Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - Switchin' It Up
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Greed1914
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The recent news with Sony and Microsoft makes me wonder how little attention execs pay to what is going on, and how much they are sort of just flailing around hoping something works.
I am convinced that what made Sony backtrack on Helldivers requiring PSN was that delisting. Review bombing might have affected it to the point they cared eventually, but getting yanked from Steam and potentially having to refund in now unsupported regions is something else. Did nobody there check ahead of time whether they region locked themselves? If it was always intended, and they only temporarily suspended the requirement, then why sell it anywhere that they didn't plan to support? Part of the launch problems were supposedly because of having more players than expected, which not selling in those countries would have helped. The execs at Xbox seem to have gobbled up more than they knew how to handle. Almost $70 billion and a year of legal wrangling meant that those above them were going to expect results. Apparently, they haven't figured out if COD will be on Game Pass or not, which seems like something they should have figured out before buying Activision. They recently said that they were spread to thin, so the thing to do is layoffs? I could see shifting a studio off of a game and onto a support role, but how do layoffs help with that load? They said Hi-Fi Rush beat all expectations, but that isn't good enough. Tango is closed, despite Xbox saying it wanted to keep trying to get a foothold in the Japanese market, and them saying they need smaller, award-winning games, like Hi-Fi Rush. Arkane Austin came to them after the Bethesda purchase asking to cancel Redfall. They get stuck continuing a dud, and despite assurances of "continued support" the studio is closed without even releasing in-progress patches or the DLC promised with the collector's edition. I don't think it is a coincidence that what they bought from that Zenimax deal is getting cut. That deal was big at the time, but was a fraction of the Activision deal, so now it's an acceptable to cut. Software revenue for them saw a massive jump, but it was almost entirely attributable to those ABK properties, and not organic. That isn't repeatable, but those numbers have to go up, so I think there was some panicking behind the scenes leading to choices that do not align with what they've said they wanted to do. |
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malvarez1
Posts: 2145 |
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Microsoft/Xbox are going down the tubes so fast it’s almost sad. I don’t know how they can overcome this PR nightmare.
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BadNewsBlues
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They’ve been willing to refund games numerous times over the years and I just find it odd that refunds for this game in particular was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back and made them change their mind.
They don’t really need to. Just look at what EA’s become. While we know the Xbox line has never been overly profitable for them if they decide to stop making consoles they could pretty much transition to the kind of role that Sega has. Now whether it’d be successful in the long term is another matter. |
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Traptrix Lover
Posts: 110 |
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I would assume it's less about refunds and more that it could be a violation of some kind of anti-consumer law. Maybe in the EU since they have all kinds of restrictions on that stuff. Although from what I hear Sony is going through with it for other games like Ghost of Tsushima so it's probably not over yet. Maybe they just have to find a way to legal-proof themselves.
I get people are upset but I don't know why people think studios should support financial failures just because it had "acclaim". Especially if we're only defining acclaim as being determined by a handful of people like judges on an award show. Any game can be acclaimed if you limit whose voice you're listening to. But either way acclaim doesn't translate to sales or money. No amount of people insisting Alan Wake 2 was an amazing game because Geoff Keighley gave it a ton of awards changed the fact they didn't even release a physical version of it because of how little faith they had in it and the studio later confirming that it didn't make it's development cost back despite all the push it got from the industry folks. Similarly, The Game Awards shutting out many other games doesn't change the fact they were some of the best selling games of the generation. Captial-g Gamers collectively mocked and ridiculed Fallout 76 ever since it launched with tons of meme videos making fun of it yet it's still alive 6 years later and getting tons of updates and just recently saw a new peak in players and has been cited as one of Bethesda's most profitable titles (no doubt due to the cash shop, but I digress) All that matters is sales and profit. As far as Arkane Austin goes I blame Dishonored 2. I know it was technically done by Arkane Lyon but it really tanked the series reputation and probably killed the franchise. The less said about Death of the Outsider the better. Prey had it's own controversy and sold even less than Dishonored 2 did and everyone already said what a disaster Redfall was so there's no need. When your last good game was made 12 years ago I can understand Microsoft pulling a Darth Vader and going "You have failed me for the last time.." before shutting down the studio. I remember liking the original Dishonored but I just view it as another case of a studio losing its way and no longer making the good games they used to so the sales decrease as people lose interest. |
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BadNewsBlues
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Usually if you opt not to make a physical version of a game that’s to cut costs not because you have little faith in it. As evidenced by most new PCs having no optical drive and many major publishers strictly sticking to digital releases for some of their titles.
Are we going to ignore the fact that mockery may have had to do with the fact the game launched in a messy state? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_notable_for_negative_reception#Fallout_76_(2018) Among other issues https://kotaku.com/bethesda-zenimax-fallout-76-crunch-development-1849033233 It wasn’t broken to the extent of Final Fantasy 14 leading to the game having to be scrubbed and rebuilt from the ground up but still.
