+- Tendo City (https://www.tendocity.net)
+-- Forum: Tendo City: Metropolitan District (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=4)
+--- Forum: Tendo City (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=42)
+--- Thread: MS shuts down some companies (/showthread.php?tid=7547)
MS shuts down some companies - Dark Jaguar - 7th May 2024
It happened again. And this from a company that posted 17% increased profits.
https://kotaku.com/microsoft-xbox-arkane-evil-within-3-prey-2-layoffs-1851461099
RE: MS shuts down some companies - A Black Falcon - 8th May 2024
Yeah, capitalism can be cruel sometimes.
For Arkane Austin, I'm sure that somebody decided that rebuilding the studio after the disaster that was Redfall wasn't worth the cost, so they are shutting it down instead. Apparently a lot of the good staff have left, so it's sadly somewhat expected -- one failure often takes out a studio now due to how much games cost to develop. This is a shutdown directly connected to Bethesda's mismanagement. But given how horrible a company Bethesda/ZeniMax were -- remember how they withheld payments to Human Head to try to force them to sell their company to them, did some really slimy stuff around the Fallout purchase, etc etc -- I think that there's no doubt who has the primary fault here, Bethesda. It's too bad MS shut it down instead of rebuilding the studio though, sure. But with most of the good staff gone, it's not the same studio...
For Tango it's a bit harder to understand, though I'd have to imagine that there was something going on behind the scenes, costs out of control or something? Also its founder Shinji Mikami left last year, so it was a studio without its famous leader. Their games weren't big hits (and I haven't played any of them, Hi-Fi Rush looked thematically very uninteresting to me with its music theme and all) but were popular with a hardcore audience, so shutting the studio has caused MS some very bad PR with core gamers. It was also MS's only studio in Japan. It'd be nice to know more of the reason for this closure -- did Hi-Fi Rush actually sell worse than MS suggested and they don't want to keep developing smaller games or something, was there internal problems at the studio after Mikami left, or what?
Overall though, it's not good to shut studios down, Nintendo's model is far better. Still, I think some people are exaggerating how bad this is in order to make Microsoft look bad. I'd guess a lot of those people are biased against Microsoft because they prefer Playstation...
RE: MS shuts down some companies - A Black Falcon - 8th May 2024
So it sounds like what happened is ZeniMax is still around as a branch of Microsoft, and they were told they had to reduce staff as a part of the ongoing problems the industry is currently having, with how dev costs are increasing, development times are getting even longer, and income isn't going up like it used to. ZeniMax decided to shut two studios that were not currently working on a game and would need a project and to hire new employees instead of cutting staff at studios working on something. So yeah, MS is the one that decided further cuts were required ut it sounds like it's ZeniMax who decided what to cut. ZeniMax may not have been the best purchase, their games have been iffy and management is the worst... but I know, I'm a Bethesda/ZeniMax hater, so I'm biased here. Heh.
With that said, there are strong rumors that MS is going to focus more on bigger games and less on smaller ones. Given that a lot of MS's recent smaller games are better than many of their recent larger ones I don't know about that decision... though they own Activision-Blizzard now, which is obviously part of the equasion -- it was an expensive purchase they want to start making back. ABK makes money, unlike Bethesda/ZeniMax, but still MS seems to think they need further cuts. I think what we're seeing is the ABK purchase is going to make MS money long term, but short term they're cutting elsewhere to make up for the cost, which is understandable but short-sighted.
Of course, part of the story here is that things are kind of bad for high-end gaming now due to the aforementioned problem of costs going up while income doesn't. We've seen lots of layoffs across the industry within the past year, and that sadly is probably likely to continue, it seems. Microsoft's problems are also about Game Pass, though. They pushed hard for Game Pass, but Game Pass subscriptions have stagnated. Also, Game Pass probably is hurting sales of some games, like Hi-Fi Rush. I don't subscribe to Game Pass and never have since it doesn't interest me, but besides that MS wants people to both subscribe to Game Pass AND to buy games, but if you can finish a mostly single player game in GP why then also buy it? So people don't. Microsoft isn't a uniquely bad company, I like their products and they still own a lot of amazing developers. It's too bad they are having problems, but closing potentially good studios probably won't help that.
Overall though, I think the main takeaway here is that Nintendo's strategy is so much better than anybody elses'... because while the rest of the industry consolidates, buys studios then closes some of them, and such, Nintendo keeps showing the better way. But their way probably makes less money, so the big companies aren't going to try it. Capitalism has a lot of good to it, it allows people to take chances and gets us things that would never have been tried otherwise, but we're definitely seeing two things here: first that there has been too much industry consolidation, and second that the length of dev time and increasing cost of development may be unsustainable unless new audiences for AAA videogames can be found somewhere. You can't keep having costs go up while income stagnates... I don't know what the solution industry-wide is any more than anyone else does.
RE: MS shuts down some companies - Dark Jaguar - 8th May 2024
Read "larger" as "heavily monetized".
Meanwhile... they did a this:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/8/24152137/xbox-hi-fi-rush-tango-gameworks-matt-booty
Bias against MS has nothing to do with this. We're mad at the whole damned industry ABF. Take Two just killed off two studios. One of them was making a game that at the time the studio was killed, had over a million concurrent players. It's that Skateboarding shooter thingy that's all the rage on the Twitchers right now.
RE: MS shuts down some companies - A Black Falcon - 9th May 2024
Yeah, it is most of the industry doing cuts right now, no question. Development times have just gotten too long and expensive, it's just ridiculous how many years finishing a single game takes now...
On a related note, Nintendo said recently that they've noticed dev times getting longer as well. They aren't firing people and are doing well at the moment, but they certainly know dev times are getting longer. See Zelda, the last one took six years to release a game which reused a lot of assets...
RE: MS shuts down some companies - Dark Jaguar - 9th May 2024
That's a part of it, but that's not the whole explanation. As I've mentioned before, these layoffs are happening far and wide outside the game industry.
RE: MS shuts down some companies - A Black Falcon - 23rd May 2024
On that note, IGN just bought some European gaming press sites and made some people redundant in the process.
RE: MS shuts down some companies - Dark Jaguar - 24th May 2024
IGN bought quite a few of them...
It's stunning to me that IGN somehow has survived all this time. I'd thought most of us gamers had just sort of abandoned them years... no decades ago, but apparently not? It's worrying to see them in charge of a number of these outfits.
The steady consolidation of every web site is just another example of the problems across numerous industries right now.