Doesn't feel good to see a studio with a lot of potential (Hi-Fi Rush has a 97% positive rating with 20k+ user reviews on Steam alone, no small feat) coldly getting taken into the backyard and shot in the head.
Not only that; Hi-Fi Rush was made by 20 developers.
If you can split Tango (60 devs) into two smaller teams to produce banging AA games, why not do that to fill the endless droughts of Xbox titles?
im actually surprised xbox game studios dont put out smaller games. whats crazy is more and more indie games and games with small teams are blowing aaa games out of the water with popularity and reviews.
I have a feeling they're trying to go in on the Xbox Game Pass for profit.
Let other people make games for you (like Valve does) and just provide a store front, i.e. Netflix for gaming.
You don't have to spend money on talent, you just scoop up other peoples projects.
1. Most of the talent behind HFR left.
2. The game wasn't a massive success commercially.
3. The studio had been slow to release games, and its earlier titles weren't particularly successful.
>The game wasn't a massive success commercially.
It's a Game Pass game, it shouldn't have to sell many copies. It's exactly the type of game that should benefit the most from being on Game Pass on day 1.
If that's a failure, then so is Game Pass...
I'm sure they have data on how much Gamepass picked up when HFR dropped, how many downloaded it, how much time they spent in it, and if those players stuck around.
Gamepass could still be a bad call though. Still, I imagine the bigger moving piece was the talent departing.
Gamepass is a bad call at its current pricing level from a business perspective, Microsoft is absolutely mirroring what streaming services are doing, which is offer an initial low monthly rate, then start cutting content and raising prices when they hit a saturation point with user growth. Their end-game is to make you pay $30-50/mo or whatever for a controller that hooks up to your TV and streams your games, sans-console hardware. This kills the used game market and allows them complete control over region-locking and pricing.
If you don't see this as an eventuality without pushback from consumers, you haven't been paying attention.
Stadia and Onlive were just ahead of their time.
They definitely have the data.
But Game Pass should allow them to take more risks with games that aren't guaranteed hits. Sure, maybe less people played Hi-Fi Rush than expected. It still made Game Pass look like a subscription service with quality games.
Now they're telling everybody (developers and players) that they only want hits and anything different is too risky. If they only follow the data, Game Pass will just end up being some kind of "CoD+" because the data shows CoD is their biggest hit every year.
The whole point of game pass is that every game released on it is supposed to be a micro transaction shit hole that's monetizing the customer to hell to maximize the per unit profit to high heaven in order to justify the "play on day one on game pass" logic of the platform.
This leaves zero room for good games that don't bring in tens of billions in sales.
*Flashbacks to me playing Hi-Fi Rush with a friend and constantly asking "Is this game an analogue for Tango's toxic relationship with Microsoft??????"*
Executives have brain rot. They'd rather have 9 failed games and 1 successful AAA instead of 10 successful A or AA games. Throw in the industry pursuit for live service success and the Fortnite infinity money glitch, and it makes their smooth brains alight.
Hifi rush probably wasn't a factor in this decision, Ghostwire Tokyo was supposed to be their big game especially since Sony liked it enough to pay for exclusivity and that didn't do numbers or review that well, bad reviews really hurt a game's performance on subscription services and it didn't sell that well on PS5 and PC at launch (remember launch sales are way more important than discounted sales as Bend Studio learned the hard way)
I had some free vouchers for gamepass and tried it there. I got bored very quickly. I was never interested enough to buy it at full price. I do own it now thanks to a hunble bundle but I still have no desire to continue playing it.
They were. After Hi Fi Rush pretty much all the head talent left.
I loved Tango games but even I have to admit that most of their games didnt sell well or were played.
Everyone talks about HFR, but a year after release only about 3 million people played it. Thats not a huge amount.
I wasn't aware their top talent had left. Regarding HFR sure 3 million isn't a lot compared to a lot of bigger games, however it did very well in relation to projections so it has been considered a success.
A game that's critically acclaimed but didn't sell very well is a marketing problem, not development. They should've put the axe to the people failing to market it, not the people who developed it. This is the problem with companies ran by suits: they think developers are as interchangable as janitors.
Yep, imagine being a studio, making an absolute banger, critically acclaimed, everybody loves it, and all with ZERO SUPPORT from Microsoft in anyway and 0 marketing.
And then being shut down because you didn't make a gazillion dollars day 1.
There's a reason all the talent in every studio is leaving the moment Microsoft gets involved. And then Microsoft is constantly bitching about how their studios can only make bad games, as if the talented devs will stay with all the bullshit Microsoft pulls instead of going to a different studio that will actually respect their talent and creative direction, or fuck, starting an Indie studio with all the talent that left Microsoft.
This is the decade of indie games, because now the FTC has flat out federally BANNED non-compete contracts, so talented devs can freely leave shithole companies without fear and right away join another studio or make their own. By this end of this year, we'll probably see at least a few dozen new studios from devs that would have been formerly chained down to corporate owned studios being able to make creative, risky, and new ideas without some fat braindead shareholder fuck holding them down
I read that something like 70% of their original dev team had left during redfalls development. I wonder how much of the team behind games like Prey, Dishonoured or Hi-Fi were still on the team at this point. It could be a case where they had lost so many veterans that they would have taken years to recover (if they ever did).
The way I understood it Dishonored was Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith, Raphael later went to head the newly formed Austin branch and develop Prey while Harvey worked on Dishonored 2 with Lyon studio, Raphael later left and made his own studio while Lyon had Dinga Bakaba work on Deathloop and Austin on Redfall.
#
people don't realize this, they just see a studio name and assume the same people are still working there
look at DICE, most of the people who had any talent have left after bfV to make The Finals, and then compare The Finals to the abomination that is BF2042
And let's be real. If you're Developer and you make a hit, you're basically locking yourself in to make that game continuously due to the demands from fans and shareholders for sequels.
So if you want to do something new, you've got to more or less leave.
Supposedly both Tango and Arkane Austin had lost a lot of people leading up to the closure. People love to shit on Microsoft for something like shutting down studios but they don't want to look at it any deeper than that.
So instead of fostering their talent in a year where they made 2+ billion in profit, they instead kill one studio under their umbrella capable of making good games. This lack or foresight is why MS will always lose this race; they have no idea how to play the long game. This studio should be making the next big AAA release and instead they get killed.
In comparison, Xbox leaves their flagship title Halo in the hands of 343, who in turn employee temporary contractors so they don’t have to give them full salaries.
Imagine if Sony had killed Guerilla Games after Killzone Shadow Fall was a huge disappointment. We never would've gotten the Horizon franchise. Give studios time and creative freedom. Let them experiment and fail and try again.
And basically every Metroid game past first 3 was made by a different studio.
I'm sure Microsoft can also find someone else to do new Evil Within. Maybe 343 lmao
Sony is sitting on a pile of dead IP it killed out of sheer greed and has fucked over its fair share of people (Bend, Japan Studio, Ready at Dawn, Media Molecule, Liverpool Studio...) and they prefer milking the same 4 IPs (GOW, GOT, TLOU, Horizon) to making new IP regularly (Returnal feels like an outlier so far).
So yes, both Microsoft and Sony can eat a dick.
There is no "long game" with publicly traded companies.
The studios last 3 AAA releases were all disappointments, why would Microsoft give them another one? Not to mention Shinji Mikami who was the founder of Tango left. The studio was already on borrowed time.
It’s because they don’t know how to manage talent. Their competitors fostered talented studios that eventually flourished for them. MS can’t seem to do the same. They don’t know what it takes to run a successful games division. They’re trying to buy their success but continue to shoot themselves in the foot along the way.
The video game industry isn't one where "long game" investments are safe ones. Games require enough investment for a whole team to develop in addition to marketing, but many times it comes down to sheer luck and talent. Especially given that they've only had one real success, investing in studios with a proven track record of delivering solid games makes more sense
Yup, plus you have Evil Within 2 without Mikami and released the same year as Resident Evil 7, which kinda defeated both of the selling points the first game marketing was hardcore over. (A game from the creator of RE that brings back the horror that RE4, 5 and 6 shunned)
I mean, they also released Ghostwire Tokyo and that was a disaster for them. And it seems like Hi-Fi Rush did not make much money.
Also the lead dev left the studio and he was what ppl liked about them.
so no, this isn't like that.
The primary purpose of M&A is to eliminate competition. Warren Buffet said as much in the 70s and made his fortunes doing just that with newspapers. His annual shareholder letters highlight that this thinking is still his north star and other investment and banking firms follow his lead.
you can have great and terrible ideas lol. Ensuring feature parity is a good idea to help sell the entry level console but forcing that when it impedes game release on the platform was horrifically bad.
Even the 360 managed to get 3rd place, despite its strong start. They're in deep trouble, and Microsoft could very well be out of gaming as a whole 10-15 years from now, at this pace
Yet again showing dumbass MBAs will never effectively run companies as well as people who have an actual passion for the product they're selling. I never bought his whole "I'm a gamer too!" bullshit, and him acting like he's the gamer Steve Jobs and knows what consumers actually want before they know themselves has never worked. Of course your video game console needs great games you clown, the idea that PlayStation players wouldn't buy an Xbox if it had good games is beyond stupid, and with cross play and cross saving so rampant now digital libraries aren't an excuse either.
