Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks shut down by Microsoft

[Wirdschowerdn]

Oh well.

Maybe Harvey can join Wolfeye now?

Ricardo Bare could tag team with Wolf Eye....

But can Harvey and Ricardo truly be seperated?

 

[DemonKing]

Your timeline is also all wrong. I said they should’ve bought Activision (or Activision Blizzard) back in the 360 days. Team Fortress, Unreal Tournament, and Quake 3 Arena are all ‘99... that’s before the original Xbox was even out. The 360 came out in 2005, and was basically done by 2015.

I was talking more about the various iterations and sequels than the original titles (a lot of 360 era games still ran on the Q3 engine including COD and I’ve even heard some of the code lives on in COD to this day).

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I think that's probably your answer, rather than global demographics of young gamers.

Young people don't want to play lame games.

This is more correct. There's also a gigantic amount of titles out there, and let's face the facts here, very few of them are anything new or interesting. Call of Duty still makes money, but how many of Call of Duty games are there? How many Call of Duty like games are there? In terms of just consoles, how many titles were there for the SNES? Then the GameCube? Then the Wii? And then the Switch? Just in the number of titles per generation of consoles, it's a nearly exponential growth in terms of the amount of titles there are competing with one another - and how many of those are just like something else you might already have?

It's not that there might be less gamers out there, it's just that there's a Hell of a lot of the illusion of choice for their money. Meanwhile, publishers are spending tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to develop titles and having to raise the prices of those titles, which is furthering the problem they're going to have in the future.

I think there’s been less direct competition for Call of Duty in recent years. It used to be that there was always some Battlefield game coming out against CoD, but there hasn’t been a new Battlefield game in years. There were always a handful of different first and third person military themed shooters coming out before; now it seems like there’s barely any, and Call of Duty’s main competition is the much different Fortnite.

The price hikes the industry recently got are kind of interesting. Looking at the biggest games in the industry in recent time it seems like the way to go is free, especially if the plan is to really make your money selling micro transactions like some iOS game. This thing of operating like a free-to-play game with how they handle micro transactions while also changing something like $69.99 is a dead end. It’s especially a dead end when people have a handful of options that are free, and also happen to be some of the biggest games around.

 

[Lutte]

and it did change with the release of the PS4 and Xbox One.

It changed because, just like when Sony got too full of themselves with the PS3, after dominating the console market to an extent still never matched to this day with the PS2, Microsoft got too full of themselves with the Xbox One and did a series of fuck up that left room for Sony to crawl back up. They didn't need to buy COD, they needed to not do those retarded moves:

First, they forced the bundling of the kinect with the Xbox and jacked the price to $499 when the Xbone came out. The ps4 came out for $399. Does that remind you of something? Yes, it was the Xbox 360 vs ps3. The ogxbox did okay numbers, but it was dwarfed by the ps2. The 360 managed to do so well partly because Sony fucked up. $299 for the 360 core or $399 for the full SKU 360 vs $499 for the ps3, the more price conscious segments had an obvious pick. Plus the ps3's weird architecture may have had some benefits for optimized first parties but the multiplatform games mostly ran worse on it (the lack of RAM really hurt for games like what Bethesda produced too). With the xbone, it was MS's turn to fuck up.

Nobody cared about the kinect (and ultimately the device was completely dropped, there is no replacement in this era).

Next, they implied they would make it mandatory to always be online to play games (and the internet was not as ubiquitous as it is now, with easy access through satellite or 4g/5g even in remote areas). That they would allow publishers to DRM their game in a way that removed your ability to sell or buy used games, one of the rare things that consoles have that is superior to the PC as we PC users got used to not owning our games. They told people "if you need offline you can still buy a 360". That really didn't fly.
They backtracked on these positions, but the damage to their image was done and it left a highway for Sony to pass through along with the lower price of their console.

