Submitted 3 weeks ago by lazycouchpotato@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Xbox is canceling Contraband, announced in 2021 from Avalanche Studios (Just Cause), after four years of radio silence, sources tell Bloomberg News. This news arrives canceled several other big titles - Jason Schreier
Microsoft seriously bought all the IPs to make sure none of them got used
That’s straight up the behavior of a company that wants to create a monopoly. Buy up the smaller companies so the competitors can’t buy them up and then just shut those companies down so their products can’t compete with the existing money makers. The money they put into those studios for game development is just a charade to please the authorities. Cause if they would shut those companies down immediately after purchasing that would be undeniably anti-competitive behavior and illegal even in the US.
They bought Rare simply becaues they thought it’d take Donkey Kong from Nintendo
Which is exactly what I expected them to do. I laughed at Blizzard fans being hopeful about the acquisition because things didn’t go well at the time. It was always just another step towards closure.
Blizzard fans have a habit of believing Blizzard is still this small indie company with humble games like Starcraft, Lost Vikings, and Diablo, and that it’s just mean ol Activision making them do things like…
sigh
Have two to three whole expansions of Sylvanas Windrunner being not only the Warchief of the Horde, but for all intents and purposes being basically the main fucking character, complete with a writer who brought her previously killed off-boyfriend Nathanos, only as a self-insert.
Like I love Sylvanas, she was my favorite character, but Jesus fucking Christ that was cringe. Not only was it completely out of character for the Horde to give her leadership (Protip: The Forsaken aren’t trusted by anyone because they’re scary fucking zombies who do scary zombie shit, the Horde just figures they’re less dangerous as allies than enemies), but she continously forced the Horde to do horrible shit.
Now if the point was that Sylvanas was evil and the Horde’s mistrust of her was valid, I guess that’d work, but the way it was executed was more like “Look how cool Sylvanas is for doing all this edgy shit.”
I don’t know who the Warchief is now, I honestly don’t think they have any fucking Horde characters left to be Warchief given how often Horde leaders get killed off. Jesus Christ WoW’s story just completely shit itself after Legion.
So, how does this work? Were people actually developing a game that will never be seen? Or did they likely stop working on this years ago and just forgot to tell the world?
The announcement on Avalanche’s website says "Active development has now stopped […] ", so, the former.
At the time it was announced, money was cheap to borrow, so a trailer like this came out when it was way too soon to let customers know about it but exactly the right time to entice new employees to work on your new project, so they were staffing up to make that game. They probably were working on it for the past four years; Avalanche hasn’t had a release since it was announced.
Well since there has been absolutely nothing revealed since, I can only guess and speculate. But I would say the most likely scenario is it was in active development hell.
Like, developers were working on it, but there were probably major problems that were holding them up. Perhaps they restarted development due to some factor. If the game was originally going to be a PvEvP looter shooter, for example, that plan may have changed after seeing the severe negative public reception to that genre (except for streamers). It may have been planned as a live service game but then Concord happened and developers decided to change everything because they were worried the same could happen to their game. Maybe some of the developers wanted a “realistic” depiction of the 1970s and other developers wanted a “sanitized” depiction and there was infighting preventing the game from progressing.
My point is, there are a lot of way that there could have been active development with no actual progress. But since nothing has been shown since the announcement trailer ( a render, not gameplay), I can say with some level of confidence that it likely had no meaningful progress in terms of gameplay development. Otherwise, we would have seen it. 4 years is a long time to spend with no updates just to be cancelled. If there was progress, the game should have been finished by 4 years.
Why would we have seen it? You normally don’t see anything until they’re gearing up for launch.
I think it’s more likely MS looked at their portfolio, looked at how much this was costing, and decided it didn’t fit what they were looking for for how much it was costing.
This is not to say it’s a good call, just that MS executives are pretty shit at game development analysis.
Imagine if E3 was still around.
“At the Xbox showcase this year at E3, we at Microsoft Game Studios can’t wait to share the amazing range of games we’ve canceled.”
If E3 was still a thing I imagine the execs would have felt inclined to keep a few projects going, just to avoid the public humiliation.
So uhh, what’s still on the table from Microsoft? Fable? Seems like they cancelled every other game.
Fallout, Fable, and COD.
I’m still really looking forward to clockwork revolution. Hopefully that actually gets released but at this point it seems like almost everything Microsoft touches is doomed.
This is why selling out to Microsoft is culture death.
And these fuckers were trying to “celebrate” the Rare anniversary on social media recently like they didn’t just cancel Perfect Dark and have done nothing with any of the other properties in years.
C’mon, they haven’t done nothing. They asked Nintendo to put Banjo and Kazooie in Smash!
“XBOX- Proudly in the worlds most drawn out nosedive since 2010”
EEE
Microsoft is getting out of the games business.
And apparently Everwild was officially dropped last month too.
Can’t say I’m surprised… after 6 years there was no gameplay footage and the impression was “Well, it’s pretty but what is the actual game?”
And, much like it is always shown, that is a problem of management at the publisher level. Visceral Games is generally one of the most well documented but every major studio with a similar “uh derr, how they not have game after five years. They deserve to die” story is a similar tale:
The studio heads and the publisher could never agree. Often there are mandates for specific technology (Visceral was forced to use Frostbite which even the Battlefield devs hate) and publisher level management can never be bothered to actually look at anything other than a full pitch level vertical slice… which they then say is not good enough or “Continue but make massive non-specific changes”.
The end result is that game dev, which already takes years, gets stretched out because so much work gets thrown out and completely redone whenever the managers actually communicate. And then the studio is gutted, jackasses online talk about how it was obviously the answer, and said managers get to move on to hopefully work with devs who can deliver products in spite of them.
So… maybe don’t just parrot the bullshit for the companies mismanaging the industry and destroying the livelihoods of the people who actually make the games we claim to like?
It shouldn’t take 6 years to demo a basic gameplay loop. If you don’t have a demonstrable gameplay loop after 6 years, yes, that’s a management problem, but it’s also a dev problem.
All we got to saw of Everwild was pretty, but it was never clear what the game actually was and the developer wasn’t clear either.
paultimate14@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Is Microsoft’s new strategy just to cancel every other game so everyone has nothing left to buy but Call of Duty?
Aielman15@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Bold of you to assume they have a strategy at all.
zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
They have a concept of a strategy.
nostalgicgamerz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Their strategy is to give up on the console wars and fucking surrender to Sony