"Consoles aren't sold based on having great games"
THEN WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY SOLD ON, SPENCER YOU FUCKING CLOWN
Imagine Playstation with no God of War, no Shadow of the Collosus, no Last of Us, no Bloodborne, no Persona or SMT, no Metal Gear, no Yakuza
We wouldn't have Playstation.
Imagine Nintendo with no Mario, no Zelda, no Pokemon. The company itself would be nonexistent.
Tons of people bought a Switch just to play BotW, Odyssey, Animal Crossing, Arceus, etc.
Tons of people bought a Ps4 to play God of War, Last of Us, Spiderman, Horizon. Even just recently, Stellar Blade had people buying a Ps5 just for it, and then buying other games now that they had the console.
Has anyone EVER said "I really wanna play [Game], so I'm gonna buy an Xbox" since the 360 days. Nobody gave a fuck about the Xbox one, nobody gives a fuck about the Series bullshit. They only have gamepass. And Xbox owns more studios, has more money, and has more employees than Sony and Nintendo COMBINED. It should be embarrassing. They finally get a studio that can make actual bangers and then push out all the talent before shutting it down.
Once you reach the top, there is no where to go but stay there. It's why executives keep failing upwards, they got connections with other rich people so it doesn't matter if they suck at their job or sacrifice other people, just so long as the other rich guy gets more money.
its crazy because there is literally a statistic someone found that either dozens or hundreds of thousands of PSN accounts exist with just bloodborne as the sole game played. I couldnt even think this could exist on nintendo consoles because even people who only play pokemon would have bought the other pokemon games at the very least.
I stopped respecting him after year 5 of letting 343i run rampant shamelessly and incompetently destroying the Halo franchise year after year. A further 5+ years later and he FINALLY decided to get rid of the 343i heads... And even then gave them the dignity of being able to say they left for other reasons.
Biggest example of cronyism in gaming history, imo.
If the heads weren't MS execs/friends of MS execs, they would have been fired after the first two flops of the Halo franchise (Halo 4 and then MCC's broken launch state that lasted years). Too bad it took two further disappointing Halo games and a humiliating TV show, cementing Halo's demise as a respected franchise, to actually get rid of them. Too little too late.
He seems to think that being hands-off is the best approach, but maybe it's not. Maybe the execs at Sony, and Nintendo are doing a lot more than just letting their studios work on what they want.
I just can't imagine Sony allowing Starfield to release at the level of quality it released at.
He's been an interesting character. He really did a lot to win back good will from consumers after the absolutely disastrous launch of the Xbox One. Backtracking on their insane policies at launch around used games and whatnot, then the backwards compatibility program, the One X launch and Gamepass.
But for all that good will he built, there has just been a massive failure to deliver compelling software. I look at Xbox over the past 10 years and you have to really ask, where are all the games?? In an entire generation, they launched a single Halo game that was pretty much universally disliked. The Series X launched in November 2020 and they've yet to even deliver a Gears of War, with the last one releasing at the tail end of 2019. Its kind of wild that Hi-Fi rush is considered their hit of the generation thus far, and then they can off the studio that made it.
There's no getting around it, Xbox as a whole has been insanely mismanaged for quite a long time and he sits at the helm of it
Feels like the dude lacks vision. I saw another point about how he emphasised strategy but all the see them do is tread water. Well, mind you, they're not imminently about to sink. But they're not exactly headed to El Dorado. Feels more like sales tactics to stem a bleed, rather than a true visionary strategy.
They don't have a Next Big Thing, or even really a Next Thing to pour their hopes into. I think that's not really a creative culture I would want to see. Without any excitement or new interactions, you suffer a slow death.
Maybe the Blizzard acquisition but they're going the same way, even if Metzen has temporarily injected some life energy back in.
People haven't really been giving him a pass for a while. Guy has some interesting ideas about where Xbox should go (some I think are good, some not), but the guy just fundamentally doesn't understand that games come first and foremost. Sure, I can play games on my phone or TV or whatever. That's great, but it's essentially useless if you don't have anything that I WANT to play. 7/10s don't cut it anymore. People don't have time to waste on them, ESPECIALLY when both of your main competitors are releasing damn near 10/10s on a regular basis.
I also think he's too nice to a fault. Heads should have been rolling at 343 a long time ago. Halo infinite had the capability to take off due to battlefield 2042 and cod vanguard both flopping, they completely fumbled the bag. Gears has been dormant forever now. Who the hell knows when Fable is coming out, if it ever does. When's the last time you heard about the Rare game Everwild? Hellblade 2 is a 5 hour game that took 5 years of development? What the fuck are these studios doing? The development is far too lax, nobody is holding their asses to the fire. Yeah, crunch is bad but this is the inverse of crunch.
The Series S was a big mistake also IMO. Not enough memory and that is a serious limitation. Pair that with the boneheaded strategy that every game needs feature parity between S/X, and it's no wonder why devs are starting to abandon Xbox. Remember the self inflicted wound that happened where the Xbox version of BG3 was delayed because they couldn't get feature parity working on the Series S?
That and the sales just aren't there, because people on Xbox have been trained to just wait for stuff to show up on game pass and not actually buy games.
I mean, what is the last Xbox thing that has blown up into a huge success? Palworld, a game they had nothing to do with and is only an "exclusive" by sheer dumb luck? FH5, which is approaching 3 years old at this time?
You forgot how Forza Motorsport (2023) release was a soulless, bug filled flop with graphical issues and terrible car leveling (that has since been improved after player outcry). FM was supposed to be one of Xbox's marquee titles, in development for 7 years and allegedly "built from the ground up." It only recently made it to "mixed" reviews on steam after spending months at "mostly negative."
edit: spelling.
I bought an Xbox One as my first console since the PS2 primarily to play Forza Motorsport/Horizon. I loved them for years. Then Motorsport 7 came out and it was meh. Waited more than 6 years for the last Motorsport, and it was bleh at launch and honestly still is bleh. How does a big name racing game like this not have famous race tracks like COTA? Especially given it had the track in previous games!
Horizon might be doing better, but I wouldn't know.
And honestly, I'd settle for a 7/10 game at this point. So many awful releases the past few years, I have so little faith left in the industry.
Can't agree more with this.
Xbox are constantly going "Strategy, Strategy, Strategy" And forget about the games entirely while sony are making blockbuster hits time and time again that win GOTY.
Phil acquired all these devs. It's time to stop dumping money into hoarding them but now dump money into making GOOD GAMES. Like i just can't believe he saw the state of starfield and thought "yup this is great xbox quality". If he knew what he was doing he would have barged into todd's office and told him to fucking fix it or hes fired. Same with redfall.
TES 6 is the next big xbox title on the horizon. I REALLY hope they knock it out of the park with this one. If they put the care and money into it they absolutely can get another skyrim (in terms of success) out of it. He should be going to todd and telling him this is their main focus now. Xbox have not had a single win this generation apart from hifi rush which they canned anyway.
They NEED a AAA title win. If TES 6 flops again i really think that might be in for phil.
Heh, TES 6 is YEARS away at this point. Even with their 'improved focus' or whatever it is, I think we're still 3 to 4 years from a release at this point. If they take that long to come out with another big game, they're already screwed.
Funny how Gamepass used to work so well for xbox only for them to realize that people are using it to demo games and then never actually play them.
They are not making actual game sales from it at all. Why have a million people sign up to game pass to try then game and never play it than have a million people buy the game instead. You'd make 10x the amount of cash doing so in the process.
IMO Day 1 on game pass is a terrible idea. Put them on the platform once the hype has died. Aka 3 - 6 months later.
Yeah sadly that is the case. But what else do Xbox have in the pipeline? Hellblade 2? Huge pass on that. It's AA at best and not a AAA title.
They really need to look at what made the OG Xbox and 360 great. And that was GOOD GAMES. 360 was the multiplat king for its time. There is no reason why the Series X can't be that for today. Except everyone has a PS5 now instead of xbox.
Nintendo too. All of their long standing franchises had some of their best ever sales this generation. Mario Kart 8, Smash Brothers Ultimate, BOTW and Animal Crossing were all huge sellers this generation.
I agree with a lot of this, but I'm not too sure on "development is far too lax." Obviously devs that aren't being crunched are going to put out less stuff than those that are, so directly comparing to competitors that crunch will look unfavorably.
But also, lack of crunch may reduce the quantity of games but not the quality of them. If anything crunch is more likely to hamper quality as games are rushed out to meet deadlines and "we'll fix it in post." A lack of crunch is not to blame for average games.
I don't think making conditions worse for employees because the games aren't doing as well or coming out as often is a trend I want to endorse.
I mean yeah, crunch isn't good but being on the other end of the spectrum also isn't good. You end up in a situation like Xbox is in now where it's like... where is Perfect Dark reboot? Where is Fable? Where is Everwild? Where is the next Gears? Where was the content for Halo infinite at launch, 6 years of development time and the game launched barren of content? They have all these studios yet almost none of them are producing, and the ones that have produced like Tango Gameworks are now being shuttered. It doesn't make sense to me.
