Microsoft Shuts Down Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, and More in Devastating Cuts at Bethesda (ign.com) 44
Wesley Yin-Poole, reporting for IGN: Microsoft has closed a number of Bethesda studios, including Redfall maker Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush and The Evil Within developer Tango Gameworks, and more in devastating cuts at Bethesda, IGN can confirm. Alpha Dog Studios, maker of mobile game Mighty Doom, will also close. Roundhouse Games will be absorbed by The Elder Scrolls Online developer ZeniMax Online Studios.
On Redfall, the disastrous vampire co-op game will now not receive promised updates as Microsoft has ended all development on the game. Microsoft said Redfall will remain online to play, and it will provide a "make-good" offer for those who bought the Hero DLC. In an email to staff sent by Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, Microsoft blamed the cuts on a "reprioritization of titles and resources."
On Redfall, the disastrous vampire co-op game will now not receive promised updates as Microsoft has ended all development on the game. Microsoft said Redfall will remain online to play, and it will provide a "make-good" offer for those who bought the Hero DLC. In an email to staff sent by Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, Microsoft blamed the cuts on a "reprioritization of titles and resources."
And KSP2? (Score:3)
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KSP2 from what I have read is in such a weird spot. An original indie game built by a company with not really much game dev experience before this should be a slam dunk for a fleshed out sequel by a more experienced dev team but alas it seems like balls were dropped left and right. Just on word of mouth I haven't even attempted to try KSP2 as a fan of the original, I just hear about terrible performance, still wonky physics and lack of content.
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Arcane Austin (Score:3)
Now that sucks. Yes, Redfall is a flop, but they also have developed Prey 2017 and that one is a gem.
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In the game world, 2017 is so long ago it never happened. Game sales are very much about "was your last game a huge hit? Yes? You will make a sequel. No? You will update your resume".
That's just how it is. A developer with a string of successes or a cash daddy can go on after one failure, or maybe two, but if the last killer game was 7 years ago, that's not gunna save them.
Frankly, it doesn't matter, anyway. Studios come n go but the people just move on to an existing studio or fire up a new one and
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Especially if as a studio you are part of a larger conglomerate. This is nothing new, Eidos is very good at shafting their studios and developers, even announcing studio shutdowns in the middle of development which they expect to continue and then pass out pink slips the same week the game is released. Standalone studios are rare, and always out of money. Studios with big owners are also always out of money as well though.
So mostly it's the same for the guys at the bottom - a soul crushing development cy
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Redfall was a pretty epic flop. There's lots of mediocre games that come out, but for a AAA game to fail that bad is kind of rare. In my field (chip design), if an organization fails that bad, there's usually not a chance for redemption. The team will go their separate ways into other groups in the company or other companies.
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As an outsider though it's hard to know who decided the direction of the product? If we look at Microsoft's recent game attempts we see an awful lot of trend chasing - its hard to imagine these were spontaneous choices by developers as opposed to top down direction. Also the IGN article includes some quotes from Arcane Lyon which tend to support this notion.
I'd also suggest that Redfall was never an AAA game, it had no where near the funding of a Halo or Gear game.
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Redfall was so bad they probably should have converted anyone who worked on it into a janitor and made sure they never works on games again.
At some point, everyone who worked on it is responsible for the condition it arrives in.
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No, people who are employees are not all individually responsible for quality or success. The people who did the very good art for example, are they responsible for the lack of engaging game play, or for the bugs, or the lack of a story? By your logic, the janitors should be held responsible too. In most companies, even game companies, individual low and mid-level workers are not given free rein, they have little actual ability to affect how the final product appears.
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You're right on this. Everyone should be contributing to a final product, but it's the higher ups in an organization who create spectacular failures like Redfall. Usually, it's a mixture of biting off more complexity than you can chew and not staying focused on a consistent vision throughout development. I've seen the same thing in my chip design work, where a previously successful group fails after management shoots for an audacious goal that proves untenable.
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Now that sucks. Yes, Redfall is a flop, but they also have developed Prey 2017 and that one is a gem.
Arguably, the studio that built Prey was already gone by the time Redfall launched. Reports indicate over 70% of the people who worked on Prey had left Arkane Austin by the time Redfall launched, including the then-president of Arkane who had been directly managing the Austin office since he founded it in 2006.