The xbone launch and the marketing campaign that worked counter to its goals were disasters of epic proportions.
Buying franchises like COD was not going to salvage this shit. It's amazing, to be honest, how both companies have those weird bouts of incompetence when they seem to achieve a certain level of dominance.
Like seriously, the ps2 dwarfed every other console known to mankind. The ogxbox was almost a non-player in comparison. It's a level of dominance Sony could have preserved if they hadn't been batshit retarded. I still remember the ugly, repulsive looking controller (google "ps3 boomerang" for those who don't remember) they originally intended to bundle with the ps3 before bringing back the classic dualshock design.

Every people involved in the decisions that made those companies lose dominance should have been fired and never gotten a job in the industry ever again.

 

[Tehdagah]

Lol, people think Ninja Theory is gonna be next. With the recent rumour that Perfect Dark is not in a good way (apparently they still haven't decided if it should be a first-person or a third-person game), it wouldn't surprise me if PD's dev studio, The Initiative, is on the list.

Ninja Theory seems like a weird one to mean. More like people just pulling a name out of their ass that they know rather than really thinking about it. Ninja Theory was a studio Microsoft specifically went after, and they’ve seemingly given them a whole lot of leeway with Hellblade 2.

Now if I was one of these studios like 343 Industries, The Coalition, or The Initiative I might be a little worried after the Activation buyout gave Microsoft a huge influx of developers that do first and third person shooters.

Hellblade was never meant to be an AAA franchise with broader appeal, the first game had a very specific target audience.

 

[Cheesedragon117]

Calling Arkane "those dudes that made Redfall" is just spitting on the grave of the person you just mercilessly killed.

Actually, no, it's even worse than that. It's like fucking the bullet hole!!

 

[ultra loser]

Pajeetsoft will now spend the money saved on those studios on hiring some diversity hires for made up positions and call it a gain because the company is growing and ESG points go up, shareholder boomers are fucking retarded.

 

[Ryzer]

The only reason the PS2 got immensely popular and outmatched its rivals was caused by the DVD player.
It was just an affordable DVD player so everyone bought it, thus game editors developed on it.
In terms of power, it was inferior to the Xbox and Gamecube.

 

[Pyrite Pachyderm]

and it did change with the release of the PS4 and Xbox One.

It changed because, just like when Sony got too full of themselves with the PS3, after dominating the console market to an extent still never matched to this day with the PS2, Microsoft got too full of themselves with the Xbox One and did a series of fuck up that left room for Sony to crawl back up. They didn't need to buy COD, they needed to not do those retarded moves:

First, they forced the bundling of the kinect with the Xbox and jacked the price to $499 when the Xbone came out. The ps4 came out for $399. Does that remind you of something? Yes, it was the Xbox 360 vs ps3. The ogxbox did okay numbers, but it was dwarfed by the ps2. The 360 managed to do so well partly because Sony fucked up. $299 for the 360 core or $399 for the full SKU 360 vs $499 for the ps3, the more price conscious segments had an obvious pick. Plus the ps3's weird architecture may have had some benefits for optimized first parties but the multiplatform games mostly ran worse on it (the lack of RAM really hurt for games like what Bethesda produced too). With the xbone, it was MS's turn to fuck up.

Nobody cared about the kinect (and ultimately the device was completely dropped, there is no replacement in this era).

Next, they implied they would make it mandatory to always be online to play games (and the internet was not as ubiquitous as it is now, with easy access through satellite or 4g/5g even in remote areas). That they would allow publishers to DRM their game in a way that removed your ability to sell or buy used games, one of the rare things that consoles have that is superior to the PC as we PC users got used to not owning our games. They told people "if you need offline you can still buy a 360". That really didn't fly.
They backtracked on these positions, but the damage to their image was done and it left a highway for Sony to pass through along with the lower price of their console.

The xbone launch and the marketing campaign that worked counter to its goals were disasters of epic proportions.
Buying franchises like COD was not going to salvage this shit. It's amazing, to be honest, how both companies have those weird bouts of incompetence when they seem to achieve a certain level of dominance.
Like seriously, the ps2 dwarfed every other console known to mankind. The ogxbox was almost a non-player in comparison. It's a level of dominance Sony could have preserved if they hadn't been batshit retarded. I still remember the ugly, repulsive looking controller (google "ps3 boomerang" for those who don't remember) they originally intended to bundle with the ps3 before bringing back the classic dualshock design.

