Submitted 6 months ago by Hypx@fedia.io to games@lemmy.world
https://twistedvoxel.com/xbox-more-studio-closures-than-first-party-game-releases-2024/
We've almost reached the end of the 1st half of 2024, and Xbox has had more studio closures than first party game releases in the year so far.
kinda hard to make video games if you keep laying off the people who make video games...
my heart goes out to those in the industry going through all this crap, man
In just four years, they have lost Toys for Bob (developer of Spyro Reignited and Crash 4), Arkane Austin (Prey 2017), and Tango (Evil Within, Hi-Fi Rush). I wish I had the money to casually buy some great dev studios, including the makers of a GOTY contender, and casually kill them off a few years later.
I know they are in panic mode right now, but I honestly don’t know what their plan is at this point. I doubt even they know. Watching the situation from the outside, it’s almost comical how MS has mismanaged everything for years. I live in Europe and I’ve never seen Xbox marketed anywhere. GamePass is supposedly their priority, and barely anyone I know who is interested in gaming knows that it even exists. The whole deal with the service was delivering first party games day one, yet failed to deliver anything worth buying four years into the service, while most of what they actually released was already in the works prior the acquisition. They bought dozens of studios, and mismanaged every single one of them. Fuck, they couldn’t even settle on the cover for their game cases for half a year when their new box released.
The only good thing out of this debacle is that people have finally realized how utterly incompetent Phil Spencer is. I remember the days when fanboys were parroting his lies and kept talking about how “Phil is a gamer just like us” and shit like that, just because he showed up on the stage in a shitty t-shirt. Too bad it took xbox fucking dying for them to realize, but I guess it’s better later than never.
Hey, quite a few people bought Game Pass for a month to try out Cities: Skylines 2, because it was quite a lot cheaper than the game itself (and considering the poor state the game was released in, probably not much more than a month of replay value anyway)
Its almost like none of you remember microsoft in the dot com era.
Did no one just intuitely understand this was a consequence of aquiring blizzard-activision?
EA still has a massive graveyard of former dev studios we lament.
In other news trees of green
Trees of green what, is the real question.
You didnt just remind me i have some new edibles to try out at alll
Corporate Greed ruining everything and MS having no real direction.
Welcome to Capitalism
deus@lemmy.world 6 months ago
At this rate in a couple years there’ll be nothing left of all those studios they bought recently.
ME5SENGER_24@lemmy.world 6 months ago
That’s by design. Force your opposition to sell, bankrupt them and write off the loses. Shrink the industry and force players to sign up for your subscription services.
I’m not a fan, but it’s hard to see this wasn’t their plan from the get go
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The industry historically hasn’t shrunk when studios close like this. There just ends up being more bespoke studios all over the world with former developers from those studios.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It seems weird for a platform holder to do this.
shinratdr@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
The sad part is this might actually end up being a net positive in the long run. Their two biggest acquisitions were Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard, one company that has started their decline and another that is deep into it.
Microsoft pissing away $100B to buy these companies only to turn around and kill them 5-10 years later will end up breaking up the gaming conglomerates that have killed the western games industry. The only sad part is all the people that will lose their jobs and all the classic IP that will be squandered.
Defaced@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Enhance, embrace, extinguish. That’s the Microsoft way, their success has always and will always be built off the backs of others they’ve fucked over.