Hellblade II: Senua's Saga is being made by a team twice as large as its predecessor, according to Team Ninja co-founder Tameem Antoniades.
In a town hall that took place on Monday, Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu reportedly confirmed imminent layoffs in the U.S. and Europe.
@Outside_ofthe_Box,
So that Microsoft can close down the studio after doing nothing with them? Right...
Sad but true. It's the consequence of a shift in player habits, massive overhead, and out of control budgets across the industry.
What did NA and EU did anyways? Just translate or something? I would say it might help them get back to there roots but DK.
Actually, you are correct they play a hand in localization especially in Europe with the many languages. That and marketing.
They should of never of made those exclusive deals with Sony. If SE made FFXVI/FFVIIRemake/Rebirth available on PS/PC/Xbox/Switch Day 1 they would of sold 20/30 million copies of each game and would mostly likely would not of lead to layoffs.
Exclusive games to any platform is not only anti gamer but they are toxic to the gaming industry. All games made by Sony and other companies should be made multi platform.
20-30 million. Right. SE must be sleeping on Japanese CoD right here.
Battle
lol are you serious? Let’s see
First game is on PC and so will the rest
Switch can’t run FF remakes
Xbox again I ask are you serious? Xbox game sales accounts for such little piece of the pie in overall gaming that there are publishers doubting if they could recover their development and porting costs for Xbox versions
The real issue here is square enix just can’t stop releasing 1-2 really bad AAA games on year basis
Babylon's Fall
Left alive
Marvel avengers
For spoken
Lol I love how the "Publishers can sell tons of copies of JRPGs on Xbox" myth won't die. The failure of exclusive JRPGs on 360 (by far the most popular Xbox) couldn't kill it. The low Xbox sales of FF games that launched on Xbox and PlayStation at the same time couldn't kill it. The fact that Gamepass has the few players on Xbox who actually play JRPGs conditioned to expect them for free can't kill it.
Publishers aren't selling millions of anything on Xbox the fanbase has adopted the I'll wait for gamepass mentality so publishers are actually starting to skip the platform unless it's a garunteed hit like GTA
Are you insane? Final Fantasy has historically not really sold close to those numbers, those are God of War and Spider-Man numbers dude. Final Fantasy 15 sold 5 million at launch, on both PS4 and Xbox One and had the benefit of releasing three years into the console lifecycle with no cross gen releases slowing the adoption rates. It sold a lifetime of ten million copies. Yet, 80% of sales were on PS4 and only 20% on Xbox One.
Are you going to seriously sit there and tell us the Game Pass crowd are going to double the sales of these games?
Put your mind onto the real problems. It isn't exclusivity. It's out of control budgets, over estimated and unrealistic sales expectations, bloated game development and poor management.
The budgets for Final Fantasy 16 and Remake and Rebirth far exceed Final Fantasy 15, exponentially so, yet did the audience grow exponentially? No.
Don't make this about something it's not, and don't fall for the crap from publishers that triple A games are unsustainable. The next stop on the station is games need to be more expensive and we need more monetisation methods like adverts in games. The problem is with publishers, not us.
It's like everyone just wants to hate on it. Fact of the matter is the install base for ps5 just isn't that big compared to ps4. Right now. I've read double packs weren't counted(remake, rebirth pack) I'm not sure if it's true, and then some are just waiting for the whole trilogy to be done. I know someone doing that.
"If SE made FFXVI/FFVIIRemake/Rebirth available on PS/PC/Xbox/Switch Day 1 they would of sold 20/30 million copies of each game"
Lmao.
I like how a lot of people are blaming the Sony exclusive deals. Yet in the last 4 years they have released about 50 games. 70% of them being multiplatform, 20% being Nintendo Exclusives and about 10% PlayStation Exclusives yet lets all blame the Sony deals lol.
Exactly. Where my dragon quest spinoff that only Nintendo do keeps getting. Stop crying about Sony. Hey Xbox players. Remember last remnant, squares exclusive Xbox 360 game Ms paid for, you guys were sht at supporting that. Same with lost odyssey, blue dragon, and infinite undiscovery. That's why Japanese devs don't wanna develop for it.