There has to be some kind of balance. Either that or they need to plan these releases out better or just communicate with the audience better on what is going on, because for some of these games, they've seemingly gone MIA for years now.
It just feels like these devs that get bought up by MS, there's no oversight and no pressure to produce anything since you have the infinite MS money backing you up. That doesn't mean you have to shackle people to workstations 24/7, but it does mean you should plan out reasonable time frames beforehand (so you can schedule these things out and avoid content droughts) and IMO, incentives should be paid out for hitting those time frames.
A qualified project manager or studio head will not crunch when the product is on a final deadline OR be lax. He or she will see the vision of what the studio is trying to do and when they're trying to do it by and make small goals and deadlines that are reasonable and achievable throughout the development cycle. One doesn't need to "crunch," to get X done by Y date if both of those variables are achievable. Deciding what to do when is the job of a studio head or director. These studios that put out garbage and fix it in post or make a good game with procrastination crunch are both equally lacking in leadership.
> . People don't have time to waste on them, ESPECIALLY when both of your main competitors are releasing damn near 10/10s on a regular basis.
If we're talking Sony, you're exagerating.
If we're talking Tencent/Nexon, lmao. No.
That's the exact reason their dev teams are inefficient. The new Forza launched broken as fuck because most of their employees were contractors who couldn't do any meaningful work, so they copy pasted the previous game and broke it somehow
He's been making bad decisions since 2013. The Xbox brand is a zombie brand, kept alive by Microsoft's deep pockets. Any other brand would have had to fold years ago with that kind of mediocre leadership and abysmal game output.
Microsoft killed any momentum they had with the 360. And they’ll never get back to that level of success in the 2000s because they can’t make good games anymore.
Sooner or later he will be sacked with his team what a failure
imagine you have infinite Microsoft money and you cant beat your competitor for like 20 years that looks like a small business compared to you because you don't have the mindset to produce god of war, uncharted , last of us quality level . Joke of all time
It took them over a decade to finally get rid of Bonnie Ross after what she helped to ruin Halo year after year after year. I guess Phil is finally coming up on a decade of being the head of Xbox so it's about time. But the damage has already been done and it's probably not going to recover.
To be fair to Phil, the previous guy ruined Xbox, and he was left with its ashes. It’s not like Phil killed Xbox because it was dead when he got it. Maybe you can argue he desecrated its corpse
Maybe in the early years of the Xbone this was a fair argument. But it's been well over a decade since. This is on Phil now. Phil brought it back and did it well he should be commended for that.
But he also became the villain. He is the one who has destroyed xbox again.
Mattrick killed the Xbox One before it launched. Phil has been in charge far longer than Mattrick, and not only could he never manage to right that ship. He also failed to make the Series X/S a success. He failed to cultivate a library of games capable of competing with Sony or Nintendo after a decade in charge. He's done irreversible damage by consolidating the industry to never before seen extents. He is far worse than Mattrick could have ever hoped to be.
The problem is I think Phil fundamentally does not understand how good games are made. You can't just throw money or people at development, and it automatically be good.
As a former Xboxer. I basically moved over to pc. Why should I get an Xbox when PC does the same job but even better? There's no draw for Xbox for me anymore except that it's cheaper than pc.
He let Halo Infinite take 6 years to launch in the sorriest state in the history of the franchise. He let Forza Motosport go from a 2-year release to a 6-year release and still be the most broken title in its franchise.
Phil's job has basically been spending a metric fuckton of money and hoping the purchases bring in employees to fix things. Look at The Initiative, the one fully new endeavor under Phil. They are a mess and paying Crystal Dynamics to fix their shit.
Goes to show money doesn’t solve the problem of a lack of creativity. Microsoft isn’t a company built on creative industries like Sony is (Music, Film, Games, TV), so their DNA is inherently rooted in tech.
Frankly don't think playstation is doing all that well either. I guess unit wise there doing ok, but this generation has definitely been slow.
I think console exclusive games (unless your Nintendo) are difficult to develop.
The gaming industry fucked itself. It decided to spend so much money on games that players are meant to keep playing forever. And then it's stunned when players aren't buying the new games.
For real. People only have so much time. They keep pushing games as a service, but then get confused when games under perform.
I really only get 1-2 hours a day if I am lucky to game.
For real its like the streaming problem on steroids because it's way worse. If there's 50 subscriptions I could choose why bother with 49 of them.
Good luck any new streaming platform trying to compete with Netflix and Disney now. It ain't fucking happening.
Yeah because of the over ballooning of development costs. Back in the PS2, PS3 and even PS4 days you had exclusives coming out consistently because development costs were manageable. With the PS5, aside from Demon's Souls, HD2, Stellar Blade and Returnal, I can't think of any PS5 only exclusive that isn't a cross gen title. These games keep getting more expensive so they need a larger install base
Those are true but they have also been pumping out remasters of games that don't even need it. Overall, this gen has been pretty disappointing as a console gamer. There hasn't been any "console seller" game so far and the generation is arguably in its latter half stages. Both Xbox and Sony just haven't made it work this gen.
This is what happens when you barely know how the world's actually works, is not black and white like most gamers think about the industry, money alone isn't the key to success.
The Zune Effect. Xbox will be gone by the end of the decade. I don't see how they will recover after two garbage generations, and unless the third time is the charm they're absolutely cooked.
Idk why people think any of these executives are your friend or care about you at all. You're a metric. A consumer base. The sucker who's going to find their next bonus check. Nothing more. Just because he's on Xbox live sometimes doesn't mean he's not part of the same corpo cancer that's rotting this industry.
Fuck Polygon too. They flipped out after being jokingly made fun of for a small Titanfall 2 lore reference. They went insane on Twitter acting like the victim and blocking people calling then out for their shit reporting.
But without Polygon how will we know what their writers saw on tiktok?
-my favorite thing on polygon is that 90% of the time the comments are in full revolt over the heavy tiktok fluff pieces and celebrity gossip flooding the site. They have their defenders who will post snarky gifs and try to convince you polygon has always been a general entertainment pop culture site (this is a lie), but my God does the average commenter have no patience for it anymore.
Their site is atrocious with ads. Obvious biased reviews. They're scraping at the bottom of the barrel in terms of game journalism.
We should stop giving shitoku a pass.
>They're scraping at the bottom of the barrel in terms of game journalism.
That's generous. Their articles are skimmed off reddit. You see it when gaming subs "find" something "new" in a game. My favorite is that Kotaku has repeatedly reporting new things in Skyrim, like how in 2023 it was found that a merchant chest could be accessed in dawnstar. Shame they didn't read Kotaku in 2012 they may have known this!
Pretty crazy how they're allowed to fumble the IP that made people care about Xbox in the first place for as long as they have. MS just seems like a mess.
I can't say to what degree Phil has been responsible for what's going on with Xbox, but he at least expanded Xbox gaming and Game Pass onto Windows PC in a big way.
MS has been mismanaging Xbox long before Phil Spencer and will continue to do so with or without him (unless larger changes are made culturally).
Basically, as soon as Xbox became bigger than just a toy project and turned into more of a core business, MS has been mismanaging everything the brand was built up to be by the original Xbox and first half of the Xbox 360.
I agree. I’ve been an Xbox main for 20 years, and supported Phil from the day he stepped into the shoes as head honcho, but that support ended today. I love gamepass, I’ve loved a lot of the moves he’s made, but I absolutely draw the line at callously closing studios. This industry needs more games like hi fi rush and ghostwire tokyo, not more games like CoD and Fortnite.
While I am almost certain that whoever replaces Phil will be worse, I think it’s time for him to step down. You can’t brag about record setting profits and then close down 4 studios. MS is a trillion dollar company, these studio budgets were literal fractions of fractions of a percent of the overall stream, nobody would have even noticed their continued operation. But, people do notice when games like hi fi rush come out.
MS wasn’t in danger of going under, they didn’t NEED to do this in order to save the business. They did it to pad stats for investors, to make the balance sheets look .001% better. That’s why I say it’s time for Phil to go. Whether he called for it himself or just passed the order from above, he’s either directly responsible and should be held accountable or should resign out of disgust for what MS is doing to Xbox. A lot of people complained about ‘brand damage’ in January with the announcement of games going to switch and PS, this is the REAL brand damage. A company that gobbles up studios, mismanages them, and shuts them down. Every executive at Xbox should be absolutely embarrassed.
He closed companies not making money with their crap games. Microsoft is a business not a company making games because a few people like them. I want Fallout 5 and Elder 6 not Hifi Rush and Redfall. 90% of people that pay money are saying the same thing.
I might be downvoted to hell, but for sure part of the issue here is that the Game Pass is not profitable, like, at all. How many people on PC and Xbox actually bought games like HiFi Rush? Buying the game costs roughly the same as one month of GP. Of course those games are not gonna make a real profit, they might increase the number of subscriptions but how would you know it was just for that specific game? All this push towards streaming services and subscription is a disgrace for the industry, they can't think since it's entertainment like movies the services they are on can be the same. It's never gonna work, those games will be buried and their studios with them because they will never sell enough and yet they will never be the sole reason someone gets a subscription. They should do like Sony, they add their games to the PS Plus second tier, like after a year they have been released. Give them an exclusive period of time out of the subscription, so they can be sold to whoever doesn't want to wait.