Every people involved in the decisions that made those companies lose dominance should have been fired and never gotten a job in the industry ever again.

 

[Lutte]

In terms of power, it was inferior to the Xbox, Dreamcast and Gamecube.

The PS2 was definitely not inferior to the dreamcast in raw power. It was, however, incapable of cheap anti aliasing, which led to worse image quality overall (the video output was also p mediocre compared to other consoles).

The dreamcast would have never been able to have a game like Metal Gear Solid 3 running as well.
The other two do beat the ps2, the Xbox with a large margin, the gamecube much less so.

Still, having a DVD player is far from being the only reason for their position in the market. Sega messed too much with the genesis extensions and the saturn and had already lost a lot of trust, Nintendo threw themselves into a niche with the n64 sticking to cartridges when they really became an obsolete form of storage and the PS2 came out with backwards compatibility with the pretty large and good game library of the first playstation. It then grew its own library into the biggest of all consoles ever made.

Success is never entirely made by taking the right decisions but also by how much other people fuck up is how giants have fallen and risen in the history of consoles. Chosing to bundle a DVD player was genius, coming at a time when the opponents were severely weakened by their own bad decisions is what puts the nail into the coffin.

It took the Switch for Nintendo to recover a significant amount of third parties caring for their platform since the mistake that was the n64. The gamecube was powerful but the game library wasn't all that good outside of Nintendo's own stuff. The pattern would continue to repeat for the Wii and the Wii U.

I owned the n64, man, that console was only good for a few nintendo titles and party games (the games that could handle 4 players). At least the dreamcast managed to be a good place for arcade games before dying.

32x/SegaCD/Saturn/N64/PS3/Xbox One : the name of shames.

 

[Tyranicon]

Is it really incompetence, or is the humongous effort of making modern blockbuster games simply outstripping the human ability to stay creatively coherent? I doubt that even extremely competent game devs like John Carmack, Will Wright or Demis Hassabis would survive, let alone thrive, today, in making accomplished Triple-A games.

Yes.

Both concepts really go hand-in-hand. Giant corpos waste so much money it would make you cry.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Weren't Tango and Arkane classic "acquisitions" by Rob Altman -- Make a deal with a studio, claim missed milestones to deny payment, lawyer them out of all their cash, then buy for pennies on the dollar?

Those wacky Altmans, whaddaya gonna do?

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Apparently with Tango the reason its closed isn't because HiFi failed to make profit far from it actually. It was closed because the people responsible for its success jumped ship during the microsoft take over - most likely because they feared this exact scenario playing out and got out while the getting out was good. Similar to what happened with Arkane however in the case of Arkane their game was a total shit show and the fact that there were still people on the team at the Austin branch despite all their Dishonored folk running from the studio should have been a telling sign of what was going on. Harvey is just the biggest dumbass ever, his decisions ultimately crashed the studio into the ground just like with Ion Storm. I'm really sick of him, Deus Ex was clearly a fluke given how he's behaved since.

The shocking reveal out of any of this though is that Their strategy is to double down on Todd and shift their investments into turning BGS into a shovelware churner. Bethesda Game Studios is going to be death marched into the ground and I could not be happier. Get ready for shit after shit after shit of terrible under cooked games. Its funny too because Todd had said Starfield was his dream game to kind of rekindle his love for development after Fallout 4 and 76 were such burn outs for him and the team, my prediction he retires after TES6 because my suspicion is TES6 is going to be a total shitshow now that the suits are putting their hands in everywhere that they can now because they don't trust any of their acquired studios. I'm happy to see these idiots being subjected to the same treatment that Access, Lion Head, Ensemble and FASA were all subjected to.

They don't care about critical acclaim, Starfield would have warranted BGS being shut too however it made a lot of money just from the bait and switch hype bullshit that Todd always pulls. So they know that's a viable strategy and they should exploit it.

Its also going to be fucking hilarious when in time they start doing the same exact shit to Blizzard. "NO ONLY COD! ONLY COD FOREVER! YOU GUYS SUCK ONLY COD NOW!" We know that's what they want, they'll split the studio between King and Acti using Blizzard is nothing more than a brand husk they wheel out every couple of releases, in the same way they do with Raven.