A studio is defined by its people, not its name, and we all get to re-learn that lesson when we see things like this.
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Now that sucks. Yes, Redfall is a flop, but they also have developed Prey 2017 and that one is a gem.
A group of people developed those games. A company name did not develop a game.
With software, the company name matters since every developer will have code in the product and it will always be in the product. When a new game is made, the code and assets for the old game is not used. Every new game is a complete restart.
Most of the people who were asked to make a live service game who made Prey already left.
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Now that sucks. Yes, Redfall is a flop, but they also have developed Prey 2017 and that one is a gem.
Prey (2017) was a remake/imagining of System Shock. It was good, but lets not kid outselves that it was great. It was far better than Bioshock for certain but lacks replayability as there's only one good ending.
System Shock (1994) has got a very good and very faithful remake and I hope it sells well enough for System Shock 2 (1999) to get the same treatment.
Future Headline (Score:5, Informative)
Five Years Ago Microsoft Bought Zenimax's Game Unit, Then Killed It As a Tax Write-Off
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What about Open AI, can we hope?
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No. OpenAI will be their new game title source. They're just killing off the human-authored games now, so there won't be anything to compare it to.
Arkane sadly made sense (Score:1, Flamebait)
And bottom line we're going to keep having layoffs across the entire economy until interest rates are cut because that's the point of raising interest rates. It's Clearly not helping inflation. Multiple studies show inflation is caused by price gouging from monopolies. But the guy that runs the Federal reserve wants 3.5 million layo
Re: Arkane sadly made sense (Score:3)
We could also avoid a bunch of layoffs by not letting Microsoft buy companies.
Lowering interest rates will just fuel inflation while Microsoft continues to buy companies left and right and laying off most of their employees.
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We could also avoid a bunch of layoffs by not letting Microsoft buy companies.
That's linked to the parent's comment on monopolies' prices causing inflation. Huge companies being allowed to buy competitors, and when not competitors, distributors for competitors' goods to "vertically integrate" them, is exactly how one gets monopolies that then cause inflation.
And they don't merely cause inflation for end consumers. They also reduce what's paid to those who produce for them, which is called "increasing the spread" (higher prices minus lower costs). This works because they own the middl
Re: Arkane sadly made sense (Score:2)
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sadly it'll do away with a lot of our jobs
Most jobs in fact.
When technology did away with the first (farming) jobs, most peasants moved into the second (industry).
When it did away with blue-collar jobs, most workers moved into the third (services).
When it did away with low level private services, many but not all low level white-collar workers managed, at great effort, to move into complex services (creative professions, NGOs etc.). This last process hasn't even finished, but now both layers are being displaced by AI at an ever-accelerating pace.
Bu
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The game is kind of a disaster.
That doesn't mean it makes sense. No studio has produced nothing but hits their entire life. Everyone has a flop. Killing off the team that did Prey simply because they released one turd is MBA style short term business thinking.
Security is job 1 (Score:2)
Microsoft blamed the cuts on a "reprioritization of titles and resources."
This is why these large companies should be broken up. As I said before, unless these company makes 1000% year profit on a product, they close it down. If this game studio was independent, it would still be in business employing people as long as they are not loosing money.
I am sire M/S is blaming this on their new security initiative. I miss the days when a company was happy to provide a service as long as they were not loosing money.
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Not helpful, that is exactly what is happening here - parts of the company are being broken off. Unfortunately Microsoft will be holding the rights to those games they are allowing to die, so it won't be possible for a spinoff company to release updates or new versions.
Re:Security is job 1 (Score:4, Informative)
that is exactly what is happening here
Breaking up means the broken off parts retain everything that makes them, them, including all their specific intellectual property so they can continue carrying on those specific business endeavors as independent legal entities. So no, not the same thing.
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Microsoft has been in the gaming space since the 80's, they definitely make money in games. If my memory is correct during their slump years the XBox division (I think this was around the 360 era) was the best performing sector of the company while other divisions (like mobile) were bleeding money.
Where were are now it seems like XBox is specifically struggling but gaming as a whole is doing well.