No one told spoiler[Deathloop] Last edited by BadNewsBlues on Fri May 10, 2024 1:45 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
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So, you know how Helldivers 2 is currently one of the biggest games around? But you notice that there's a "2" at the end of the title? There was a "Helldivers 1", which was not a massive industry-defining success. A modest hit, sure, but nowhere near the level of its sequel. Sometimes, you need a modest success to be the bedrock for a big hit. You need to be willing to invest in your talent and in your assets. Now, on top of that, "Publisher shuts down award-winning studio" is just bad press all-around. HFR wasn't a huge hit, but it was a modest one with a major following. People were passionate for that game, there was fan art and cosplay and everything. (Korsica alone was more popular than the entirety of Starfield.) A sequel was likely to be a lot bigger, because now it has all this anticipation. And when audiences hear "sequel to the award-winning title", they're liable to pay a lot more attention. Now, add to that the optics of Tango Gameworks being the only Japanese studio that Microsoft had under their belt. They've spent years trying to get a hit in Japan--and they had one. From a studio with lineage, even ("studio started by Shinji Mikami" is a big deal in the industry). So they make a good game that people like and they have a shelf full of awards to show for it... and they still get shut down. It's one thing to shut a studio down when they're laying eggs. It's another when the studio serves you the hit you say you need on a silver platter... then you pull the trigger on them, then do the Eric Andre bit of "Why don't we have anyone making AA titles for us?". It's a bad show of faith, it snubs a lot of hard-working staff at your studio, and a lot of gamers don't like seeing people who do good work get shafted--especially not when it's for stuff they like. And remember: even if metrics are all you wanna go by, Microsoft had insisted Hi-Fi Rush was blowing past all their expectations. So even if folks all over the industry cheering for a game isn't enough, the sales and profit you were asking about were also there. |
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AiddonValentine
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Nintendo: Okay, now people can SHUT UP about a Switch Pro. They'll reveal the new one when they reveal it, so the speculators can stop gossiping. The only thing I'll say is I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo has a gimmick up their sleeve with it as that would be right up their alley.
Microsoft: -Ten minutes of Aqua-level incoherent screaming- Okay, got that out of the way. I've said this repeatedly over that last few days of Microsoft crapping their pants: the FTC was doing the XBox division a favor by blocking the ActiBlizz acquisition. Buying ActiBlizz was always a bad idea, it was ALWAYS going to put XBox in a hole they were never going to crawl out of and was going to make it too big and unwieldy to manage properly. In a true monkey's paw situation, Spencer might have just doomed the entire division because he was so desperate to not be in third place behind companies way smaller than MS. XBox could have just been a steady, reliable profit generator, but no, that was apparently too boring for Spencer. Now he's put his division under a spotlight and has to actually answer to the money men. That Bloomberg interview with Sarah Bond yesterday is the epitome of someone who was thrown to the wolves and no longer has any control over their destiny while Booty (how is that his real name!?), Greenburg, and Spencer all hide in a bunker. It was best summed up in an IGN column (whose writer Ryan McAffrey, I must add, was one of the people cheering for the acquisition and regularly going on Twitter tirades against Lina Khan and the FTC for blocking it, so serious "Never thought the leopards would eat my face" vibes) where a former XBox employee said "It's no longer XBox, it's Microsoft Gaming." OUCH Last edited by AiddonValentine on Fri May 10, 2024 2:40 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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BadNewsBlues
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Xbox as a brand was never profitable as that lawsuit to block the Activision-Blizzard merger unexpectedly revealed. So I don’t know what Microsoft would’ve been able to get out of it they weren’t already not getting out it profit wise had that sale been blocked.
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
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As it turns out, "Angriest" Pat Boivin made a very salient point on Twitter; there's a good chance the game industry at large doesn't have the revenue for Microsof to make back the money they spent buying Activision-Blizzard. They'd need something with GTA5's total profits over its nine-year life span--every year, for the next decade. |
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AiddonValentine
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That's around three times Nintendo's entire net profit for 2023, which was an unprecedented year due to Tears of the Kingdom and the Mario Movie. This whole thing was based off magical thinking and fairy dust from Spencer and the other executives. Nobody did one minute of planning ahead with this. |
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Bertram
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No physical on PC is expected but there wasn't a disk version for consoles either. Not sure if it was for cost cutting reasons or a scummy way to prevent resales or something but Hellblade 2 isn't getting a physical version either. We'll probably see more devs go digital only as a growing trend.
