Comment on Fable delayed to 2026
Viri4thus@feddit.org 1 week agoAvowed is a success in which planet? Grounded, which is a pretty good game for what it costs, has a 33% higher player peak and gigantic tail compared to avowed’s player drop off… This is a game, from the same studio, that cost a fraction of what avowed cost (1/4 people credited) to make. MS pulled all the stops for people to engage with avowed but ultimately failed because the game is just mediocre.
Regarding management, MS are the paragons of good management and would never put a team on a game they don’t want to make, resulting in several delays and ultimately a poor quality product. This never happened at Microsoft… EVER!
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Any given game being more successful does not make Avowed unsuccessful. Grounded has a 33% higher peak and also cost 57% of what Avowed cost for the audience to buy; they may have sold more copies and made less revenue. A more repetitive multiplayer focused game will retain players longer than a single player game with an ending. But ultimately, we have no idea if the game was successful outside of the team saying publicly that they’re happy with its performance. That will never mean raw sales anymore, since they are a part of Game Pass. Game Pass pulls in, in all likelihood, 3-4x Avowed’s budget in revenue every month. Even with the overhead they have of running the service and licensing third party games for it, they can probably afford at least one Avowed on their books every month and justify it as long as they feel like the presence of a flashy new game is what’s keeping people subscribed. No one knows how many people on Game Pass need to play a given game for Microsoft to consider it a success, but perhaps the worst way to evaluate the game’s success is to look at Steam charts and compare it to some other game arbitrarily, much like what’s happening with Assassin’s Creed right now. The Steam forums are full of armchair quarterbacks that are sure that Shadows has flopped by doing the same nonsense comparisons to Steam charts even though this is a series that handily sold tens of millions copies on non-Steam platforms for years.
Mismanagement has and will continue to happen at Microsoft. The first iteration of Avowed was aiming at being “Microsoft’s Elder Scrolls”…but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no need for that design anymore once they bought Elder Scrolls itself in the next couple of years after that. I’m not too concerned about how long Fable has taken to develop thus far considering when their last Forza Horizon game came out and that full development on Fable probably didn’t start until that game shipped. What I did hear was that when Microsoft originally announced it for 2025, the development team laughed at the idea.
Viri4thus@feddit.org 1 week ago
This premise is flat out wrong. A cheaper game, from the same studio, captured more return customers than a flagship with a massive ad campaign and significantly more effort behind it. That’s an epic blunder, so much so, Patel had to do the rounds in the press to appeal to the stock holders and paint a pretty picture, lest MS dissolve the studio before Outer worlds 2 is done.
This level of reality distortion field is almost as the one from the people (and some subhuman racists) saying AC Shadows flopped. AC Shadows delivered (according to reviews) exactly what was promised to its customers, an AC game in Japan with shinobi. I haven’t touched AC since Black Flag, but if I were a fan of Ubisoft open worlds, I’d be ecstatic right now. A Ubisoft game delivering on what was promised without game breaking bugs is actually remarkable. It’s still a mediocre game, but for its niche, it’s a solid release. It’s diametrically opposite to Avowed, which advertised a deep RPG and sold a fantasy action game with no depth or interactivity.
If someone would have told me, a year ago, Avowed would review worse and, have lower user score than AC Shadows, I would have laughed in their face. That game has suffered controversy over controversy just because they decided to have an afro samurai and the conservative anglophones lost their shit.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
A cheaper game captures more customers, yes. It doesn’t mean it didn’t make its money back. Retention as a metric doesn’t matter at all for an offline game you play and finish, and depending on how Grounded is monetized, it might not matter for that game either, if the intention is that you just play with your friends. The profit or loss of Avowed, next to the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Microsoft brings in in a year, hardly matters to investors, and I don’t know where you got it in your head that these media appearances are a plea to investors. Microsoft is an enormous behemoth operating at much larger scales than any one video game. Their strategy is Game Pass. They’re all in on that strategy. If Avowed seems to provide value for Game Pass and keep people subscribed, then they and their investors are happy. For everyone who isn’t interested in Game Pass, they’re happy to sell it to you for $70. You’re just making shit up as you go instead of admitting what you do and do not know.
Viri4thus@feddit.org 1 week ago
*Looks at tango, arkane and the rest of the cemetery.
Yes, every time anyone at MS said the engagement and GP users was amazing it was totally true. Lets believe that and appreciate how normal it is to give interviews to bloomberg saying, “we totally didn’t fail our objectives with this mediocre piece of media”.
Time is on my side, I’ll just save this interaction.