This is true! But I think the “good” (?) news there is Annapurna Studios is not going anywhere, and they retained all the IP their subsidiary holds. Sucks for the former Annapurna Interactive folks that they can’t bring the IP with them, but c’est la vie.
Fuck Embracer. I was following the rumors for quite a bit and this is such a massive disappointment. Deus Ex has to be one of the most mismanaged video game franchises of all time. I don’t understand why they’d give up on a loyal fanbase in favor of an “original franchise”.
As a mass effect and dragon age fan, I empathize so much with you. Love deus ex too, so many rpgs just left ignored.
I really don’t understand it. All of these games would be smash hits. Let’s be honest even if they weren’t very good the franchises are known so well that they would all be bought, and older game sales would swell too. To me it’s a no brainier, make the game, it prints money. They’re just so terrified of having to… Invest in something to get a payout.
The only one remotely close to being a hit was the first reboot. I guess it depends on whether you count the "I can't believe it's not Deus Ex" franchises they kept spinning up for a while. The first Dishonored probably did very well.
It makes even less sense considering the pivot to an “original franchise.” If they’re cynically trying to print money, why not cash in on something with an established active fanbase? Seems like less of a risk.
I’d have bought a new Deus Ex game, regardless if it got badly reviewed. Not really interested in whatever they’re cooking up now. I’m sure most of us fans probably feel the same way.
Considering the hours you put in a good building game just about every one of them is “free”. But yeah, OpenTTD is great and a lot of fun. TTDX was my first PC game which was an instant buy (before I even had a computer but was getting one in a couple of months) after I saw a review on TV. The 90s was something else.
Yeah, i bought it too when it came to steam but also donated about 50 dollars back around 2009 I think. It is worth it even if I don’t really play it any more.
Honestly itch.io has plenty of free indie gems that can last me just as long as throwing $80 at a AAA game. I’d rather donate/tip after the fact for genuine well-crafted experiences
I absolutely love Manic Miners (the fan remake of the old Rock Raiders game). The customization so you can make your own mining crew, all the old-school parts that are in the game, everything about it is fantastic.
So what’s the difference for Nintendo fans that love any Mario or Zelda game, for example? I’m not trying to be an ass here, but what makes your specific “I only buy this full price” a better decision than someone else’s “I only buy this at full price”?
FromSoftware is not a multi-billion dollar company that has major influence on games peicing in the gaming industry, and when game prices jumped to $70 USD, Armored Core 6 released at $60 and Elden Ring Nightreign will release at $40.
They released the game early access, so everyone was expecting a perfect game from the start because of how much development went into 1. Honestly, while 2 had issues, the game engine is much better than 1, they just needed to bake it more, like several years more, before releasing it hot off the heels of 1.
Man that’s been the case with these sequels to games I really loved. Happened to Cities Skylines as well, and at first it seemed like that’s happened with Helldivers but it turns out it was so good it just ruined the servers.
Why are we defending publishers and letting them get away with using this term this way? The term should be earned for its content and quality. AAA should not mean “large studio”.
This whole “we are a AAA studio”, when they haven’t even made a game and got the business license the day before is fucking stupid as shit. Don’t use the terms the way they want it to be used.
I always thought AAA just meant they have a lot of money, like how cod games are AAA because of the budget but are still terrible, not as an indicator of quality
What other industry uses the term that way? Every other industry is quality. AAA to refer to size…. Right….
I know that’s how the term is used, it’s just fucking wrong when every other industry uses it differently……
Don’t let them get away with this shit. You are defending them. Notice how your link even says informal……… they are trying to make it a thing, when no other industry uses that way, and other people in the industry are calling it out.
You’re trying to defend this stupid shit.
If you continue to use this incorrect term, it will become a thing, that’s what they are hedging on, people like you letting this happen. AAA means quality, they aren’t putting out quality product so they are trying to change what the term means so they look good. Way to eat that shit right up.
And that’s how marketing wins, when everyone just rolls over and accepts it.
Nah, this is just part of a long list of shit the rest of the gaming industry is trying to reverse, stop letting this continue to happen and stop defending it.
What are you talking about? The “AAA” classification has always been a measure of corporate involvement and budget, not of quality. If you think that being large in scale and having good production quality is what makes “AAA” games, you’re dead wrong.
