Terrified for compulsion. South of Midnight was an absolutely beautiful game and one that means so much to me as a Black American that grew up in the south, but it also wasn’t the hugest sales success. It did well critically but didn’t make a splash socially. Obsidian has grounded at least. Also worried for Double Fine. Their games are inexpensive and Keeper won a lot of hearts, but Kiln doesn’t seem to be doing good numbers (which is a shame because it is good fun).
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I think Xbox couldn’t afford the pr damage and tanked it. We’d all become used to January layoffs from tech companies. We also now know Sharma was coming and the entire leadership change. Imagine if a month before there were big layoffs on top of the crashout people already had.
3% profits and less revenue than 5 years ago is rough, it sadly looks like Phil’s team left the Xbox brand on life support.
Many mistakes were made this gen, but the biggest one was acquiring all these studios and going like “you know what, create whatever you want, we put the money”
I don’t like samey games and sequels, but games need to be profitable, and almost everyone except Xbox could see several of their last released games flopping and losing them money
You can even make AAA’s or appealing games that feel fresh like Fable, i don’t know why this studio feels like it’s 2-3 leagues above every other from Xbox
Let’s see how big lay offs are, but i hope it’s not just about firing people but also about starting to manage their studios properly from now on
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From a quite nice showcase, just good vibes all around to this news. I thought the bad news was over for a while now. The news about PD canceled and other stuff already sucked enough, can they just chill now? Ffs.
This is going to bring back the “Xbox is dead”, clowns again. But what else is new. Hope no drastic changes for Helix. That be extremely odd with all the Helix talk today.
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I saw the interview with Toys for Bob where they said they needed to find their own path and didn’t want to keep working on COD forever, but from Asha’s post, I can now see that this is actually madness. Farming COD to several studios and producing titles in a big franchise in a timely manner is actually what MS needs. Remember when Tim got on stage and said he’d work on Forza or Excel? You need to put take studios like Double Fine, like Compulsion, even maybe Ninja Theory and make them help out on big franchises that MS owns that takes forever to come out like Fallout, like Elder Scrolls, like Halo, Fable , etc. Focus on the hits and churn them out. There’s just too much coming out and that saturation means your chance to attract buyers to your game is far more diminished than it used to be. They can’t just let their studios do whatever they want anymore, they need sure fire hits to turn the ship around.
That M&A, I wonder who they could end up buying to help them out. Maybe they need to start producing their own memory lol But considering MS is also making hardware other than XBOX, maybe something big is at play here?
It’s sad that this had to happen at the same time as SGF, but while I know a lot point to it as corpo speak, what it does show me though is Asha’s been given the keys to a badly run business and she needs to figure things out fast. But seeing how dire things are, especially with hardware, I wonder what they could do. Wonder if they could team up with someone like Asus for the long term?
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I hope not, and it’s just layoffs(Since at least people can find jobs, but studios with history cannot) and not studio closures. Would hate to see that, honestly.
Concerned more with Double Fine and Compulsion. Hope it’s just layoffs and restructuring.
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Is Fable your example of a game managed properly? As excited as I am for that game they announced it in 2020 and it is releasing in 2027. Pre-production likely started before and they had to build up a new team to work on it. It is certainly over budget especially as a AAA game and the Fable Team in Playground in danger after it releases. Studios do need to be managed better and that means getting budgets and production cycles under control more than anything.
They started building a team and doing pre-prod during covid. It’s not a normal situation.
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Wow this sounds really bad.
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The Verge article by Tom Warren mentions their sources saying studios could be closed.
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It seems one studio. i Just read this:
Sources suggest the cuts could even involve a studio closure, or changes to the Xbox studio lineup. In a recent Giant Bomb episode, rumors of 1,000 layoffs for Microsoft’s Xbox division were mentioned. Bloomberg also reported today that the cuts would be “major,” and involve budget cuts for marketing and other areas of Microsoft’s Xbox business.
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It’s worth noting that COD has a problem in of itself that the yearly releases and being so big just causes the entire company’s gaming revenue to fluctuate on this up and down curve. This was Activisions problem and now it’s Microsoft. COD is up one year and all of gaming is up and then it’s down the next and all of gaming is down. They can’t get rid of COD or every do “every two years” because it still brings in a crap ton of revenue even when it’s down, but they also can’t grow.
A balance needs to be struck. Cookie cutter games with ballooning budgets is a problem a lot of publishers are seeing right now. They get stale and they peak and the company is suddenly trapped. It’s Ubisofts and Playstation’s problem. Speaking of Ubisoft, Expedition 33 spun out of a team of people who founded their own Studio not wanting to work under Ubisoft’s terms and follow their cookie cutter games. They were rewarded for that with huge critical and sales success. It is far riskier to not just pump out a cycle of the most popular franchises, but it’s through that risk that actual growth occurs.
Xbox and most of the industry unfortunately suffered a LOT from COVID lengthening dev times. There were also problems of games getting internally rebooted too much pushing up budgets and delaying them. A lot of work needs to be done there with the smaller studios to let them focus on being creative and making games that keep Xbox’s portfolio fresh and growing. Avowed taking as long as it did to just release is a massive problem. But it wouldn’t be solved by putting Obsidian to work as an Elder Scrolls factory. That would just create a different problem where Xbox will soon become like Playstation or Ubisoft or even like Activision was before they sold and be too dependent on these games with fluctuating stagnat success with ballooning budgets.
I don’t entirely disagree with you, but I think the solution is in finding a balance. The major stable success of games like COD should serve as cushion that allows them to take risks to find growth with new IP and creative games. But those risks should be reasonable and not have the budget of a AAA game or somehow take even longer to make.
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Budget cuts for marketing is unironically more damning than a studio closure to Xbox. They JUST hit a good stride with having a stronger prescense. They need to continue to improve their marketing not cut it. People online are probably responding with “What marketing?”
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Think about the potential 1K number here, that’s more than one studios worth of people, I don’t believe there are enough positions in marketing or management that would make up for that number across all of Xbox.
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Most comments I’ve been seeing are wait for it…
“XBOX dead, but now for real, it’s over.”
We’ve only heard that a million times.
But yeah, marketing, wtf., agree with what you’re saying.
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I wonder where that crowd is when everyone else is doing layoffs. Like, not just gaming but every other company.
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This is too rare to rely on though. Even industry wide acclaim wasn’t enough to make Hi-Fi Rush sell a decent amount, so while they can take chances once a while, considering where they are right now, I think they really need to think it through. Gears Tactics, while not that successful, is the type of thing I they need to do, or stuff like Halo Wars. Use a big franchise and make a different type of game around it. Nintendo did it so much with Mario and Pokémon, and they did innovate once in a while with Metroid, or Pikmin for example, but mostly stayed with franchises they knew.
If you want to take risks, right now I think they need to be safe risks, if that even makes sense.
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I could see it if we’re including Zenimax and ABK. It’s possible (we can cross our fingers though this would still suck) that they’re looking to reduce all those positions across their acquired companies and further integrate them with Xbox/Microsoft. That’d still sting. A lot of us have said post ABK that Xbox should use & learn from Activision’s marketing departments.
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Ah fuck! Man I hope it isn’t Double Fine, of course I don’t wish this on any studio but Double Fine has a special place in my heart and they should be there for the “revival” of XBOX, so to speak.
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It’s already been discussed, Ghost Wire Tokyo and The Evil Within 2 sold poorly and Hi-Fi Rush wasn’t able to make up the difference.
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