Awesome! I've been excited for this game for a while now, glad to see it finally get a date. I might have to break my no-early-access rule for this one.
If this is true... Oof...
Like, imagine losing your job because somebody decided to drop over 70 milion in something like this... I bet everybody affected would have predicted that this needed to be canned way earlier. Yet the people responsible for this unforced error will be largely unaffected because since business is accepted to be a gamble at times, I guess that means you get to make stupid mistakes that ruin hundreds of livelihoods for no reason and just go oops, my bad, we'll have to do a tactical restructuring I guess.
Seriously, the first trailer was unanimously received with "another one of these games?" reactions. There is no excuse for any dollar spent after that! Anybody could have told you it was a miss! Aaaarrrgh.
Also much less important but still frustrating, knowing that so many properties under SEGA have struggled to get a budget and support, while they were spending all of the money in a fire pit instead. Now that it's been cancelled, we can say ANYTHING would have been a better use of that money. Don't ever let SEGA tell you that anything would be a bad project ever again! Oh, SEGA, you still think a localized port to modern platforms of Valkyria Chronicles 3 would be a bad project? Well let me tell you, it sure as hell wouldn't have lost DOZENS OF MILLIONS.
And in that line, nothing hurts more for me personally than knowing all of the issues that the Total War franchise has had, with products that didn't get the development time they needed, additional content policies that went way overboard with pricing, very small degree of evolution and investment between entries... And the money that could have gone to that consistently performing franchise that has no true substitute competitors was instead going to... To burn it in a pit with funny colors and masks and dances and...
I have to imagine it is related to the claims that they are gonna retool "Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators" and the acquisitions they have made of platforms related to user created content.
I really really hope that the expectation vs reality of Starfield is the final straw that makes people pause the next time a game markets itself as having an scope and quality that is absurdly beyond anything else on the market.
We have seen this story time and time again and the claims never, ever, materialize on launch. Maybe they get closer to the initial scope over the next few years if they can afford continued development and support, but that's exactly the point, that you need way more man hours and budget than what is acceptable in a realistic development cycle to reach that kind of scope while maintaining overall quality of the game.
The next time that a game claims to have absurd size or whatever million planets or that you can be anything you want or whatever other immense thing like that, ask yourself what parts of the game have taken a significant backseat to achieve that. Because we are well past the point of the industry having proven that the limitations for the scope of a game are not technical anymore, but budgetary. And there's only so much that can be done in 8 years.
We will implement reduction of various fixed expenses at several group companies in relevant region, centered on the Creative Assembly Ltd. We expect to incur one-time expenses related to reduction of fixed expenses.
The only "reduction of fixed expense" necessary here is whoever was supposed to keep their finger on the pulse of the industry, yet still decided to greenlight such an obviously late-to-the-party pitch in such an oversaturated part of the market, and chose to waste the time of a studio that has a successful monopoly in an underserved niche and could have been contributing to that kind of project instead.
Nah, even then that guy is still right. Go check out what Microsoft makes in a quarter, Q22023 for example.
They can afford that loss. Remember, Microsoft is stupid big and makes stupid money, if you go to any world index fund, Microsoft is like 3% of it. It is titanic.
Yeah, I know a Sims player and Sims 4 is literally the only game she plays. The way you or me would buy a new game, she buys a DLC. It's like it is its own gaming ecosystem for most of its players.
There've been some cases of remastering projects being affected by the loss of some of the source material, such as the Silent Hill HD Project
Which is why I find the negative attitude of so many of these companies toward emulation and fan conservation of abandonware so frustrating, there's a proven track record that they cannot be trusted with the task.
The fact that the same user reinstalling the game counts as 2 installs makes this doubly absurd. The decision is already baffling by itself but the idea that you could take a financial hit for an install that didn't net you any additional income is... Jesus.
Yeah... A new store would need to have a handful of killer apps and significant feature superiority over Steam, all on release, just to have a chance at being a successful competitor. And it would probably need to maintain that momentum for a decent amount of time, and it would probably also need a fuckup on Valve's part.
Freakin EA didn't achieve it, freakin Sony didn't bother trying it, Epic dropped a fuckton of cash just to barely move the needle. I can't imagine what it would take.