"The sudden closure of several video-game studios at Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox division was the result of a widespread cost-cutting initiative that still isn’t finished.
This week, Xbox began offering voluntary severance agreements to producers, quality assurance testers and other staff at ZeniMax, which it purchased in 2020 for $7.5 billion, according to people familiar with the company’s plans. Others across the Xbox organization have been told that more cuts are on the way.
Speaking about the closures more broadly, Booty said that the company’s studios had been spread too thin — like “peanut butter on bread” — and that leaders across the division had felt understaffed. They decided to close these studios to free up resources elsewhere, he said.
Game Pass has not seen the massive growth that Xbox boss Phil Spencer may have been hoping for."
Ubisoft recently shared more details about Assassin's Creed Shadows protagonists, confirming that both of them will romantically attract and be attracted to different types of people.
Feudal Japan DEI LGBTQ+ Samurai, sounds very accurate for the time period. Surely a decision made only with historical accuracy in mind.
You have no idea what you are talking about, bet you didn’t know nobunaga was bi-sexual. Or ran maru his is often depicted as androgynous was a “beautiful boy”.
So yeah, feudal Japan had tons of lgbtq and kawaii enough… A BLACK SAMURAI! All without the need of offending a Caucasian because the world is diverse.
This story has cracked me up so much! Bravo Ubisoft, bravo! 🤣. So last week everyone was upset that in the long-awaited first Assassin’s Creed: Japan game the protagonist is black. But NOW he is also LGBTQ+ ! It’s like the Ubisoft creative team sat around a table and said “How can we best impress our Kotaku/IGN/Polygon friends and antagonise gamers? Let’s make it woke x 100!’ And then they all silent clapped!
Just you wait until the Star Wars: Outlaws details come out, there better not be anybody complaining about Kay Vess’ dating preferences and the gay droid armies.
Lexreborn2 is right
Go read up on Japan's feudal era homosexuality and bisexuality was a very common thing in that time.
I just have to laugh because the same people complaining about this are the same ones crying about wanting "historical accuracy". When it's clear most of the whiners don't even know history themselves.
Facts don't care about downvotes, btw. You either claim to understand historical accuracy or you just admit you don't like the stuff people did throughout history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
Oh yeah!!!! What about being inclusive???
I'm sorry
..please replace the word inclusive with stupid.
Thanks… I was originally going to write Samu-Bi but then I realized it was right there already so it works better
You have to understand they’re incapable of writing a good story so this is the best they could come up with
ESTNN writes: "A leak for Valve's 6v6 3rd-person shooter MOBA has supposedly been released ahead of time. And if the reports are true, fans of the genre have much to be excited for."
They should've had a new L4D like 10 years ago, it can be expanded upon a lot more but they just left it collecting dust.. it was a good game for its time but L4D2 doesn't have nearly enough content these days to keep players engaged, and it needs a serious graphics upgrade
Nice bend at the knee there Gabe. Seriously? A quirky character arena shooter? This late into the me-too-shooter market? I thought you guys were so much better than that crap. Gabe must need a bigger yacht.
Limited Run Games believes that more companies will start selling a limited number of physical media in a decade.
Like a vocal minority demand?
On PS5 alone the digital sales made up 77% of all game sales in 2024.
https://www.truetrophies.co...
Also, I despise f*ckin limited run games because they will extort people that want a physical version by marking up the prices almost 100% so they make more. So a game digitally that’s $30 you can expect it to be $60 on LRG and don’t even get me started on the collectors edition prices… it’s borderline highway robbery.
Yeah and other quarters it is 63% and sometimes lower than that, the split goes up and down so it isn't quite the digital domination you are trying to paint. I suspect given all that has been going on the past couple of years with digital and subscriptions people might start having a change of heart and tip the balance back.
No, it is quite the domination that I’m painting it out to be. Otherwise we wouldn’t be hearing how stores out struggling or seeing the removal of physical media flat out.
Please show me the quarter where physical sales beat out digital please. I would like to stand corrected.
I've never liked their practice of taking someone elses work and putting their own spin on it. Glorified bootleggers is what they are. Peddling their reproductions at more than full value of the original.
You do know the developers sign up for it and get paid. Believe it's a 70 percent developer and 30 percent limited run games. How are they bootlegging. They also go through Sony so it's all legit
At the end of the day, they are providing a service that others don't. You can moan about it all you want, but the reality is that without them, very few niche games would get a physical release. It's niche and they don't get the benefit of large volume manufacturing and sales.
They are a business; they have many costs. They employ staff, probably pay out benefits, have to invest in capital and property, have to work out licensing and contract agreements, have to come up with design ideas and work with manufacturers, they have to market, and they have to take on risk of inventory. They do it while still providing a service that others are willing to pay for. Sounds like a success story to me.
Those numbers are fabricated as fk though.
Say there's 1000s games and only 200 are available physically. Of course digital will be higher.
what are you even going on about?
What is being fabricated as “fk” with and I quote, “ Sony's fiscal report for the year ending March 2024, less PlayStation owners are buying boxed PS5 games that ever before. PS5 and PS4 physical sales in 2024 now only account for 30% of all PlayStation games sold as players continue to invest more in their digital game collections. Plus, with the release of the new PS5 Slim with its optional disk drive, we might see even more players buying the best PS5 games digitally.”
Help me with the mental gymnastics on how the numbers are fabricated in a fiscal financial report…
And regardless of the number of games even your point still shows how digital is selling more than physical. Like, what is even happening here?
A physical media distributor is even saying the landscape is changing in this very article. I don’t even know how this is up for debate. What will be apparent is “fk’s” like LRG will charge you way above the MSRP for physical games.
I have 4 sealed first release copies of Class of Hero’s 2g on PS3 from Monkey Paw. The only way they’d be printed is if you placed an order, so it was a publishing run by number of orders. Their shipping date was delayed a couple months due to some publishing issue from Sony at the time. Monkey Paw ended up making another run or two of the games publication after the first
We already know 😂
"Speaking about the closures more broadly, Booty said that the company’s studios had been spread too thin — like “peanut butter on bread” — and that leaders across the division had felt understaffed. They decided to close these studios to free up resources elsewhere, he said"
So what you're saying is...you bought all these studios and you guys can't run them.
Jesus.
Reports are suggesting that Game Pass will be getting a price hike soon and that Call of Duty may not be added to the day one offering. I honestly have a hard time believing this but it does beg the question why exactly did GP fail? I think the answer is that it just didn't get the growth that it anticipated. Jim was right but I wish he wasn't because at the end of the day, its gamers, devs and other front-line workers who have to absorb the blow for Spencer and team's miscalculations.
For all the armchair executives who were calling for Sony to release its big-budget AAA games on PS+, the same exact thing would have happened at PlayStation. Game Pass has killed Xbox. Congrats.