8 ms·
Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios
- loa_in_ 2y agoAnecdotally, as an avid gamer, I, personally do not miss the studios listed
- Apocryphon 2y agoNever played Prey 2017?
- HDThoreaun 2y agoTheyve released 5 bad games since prey
- ajmurmann 2y agoDidn't like Deathloop?
- HDThoreaun 2y agonope
- badsectoracula 2y agoArkane Austin only made Redfall since Prey, the rest were Arkane Lyon (which didn't close). Allegedly (based on some articles) Redfall started as a pure singleplayer game ala Prey 2017 (and their older titles) but Zenimax and Bethesda wanted to add multiplayer and Games-as-a-service elements because they thought it'd increase the company's value back when they were looking for buyers Essentially the studio was forced to make a game very different from what they were known for (not just as Arkane but even people who worked there) and wanted to make for reasons outside the game's own merits, which in turn introduced a lot of production issues (they did not have the staff or know-how and had to expand in size) and predictably ended up a mess.
- HDThoreaun 2y agothank you for the context.
- failuser 2y agoRedfall was the only outright bad one. And it was pretty obvious the specification for the game was bad already.
- drrlvn 2y agoOnly one, Redfall. They're only closing Arkane Austin, not Arkane Lyon. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkane_Studios#Games_developed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkane_Studios#Games_developed
- Sakos 2y agoThis seems bizarre to me. They're closing the one that made Prey 2017. Is it because labor is cheaper in France vs in Austin, USA? Or maybe because everybody who was involved with making Prey left during the shitshow that was Redfall? Or a combination maybe? I can't imagine giving Harvey Smith the axe, though I guess he'll be one of the handful who'll be shuffled off to work on something else inside Bethesda.
- anbotero 2y agoNot only it’s probably cheaper in France, but France has strong employee-protection laws, so closing a company there will probably be more costly on severances alone, assuming they can justify to the government why they are closing that company.
- Apocryphon 2y agoHarvey Smith making a Fallout would be a sight to behold, shame Todd won't let him
- ProfMeowsworth 2y agoThere are two Arkanes: Austin and Lyon. Redfall was made by Austin and I think they didn’t make any game between that and Prey (2017). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkane_Studios https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkane_Studios
- phyllistine 2y agoI can't say the same, Hi-Fi Rush was incredible and I want so many more genre bending games like it.
- timeon 2y agoI would not miss 3d Fallouts.
- delecti 2y agoBut that clearly isn't equivalent to "they will not be missed", or "the gaming industry is better without them". Rockstar or Treyarch could disappear and I personally wouldn't care, but I also wouldn't pop into threads about them and pat myself on the back for not being bothered.
- DannyPage 2y agoHi-Fi Rush was a fantastic game, won major awards, showed off the promise of XBox Game Pass… and for their efforts their studio has been shut down. There have multiple instances of this in just the past few weeks; are publishers really going to just bet on their prime AAA titles (Call of Duty, Halo, GTA6, etc) and nothing else? And those games either take a lot of rotating studios and a long development cycle to release. What’s going to fill the gap?
- Apocryphon 2y agoJust as with movies, it seems like we’re witnessing the death of mid-budget (AA) games.
- iLoveOncall 2y agoHonestly I think it might make sense. I can't remember a single AA game that was great. Actually, I can't remember a single AA game other than the ones I remember because of how bad they were. I think AA in games has, for a long time, meant "We want to do a AAA but don't have the money or time" and this can only end in disaster.
- failuser 2y agoHow many As does Psychonauts have?
- ryanmcbride 2y agoIs Yakuza AA or AAA? Because every Yakuza game is great and I don't think they have that big of a budget.
- ClimaxGravely 2y agoI've worked on some titles very similar to Yakuza and I keep espousing the way they develop their titles. I don't know for sure because I haven't worked at the studio but it really seems like they've streamlined their development to keep costs down and allow them to develop quickly via asset reuse and resisting major engine upgrades across titles in favor of a slower, more focused pace. Often in my experience in the west we tend to re-author assets, do major engine upgrades or re-implement gameplay systems across sequels when we could have iterated on existing systems and use the time we saved to work on new stuff.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago"Thanks for the widely acclaimed mid-budget surprise hit, Tango. Now polish up your resumes, pack up your stuff, and get out." It's like AAA publishers have no notion of a game studio as an organic thing that can grow. It's all just pieces on a board.
- nercury 2y agoIt's like destroying a factory when the chips it produces do not sell.
- ppseafield 2y agoWith Tango/Hi-Fi Rush, MS decided to make it free with Game Pass at launch, which obviously hurt its sales. If you sell chips but charge people $1 for two weeks for unlimited chips, then just $10/mo for unlimited chips, you might be disappointed with direct chip sales.
- VyseofArcadia 2y agoFiring an entire sports team after a loss. Although in Tango's case, not even a loss, just not a big enough victory.
- sumtechguy 2y agoGame studios have always been very brutal in their hire/grind/fire cycle. Not sure they really want to change.
