Honestly all these tech layoffs could really come bite back publishers and the big tech in the near future.
Theres a lot new talent for competitors to snatch and fraction of these developers might even form up new studios to make the next big thing.
I never played Hi-Fi rush, Redfall, Mighty Doom, or The Evil Within. That said it looks like Tango hit their sales and quality strides. Alpha Dog and their Mighty Doom shit-ware deserves the dust bin and closure.
As cold and callous as this all sounds, I read about the Redfall development and it was leadership start to finish on that disaster. The employees, even at Alpha Dog, don’t deserve this treatment. Dinga Bakaba from Arkane Lyon stated it perfectly
Don’t throw us into gold fever gambits, don’t use us as strawmen for miscalculations/blind spots, don’t make our work environments darwinist jungles. You say we make you proud when we make a good game. Make us proud when times are tough. We know you can, we seen it before.
Fuck me, this part hurts the most, and I highly recommend anyone who didn’t read the article at least look at what was said here. Everyone knows damn well that the corporation has the ability to flourish in keeping all the talented workers who got fucked by shitty leadership, instead the leadership will fail upward and keep ruining projects. Companies have so many chances to really disrupt and show the world a better way and they continually take shallow short sighted routes to cheap monetary victory, discarding humanity along the way. Fuck companies.
We all know this was completely necessary at any level, but why the hifi guys? Aren’t they the best bets you could hope to invest in? They make good games that sell decently with less investment than AAA massive failures need.
Sad. I was thinking the buyout was more about owning ip e.g halo, fallout tv shows than the devs. I guess in ms world any other studio can take over game development.
I’m honestly ready to not support Xbox anymore after this. They’ve been non-stop fumbling the ball with game releases this generation. Hi-Fi Rush was the first game that came out that I felt was phenomenal and such a breathe of fresh air, and they just straight killed the studio anyways. Killing studios that make good games is not how you foster a gaming platform people want to be part of.
Arkane Austin (Tap for list) Blade (Marvel game (not?) in development)
Redfall
Deathloop
Prey
Prey Digital Deluxe
Prey Mooncrash
Dishonered
Dishonered 2
Dishonered Death of the Outsider
Dishonered Dunwall City Trials
Dishonered The Knife Of Dunwall
Dishonered The Brigmore Witches
Dishonered Void Walker’s Arsenal
Arx Fatalis
Tango Gameworks Hi-Fi Rush
Ghostwire Tokyo
The Evil Within
The Evil Within 2
Alpha Dog Games Wraithborne (iOS, Android)
MonstroCity: Rampage (iOS, Android)
Ninja Golf (iOS, Android)
Mighty DOOM (iOS, Android)
I’m not gonna lie I found he died today when I was double-checking the spelling with a quick google. I then had to check the timeline to make sure he was actually involved in the sale.
Basically selling user data from BNET didn’t work out and after the year of flops the board got antsy. Still blame Altman tho.
Because these corporations presumably think they’ll buy a talented studio, get it to make something its isn’t used to making, force a bunch of shit into it for monetisation and/or launch early in order to keep schedule. All this to keep investors/management happy. Then when the combination of the aforementioned (repeatedly) blows up in their face; usually by pissing off customers, they lose money. Finally you start layoffs and rehires if needed because you’re running into money problems.
They couldn’t care less about the talent. It isn’t rare for a lot of the talent to bail when these studio get bought up. Especially since it feels like you’re just going to be crunched the second you get the first job post acquisition. Found this while checking this assumption, a bunch of them left early for Arkane specifically.
I always viewed it companies like EA take a gamble. Either the investment pulls off the unlikely, convoluted shit you ask and makes you money or you take it out back and try with another studio.
You would think, right? But HiFi Rush was lauded as one of the best games last year and was highly successful, even being ported to PS5 and Switch at this point, so why close them?
From what I read it outsold forspoken and got around $6 million in the first month? That’s small change to a billion dollar publisher. Especially when you can close a bunch of studios(probably claim some losses for tax reasons like WB with catwoman) and reshuffle. Doesn’t need the individual studio to do poorly in this instance I’d guess. Just didn’t make the selection for “who do you want to keep going forward”.
My best guess is that Microsoft/Bethesda hired too many people during the pandemic, because gaming had a boom then. I do not know, if it’s a massive management failure or planned, that all these people would need to be laid off shortly after the pandemic-boom ends.
