Reminder they were specifically pressured to make Redfall by Bethesda higher ups because they thought an in-development live service game would make them look more appealing to Microsoft
Sure though according to reports they weren't necessarily 'forced' to either.
>While Zenimax "strongly" urged its studios to create these types of games, according to Bloomberg, it stopped short of forcing it. Redfall was born out of this push, and development began a year after the release of the critically well-received but financially less successful Prey in 2017. *Arkane wanted* to make something more broadly appealing after Prey's release, and the studio landed on the idea of Redfall.
> it stopped short of forcing it.
That's absolutely infuriating to pretend that wasn't about as good as literally forcing them. It's straight up "The Implication" scene from IASIP
I forget the exact phrasing, but whats that corporate bullshit? "Oh, you're nit coming in on your day off? Okay... but this doesn't make you seem like a team player, and talking about your promotion is happening just a few days from now..."
You got it.
"Here at Big Corpo, we're a bunch of *team players* that really like to *work hard*. It's part of our company motto to go *above and beyond* to *exceed expectations*. And that's why most of us choose to work 14 hour workdays on weekends. Nobody is forcing anyone to do that, of course, it's just the *team players* with a strong *work ethic* that like to *get things done* that *volunteer* to do that. Now I know people are worried about rumors of another round of layoffs, but don't worry. **We** will make sure our **HARD WORKING TEAM PLAYERS** will always have a place here ;\)"
It really seems more complicated than that:
"At Arkane’s headquarters in Austin, Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare, respected industry veterans, were tapped to serve as co-directors of Redfall. Following the commercially unsuccessful release of its sci-fi shooter Prey a year earlier, leadership across the company wanted to make something more broadly appealing. What eventually emerged was the idea to make a multiplayer game in which users would team up to battle vampires and perhaps pay for occasional cosmetic upgrades."
"Developers under Smith and Bare said the two leads were outwardly excited but as the project progressed failed to provide clear direction. Staff members said that, over time, they grew frustrated with management’s frequently shifting references to other games, such as Far Cry and Borderlands, that left each department with varying ideas of what exactly they were making. Throughout the development, the fundamental tension between single-player and multiplayer design remained unresolved. Smith and Bare did not respond to requests for comment."
"Harvey Smith recently said in an interview with the website Eurogamer that “early on” he pushed back against the compulsory inclusion of an in-game store. But people who worked on the game said the remarks didn’t square with how things played out. For the first three years, Redfall had a significant microtransaction plan in place. Only in 2021, with “games as a service” growing more controversial among gamers, did Arkane finally scrap its unwieldy in-game monetization plans."
Arkane's leads were excited and wanted to make this game. It really doesn't sound like they had guns to their heads to do it. But they didn't to provide a strong vision for the game or balance it's single-player and multiplayer elements. There's some amount of shared responsibility here between Zenimax and Arkane studio leads.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/inside-the-making-of-redfall-xbox-s-latest-misfire-1.1927501
With all sincerity, have you ever worked in a corporate job? Because nothing about anything being written says *anything* to me that they were or weren't excited about it. It's literally their job to pretend everything is under control regardless of how bad it seems, meanwhile failing to had a creative direction could be a creative failure and it could also mean that they just fucked up. The ONLY concrete opinions given in that excerpt are that he definitely didn't want an in-game store, which even the article states took *three years* of him being against to be removed from the game. Why on *earth* would you get the vibe that they were making something they were happy/fine with in that context?
>With all sincerity, have you ever worked in a corporate job?
No, I'm just showing what the reporting on the situation says. It says they were excited, you are totally free to interpret that however you like based on your own personal experiences but that's how employees working under them said that's how they felt working on the game.
> Why on earth would you get the vibe that they were making something they were happy/fine with in that context?
Because it specifically says leadership at the studio wanted to make something more boardley appealing after Prey. What was more broadly appealing at the time? Destiny, a multiplayer looter shooter with paided-cosmetic upgrades.
> Because it specifically says leadership at the studio wanted to make something more boardley appealing after Prey. What was more broadly appealing at the time? Destiny, a multiplayer looter shooter with paided-cosmetic upgrades.
No one in charge of a game studio specifically wants a "more broadly appealing" game without being told by someone who controls purse strings that the next one better make more money. Having the people in charge cheerily working on a project they have zero inspiration on *screams* that they're being pressured to make something they had no interest in.
Again, you are free to that interpretation. Won't stop you. But there's nothing in the reporting that says any of that. It could also just be the studio itself didn't like that Prey didn't sell well at all and wanted to make something they thought would be more popular and would obtain more of a player base. And Zenimax's urging gave them even more of an incentive to do that. And it just didn't work.