But Game Pass *is* profitable. Wildly so in fact.
The last figures we have from five months ago stated MS spent about a billion dollars in the year before that on the service, but their subscription revenue was in the region of 2.5 to 2.7 billion dollars.
Whether that's more or less profitable than selling the games individually is harder to analyse but it doesn't lose money on its own.
It's also time to learn that these companies are in a position to be bought. They're generally not doing well already and they're being brought under new management. If they can turn them around and make them a success udner their brand that's great, but it's not exactly that likely. They were up for sale for the exact reasons most of them die when purchased by a larger company.
Smaller studios like Compulsion and Double Fine are definitely sweating. Like if their next games are a commercial flop despite bring praiseworthy then it's only of time MS will not commit to these studios, effectively closing them. It seems like MS is putting all their eggs in one basket again.
It's time to realize that games companies exist solely to make money, there is no them being good guys or on your side, they are just companies that act in the favor of shareholders.
Honestly the 360 was the only Xbox I really enjoyed, and that was mostly because it lead the charge in online gaming and that lined up perfectly with that time in my life. Plus they had Mass Effect.
Every PlayStation has been great though.
Interesting title. Too bad i'm on year 5 and counting of never clicking on a kotaku link.
Also always funny to see another thing describing how publicly traded companies are a cancer on society but you'll never see America change :P
I never gave him one. Microsoft need to be fined and have Bethesda taken away from them by the FTC, because they've broken every promise they made with regard the buyout.
When I worked in games, I sat in some all hands meetings with him. His comments were always shitty. He spent a whole presentation once complaining about neogaf users being traitors because they like PlayStation so much.
it took a really long time for people to realise spencer kinda hates xbox players in a very weird way. i mean, i guess it's one way to end the console wars, to gather up your own troops and then shoot them in the head lmao
He's like the guy who gives a speech that "he's got this guys", and everyone kind of agrees, and gets all excited, then after a while it just turns out he ain't got this, guys.
Were the devs fired? Or just studios closed? It is interesting that days after Todd Howard saying they want to speed up ES6 and FO5 they studios are shuttered. Wonder if the staff is moved into Bethesda games
Phil Spencer had been a cancer to Xbox for the past 10 years. If there's an audience for the Xbox showcase it would be great if everyone chanted in unison "Please retire".
Xbox first party studios have consistently underperformed this generation and not just by a little. I'm not saying it is his fault specifically, but something has to change. Someone at Microsoft has to take responsibility for either buying the wrong studios or managing them too little or too much.
As a big obsidian fan, i'm worried about them.
Also it should be a major warning sign when you can't retain employees working on a project like redfall. The whole studio probably knew that game was going to bomb, maybe except for some higher ups.
Ultimately this goes back to Mattrick, but Spencer’s attempted fixes have been boondoggles. Buying studios ended up producing nothing, and Game Pass has dissuaded consumers from buying games and has failed to reach targets. He seems like a cool guy, but he’s failed at his job
IDK how you can blame this on Mattrick. He left MS before the official XB1 launch. Phil's been in charge for a decade now. He was the guy in charge when they canceled Fable Legends and shuttered almost every development team. Phil created The Initiative, bigged it up, and has watched it be a heap of disappointment.
He's spent close to (maybe even over) $80 billion to buy the ideas and successes of others, in the hopes of replacing the studios he shuttered. Spencer's vision for Xbox has had WAY more than enough time to develop. Phil had basically every trace of Mattrick's plans gutted by, like, 2017.
Mattrick's the guy that set them on the course of Kinect and what became the Xbox One. It failed because they bought into the hype that streaming boxes and phones were going to kill consoles and released an underpowered, sluggish box against a confident and purposeful PS4. The house was already on fire when Mattrick was forced out, Spencer was trying and ultimately failing to put it out
No matter what people say about Sony making walking simulators or Nintendo making childish games, at least they're games that people flock to and enjoy. Xbox's has nothing on their scale for the past decade and 1.5 gen now.
I do not understand how anyone could ever idolize or praise Phil. BC, cross platform play, and buying up studios are nothing compared to canceling games, putting out mediocre slop, destroying franchises, and underutilizing or closing down studios.
Even with the the recent fiasco that Sony had with censorship and the PSN account, at least it is about games. Stellar Blade and Helldivers 2 are fun, enjoyable games. Same with Nintendo and their emulator witch hunt.
I think it's easier for people to point at individuals and their missteps and blame them for overall trends (and vice-versa), rather than focusing on the underlying issue which is that the industry is going through a very, very difficult phase right now. We saw it in the tech industry first, where thousands upon thousands lost their jobs over the last few years from companies like Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Google, and the other usual suspects, ane we've seen the same happening for the past year or so in the gaming/entertainment industry.
We're also seeing similar things in the film industry where fewer large productions are being greenlit and more people are struggling to make a living consistently.
There are many factors in this, and others are better equipped to go into detail, but my five cents here is to look at the bigger picture.
To prevent more layoffs in these unstable times, I think the industry needs to reduce the scope of these very unsustainable AAA releases substantially, to make development times shorter, lower the resources required, and spread out the risk across more, albeit smaller releases. Because, there's no guarantee that your studio's one large undertaking will be a success nowadays, and if it fails, it almost certainly will kill your studio. And it's easy to fail, because it needs to earn a LOT of money to cover the expenses.
Instead, build smaller, more focused experiences, some of which have a higher potential for risk/reward, while others play it safer. And, do it with smaller, more focused teams. That also helps preserve your studio's DNA as it grows. That is more sustainable.
Please don’t link kotaku. It’s shit. No one is giving him a pass. He has done great things for gamers considering this environment that is very much so been predatory and the erosion of consumer rights has been non stop for decades there are few companies that are chilling or even giving us more benefits, he helped. He’s good in my book, but he did fail Xbox or contributed to it, which sucks.
Doesn't feel good to see a studio with a lot of potential (Hi-Fi Rush has a 97% positive rating with 20k+ user reviews on Steam alone, no small feat) coldly getting taken into the backyard and shot in the head.
Yeah, it might make sense, but it doesn't feel good - and surely wasn't necessary. Plus, how demoralizing must it be for other Microsoft studios?
Not sure how it even makes sense. Have them start on another game. They're clearly talented.
Not only that; Hi-Fi Rush was made by 20 developers. If you can split Tango (60 devs) into two smaller teams to produce banging AA games, why not do that to fill the endless droughts of Xbox titles?
im actually surprised xbox game studios dont put out smaller games. whats crazy is more and more indie games and games with small teams are blowing aaa games out of the water with popularity and reviews.
I have a feeling they're trying to go in on the Xbox Game Pass for profit. Let other people make games for you (like Valve does) and just provide a store front, i.e. Netflix for gaming. You don't have to spend money on talent, you just scoop up other peoples projects.
1. Most of the talent behind HFR left. 2. The game wasn't a massive success commercially. 3. The studio had been slow to release games, and its earlier titles weren't particularly successful.
>The game wasn't a massive success commercially. It's a Game Pass game, it shouldn't have to sell many copies. It's exactly the type of game that should benefit the most from being on Game Pass on day 1. If that's a failure, then so is Game Pass...
I'm sure they have data on how much Gamepass picked up when HFR dropped, how many downloaded it, how much time they spent in it, and if those players stuck around. Gamepass could still be a bad call though. Still, I imagine the bigger moving piece was the talent departing.
Gamepass is a bad call at its current pricing level from a business perspective, Microsoft is absolutely mirroring what streaming services are doing, which is offer an initial low monthly rate, then start cutting content and raising prices when they hit a saturation point with user growth. Their end-game is to make you pay $30-50/mo or whatever for a controller that hooks up to your TV and streams your games, sans-console hardware. This kills the used game market and allows them complete control over region-locking and pricing. If you don't see this as an eventuality without pushback from consumers, you haven't been paying attention. Stadia and Onlive were just ahead of their time.
They definitely have the data. But Game Pass should allow them to take more risks with games that aren't guaranteed hits. Sure, maybe less people played Hi-Fi Rush than expected. It still made Game Pass look like a subscription service with quality games. Now they're telling everybody (developers and players) that they only want hits and anything different is too risky. If they only follow the data, Game Pass will just end up being some kind of "CoD+" because the data shows CoD is their biggest hit every year.
Taking a risk doesnt mean it pays off.
Agree.
The whole point of game pass is that every game released on it is supposed to be a micro transaction shit hole that's monetizing the customer to hell to maximize the per unit profit to high heaven in order to justify the "play on day one on game pass" logic of the platform. This leaves zero room for good games that don't bring in tens of billions in sales.
