According to a new report, Xbox knowingly revealed Ninja Theory’s new title ‘Senua’ at the Xbox Games Showcase, knowing full well they had plans to either ‘sunset or split’ from the studio.
Per Totilo, this isn’t the case that the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing – to coin a phrase – and Microsoft had already ‘planned to sunset or split with the studio’. With Senua revealed, and hopefully received positively, the apparent hope was that it would draw investor interest in the studio. The full quote is below.
By the time that game was revealed, Microsoft had already planned to sunset or split with the studio. The thinking was that the promise of a newly announced game would help draw investor interest in the studio, a source familiar with Microsoft’s plans told Game File (it’s unclear if anyone atop Ninja Theory was involved in this plan).
Really doesn’t help with the narrative that Xbox doesn’t have a plan (or if it does they don’t last long) and that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
Their explanation is bollocks (why announce it as Game Pass, have an article ready and why not be upfront in that scenario), a more likely answer from working in similar corporate environments is that they weren’t allowed to tell everyone till a certain date and pulling Senua from the showcase may have given the game away.
That’s the charitable answer, the other obvious possibility in corporate settings is incompetence, it was overlooked by the people who knew and who probably should’ve stopped it to avoid misleading their customers and looking like idiots
So assuming that the decision is made to close Ninja Theory, do they get to finish the game first? Or it’s just cancelled?
Regardless of what went on behind the scenes this really makes Xbox look incompetent and/or deceptive.
We’ll see what actually happens next month, and maybe Ninja Theory ultimately just wasn’t a good fit for where Xbox needs to be… but it’s like every step of this process has been handled as badly as possible.
They had a trailer of Gears E-Day with PS5 logo, so these last minute changes didn’t all go through it seems.
It doesn’t change the fact that it was handle extremly poorly. That interview on Xbox Wire feels even weirder to read now… You could feel the pressure from the director, but with the context, now it’s even more sad.
IF they are serious about actually trying to find a solution where Ninja Theory remains open it sounds like a plausible explanation. To me it seems like they are trying to find solutions for all the studios rather than just killing them off, I think that’s a positive thing.
To be far to XBOX they have shown the game is the best possible light & it gives Ninja a better chance of finding a investor willing to take a punt with the game I would have liked XBOX to have seen how the game sold 1st, with its new direction.
But I get why XBOX Needs to close or sell off some studios
I really hope that’s the case. If Xbox’s strategy going forward is to triple down on big budget AAA franchise sequels only, like okay, it makes sense that Compulsion and Double Fine don’t have a place there anymore, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t fit in at another publisher.
This Ninja Theory move is still peeving me because they were actually moving in the right direction. Hellblade 2 visual quality with a more traditional action game with a bunch of bosses attached is what most people want. It seems incredibly short sighted to dump them now especially when you’re trying to push exclusives going forward. Instead of canning it, they should of delayed Senua and pushed it as a launch title for Helix.
Xbox is actually better positioned in many ways, even though it’s hard to admit.
Weirdly enough, Xbox is still pushing graphic fidelity and technology as we saw with Halo Remake, Forza Horizon 6, E-Day and Fable. They are the one releasing multiple tentpole games this year.
Yep that’s what pisses me off - from FH6 to Fable and Clockwork Revolution they’ve got some huge brilliant looking games coming, and Microsoft couldn’t give them a year to see what difference it all made, particularly with an Infinity War CoD and GTA6 likely helping to bring in a lot of income from casuals.
Plus probably give Senua time to release.
Instead they had to send in the axe and kinda ruin the positive vibes for the 25th anniversary
I’m not defending them, as I’m just as pissed as everyone else, but I’m tired of this doom and gloom that is somehow always Xbox fault.
It’s the whole industry that is cooked. Sony took a gamble at service games and how did it go ? They are back to square one.
Xbox has actually had much more success there. And they are pumping games left and right, but some studios are just badly underperforming, that’s the terrible nature of these things.
Yes but it feels like they’ve culled them while the financial results look bad due to BLOPS struggling having had two in a row from the same series plus competition, rather than giving it a year now the pipeline is coming together to see how everything goes - particularly in the case of Ninja Theory with a promising game not too far off
Story of Xbox over the past few years. The timing is always wrong. Phil Spencer waited too long to put the hammer down on underperforming studios. Then they didn’t wait long enough to see if Activision and Bethesda exclusives could move the needle. Then they didn’t wait long enough after pivoting away from exclusives to pivot back to exclusives.
For Ninja Theory, I think it’s the worst because of that trailer we saw. But we don’t know how far they were on Senua’s development and if it would have done better than Hellblade 2 ? Probably, but maybe not by a wide margin.
It’s not movie money guys, it’s high-tech hundreds of million budgets. Every delay adds up pretty quickly. I wish it was still 100 guys in a repurposed warehouse making Halo, Gears or Forza, but that past is long gone.
And I think that’s a fundamental problem that is still not resolved and probably won’t be for the forseeable future. That E-Day demo was incredibly impressive but at the end of the day, how many people will play that game ? 5-6 millions ?
Yeah, it’s high-tech hundreds of millions…coming from a high-tech nearly 3 Trillion dollar corporation. Out of all the platform holders, Microsoft has the most money to throw around. They can absolutely fund every studio that are on the chopping block and it would be a drop in a barrel. This is very much Satya and the C-suite just fundamentally not understanding the situation Xbox is in right now (and for the last 15 years). It’s self-imposed setback after setback. They are a tech company in an entertainment industry and they still can’t comprehend that. Nintendo has proven creativity (and blind nostalgia too) sell more than raw computing power.
