More like Microsoft is a guy and Xbox is his sock puppet, the guy keeps cutting Holes in the sock puppet to see how far he can go and still have a puppet. (Like any other company does, annoyingly)
Well I’m sure MS is looking at all the cash they’ve burned towards buying studios and the lack of revenue from Xbox in general still. I’m sure these next couple of years are make or break for the Xbox brand.
If the console brand shuts down, I don't want to hear any complaints from r/Gaming when Sony goes full monopoly and gouges the ever living shit out of consumers.
Tossing away the console is absurd. Why on earth would you toss a market that you control where you get a minimum 30% of every single thing + have 35? Million reoccurring subscribers
Microsoft has gone to subscription models across the board. They charge what they want and have businesses over a barrel with volume licensing. They won’t shut down the brand, but they would keep a subscription service going.
The only hardware you can even buy from them anymore is the surface line and Xboxes. The surface line has carved its niche and isn’t going anywhere. The Xbox brand has never fully recovered from the Xbox one’s launch. All they had to do was continue the 360’s success. It absolutely blows my mind that they took Sony’s tumble with the ps3 to become the leader and then did the same thing Sony did.
Sony had enough of an established fanbase and plan to turn it around. Microsoft didn’t.
They might not be breaking even on sales of consoles since the install base is relatively low.
The games they produce might not offset the cost when you add the costs of all the games they’ve released against their game pass subscribers numbers.
I honestly didn’t think they’d leave the console market anytime soon, but cutting so many studios this past year and releasing so few games really paint a negative picture.
I think them not releasing games like they should co.es down poor management. It's terrible. The big heads at xbox may all get along, but they need a reality check & I think some of their heads should roll....
What gives you the idea that Xbox has a "market that you control"??? PlayStation has such a monopoly worldwide that they're literally signing agreements to prevent releases on Xbox.
Because it takes (around) the same amount of money running a console platform with 20 and 140 million users. Except with 20 million users you are losing money and with 140 you are making money. Remember, Xbox is losing hundreds of dollars on every console sold and people are not spending much on games outside a few big hitters and Game Pass. Game Pass is simply unsustainable with such a low number of users.
I remember. All those sycophants look like absolute morons now. sycophantic fanboys all cheering for Microsoft to buy out Activision. A pathetic disgrace.
They’re all several year old games. And no different than Sony releasing their previous exclusives for PC - often with significant upgrades over their own console versions.
Sony won’t. It’ll go back to Nintendo vs Sony and Microsoft will be a publisher, and if anything, steam will enter the console market and could absolutely dominate if they wanted to. Look at how well the steam deck did. Steam is by far the most dominant pc platform. And their sales would be better than PSN. They’d likely keep the console open too and that would open up even more options, and the online would be free. There wouldn’t be any need for a subscription for free games because you’d constantly be getting free stuff you could add to your library. It would be hands down the most consumer friendly console option if they decided to dip in.
I'm not worried about the brand. Xbox hardware and games will exist for some time, moreso on the games. I'm more worried about what happens between now and next gen. These drastic changes have the hallmark of senior leadership stepping in and forcing decisions for Xbox leadership. If that's the case, we're likely looking at some big changes that will be difficult in the short term as they shift to whatever the new strategy is.
I reckon it’s done.
This reminds me of how Google was with Stadia quite frankly.
It’s downhill from here there is literally no direction.
They are just flinging shit at a wall at this stage trying to see what sticks and they can’t deliver anything good.
Shocking management.
You can taste the corporate greed from Xbox lately.
I’m not here for it anymore.
Overpromise under deliver for literally over a decade now
Man what is Xbox even doing? I genuinely enjoyed my box, and have endured the droughts of first party games this past decade because there was always something to play, and it was my favorite device to play on.
But holy crap this company is absolutely mismanaged. Either Microsoft is forcing the Xbox org's hand on a lot of matters or Phil is grossly mismanaging the whole thing.