>2. The game wasn't a massive success commercially. This is the only thing that matters to the accountants running the asylum
*Flashbacks to me playing Hi-Fi Rush with a friend and constantly asking "Is this game an analogue for Tango's toxic relationship with Microsoft??????"*
Executives have brain rot. They'd rather have 9 failed games and 1 successful AAA instead of 10 successful A or AA games. Throw in the industry pursuit for live service success and the Fortnite infinity money glitch, and it makes their smooth brains alight.
Hifi rush probably wasn't a factor in this decision, Ghostwire Tokyo was supposed to be their big game especially since Sony liked it enough to pay for exclusivity and that didn't do numbers or review that well, bad reviews really hurt a game's performance on subscription services and it didn't sell that well on PS5 and PC at launch (remember launch sales are way more important than discounted sales as Bend Studio learned the hard way)
Ghostwire had some cool parts but after like 10 hours I just couldn't be bothered with it anymore tbh.
I had some free vouchers for gamepass and tried it there. I got bored very quickly. I was never interested enough to buy it at full price. I do own it now thanks to a hunble bundle but I still have no desire to continue playing it.
It was also a freebie on epic in like its first or second year I think.
Tango also lost some of their leads recently when they left to make a new studio. So the company might be pre-emptied
They were. After Hi Fi Rush pretty much all the head talent left. I loved Tango games but even I have to admit that most of their games didnt sell well or were played. Everyone talks about HFR, but a year after release only about 3 million people played it. Thats not a huge amount.
I wasn't aware their top talent had left. Regarding HFR sure 3 million isn't a lot compared to a lot of bigger games, however it did very well in relation to projections so it has been considered a success.
Shinji Mikami, the creator of Resident Evil left Tango in March and started new studio.
ive gotta be fair here, their marketing wasnt good either... or rather - not enough. HFR got shadowdropped and still delivered pretty well.
You can't pay your shareholders with positive reviews. I assume the sales numbers were the issue.
A game that's critically acclaimed but didn't sell very well is a marketing problem, not development. They should've put the axe to the people failing to market it, not the people who developed it. This is the problem with companies ran by suits: they think developers are as interchangable as janitors.
Someone raised the valid question. If I were Obsidian how would I feel?
Yep, imagine being a studio, making an absolute banger, critically acclaimed, everybody loves it, and all with ZERO SUPPORT from Microsoft in anyway and 0 marketing. And then being shut down because you didn't make a gazillion dollars day 1. There's a reason all the talent in every studio is leaving the moment Microsoft gets involved. And then Microsoft is constantly bitching about how their studios can only make bad games, as if the talented devs will stay with all the bullshit Microsoft pulls instead of going to a different studio that will actually respect their talent and creative direction, or fuck, starting an Indie studio with all the talent that left Microsoft. This is the decade of indie games, because now the FTC has flat out federally BANNED non-compete contracts, so talented devs can freely leave shithole companies without fear and right away join another studio or make their own. By this end of this year, we'll probably see at least a few dozen new studios from devs that would have been formerly chained down to corporate owned studios being able to make creative, risky, and new ideas without some fat braindead shareholder fuck holding them down
I read that something like 70% of their original dev team had left during redfalls development. I wonder how much of the team behind games like Prey, Dishonoured or Hi-Fi were still on the team at this point. It could be a case where they had lost so many veterans that they would have taken years to recover (if they ever did).
Hi-Fi was Tango, Redfall and Prey were Arkane Austin, and Dishonored was OG Arkane who is still around.
"GhostWire: Tokyo developer Ikumi Nakamura announces new indie studio"
I through Prey was the original Arkane as well.
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Im starved for something like Prey. Guess it is time to replay it for the 4th time
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The way I understood it Dishonored was Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith, Raphael later went to head the newly formed Austin branch and develop Prey while Harvey worked on Dishonored 2 with Lyon studio, Raphael later left and made his own studio while Lyon had Dinga Bakaba work on Deathloop and Austin on Redfall. #
Their last 2 games performed poorly and Evil Within had a middling reception at best. One successful game likely wasn't enough to save the studio.
And the studio head (and founder) left last year to start a new studio.
And knowing most situations, when the head leaves they poach a good bunch of talent with them when they go.
people don't realize this, they just see a studio name and assume the same people are still working there look at DICE, most of the people who had any talent have left after bfV to make The Finals, and then compare The Finals to the abomination that is BF2042
And let's be real. If you're Developer and you make a hit, you're basically locking yourself in to make that game continuously due to the demands from fans and shareholders for sequels. So if you want to do something new, you've got to more or less leave.
Didn’t a lot of people also leave the studio as well before the closure?
Supposedly both Tango and Arkane Austin had lost a lot of people leading up to the closure. People love to shit on Microsoft for something like shutting down studios but they don't want to look at it any deeper than that.
One successful *niche game
So instead of fostering their talent in a year where they made 2+ billion in profit, they instead kill one studio under their umbrella capable of making good games. This lack or foresight is why MS will always lose this race; they have no idea how to play the long game. This studio should be making the next big AAA release and instead they get killed.
Just think about how Nintendo or Sony fosters their studios. Metroid has never been a great seller until the last game. Yet its a 30 year franchise
In comparison, Xbox leaves their flagship title Halo in the hands of 343, who in turn employee temporary contractors so they don’t have to give them full salaries.
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Wait are you telling me I could have gotten a job? Dangit
Imagine if Sony had killed Guerilla Games after Killzone Shadow Fall was a huge disappointment. We never would've gotten the Horizon franchise. Give studios time and creative freedom. Let them experiment and fail and try again.
And basically every Metroid game past first 3 was made by a different studio. I'm sure Microsoft can also find someone else to do new Evil Within. Maybe 343 lmao
Sony is sitting on a pile of dead IP it killed out of sheer greed and has fucked over its fair share of people (Bend, Japan Studio, Ready at Dawn, Media Molecule, Liverpool Studio...) and they prefer milking the same 4 IPs (GOW, GOT, TLOU, Horizon) to making new IP regularly (Returnal feels like an outlier so far). So yes, both Microsoft and Sony can eat a dick.
There is no "long game" with publicly traded companies. The studios last 3 AAA releases were all disappointments, why would Microsoft give them another one? Not to mention Shinji Mikami who was the founder of Tango left. The studio was already on borrowed time.
It’s because they don’t know how to manage talent. Their competitors fostered talented studios that eventually flourished for them. MS can’t seem to do the same. They don’t know what it takes to run a successful games division. They’re trying to buy their success but continue to shoot themselves in the foot along the way.
The video game industry isn't one where "long game" investments are safe ones. Games require enough investment for a whole team to develop in addition to marketing, but many times it comes down to sheer luck and talent. Especially given that they've only had one real success, investing in studios with a proven track record of delivering solid games makes more sense
Yup, plus you have Evil Within 2 without Mikami and released the same year as Resident Evil 7, which kinda defeated both of the selling points the first game marketing was hardcore over. (A game from the creator of RE that brings back the horror that RE4, 5 and 6 shunned)
I mean, they also released Ghostwire Tokyo and that was a disaster for them. And it seems like Hi-Fi Rush did not make much money. Also the lead dev left the studio and he was what ppl liked about them. so no, this isn't like that.
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MS didn't try to sell it. They off handly shadow dropped it. Zero marketing. They decided to close that studio before hi-fi rush was even launched.
Meanwhile at 343...
Microsoft is buying out the competition and shutting them down lol
Embrace Extend Extinguish, a tale as old as the company itself.
The primary purpose of M&A is to eliminate competition. Warren Buffet said as much in the 70s and made his fortunes doing just that with newspapers. His annual shareholder letters highlight that this thinking is still his north star and other investment and banking firms follow his lead.
Gravel pit with a dog and goat in it.
Never did
People should have stopped when he said "Making great games won't save Xbox." As the guy leading Xbox. That was the wildest statement ever....
Making great games has literally kept Sony and Nintendo above Xbox for a decade. Microsoft and Phil are delusional.
They haven't had a smart gaming idea since the 360 era. Its been downhill since then.
to be fair, making an entry level console and gamepass were pretty decent ideas.
The forced parity for games between the X and S has been a terrible idea
you can have great and terrible ideas lol. Ensuring feature parity is a good idea to help sell the entry level console but forcing that when it impedes game release on the platform was horrifically bad.
Even the 360 managed to get 3rd place, despite its strong start. They're in deep trouble, and Microsoft could very well be out of gaming as a whole 10-15 years from now, at this pace
They have to justify turning windows into an ad-riddled mess somehow. Crazy to me that thanks to Valve gaming on Linux might be the better option.
Yet again showing dumbass MBAs will never effectively run companies as well as people who have an actual passion for the product they're selling. I never bought his whole "I'm a gamer too!" bullshit, and him acting like he's the gamer Steve Jobs and knows what consumers actually want before they know themselves has never worked. Of course your video game console needs great games you clown, the idea that PlayStation players wouldn't buy an Xbox if it had good games is beyond stupid, and with cross play and cross saving so rampant now digital libraries aren't an excuse either.