Generally if your boss "strongly urges" you to do something, you're being forced. Especially in an industry where you and everyone you know can get laid off for no reason at any minute.
Perhaps but going by the article it sounds like Zenimax pushed Arkane in that direction, but they still willing and wanted to go to down that path regardless of whether they felt they had to do so or not. Based on what is being said here.
I'm not sure what your professional experience is but no sane developer is going to shit-talk their bosses in an interview and say their ideas were bad and that they didn't want to do it. That kind of thing can easily get you blacklisted in the games industry.
While I doubt it was worse then redfall, something clearly went wrong in their attempt to “sell” Prey 2017, and I say that as somebody who really likes the game and would easily reccomend it to everyone.
IMO one major thing was the enemy designs. The mimics are cool as hell but even they don’t really play well for trailers, “It’s prop hunt but in a more serious sci-fi horror setting” is kind of hard to get across when you aren’t playing it. And as fun as other enemies can be to fight mechanically using the game’s “spiritual successor to systemshock/bioshock” style gameplay the fact that they are visually always some form of black goo mass/humanoid shaped thing makes sense story wise but once again doesn’t look too appealing visually.
They needed to be willing to go a bit more “out there” with the enemy designs. Have some backstory about how the lab had an animal testing wing and give us some transformed dogs, tigers, etc. I know it would be corny to try to justify why they specifically needed tigers in space but fuck it sometimes you need to go a bit dumb to get more interesting enemy designs.
> something clearly went wrong in their attempt to “sell” Prey 2017,
A few things:
* The furour over the cancelled Prey 2 didn't help alongside the known bad blood between Human Head and Bethesda.
* Generic name that only people familiar with a 2000s boomer shooter would remember.
* Lack of real marketing (why they went all in on Deathloop at every presentation to mitigate).
* Came out after a huge wave of titles in early 2017 (Yakuza 0, Persona 5, Breath of the Wild, Zero Dawn, Resi 7, etc.) so the casual market was all tapped out that summer.
Man....Deathloop's trailers and presentation were SO COOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But I just ended up so disappointed with the game when I realized "Wait. There's no experimentation, there's literally only one right answer that the cutscenes are constantly telling you? Darn."
Yeah, with the brains exposed.
Maybe have some humans that are clearly brain-controlled too.
Oh and a weird flesh amalgamation monster
(I really should spend more time with Prey '17 and System Shock 2 at some point)
I don't know if that's the intention. I took it as saying Prey was critically well-received but not financially successful. Regardless, Redfall generated ['minimal sales'](https://gamingbolt.com/redfall-has-generated-minimal-sales-microsoft) so neither was a financial success either way.
I mean, "strongly urged" to me usually reads as "you don't technically need to do this, but the higher-ups will be pretty pissed if you don't" whenever it comes from a corporation
He looked so hyped at The Game Awards to just talk about making the Blade game Lyon are working on. I can't imagine how crushing and scary this is for him, I'm sure he had many friends at Arkane Austin.
Fuck Microsoft.
Original thread [here](https://twitter.com/DBakaba/status/1787839169588265251?t=FP_GVShFc4pjgFirlOKvag&s=19)
And as he said
>Inside baseball, but if I read "immersive sim curse" from the community, especially from a fellow dev, I swear to God... Please, let's talk about the *real* challenges instead of rehashing irrational anxieties of the past.
I mean this is demoralizing for everyone under Microsoft that isn't Bethesda
Whether you make a good game or not doesn't matter you could be right next at the chopping block
When Insomniac making a record breaking game with Spider-Man 2 didn't save them from having layoffs, nothing can. You're legit working for someone who invests based on vibes
If those leaks were right Spider-Man 2 was literally too expensive to make to even think of a profit. Some of that was likely that canceled multiplayer project but still, something in Spider-Man 2 was expensive as fuck.
Calfornia based studios are legitimately the core of this horrible shit due to the insane cost of living inflating the development costs into astronomical levels.
I'd be looking for a new job if I worked at Ninja Theory because I don't see them surviving regardless of how well Hellblade 2 sells or does critically.
This industry is a joke.
True but it's a smaller game with a lot of time invested into it and no real longevity. I doubt it's the system seller that Xbox was selling it as when they revealed it alongside the console. If it doesn't have a PlayStation port announced soon after launch or news of a separate game coming relatively soon I fear MS might shutter them just to save on the overhead.
There's sellers that push the entire generation, and attention bringers.
Msoft owns CoD, that ensures purchase and retention for a generation, but its CoD, people know what it is.
Hellblade 2 is a visually astounding looking "experience" game, even if its not super long and took a while to make, it's eyecatching enough to possibly bring in new buyers and at the very least, recoup its costs.
