Eliminating 9,000 jobs only guarantees they’ll flounder even longer.
Maybe. Microsoft’s biggest revenue stream has historically been government contracts. I don’t see that failing them anytime in the next decade.
But retail consumer spending? That’s something that could seriously take a few hits in the next big downturn. I can see a company putting its finger to the wind and betting a '08 style recession will kill the market for console gaming in another two or three years.
That’s a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.
Okay, sure. But consider that they didn’t earn those billions of dollars by sucking up to the right assortment of Wall Street financiers, rich family members, and ego-driven Presidential nominees.
But then again, the mass general population is fucking dumb
That’s a lazy explanation. It neglects that Netflix did have a lot of accumulated goodwill from ease of access and quality content.
But now its in the enshittification era. All the streaming services are behaving like this. There’s no alternative that doesn’t suck with a comparable library.
*Also the writing generally sucks ass and assumes I’m not paying attention.
I’ve seen the articles dealing with the phenomenon of “Standard Netflix Show” and how it has become so painfully formulaic that it can only be described as background noise.
Really not a great sign when your premium service is treated like elevator music. But hey, they’ve got a near-trillion dollar valuation, so clearly I’m dumb and their C-levels have earned every penny.
Netflix getting in on the streamed video games wasn’t all that crazy. I flirted with it initially, as they had a few good Steam titles on there that I was effectively getting handed for free.
But the marketing approach of jamming “Play this clickbait garbage game, you stupid idiot!” install button into my face every time I visited the site ultimately lead me to cancel my subscription. Like so much else in modern streaming, the website’s admins do not want you to have any control over your front page. The end result is utterly alienating.
I genuinely enjoyed the Kingdom Hearts action-adventure with a couple of celebrity minions supporting your Dark Souls-style main character and the occasional Big Summons to drop a global special effect. I don’t think its bad on its face.
But they’ve invested so much time and energy into making Live Action work as a system that everything from the story to the game mechanics have suffered. Like, if you want to make a FromSoft game, then go over to FromSoft and do a business partnership to make Eldin Fantasy: The Soulslike Crystal Saga. You don’t need to keep tinkering with this engine that clearly doesn’t work.
Also, the FF7Remakes seem to have found a sweet spot. Why can’t the mainline games deliver this level of quality?
Also, also, also why have you abandoned ChronoTrigger? Twelve different DragonQuest titles but you gave up on Chrono in the mid-90s? You monsters.
14 crashed and burned until they brought in the A-Team to reboot it.
I’d say that had a much bigger impact on Dev cycle than a successful release on the first try with 7Remake.
If nothing else, successful releases produce more talented Devs, while failures burn them. And that gets us back to 15, which was an outright dumpster fire.
I’ve had a great time with Remake and Rebirth. They put a lot more into it than some of the earlier spit-shines on 2D classics, which wouldn’t have worked for a game that was kinda in between generations of art and technique. But they’re really dragging this shit out. And I really don’t need a ChronoTrigger Integrade.
The franchise and the world have abundant potential. There’s no reason they couldn’t do something really creative and exciting with it. It just feels like the modders already did exactly that, only to have their work thrown in the trash.
As a rule of thumb, you’re looking at 25-50% of a AAA game’s budget going to advertising. So a $40 game becomes an $80 game in large part because the publisher is putting out $10Ms-$100Ms just to raise name recognition and build hype.
there are the likes of South of Midnight and Clair Obscur launching at $50.
Beautiful games, both. But again, they aren’t having the full court press of advertising like a new Call of Duty or Final Fantasy or Diablo would.
That’s the real cost savings. You don’t need to change $80+ for a game if you aren’t focused entirely on presale figures to justify your studio’s budget.
Incidentally, you also get to focus on a better game. Balatro didn’t need wall to wall subway ads in New York to end up on everyone’s phones.