What are you talking about…? What other industry uses it that way? Every other industry is quality, not size. Don’t let them get away with this shit.
Don’t defend them and let them get away with this shit.
If you continue to use this incorrect term, it will become a thing, that’s what they are hedging on, people like you letting this happen. AAA means quality, they aren’t putting out quality product so they are trying to change what the term means so they look good. Way to eat that shit right up.
The AAA games they used to put out were quality games at one point. So the term was correct, now that the quality has slid they are trying to get marketing to work on their side.
And people like you letting them get away with it is how it works.
I think this is where people usually say shill and boot licker in these exchanges.
Way to explain your point with anything of substance dude….
You’re the reason why marketing works so well. Say something flashy and people will find a way to defend it and support them. Even if it’s nothing to do with anything.
So nothing but a troll defending corporations using terms how they want…? Okay. Keep using the term the way they want so it means literally nothing anymore! You are the problem, glad you made it obvious! Thanks!
It’s terrible. They released an Alpha at full price. They changed how building rockets was done, for the worse. Performance was horrible even on my 3080 and aside from prettier graphics, there was nothing really new to explore. If it were cheaper, I’d be kinder. If it performed decently I wouldn’t mind but they released a POS of a game knowing full well KSP1 owners would buy it and it made us all look like suckers. They knew they released an incomplete game at full price and didn’t deliver. That sir is hot garbage.
Most of these I’m perfectly fine with, leakers get banned, but what was that pokemon kid? The kid pulled a texture out of a public release and this guy goes threatening the parents for “federal crimes.” What the shit?
This guy is the kind of scumbag that gives lawyers bad names and… that is a REALLY REALLY high bar. His “do I not seem approachable” stance on investigating sexual harassment says it all. His focus is solely on damage control, nothing else.
That said: The way he tells it (and considering this was high profile, he read his notes before or even during the interview): He very specifically did not threaten the parents. They asked if it was hacking. He never said it was hacking but he DID say that hacking is a federal crime.
And this is why, much like cops, never talk to a lawyer without a lawyer present.
never said it was hacking but he DID say that hacking is a federal crime.
He didn’t threaten them directly. The parent asked and he could have just said no. But instead he starts talking about “federal crimes.” If that’s irrelevant, why even bring that up? That sounds like intentional misleading to me.
“do I not seem approachable” stance on investigating sexual harassment
The guy sounds real pleasant, but that was about leaking and not harassment.
What’s the definition of “hacking”? Because datamining could be as simple as using a hex editor or extracting compressed assets. Do those qualify as “hacking”? (Not even necessarily asking you, more just trying to make a point that this is an extremely broad term).
I hate this Microsoft cycle so much: buy gaming studios, do fuck all with them, fire all staff, close studios, rinse, repeat. So much talent and so many great IPs down the drain because MS can’t decide what the fuck are they doing
That narrative doesn’t make much sense. There’s far too much competition in the industry, and you’re not reducing competition by shutting down the likes of Tango Gameworks.
It’s how these large corporations operate though. Ignore, buy, or bury, that’s how they all operate. They may have ‘plans’ to use the studio, but for them if all they get are the assets and a less of a threat from the old ip, then that’s enough. I don’t think it makes any sense either, but it also absolutely something microsoft has done for years in their larger business model.
From past articles on why this is happening though, it’s that they had a growth strategy for years, with Game Pass, with Xbox consoles, with studios. Then what changed was the general state of the economy and Nadella’s goals. Game Pass plateaued, the old console model is clearly headed toward obsolescence, and they bought the world’s largest publisher by market cap. Suddenly Nadella decided that you can’t spend what you were spending, and it’s time to take profits.
Well, perhaps I’m just wrong then. But for me, I see twenty tears of MS buying up studios, sitting on them, and closing them with some sort of excuse about changed plans. It’s always the same though, studio performs well, gets bought, makes no games or games out of their genre, and closes. Call it whatever you want, I call it business as usual.
There was also COVID screwing up sales projections for the last few years. People were stuck at home for months and ended up buying a ton of digital media such as games to stay sane. Executives are stupid and were somehow shocked when numbers dropped after quarantine ended and people went back to their regular lives. Since then, a bunch of projects or even entire studios have been axed due to “underperforming” because they couldn’t compete sales-wise with a period where the entire world was a captive audience.