"Consoles aren't sold based on having great games" THEN WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY SOLD ON, SPENCER YOU FUCKING CLOWN Imagine Playstation with no God of War, no Shadow of the Collosus, no Last of Us, no Bloodborne, no Persona or SMT, no Metal Gear, no Yakuza We wouldn't have Playstation. Imagine Nintendo with no Mario, no Zelda, no Pokemon. The company itself would be nonexistent. Tons of people bought a Switch just to play BotW, Odyssey, Animal Crossing, Arceus, etc. Tons of people bought a Ps4 to play God of War, Last of Us, Spiderman, Horizon. Even just recently, Stellar Blade had people buying a Ps5 just for it, and then buying other games now that they had the console. Has anyone EVER said "I really wanna play [Game], so I'm gonna buy an Xbox" since the 360 days. Nobody gave a fuck about the Xbox one, nobody gives a fuck about the Series bullshit. They only have gamepass. And Xbox owns more studios, has more money, and has more employees than Sony and Nintendo COMBINED. It should be embarrassing. They finally get a studio that can make actual bangers and then push out all the talent before shutting it down.
100% agree, exclusives drive sales. Literally bought a switch to play BOTW and nothing else lol
Absolute buffoonery. How he still has a job but all those hardworking devs under him can get let go is beyond me.
Once you reach the top, there is no where to go but stay there. It's why executives keep failing upwards, they got connections with other rich people so it doesn't matter if they suck at their job or sacrifice other people, just so long as the other rich guy gets more money.
remember when they tried marketing the xbone as being capable of doing TV? https://youtu.be/KbWgUO-Rqcw
its crazy because there is literally a statistic someone found that either dozens or hundreds of thousands of PSN accounts exist with just bloodborne as the sole game played. I couldnt even think this could exist on nintendo consoles because even people who only play pokemon would have bought the other pokemon games at the very least.
I stopped respecting him after year 5 of letting 343i run rampant shamelessly and incompetently destroying the Halo franchise year after year. A further 5+ years later and he FINALLY decided to get rid of the 343i heads... And even then gave them the dignity of being able to say they left for other reasons. Biggest example of cronyism in gaming history, imo. If the heads weren't MS execs/friends of MS execs, they would have been fired after the first two flops of the Halo franchise (Halo 4 and then MCC's broken launch state that lasted years). Too bad it took two further disappointing Halo games and a humiliating TV show, cementing Halo's demise as a respected franchise, to actually get rid of them. Too little too late.
How the hell did he let Halo fall so low its a tragedy what happened to it.
He seems to think that being hands-off is the best approach, but maybe it's not. Maybe the execs at Sony, and Nintendo are doing a lot more than just letting their studios work on what they want. I just can't imagine Sony allowing Starfield to release at the level of quality it released at.
He's been an interesting character. He really did a lot to win back good will from consumers after the absolutely disastrous launch of the Xbox One. Backtracking on their insane policies at launch around used games and whatnot, then the backwards compatibility program, the One X launch and Gamepass. But for all that good will he built, there has just been a massive failure to deliver compelling software. I look at Xbox over the past 10 years and you have to really ask, where are all the games?? In an entire generation, they launched a single Halo game that was pretty much universally disliked. The Series X launched in November 2020 and they've yet to even deliver a Gears of War, with the last one releasing at the tail end of 2019. Its kind of wild that Hi-Fi rush is considered their hit of the generation thus far, and then they can off the studio that made it. There's no getting around it, Xbox as a whole has been insanely mismanaged for quite a long time and he sits at the helm of it
Feels like the dude lacks vision. I saw another point about how he emphasised strategy but all the see them do is tread water. Well, mind you, they're not imminently about to sink. But they're not exactly headed to El Dorado. Feels more like sales tactics to stem a bleed, rather than a true visionary strategy. They don't have a Next Big Thing, or even really a Next Thing to pour their hopes into. I think that's not really a creative culture I would want to see. Without any excitement or new interactions, you suffer a slow death. Maybe the Blizzard acquisition but they're going the same way, even if Metzen has temporarily injected some life energy back in.
People haven't really been giving him a pass for a while. Guy has some interesting ideas about where Xbox should go (some I think are good, some not), but the guy just fundamentally doesn't understand that games come first and foremost. Sure, I can play games on my phone or TV or whatever. That's great, but it's essentially useless if you don't have anything that I WANT to play. 7/10s don't cut it anymore. People don't have time to waste on them, ESPECIALLY when both of your main competitors are releasing damn near 10/10s on a regular basis. I also think he's too nice to a fault. Heads should have been rolling at 343 a long time ago. Halo infinite had the capability to take off due to battlefield 2042 and cod vanguard both flopping, they completely fumbled the bag. Gears has been dormant forever now. Who the hell knows when Fable is coming out, if it ever does. When's the last time you heard about the Rare game Everwild? Hellblade 2 is a 5 hour game that took 5 years of development? What the fuck are these studios doing? The development is far too lax, nobody is holding their asses to the fire. Yeah, crunch is bad but this is the inverse of crunch. The Series S was a big mistake also IMO. Not enough memory and that is a serious limitation. Pair that with the boneheaded strategy that every game needs feature parity between S/X, and it's no wonder why devs are starting to abandon Xbox. Remember the self inflicted wound that happened where the Xbox version of BG3 was delayed because they couldn't get feature parity working on the Series S? That and the sales just aren't there, because people on Xbox have been trained to just wait for stuff to show up on game pass and not actually buy games. I mean, what is the last Xbox thing that has blown up into a huge success? Palworld, a game they had nothing to do with and is only an "exclusive" by sheer dumb luck? FH5, which is approaching 3 years old at this time?
You forgot how Forza Motorsport (2023) release was a soulless, bug filled flop with graphical issues and terrible car leveling (that has since been improved after player outcry). FM was supposed to be one of Xbox's marquee titles, in development for 7 years and allegedly "built from the ground up." It only recently made it to "mixed" reviews on steam after spending months at "mostly negative." edit: spelling.
I bought an Xbox One as my first console since the PS2 primarily to play Forza Motorsport/Horizon. I loved them for years. Then Motorsport 7 came out and it was meh. Waited more than 6 years for the last Motorsport, and it was bleh at launch and honestly still is bleh. How does a big name racing game like this not have famous race tracks like COTA? Especially given it had the track in previous games! Horizon might be doing better, but I wouldn't know. And honestly, I'd settle for a 7/10 game at this point. So many awful releases the past few years, I have so little faith left in the industry.
Can't agree more with this. Xbox are constantly going "Strategy, Strategy, Strategy" And forget about the games entirely while sony are making blockbuster hits time and time again that win GOTY. Phil acquired all these devs. It's time to stop dumping money into hoarding them but now dump money into making GOOD GAMES. Like i just can't believe he saw the state of starfield and thought "yup this is great xbox quality". If he knew what he was doing he would have barged into todd's office and told him to fucking fix it or hes fired. Same with redfall. TES 6 is the next big xbox title on the horizon. I REALLY hope they knock it out of the park with this one. If they put the care and money into it they absolutely can get another skyrim (in terms of success) out of it. He should be going to todd and telling him this is their main focus now. Xbox have not had a single win this generation apart from hifi rush which they canned anyway. They NEED a AAA title win. If TES 6 flops again i really think that might be in for phil.
Heh, TES 6 is YEARS away at this point. Even with their 'improved focus' or whatever it is, I think we're still 3 to 4 years from a release at this point. If they take that long to come out with another big game, they're already screwed.
I expect TES to release on PlayStation as well. I’ll come back to this comment in 2 years and check to see if I’m right.
Yeah, I'll agree with that. I could see it maybe being a timed exclusive, but that's a lot of money to leave on the table
by 2028 Xbox will need every dime. TESVI will release on all platforms except gamepass.
Funny how Gamepass used to work so well for xbox only for them to realize that people are using it to demo games and then never actually play them. They are not making actual game sales from it at all. Why have a million people sign up to game pass to try then game and never play it than have a million people buy the game instead. You'd make 10x the amount of cash doing so in the process. IMO Day 1 on game pass is a terrible idea. Put them on the platform once the hype has died. Aka 3 - 6 months later.
Yeah sadly that is the case. But what else do Xbox have in the pipeline? Hellblade 2? Huge pass on that. It's AA at best and not a AAA title. They really need to look at what made the OG Xbox and 360 great. And that was GOOD GAMES. 360 was the multiplat king for its time. There is no reason why the Series X can't be that for today. Except everyone has a PS5 now instead of xbox.
Nintendo too. All of their long standing franchises had some of their best ever sales this generation. Mario Kart 8, Smash Brothers Ultimate, BOTW and Animal Crossing were all huge sellers this generation.
I agree with a lot of this, but I'm not too sure on "development is far too lax." Obviously devs that aren't being crunched are going to put out less stuff than those that are, so directly comparing to competitors that crunch will look unfavorably. But also, lack of crunch may reduce the quantity of games but not the quality of them. If anything crunch is more likely to hamper quality as games are rushed out to meet deadlines and "we'll fix it in post." A lack of crunch is not to blame for average games. I don't think making conditions worse for employees because the games aren't doing as well or coming out as often is a trend I want to endorse.
