Having recently played through Hifi Rush after the studio closed, it reads very differently when you know the characters who go up against Vandalay and Kale, the most corporate of corporations and evil CEO, are killed by a real life evil corporation.
This is great news and even makes playing through the 1st game more enjoyable knowing we’re (hopefully) getting more!
The fact that MS spent an entire decade fumbling the ball, and when it finally got it right and released a game people actually liked, immediately shut down the studio and sold the IP, is still highly amusing to me.
You can’t convince me that it wasn’t an inside job from someone who either secretly works for the competition, or who actively hates MS and wants it to fail.
I read that by the time MS acquired Tango and Hi-Fi Rush was released, most of the developers and management had already quit, so MS basically only owned the IP anyway. Tango allegedly had nothing in the pipeline, and the few people who were left were working on nothing, and there were no leads to start the process of developing a new game.
Not sure how true it is, but in that case it would make some sense to just shut down the studio, because the alternative would be essentially starting a studio from scratch.
Of course, this begs the question of why all these developers left. I can speak from experience a bit here. When it was announced that a small company I worked for was acquired by a mega corporation, everyone quit because the company we were being acquired by had a reputation of being a horrible, toxic workplace. This is obviously just speculation, but I could see something similar happening here.
MS usually buys competition to erase it so there’s nothing too surprising about this. And no, Bethesda and Blizzard won’t be treated very differently in the long run. That is after every material of everything the studios have ever worked on is fed into datasets to train AI for who knows what.
If this deal went through in time to save Tango, as the press release states, this just must have been how long it took for the paperwork to go through.
They did to me too, but maybe it’s one of those things where you can’t talk about the deal for X, Y, and Z reasons, especially since it might not go through.
“Just yesterday, it was alleged that Bungie’s CEO Pete Parsons had purchased 24 cars cumulatively valued at $2.5m just before the layoffs. Parson’s Twitter account went private yesterday, too.”
Gaming is not the most refined form of play. The most refined form of play is unstructured, spontaneous, and uses imagination. Gaming is the opposite of that. It is essentially a grim struggle to perform at one’s best in a 100% defined environment and ruleset.
I’m a gamer. Mad respect for gaming. I use it to achieve flow and improve the precision and skill of my brain.
But I don’t really consider it “playing” in the sense that puppies and little kids play.
The industry’s effort to be more inclusive and diverse mostly comes from indie games, though. Of course AAA has long realized the potential to boost their image by copying some mechanics and ideas but let’s not pretend any of those CEOs on their high horses actually cares about inclusion. They’ll drop any efforts the very moment it doesn’t benefit them directly. But there will always be passionate indie developers pushing boundaries to actually help more people enjoy games.
I mean, GW2 (by Arenanet, owned by NCSoft) has had a lesbian couple since the first Living World season, and had a non-binary character in the 3rd expansion. They have inclusivity in a way that doesn’t feel hamfisted or marketed; it’s just in there because they feel like their world should have all sorts of people.
gamesindustry.biz
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