Xbox Sales Drop But Microsoft’s Gaming Division Grows in Revenue [hollywoodreporter.com]
I personally would much rather they get
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Making money from XBox is not the same as making money from game titles. The games from Microsoft for the most part aren't all that great, at least not until they started buying more companies. This is the Microsoft corporate style - insist on doing everything themselves, have fingers in every pie, and hope to be mediocre at all of them. So they want to make the consoles and the games; the operating system and the keyboards.
And you need XBox in the mix. Nintendo isn't really going to compete on its own
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MSFT has always stated that they will probably never make money on games. They said the same thing about the MSNBC news channel.
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That's Right Billy! (Score:2)
FIRE those developers. Out they go. Here's your box and get the polka-dotted fuck OUT!
Can't be retrained. Can't be re-assigned. Only put them through six interviews. Gonna cost 200% of their salary to find a replacement but there's nothing better than oiling up and mmmmmmmmmmm look at them honey-dripping layoffs.
China love you long time. Eat shit.
any Steam ties (Score:2)
So it stands to wonder how they planned this all along, to purchase Bethesda and sh
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What happened to Nokia was going to happen regardless. Android, at the time, would not have saved them either.
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They weren't interested in Android. Meego was their path forward.
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Which would have been even worse seeing as it was already a dead project before Nokia announced their first Windows phone.
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Everything looked like Elop was a plant. And it's sure looking like something is up with the Bethesda purchase too.
LoB
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Meego was shit and was going to die regardless. At that point in time, all other linux-based options that were not Android were not worth Nokia's time or investment, because they were terrible. Going with either Android or Windows was legitimately their best chance at surviving.
Did Elop have a bias towards Microsoft and, thus, Windows Phone? Absolutely. I wanted Windows Phone to succeed as well if for no other reason as to have more real options and competition. And I like the UI. It only failed because app
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It only failed because apps are the only thing people care about and they weren't at the point of just being able to emulate them yet, like they can now.
AlienDalvik was originally demoed on the N900 in 2010 (or maybe 2011), but Nokia didn't license it because they wanted people to make native Maemo/Meego apps instead of simply targeting Android.
It took a long time for Android compatibility to show up on Windows Phone for exactly the same reason.
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LoB
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Bethesda purchase surprised me, until I remembered it was really ZeniMax. Bethesda Game Studios (below Bethesda Softworks) is slow and ponderous, the anti-Microsoft style. But Zenimax has a lot of studios under its umbrella, and Microsoft wanted those. "In house" studios that they could control, not temporary partnerships.
So, would the Microsoft purchase screw up the games? They claimed no, the companies being acquired were reporting that yes, they were mostly being left alone, there was nervous optimis
Refocus on Bethesda Titles (Score:3)
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd suggest that Microsoft wants to refocus on Bethesda's high-profile titles like Fallout and Elder Scrolls (maybe another Starfield... maybe not). Those are huge sellers and I'd guess they're not real happy with the current pacing of one game per franchise every 10 years. While the shuttering of smaller studios in favor of industrial monoliths is tragic, I hope the silver lining is that they're going to push more money into Bethesda's primary dev teams, increasing their size to allow for parallel development of multiple big titles.
Oh, and that they fire that hack Emil Pagliarulo and hire a couple of people who can actually put two thoughts together to tell a story.
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If I were to hazard a guess, I'd suggest that Microsoft wants to refocus on Bethesda's high-profile titles like Fallout and Elder Scrolls (maybe another Starfield... maybe not). Those are huge sellers and I'd guess they're not real happy with the current pacing of one game per franchise every 10 years. While the shuttering of smaller studios in favor of industrial monoliths is tragic, I hope the silver lining is that they're going to push more money into Bethesda's primary dev teams, increasing their size to allow for parallel development of multiple big titles.
This is why we shouldn't be hanging our hopes on the next AAA snoozefest (or is it AAAA now, fuck it, we're adding a fifth A). It'll just be disappointing. We've passed the days where a good, well known studio can produce a good or even playable game. Just look at Starfield, so much hope, so much promise, so little delivered.
But despair not, the age of great games isn't past, it just wont be another Fallout (which was killed by making 76 a MUMORPERGER), plenty of indie studios out there making great game