You mean pc
Wouldn't have sold sht on Xbox, and the switch couldn't hang
Xbox accounted for 9 percent of ff15 sales. Lol. Xbox ain't doing sht
To put it into perspective, take a studio like Black Box who went through a spell of churning out half decent Need for Speed games annually.
Need for Speed: Underground - 15 million+
Need for Speed: Underground 2 - 11 million+
Need for Speed: Most Wanted - 17.8 million
Need for Speed: Carbon - 15.6 million
Need for Speed: ProStreet - 10.9 million
Need for Speed: Undercover - 8.9 million
This was the norm for the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era.
A Need for Speed game now requires more employees, considerably more time than one year to develop and absolutely a whole load more capital to fund development, let alone the extra costs of developing Frostbite and adapting it to a racing game (if that's still a thing). And at the end of it, it will likely never sell anywhere near even the worst game in that list above.
In that same era, Rockstar Games (albeit, various Rockstar studios) released GTA3, GTA VC, GTA SA, State of Emergency, Manhunt, The Warriors, Red Dead Revolver, three Midnight Club games and Bully. We're lucky if we even see a single game from them this generation.
In summary, committing to making a big AAA game now is barely worth it. Unless you are lucky enough to be sat on a mega IP like CoD or GTA, it's a huge gamble. Games simply take too long, require too many employees and cost too much. Unless AI or Unreal Engine can fix this and QUICK, the industry is going to be reduced to mobile-like experiences.
That era is one of my favourites but let's face it games were different back then at the time underground felt like a revolution so did the GTA trilogy and even shooters like halo changed the way we play.
I honestly believe that generation laid the template for how most of our modern games worked but development times were like 12 months for a decent project the budgets were far lower and publishers could freely experiment.
Since that generation we are playing mostly the same ips and most have anywhere between 5 to 10 sequaks since that point so many of these IPS are classics but are getting stale who even cared the nfs heat came out. Halo 2 was a mega event and a global phenomenon but haloe infinite got a decent amount of buzz but was gone off the radar in a month.
The gaming industry needs to learn just like Hollywood. You cannot sustain "more, more, more" indefinitely if your sales are not increasing in line with your costs. But no, every sequel needs to be three times the size of its predecessor, have twice as many staff, have monetisation systems and 100 hours of padded content and six year development cycles. But are these sequels ever twice as good?
Godzilla Minus One, on a poultry budget of $15 million, blew anything Disney has done out of the water since 2021 in terms of visual effects and created the best monster movie I've seen in my life.
Asobo made A Plague Tale Requiem for $25 million and its visuals, writing and quality rival games with ten times its budget.
Am I against big production values? No, God of War, The Last of Us, and so on justify their budgets and sell ridiculously well. But I am against unrealistic excess. If a game sells two million copies, tripling its budget isn't going to get you six million copies.
Square Enix is facing the reality that Final Fantasy sales are in decline and have been since FF15, yet they seem to be ramping up their development costs exponentially. It's hard to find facts but word seems to be FF15 had a budget of $50 to $100 million and FF16 had a budget of like $250 million plus. Same goes for FF7 remakes.
Yet other factors affected their market potential, like years of cross-gen releases slowing the PS5 adoption rate.
These lay offs will keep happening until publishers make their costs sustainable and stop trying to make it seem like triple A development is impossible or that we need more monetisation and higher priced games to account for their hubris.
Talk about a sound explanation instead of it didn't sell well because it releases at the same time as X game or it's because it's only digital.
I've been saying this for a long time, game budgets have ballooned out of control. We don't need better graphics, we need FUN GAMES that feel complete and satisfying to play. But publishers have a one-track mind, they've all been convinced that better graphics and bigger and more detailed worlds are required or people will pass on their games. This logic obviously doesn't apply to Nintendo which sells games in excess of 15 million copies, with out-dated visuals.