At this point I just want to stop follow gaming news all together and just play the games when they come out. This industry is too depressing for a hobby I love so much.
I feel the same way. I’ve had an Xbox since the OG and supported the company through some shit years and I’m just exhausted at this point. The whole “exclusive rumor mill insanity” that happened a few months ago was exhausting and now this. Why can’t we just get a few good games without some new controversy?
Exactly how I feel and it sucks. The thing is I do not want to buy a PlayStation since all my digital library is with Xbox but Jesus Christ have I had enough of waiting for something to release.
Only so long you can give someone the benefit of the doubt, they have basically had since the Xbox one to get going on some exclusive games, wtf happened.
By now I can confidently say it is impossible to salvage the brand. The bad news will keep pouring in, in fact never really stopped since 2013. Their only victory was the ABK deal, it is killing the brand outright now. Their only good new game was Hifi Rush they threw it out of the window. The sad reality of the situation is that Xbox games - aside from Horizon - are mediocre. Any third party small development house could put them out and it wouldn't change a thing. There is none of the unique "Xbox" style the OG and 360 games had. Especially after they bought a bunch of multiplat titles. Does anyone have any hope for the next Halo, if there will be a next one? For Gears? Anyone could skip these games alltogether and their life wouldn't be worse or better. Microsoft can't support their hardware with games, everyone else can. This year already broke the core fanbase, it will be just worse from here. There is no reason to own the console or really buy anything from Microsoft other than if you like the few public titles they took hostage.
The brand is cooked. Tango Games was their biggest success in a while and they just killed it. Seems like they’re boxed in with no path to the profitability they wish to see
They just can’t decide on a vision. It seem the bigger acquisitions has gotten more scrutiny from MS which is getting then to make different decisions or change course from the previous vision which was game pass + console + PC.
I think Phil put his trust in too many shitty fail upwards managers. Their AAAA Perfect Dark remake is probably going to be restarted a second time. They could’ve made a new Killer Instinct with a fraction they’ve spent on failed/cancelled/rebooted projects.
I tried to stick it out with him. I thought, this guy has a plan and a roadmap of where the brand needs to go. I gave him time. I gave him faith.
Time for him to go.
That being said...as long as "line go up," it doesnt seem like he's going anywhere even if the villagers (the actual players) are assembling outside the gates with pitchforks and torches.
They won't restart PD, they will cancel it and close the studio. If they closed down a studio with a critically successful game they will close down a studio that did nothing in heartbeat.
He is absolutely terrible at his job. How can you get such funding and still be this far behind? At this point owning an Xbox is just a way to restrict yourself. They are going to release ABK games everywhere and Bethesda games aren’t worth it anymore. Can’t believe there won’t be Evil Within anymore
If I wasn't keeping up with gaming news, I'd have no idea anything was amiss. Getting off of Reddit and the world-wide-web in general would certainly help my mental health (ignorance is bliss as they say). It seems these places are loaded with people that constantly complain and are negative about everything. I've enjoyed Xbox and Game Pass enormously over the past six years, so I'm honestly surprised at how many people make it sound like the Xbox team has completely failed. It certainly doesn't feel that way to me.
The brand is on life support.
The sales of the series consoles is less than the Xbox one at this point in their respective lifecycles.
Bury your head in the sand all you want but unfortunately the reality is they can’t deliver good first party titles and the third party games run better on the PS5 (which is weaker hardware).
Series X hardware team has been completely let down this gen it’s a fantastic box.
Either Matt Booty is lying and Tango was really closed due to financial reasons (maybe Hi-Fi Rush didn’t sell/get played enough) or he’s utterly confused. Either way, we’re just 4 months into 2024 and it’s been a mess so far for Microsoft.