But yeah Gamepass was a huge mistake, I had been saying for years that there's a reason the MMO industry had abandoned Subs because they were having to essentially pool resources which if you release more than one MMO (see SOE for example - they had Everquest, Matrix, Star Wars Galaxies and Planetside all running at the same time - Everquest being the only one that survived) then these projects all start cannibalizing each other. This is exactly what is happening, Its a stupid idea, its been done before and proven to be a stupid idea. In the words of Yahtzee "lets all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee hee hee".

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

If it didn't do as well as they would have liked, MS brought it on themselves by dropping it without any pre-release announcement or marketing.

You mean the shadow drop on a show that was seen by over a million people and that had the whole industry talking? That was probably some of the best marketing the game could’ve had. And at least at first it seemed to do well. They had two million players in the first month. But the next million took another six months, and after that they stopped giving numbers. Microsoft was probably expecting more of the millions and millions of people that have Xbox Game Pass to at least give it a try. But only a fraction people with Game Pass seemed to play it, and it seems like few people bought it...and the game is on PS5, where if you want to play it there you’ve got to buy it.

 

[markec]

 

[soutaiseiriron]

never heard PR speak PR spoken harder than the video above

 

[DemonKing]

never heard PR speak PR spoken harder than the video above

She should get into politics.

Meanwhile...

 

[Tyranicon]

I didn't even watch the video lol.

 

[Baron Tahn]

Well this news is about the least surprising thing one could imagine. Tired of shithead publishers and their shit ideas....

 

[Elttharion]

There was an article I read a few days ago saying that devs just want to survive until 2025 and that 2024 will be a bloodbath in the industry, huge layoffs, that no one is funding games, etc. They are certain that 2025 will be a much better year. My question is, why do they believe this? I dont see any signs of the economy improving in a significant way. The only thing that could save the gaming industry would be a new pandemic forcing people to stay at home for months. Otherwise I think we will soon experience another crash.

 

[lycanwarrior]

New vid from Alanah Pearce of Santa Monica Studios:



Summary of the main points from the video

1. "If a studio doesn't want layoffs or to shut down, they should just make good games." Her response: the quality of a game no longer matters. You can have a Hogwarts Legacy that sells gangbusters, but all Warner Bros. sees is a potential risk if it fails. Live service games can also fail, they often do, but the overall cost-benefit analysis actually makes them less risky.

2. As an addendum to 1, the biggest focus right now for most entertainment companies isn't even necessarily money, it's time. Because the more time you spend on a platform, the more you're likely to spend money, view ads, and have all your info mined and sold. A one-and-done experience is fundamentally not aligned with that goal.

3. "More studios should just go indie so they aren't beholden to these awful practices." Her response: the indie space is just as volatile and doing pretty bad right now, studios are closing all the time, they just aren't all big news like a AAA studio closing. Indies are having increasing trouble getting publishing support or just funding for projects in general, specifically because they're often more niche, less focused on monetization, and therefore more risky, even if they're generally smaller scale. But whereas a flop at a big studio might result in layoffs or maybe a closure at worst, an indie flop is probably just going to tank the whole company immediately and it might not even release if the stars don't align.

Now, there are still big games, Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, Cyberpunk. But she feels these will increasingly become the exception in the industry, not the rule. Companies like Fromsoft and Nintendo will become the go-to companies you go to for your single-player experiences, while 90% of the rest of the industry chases what they see as the bigger cheese, and even if 10+ more live services fail, a company is going to keep trying because the cost-benefit is still conceivably more attractive than any single player game could ever be. If that crashes a company, pull your losses and move on to the next company and hope they succeed.

Source: https://www.resetera.com/threads/al...d-why-it-will-probably-get-even-worse.866469/

 

[Ryzer]

In terms of power, it was inferior to the Xbox, Dreamcast and Gamecube.

The other two do beat the ps2, the Xbox with a large margin, the gamecube much less so.