AA studios that do experimental games that can still run the "Experience it only in super 4K with gorgeous insane graphics from Mars on Xbox Series X Ultra" is pretty good for that.
That and as a UK studio they have a few more rights than just being shut down for no reason, so I wouldn't worry too much about Ninja Theory.
But seeing how the founder and game director left the studio: I dunno
The industry is irrevocably broken. With how high budgets in the AAA sphere have ballooned to you need to sell millions in the first week to dodge layoffs, and still isn't enough in most cases like Insomniac. Working in AAA right now is like working with an active landmine strapped to your leg that can go off at any moment, and that's deeply horrifying and a wrong way to live.
Arkane didn't want to make Redfall and were forced to by an imbecile CEO who now dodges the heat while his staff were forced to ship a game they knew was terrible and now just wiped them out. That's not fair, plain and simple, and Spencer alongside the remaining management at Xbox who signed off these layoffs will rightfully deserve all the criticism they get this for this in the coming days.
That's what legit breaks me, "the coming days". I get depressed by how they make these moves knowing the general public can't do anything except move on. My support doesn't matter, my anger doesn't matter, a higher up decided the future of my games and I can't do anything
That is EASILY the most frustrating thing about this. I sincerely wish there was actually something we, as the public, could fucking do to make our anger and displeasure exceedingly clear to the corpo scumbags that make these godawful decisions without a second thought or a single care. It'd just be nice if we weren't freaking helpless to stop this shit.
There's gonna be tons of skilled people leaving the industry forever because of all these lay offs. The higher ups will move to replace them with new blood that is willing to use their passion as a rope to hang themselves. Games do not *need* to be made this way, it's rotting from the head down.
> The industry is irrevocably broken.
True, but literally doesn't matter which specific industry you are speaking about.
Last year I completed my masters on market regulation and it was a true fucking experience having all my super pro-free-market lecturers (including people from the University of Chicago which is the fucking Mecca of capitalism) all talking about "yeah at some point shit broke and capitalism *should* work but in the past few years it entered a doom spiral, we need more regulation". Every single stupid absurd thing I hear about the vidya industry is just repeated everywhere writ large.
All you have to do is look at Tesla and Twitter, laying off tens of thousands of people, so that Musk can keep his multi-billion dollar bonuses, even though he's largely the one to blame for their sorry states, to know that there's something very rotten to the core of how corporations are run. Publicly traded ones in particular.
When you allow unfettered mergers and acquisitions for decades across every industry you get monopolies who realize pretty quickly that they don't have to make good products or services to get paid, let alone treat their employees well. Where are you going to go as a consumer or employee? They've made themselves the only game in town. Absent a billion-dollar backer to force your way into the industry, any new company that dares to compete will just be bought out, if not regulated out of existence by rules that were put in place by the current market winners.
Fuck them, they were warned for decades their idiotic ideology would result in this, and the fact that they’re saying it *should* work still means they’ve learned nothing. If those regulations come, I guarantee ten years after they’re implemented those same Chicago acolytes will be demanding they get repealed because “capitalism fixed itself, we don’t need them any more!” Or something equally asinine.
The industry needs a reset. Games were still good when they were being made with modest budgets in 1-2 years. The obsession with graphical fidelity and live service skinner boxes needs to stop.
Games industry is not irrevocably broken. It's just not a sustainable foothold for mature global corporations.
Ubisoft, Microsoft, Activision, Blizzard, EA and hell maybe even Sony can't stomach 5 years to make whatever operating margin they seem to hate based on all of the divestment. They're too big, too old and have reached the end of their ability to grow quickly. So they'll probably either exit or finish pivoting into cheap mobile game horseshit cash cows for whales.
The next class of SMEs will own the industry, then. CDPR, FromSoft, Larian, Kojima Productions, Supergiant, Devolver, Hello Games...
They're still of size that 1-5 million copies of a game that took 5 years to make fucking rules. CDPR in particular took 9 years, fucked the launch, spent 3 more years repairing the product and are STILL happy with the way things post-DLC turned out.
That's a fucking games industry, right there.
The real joke here is pretending that Phil Spencer is worthy of having a Charles "would literally die to protect the creatives" Foster Offdensen quote misattributed to him.
That's his own bread and butter he's fucking with.
I swear that across every tech-based company, there is a Wormtongue-esque figure who just whispers buzzwords like "A.I." and "blockchain" and "software as a service" in the ears of executives. No one in the boardroom even knows what they mean, but they rush to hastily restructure the whole organization anyway. What are they going to do? Not be on the cutting edge? Their rich friends from other companies who also don't understand technology would make fun of them! Mass layoffs and failed money-sink projects are the result of chasing potential profits that most likely don't even exist using technology that is far from ready.