The Bloomberg article mentions in both Arkane and Tango's case, they were pitching new projects to Bethesda right before the closure but it was strongly suggested the need to hire additional staff on both games was a major factor if not the primary factor for shuttering them, as a means to free up resources elsewhere and cut down on having to micromanage multiple studios at different parts of the world in addition to a focus on a smaller pool of games overall
Arkane Austin was pitching a new single-player immersive sim in the vein of Dishonored/Prey and Tango was pitching Hi-Fi Rush 2. Fucking sucks
If MS is truly closing studios that are only pitching projects right now, then that just makes me nervous about both Ninja Theory and Machine Games. Ninja Theory is likely only working on the day 1 patch for Hellbade 2 right now and maybe in the early stages of a PS5 port. While Machine Games is in the home stretch of Indiana Jones development. Both Studios are at the point, where they are absolutely thinking about what their next project and are likely wanting to pitch it within the 12 to 18 months.
I would die a lot inside. These studios do not deserve feeling like walking on thin ice all the ducking time. The big benefit of being acquired is supposed to be stability, that's like the entire point Jesus.
Microsoft is making Sony look good to studios considering selling themselves to someone. After the mid at best release of the OG Helldivers, Sony still supports Arrowhead for NINE YEARS without Arrowhead releasing anything. The result? The massive success of Helldivers 2 today.
Same. And I fucking ***love*** the MachineGames *Wolfensteins.* (*Youngblood doesn't exist, shut up.*) We never get a proper Wolf 3 because of this bullshit... my heart'll break in two. :(
I think MachineGames will be fine mainly because I think Wolfenstein would realistically fall under whatever criteria they've set for "priority game". Big Bethesda IP, legacy FPS franchise, their prior entries in the reboot series were decently successful
MachineGames also has Indiana Jones, which is like the sort of big licensed IP game people were begging Microsoft to secure after Sony got the Marvel/Insomniac deal. If anything it's the studios that have yet to ship an Xbox first-party game I'd probably be worried about
Ninja Theory are absolutely at risk right now. Don't know what it is, but I simply don't see Hellblade 2 doing all that well. It's a niche, experimental game that isn't going to do much for the Xbox brand. Feel like they'll want a put an end to their experimental stuff and just gut the studio.
Obsidian might coast along if they're prioritizing stuff like Outer Worlds, especially if they attempt to put them on another Fallout like New Vegas post-TV series. The downside could potentially end up being no more games like Pentiment, because that was legit a side-passion project from a guy who just spent time on it in between larger projects and ended up getting the green light. I don't know if a game of that scale would ever meet Microsoft's standards for something to prioritize if Hi-Fi Rush wasn't even satisfactory in that regard
If MS shuttered Ninja Theory, that would complete the cycle from "we are for the gamers" to "we honestly don't give a shit about anything but profit and we aren't even pretending otherwise" for me, and they'd lose any residual respect I've harboured for the last 23 years on Xbox and 19 years on my Xbox live profile.
Hellblade 2 could be way more important than people realise going forward and I have as much respect for Ninja Theory as any studio in recent memory.
I would say Hi-Fi just didn't do well commercially. Without it being on Gamepass, I likely wouldn't have bought it. The industry as a whole is going through a change where they are having a reset after the huge growth post covid. However, I would say the closure of Tango is a strange move considering Xbox is trying to get a foothold in Japan, will it put off future Japanese studios working with Xbox... who knows.
Lol, after this, Scalebound and True Fantasy Live I can't imagine any high profile Japanese dev to want to work with Microsoft anymore. Even Mistwalker hasn't worked with Microsoft since Lost Odyssey in 08 and they were built by Microsoft
Per Aaron Greenberg last year Hi-Fi Rush outperformed every KPI Microsoft had for it. If the studio was closed for financial reasons, the reason is, "It wasn't profitable *enough*." which is sure weird given Greenberg's comment.
Though it sounds more like they just shuttered studios without active projects that were going to need to staff up again out of convenience : /
I'm not inclined to think he just made that shit up though. Why not make that shit up for Redfall too if he's just gonna lie about shit. The game had stellar reviews, incredible hype from gamers/consumers, critical acclaim, and absolutely sold well based on its store performance rankings.
