There are two reasons why all those Bethesda studios closed, and neither of them have anything to do with Bethesda (directly)...
Game Pass and Activision.
Recently Gareth at Skewed and Reviewed spoke with Soham Jaiswal, CEO, SD Games about the pending Eternal Damnation game. The game is a hybrid of RPG and RTS and cast players as a Spider.
By putting Black Ops 6 on Game Pass, Microsoft plans to gauge its growth, pricing, and monetization changes, at the cost of less game sales.
If they have follow up games that are bangers, then this strategy will work. But if it’s Call of Duty followed another dead period then it won’t last.
When the game does not hit 1 Billion in revenue in under two weeks they will wonder why and the next thing you know; Season Updates will no longer be free.
subscribers go up, execs celebrate win, get bonus, price goes up, subscribers go down,
execs dont care, got their bonus,
If it works CEOs and shareholders get a payday and if it doesn't even more studios get closed by MS so CEOs and shareholders get a payday.
It will sell on PC & PS but as long as COD is for rent on Gamepass it will not sell well on the XB platform. Most folks such as myself that like COD just for the campaign would rather rent it for that month instead of paying $70 plus tax for the game.
Finally, the Vietnamese government has officially responded to Steam being blocked in the country.
VPN to buy games, fuck that if it's allowed or not, or just use a VPN and torrent what you can.
If the game is crap then yes there will always be negative feedback it comes with the territory. It's called word of mouth or welcome to the internet. Where the truth about a game comes out really fast whether the game is good or crap. If you can't handle the criticism because of a game then why publish the game. Why should people who never criticized or even played the game be punished? Vietnam has some really screwed up laws block Steam because they don't answer us rule. And going on a witch hunt with Steam please. Where's the proof, where's the evidence of this witch hunt. Somebody is butt hurt and has a Vietnamese Karen leading the witch hunt.
The guy confirming what we've all (well, most of us) been saying since the latest purchase.
I'm not surprised Microsoft guys are crock nuff said
Honestly i think Bethesda needs to buy themselves out of zenimax/MSs hands and do their own thing, i honestly think that would fix a lot of issues and save them from a potential closure.
Ah, we can see how the Microsoft media machine works.
Every article I read now is some kind of attempt to shift the blame off Microsoft and paint them as the victims or convince people that Microsoft mistakes were just some kind unforeseeable unfortunate twist of fate.
The shills are out in full force today.
It's greed. MS has the IP's it wants now it's dumping the studios that it's raided, MS will still make money from Tango's games unlike the people that made them. If anyone follows MS outside of gaming you'll see this is what they do, buy companies take what they want consolidate some of the workforce and shut them down. I don't know why people are acting so surprised when this is Microsoft being Microsoft.
MS is a three trillion dollar company, if it enters a market it has no need to compete, they take what they want and with the financial influence it can bypass laws that are meant to protect the consumer and the workforce. Just look at how they are cornering the AI market right now with buyups and investments.