From past articles on why this is happening though, it’s that they had a growth strategy for years, with Game Pass, with Xbox consoles, with studios. Then what changed was the general state of the economy and Nadella’s goals. Game Pass plateaued, the old console model is clearly headed toward obsolescence, and they bought the world’s largest publisher by market cap. Suddenly Nadella decided that you can’t spend what you were spending, and it’s time to take profits.
That narrative doesn’t make much sense. There’s far too much competition in the industry, and you’re not reducing competition by shutting down the likes of Tango Gameworks.
Neither time was that my response. I have asked developers via social media for LAN or listen servers or offline modes, and I’ve never been nasty about it. Being doxxed or getting hate campaigns is not okay. Customers asking for features for a video game that are important to them are not harassment, and listening to requests for those features is part of the job. If everyone at a company wanted their game to live forever, from the bottom all the way to the top, and it didn’t launch with an offline mode, then I don’t believe they wanted it to live forever; it simply didn’t make their list of priorities.
Harassment is not an inherent part of Stop Killing Games. If publishers (or really, whoever the financiers are for a given game) wanted their game to live forever, they had the power at the start and opted not to.
People can (and shouldn’t) be nasty about anything. Part of a community manager’s responsibility would be to convey what customers are asking for, and…yeah, games should have listen servers and offline modes and do what they can to prevent cheating. Those are all things that some segment of their customers or potential customers care about. And at the same time, plenty of devs want to make their games live forever but don’t have the ability to make it so. It’s not inherently adversarial, nor does it inherently shift blame toward developers. We all know why we don’t have these things: microtransactions. The people mandating those are the ones with a profit share incentive, which aren’t typically the boots on the ground actually building the game.
There was plenty of off-the-record talk from devs who wanted something to show for the years they put into a project that was shut down in less time than it took to make the game in the first place.
The metrics on signatures for the citizens’ initiative. If it helped, it would have boosted those too, but it didn’t. He also got word that at least one very large YouTuber/streamer that he did not name decided to stay quiet about SKG because it would have contradicted Thor.
I’ll also reiterate that 1M signatures out of a population of 450M is an absurdly high threshold to have to reach, so getting 1/10th of that is still impressive, even if it’s unsuccessful.
It’s interesting to note that the Game Awards started having a tangible effect on sales in the past handful of years. Games that used to come out in November now come out in October at the latest, because that’s the deadline for Game Awards nominations.
The OpenCritic score is a very reliable predictor for winning the Game Awards, which is itself mostly an aggregate of review outlets. Donkey Kong is the next game from (probably) the Mario Odyssey team, and Odyssey has a 97 on OpenCritic, with Bananza looking to have a lot of the same design ethos. If I were a betting man, I’d be putting my money on Bananza winning GOTY. The previous Hollow Knight and Shovel Knight both hover around 90, so it’s possible but not the most likely thing in the world that Silksong or Mina exceed 90 by a wide margin, but they’ve got a better shot than most.
It’s definitely not decided yet. A breakout hit could still come out of nowhere, which seems to be happening more and more often lately, including Clair Obscur. There’s also still the likes of Donkey Kong Bananza, Mina the Hollower, and Hollow Knight: Silksong coming later this year, and those are just the ones on my radar that seem likely to review that well.
The settings targeted on PC typically far outstrip what consoles can do. I’m targeting modest settings that are still better than what a console can do in those blockbuster games, and it still runs better than on consoles. They just don’t scale as well as they should when you continue to crank the settings up.