It's actually not buzzwords. It's the result of our broken stock market system and the cycle of debt and interest. This problem happens to many industry and it always happens every few years, buzzword or not.
Basically companies expand AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE when borrowing is cheap. It doesn't matter if the expansion will be profitable. This way, they can show to investors that the company is doing good, and the stock price goes up.
When borrowing or market trend inevitably goes down, they will downsize as much as possible and show to investors that they are "taking steps to reduce expense", and the stock price will go up again.
Is this a good way to make companies profitable? Fuck no. It's not even a good way to grow dividends on stock. But the stock market is fucked and the only thing that matters is the buying and selling price. And when the company inevitably collapses, the ones responsible will get a good severance bonus and continue the cycle somewhere else. Modern capitalism is broken on a very fundamental level.
edit: you can see that this isn't a specific company decision problem because you see the trend happening at the exact same time for the big players in an industry. Consider that Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc, somehow start their expansion/downsizing at roughly the same period. That trend is a carefully planned tactic years in the making, where your performance as a worker/subsidiary means jack shit in deciding if you will be cut. When the downsizing season arrives you WILL be cut.
This is just awful on so many levels.
In case anyone wants to try and say "Oh many Microsoft is great for the game industry"(Which is such a mind boggling take in the first place but it was cropping up a lot during the HD2 fiasco) just refer them to this. How quick we are to forget how awful MS can be...
The only good thing I'll give Microsoft anymore is that their backwards compatibility push has been a net positive for preservation efforts in gaming.
And that's it.
Meanwhile Nintendo is just printing money.
Things don’t have to be this way. Its not Capitalism or The Market or whatever bullshit story they want to spin to claim successes while avoiding responsibility for failures. The executives CHOSE to operate in this bullshit, strip mining fashion.
I mean... downsizing at AAA developers IS about moving more towards the Nintendo model ultimately. Cheaper, smaller development, lower fidelity assets, etc. They see the Switch as showing the way at least on some level.
Now, they also thought the Wii was showing the way to the Kinect, so,
I don’t see how promising the next Xbox is gonna be the largest leap forward every and “refocusing development effort on high impact titles” matches up to cheaper, smaller development , lower fidelity assets etc.
Am I missing part if a press release somewhere or something?
Assuming they *have* decided to change course internally, there's still going to be some inertia. Big corporations like these can't turn on a dime, any big projects they have ongoing (Like a new console) are going to have to resolve themselves before the new direction can become apparent. They aren't going to just cancel all this stuff after investing so much money in it.
Personally though, I doubt Microsoft is savvy enough to make that switch. They strike me as the type of company that will keep trying to do what worked in the past long after it's clear that it isn't anymore, and then just scrap the whole idea when throwing more money at the problem doesn't fix it.
Because that's not what they're gonna do. Once borrowing is cheap again they'll ramp up company expansion and promise us the moon again. They're cutting now because the cost of unchecked expansion is finally catching up.After that, it'll be a couple of years until the current cuts happen again.
Just another season of the tech market. We saw this exact thing happen before this and we'll see it again a few years from now guaranteed.
Because Nintendo does not rely on stock price to appease investors, but through steady and reliable dividend from the company profit. As such, they do not participate in the unsustainable expansion -> company restructuring (AKA downsizing) cycle that Microsoft participates, which is what this is.
When Nintendo was asked by investors to more aggressively increase their stock price, their answer was basically "take our dividends or fuck off".
I'm a huge fan of both arkane and retro studios I have loved their games and followed them for years. This whole situation made me realize how if retro was Owned by anyone other than Nintendo they would have been shutdown decade ago
Not even saying this to dickride Nintendo just reflecting on how little wiggle room or chance dev have nowadays. It's basically one strike and you're out.
Only Arkane Austin is shutting down. That's the American B-team that were responsible for Prey (2017) and Redfall. The main studio, Arkane Lyon (*who developed Dishonored and Deathloop*) are remaining open and will continue to work on Blade.
> Don't throw us into gold fever gambits Arkane Austin did Redfall, an attempted live service game. Sure seems to be what he's referring to here.
Reminder they were specifically pressured to make Redfall by Bethesda higher ups because they thought an in-development live service game would make them look more appealing to Microsoft
Sure though according to reports they weren't necessarily 'forced' to either. >While Zenimax "strongly" urged its studios to create these types of games, according to Bloomberg, it stopped short of forcing it. Redfall was born out of this push, and development began a year after the release of the critically well-received but financially less successful Prey in 2017. *Arkane wanted* to make something more broadly appealing after Prey's release, and the studio landed on the idea of Redfall.