I think any company banking on being the next Helldivers 2 is in for nothing but disappointment. A situation like that is the exception and not the norm. More often than not a sequel to a middling game sees diminished returns and does even worse than the first one. Tango Gameworks experienced that already with the commercial failure of The Evil Within 2 which failed to sell even half what the first game did. People can criticize game company decisions but none of us are marketing researchers and I'm sure they know better than we do even if some fans might like to think otherwise. Hindsight is always 20/20 but there's probably more evidence that a Hi Fi Rush 2 would have gone the way of Dishonored 2 or The Evil Within 2 and not done as well. Not even Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth sold as much as Remake did. Honestly Tango Gameworks has been on the edge of being shut down for years now: Nakamura leaving in 2019, Hero Dice lasting only 5 months before shutting down, and then Mikami leaving in 2023. This was inevitable and not at all surprising to hear about.: especially if Hi Fi Rush really didn't make much money like the execs are saying. I know it had less than half the players Ghostwire: Tokyo did at the very least so it was a step down from their previous release. Last edited by Bertram on Fri May 10, 2024 4:54 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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FishLion
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The bedrock is very important, something people really overlook with any medium built on the work of artists is that these talent is something to be nurtured. To make big projects like gaming and animation come together takes a lot of experience and passion built up over a long time. The reason Bethesda could make such a mammoth franchise out of Fallout is because in the mid 90's Tim Cain convinced Interplay not to shuttle his experimental game or convert it into real time multiplayer (essentially a completely different game.) That game pushed through by a passionate creative vision was commercially successful, but did not meet sales expectations despite critical acclaim. Ten years after that it was picked up by Bethesda where it was remade into a totally new style of RPG and slowly built into a monolith in gaming culture. Even though the original creator had nothing to do with the franchise for a long time, it took a lot of creative direction, nurturing the franchise, and fan passion to lead to it's final form where Fallout 3 was worth purchasing the IP that was then developed and published by Bethesda. This worked for Fallout because Bethesda was taking a solid and critically acclaimed title with a lot of pedigree and making it a core part of their studio identity and business model while juicing it with the resources at hand. If we start breaking down studios for parts the second they make a game that wasn't to expectations but was still a modest success then the industry won't have enough creative vigor to find the next would be Fallout. If handled differently then those IPs could have been slowly growing seeds that have the potential to be the next big thing, but the way they handled it ensures that Microsoft will forever be seen as creative anathema. People will see them as a reliable producer of massive IPs who will kill your favorite thing if they buy it, which means if the flagship series ever falter there is no new creative IPs to build on and fans won't be supportive of you picking up their franchise through acquisition. Rare eventually made Sea of Thieves and is a success again, but if they were completely axed when Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts tanked (much worse than HFR it seems) then they would not have had the time to come up with such a different and innovative game. Tango may or may not have ever made such a success, but there a value very different from bottom lines in having creatively innovative game studios. |
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funkfoot
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@FishLion
Fallout seems likes one of the worst examples to use because a lot of hardcore old-school Fallout fans hate Bethesda Fallout and everything related to it and condemn it every chance they get for how it doesn't understand "real" Fallout. Fallout's probably one of the most divided fan bases out there where people can list hundreds of reasons why Bethesda doesn't understand Fallout and games like 3, 4, 76, and the TV Show aren't true Fallout. Luckily for me my favorite Fallout game is 4 and that's the one Betesda seems to be using as the basis for everything like the TV show and future games so I'm set. But seeing old school fans get upset when a Bethesda game or the TV show does something they don't like and feel like their games are being erased from canon is still noticeable. So some people would say the bedrock has been destroyed and replaced. New Vegas fans were not very happy with what happened in the TV show to say the least Personally I'm scratching my head at the idea that fanart or cosplay is a good way to judge the success or something. Just because a TV show or game doesn't have tons of fan art or cosplay doesn't mean it's not popular. I somehow doubt the Young Sheldon fandom is overflowing in fanart and cosplay compared to something like a seasonal isekai anime but I'm pretty sure it's still one of the highest rated shows out there and probably overall more popular. If fanart saved a franchise then a lot of those niche kid cartoons weird people online attach themselves too would have lasted more than a single season. Hi Fi Rush can have all the fanart and cosplay it wants but to say that makes it more successful or popular than something like Starfield or any other huge successful AAA seems crazy to me. That's not how companies make money or do business |
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BadNewsBlues
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And we thought Embracer dropped the ball throwing around all that money to snatch up studios all Willy Nilly and then waiting on an investment from the Saudi’s that never happened. Damn. |
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Nekbone
Posts: 51 |
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This news makes the Hi Fi Rush VS Forspoken rivalry last year all the more hilarious in hindsight as it turns out Forspoken still did better despite both dev studios being shut down in the end and no one was the winner in the end. I guess people should remember what they say about glass houses.
I couldn't find any sales data for it in Japan but it doesn't appear any of Tango's game did well there with Ghostwire Tokyo only selling 10,144 copies when it came out in Japan on the PS5. By comparison, Forspoken sold 29,055 copies in Japan. Not impressive for either of them. It didn't appear Tango was going to be the studio to put Microsoft on the map in Japan regardless, but Hi Fi Rush being heralded as Microsoft's foot in the door for Japan is weird because it was written and directed by Americans and has a completely American style and was purposely made to emulate Edgar Wright's style of films. |
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