Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks shut down by Microsoft

[Cologno]

i'm entirely aware of how capitalism and growth works with public companies. as i said "bethesda is never getting shut down or cut even if their growth falls off a cliff".
being successful (i.e. making a small-moderate profit) and not meeting expectations is not contradictory and i never said that it did meet MS' expectations of skyrim-tier success. it didn't. it's just that i find it exceedingly unlikely that it didn't make a profit at all.

Who knows these days with corporate profit reports. Numbers of shit shipped doesn't necessarily indicate profit made per unit (or whatever digital crap is classified as) or even no profit being made.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Fallout 3 required steam when it was released. The non-GOTY edition has about 20k reviews, probably a reasonable indication of first-year sales. Starfield has about 150k reviews. Seems strange that the former would be considered a success and the latter a failure. They must have wasted massive amounts of money during development.

Vidya game budgets in times of Fallout 3 were 10x smaller, plus it was an established IP and they got to reuse Olibiion engine and shit it out quickly, whereas Starfield had to be cooked from scratch.

 

[BrainMuncher]

It's the same gamebryo frankenstein thay've been updating since Morrowind, not a new engine from scratch. Much bigger budget but much bigger sales too. Should have been profitable unless they were really inefficient. Not sure what success looks like if you get half of Fallout 4's lifetime sales in just a few months. Were they expecting to attract some big new audience with the same old formula repackaged with extra loading screens?

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

(we should always remember that DEI/ESG is a socialis government creation to inject politics into capitalism by forcing institutional investment orgs to factor in DEI/ESG stuff when deciding where to put their money and other people pension funds)

I don't think many people realize this. The reason Blackrock and Vanguard have the power they do is largely because of government sponsored retirement accounts. There's roughly 22,000,000 active employees in government in the United States, and that doesn't count the military or the retired people who can retire early like policemen, firefighters, and teachers of all things. That's 22,000,000 people who are putting in some money to those accounts with the government matching a greater percentage. Meanwhile, the government decides which investment firms they use for their employees.

 

[ropetight]

(we should always remember that DEI/ESG is a socialis government creation to inject politics into capitalism by forcing institutional investment orgs to factor in DEI/ESG stuff when deciding where to put their money and other people pension funds)

I don't think many people realize this. The reason Blackrock and Vanguard have the power they do is largely because of government sponsored retirement accounts. There's roughly 22,000,000 active employees in government in the United States, and that doesn't count the military or the retired people who can retire early like policemen, firefighters, and teachers of all things. That's 22,000,000 people who are putting in some money to those accounts with the government matching a greater percentage. Meanwhile, the government decides which investment firms they use for their employees.

Retirement funds are the scourge of the stock markets in every country, and US are not the exception.
They form the price and demand on a much bigger scale than GameStop bros.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Retirement funds are the scourge of the stock markets in every country, and US are not the exception.
They form the price and demand on a much bigger scale than GameStop bros.

Retirement funds aren't bad in and of themselves, but like pretty much everything once it gets to a certain size, can be used for nefarious means. I don't think it's a coincidence that politicians know that the Social Security system is absolutely fucked and have known this for years, but refuse to do anything about it, all the while making damned sure that the government retirement funds use those two groups which push political bullshit on companies.

 

[ropetight]

Retirement funds are the scourge of the stock markets in every country, and US are not the exception.
They form the price and demand on a much bigger scale than GameStop bros.

Retirement funds aren't bad in and of themselves, but like pretty much everything once it gets to a certain size, can be used for nefarious means. I don't think it's a coincidence that politicians know that the Social Security system is absolutely fucked and have known this for years, but refuse to do anything about it, all the while making damned sure that the government retirement funds use those two groups which push political bullshit on companies.

From the days when I still traded, mayor speculation was retirement funds dumping or buying a stock.
They usually do it in volumes that shake whole market, so if you are lucky or ride insider info of their trading, you can make nice margins.
Most crooked politicians make money that way, lots of them in Congress and Senate - Paul Pelosi is more succesful trader than Warren Buffet.

 

[SharkClub]

Fallout 3 required steam when it was released.

Wrong. It was a Games for Windows Live game before it was ever on Steam, and when it came to Steam it still required GfWL until player-made workarounds came by, it actually only recently got patched (within the last year) to remove the GfWL dependency, despite GfWL not existing for ages. New Vegas required Steam when it released.

 

[Konjad]

 

[BrainMuncher]

Fallout 3 required steam when it was released.

Wrong. It was a Games for Windows Live game before it was ever on Steam, and when it came to Steam it still required GfWL until player-made workarounds came by, it actually only recently got patched (within the last year) to remove the GfWL dependency, despite GfWL not existing for ages. New Vegas required Steam when it released.

There was no "before it was on steam". It was on steam from release. Maybe not required though

Store Release Date	28 October 2008 (16 years ago)
Steam Release Date	28 October 2008 – 17:00:00 UTC (16 years ago)
Original Release Date	28 October 2008 – 07:00:00 UTC (16 years ago) (1225177200)

 

[SharkClub]

Regardless, it definitely did not require Steam in any way. The dependency was always Games for Windows Live. And if you bought a physical copy (all the rage back in 2008) it would be a GfWL game.