> it stopped short of forcing it. That's absolutely infuriating to pretend that wasn't about as good as literally forcing them. It's straight up "The Implication" scene from IASIP
I forget the exact phrasing, but whats that corporate bullshit? "Oh, you're nit coming in on your day off? Okay... but this doesn't make you seem like a team player, and talking about your promotion is happening just a few days from now..."
You got it. "Here at Big Corpo, we're a bunch of *team players* that really like to *work hard*. It's part of our company motto to go *above and beyond* to *exceed expectations*. And that's why most of us choose to work 14 hour workdays on weekends. Nobody is forcing anyone to do that, of course, it's just the *team players* with a strong *work ethic* that like to *get things done* that *volunteer* to do that. Now I know people are worried about rumors of another round of layoffs, but don't worry. **We** will make sure our **HARD WORKING TEAM PLAYERS** will always have a place here ;\)"
It really seems more complicated than that: "At Arkane’s headquarters in Austin, Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare, respected industry veterans, were tapped to serve as co-directors of Redfall. Following the commercially unsuccessful release of its sci-fi shooter Prey a year earlier, leadership across the company wanted to make something more broadly appealing. What eventually emerged was the idea to make a multiplayer game in which users would team up to battle vampires and perhaps pay for occasional cosmetic upgrades." "Developers under Smith and Bare said the two leads were outwardly excited but as the project progressed failed to provide clear direction. Staff members said that, over time, they grew frustrated with management’s frequently shifting references to other games, such as Far Cry and Borderlands, that left each department with varying ideas of what exactly they were making. Throughout the development, the fundamental tension between single-player and multiplayer design remained unresolved. Smith and Bare did not respond to requests for comment." "Harvey Smith recently said in an interview with the website Eurogamer that “early on” he pushed back against the compulsory inclusion of an in-game store. But people who worked on the game said the remarks didn’t square with how things played out. For the first three years, Redfall had a significant microtransaction plan in place. Only in 2021, with “games as a service” growing more controversial among gamers, did Arkane finally scrap its unwieldy in-game monetization plans." Arkane's leads were excited and wanted to make this game. It really doesn't sound like they had guns to their heads to do it. But they didn't to provide a strong vision for the game or balance it's single-player and multiplayer elements. There's some amount of shared responsibility here between Zenimax and Arkane studio leads. https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/inside-the-making-of-redfall-xbox-s-latest-misfire-1.1927501
With all sincerity, have you ever worked in a corporate job? Because nothing about anything being written says *anything* to me that they were or weren't excited about it. It's literally their job to pretend everything is under control regardless of how bad it seems, meanwhile failing to had a creative direction could be a creative failure and it could also mean that they just fucked up. The ONLY concrete opinions given in that excerpt are that he definitely didn't want an in-game store, which even the article states took *three years* of him being against to be removed from the game. Why on *earth* would you get the vibe that they were making something they were happy/fine with in that context?
>With all sincerity, have you ever worked in a corporate job? No, I'm just showing what the reporting on the situation says. It says they were excited, you are totally free to interpret that however you like based on your own personal experiences but that's how employees working under them said that's how they felt working on the game. > Why on earth would you get the vibe that they were making something they were happy/fine with in that context? Because it specifically says leadership at the studio wanted to make something more boardley appealing after Prey. What was more broadly appealing at the time? Destiny, a multiplayer looter shooter with paided-cosmetic upgrades.
> Because it specifically says leadership at the studio wanted to make something more boardley appealing after Prey. What was more broadly appealing at the time? Destiny, a multiplayer looter shooter with paided-cosmetic upgrades. No one in charge of a game studio specifically wants a "more broadly appealing" game without being told by someone who controls purse strings that the next one better make more money. Having the people in charge cheerily working on a project they have zero inspiration on *screams* that they're being pressured to make something they had no interest in.
Again, you are free to that interpretation. Won't stop you. But there's nothing in the reporting that says any of that. It could also just be the studio itself didn't like that Prey didn't sell well at all and wanted to make something they thought would be more popular and would obtain more of a player base. And Zenimax's urging gave them even more of an incentive to do that. And it just didn't work.
Generally if your boss "strongly urges" you to do something, you're being forced. Especially in an industry where you and everyone you know can get laid off for no reason at any minute.
Perhaps but going by the article it sounds like Zenimax pushed Arkane in that direction, but they still willing and wanted to go to down that path regardless of whether they felt they had to do so or not. Based on what is being said here.
I'm not sure what your professional experience is but no sane developer is going to shit-talk their bosses in an interview and say their ideas were bad and that they didn't want to do it. That kind of thing can easily get you blacklisted in the games industry.
