The only thing that matters to MS is money.
Remember when Microsoft bought Rare and did basically nothing with them for two decades?
Not nothing. They remade a bunch of games worse than the originals.
(Some people did enjoy Viva Pinata, but I didn’t play that.)
Viva pinata was absolutely dope
It’s one of my fondest memories on that console
Playing devil’s advocate, sometimes the blame is not solely on Microsoft.
Bethesda Softworks is a good example. They’d basically doomed Arkane to dev hell with that vampire game, and kept that little detail hidden during the acquisition; Microsoft gave them total leeway when the Arkane team supposedly hoped a “rescue” instead, and never got it.
It’s a hard argument though.
Take Phil Spencer. Just Phil Spencer. Thats an incredible crater, right there, and he failed upwards for it.
MS shot itself in the foot: MS gutted the team, then the game didn’t come out right and this resulted in bad sales.
Here are the Steam sales numbers:
- DOOM (2016): 5.4M
- DOOM Eternal: 4.7M
- DOOM: The Dark Ages: 1.2M
Dark Ages is meh. 2016 was legitimately fresh, and Eternal went a kind of interesting direction, but they legitimately need to take some time and go in a brand brand new direction if they want to make more than four of these games, because the “push forward” formula + lofi sf&f aesthetic alone is not going to cut it on its own.
FYI Doom The Dark Ages was available day 1 on game pass and they were boasting on social media that they had over 3 million players on the first week if I remember right.
It’s Microsoft’s fault the game didn’t sell. Most people (me included) opted to subscribe to game pass for a month instead.
I bought Doom 2016 and it literally wouldn’t even get past the loading screen. I tried every suggestion I found online and none of them worked. I ended up refunding. It’s why I never even considered the next two.
I think that’s Bethesda being incompetent as fuck. They burned bridge with Mick Gordon, after Doom Eternal then instead of making dynamic well optimized game they made I’d make Dark Ages.
Wait, there’s a new doom game? (Not joking, just noting that I’ve missed any mention of this whatsoever)
Been out for almost a year and just received a new DLC a few weeks ago.
Huh, TIL, and I learned it because it is, I’m guessing, really bad.
Tbh Doom TDA Revelations has been the most fun I’ve had with a game in years. It’s really good. But what M$ did to id software is disgusting. On release day of the DLC over half their employees got fired.
Good job guys, you finished the project. Now pack your stuff and go.
It’s not bad, it’s just not great and is also a mechanical deviation from what doom games usually are.
Not really. It’s actually pretty good. Microsoft just did jack all to market it for some reason.
It also did have some controversy at the start.
First is because of a granular difficulty customization, down to even having a slider to slow or increase the speed of the game itself. Some elitists got butt hurt over it.
Second is that it is a slower pace overall compared to the experience that 2016 and Eternal were. So, when it didn’t play like people expected, it caused some friction.
Yeah, this isn’t news and the studio owners who can cash big checks to sell don’t care.
I have talked to a mobile game Dev, a very drunker heart to heart. He had an India mobile game (like alto). He made about 120k in 5 years between two versions of the game. And then some tenent adjacent studio offered him 650k for the IP.
In his words “All I could think was that in 650k, my house would be paid. My education loan would be paid and I would still have enough money to ensure my kid goes to college and not worry about an education loan. I knew selling game would mean enshittification of my baby. But then i looked at my actual baby and I knew I had to betray the digital one”
That’s the first time I saw it from the dev point of view. He wanted to keep the project, but between choosing fans of his games that can’t keep a subreddit alive and doing right by no name, no face fan base vs 650k hard cash from a shitty studio that would concretely secure his family’s future. I am not sure if I would hold out.
I know it’s not the same with the studio Microsoft bought… But I can’t help but wonder people who sellout might not be such horrible pieces of shit that we imagine them to be.
When you’re young you tend to think accepting money means you’re a sellout.
When you’re an adult you think accepting money means you’re taking care of your family.
Also adults are less likely to think video games are the most important thing in the world.
Microsoft has a lot more problems than that, but I suppose that’s the only one Steve Jobs would care about.
Steve engineers developed the iPod Touch in secret because they thought he would look at the ugly prototype and can the whole project Jobs
Steve so impossible to please as a boss that his worker developed an application for him to develop a calculator layout because nothing the other designer did was ever good enough Jobs.
Steve the iPad won’t get a calculator for fourteen years even though his corpse is long since dead and buried Jobs.
anyone who is hopeful about xbox’s new leadership probably isn’t terribly aware of microsoft’s past. they’ve done this dance a million times. “we’re improving!” -> people believe it yet again -> surprise, they found a way to suck even more now.
Poisonous leopards never change their spots after all.
Basically: The thing everyone worried about and quite frankly knew would happen when Microsoft started buying every studios they could get their hands on… happened.