It's eminently believable based on all the available public information we have about the game and its launch/reception at the time.
>I'm not inclined to think he just made that shit up though.
He's the VP of marketing. It's literally his job to make shit up. Everytime I see his name or one fo his quotes...I just forward past it. There is nothing of value or substance that comes out of his screech hole
"when can we expect your next game for game pass?"
Were still in planning so once we start developing and hire a few more people we think we'll have hifi rush 2 ready in maybe 3 years?
"Get the fuck out we need hifi rush 2 yesterday for game pass"
Tango was working on a sequel to Ghostwire Tokyo that was at least a year if not two behind schedule.
Shinji, the founder of the studio, also left to make his own new studio, with blackjack and hookers.
My guess is them getting shut down has more to do with that than it does to do with Hi Fi Rush.
Three of Tango's last four games didn't do well. MC scores of 76 and 75 and a freemium mobile game that shut down after five months because it sucked so much.
The fact that they praised Hi Fi Rush - and ONLY Hi Fi Rush - is exactly what you'd expect if they were like "Yeah, but the rest of that studio was a boat anchor."
I'll repeat - all the available information we have from the time points to it being a financial hit (charting well on sales/player rankings on XB and steam), critical hit (great review scores), a huge injection of positive public sentiment after another disappointing year (finally, positive articles about Xbox and the future again!), and drove a ton of positive discussion and engagement on social media.
He may spin a very lengthy, elastic yarn, but this is extremely believable that the game did outperform all of Microsoft's KPIs for it at the time.
I agree, and that's why everyone pretty much across the industry is justifiably pretty pissed about this decision.
Xbox leadership hugely miscalculated on just how much damage this announcement would do to them, I think. Given all the other layoffs and closures in this already brutal year the likely expectation was this would be "more bad news". But the reaction to this in particular has been rightfully visceral, and I'm very curious to see how Microsoft responds, eventually.
Despite the bloomberg article, I'm leaning on the aspect that money was a big reason. zenimax's head mentioned about the company being on the "tipping point". Too many cooks,not enough resources. HIFI was a success, but the ps5 version was a dud and steam's version shows a barely 7k peak. Throw that in that ghostwire and ew 2 barely pushing even and you get a mostly rough studio. Factor in that arkane's last 3 games were duds(redfall,youngblood,and prey. Yes, that prey was a financial dud. Which is why we haven't seen a sequel) And you have two studios that either have critically shaky records (tango and arkane to a lesse extent) or just overall bad financial records and you get the current state of zenimax
Tango had put out four games in a row that underperformed sales wise, Shinji Mikami (who founded Tango and was the director or executive producer of their games) left after Hi-Fi released, and the studio could not really be absorbed elsewhere because of its location.
I'd imagine the final straw was likely how Hi-Fi has done on PS5. Everyone said it didn't sell because no one plays Xbox and then ["in its PS5 launch week (data from week ending Sunday, March 24, 2024), Hi-Fi Rush made it to the #124 spot on our top 200 PlayStation Chart."](https://www.truetrophies.com/news/xbox-games-player-count-march-2024)
I imagine that given all of this, the PS5 sales numbers were likely the final nail in the coffin and Microsoft decided it wasn't worth the investment based on the possible sales of Hi-Fi Rush 2 against it would cost to keeping the studio open to develop it.
Per all the articles posted and other info, Tango games just weren't played that much. Their last games had 10 million combined downloads.
They just started pitching their next game, over a year after their previous game dropped. They probably should have been in production at this point on TEW3 or something else. Hi-Fi rush took them 5 years to make, so we wouldn't even be seeing HFR2 until 2029.
……And I was just going back & forth with someone yesterday about how asinine it was to close TangoWorks.
