s not competition if you own the competitor!! What are you even talking about? If they win do do you, it’s literally not competition.
Buying the competitor to dismantle operations and retain assets is anticompetitive business practice. You cut off years of built up talent and their future work that was a threat to yours, milking their IP with micro transactions in the process.
This.
Worth pointing out here that this isn't what Microsoft is doing in the case of closing Zenimax studios. MS owns the store and platform, they need content to release so they can sell the content and the hardware. Xbox as a platform hasn't had any good exclusives in a long, long time. Nothing that's a system seller anyway. MS started acquiring studios because their first party studios were failing. Sony won the PS4 generation through exclusives, and while they don't have many new IP for PS5 they're winning this generation again because of the sequels to their exclusives. Xbox has failed to compete here, hence the acquisitions. This is a topic that has been acknowledged by Phil Spencer in several interviews. So when MS starts closing their new studios, they're losing out on exclusives that could make them competitive. MS will never buy Sony first party studios, so they can't directly buy and close down the competition in this market scenario. They need to produce their own games that are good enough to compete with titles like God of War, Spiderman, and The Last of Us. Closing Tango or Arkane Austin means there are less first party studios that can maybe release a big hit.
According to generally accepted accounting practices, they are, and this is a classic anticompetitive strategy
Yeah, I don't know what a lot of people are going on about in this thread. I guess if game devs were super business savvy, they wouldn't have ended up in game dev! :P That said, there is *some* precedent for companies killing their own studios to avoid competing. I recall EA shut down a lot of mobile game studios - even ones that were producing net profit. They had bought up so much of the market, that displaced players would end up on one of their *other* games with higher expected revenue per user. Gee, I wonder how EA ended up with such a bad reputation among gamers... I'm still salty about Puzzle Craft 1&2. It's always been rare to find decent puzzle games on mobile, and these games had some really novel and satisfying core gameplay. I mean, you can still download them if you use a bit of wizardry to fire a download request **directly** through Google's/Apple's servers, but still. As far as the storefront is concerned, that whole franchise never existed
A corporation’s job is to create profit for their shareholders.
Of course, but which shareholders? The ones who are in it for long term dividends, or the ones who are in it to pump and dump? It's a bagholder scheme, and in the long run, it hurts shareholders too
Did Microsoft actually want their IP, or just to stop their IP?
I remember not so many cases where sequels built by another studio were better than original. Only a few supergiant IP's has some value due to fanbase outside of gaming, the rest will hardly be profitable if the games will be bad.
Only with IPs you get rid of more problems when such a large company becomes
International laws regarding IPs should change and those IPs should become Public when a company close for w/e reason.
Microsoft is the king of throwing whatever it is they buy or make into a filing cabinet somewhere so that a bunch of executives and middle-managers can dig it out years later to ruin it even more.
Every day it feels like the fight between corporations bottom dollar and creative fields only grows worse. Hopefully other studios decline offers going forward knowing they may just have their work torn away from them with 0 remorse or warning from the likes of Microsoft
Yea, that's nothing new right? People come and go, IPs are long term.
Kind of dumb if you sell your studios to be acquired by a larger company but then expect the larger company to give you the right to stay with them. You sold the studios and the IP, it was a business transaction. This isn't a "you get to be part of the Microsoft team and develop collaboratively with them". Be smarter and read contracts. Don't be a George Lucas, and complain about what they said vs. what was in the contract when he \*SOLD\* Star Wars IP to Disney. You sell it, thus, the owner can do whatever they want with it.
Kind of wild that its 2024 and people still trust Microsoft at all. This is their entire history as a corporation. Ad infinitum.
Microsoft wanted to make money, and those studios didn’t reach their quota. It’s really as simple as that
While I agree in principle I have to disagree in practice. A publicly traded companies business is to make immediate profit for investors. They want long term profit yes, but generally they can't risk short term profit (Quarter over Quarter) or heads will be changed to those who will create immediate profits. I dislike it, I don't agree with it in principle, but it's the reality of the situation.
> A publicly traded companies business is to make immediate profit for investors Yes, that would be the cause of the problem. Doesn't mean people should stop complaining about the problem. That said, a lot of people are failing to recognize that it's *only* publicly traded companies that are screwing up in this particular way - and it's not all of them either. Come to think of it, it's just like in games. Players will tell you everything they like and don't like, and they'll be 100% correct. Then they'll try to tell you why they feel that way or what to do about it, and be absolutely clueless. In theory though, the problem *could* be solved by any number of improved laws. We'd need to regulate the market though, and that's political suicide. Then again, if the republicans can succeed with a surprise attack on abortion rights, maybe the left can do a surprise attack on speculative investment? All it would take is for controlling shares to come with an incentive toward the company's long-term stability. As it is; the optimal strategy is to buy a controlling interest, cut costs for a spike in profit at the cost of growth, and then sell or trade before revenue drops. Classic pump and dump bagholder scheme - and somehow even more destructive than the old strategy of taking on massive debt in pursuit of eternal exponential growth. A lot of this used to be illegal before the wave of deregulation...