Embrace. Expand. Extinguish. It never went away. Careless incompetence. The shareholders way.
Shareholders: “Wow, Microsoft is really expanding by buying up those studios, promising great output for them in the future!”. Line goes up.
Microsoft then does nothing except investing all of their money into AI.
Shareholders: “Wow, Microsoft is really streamlining their organisation by dumping all of those useless dead weight studios. Excellent management”. Line goes up.
I absolutely hate how on the nose this is. sigh
TIL that this is a valid use of “on the nose” (definition 1). I was genuinely confused, I’m only familar with definition 2 there, “unimaginative; overliteral; lacking nuance; unsophisticated”.
TIL about the second definition
We are the lucky ten thousand.
“Wow, I hate how on the nose this is”. Line goes up.
“predictable investment”
Yeah. I would look at Microsoft’s aquisition of studios as those studios exiting the space in the long term. Gaming is thriving but it’s not the big studios, it’s the myriad of indies and smaller games that are where the innovation and interest is. The monolithic AAA gaming space is in a crisis of it’s own making - driven by shareholder demands and the view of games as nothing more than franchises to milk every year.
Also, AAA is struggling with games being too large. Every game is so expensive and has so many years of development that it’s hard for a studio to survive a flop without a major publisher. But the major publishers are pushing for studios to pursue games that have a really high flop rate (live-service, competitive shooters/etc). Additionally because every game has so much money invested in it, the studios are scared to try anything too different or unique, resulting in the games having a bland “design-by-committee” and not offering anything meaningfully different from what’s already out there. Features are intentionally held back so that the game will have content to drip-feed the players later, resulting in lacking content at launch.
I really think the AAA industry needs to downside, split up many AAA studios into multiple AA projects.
What I’m worried about is some of those greedy fuckhead parasites would start courting big indie studios and AA games and ruining a part of that scene
I assume that Microsoft is trying to appeal to two different groups of shareholders. The first sees Microsoft buying up studios and assumes that the studios will be able to put out better games cheaper (by firing support staff like HR). The second group sees Microsoft cutting low performing workers and assumes that Microsoft will be able to get more profits by cutting lots of cost without losing much income. If they time it right, they can get the second group to start buying just as the first group starts selling.
Yep. They don’t understand games so they buy studios that DO understand games, and then turn them into divisions of Microsoft instead of game studios and are surprised that they no longer can make games.
Im not even sure the extinguish part is intentional here. I think they are just genuinely this incompetent, but Greys Law applies here imo.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
See also: the US government
What we gotta do is start going after the people selling the studios and companies and pillars of society. Make selling off unprofitable or even downright dangerous again and we’ll see companies that compete to grow instead of compete to sell inferiority while intentionally poisoning competence.
Except, game dev companies are not competitors for MS (meaning XBOX), but essential for their survival. What’s the point of extinguishing your source of supply?
They’re probably banking on the fact that devs love making games, and when a bunch get laid off, some of them will inevitably go start some new studio that Microsoft can swoop in and buy again in 5-10 years, wring another game out of, then toss aside like trash again.
It’s the EA strategy. Wait for a studio to get public recognition, buy it out and milk it until the devs break for the exits, start a new indie studio, rinse the blood off and repeat. Frankly every “Creative Industry” since they invented the Victrola has operated the same way, and it’s only a hair’s breadth different from how noble patronage worked (and arguably more exploitative). And every time anyone tried to build a more co-operative style system, they burn it to the ground with market manipulation and regulatory capture.
That seems like a bad business model to me.
It’s been working so far
Only ‘working’ to make a few rich cunts even richer, which is not what I’d call working.
Embrace. Expand. Extinguish.
That implies careful planning.
In this case, MS thought just mindlessly throwing money around will somehow bring in massive profits.
Its just a vestigal instinct at MSFT these days lol.
You have to remember that the only person who ever really wanted Microsoft to get into console gaming was Bill Gates and this was largely an extension of his own love of video games and obsession with getting MS into the living room. Other efforts included things like WebTV, MSNBC, and a device that led to the creation of TiVo. Ballmer cared about Bill’s legacy but once the two of them were gone nobody was left who gave a rat’s ass about Xbox.
They had vision and knew how to build a brand. The current CEO’s idea of branding is to name their products after a tool that absolutely no one will be using.
I get what you’re saying, but it’s probably worth pointing out that the Xbox was built on the ashes of the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast ran Windows CE, a precursor of sorts to Windows Mobile. Microsoft was perfectly happy using an already wounded Sega, who had mismanaged their last two console generations and lost a lot of users to the then fairly new PlayStation line, as the test bed for the software platforms that would eventually power the Xbox, though under a slightly different hardware platform. This is why, among other things, the Duke controller looks very much like a Dreamcast controller.