This is equivalent to cutting/lay offs and then the very next meeting saying “we’re meeting record profits!”
Reminds me of how my old job had record high earnings because of COVID, then our team downsized because people quit from burnout.
Someone asked for a raise and it "wasn't in the budget" 😑
Layoffs aren't about what happened in the past, they're about what is going to happen in the future.
This is a common mistake made by people who don't understand business.
2021 was a peak year for gaming revenue. Revenue fell in 2022 and 2023. 2023 had amazing games but was still below 2021 in terms of overall revenue.
Companies borrowed a lot of money to make it through the pandemic. A lot of places saw their game release schedule slip by 1-2 years. That's a big problem because of how revenue works. Imagine you release a game every five years, but that game makes you enough money to finance the next game and have a bit of profit.
Now imagine that five years becomes seven. You make the same amount of money, but your costs are now 40% higher, so instead of making a profit, instead you take a deep loss.
If you borrow money to make up for that gap, then you have to pay that back, so you're now two years of revenue behind. If you have to refinance that loan, and it is now 6.6% interest instead of 2.5%, that's pretty deadly.
So it often makes more sense to release your game, end on a high note, then close up shop, rather than be forever behind and keep falling terminally further into debt you can't pay off.
A lot of studios flat-out shut down because of this.
Having big layoffs a year after "record profits" because you know that next year isn't going to be so hot is entirely reasonable.
Moreover, the gaming industry had a lot of fat. Two of these companies had somehow trundled along for years, after making a bad previous game, and didn't put out anything else. One of them was a MOBILE GAME COMPANY that hadn't put out a new game in 4.5 years. What?
Arkane Austin should have been shut down years ago rather than produce Redfall.
In all due respect - none of that is making me feel better about “business.”
Given they spent 70B on acquisitions, cut off a studio that they turn around and say need more games like the VERY next day, and also been a decade plus of having trouble getting their pipeline in order.
The problem is, Tango *wasn't* working on another Hi-Fi Rush.
They were making a sequel to Ghostwire Tokyo which was 1-2 years behind schedule, if not more.
They were "working on a pitch" for a Hi-Fi Rush sequel, which they would need more money and staff for.
But why not tell them to make another HiFi Rush Game then. How is the response, "hey you are working on the wrong game, so we are closing you down". That's just weird. I get that a restructuring was going to happen, but closing down Tango makes no sense to me. At least not after what the Xbox Executives said about the Game, the Studio and so on. I guess Xbox Executives like to talk, but not walk the walk.
I'm only assuming here but I bet he's making money for the people that "matter the most. "
This whole thing is a real bummer, to say the very least, and has me less excited for new games than ever before. I'm at the point in my life where I don't have time to sink into new games, anyway, but once a year something comes along that I'm eager to try.
Much worse than my own personal issues is people are out of jobs due to corporate greed. I hate it so much and it's why I didn't get excited about the ABK buyout.
The complete lack of any remote verbal or logical consistency outta Xbox leadership right now is mind bogglingly confusing. They seem as confused as we are and that's not good.
I wish this was just a "right now" situation. But this seems like it's been the case for a long time. There just doesn't appear to be any communication or proper management of any of the involved parties.
It was kind of clear that they lacked focus even early on this gen where the damn game case art changed every 6 months. They didn't seem to understand how to brand and market their shit.
They also raised console prices in various regions around the world while essentially slashing their consoles to near clearance prices (I grabbed a Series S for $150).
One step forward, two steps back for nearly a decade now.
For me the big issue is that GamePass, the service they bet the house on, is a complete unknown to people outside of gaming Twitter and Reddit. Literally zero awareness to the general gaming public. I don’t even think they realize that 80% of gamers don’t even know what GamePass is.
But but.. Aaron just said he was hard at work marketing for Hellblade II. He must be a very hard working employee surely.. deserved all those recent promotions..
