CD Projekt Red sought to mislead consumers and secure their bonuses when distributing review copies.
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
Bullshit.
Perfect Dark IP was purchased along with many other games like Halo, Gears, etc. Perfect Dark needs help with Crystal Dynamics just to finish the game. That's pathetic. HiFi Rush was purchased and was probably already coming to PlayStation before the purchase.
If Game Pass was a success, these developers wouldn't be closing their doors. We told gamers it isn't profitable. It does make revenue. But revenue isn't profit. It hasn't changed Microsoft's position in the industry or increased hardware sales. If it did, they would be shouting from the rooftops like their arrogant asses always do.
Anyone can have a cloud service. And Sony's is more successful. It took buying major publishers just to increase their spreadsheet. But Xbox continues to fail even then. By having to place games on their competitors platform while still trying to compete. You don't see Nintendo putting their games on Xbox. And Sony was only forced because they don't own the MLB license. Which was forced behind the scenes by Microsoft to take away Sony's successful game and throw it on game pass to use it against gamers buying it on PlayStation. How is the acquisitions a success if they have to close companies they just bought and make many developers jobless? Are you serious? Unless you call it a success by taking away games from other platforms that made those developers more money. That's ridiculous.
Sea of Thieves took years to fix. How is that a success that you have an unfinished game for years that needs fixing? Games should be complete at launch. Just like Halo was an incomplete game that needed fixing. Forza Horizon is a good game but even that game hasn't improved Microsoft's standing at all.
Denying all that shows that you're not paying attention.
Success? They missed their own targets 3 years straight, stopped announcing numbers because they're so terrible and it's not profitable. Hence the closing 4 studios. There will be more consolidation too. Just watch the by the books garbage yearly releases too followed by more season passes and shorter games come out
I have been paying attention for past 11 years. That's why I made my fully accurate above post.
You're the one who hasn't, thus you made that completely worthless post.
- I don't care about a rental service for mid-tier (or any tier) games.
- I don't care about streaming services, I play on actual hardware.
- What is Perfect Dark at this point? Its just a name trying to have an easy win with nostalgia. The original developers and talent has long been gone once MS bought Rare in 2001. ITS JUST A NAME, nothing more.
-Don't care about Forza Horizon.
- Don't care about Sea of Thieves.
- I am interested in Hi-Fi Rush, but MS killing off Tango has pissed me off, so I don't want to reward them for their B.S. and now its guaranteed that the hard working devs won't see any benefit from me supporting them.
MS has done squat over the past 11 years. Nothing but the embarrassing stink of failure. I know this because I have been paying attention.
I never played hi-fi rush, even though I would have loved it from all I can see, but as it never came to playstation... Now it comes to playstation and I have no intention to buy it because they closed the developer and the money will only go to poor phil and his poor suits. Well I mean, what else is there to say.
Gamepass brought them into this position so you would be a fool to see it as a success lol
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.
That just shows how backwards their philosophy is. Studios are the ones creating the magic, you can't just chop and change them on a dime.
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
Funny we buy art though, we don’t buy money.
So they should start “thinking” more like creators of art l, rather than creators of money, and as a side bonus, guess what, they might get more money
I get what your saying though, even any scraped some projects recently
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.
lmao forgot about that meme. Still pissed at EA for shutting down Westwood, Pandemic, Origin and Maxis. I will never forgive them for that.
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.
No Man's Sky all over again I feel sorry for WB publishing the game when WB publishes something its good.
At least Joel didn't die. Jk This is a let down. Right before the launch, I was talking with some friends about how cool CDPR was. And they decided to go 16xs the detail on us. It's still downloading so I am going to play it or write a crap article about why I decided to be angry. I haven't decided yet.
It is important for the community to learn from the lesson that, in the end, developers need more than one game to prove themselves worthy of trust. CDPR had a great multiplatform game, released full of bugs and with performance problems, and quickly received the same status from giants like Nintendo, Rockstar, Blizzard or Naughty Dog.
The latter have a long history of quality in launch and support. Something that was given true to CDPR for its "friendly" way with gamers. The result is there. Even the apology should be ready before the game is released.
Now we must press for those who want their money back to receive, who want to wait for it to be served (especially console owners) and put CDPR on the level it deserves. To get to the top of the stairs there is still a lot to prove.
Funny thing is i saw this coming a mile away, not that it would be in such a poor state pe lr se, but that it was too ambitious to provide a solid experience on current consoles, especially given how poorly TW3 launched. I made up my mind to wait tof the next gen versions ages ago, if and when it gets to a stable state.
They didn't really have a choice. Imagine the backlash if they delayed it again