“Just one more layoff. Just one more and I promise we’ll have Copilot reach AGI. We just need one more layoff to make the cost structure work. Please, just one more.”
XBOX can’t be buried soon enough. It’s been dead in the casket for over a decade and it’s time to start throwing dirt on it.
I love the original and the 360. The people that had the passion and vision for what XBOX was and needed to be are long gone and this is what we’re left with. A bunch of suits making decisions who probably don’t even know how to play pong.
“Everything is an Xbox” now. Even the PlayStation is living on borrowed time. The way Xbox is run right now may not be very good, but the vision for what Xbox was had to change. They were just an earlier casualty of the way things are changing than their competition.
I don’t see it that way at all. Xbox took their foot off the gas when Kinect came out and has been dying from 1000 cuts. What was working for Xbox - they stopped doing. This isn’t the future, this is them throwing anything they can at the wall and see what sticks.
Yeah, but that’s something you do when times are changing and you need to adapt. Sony investors are already asking if there will be a new PlayStation or if they’ll just go to PC. (There will be at least a traditional PS6, but Microsoft doesn’t have the same luxury.)
Why? What about their strategy right now it because of the way things are changing?
None of it is. It is because of mismanagement that happened with Don Matrick and the OG Xbox one focusing on fucking cable hookups and banning their users from borrowing physical games.
That corporate garbage in Xbox NEVER fully disappeared and now they’re reaping what they sowed.
Also not releasing an exclusive game worth buying since before 2014 is a wild strategy.
Why? What about their strategy right now it because of the way things are changing?
Accepting other storefronts on their platform going forward, choosing to instead make their money via Game Pass and third party publishing. An Activision or Bethesda acquisition made great strategic sense when you needed to lock up exclusives for the way consoles used to work, but in the time it took for Activision to go through, they realized that strategy no longer makes sense. It’s a huge paradigm shift to decide to no longer take a cut of every “Xbox” game sold the way that Nintendo and Sony do, for now, but it’s in their best interest long term to be the first to do so.
I already dont buy anything xbox but god damn i hate MS for this shit. Buy a bunch of studios to lock in IP then kill them all and shed talent. So fucking stupid.
Stuff like this makes me weary at getting another xbox console in the future (or if there even will be one) they keep seeming to shift away from games. I just hope that they allow people to access their past purchases into the future (lol I doubt it though)
I don’t get EA/Bioware. Fantasy is consistently more popular than scifi. Inquisition was their best selling game. Yet DA was never treated like a heavyweight like Mass Effect. My expectations tanked when David Gaider left
Looking through each series’ Wikipedia articles, it looks like Mass Effect sold about 50% more than Dragon Age 1 and 2. And that tracks with my experience. I know far more people who’ve played Mass Effect than Dragon Age, and I’ve never played Dragon Age myself.
I agree, Mass Effect was/is gaming pop culture at one point. Almost every gamer I know has played or at least very familiar with ME. That number is maybe 1/4th for DA.
Was it? Even if it was, you have to consider the cost and time that goes into making it.
Also, where’s the post-release monetization? Like it or not, fantasy games made for smart people unfortunately are held to the same standard as sports games made for morons.
One factor might be just that Mass Effect came out first and was also Bioware’s last game before EA bought them.
The rest is just my opinion, but I do believe that Mass Effect simply told a better story (multicolored endings aside) and had a better cast of characters. Not to mention the fact that it was a single narrative across the three installments helped keep engagement up. And shooters were incredibly popular at that time.
If you look at it critically, Dragon Age Origins and Awakening are really the only good games in the series.
It went to shit, fast. Now they’re just pandering to the wrong people expecting it to save their game when everyone who was interested in the original has long since moved on.
It’s on Bioware not EA. This is the third flop out of Bioware, and the post mortems for the past failures have all indicated that Bioware’s management has a dumpster fire for years, with EA often uncharacteristically serving as a voice of reason to protect them from their own mistakes. For example, it was EA that got them to include the flying in Anthem, the only fun part of the gameplay. Unfortunately, in the case of Andromeda and Dragon Age 4, EA’s mistake may have been giving Bioware’s management so much rope that they hung themselves.
This game felt like it was written by 2 different groups of writers, who also hated each other. The first group wrote about a world where everything was dying and dark.
The second group was a PR team, who wrote about “wouldn’t it be fun to go camping!” And “the pirates and assassins are unambiguously good”.
there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare… In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises… Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new.
Ironically, EA grew out of Origin, one of the original grand-daddies of computer RPGs and the maker of the Ultima series in the 1980s-1990s.
Search for the story of Anthem and David Gaider opinions about how they handle their writers, they fucked that up on their own.
And reading this article is basically: The DA team blames the ME team for diverting them to Andromeda. Then they blame Anthem. Then they blame EA. Then they blame the pandemic. Then they blame EA. Then they blame the ME team again.
The only moment that they actually put some blame on the DA team is with the tone of dialogue and they quickly blame EA for saying “you guys doesn’t have time to make changes”. The ME team made changes, it’s because of favouritism from EA or the ME team just has better management and know how to negotiate?
A good portion of that comes from how the teams are treated by EA and how many resources they’re granted though. I’m not about to assign a percentage to the blame, but of course the DA folks will be resentful of the ME folks if EA listens to one of them and gives them the time and money they ask for at the expense of the other. “Knowing how to negotiate” can often just come down to how much one game sold versus another, which isn’t really something the developers are responsible for.
But even that is a mess of causality for blame. EA wants to save money and mandates a nightmare of an engine for development; managers get incentives from EA to build a type of game that their studio doesn’t usually make; etc.
I could argue in favour of EA’s decision regarding the engine. Their previous engine was also a mess, but they mishandled the change. They didn’t give the studios the necessary time or support to implement it properly. But at the time of Veilguard they already had plenty of experience, the game performs really well and they release the game practically bug free.
The part of EA forcing them to build a type of game that they didn’t usually make I’m particularly not inclining to believe it’s was a problem. Bioware developed and maintain Star Wars Old Republic, an MMO, MMOs have many similarities to live services(it’s a type of live service), they already had experience with that. They also released Anthem, and looks like the idea of a multiplayer for Anthem came from Bioware.
The idea of a multiplayer Dragon age to finish the story is completely stupid but Bioware had the expertise to work on it. It’s a different case for Fallout 76 as Bethesda has never developed a multiplayer game before, TESO is a completely different studio with its own team, SWTOR is from a team within Bioware.
Veilguard was…okay. But coming out after Baldur’s Gate 3, the series that DA was inspired by, really showed the massive gap in storytelling and character quality. I pirated it and was glad I did, as it was NOT worth anything close to $70.
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Aktywne