Publishers need to lower the budgets, and stop killing themselves off, its pure insanity.
I actually don't think it's because they're pushing graphics, I mean, these massive budget titles are not actually that much greater visually or technically than smaller games these days. The talent of the graphics artists matters an enormous amount. Take the movie scene with Disney, their budgets are twenty times that of smaller films like Godzilla Minus One or Monkey Man, and more than double larger productions like 1917, yet they're outclassed by these lesser movies.
The reasons for the development costs ballooning in my opinion, is far too many staff working on projects leading to inefficient production (i.e like what we heard about Starfield), forced monetisation systems which eat up development time and resources and push for engagement in the hope of an uptake with in-game purchases, bloated game design and world building which increases time required to playtest and code all the filler content, prolonged development periods and repeated delays where the quality doesn't come close to the time spent (see Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League), mismanagement, excessive spend on advertising beyond what the title is reasonably expected to sell, lack of focus in game development.
Dead Space remains the best example I can ever use. The original sold a million copies and was a breakout success. Dead Space sold two million copies but EA was disappointed in its performance. They then lost their minds and ramped up again for Dead Space 3, with an unrealistic sales target of like 5 million to breakeven. Of course, it crashed and burned, because they forgot their original audience was between one and two million. Exponentially increased their budget, unrealistically increased their sales expectations, kept adding more and more costs and unnecessary excess until it became completely unsustainable.
No way FFXV had a budget to 80 to 100 million...that was probably it's marketing budget. FFXV has 3 versions. Versus 13, Nomura directed XV and after taking nomura off the project the rushed and downdraded final version of XV.
Those numbers come from a random message board.
https://www.ffxivpro.com/fo...
Here's a message board speculating it had a budget of 600 million based on financial statements if this is the kind of accuracy were going for.
https://www.ffxivpro.com/fo...
It's the implosion I keep talking about. Expectations and reality in the industry are no longer aligned. This will continue until some sort of market equilibrium is reached.
Agreed, this cannot continue and something has got to give. I miss the old days where development costs and time were managable and SquareSoft released hit after hit. Vagrant Story, Xenogears, Final Fantasy 7 to 9 released ONE year apart and all of them were critically acclaimed.
The facts are the time and money needed to make games has gone through the roof and we as gamers just aren't buying enough. These games are costing 100 of millions to make and even games rated highly are doing good to get 3 or 4 million in sales. Something has to give.
Raising prices has failed. Seeing games go from $89 CAD to $94 in some cases. I’m just not buying those games.
We all can see the days of square enix being 3rd party are coming to an end which is really sad because they have so many valuable IP’s only if they manage them properly.
Like I said before, it's not just Microsoft laying people off. It's happening throughout the industry.
Ms has come under fire because they have recently dropped so much money on studios and publishers. That's people's issue. That and the highest rated game they've released in years seeing its studio closed. That's why there's a difference.
Are we sure, and I mean super sure, fanboyism aside and the like that maybe Final Fantasy XVI and especially VII Rebirths sales weren’t at least a tad disappointing for them?
We keep fighting about it but if freaking VII, Square Enix’s Golden boy and it’s hype of us begging for a remake for almost 15-20 years didn’t set the world on fire like Square Enix wanted then what else can they give us product wise at this point high expectations and all.
I’m not saying it would have stopped this and everything would have fixed its self if they launched on more platforms since the industry seems like it’s imploding within itself at the minute but it could have given them a little leg room.
Maybe it’s time to admit, regarding your feelings on the games, and this has NO impact on the quality of the games, that XVI could have felt more FF like being more that a simplistic hack and slash game and VII’s remake should have just been a single, less ambitious game just telling the original story over reimagining it?
Even Kingdom Hearts III felt shallow, look at how convoluted it’s become and they are still doing that with all the Missing Link / Union X shit before Kingdom Hearts IV even comes out.
What’s new? The whole industry is in an upheaval and this isn’t the end of it. I really think the pandemic poisoned the industry as a whole. Big profits, everyone playing games during the pandemic. Now it’s back to normal and they’re trying to regain those pandemic numbers numbers. Our hobby hijacked by a bunch suits.