What the fuck? I understand Arkane Austin since they dropped the ball, but why Tango Gameworks? I was secretly hoping they’d make another game like Hi-Fi Rush…
If you ever wonder why gamers buy Playstation and not Xbox, here is your reason.
MS have no idea what they’re doing with gaming. There will be no The Last of Us or God of War coming from them. They don’t want to sell you games. They want to sell you GamePass. They don’t want you to have a great time. They want you to have a time that is just about acceptable enough to keep paying for it.
The only one of their games I’ve heard people get excited about is Hi-Fi Rush, and you can see here what they think of that. Clearly it didn’t maintain enough Monthly Active Users, or have a short enough Time To Purchase or whatever other bullshit mobile-era metric determines whether a studio lives or dies.
And this is WHY the smaller studios are on the chopping block and not core Bethesda.
Because smaller games that are incredibly solid don’t matter. What matters are AAA tentpoles. And Tango’s A/AA games were “lukewarm” at best. They had an AMAZING B/A game but fuck 'em. Same with Arkane Austin
And… probably same with Obsidian this fall (?) when their Elder Pillars game comes out and people decide it isn’t Skyrim so it is bad. Ignore that Pentiment was amazing or their long legacy as one of the best studios in CRPGs. People will just talk doom and gloom because it isn’t The Last Of Us.
Which will lead to MS continuing to try to be Sony rather than take advantage of the studios they actually have. And people will continue to talk about how they can’t compete with Sony because they don’t have a Horizon Zero Dawn.
I’ve been saying it ever since MS started buying every studio they could. They have an AMAZING roster and can basically dominate the market by “flooding” it with high production value “indie” games. But… people want their AAA tentpoles.
This is such a fanboy opinion. Sony killed basically their entire Japanese Development, had 13 GaaS in development at the same time and actively are holding back the standard of Cross Save. They give plenty of reasons to not be the ‘gamer’ console. Especially now when they are also beginning to drop games on gamepass.
Ironically we still know of more single player games coming to Xbox then games coming to Sony outside of Spider-Man Leaks.
Fallout is currently the hottest game on the market thanks to the Show on top of this.
This really fucking sucks but damn stop trying to use this as a way to promote your team
If anything, Nintendo is likely the company about to make lightning strike twice with the Switch successor due to be announced this year. Will be interesting to see what it’s like, but no matter the case, it is going to sell like hotcakes.
Sony’s Japan studio’s own library was always gimmicky games that were basically tech demos- Ape Escape was for the Dual Analog controller, LocoRoco for the PSP, Gravity Rush for the Vita, Knack to be a pack-in for the PS4, and games for VR, Move Eye toy, etc. In fact it’s kind of hard to find games they did on their own because they’ve always been mostly a support studio even going back to the PS1’s launch lineup, and they are continuing that. There have been several studios that make original games that started as part of Sony Japan that have been spun off into separate teams too.
I’m struggling to think of many studios Sony has closed. Sony London studios was similar to Japan- mostly just games to go with hardware gimmicks like the EyeToy, SingStar, and Wonderbook. It’s even harder to find studios that Sony has purchased and then closed or turned into a support studio- I guess you could count that Psygnosis was purchased and merged into London studios back in the 90’s, but considering they went 20 years between that merger and closing I doubt there were many Psygnosis devs left there.
A quick search pulls up PixelOpus, a tiny studio Sony formed from 9 college grads with a couple of industry veterans to lead them They released 2 small games and were closed last year.
I don’t mean to be too defensive of Sony- they did close one of their own studios and laid off ~900 people this year. But it’s not really a comparison to Microsoft who now has a long history of buying 3rd party studios, mismanaging them, and closing them.
I’m also confused about your comment about Xbox making more single player games than Sony. First of all… I would expect that to generally be true. It looks like Sony owns 21 studios while Microsoft had 40 as of the Activision-Blizzard acquisition. And while a lot hasn’t been announcedwith release dates, we know of a handful of single player games Sony has in the works- Horizon 3, TLOU3, Ghosts of Tsushima 2, and new IP’s from Bend, Housemarq, and BluePoint. Plus Wolverine, and you could argue whether Physint should count or not since that’s a partnership between Kojima and Sony-owned Columbia Pictures. If you’re trying to imply that Sony is abandoning single-player games or something that’s pretty far from the truth.
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