- pixl97 2y agoMost game studios don't give 2 shits about the games themselves, it's all about the MTX. They don't care if selling the game installer is a massive money loss, it's about bringing in the microtransactions and the massive piles of cash they create (generally at the expense of the users game experience).
- willis936 2y ago
- fidotron 2y agoWhat is extraordinary about the Microsoft games unit and Xbox is how immune their senior staff are to the repercussions of their bad decisions. They're certainly not taking responsibility for the failed gamepass experiment, trashing the Xbox brand, or the acquisitions they now regret since successfully closing Activision. Failing upwards has never been so conspicuously obvious as it is in modern corporate America thanks to the pervasive use of social media.
- CSMastermind 2y agoI don't play games at all so I'm very out of the loop but gamepass was a failure? I have friends at Microsoft who worked on it and they all seemed to think it was going well last I checked (about a year ago).
- fidotron 2y ago> gamepass was a failure? I'm amazed that this is a question. Gamepass is essentially so low cost as to be an incredibly costly giveaway, only it has proven that this devalues everything that touches it. For context, Hifi Rush had 3 million players on Gamepass last August, and today they shut the studio. So even when they get a break out hit they cannot justify keeping the studios around to try and do another; that's not a success.
- coffeeindex 2y agoUntil I see actual numbers on Gamepass I won’t believe that it was a failure. It isn’t a direct comparison of “gamers are spending $10 instead of $70”. People who would not buy a game that just came out will willingly pay for Gamepass every month. Gamepass also exists on PC, so Xbox is dipping into a user base which otherwise might not buy many products from them. Yes they almost definitely make less money from some people, but they might make that back and more from people who otherwise would not be buying their games. It’s hard to use your intuition here without some numbers
- rrix2 2y ago
- nercury 2y agoCorporate prioritization is the ultimate cookie cutter, doomed to produce the most generic thing possible.
- reubenmorais 2y agoThe already existing and extremely powerful paperclip maximizers.
- oersted 2y agoIndeed, modern public corporations are already functionally equivalent to AGIs in many ways, with a legal obligation to maximize profit by any means. Not sure why this is not a more common point in AI doomsaying discussions.
- VyseofArcadia 2y agoEspecially in this modern era of metrics and data-driven design[0]. It's just design by committee at scale. [0] Why you would go hard on data-driven design in a creative field instead of trusting the instincts of creators I will never know.
- AdmiralAsshat 2y agoLooks like Shinji Mikami left Tango before he had to watch it get shut down.
- Apocryphon 2y agoLooking Glass, Irrational Games, Ion Storm, Arkane. Wonder if immersive sims are fated to be an over-ambitious, under-sold, mass audience-unfriendly genre made by doomed studios.
- mepian 2y agoArkane's Prey is one of my favorite games ever, shame they were "rewarded" like this.
- SlowRobotAhead 2y agoI liked it, but couldn't get past "this is just Bioshock in space with a more mysterious plot". Then the reveal, well, IDK.
- Apocryphon 2y agoahem it was a System Shock 2 spiritual successor, c'mon
- mepian 2y agoDan(ielle) Sho was initially conceived as a direct reference to SHODAN, even: https://kotaku.com/old-leaked-design-documents-show-what-prey-couldve-been-1795295577 https://kotaku.com/old-leaked-design-documents-show-what-pre...
- bpiche 2y agoThe Dishonored games were great. At least they wrapped up the story before they got canned. Wonderful painterly art style and imaginative gameplay.
- jerf 2y agoImmersive Sim + "I have to keep up with the latest AAA game standards for graphics" probably is doomed. We really need to give them permission to not have to be up to that graphics standard. Permission to not have to be fully voiced would be nice too. Right now they're in an ugly place where they're still awfully large for an indie or AA studio, but an AAA studio still largely won't make anything that doesn't drive to the limit of modern graphics.
- bilekas 2y agoThis is quite a lot of studios to be dissolving and obviously a lot of good developers and artists. The silver lining, if any, is that usually some of those let off open up their own indie studios and release some absolute gems. So here's to hoping and good luck to them!
- baerrie 2y agoI’m calling it now, in five years Bethesda will be making more money with Fallout and Elder Scrolls television shows than their games
- SlowRobotAhead 2y agoI think the Starfield TV show is going to have difficulties, it'll just be people switching between planets every scene.
- burnte 2y agoI don't even know why this makes news anymore. It's so rare for a game studio to last a decade, most don't, and even successful ones will be shut down after launching a huge title in order to keep more profits for the publisher. Publishers are slave masters in the games industry.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoMaking a crass example, but schol shootings also make the news all the time and they are reported on in detail everytime. It being semi-common doesn't not make it depressing.
- WhereIsTheTruth 2y agoFTC must be happy!
- AlwaysRock 2y agoSo... When does the government take action against Microsoft for lying about the Activision merger and how there wouldnt be layoffs?
