"MinnMax's Ben Hanson put together Tim Schafer from Double Fine and Hazelight Studios' Josef Fares to talk about Psychonauts 2, It Takes Two, and designing a great platformer in 2021."
The Outerhaven writes: With multiple gaming studios, including Tango Gameworks, closing, the editor-in-chief of The Outerhaven shares his thoughts on the matter.
Honestly I was looking back and at the launch of the Xbox 1. With Don Matrick at the helm I was disappointed but therevwas something else. That fighting spirit of Xbox at its inception was lost. They stopped innovating, I lost excitement on what the next big new surprise was, because their weren’t any. Not like Halo 2 and Gears launch. You couldn’t really brag about it anymore.
So here we are and corporate MS has ruined what was a beautiful renegade project.
"Right now"?
But not 11 years ago with the disastrous Xbox One reveal which they NEVER recovered from?
Man are you slow on the uptake.
I imagine smaller ABK studios like toys for bob and beenox are now feeling uncertain about their futures
It was announced today that Tango Gameworks, the studio behind Hi-Fi Rush, will be shut down, which casts doubt on the future of the game.
I’m sure the support and franchise will live on due to its success. They may even keep some ppl and roll them into other studios. There are layoffs across the map tho in the game/tech industries in general tho including Sony, Facebook and more. My personal family has been affected by them.
Yet MS made a company-wide profit of $22 billion.
In my eyes releasing this on gamepass was a double edged sword approach, received extremely well, but didn't hit w.e batshit insane sales target MS had In mind
have all the people saying m$ buying all those companies, been proved correct yet,
they said more games, more choice, but ended up
less choice, less games, in reality... we were right
They developed the highest rated game Xbox has had as a exclusive in years and they shut them down? Doesn't make much sense.
Developers at Arkane Studios are reacting to the announcement of the shutdown of Arkane Austin, calling it "absolutely terrible".
I get it, but frankly, AA failed pretty badly on Redfall. The XBOX production team is also to blame (they are safe as usual) for releasing a game this hyped in a sorry state. There are lots of fail points on Redfall, but only Arkane bears the pain.
"Welcome to the Xbox family, graveyard is out back, what should we put on your epitaph?" Microsoft turning into this generation's EA, spend all those billions on Activision while closing studios they've run into the ground.
Why I’m really disappointed in Xbox and MS at large. At the same time let’s not pretend that somehow this isn’t an industry issue. Theirs a graveyard behind every major publisher. The only company I haven’t seen canning people is Nintendo and let’s hope that trend continues.
This was a great interview. It reminded me a bit of the Devs Play interviews that Double Fine used to do: https://youtu.be/DxUfaZuGQK...
The ramblings of Josef Fares are endlessly entertaining. haha. He basically sounds crazy at the start of every tangent, but by the end of it, it's obvious that he's very talented and really knows what he's talking about.
He has a strong vision for his games - he didn't water down It Takes Two so it could also be played in solo with an AI and lose the need for collaboration, just like people don't want single-player games to be watered down. I would like if more studios took Hazelight's approach to game design: huge amounts of gameplay variation with very distinct levels.
I felt a bit bad for Tim because he talked about the struggle of cartoonish-looking games appealing to older gamers ... whereas Josef talked a lot about the high sales of It Takes Two (3.5m now). lol. Psychonauts 2 is fantastic and deserves higher sales and more recognition.