Microsoft has never been good at running game studios, which is a problem when it owns them all
The latest Xbox layoffs are about a long history of mismanagement as much as recent overexpansion
Eighteen months ago, I was an advocate for Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard, because I didn't think anybody could have done a worse job than Bobby Kotick.
Phil Spencer has proven me wrong. This arsehole tried to shut down Tango Gameworks after they literally shadowdropped a critically acclaimed GOTY contender.
Bizarre Creations had the misfortune of being owned by both of them before being shut down.
It really shows that something is fucked up in businessland that they're so bad at managing studios, when managing studios is literally all they fucking do.
Same with EA. It's just a wasteland of dead companies. The list of studios they've closed is bigger than the list of ones they still own.
Never underestimate Phil Spencer.
But that is the whole point. You don't buy studios to make games, you buy them to get rid of competitors.
The problem in most big companies (and organisations or countries) is that leaders promote people who think like themselves or at least are very agreeable. And as time passes they end up surrounding themselves with yes-people; every bad idea is cheered on, because all the critics have been fired or are way down in the hierarchy.
And in that environment, everyone who actually understands how things work quits or gets quit. It's my understanding that there are large sections of code bases that MS just doesn't touch, because everyone who understood how they function is gone. Continuity of institutional knowledge is difficult in the best cases and impossible under leaders that discourage dissenting perspectives.
/gestures about wildly
So true. All those suck ups are at the top and the bosses overestimate themselves. What we need more smaller studios.
I'm not really all that bothered. Unlike movies, new start ups for making games happen a lot. When the greedy giants topple, like a forest something grows in the new patch of sunlight.
We probably wouldn't have expedition 33 if Ubisoft gave people a reason to stay
I wish that was true, but funding has dried up across the entire sector and that affects the viability of smaller studios more than it does the mega corps with bottomless warchests.
Personally I agree. I've seen way more startups kicking off with these waves of layoffs. It's a silver lining, not much more, but I'm happy to see people finally realizing they don't want the big tech solutions anymore.
Still bugs me that Microsoft owns the rights to the King's Quest series, though.
I mean sure but just like with movies, the rights dont change hands very often, even if they're not being actively used or the rights holder goes out of business. This means a ton of promising franchises either suffer by getting terrible sequels or no sequels at all.
They're really good at killing them though. I'll never forgive the death of Ensemble.
Don't forget they also murdered Rare.
I 100% believe the claim that Microsoft executives mistakenly thought they've just nabbed the Donkey Kong IP by acquiring Rare. Definitely seems like something some c-suite ghouls who are totally out of touch with the games industry would believe.
Also, I'm not sure how much of Rare's downfall was due to Microsoft's mismanagement or their core talent leaving to form other studios. Maybe a bit of both.
Arkane Studios for me.
We've bought these studios that are loved by gamers for their niche content.
What do you mean they're not making the next Fortnite? Shut them down immediately.
Also a crime. Not just a great game in their niche, but a long history of them.
To be fair, Age of Empires III was bad, and the last project Ensemble was working on before they got shuttered was a Halo MMO.
Also, Robot Entertainment (the studio that rose from the ashes of Ensemble) were the initial developers of Age of Empires Online, which was P2W slop that 90% of players couldn't run because Games For Windows LIVE was a buggy crock of shit. And since then they've released nothing but Orcs Must Die games.
AoE III was excellent. It explored new ideas and did it well. As a long time AoE fan who played all of them since the first, AoE II is massively overhyped, and AoE III is unfairly shit on.
Also they were voluntold to do Halo Wars, and they did a good job on it. It's a good game, and it did an excellent job on console with a controller scheme, which was impressive at the time.
Ensemble got shafted. They were held up at the time as the leaders of RTS and Microsoft didn't give a fuck. Just used and abused.
AoE online was clearly executive suite demands. Of course it fucking sucked.
A Halo MMO could have been cool.
Speaking of MMOs or open world games, I wish that Stargate MMO game got off the ground. That would have so much potential.
Were entering the video game dark ages.
AAA devs are finding out there's no such thing as infinite money doesn't mean there are no good games. Look around and you might just realize they're actually the least interesting content out there. There are more games coming out per/day than at any other point in history. Take some initiative and you'll find something great.
“You’ll have GaaS and you’ll like it.”
Microsoft owns taco bell?
Yeah, remember when we had a proper alternative to twitch that had a better & faster Streaming Protocol called Mixer. Which was actually focussed on Gaming ??
Yeah it was run by Microsoft & then they killed it.
Then Glimesh revived it in a way& now it's dead too. Shame, it was OpenSource too
All this to feed 545 insatiable hunger for another halo slop.
RIP halo, my favorite competitive shooter ever 😭 infinite is such an absolute botch.
Even Halo 5 had redeeming qualities. I legit wish Infinite would be treated like a fan made game and ignored so they can make a Halo 6 that concludes the Promethean saga.
Maybe I'm missing context on this, but halo slop?
Infinite came out 3 years ago and though they've done updates and general live service garbage there haven't been any major releases since. Halo isn't a yearly release schedule, charging full price for the same game every year like sports games, so i'm not seeing the slop...
Why cancel Freelancer 2, Microsoft? Why?
From Crosspoint I heard that they even cancelled and shut down the studio making a game (forget the name off the top of my head) that Phil Spencer himself was said to have liked so much, they had to force him to quit playing their demo in a meeting about it. Not to mention the absolute waste of time and money on nearly finished projects that were probably going to sell well.
Quarterly profits.
I look forward to the small new game studios that will surely appear as the big old ones are consolidated and/or dismantled.
It's disappointing to see things we like fade away, but as the sun sets in one place, it rises in another.
Smaller studios have been consistently putting out good games as of late anyway. Indy and AA studios have the freedom to make fun things instead of having to check every box on a spreadsheet.
Freelancer 2. Will not forget.
I wonder how much of it is mismanagement on behalf of Microsoft itself, and how much of it is small-time devs suddenly getting more budget than they've ever seen before and deciding to get super ambitious with their next project and then having to scale it back when they can't actually handle the project?
It's what happened with EA and Anthem. Bioware suddenly got a shitload of money, couldn't hack it, had to scale back the project, and it all fell apart.
They would have been fine if they just gave them budget and left them to it, but it was never about producing good games.
