I’ve never heard of them until now, so it’s not as if I chose to ignore it! Still, regardless of that, my point is to clear up why Xbox are on the BDS Movement and that we really shouldn’t be engaging in tit-for-tat over the reason why.
Yes, there are Sony fanboys who aren’t as slick as they think they are throughout that Resetera thread, but the takeaway should always be to make your own choice and do you.
Yeah, I’m not well versed on this topic but imo it feels a lot of big tech has their hands in this . I feels it’s hard to wash all of our hands from it. My only hope is gamers aren’t using it to fuel console wars and are actually doing it for Caring for the cause . I just think if pushing for an Xbox boycott because parent company then they might have to consider PlayStation based on semi conductor and surveillance cameras . Plus they also have to look at mobile with Apple and google . I just think it’s difficult for most because how big tech is involved in our daily lives.
Just me 2 cent there
Google are on the list, amongst plenty of others, such as Amazon and McDonald’s - Guide to BDS Boycott & Pressure Corporate Priority Targeting | BDS Movement
SneakersSO has spread Xbox FUD for nearly 10 years now. He pretends to be an insider. Expectedly he would claim the cancelled game was “Incredible”
Unfortunately, Jason Schreier is confirming it to be true in that there were playtesters that thought that.
Schreier also wrote an article that Phil had played the game and had been impressed by what he was playing. I think the Matt Booty needing to take away the controller part is probably embelishment from his source though.
Edit: Which if true I would hate to know that Booty just decided to cancel it because of how long it would take. Or even worse, the order came from above them to cut spending to keep funding the hole that is Copilot.
This is the one!
Don’t delete it! It’s a link to the source that I didn’t post!
Oh good, it’s back.
I feel like in a far distance future, we will see how they are. If there’s anything leak of today taught me, nothing is forever lost. I mean how close were they? Fable Legends close or Sea of Thieves first rendition of its play test alas using beans close?
If it was Destiny like, I can understand why Phil liked it so much.
God what is it with looter shooters?
Haven’t PlayStation got two coming too?
Probably realised by the time the Zenimax one came out either the market would be flooded or dying…
Not to defend MS for the cancellation but nobody seems to be thinking this.
Game has been in dev for 7ish years, greenlit just before division 2 came out with destiny two flying high. fast forward 7 years n destiny is losing players n division is just there but mostly forgotten. Is there a market in 2025 for looter shooters, AAA ones costing hundreds of millions at that. Also remember this was scheduled for 2028, so another 3 years or 100 plus mill in budget.
Also remember this is a new IP GAAS, so it has to come out, find an initial audience, sell enough, then continue to have an audience spending money continually to justify the 10 years of dev.
Phil, and co more than likely looked at it weighed it up and regardless of the “FUN” came to the conclusion the lemon was no longer worth the squeeze.
A real fucking shame for not only the game but those working on this for 7 years of their lives. but sadly it is just this when games regularly take more than half a decade to make.
For more clarity look at the strategy genre or fighting game genres right now, they are composed of a couple of big known quantities and everyone else has to budget and scope to shit if they want to make something or risk bombing hard as their just isn’t an audience big enough.
This shit is my jam…fuck. Sci-Fi noir ? It sounds really cool to me. I hope one day we can get a glimpse of what they were cooking… or maybe not… this shit could have been fire and now it’s dead…
Whilst I can live with cancelling projects and games that don’t work despite have been given time, what I can’t stand is Satya and Amy hood treating Xbox, Surface or even Windows for that matter like any other high profit margins business like Azure or M365. It’s completely stupid and was huge red flag for me when Phil said that Amy Hood mandate was for them to bring Xbox in line with the rest of Microsoft’s profit margins.
You just can’t run a creative business like that, Disney, WB go through spells of hits and misses, video games are no different. They should be allowed to run without sticking to the frankly absurd 35% profit margins that MS is currently running on ($25.8 B net income on $70.07 B revenue), even Apple for all their faults treat Apple TV, Music with much more leniency, I think they still run on loss for TV+ and music is barely profitable.
The decision making for Xbox is no longer in the hands of Phil, if Amy Hoods says you are not having enough profits then Phil has to go looking for things to cut down and games to scrap and no, I don’t think Phil stepping down is going to change anything, the next CEO of gaming will have to do the same thing. It all comes down to Amy Hood and Satya’s absurd and relentless pursuits of shareholder value, the firings had no impact on the stock, infact it almost again peaked today. It would be nice to have a focus on consumer products again, instead of spending another 80b on AI every year just to get blindsided by openAI. Maybe spend 70b on AI and let the other divisions breathe a little? What do I know 
but the current state of MS is just too cut throat to be a fan of.
Is there any word of actual layoffs at ZOS? So far I’ve only seen the game being canceled and some staff leaving seemingly of their own volition.
So far the only number I have seen were the 200 from king, the 70 or so from Turn 10. With just talk about Microsoft’s cutting jobs on multiple other studios, some Union members included, as well as Xbox user research team losing almost half of their team, and a product lead for Xbox family and child safety being fired.
Edit: I think the most accurate number we could get is if we find out how many people of the 9000, were let go from the other Microsoft divisions.
The estimate I saw was that somewhere around 8000 were from other areas of Microsoft.
So it would line up with the skeet by George Broussard of 1000 - 2000 people being let go from Xbox, so whatever information he was hearing and putting together from the news, may have been pretty close estimate.
Closer to 1000. Or if broken down further about 250 each between Activision/King, Blizzard, Bethesda, and XGS (if distributed evenly). But we know King was around 200.
XGS, Bethesda, and Blizzard are all around 5k employees each, and Activision/King would be another 10k. Give or take. (~20k total prior to this week)
I was reading that sometimes these big announced layoffs are a bit performative. The market/shareholders actually react positively to them as it makes you look like you are maximizing profits. So what happens is they announce these big changes/layoffs but the numbers include people normally leaving like retirements.
I think it’s a bit of a mistake to view game development jobs like “lifetime in one place” type jobs. It’s more like movies, you move from project to project. Once a game is released that job is mostly gone and you have to get hired onto the next job. A game cancellation after 7 years just means you are on to the next project, not much different than if the game released. That’s why a lot of game development is centered around certain cities. It’s all the same people rotating around making different games. It’s also why it’s stupid to insult developers for bad games when it’s likely the same exact people making the good ones.
The big worry shouldn’t be Microsoft, we should be worried about the reports of reduced spending on gaming overall. This means there will be less projects in the works for these developers to shift over to. Of course eliminating projects looks bad, but how about not starting new ones? I understand the optics and perception of it, but is it okay to bring out the torches and pitchforks because Xbox bit off too much and employed people for 7 years, when the alternative would have been to never hire them at all (start the project at all)? Sony may not be firing the same amount of people, but they just never hired them in the first place.
Maybe MS realized it’s cheaper and less financially risky to just outsource games like we are seeing with the remaster of THOS3+4 as well as Ninja Gaiden 4 for example. Just pay for the job and you can still include it in Gamepass and keep it there forever, but it’s one and done and you don’t need to pay for insurance/pensions and the likes.
They say they have 40 projects in the works, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more and more being done by 3rd parties. They also seem to be using a lot more support studios from outside the organization as before, and I think we’ll see that become the new trend if they do indeed scale down even more. The switch to UE5 across all studios makes it even easier to do as well.