The gamecube is more powerful than the Xbox bro.
https://segaretro.org/Sega_Dreamcast/Hardware_comparison

The gamecube was powerful but the game library wasn't all that good outside of Nintendo's own stuff.

I disagree, it has Sega exclusives on it like Super Monkey Ball, F-Zero GX, Phantasy star online and other third party exclusives. It was just less numerous.

 

[Lutte]

In terms of power, it was inferior to the Xbox, Dreamcast and Gamecube.

The other two do beat the ps2, the Xbox with a large margin, the gamecube much less so.

The gamecube is more powerful than the Xbox bro.
https://segaretro.org/Sega_Dreamcast/Hardware_comparison

If you only look at certain arbitrary numbers like the GFLOP, yes. The reality of it is more complex.
It's evidenced by how the gamecube never had anything approaching what Splinter Cell Chaos Theory looked like on the ogXbox (btw, it also had a gamecube release, and it looked a lot more like the ps2 version).


Chronicles of Riddick is another example of what was possible with lighting here:


You might argue "they just made a bad gamecube version" (in the case of splinter cell, cuz riddick was not multiplat) but there really isn't any game on the gamecube that has the level of lighting this game had on the ogXbox. Or Riddick.

The difference in ram also means there will be compromises too, Splinter Cell couldn't just import the xbox levels straight into a gamecube port. Xbox had slower ram, but I'd argue having /more/ ram mattered more here.

Which is NOT to be interpreted as "the gamecube had no visually impressive games". It had. Some of them aged the best in fact because of the level of stylization, like the cel-shaded Wind Waker. Nintendo had a strong sense of art direction. Good visuals isn't solely about the most realistic or detailed looking shit. You don't need the hardest push in technology to be impressive either.

Anyway, despite their architectural differences, all 4 consoles had titles that could impress and the architecture definitely isn't a major part of what determined the loser and winner.
When I was younger and looked at Dreamcast titles, I didn't even know what "framerate" meant but it was in fact one of the things that stuck with me when I saw game demos running in the local shop and then bought the console and played games on it: holy shit, this looks so smooth in movement. Most dreamcast titles heavily focused on hitting the 60 fps bar, it turns out. As games focused more and more on being cinematic and detailed the art of being nice and smooth got lost along the way on consoles. When you see console fanboys argue on this topic, they act like it isn't reasonable to expect 60 fps these days. But that's exactly what this ancient console provided. Because that's a metric determined not by the power of the hardware but by the decisions of the game developers. You don't have to have X and Y amount of polygons or shaders to push if you don't want to. You don't have to have blurry crappy temporal antialiasing if you don't want to either. Any of the current consoles could have games that run at 60 fps /and/ look nice if developers focused more on what matters.

And I think DLSS and frame interpolation on PC is promoting the degenerate path. Although, it's better to have it than not have it if the alternative is devs still making games that need it to run without being a slideshow. Most AAA devs have completely lost sight when it comes down to providing good image quality and a smooth experience. When it comes to visuals, I've come to despise what modern gaming has turned to.

I disagree, it has Sega exclusives on it like Super Monkey Ball, F-Zero GX, and other third party exclusives. It was just less numerous.

"just less" ? "far, far less" is more accurate.
Btw F-Zero GX is more of what is called second party than third party. The franchise belongs to Nintendo. It can only be allowed to exist by Nintendo. Just like Pokemon and a few other franchises that are always associated with Ninty.
It's not some purely independently developed and thought up game a third party decided to dedicate to their Nintendo gods (like, say, Xenoblade)

 

[RobotSquirrel]

shit its almost as bad as the Abbott defense.


Smile and wave boys, just smile and wave.

New vid from Alanah Pearce of Santa Monica Studios:

You mean the same GDC where a bunch of idiots yelled and cried because the industry had gone to shit? and everyone just suddenly felt better about it?... You idiots paid for that conference!?
fucking copium.

 

[dbx]

Once upon a time I would have cared about gamedevs layoffs, but in 2024?
After it has become patently clear they at least share the same level of responsibility with managers when games turn shit or worse woke?
Nahh, they all deserve it, hell, I'd argue gamedevs are the bigger reason gaming is shit nowadays, more than managers and corpos.