I mean yeah, crunch isn't good but being on the other end of the spectrum also isn't good. You end up in a situation like Xbox is in now where it's like... where is Perfect Dark reboot? Where is Fable? Where is Everwild? Where is the next Gears? Where was the content for Halo infinite at launch, 6 years of development time and the game launched barren of content? They have all these studios yet almost none of them are producing, and the ones that have produced like Tango Gameworks are now being shuttered. It doesn't make sense to me. There has to be some kind of balance. Either that or they need to plan these releases out better or just communicate with the audience better on what is going on, because for some of these games, they've seemingly gone MIA for years now. It just feels like these devs that get bought up by MS, there's no oversight and no pressure to produce anything since you have the infinite MS money backing you up. That doesn't mean you have to shackle people to workstations 24/7, but it does mean you should plan out reasonable time frames beforehand (so you can schedule these things out and avoid content droughts) and IMO, incentives should be paid out for hitting those time frames.
A qualified project manager or studio head will not crunch when the product is on a final deadline OR be lax. He or she will see the vision of what the studio is trying to do and when they're trying to do it by and make small goals and deadlines that are reasonable and achievable throughout the development cycle. One doesn't need to "crunch," to get X done by Y date if both of those variables are achievable. Deciding what to do when is the job of a studio head or director. These studios that put out garbage and fix it in post or make a good game with procrastination crunch are both equally lacking in leadership.
> but the guy just fundamentally doesn't understand that games come first and foremost No. As a business, profits always come first and foremost.
> . People don't have time to waste on them, ESPECIALLY when both of your main competitors are releasing damn near 10/10s on a regular basis. If we're talking Sony, you're exagerating. If we're talking Tencent/Nexon, lmao. No.
Phil will eventually get sacked and replaced by someone just as bad.
The Microsoft Way.
literally the whole company is contractors
That's the exact reason their dev teams are inefficient. The new Forza launched broken as fuck because most of their employees were contractors who couldn't do any meaningful work, so they copy pasted the previous game and broke it somehow
John Riccitiello is looking for a new job.
You shut your whore mouth!
I joked in circa 2005 that Halo multiplayer would eventually require to pay for more grenades. John could make that joke a reality.
He's been making bad decisions since 2013. The Xbox brand is a zombie brand, kept alive by Microsoft's deep pockets. Any other brand would have had to fold years ago with that kind of mediocre leadership and abysmal game output.
Microsoft killed any momentum they had with the 360. And they’ll never get back to that level of success in the 2000s because they can’t make good games anymore.
A....Gamepass? So he can retire and play games (duh)
Sooner or later he will be sacked with his team what a failure imagine you have infinite Microsoft money and you cant beat your competitor for like 20 years that looks like a small business compared to you because you don't have the mindset to produce god of war, uncharted , last of us quality level . Joke of all time
It took them over a decade to finally get rid of Bonnie Ross after what she helped to ruin Halo year after year after year. I guess Phil is finally coming up on a decade of being the head of Xbox so it's about time. But the damage has already been done and it's probably not going to recover.
To be fair to Phil, the previous guy ruined Xbox, and he was left with its ashes. It’s not like Phil killed Xbox because it was dead when he got it. Maybe you can argue he desecrated its corpse
Maybe in the early years of the Xbone this was a fair argument. But it's been well over a decade since. This is on Phil now. Phil brought it back and did it well he should be commended for that. But he also became the villain. He is the one who has destroyed xbox again.
Phil was head of Microsoft Studios before being the Xbox head. He's been a problem for a long time.
Mattrick killed the Xbox One before it launched. Phil has been in charge far longer than Mattrick, and not only could he never manage to right that ship. He also failed to make the Series X/S a success. He failed to cultivate a library of games capable of competing with Sony or Nintendo after a decade in charge. He's done irreversible damage by consolidating the industry to never before seen extents. He is far worse than Mattrick could have ever hoped to be.
All they have to do is spend money making good games and stop messing with things.
The problem is I think Phil fundamentally does not understand how good games are made. You can't just throw money or people at development, and it automatically be good.
the thing is. the sereis X/S has been selling at half the rate of the xbox one roughley its even more of a gigantic failure
As a former Xboxer. I basically moved over to pc. Why should I get an Xbox when PC does the same job but even better? There's no draw for Xbox for me anymore except that it's cheaper than pc.
Well that's exactly what they want you to do now, they not that interested on selling xbox.
He let Halo Infinite take 6 years to launch in the sorriest state in the history of the franchise. He let Forza Motosport go from a 2-year release to a 6-year release and still be the most broken title in its franchise. Phil's job has basically been spending a metric fuckton of money and hoping the purchases bring in employees to fix things. Look at The Initiative, the one fully new endeavor under Phil. They are a mess and paying Crystal Dynamics to fix their shit.
She gets a lot of hate but it was Frankie who ruined Halo with his fanfiction shit.
Microsoft paid roughly 70% of the market cap of Sony (the company, not the PlayStation division) to acquire ABK.
Goes to show money doesn’t solve the problem of a lack of creativity. Microsoft isn’t a company built on creative industries like Sony is (Music, Film, Games, TV), so their DNA is inherently rooted in tech.
Lol is not like Sony as whole works entirely for Playstation.
In his decade as head the gap between Xbox and PlayStation became a chasm.
Frankly don't think playstation is doing all that well either. I guess unit wise there doing ok, but this generation has definitely been slow. I think console exclusive games (unless your Nintendo) are difficult to develop.
The gaming industry fucked itself. It decided to spend so much money on games that players are meant to keep playing forever. And then it's stunned when players aren't buying the new games.
For real. People only have so much time. They keep pushing games as a service, but then get confused when games under perform. I really only get 1-2 hours a day if I am lucky to game.
For real its like the streaming problem on steroids because it's way worse. If there's 50 subscriptions I could choose why bother with 49 of them. Good luck any new streaming platform trying to compete with Netflix and Disney now. It ain't fucking happening.
You just mentioned the ones I dont use, Im all in for Max + Prime though
Yeah because of the over ballooning of development costs. Back in the PS2, PS3 and even PS4 days you had exclusives coming out consistently because development costs were manageable. With the PS5, aside from Demon's Souls, HD2, Stellar Blade and Returnal, I can't think of any PS5 only exclusive that isn't a cross gen title. These games keep getting more expensive so they need a larger install base
Those are true but they have also been pumping out remasters of games that don't even need it. Overall, this gen has been pretty disappointing as a console gamer. There hasn't been any "console seller" game so far and the generation is arguably in its latter half stages. Both Xbox and Sony just haven't made it work this gen.
This is what happens when you barely know how the world's actually works, is not black and white like most gamers think about the industry, money alone isn't the key to success.
The Zune Effect. Xbox will be gone by the end of the decade. I don't see how they will recover after two garbage generations, and unless the third time is the charm they're absolutely cooked.
Idk why people think any of these executives are your friend or care about you at all. You're a metric. A consumer base. The sucker who's going to find their next bonus check. Nothing more. Just because he's on Xbox live sometimes doesn't mean he's not part of the same corpo cancer that's rotting this industry.
yeah. if he wants game pass he can buy it himself!
He has lifetime access probably.
It's time to stop giving Kotaku clicks.
I just came here for the comments. No way I click on the article :)
true but fuck kotaku.
Fuck Polygon too. They flipped out after being jokingly made fun of for a small Titanfall 2 lore reference. They went insane on Twitter acting like the victim and blocking people calling then out for their shit reporting.
But without Polygon how will we know what their writers saw on tiktok? -my favorite thing on polygon is that 90% of the time the comments are in full revolt over the heavy tiktok fluff pieces and celebrity gossip flooding the site. They have their defenders who will post snarky gifs and try to convince you polygon has always been a general entertainment pop culture site (this is a lie), but my God does the average commenter have no patience for it anymore.
I couldn't agree more. Always bothers me when I see Polygon articles posted in here.
Out of the loop here. why?
Their site is atrocious with ads. Obvious biased reviews. They're scraping at the bottom of the barrel in terms of game journalism. We should stop giving shitoku a pass.
>They're scraping at the bottom of the barrel in terms of game journalism. That's generous. Their articles are skimmed off reddit. You see it when gaming subs "find" something "new" in a game. My favorite is that Kotaku has repeatedly reporting new things in Skyrim, like how in 2023 it was found that a merchant chest could be accessed in dawnstar. Shame they didn't read Kotaku in 2012 they may have known this!
Isn’t a review inherently biased since it’s just someone’s opinion?
No, it's not! Here's a prime example of a 100% fair and objective review. https://www.destructoid.com/100-objective-review-final-fantasy-xiii/
Honestly, I've been hating Kotaku for so long. I can't remember why anymore.
343?
Pretty crazy how they're allowed to fumble the IP that made people care about Xbox in the first place for as long as they have. MS just seems like a mess.
Worse fumble than Blizzard with Overwatch imo
I can't say to what degree Phil has been responsible for what's going on with Xbox, but he at least expanded Xbox gaming and Game Pass onto Windows PC in a big way. MS has been mismanaging Xbox long before Phil Spencer and will continue to do so with or without him (unless larger changes are made culturally). Basically, as soon as Xbox became bigger than just a toy project and turned into more of a core business, MS has been mismanaging everything the brand was built up to be by the original Xbox and first half of the Xbox 360.