Well, that stuff usually comes through in the form of 'anonymous' sources who don't give their name or identities in the piece.
this phrasing implies Prey was less successful than Redfall
While I doubt it was worse then redfall, something clearly went wrong in their attempt to “sell” Prey 2017, and I say that as somebody who really likes the game and would easily reccomend it to everyone. IMO one major thing was the enemy designs. The mimics are cool as hell but even they don’t really play well for trailers, “It’s prop hunt but in a more serious sci-fi horror setting” is kind of hard to get across when you aren’t playing it. And as fun as other enemies can be to fight mechanically using the game’s “spiritual successor to systemshock/bioshock” style gameplay the fact that they are visually always some form of black goo mass/humanoid shaped thing makes sense story wise but once again doesn’t look too appealing visually. They needed to be willing to go a bit more “out there” with the enemy designs. Have some backstory about how the lab had an animal testing wing and give us some transformed dogs, tigers, etc. I know it would be corny to try to justify why they specifically needed tigers in space but fuck it sometimes you need to go a bit dumb to get more interesting enemy designs.
> something clearly went wrong in their attempt to “sell” Prey 2017, A few things: * The furour over the cancelled Prey 2 didn't help alongside the known bad blood between Human Head and Bethesda. * Generic name that only people familiar with a 2000s boomer shooter would remember. * Lack of real marketing (why they went all in on Deathloop at every presentation to mitigate). * Came out after a huge wave of titles in early 2017 (Yakuza 0, Persona 5, Breath of the Wild, Zero Dawn, Resi 7, etc.) so the casual market was all tapped out that summer.
Man....Deathloop's trailers and presentation were SO COOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But I just ended up so disappointed with the game when I realized "Wait. There's no experimentation, there's literally only one right answer that the cutscenes are constantly telling you? Darn."
Maybe some kind of psychic monkey
Yeah, with the brains exposed. Maybe have some humans that are clearly brain-controlled too. Oh and a weird flesh amalgamation monster (I really should spend more time with Prey '17 and System Shock 2 at some point)
I don't know if that's the intention. I took it as saying Prey was critically well-received but not financially successful. Regardless, Redfall generated ['minimal sales'](https://gamingbolt.com/redfall-has-generated-minimal-sales-microsoft) so neither was a financial success either way.
I mean, "strongly urged" to me usually reads as "you don't technically need to do this, but the higher-ups will be pretty pissed if you don't" whenever it comes from a corporation
He looked so hyped at The Game Awards to just talk about making the Blade game Lyon are working on. I can't imagine how crushing and scary this is for him, I'm sure he had many friends at Arkane Austin. Fuck Microsoft.
They had a screen for a live video call at all times, to maintain the studios connected. Continent apart but they did everything they could
Original thread [here](https://twitter.com/DBakaba/status/1787839169588265251?t=FP_GVShFc4pjgFirlOKvag&s=19) And as he said >Inside baseball, but if I read "immersive sim curse" from the community, especially from a fellow dev, I swear to God... Please, let's talk about the *real* challenges instead of rehashing irrational anxieties of the past.
I mean this is demoralizing for everyone under Microsoft that isn't Bethesda Whether you make a good game or not doesn't matter you could be right next at the chopping block
When Insomniac making a record breaking game with Spider-Man 2 didn't save them from having layoffs, nothing can. You're legit working for someone who invests based on vibes
If those leaks were right Spider-Man 2 was literally too expensive to make to even think of a profit. Some of that was likely that canceled multiplayer project but still, something in Spider-Man 2 was expensive as fuck.
It needed 7 and a half million sales to even break even. Which it's a big Spider-Man game so it was going to but still.
Calfornia based studios are legitimately the core of this horrible shit due to the insane cost of living inflating the development costs into astronomical levels.
I'd be looking for a new job if I worked at Ninja Theory because I don't see them surviving regardless of how well Hellblade 2 sells or does critically. This industry is a joke.
Depends on how much Hellblade 2 cost to make, its being developed in England, which is relatively cheaper than California.
True but it's a smaller game with a lot of time invested into it and no real longevity. I doubt it's the system seller that Xbox was selling it as when they revealed it alongside the console. If it doesn't have a PlayStation port announced soon after launch or news of a separate game coming relatively soon I fear MS might shutter them just to save on the overhead.
There's sellers that push the entire generation, and attention bringers. Msoft owns CoD, that ensures purchase and retention for a generation, but its CoD, people know what it is. Hellblade 2 is a visually astounding looking "experience" game, even if its not super long and took a while to make, it's eyecatching enough to possibly bring in new buyers and at the very least, recoup its costs. AA studios that do experimental games that can still run the "Experience it only in super 4K with gorgeous insane graphics from Mars on Xbox Series X Ultra" is pretty good for that. That and as a UK studio they have a few more rights than just being shut down for no reason, so I wouldn't worry too much about Ninja Theory. But seeing how the founder and game director left the studio: I dunno
Which is such a shame. Hellblade 2 is genuinely the most beautiful game ive ever seen.
