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Game Pass used to mean all first party games, day one, and now 2/3 tiers on console won't have that. It's a pretty shocking turnaround.
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Surely this will turn things around for them 🙄
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I think a lot of people will end up unsubscribing and then buying the games they miss.
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Different voice actor too.
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I'm surprised Aaron Greenberg didn't fight for it, since according to him their last game smashed every metric and exceeded all expectations.
www.ign.com
"The closure of any team is hard obviously on the individuals there, hard on the team," Spencer said. "I haven't been talking publicly about this, because right now is the time for us to focus on the team and the individuals. It's obviously a decision that's very hard on them, and I want to make sure through severance and other things that we're doing the right thing for the individuals on the team. It's not about my PR, it's not about Xbox PR. It's about those teams. "In the end, I've said over and over, I have to run a sustainable business inside the company and grow, and that means sometimes I have to make hard decisions that frankly are not decisions I love, but decisions that somebody needs to go make. "We will continue to go forward. We will continue to invest in what we're trying to go do in Xbox and build the best business we can, which ensures we can continue to do shows like the one we just did."
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The whole piece is worth a read but to me this paragraph sums it all up:
"Who even knows what would please these people? They say they're focusing their resources on bigger games, then they say they need smaller games. They say they love your games, then they shut your studio down. They make more money than they've ever made before, then they cut costs repeatedly, drastically, and cruelly. They buy more studios than they can manage, so the answer is not to use that aforementioned money to hire more (or perhaps better) managers, but to have fewer studios so management's job can be easier."
www.gamesindustry.biz
If you're a developer working for Xbox, what can you do to secure your job?
www.eurogamer.net
The platform holder has repeated the same terrible mistakes for over a decade. The reason is simple: its priorities are back-to-front.
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Me too. The writing is on the wall, especially if you're at a small studio working on "small" games like Ninja Theory or Double Fine.
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Give it a year. Thankfully Toys for Bob was able to buy themselves out, otherwise surely they would have either been shut down or put to work in the Call of Duty mines.
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Shutting down entire studios should not be a part of normal cost saving.
Xbox is offering voluntary severance agreements to producers, quality assurance testers and other staff at ZeniMax as part of a broader cost-cutting initiative
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I heard they were basically forced into that situation after Bethesda canceled their Prey sequel (which looked great BTW.)
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There have been rumors and speculation, but that's not what MS is saying.
"More interestingly, [Xbox President Sarah] Bond teased a roadmap focused on next-generation hardware.
"'And what we're focused on there is delivering the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation, which makes it better for players and better for creators and the visions they're building," Bond explained in the recent episode of the Official Xbox Podcast.'"
https://www.ign.com/articles/xbox-next-gen-console-confirmed-business-update
www.gamesindustry.biz
Microsoft has released its latest financial results, showing significant growth in gaming revenues — thanks in no small part to the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. However, Xbox hardware sales continue to decline and saw the steepest drop since the Xbox Series X and S launched in 2020, down 31% year-on-year.
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I hope everyone who plays Call of Duty next year on Game Pass takes a moment of silence for the ~2000 people that had to lose their jobs to make it possible.
www.thegamer.com
This is a fascinating deep dive into the development of the game, with many people involved giving interviews. Instead of being in a long development hell, Lionhead knocked out the game in a stunning 18 months - which made Microsoft happy, but resulted in the cutting of a ton of content.
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~15% of Steam players have the level 50 achievement (if that's what you mean.)
www.gamedeveloper.com
> Crucially, the creator allows players to make modifications that aren't always possible in other RPGs, letting them modify a characters genitals (choosing between preset options), identity (male, female, non-binary/other), and voice. [Lead character artist Alena] Dubrovina says including those options was about giving players the ability to create characters that, while grounded in the lore of Dungeons & Dragons, are "relevant today." > "Gender is not defined by your body, genitals or your voice in our game, we want everyone to be who they want to be and build their own unique identity. If you want to play as a bearded non-binary dwarf with a masculine voice and green hair, why not?
www.eurogamer.net
"What's more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield's code without official modding tools and support. This isn't helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year."
www.gamesindustry.biz
The effort to squash unlicensed controllers hurts plenty of paying customers, and might not even achieve its goals
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I'm sorry, my next post will be about your balls getting blown off to better accomodate your specific needs.
www.eurogamer.net
2.5m copies shifted on first day
www.eurogamer.net
"Assuming Arkane will continue development, clearly there are many areas for technical improvement, with some annoying visual glitches, oversights and outright bugs remaining in the updated code. I'm not sure that any amount of patching will make Redfall a truly good game, but Arkane has at least delivered the performance level it should have delivered at launch."
www.eurogamer.net
There are some great stories from legendary program Giles Goddard (Star Fox, 1080 Snowboarding) in this piece. > He remembers one time that he blew up a power supply in a new development PC, because he plugged it in at the wrong voltage. And Miyamoto noticed. "And Miyamoto got really angry and said, 'You need to go and apologise to blah-blah-blah now.'" But Goddard had other ideas. > Quick as a flash, he went to his desk and swapped the fried power supply for his computer's, and then - as if making a sudden, surprise discovery - announced, "Actually no it's fine - it's not broken." And it worked: Miyamoto was calmed. "But I did actually break it," Goddard tells me. "I just fixed it before he found out." —- > The SGI Indy had a bonus feature Goddard was excited about too: a webcam. I know that doesn't sound exciting now, but back then, webcams were new, so Goddard started experimenting with it. He put ping pong balls on his face, because the camera picked them up well, and ended up creating a mo-capped facial animation prototype. He was impressed. Miyamoto was impressed. So much so, Miyamoto announced, "Well let's try and get a Mario face into that." > So, Nintendo did. Yoshiaki Koizumi took the prototype and added "bones and everything" for Goddard to use. "Then I just skinned all the polygons together - skinning was a new thing as well - and I got it all spongy, and then we just iterated on that to see what was fun." And that's how the famous N64 Mario face - the one you can pull around at the beginning of Mario 64 - came to be.
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400 million payout as I understand it. And odds are very good he's going to go to some other video game company. People like him don't just disappear.
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How is that ironic?
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Supposedly the whole Fall Guys team at Mediatonic, who Epic just acquired, were let go. Including the game director.
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Some people believe he showed up briefly in one scene in the background but it was never substantiated.
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I assume it happened at a recording or mo-cap studio in the states.
www.pcgamer.com
> While Elon's then-partner Grimes was recording her part in the game as cyborg popstar Lizzy Wizzy, the erratic tech billionaire turned up with an antique firearm to "insist" on being included in the game. "The studio guys were like sweating," Grimes is quoted as saying. Musk adds "I told them that I was armed but not dangerous". > Apparently, the developers relented at the time, though it's unclear if Musk did actually get the cameo in the end.
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Embrace, extend, extinguish. That's MS's strategy, by their own words.