- gwill 2y agoThey already broke that promise back in january with 1,900 layoffs https://www.polygon.com/24065269/ftc-microsoft-activision-deal-layoffs-appeal https://www.polygon.com/24065269/ftc-microsoft-activision-de...
- chucke1992 2y agoLying for what? They did not promise not to close studios or laying off people. Governments should start looking at their own layoffs first too.
- AlwaysRock 2y agoPart of the reason the merger was allowed was because they promised it would not result in layoffs for either company. They have now done multiple rounds of layoffs. They lied.
- coolbreezetft24 2y agoI feel like AAA gaming has just gotten too big, the time between releases is way too long compared to back in the 2000s and try to hard to big massive open world or movie quality cinematic experience. I feel similar about Sony. Nintendo on the other hand seems have a good balance of putting out quality games of various ambition with a good frequency
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>Nintendo on the other hand seems have a good balance of putting out quality games of various ambition with a good frequency And you see how vehemently the gaming community reacts everytime a Switch exclusive game has some slight frame dip despite running on 2016 hardware. Part of that demand does in fact come from the consumers who don't understand how much work goes into those fancy graphics. And what it sacrifices.
- hbn 2y agoJust yesterday there was a poll going around on Twitter of which of the big 3 gaming companies, Nintendo, Sony, and MS is the "least bad" or something like that, and I saw a lot of people saying Microsoft. I figured they'd do something stupid soon to remind everyone how Microsoft operates, but didn't think it would be so soon! I can't believe these studio acquisitions still aren't being blocked. At what point will they finally acknowledge the blatant anti-competition Microsoft regularly demonstrates by buying any studio that gets too big, letting them rot, and then killing them off?
- wredue 2y agoHow on earth is MS the “least bad” in the wake of this massive anti-competitive practice of just buying up studios?
- hbn 2y agoEvery once in a while they'll do a generous move to essentially buy the good graces of gamers -- e.g. backwards compatibility, launching new releases day one on GamePass (I don't consider that a good thing but whatever), making some custom accessible controller for the disabled, etc. But as with any shitty corporation like MS, it's not charity. It's an investment to distract everyone from the fact that they're a shitty corporation. And it works apparently!
- faet 2y agoGamepass is pretty generous. Gamers see MS buy a studio and add their catalog to gamepass. PC gamers appreciate that Xbox games are also usually on PC. Nintendo sends a ton of C&D letters to smaller developers, and are pretty anti-emulation. Games never go on sale. Remakes are expensive ($60 for Super Mario RPG for example). Sony just had the whole "You need a PSN account to play a PC game" thing. But also, you can't create a PSN account in some countries, so sorry you can't play the PC game you bought anymore. They ended up walking it back though. You also need to pay to play online, which is a thing on xbox as well. But I think that's usually drowned out by the "PC Gamers" who don't need to pay for something like that.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
- etempleton 2y agoMy guess is that because of the success of Fallout show Microsoft is trying to spin up resources to make another Fallout game as soon as possible while also keeping Elder Scrolls moving forward. Bethesda has always been a one game studio, but perhaps they will try to hire up to become a two game studio or they could go beef up Obsidian to pivot into a Fallout New Vegas to or other non-numbered Fallout game. The casualties of this are two financially under performing studios.
- lupusreal 2y agoIf Microsoft plans to bring a lot of new people into a Bethesda game, I hope they invest in new engine tech and QA. Old Bethesda fans know what to expect by now, but newcomers with any modern game experience are going to be in for a rude surprise if the next Fallout game ships with typical Bethesda quality. They've had this problem with their last several releases too, but I think the TV show will make it a lot worse.
- etempleton 2y agoStarfield was much better than past Bethesda releases, but I agree.
- laylower 2y agoNo it was not. It was bland, linear, empty and it felt like an asset flip of fallout 4. At least fallout 3 and NV had some great RPG elements. Fallout 4 and Starfield were not great. The graphics engine was dated 10 years ago, it's now comically underwhelming.
- etempleton 2y agoQA was better. The game was released with significantly less bugs than their previous entries. And you can say what you will about the engine upgrades, but they are there.
- FractalHQ 2y ago
- swozey 2y agoThe amount of layoffs the last two years is ridiculous. My company just laid off 35 people (150ish employees) and gave them a whopping 2 weeks severance for each year that they worked there. Most of the people let go had only worked here for 1-2 years. Engineers and QA. I was shocked when I heard that because I've always seen it as a great place to work and very forward thinking. That wasn't publicly disclosed, of course, I heard it from a manager coworker/friend. Now I'm petrified.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoHey that was my package too, and sadly it was my best package. Company #1, nothing. Company #2, this. Company #3, 1 month (TBF I was only there a year, so I guess it was as good as #2). #2 only wins out because I had partially vested stock. But otherwise, my severance history is paltry.
- _akhe 2y agoBring on the AI: - Procedural worlds - Realistic NPC conversations - Dynamic and unpredictable encounters
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]