Former Rockstar Games technical director Obbe Vermeij has shed light on the developer's long lost spy thriller Agent, which was announced as a PlayStation 3 exclusive in 2009 but has since disappeared.
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.
For everything that Xbox did, I was hopeful it would turn stuff around. Game Pass was a start, and the release of its upcoming titles was a nice way to return. I mean, I'm not going to say it was perfect, just like I wouldn't say PlayStation is perfect. Neither company is, but when Xbox goes and does this, it makes zero sense. The message of Xbox's plan had already had me frustrated, but I was like, "Maybe they'll fix this mess."
Now... yeah. Not so confident anymore.
That's how you know this is clickbait garbage. If you write about games for a living and didn't know Microsoft is a cancer on the industry until now than you are awful at your job.
"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.
No, Xbox never recovered, but Game Pass (which you're a fool if you deny the success of it), Xbox Cloud, the acquisitions, the reboot of Perfect Dark (which seems to be in the gutter now), the success of Forza Horizon, Sea of Thieves, and yes, Hi-Fi Rush (FFS).
Denying any sort of improvement only goes to show you don't pay any attention to the entire picture.
I think you missed the part where these things were spread years apart. Theres no consistency
I imagine smaller ABK studios like toys for bob and beenox are now feeling uncertain about their futures
Thankfully Toys for Bob managed to safely separate from Xbox and are independent now.
Beenox has been in danger for years now with Activision. Microsoft may act more ruthlessly to them unfortunately.
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.
No excuses for MS. I guess Hi Fi didn't do as well as we all thought. So Much the for fun Little experiences that MS has been wanting games of all sizes. The thing is MS are so predictable this year they say "oh we want to prioritize bigger games." Next year they'll have more shut downs and say oh well these ballooning budgets of AAA blah, blah, blah. Even though a year prior they said they want more bigger games. When are gonna admit MS can't do or won't do gaming right? It's always waiting for this and that. String you along while destroying ppls jobs. Year in and year out.
MS’ aren’t gamers they are businessmen.. they prefer a terrible game that sells and makes money to a great game with potential and can be used to grow a wider fanbase.. a bunch of crooks 🤮
this MS employee goes around every posts about MS studio closure and made deflecting comments in all of them lmao
Yet MS made a company-wide profit of $22 billion.
In my eyes releasing this on gamepass was a double edged sword approach, received extremely well, but didn't hit w.e batshit insane sales target MS had In mind
Nothing will sell well when they have trained their fanbase to rely on GamePass. (There could be a unicorn every decade or something like that) The price has to go up a lot or more than likely they close a lot of studios to get upkeep way down and have few studios handle all of the IP and still raise gamepass price just not as much as necessary to keep those doors open for all of the devs that created the IPs MS now owns.
The problem is it did seem to hit their targets
https://x.com/aarongreenber...
have all the people saying m$ 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
It sucks to be right sometimes. Love tango works games with evil within. Also huge fan of prey...if redfall had been a single player story driven title I bet your ass they could've done wonders with freaking vampires.
They developed the highest rated game Xbox has had as a exclusive in years and they shut them down? Doesn't make much sense.
It does when it was a nice Indy time that didn’t make money. Unlike you, they think as a business and if the studio made enough money it would have been safe. One of the biggest companies in the world knows not then you, me, or any other random no matter what you abt to believe.
"Unlike you, they think as a busines"
Yeah a very poorly ran business, the brand has been going down the toilet for over a decade. With all the dumb decision making, it's not suprising why they're going 3rd party.
You can't give your games away for free and then shut down studios when they don't sell. Extremely idiotic thinking
Developers at Arkane Studios are reacting to the announcement of the shutdown of Arkane Austin, calling it "absolutely terrible".
There are textbook scenarios where it's good...
Microsoft is definitely not one of those scenarios
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.
They were set up to fail by Zenimax and had been for a while. They should have done Prey 2, but instead were forced to do mp games.
Apparently even with Prey they wanted to name it something else, they didn't want to use the Prey name because it had nothing to do with it.
That alone put a lot of people off playing it out of support for the original.
@Foxtrot
Yeah, it was a mess, that whole business. Could probably also have done a killer Dishonored 3 if given the chance, right after Prey, when they had a top tier team.
the game (at launch) certainly wasnt all that. the performance update later on made it better but Im glad I got the special edition controllers when I did. Those are nice.
True. We don't know exactly who to blame for what, but end of the day you're not getting paid to put out crappy games.
I hope at least they kept the good people and moved them into other divisions
"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.
I know it's just one person's words, but love to see a game someone paid you to develop being called a 'distraction'.
He calls it a distraction but I always assumed they were the ones who went to Sony and made the deal because they wanted L.A Noire to be multiplatform and moved Sony's deal with L.A Noire to something else.
Kind of their way of going "would you rather have a game developed by a studio outside Rockstar or a game made from us directly".
His blog is really fascinating an actual peak behind the curtain of Rockstar back in the day these guys are probably the most secretive development studio in existence
We all knew it was scrapped but the idea alone blew my mind. I had full confidence Rockstar could make Agent a great game.
Rockstar leadership...the egos...must have been a huge challenge. Having worked in the games industry, I have to say it is exhausting constantly having to prove your point/position. Everyone on the team has a strong (I know best) opinion, and if are in leadership and don't abide them...look out. Now imagine managing the egos/dictates of the Houser bros!