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.
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.
I assume a lot of the top level staff stick about until their contractually obliged period for getting a massive payday is over, and then look very closely at whether they actually want to be told what to do by a bunch of suits all day long.
Realistically they’re working to make somebody else richer at that point, and there’s only so much enthusiasm anyone can have for that. Certainly not enough for the long hours needed in the games industry.
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.
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.
AoE2 genuinely had a small competitive scene on Voobly and Gameranger. It was being played as a grassroots esport by dedicated fans even before the HD and DE remasters.
One of the third game’s glaring problems was how poorly balanced it was. IIRC the winning strategy was to play French (who already had overpowered cavalry), rush to the third age and use a particular tech to effectively blockade your opponent’s home city and prevent them from playing anything in their deck.
Even when AoE3’s Definitive Edition came out, fixed a lot of the balance issues and added a bunch of new civs via expansions, the damage was already done and sales were so low that Microsoft cancelled their latest expansion and halted development a few months ago.
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.
Played the Xbox 360 demo of Halo Wars near its initial release and wasn’t impressed. All I really remember about the game beyond that was how bad the box art looked. I mean those spartans look like they have fucking long giraffe necks.
Gamepad controls and real time strategy just don’t mix. You either make something so mechanically slow that keyboard & mouse would shit all over that control style, or have to bastardize the game mechanics so much that it’s all but fully automated. The only game I’ve seen remotely work as a gamepad RTS is Tooth and Tail.
I couldn’t believe it when they shut down the studio that did Hi-Fi Rush. They put out a great game that received universal praise, then shut them down like a few months later. Infuriating.
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…
Ever since 545 take over from Bungie, halo fans hasn’t been eating good. 4 is really bad, 5 is subpar, infinite is just ok. Not to mention the spinoff and tv series.
Halo 4 was mostly good, especially the story, but they listened too closely to the complainers and scrapped the story line. They haven’t been able to commit to villain. Didact? Killed off at the end of 4, and then resurrected and killed off in a comic. Jul 'Mdama? Introduced and explored in Spartan Ops and books/comics. Killed off in the beginning of Halo 5. Cortana? Resurrected/Introduced as a villain in Halo 5 and killed off between 5 and 6(Infinite). Atriox? Introduced in Halo Wars 2 “killed off” between the opening cutscene of Halo 6 and the first level. Escharum(Atriox lite), Introduced in 6 and killed off in 6. Harbinger? Introduced in 6 and killed off in 6. But wait, Atriox isn’t really dead and he’s totally going to come back in Halo 7 and be a long term villain. For real this time.
Agreed, I think it also hurts the games trying to even have a singular “villain” in the first place. Halo 1-3 had villainous figures, but I don’t think anyone was under the belief that just killing the 3 Prophets would solve the problem of the Covenant, or that killing the Gravemind would mean that the Flood would never be a problem again. The Halo series relies on having compelling factions with clear purpose and ideology to act as antagonists in a more general sense.
The Prometheans in 4 weren’t bad, but outside of the Didact, they had no real purpose or personality. They were just an obstacle. I was really looking forward to the premise of 5 with the concept of going rogue and tackling the underlying themes of fascism at the heart of the UNMC, but then it just rapidly pivoted to some other garbage with Cortana and the Guardians which led to nothing in the end anyways. And so I didn’t even bother to play Infinite.
Well, the Gravemind is definitely not dead as it’s mind resides in either the Domain or an adjacent dimension. Hell, the Flood aren’t even sterilized from known infection locations. But like you said, the factions all have a clear purpose. Even the Flood in Halo 1, before the Gravemind was even introduced, were working towards a goal though consuming the minds of the species it encountered and fixing the Covenant ship. Hearing Cortana say that the Flood were fixing that ship was chilling. Zombies repairing an FLT capable spacecraft?!
A lot of my disappointment in 5 was how irrelevant and misleading the advertisement was. Nothing even remotely similar to this happens in the game. Hunt the Truth had so much better writing then 5 did. Let those people write a spinoff game.
For the longest time I refused to watch the Halo show because I heard that Master Chief takes off his helmet. But then I gave it a shot and it’s a really really good show, and they did the adaptation solid justice.
They made changes where it (mostly) made sense and were truthful to everything else.
They set up a back story that explains how we got a John-117 in the games. Someone who is socially reserved, doesn’t talk much, never takes off his helmet, and prefers to work alone. The ending of the second season was a setup for season 3 to start exactly where Halo 1 started.
The music was phenomenal, cinematography was on point, acting was great, story line was compelling.
I’m normally the person who’s a stickler for not changing a story at all, but the Halo universe was originally told through a game that was more about story beats than actual literary writing. So there’s a ton of room for the in-between conversations and events.
I think the show got an undeserved bad rap. If more people gave it a chance they may have actually liked it.
Halo fans got an actually decent show. Whereas Wheel of Time and Tolkien fans got the abominations of a show we got.
The first few were really good on console. I played the first one on PC as well and there was definitely something missing with mouse and keyboard controls. The vehicles especially.