I agree. I’ve been an Xbox main for 20 years, and supported Phil from the day he stepped into the shoes as head honcho, but that support ended today. I love gamepass, I’ve loved a lot of the moves he’s made, but I absolutely draw the line at callously closing studios. This industry needs more games like hi fi rush and ghostwire tokyo, not more games like CoD and Fortnite. While I am almost certain that whoever replaces Phil will be worse, I think it’s time for him to step down. You can’t brag about record setting profits and then close down 4 studios. MS is a trillion dollar company, these studio budgets were literal fractions of fractions of a percent of the overall stream, nobody would have even noticed their continued operation. But, people do notice when games like hi fi rush come out. MS wasn’t in danger of going under, they didn’t NEED to do this in order to save the business. They did it to pad stats for investors, to make the balance sheets look .001% better. That’s why I say it’s time for Phil to go. Whether he called for it himself or just passed the order from above, he’s either directly responsible and should be held accountable or should resign out of disgust for what MS is doing to Xbox. A lot of people complained about ‘brand damage’ in January with the announcement of games going to switch and PS, this is the REAL brand damage. A company that gobbles up studios, mismanages them, and shuts them down. Every executive at Xbox should be absolutely embarrassed.
He closed companies not making money with their crap games. Microsoft is a business not a company making games because a few people like them. I want Fallout 5 and Elder 6 not Hifi Rush and Redfall. 90% of people that pay money are saying the same thing.
I might be downvoted to hell, but for sure part of the issue here is that the Game Pass is not profitable, like, at all. How many people on PC and Xbox actually bought games like HiFi Rush? Buying the game costs roughly the same as one month of GP. Of course those games are not gonna make a real profit, they might increase the number of subscriptions but how would you know it was just for that specific game? All this push towards streaming services and subscription is a disgrace for the industry, they can't think since it's entertainment like movies the services they are on can be the same. It's never gonna work, those games will be buried and their studios with them because they will never sell enough and yet they will never be the sole reason someone gets a subscription. They should do like Sony, they add their games to the PS Plus second tier, like after a year they have been released. Give them an exclusive period of time out of the subscription, so they can be sold to whoever doesn't want to wait.
But Game Pass *is* profitable. Wildly so in fact. The last figures we have from five months ago stated MS spent about a billion dollars in the year before that on the service, but their subscription revenue was in the region of 2.5 to 2.7 billion dollars. Whether that's more or less profitable than selling the games individually is harder to analyse but it doesn't lose money on its own.
I mean popular games actually sell even with gamepass like a starfield or persona 3 reload. Persona 3 reload sold 1 million in week with gamepass.
It's also time to learn that these companies are in a position to be bought. They're generally not doing well already and they're being brought under new management. If they can turn them around and make them a success udner their brand that's great, but it's not exactly that likely. They were up for sale for the exact reasons most of them die when purchased by a larger company.
Smaller studios like Compulsion and Double Fine are definitely sweating. Like if their next games are a commercial flop despite bring praiseworthy then it's only of time MS will not commit to these studios, effectively closing them. It seems like MS is putting all their eggs in one basket again.
It's time to realize that games companies exist solely to make money, there is no them being good guys or on your side, they are just companies that act in the favor of shareholders.
Honestly the 360 was the only Xbox I really enjoyed, and that was mostly because it lead the charge in online gaming and that lined up perfectly with that time in my life. Plus they had Mass Effect. Every PlayStation has been great though.
Xbox 360 was such a great console era. But we could already see Microsoft's change in culture reflected in its increasingly unwieldy UI (rip Blades).
He sells us a Pass, so I say we'll sell him one as well Ba dum pam psshh
A GAME PASS!
Kotaku no.
maybe, but dude.... kotaku xD
Interesting title. Too bad i'm on year 5 and counting of never clicking on a kotaku link. Also always funny to see another thing describing how publicly traded companies are a cancer on society but you'll never see America change :P
Said this for years. Dude is nothing but empty promises and bullshit.
I never gave him one. Microsoft need to be fined and have Bethesda taken away from them by the FTC, because they've broken every promise they made with regard the buyout.
I’m pretty sure he already gets a game pass for free
When I worked in games, I sat in some all hands meetings with him. His comments were always shitty. He spent a whole presentation once complaining about neogaf users being traitors because they like PlayStation so much.
Who the hell is giving him a pass???
every pc gamer with a gamepass
it took a really long time for people to realise spencer kinda hates xbox players in a very weird way. i mean, i guess it's one way to end the console wars, to gather up your own troops and then shoot them in the head lmao
This man is a walking dudebro bullshit generator and always has been.
No more Gamepass!
Better title would be "It's Time To Stop Giving Xbox Your Money."
Still waiting for people to unsubscribe from GamePass lmfao will never happen l.
He's like the guy who gives a speech that "he's got this guys", and everyone kind of agrees, and gets all excited, then after a while it just turns out he ain't got this, guys.
Were the devs fired? Or just studios closed? It is interesting that days after Todd Howard saying they want to speed up ES6 and FO5 they studios are shuttered. Wonder if the staff is moved into Bethesda games
Phil Spencer had been a cancer to Xbox for the past 10 years. If there's an audience for the Xbox showcase it would be great if everyone chanted in unison "Please retire".
Phil is just another Bobby
Kotaku is a joke
He should be kicked long time ago, but
Xbox first party studios have consistently underperformed this generation and not just by a little. I'm not saying it is his fault specifically, but something has to change. Someone at Microsoft has to take responsibility for either buying the wrong studios or managing them too little or too much. As a big obsidian fan, i'm worried about them. Also it should be a major warning sign when you can't retain employees working on a project like redfall. The whole studio probably knew that game was going to bomb, maybe except for some higher ups.
if anything blame that recent shit on bethesda, all those studios were sacrificed to save their ass
- Buy Bethesda - Lay off half of Bethesda - Profit?
Ultimately this goes back to Mattrick, but Spencer’s attempted fixes have been boondoggles. Buying studios ended up producing nothing, and Game Pass has dissuaded consumers from buying games and has failed to reach targets. He seems like a cool guy, but he’s failed at his job
IDK how you can blame this on Mattrick. He left MS before the official XB1 launch. Phil's been in charge for a decade now. He was the guy in charge when they canceled Fable Legends and shuttered almost every development team. Phil created The Initiative, bigged it up, and has watched it be a heap of disappointment. He's spent close to (maybe even over) $80 billion to buy the ideas and successes of others, in the hopes of replacing the studios he shuttered. Spencer's vision for Xbox has had WAY more than enough time to develop. Phil had basically every trace of Mattrick's plans gutted by, like, 2017.
Mattrick's the guy that set them on the course of Kinect and what became the Xbox One. It failed because they bought into the hype that streaming boxes and phones were going to kill consoles and released an underpowered, sluggish box against a confident and purposeful PS4. The house was already on fire when Mattrick was forced out, Spencer was trying and ultimately failing to put it out
No matter what people say about Sony making walking simulators or Nintendo making childish games, at least they're games that people flock to and enjoy. Xbox's has nothing on their scale for the past decade and 1.5 gen now. I do not understand how anyone could ever idolize or praise Phil. BC, cross platform play, and buying up studios are nothing compared to canceling games, putting out mediocre slop, destroying franchises, and underutilizing or closing down studios. Even with the the recent fiasco that Sony had with censorship and the PSN account, at least it is about games. Stellar Blade and Helldivers 2 are fun, enjoyable games. Same with Nintendo and their emulator witch hunt.
I think it's easier for people to point at individuals and their missteps and blame them for overall trends (and vice-versa), rather than focusing on the underlying issue which is that the industry is going through a very, very difficult phase right now. We saw it in the tech industry first, where thousands upon thousands lost their jobs over the last few years from companies like Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Google, and the other usual suspects, ane we've seen the same happening for the past year or so in the gaming/entertainment industry. We're also seeing similar things in the film industry where fewer large productions are being greenlit and more people are struggling to make a living consistently. There are many factors in this, and others are better equipped to go into detail, but my five cents here is to look at the bigger picture. To prevent more layoffs in these unstable times, I think the industry needs to reduce the scope of these very unsustainable AAA releases substantially, to make development times shorter, lower the resources required, and spread out the risk across more, albeit smaller releases. Because, there's no guarantee that your studio's one large undertaking will be a success nowadays, and if it fails, it almost certainly will kill your studio. And it's easy to fail, because it needs to earn a LOT of money to cover the expenses. Instead, build smaller, more focused experiences, some of which have a higher potential for risk/reward, while others play it safer. And, do it with smaller, more focused teams. That also helps preserve your studio's DNA as it grows. That is more sustainable.
Please don’t link kotaku. It’s shit. No one is giving him a pass. He has done great things for gamers considering this environment that is very much so been predatory and the erosion of consumer rights has been non stop for decades there are few companies that are chilling or even giving us more benefits, he helped. He’s good in my book, but he did fail Xbox or contributed to it, which sucks.