I’m frankly astounded by the sheer ineptitude on display here. I don’t know what’s happening at Microsoft, but whatever it is, it’s insanity. How tone deaf can you be? And this is only days after the gamepad fiasco.
If you sell individual games, you have basically two ways of making more money: make more games or make better games so more people buy them.
The economies for a subscription service are completely different. People don’t subscribe to GamePass for a specific game, they subscribe for the entire collection. More games or better games don’t really drive up the number of subscribers. The only way to make more money is to drive down costs. You don’t make expensive, awesome games. Instead you drip-feed a steady stream of low-budget titles. You just have to make sure that the value of access to the entire collection is just about worth the subscription price.
Microsoft doesn’t care about games, they care about making money. They didn’t get into gaming because of a love for games, they realized it’s a market they didn’t dominate yet.
They lured people into GamePass with day-1 drops of AAA titles and now that the subscribers are there it’s time to squeeze as much money out of the service as possible.
And it’s not just GamePass. It’s all subscription services. Netflix is a good example: quality has been going down there for years.
The only real exception seems to be music streaming, but that’s mainly because there are so many artists and practically no exclusivity. In other words: there is healthy competition in the music streaming business.
Very nicely explained, I find myself in agreement with you. This makes a lot of sense and would explain their current behaviour. So, with this in mind, if I look at Microsoft’s statement from the article, it now reads slightly differently. Before, it was just their statement verbatim: “we need games like Hi-Fi rush”, but now it’s “we need games like Hi-Fi Rush, but a hell of a lot cheaper”. All because of GamePass. Dude, I am so sick of subscription services.
This is an excellent explanation of why the layoffs were a terrible idea.
I wouldn’t have volunteered $30-$40 for Hi-Fi Rush on release because of my low budget for new singleplayer games - but I did play it through Game Pass, and knowing how good it is now I would’ve paid more. Similarly, MS has put out many “mixed” games that are perfect for certain types of people but not many others. Those are the things that keep people on Game Pass. Nobody needs to be paying $100 a year to keep playing the few familiar live service games they know.
The “unsubscribe” button is really easy to reach the month Game Pass stops putting out anything new and interesting, and that’s coming soon now that they have no one ready to put out these surprise hits.
The gamepass numbers looks way better than they actually are. There is that loophole where you can buy Xbox gold and convert to gamepass for a really small amount compared to what gamepass actually charges. A ton of people like myself got that deal, because it was like $100 for 3 years of gamepass. I will never renew or do gamepass again, as it’s just not worth it for me. I imagine there a ton of people like myself on the discounted converted plans with no plans of renewal, especially at full price.
They have set themselves up to lose a ton of users, and fail, and they are unaware.
And music streaming is only as good as it is because artists are getting completely shafted at every turn by both the streaming services and the record labels.
There have been a lot of good responses to the studio closures and good articles written, but this is not one of them.
Hi-Fi Rush was not a small project, and putting it in the same bucket as Balatro and Manor Lords is outright bizarre. It’s far closer to AAA budget scale than it would be solo/small indie projects.
Edit to add:
I don’t know how the fact presented here ended up being controversial somehow, but don’t take my word for it. Here’s a quote from John Johanas, Hi-Fi Rush’s director:
It was supposed to be a small project from Tango. And people probably see it as this weird, sort-of AA title. Or people are like, “Oh, they made a nice indie game.” This ain’t no indie game. Obviously, I can’t say how much it cost, but it was not a cheap game to make.
And lead programmer Yuji Nakamura:
For the first two years I would say it was a small project. But what John wanted to make was not a very small thing to do. We needed to get more and more people to help. In my mind, small projects would be maybe 20 to 30 people for two years. We ended up developing for about five; I wouldn’t call it a small project at all.
It’s not AAA by any stretch. It was sold at a fraction of the usual price point, it’s advertising was non-existant, and it makes no effort to do the usual AAA things: live-service, online multiplayer, “you can play it forever”, etc. are are not present.
But putting it side-by-side with Manor Lords and Balatro, the latter of which was a single-person dev, also doesn’t suit it. It has a real studio, a dev team with experience, and at least enough of a budget to license real music from popular (or at least, once popular) artists. I’d perhaps agree with your statement that it’s closer to AAA than to a “small dev” game, but it is true that it’s a “smaller game that [gives Microsoft] prestiege and awards”.
This is a great article highlighting the pig-headed double speak going on at Microsoft’s gaming divisions. On the one hand, they’re cutting studios and supposidly refocusing on their core offerings, while simultaneously describing the experiences they want to offer as exactly the studios they just cut. The absolute worst part is I can’t help but suspect that they’re going to take the IP, push it on a different dev team that they control and give it the Fable treatment: “this IP was so well received; make a sequel that checks all these boxes that our market research data tells us popular, profitable games have” while conviniently ignoring the passion and vision that the original devs poured into the original title.
I see the contradiction. And I’m not saying the game was AAA-sized, although live service, multiplayer, or ongoing support are not requirements for the term. It’s a budget classification. Hi-Fi Rush had 1,400 people in its credits.
My comparison to Balatro was more in the line of “Cleopatra lived closer to present day than the era the Great Pyramid was built.” We’re talking about massive gaps in scale, and gaming communities tend to have trouble reconciling that. Balatro is not Hades, Hades is not Hi-Fi Rush, Hi-Fi Rush is not Starfield.
I was a massive fan of the OG Xbox and the 360, and every generation since the 360, I’ve grabbed an Xbox with the hope of getting a taste of those glory days.
I’m over it. Microsoft is making dumb decisions up and down the org these days. Their decisions make me sad at work, then sad on the couch after work.
Couldn’t stand all the backtracking and checklist style gameplay. Plus the dialogue… Who was that made for? No emotions, not witty; it left no reason to listen to it.
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Aktywne