You have to remember that most FPS on consoles were pretty terrible back then (e.g. Medal of Honor series), and there was a lot of experimentation to try and find a control scheme that didn’t completely suck, along with just the right amount of aim assist. Other devs were still wrestling with that into the Xbox 360 era. Sony put so much effort and money into Killzone, and it wasn’t anywhere near as good as Halo.
Plus, split screen co-op made it very popular. It’s one of the few games to keep that into the modern era as well.
Oh, then Battlefield 1942 then. People here were saying 2005 so I went with the one I knew from 2005. Also, first isn’t always best, the BF games made Halo look like a school project imo
I did miss the “on consoles” part of your quote though as I was referring to playing on PC so my bad.
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.
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.
i don’t believe the next video game collapse is going to be very pretty for anyone. also, most independent studios and developers make little to no money at all
Tell that to all the smaller studios that have already been decimated and forced to close because of their publishing/funding deals falling through over the last couple of years.
You don’t hear much about it because they’re smaller and/or working on things that hadn’t released yet, vs the occasional big media splashes from companies like MS doing more layoffs, but indies and AA are being gutted too.
It’s comforting to believe that only the biggest companies are struggling, but the industry as a whole is currently in active collapse from the inside out.
i know it’s not the important part of your comment, but I must point out that indies will be fine because indies do not have publishing deals. If your studio is beholden to a publisher, then you are by definition not independent.
The definition of indie is always contentious, but there are definitely studios out there who are independent (as in not owned by a larger company) but work with a publisher for funding, marketing, and other support.
Even beyond that bit of semantics, many indies rely on funding from investors of one sort or another, be that angel investors, startup funds, or even just small business loans.
Many of those investors have lost their appetite for games, making it extremely difficult to pay the bills unless you’ve already got a sizeable cash reserve to cover costs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Excluding steam because even playstation release exclusives on steam now, Starfield is (was? I don’t know if it released on ps later on) xbox exclusive. Out of Zenimax’s library, that is probably the game that you would want the least as an exclusive but at least it is something (they needed something after spending US$7.5 billion on them)
You don’t spend 8 billion dollars on a company to then shrink their market. Microsoft was never planning on making any of these properties they bought fully exclusive. The transition to third party you’re seeing now has been in the making for 5+ years at this point. Youre all just looking at this through the old console war lense when they’ve been over that ever since Gamepass released and they realized they make more money putting that on everything (larger market) than playing the exclusives game (smaller market)
Yes, it did eliminate competition. They’re no longer competition once Microsoft buys them. They’re employees, possibly if a subsidiary, who contribute to Microsoft’s profits.
There is basically no good AAA studio left save for maybe bohemia, rockstar and cd project red. Meanwhile indies have risen up and overthrown the corpos by making fun games that set trends.
A big studio hasnt set a single trend in like over a decade now. AAA gaming has been dead for a while.
I think the larger issue is that so many studios get set up as things that can be sold by one or two people for the benefit of only one or two people. Like, the larger issue is that everyone who has been working at the studio should have some amount of say in if it should be sold or not. And if they do sell, you should be getting a cut of the truck of money.
But if I were to buy one, I’d like that every worker at the factory who assembled it got paid some percentage of the factories profits, and had some amount of input on the leadership of the company as a whole, not just an hourly wage.
Does it generally work like that? No, but doesn’t mean I don’t think that’s a better way to do things.
Unless the company is an ESOP, has some sort of profit sharing mechanism or is a co-op, they do not, they only get paid an hourly wage or a salary. If the company becomes more profitable, they do not see a consummate increase In their compensation. And they have no say on if the company is sold, and they are not compensated in anyway for the company they’ve contributed to being sold.
Where do you think the wages materialize? They get paid out of the product sold. Literally every time you buy something the company uses that money to compensate their workers for their time and skill.
Profit is revenue minus expenses. Wages are part of expenses.
Wages are used to ensure that people working there are able to keep working there, covering day day expenses of the workers.
Wages rarely reflect the real value of the effort put in by the people working at the company. They reflect the cost to the worker of choosing to work at the company.
I think that workers at a company should be payed some percentage of the profit of the company, with financiers and investors receiving some percentage of the profit in turn.
I agree, wages should be distributed more evenly with the bare minimum wage being so that fuckhead todd who never does anything and only works part time could still afford paying morgage/rent, food and transportation. Id also like managers and ceos be held responsible for any big fuckups of the company. How nestle is still allowed to exist is beyond me.
Regrettably…they kinda do. At least for studios like Obsidian and Double Fine, the landscape has become very grim. They are studios of a size that is very difficult to keep afloat in this environment. Investor funding in the gaming segment has dried up post-COVID, and these kinds of mid-level (or higher) devs were very reliant on that kind of funding. In light of that, these studios may have seen Microsoft as something of a safe harbor. They knew these layoffs were always a possibility, but I think it was better for them than the alternative. Or at least, it was the best choice for the people leading these studios prior to their respective Microsoft acquisitions. The devs that are being laid off are not the same people that signed off on the acquisition.
The modern American dream - figure out how to get paid tens of millions to spend someone else’s tens of billions chasing my own tail. No, I don’t create a fucking thing. I get rich by dismantling shit that used to have value!
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