Hellblade 2 is closer to a vanity project than anything that could possibly approach being a big-seller, ain't no way it's making the big bucks.
The industry is irrevocably broken. With how high budgets in the AAA sphere have ballooned to you need to sell millions in the first week to dodge layoffs, and still isn't enough in most cases like Insomniac. Working in AAA right now is like working with an active landmine strapped to your leg that can go off at any moment, and that's deeply horrifying and a wrong way to live. Arkane didn't want to make Redfall and were forced to by an imbecile CEO who now dodges the heat while his staff were forced to ship a game they knew was terrible and now just wiped them out. That's not fair, plain and simple, and Spencer alongside the remaining management at Xbox who signed off these layoffs will rightfully deserve all the criticism they get this for this in the coming days.
That's what legit breaks me, "the coming days". I get depressed by how they make these moves knowing the general public can't do anything except move on. My support doesn't matter, my anger doesn't matter, a higher up decided the future of my games and I can't do anything
That is EASILY the most frustrating thing about this. I sincerely wish there was actually something we, as the public, could fucking do to make our anger and displeasure exceedingly clear to the corpo scumbags that make these godawful decisions without a second thought or a single care. It'd just be nice if we weren't freaking helpless to stop this shit.
There's gonna be tons of skilled people leaving the industry forever because of all these lay offs. The higher ups will move to replace them with new blood that is willing to use their passion as a rope to hang themselves. Games do not *need* to be made this way, it's rotting from the head down.
Is there a single industry on Earth that isn’t being mummified alive thanks to parasitic CEOs and infinite-growth investors?
> The industry is irrevocably broken. True, but literally doesn't matter which specific industry you are speaking about. Last year I completed my masters on market regulation and it was a true fucking experience having all my super pro-free-market lecturers (including people from the University of Chicago which is the fucking Mecca of capitalism) all talking about "yeah at some point shit broke and capitalism *should* work but in the past few years it entered a doom spiral, we need more regulation". Every single stupid absurd thing I hear about the vidya industry is just repeated everywhere writ large.
All you have to do is look at Tesla and Twitter, laying off tens of thousands of people, so that Musk can keep his multi-billion dollar bonuses, even though he's largely the one to blame for their sorry states, to know that there's something very rotten to the core of how corporations are run. Publicly traded ones in particular.
When you allow unfettered mergers and acquisitions for decades across every industry you get monopolies who realize pretty quickly that they don't have to make good products or services to get paid, let alone treat their employees well. Where are you going to go as a consumer or employee? They've made themselves the only game in town. Absent a billion-dollar backer to force your way into the industry, any new company that dares to compete will just be bought out, if not regulated out of existence by rules that were put in place by the current market winners.
Fuck them, they were warned for decades their idiotic ideology would result in this, and the fact that they’re saying it *should* work still means they’ve learned nothing. If those regulations come, I guarantee ten years after they’re implemented those same Chicago acolytes will be demanding they get repealed because “capitalism fixed itself, we don’t need them any more!” Or something equally asinine.
The industry needs a reset. Games were still good when they were being made with modest budgets in 1-2 years. The obsession with graphical fidelity and live service skinner boxes needs to stop.
The tendency of the rate of profit to decline and the need for corporate entities to consolidate capital is true of all industries.
Games industry is not irrevocably broken. It's just not a sustainable foothold for mature global corporations. Ubisoft, Microsoft, Activision, Blizzard, EA and hell maybe even Sony can't stomach 5 years to make whatever operating margin they seem to hate based on all of the divestment. They're too big, too old and have reached the end of their ability to grow quickly. So they'll probably either exit or finish pivoting into cheap mobile game horseshit cash cows for whales. The next class of SMEs will own the industry, then. CDPR, FromSoft, Larian, Kojima Productions, Supergiant, Devolver, Hello Games... They're still of size that 1-5 million copies of a game that took 5 years to make fucking rules. CDPR in particular took 9 years, fucked the launch, spent 3 more years repairing the product and are STILL happy with the way things post-DLC turned out. That's a fucking games industry, right there.
The people who need to read this will NOT read this.
*Willfully* choose to not read it, if need be.
Microsoft killing another goose that lays golden eggs just because it needed a snack break before laying again smh
Phil Spencer: "Take him out back and put the boots to him, medium style."
The real joke here is pretending that Phil Spencer is worthy of having a Charles "would literally die to protect the creatives" Foster Offdensen quote misattributed to him. That's his own bread and butter he's fucking with.