Games and media sales did indeed go down. But movie theatres (and a lot of live entertainment) never actually went back up. People didn’t “go back to their regular lives”. We got a new normal
Which is why trump et al are working so hard to trigger doom spending and likely another pandemic or three if rfk gets his way.
But the bigger factor is funding. Plenty of indie studios have talked about how hard it is to find funding. Because economic uncertainty means that even a 2-3 year investment is a LOT riskier than it used to be. And that is a death sentence for indie devs but also very alarming for the major publishers who have to answer to investors.
Fuck microsoft and all their bullshit. But this goes way beyond “they bought too many studios and mismanaged them”
It has also been the official reason for every illegal merger in the last 50 years.
And somehow almost every merged organization ran into tough financial times about 5 years later (or less), and had to reduce staff, disperse the previous competition’s staff, while filing away the dangerous intellectual property safely out of sight.
But sure, we could assume that Microsoft meant to do the right thing, and that it just went wrong this time.
It was the reporting from Jason Schreier, not the official reason. The official reason is something like “difficult economic conditions” and “we were about to topple over”. The behind-closed-doors reasons were that Nadella made a sweeping change across all of Microsoft that was antithetical to what Xbox had been working on for years, and that Xbox had a much larger spotlight on them after making an acquisition as large as Activision.
They had the Kinect which (ignoring all the negative press surrounding it) fucking slapped, and could easily have been integrated with a VR headset for full-body VR.
They have Blizzard which im pretty sure means they can put WoW on xbox but don’t even seem to have started.
They’re positioned to have the greatest console of all time and they’re just fucking around instead. It’s maddening.
I remember being the lone voice against GamePass and Microsoft buying up all these studios. These idiots kept saying “It’s pro consumer bro! The more studios they buy the better the GamePass value gets bro!” “So many games for one low monthly price! Let’s see greedy Sony do that!”
As if they didn’t live in the same world where Netflix exists. We’ve already seen this bro, it’s a classic. Yeah man it’s great deal now while they desperately need your buy-in. But a few short years later and very predictably we get nothing but layoffs, award winning studios shuttered for no reason, formerly third party games becoming exclusive etc.
I’m no corporate simp for Sony or any other corp out there by any means. But the Microsoft grift was so blatantly, obviously an unsustainable market grab that would inevitably go south and make the industry worse for all of us.
Yeah, it kind of what it was in the beginning, wasn’t it? I remember telling people that it was just like Netflix for games, both in the positive and in the negative sense. And Netflix was still viewed more positively at that point.
The game’s narrative was identified as an area that was particularly in need of improvement and will be revamped in the coming months
I really don’t trust executives to be the arbiters of what is considered good narrative. I hope they didn’t just kneecap the writing because it wouldn’t appeal to as many people as possible.
To be fair, they are largely anti-american and woke, but in a good way. Woke is good, and America has some fucking issues. If you’re choosing to be not woke or actively pro-america, then you might be doing something wrong.
It’s TakeTwo - you know they did. Bioshock was a complete arc and died with Irrational. Whatever this zombie project is, I expect it won’t live up to the name, but they’ll slap it on anyway because goshdarnit executives just can’t help milking a franchise dry instead of innovating.
Not saying you're wrong but I do feel like there's still so much of the universe to explore, even if the main arc is complete. I would love to learn more about Rapture
Don’t overestimate what unions do. MS is still perfectly in their right to close down the studio and fire all it’s staff, if they had a mind to.
It’s just a matter of doing it properly. Severance Pay, Pensions and such. Which I honestly don’t think Microsoft cares too much about.
I mean, if they can avoid paying it, they would. But they do actually have a legitimate business side. And severance pay for the entire Blizzard staff would likely still cost them less than what they had to pay Kotick to get rid of him.
I hope that they will share the source code on some kind of GPL to make this game not dead, shot down studio isn’t going to make any update and who will get the money?
Take-Two still receives the proceeds from the sales, depending on employment contracts probably pays royalties to the devs. Also, it’s their intellectual property so there could be consequences for leaking the source code.
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