Fking word. It's fk up how they just raised the middle finger to ps4 players. I'm still peeved about this
This is not limited to any one company, the industry is in a major change, for better or worse. Game budget and time for development have skyrocketed, and the industry is trying to find it's balance again, it will level out, it's just a matter of when.
Restructuring come with layoff 90% of the time.
The gaming world is still reeling from the announcement that Microsoft is shuttering Tango Gameworks, the studio behind last year’s big Xbox hit, Hi-Fi Rush.
They have a reason but they don't need to give a explanation. Gamers nowadays think they have a say so in telling people how to run their company. It's not the end of the world, fanboys. Microsoft is gonna due what benefits them the most. It's never been about you. Same with sony. Some of you need to get a grip. The crazy part is that some of the ones complaining don't even own an xbox.
I don’t own an Xbox and I have no real interest in HiFi Rush. I just hate to see a talented group of people lose their jobs when they did everything that was asked of them. You know… the decent, normal reaction to have when something like this happens.
There's no logical or good reason to give for closing Tango Gameworks. They make great games consistently and Hi-Fi Rush was the highest rated Xbox game in literal YEARS. Closing the studio was just plain stupid and nonsensical.
It’s quite strange to not see Phil Spencer in any talkshow or podcast… usually the dude would talk almost daily when there’s even a bit of news from xbox.
Muzzled and/or in on it from the very beginning. You have to be a very stupid person not to anticipate that your division is going to be under scrutiny from shareholders after 80 Billion Dollars worth of acquisitions
The beauty of being a CEO here in America is that when your company does well, you get extra money as a reward...
And when your company does badly, you get extra money to encourage you to stick around and lead it through the storm...And at some point, you get to bow out and float toward retirement on your golden parachute, which means and you guessed it, MORE MONEY!! What a deal for snake oil man Phil!!
Oh god no
You see when shit like this happens he throws Sarah Bond to the wolves
Seriously I only hear from her when it’s the yearly big Xbox showcase or when it’s super bad.
When the whole multiplatform release came out earlier this year he put her front and centre…kept his mouth shut for most of it
Perhaps they think they can sweep this one under the rug, gamers will forget about it,
We will not
They made a good game and you put the whole studio in the bin, this couldn’t be clearer, ms don’t care, everyone suspected it, but now we KNOW it
She's kinda got the verbal communication of 3-years-ago Biden trying to say something he knows nothing about.
What she meant to say is: "We wasted our budget for the next couple years buying Call of Duty, and we're moving all our chips to that one series"
It's starting to seem quite obvious that XBox is going to be shutting down most of their studios or selling them off, then focusing on some sort of PC/Console hybrid OS for the next XBox where they can collect royalties Valve style.
To be fair I don’t think there is a good answer, I’d rather her been honest but that probably would have pissed more people of then the word salad route.
@amp please leave your political red ruby sleepers at the door this is a gaming site or go back to truthfoxnewsmax to comment over there.
BACK ON TRACK
It’s obvious that Microsoft is moving on the money now direction guided by their investors watching all the failures from the 3rd quarter of the 360 gen to this generation I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a plan to replace Phil with Bobby as he proved for years he kept making money for activision.
Bobby jeez that would be an interesting turn of events and they'd certainly go 3rd party
As sad as it is it actually makes perfect sense. It just requires you to be objective from a business perspective and understand the web of revenue and operating budgets
Yeah and regardless if it wasn't exactly a blockbuster as a company you have to nurture a source that seems to be making great content for your brand. Sheesh. They have next to no exclusives and Hi Fi Rush certainly didn't cost what it costs to make Halo or Gears of War does. Yet if you care about your fans those that love Xbox you show support not pull the plug on a development team that just brought you a great game for Xbox and fans. It is puzzling.
Tango must have had a lot of friends in the media. Definitely not enough gamers to care to be reeling.
There's nothing they could say that would justify it that wouldn't make the company look bad. It's pointless to speculate.