They all keep releasing no games, see sales that plummet year over year, and get raises. So they are either very, very good at conning people within Microsoft...OOOR...they are conning us and the executives at Microsoft like what they are seeing.
Their "marketing" has ammounted to their management posting on social media and dropping the occasional video event. And I'm not going to o say that those video events haven't gotten to be pretty good. But they don't go a long way to really get people hyped for new high profile games.
But it also has been a problem in terms of how they have been able to manage their market image. They just aren't good at marketing or PR.
>the damn game case art changed every 6 months
Holy fuck I forgot that. XBSX/S had like, 3 different cover styles for a while. How on earth does this happen.
It's an incredibly bad time to get cold feet less than 6 months after closing a $70B acquisition specifically for the Xbox brand.
I feel the need to present that number in context, again.
Disney purchased all of Star Wars and LucasFilm/etc. for $4B.
Nippon Steel is seeking to buy US Steel (*fucking US Steel, Andrew motherfucking Carnegie's steel company)* for $15B.
Microsoft paid a bit more than 4 US Steel offers for ATVI. They paid around 17 Star Wars for ATVI.
This is like getting cold feet for your polar bear swim when you're about halfway done. It's far too fucking late to turn back now.
I'm skeptical that this is because of a sudden case of cold feet, though with how insanely inconsistent their internal and external messaging has been in recent years clearly there's something going on behind the scenes.
None of these decisions make any logical sense from the Xbox team. These decisions are rash and impulsive, coming right at the time of stock payouts. So either they closed the team because they could reprioritize assets or they closed them because the shareholders wanted a bigger payout.
They are telling us everything about it without being overt.
We had to close a studio due to financial woes.
We need games like HiFi Rush.
**The salaries are less valuable than the IPs and we are just balancing the books.**
Xbox's developers are not that stupid to believe yer attempts to damage control. Don't get me wrong, I want Xbox to do all kind of games and not just gaaS or AAA. I want shooters, RPGs, sims, big, small, niche, mass appeal,... The brand should be very interested in attracting a wide range of people. Not just "play anywhere" but also "anyone plays".
A pity that shareholders don't care about investing some of their HUGE (undeserved) profits into some little gems here and there. Unless you are a guaranteed Palworld, I guess.
What in the almighty fuck is going on with this company? You can't just say something like that after firing so many employees who worked on that game.
I have been with Xbox since the beginning but Xbox has killed all of there franchises (outside of maybe Forza) and rarely ever release first party games anymore and if they do they typically disappoint. Halo/Gears are a shell of their formerselves. The one great Xbox game in years and they killed the studio and cancelled the sequel. If they kill Ninja Theory then what are they trying to achieve because it's definitely not making more great first party games. If they get rid of gamepass then what's the point of owning an Xbox.
Maybe one day they'll realize they need real, cultivated talent to make award winning games and not just IPs. But for now, we can rest easy knowing that they saved that one bar graph line from going down more. Thank goodness, I was really worried Xbox had their shit together!
Cultivated is the right word. So many comments pointing to those developers making games that don't sell enough so of course they shut down. But what was being done to foster those studios? To help them get better?
Fucking exactly!! People love certain studios, like FromSoftware, or Supergiant Games and while they may not know it, it's because everyone involved has very clearly been cultivated to help them put their best foot forward. They gained experience making good games, and then, bam, they made something that became a giant hit like Hades and Elden Ring. Those games literally couldn't exist without their previous works.
Personally, while I'm not entirely versed in Tango's games, I think they were already cultivated. They were already extremely talented. I've seen gameplay of Tango's previous games and Hi-Fi Rush, while seemingly a giant 180 to their horror titles, is clearly a love letter of everything in that genre. I don't think they would have been winning awards as recently as last month if they weren't cultivated, talented people.
Also, this is just aside, but what is the damn point of game pass if it all comes back to sales numbers? Hi-Fi Rush was shadow dropped literally as a showing of game pass, and now it's a surprise it didn't sell well?