Like a lot of things that Gates did, he was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Probably true, although Ballmer didn’t screw it up and Nadella did screw it up for one simple reason. He’s a 1 Cloud Pony. He came from the cloud and that’s all he really knows, and his narrow Senior VP perspective helped him extract earnings from cloud but nothing else at Microsoft.
In the future they will have difficulty recruiting talent for projects and as a result will have to pay people way more like Meta because of the stigma.
They also don’t understand software.
Or user privacy.
Or valuing their own workers.
Or how to respectfully be a part of the F/OSS ecosystem.
Or humanity’s desire to not live in a pollution stream from their AI processing centers (they’re not really “data centers”).
Or that we all wish LinkedIn would self-destruct under the weight of its own bullshit, and magically blink itself out of existence.
Not a single fucking CEO understands art and games. They only thing they understand is profit$. That’s all that matters to them.
Of something can’t generate a profit, it’s essentially useless. Art? If you can sell it at a profit it’s good. Or doesn’t matter if nobody will ever see it. Oxygen producing trees, sea weed, algae? Not worth a damn until it’s cut down, collected, and sold. Food, water, shelter and basic human needs? Gotta make a profit. Don’t matter if we can produce tons and people are going hungry, homeless and thirsty, if we can’t generate a profit.
Capitalism is a fucking cancer. And these guys are the rogue cells that make it grow.
They are blinded by their own goals, and forget how things are interconnected. Or maybe its just arrogance.
I’ve seen it on the smaller business side too. They want immediate profit, so cut key staff when the work slows a bit, rather than carry the veterans till the next projects. Then complain that things aren’t getting done and the costs to outsource the missing skill set is high.
While the lower levels are like : this is exactly as we predicted it would go.
Yeah, because they are a business first and everything else, second. Business ruins everything.
Shareholders.
Businesses can do fine without them.
Everyone should be able to talk about their current employer as openly as Hays here
Meh.
Their understanding and objectives are simply different than game devs.
And game devs understanding and objectives are different than mine.
MS is a massive org with a research arm with more money than Croesus. God only knows what their C-level and upper management have gleaned from that arm.
At a minimum, we aren’t privy to their actual objectives, so statements like “they don’t get gaming” are meaningless - they get it as well as they need to for their objectives.
Not to defend them, just that we don’t really know what they intend, what they’re really trying to do.
But to call them ignorant would be naive.
But to call them ignorant would be naive.
I used to believe that sort of thing, in my callow youth. They’re rich and powerful, they must know what they’re doing. It’s hard to imagine how anyone paying attention to the news these past ten years could still believe it. There’s no mysterious logic behind their nonsensical decisions. There’s no more than luck involved in any success those decisions have brought them. When they behave like clueless twits it’s because they’re clueless twits.
anyone that’s been in a csuite meeting knows it’s all nepotism and good ol boys
no brains in the lot of them
just keep failing your way up until your so big the government has to bail you out
Yeah, I think all their talk about games not being where they want and bringing in a new head of Xbox and saying “they’ve tried everything” to make their games division successful how they want shows they have no idea and are just going shotgun style with changes and hoping something works.
Hell, the way they let Halo, Elder Scrolls, and Fallout be managed shows they don’t really know anything and just sit around waiting for magic to make them rich.
Not to defend them, just that we don’t really know what they intend, what they’re really trying to do.
They want profit. Maximum profit, preferably by the end of this quarter. Failing that, they want monopoly power. The fact that M$ is going all in on AI (it already spent over 150 fucking billion dollars on it as capital expenditure) with nothing to show but “trust me bro” revenue and empty promises should be all you need to know about how far up their own asses the higher ups are.
When they went on a studio acquisition spree, it was with the intent of gaining market share. This was back when cloud gaming was “the next big thing”, but that it has mostly disappeared from headlines should make it obvious that it was not “the next big thing”. Sure, only Google Stadia was shut down, but you don’t hear much about GeForce NOW, Amazon Luna or even Xbox Cloud. “Cloud gaming” was nowhere near as big as they hoped and is unlikely to be, even with the absurd prices of electronics thanks to the AI craze.
We are talking about the M$ which is actively sabotaging their own mainline programs for greater profit extraction. Win11 is a mess of unwanted ads, worse than Win10 ever was. They bundled copilot everywhere - teams, office, even fucking notepad - in order to artificially boost adoption numbers.
All of the decisions that put focus on profit extraction come from higher up. None of them come from Joe Software Engineer, who has to do what the boss says or pack his shit and look for a job elsewhere.
Their objective is the same as every other corporation:
Provide shareholder value that grows indefinitely.
They don’t care about games or art, they see them as a means to an end, the end being profit above all.