I could say that they closed it because they found child p*rn on their leaderships laptop and it would be as valid as anyone else's guess.
I like Jez Cordens thoughts on this. He said it could be because it's a Japanese studio and Xbox has been working on making their teams work together as much as possible. Them being isolated all the way in Japan makes that very difficult. There's also cultural differences to consider.
Xbox executives giving incoherent explanations? They've been doing that since they started to promote the Kinect back in 2011 with all that B.S. marketing and have never changed since then.
Yeah there’s no reason. They litterally just released a hit which is why they bought the studios to begin with. He’ll release there games seperate from gamepass and let them survive on there own if need be
I have been a defender of Microsoft and Xbox for many years. I was there at midnight to pick up the original Xbox. Been there through it all. I always buy every machine, but between Sony and Microsoft, I backed Microsoft more. Why? My son, most friends etc were on Xbox. But I am finally losing faith. They are not new to the video game business. They have been in it for 23 years now. There is no excuse that they have next to no games in terms of exclusives. Shuttering all these development teams is ridiculous. They are ridiculous. I have invested so much in the Xbox ecosystem. Hundreds and hundreds of games and now I fear for my investment. I really question why they are in video games anymore. This answer she gave here is pathetic and sickening. Microsoft has lost any, which hasn't been much of any, credibility in calling itself interested in video games. They SOLELY are interested in money. Period. Not one shred of interest in gaming.
Funds are lining the walls of the escape pods for the MS executive team and directors.
Hard to explain any reasoning when you have numbers on paper dictating your company's actions and not talent and critical acclaim
Xbox's handling of the marketing for Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 is casting a huge doubt over the future of its developer, Ninja Theory.
They should be worried. They we told they were free to be creative to dev. a walking sim, and now Phil and the Lady are walking that back.
let's look at the other side of the coin. why did HellBlade 2 which is a short game took more than half a decade to develop? If a game is taking millions upon millions to make then expectations will grow and when those expectations fail to meet then decisions are made.
I am not defending MS here, above is just my humble opinion.
In other words MS were never interested in the people that made the ip, MS only wanted their ip…
MS knew everything you said before they bought Ninja Theory.
"why did HellBlade 2 which is a short game took more than half a decade to develop?"
They're a smaller studio that has had a number of other projects they've been working on in that time as well.
This 2 comments from Microsoft worries me
“ Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, mentioned in an email to employees that the company is now looking to prioritize “high-impact” titles and “identify the opportunities that are best positioned for success.” Similarly, Xbox president Sara Bond talked about identifying industry trends and transitioning towards them during her recent interview with Bloomberg. ”
One is saying it will prioritize high impact games like CoD and service games while she basically saying they’re going to follow trends AKA the leader AKA Sony.
We all know that to succeed in the gaming industry you need to be a trends setter not a follower 🤦🏿.
Microsoft have learned nothing they still think that the 360 era of buy, absorb, destroy is the way to succeed in the video games industry.
I've said before, and I'll say it again. If MS wants Hellblade 2 to be a success, they must release it for PS5 too, both physical and digital. Not saying as a fanboy or anything but success depends on it's sales.
Just remembered this is on GP too right if i recall correctly? I really don't know then. Good luck to them.
They will close the studio, mark my words. HB2 is a pure single payer experience, took forever to release and won’t sell tons.. MS isn’t interested in these kind of games.
They should have stayed independent and should have never gotten involved with MICROSOFT
It wasn't that easy. Ninja Theory were down to less than 20 employees and were forced to making a MOBA of all things (Bleeding Edge) in order to try and make enough money to survive. That game ended up being a total failure, so without MS, there's a high chance they closed anyway.
The same with Obsidian (ironically, they were on their last legs because they missed a metacritic score by 1 with Fallout New Vegas which would have netted them a huge cash bonus from Bethesda - something they were banking on and financially ruined them for nearly 10 years until being acquired).
Maybe someone else would have come in - but we'll never know.