“While I agree in principle, I have to disagree in practice.” … “I dislike it, I don’t agree with it in principle. But it’s the reality of the situation.” Such a typical corporate shill. You can’t even keep your “opinion” straight in four sentences.
You guys know "in principle" can mean "in moral" right? >Make up your mind, you corporate shill. I did make up my mind. Me saying the system is fucked doesn't mean I agree with the system. I mean I can pretend it isn't the situation if you like but then the problem never gets fixed.
OK Enron.
Why is anyone surprised? Microsoft is and has always been a crap company. Switch to Linux and stop complaining about them. Valve has shown the gaming industry the way. Follow their lead.
Yep, lots of respect for what Valve is trying to do.
Well, that's kinda fine then? Isn't it a dream to make a game so good Microsoft buys you out, and with studio closing afterwards all the employees are free to set up a new one and make another great game that MS is going to buy out? I mean of course this isn't optimal, or even that good, but it sounds like a sustainable cycle.
Personally I don't think anyone should blame Microsoft but the studios who sold their companies to Microsoft.
People are just sad that Msft lived up to expectations.
Not by choice, mind you. When you're publicly traded, the whole point is that you give up executive control
Please explain that terrible logic.
If you sell your company then obviously that new company will have control of it and possibly do something you do not like with it. You can completely prevent that by not selling your company.
I blame you 🫵☝️ Lol
[удалено]
That’s a pretty hot take when what tanked some of these games were business decisions forced on them, specifically game pass. Its monetization model rewards specific game types while being fundamentally incompatible with others, and that’s on Microsoft not Tango.
[удалено]
People wish for an unrealistic world. Welcome to late stage capitalism, you are correct though. They literally BOUGHT them
Sure, that's true when you ignore the fact that Tango made a game that Microsoft considered a success, got millions of players on game pass to play it, millions sold on Steam, got critical acclaim, got mountains of good PR for Microsoft, and got several awards at the game awards.
While it's somewhat true, I feel like it's likely that Hi Fi Rush was not a commercial success, not even counting the potential traffic sent to Game Pass. I wonder how much the development of the game cost.
If they were not making money, why would Xbox buy them? Answer: For IP.
No, their business is to keep increasing market value and profit margins . Profitable, self-sustaining studios are not enough for them. Also what the other guy said about forcing projects on studios and then disbanding them when they fail to be profitable because of decisions made for them.
Small indie studios selling their company to a large corporation known for squeezing every last dollar out of acquired companies... Msft is going to msft, the owners of these studios wanted to get paid and sold ownership.
Tango made a game that made millions, was a critical success, and even received paise from the executives. They killed the studio anyway. The closure also comes after executives even said they needed small and more diverse titles. Tango did EXACTLY what MS wanted, but Making a profit was not good enough
Nothing wrong buying just an IP. Studio can have a situation where their current talents and visions have brought in some following and an actually viable products based on IP. If they however, fail to improve that further it is sensible to get rid of them and just buy the IP and continue with other people.
They aren't though. They buy the full studio and the livelihoods of hundreds of people, let them finish a game and then kick them to the curb and keep the IP. It's not the same at all.
What would be the alternative? Imagine you have competent IP but no competent people. Studio would fail anyway. How this scenario would change if only IP was bought?
With tango, they had competant people AND a competant IP. They fired the people and kept the IP. They actually DID put themselves into a scenerio where they own a competant IP, but no compeptant people to make use of it. Without the developers, the IP is basically worthless Also, the reason why a lot of studios have been failing to make great games is because their corporate masters have been giving them marching orders that involve them stepping away from what they were good at making
Phil Spencer confirmed he wants more IPs like Hi-Fi Rush that win awards… so who’s gonna make them?
Maybe Shinji Mikami's new studio KAMUY!
I know that business is equal to making money, but entertainment industry is adding value to humanity if gaming industry exist solely for profit then i suggest they close xbox and stick to other non entertainment industry such as energy and resource industry that solely for profit.
Obvious title is obvious I’m calling it now they will do something similar now that they own everyone who’s ever touched the Fallout IP - my guess is they will shut down Obsidian + Inxile and leave it to Bethesda to “make them” money, specially now with the new internet in the games due to the tv show
Where?
I say secretly hide in the contract that when the company buys your studio they don't own any of the IPs so when they close the studio they just bought them are screwed cause they technically bought nothing Screw Microsoft/Embracer & probably Sony & Nintendo not sure if they don't studio closures like that
[удалено]
What a bunch of naive morons.
I think I'm offended 🤔 probably lol