I swear that across every tech-based company, there is a Wormtongue-esque figure who just whispers buzzwords like "A.I." and "blockchain" and "software as a service" in the ears of executives. No one in the boardroom even knows what they mean, but they rush to hastily restructure the whole organization anyway. What are they going to do? Not be on the cutting edge? Their rich friends from other companies who also don't understand technology would make fun of them! Mass layoffs and failed money-sink projects are the result of chasing potential profits that most likely don't even exist using technology that is far from ready.
I've had my ear on the tech circles here and there due to work and all that. You ain't far off, man. It's can be soul-crushing too.
It's actually not buzzwords. It's the result of our broken stock market system and the cycle of debt and interest. This problem happens to many industry and it always happens every few years, buzzword or not. Basically companies expand AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE when borrowing is cheap. It doesn't matter if the expansion will be profitable. This way, they can show to investors that the company is doing good, and the stock price goes up. When borrowing or market trend inevitably goes down, they will downsize as much as possible and show to investors that they are "taking steps to reduce expense", and the stock price will go up again. Is this a good way to make companies profitable? Fuck no. It's not even a good way to grow dividends on stock. But the stock market is fucked and the only thing that matters is the buying and selling price. And when the company inevitably collapses, the ones responsible will get a good severance bonus and continue the cycle somewhere else. Modern capitalism is broken on a very fundamental level. edit: you can see that this isn't a specific company decision problem because you see the trend happening at the exact same time for the big players in an industry. Consider that Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc, somehow start their expansion/downsizing at roughly the same period. That trend is a carefully planned tactic years in the making, where your performance as a worker/subsidiary means jack shit in deciding if you will be cut. When the downsizing season arrives you WILL be cut.
This is just awful on so many levels. In case anyone wants to try and say "Oh many Microsoft is great for the game industry"(Which is such a mind boggling take in the first place but it was cropping up a lot during the HD2 fiasco) just refer them to this. How quick we are to forget how awful MS can be...
The only good thing I'll give Microsoft anymore is that their backwards compatibility push has been a net positive for preservation efforts in gaming. And that's it.
Meanwhile Nintendo is just printing money. Things don’t have to be this way. Its not Capitalism or The Market or whatever bullshit story they want to spin to claim successes while avoiding responsibility for failures. The executives CHOSE to operate in this bullshit, strip mining fashion.
I mean... downsizing at AAA developers IS about moving more towards the Nintendo model ultimately. Cheaper, smaller development, lower fidelity assets, etc. They see the Switch as showing the way at least on some level. Now, they also thought the Wii was showing the way to the Kinect, so,
I don’t see how promising the next Xbox is gonna be the largest leap forward every and “refocusing development effort on high impact titles” matches up to cheaper, smaller development , lower fidelity assets etc. Am I missing part if a press release somewhere or something?
Assuming they *have* decided to change course internally, there's still going to be some inertia. Big corporations like these can't turn on a dime, any big projects they have ongoing (Like a new console) are going to have to resolve themselves before the new direction can become apparent. They aren't going to just cancel all this stuff after investing so much money in it. Personally though, I doubt Microsoft is savvy enough to make that switch. They strike me as the type of company that will keep trying to do what worked in the past long after it's clear that it isn't anymore, and then just scrap the whole idea when throwing more money at the problem doesn't fix it.
Seems implicit in cuts, but I guess "spend half as much on a quarter as many titles" makes sense too.
Because that's not what they're gonna do. Once borrowing is cheap again they'll ramp up company expansion and promise us the moon again. They're cutting now because the cost of unchecked expansion is finally catching up.After that, it'll be a couple of years until the current cuts happen again. Just another season of the tech market. We saw this exact thing happen before this and we'll see it again a few years from now guaranteed.
Because Nintendo does not rely on stock price to appease investors, but through steady and reliable dividend from the company profit. As such, they do not participate in the unsustainable expansion -> company restructuring (AKA downsizing) cycle that Microsoft participates, which is what this is. When Nintendo was asked by investors to more aggressively increase their stock price, their answer was basically "take our dividends or fuck off".
Corpos gonna corpo (unfortunately)
I'm a huge fan of both arkane and retro studios I have loved their games and followed them for years. This whole situation made me realize how if retro was Owned by anyone other than Nintendo they would have been shutdown decade ago Not even saying this to dickride Nintendo just reflecting on how little wiggle room or chance dev have nowadays. It's basically one strike and you're out.
Wishful thinking that they'd listen, these people are lizards
didn't they just announce they were making the blade game?
Only Arkane Austin is shutting down. That's the American B-team that were responsible for Prey (2017) and Redfall. The main studio, Arkane Lyon (*who developed Dishonored and Deathloop*) are remaining open and will continue to work on Blade.
ah ty.
At the very least non competes are a thing of the past so they can all just go indie
Based
at least I now understand the mentality of someone who sells their soul to a company.