If MS do close Ninja too, at that rate, we should consider possibility that MS’s end goal is to buy more and more studios and shutter them, keep the ips, then when the game development community is a desert of its former self, use MS’s abundance of capital to recreate gaming space under its own management…
Why shutter them? Maybe because otherwise it would be too obvious that they are creating a monopoly. They are shuttering them while keeping their ips, which allows for purchase of more of the multiplatform industry.
This could be a part of it. I think it has more to do with shareholders, but MS would love the position you are mentioning.
I think it really is as simple as Anast says.
According to that Bloomberg graph, Xbox experienced a few years of massive growth a few years ago and since then, it's been going down each year. Of course, most normal people would put that growth down to Covid but investors live in a different world. They don't see that it's making hundred of millions or even billions. All they see if that it's going down and that's enough to spook them.
Yup, MS is not buying to manage the studios and make games, they are buying them to dismantle and destroy, keep the ips, then go after more studios to dismantle. Once nothing is left, they will use their deep pockets to make studios. Its like telecommunication companies. They merge together and shut down competing services, so now I only have one service provider in my area, and that company is a local monopoly so they treat you however it damn well pleases.
Only issue is that if that happened, people would just make new IP's instead. New Ip's can easily thrive, it's just a more risky.
But in time every big game will be either Marvel or Star Wars, so wouldn't matter anyway. Joking ofcourse. Partly.
Everything they bought is at risk, Game Pass is NEVER going to be able to support all the development for these studios while also maintaining any kind of catalog of new games.
If it wasn't supporting itself before they bought all these studios it's obviously not going to be able to support even more.
Pretty apparent they next on the cutting block. Hellblade 2 is a week out and the only noise from XBOX marketing is akin to a fart. Not even a loud pants-ripping fart....but a shameful supressed one.
Very possible that they allready planned it, but they obviously can't announce it until the game has been out for a while.
I think they have changed plans a lot. Current MS wouldn't have greenlit Senua 2 and games like Pentiment and avowed. Wonder whether we'll get Outer Worlds 2 or if it will be reworked into a more succesful franchise.
There's no way Ninja Theory stays in business after Hellblade 2.
It's a digital only release, it's been in development for over five years, and it's a Game Pass Day One, which means it's not going to blow any sales charts apart. That's already taking into account that Ninja Theory don't make games that sell multiple millions, they cater to a niche audience.
Ninja Theory has been around for a very long time and they've served their audience well, DmC aside, but I'm betting on them closing or being absorbed soon.
Yeah apparently the ABK acquisition is not that good of a decision for them. I reckon that now after paying for ABK, MS higher ups have way more leverage than xbox team expected and that many decisions were made forcefully by MS. That would explain the blatant 180 degree turns on their strategy after years of building this image of xbox and gamepass as a safe haven for creativity.
And the strange silent from Xbox teams, best we got is a vague statement from Sarah Bond and I reckon that only happened because her schedule to show up on that show was fixed before the closure decision was made. Literally no one from Xbox executives made a public appearance to explain things, when usually they’d compete to have a say when something happened.
My theory is that they bought ABK to make COD etc exclusive (see Bethesda/Starfield). Then when the tide of public opinion turned against them, they panicked and committed to at least a decade of multiplat.
COD was going to be the big stick with which they finally beat the masses into submission to Xbox. They depended on it, bc multiple generations of their own hardware ecosystem failed to grow their core audience beyond a subset of US and UK gamers. So now that the stick has been taken away, they have to cut costs (reduce headcount) and maximize profits (sell software to other platforms).
Acquisiont might also have been more expensive than expected. Not sure how it works, but that year of legal battles can't have been cheap?
This is just pile on journalism. Xbox has dumped 27 metric tons of cash into NT and this will be one of the biggest Xbox releases that will actually push the quality bar on AAA games (finally). I seriously doubt they are going to tank this studio all things considered.
I could see why if they had to chop studios they chose the ones they did (purely from a spreadsheet perspective, not accolades perspective). That doesn’t make it better but they were business decisions and it doesn’t mean they are just going to axe a ton of studios. Just bc MS has more money than god doesn’t mean Xbox has all that money. They have operating budgets and forecasts just like every other company. Their revenue is down. Adjustments are made. This is surgery not demolition. They still need key developers and NT is bringing far more to the table across the board (even from a technology perspective) than Tango was. I’m sad for them but it’s true.
Everybody loves a good pile on tho.
If hell blade doesn't sell new gamepass subscriptions, new xbox's or copies of its own game, it will be shuttered.
Hifi celebrated 3 million player. Now we don't know how the split between GP and sales is, yet that still wasn't good enough to save Tango.
GP does canabalise sales, no matter what they say. Also their is less player investment. It being " free" removes urgency or commitment, a player is more liley to download and forget it.
Slow news day? People were literally complaining about how much they showed of Hellblade 2 lol
Where?
Where were people complaining and where is the footage they were complaining about?
I saw the article recently about the "visual upgrade" but beyond that, where's the marketing? Where's anything that a typical bread and butter "big time" release usually receives? Where's all the "finish the fight" tagline and stuff we saw leading up to Halo Infinite?
This is supposed to be "the" game after Starfield, the other "best game ever" which received more promotion than this.
It's been shown at every xbox show for the last 5 years but in the month leading up to release there has been radio silence. I'd argue most gamers don't even know it's coming out next week. It's #191 on Steam top sellers. Compare the marketing Hellblade is getting to Stellar Blade or even Rise of the Ronin.
I don't think the lack of marketing is due to Xbox's lack of faith in the game. It's due to them laying off their entire marketing team
They could have attempted to use the game to drown out all the negative attention after the shutdowns.
If I worked for any studio owned by Microsoft I'd be looking for work. I would be expecting the hammer to drop at any time.
are there any commercials for this game?? With gameplay? I would love to see it
Ninja Theory is a great developer that never really had an enormous hit. Unfortunately, that's similar to the other development companies that got shut down by MS. Hopefully, NT can buy itself back like Toys For Bob did after the acquisition.
The amount of alt accounts on these threads are hilarious. I'm having a field day, this one clown is going absolutely mental...
Indeed, he's in a world of hurt now that he's practically watching his favorite and irrelevant brand going down the toilet. It's just a matter of time before all is set and done. The green brand is on life support.
Sony's handling of Final Fantasy is Casting a huge doubt over the future of Square Enix.
They should be worried, being a dev under MS banner is now like being a general in Putins army, they dont like disappointment
Looking at the financially history its been spotty even though their games have seen okay reviews. Before getting purchased they were forced to become a smaller guerrilla style studio using tech to compensate for size while still aiming to make AAA games (HELLBLADE 1) on a budget. So the studio does falls into the same bucket as Tango and Arkane Austin, they make games people tend to like but no one buys them until they're on a fire sale. Likewise, key leadership roles have also departed the company ahead of launch in the co-founder Tameem Antoniades and main Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice writer. The signs are there that if the game comes out and does not move Games Pass sub count or produce sales it could mean layoffs at the studio in the least.
HELLBLADE II - ??
BLEEDING EDGE - 66
HELLBLADE - 81
Dexed - 65
DmC - 86
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West - 72
Heavenly Sword - 79
Heavenly Sword was a great PS3 launch game, they've kinda fallen far from those old days.
Would have been a perfect launch title. I think it will do well enough because it's probably good, but can't imagine it will make enough money to justify what must be a gargantuan budget by now. Feels like they expected it to be God Of War, but in reality it's a fairly niche title due to it being a primarily narrative driven experience with a heavy subject.
Oh boy, I can’t wait!!!
Sounds dope!
Wow as someone who loves discussing religion and having read books like the breaking the spell - Daniel Dennet and the god delusion- Richard dawkins. Letter to a nation - Sam Harris. This really excites me!!
team was struggling to make the original and had to Barrow equipment to make the game
So it's good to be in a stable environment and have enough resources to make their vision and reality
how madness shapes Myths, Gods, and Religion? ummm? ok?