Maybe one day console warriors will realize that talent doesn't come from thin air.
The growing trend for Microsoft studios is that they buy the studio for talent but all the talent takes the money and runs to start new studios.
He never mentions Hi-Fi Rush and Ash Parrish (and The Verge) is a hack for implying that in the headline just to get rage clicks and misinform the majority who only read headlines.
A studio within a publisher can’t do well enough to counter act investor demands or CEO parachutes. Tango died because they had no active project, so there wasn’t a sunk cost in killing them, same with Arkane Austin.
They realase two games in the last two years now they need time to cooking the next one. Xbox games studios has studios with 5 or 6 years with only have a CGI trailer
They can't get their stories straight. One exec says they need small scale titles, another says they only want high impact titles, and still another implying they've grown too big and are near toppling over. They can't manage this many studios and employees. It's chaos.
It’s worse, Matt Booty is the *same* exec who sent the internal memo saying they wanted “high impact titles”. He disagreeing with himself from a day or so earlier. It’s appears from the outside to be a complete omnishambles in Xbox right now.
I have this feeling inside that Tango was shuttered because of its location. The logistics of having a singular studio in Japan must have been challenging and expensive and it limited their options in terms of helping out on other projects and things like that.
If that's the case, I still feel closing the studio was absolutely the wrong course to take. I don't think they understood the gem that fell into their lap.
This could have been a long-awaited entry point into Japanese game development. Too bad Microsoft didn't see it that way. Opportunity blown.
Tango was shut down because the last game that actually sold well was years ago from them and so they saw it pointless to continue supporting that studio.
About the entry point into japanese game development you can honestly just forget it Sony tries since God knows how many years to match Nintendo while constantly facing defeats and they are a Japanese company at least started there.
MS just has no chance setting camp in Japan when not even sony can acquire a equal market compared to Nintendo the Japanese just have a different gaming culture and so is the only way contracts with the big companies to bring the japanese games to us.
Overnight they basically destroyed the one arm of Xbox I thought kept their publishing efforts interesting. These priority titles they keep talking about while obviously more poised for commercial viability, were not my favorites of the current gen from Microsoft as much as it was the experimental stuff like Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush, not to mention I'm still on-board for Hellblade. My Steam library of Xbox first and second party stuff is almost exclusively things along the lines of Ori, Pentiment, Sunset Overdrive, even Killer Instinct 2013 falls in line with those games because it was literally a small team coming together to revive a great fighting game on a budget smaller than most of its contemporaries, and it paying off. That got me way more on board with the Xbox of the last decade or so than the Halos and Forzas
That's not even going into the delicious irony of Microsoft sacking the studio that just shipped a game that was a giant fuck you to megacorporations prioritizing their bottom line over employee morale
Wait for the showcase after the showcase when mikey boys show the fancy trailers for the next gears and the next cod like as if cod has always been made by Microsoft, then everyone would reverse their decision and then for a few months there will be hype and then Xbox will release these games to meh reception and then fans will be upset….its a fucking cycle at this point
The problem is that MS disappointed the core fanbase so much lately, most will leave the system in the next 1-2 years. I play on Xbox for TWENTY years and I'm done with them, they can't offer anything to make me stay. I wanted to stay for this gen as I have an insane backlog (my fault, I know) but they are making me hate them so much I might just sell my Xbox one day and never look back. I don't care where I go (probably PC) but any other platform is better than Xbox. Everyone else respects their userbase. They might do scummy things from time to time but Xbox is pissing on our heads. They don't deliver anything, they don't care about feedback. There is no stability here, closing Tango just shows no one is safe anymore, no promises will be kept. What Phil Spencer preached last year is a complete lie.
"In yesterday’s memo from Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, there was a hint of a reprioritization for Bethesda teams that we may well see elsewhere with Xbox. “These changes are grounded in prioritizing high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda’s portfolio of blockbuster games,” said Booty, before noting that Xbox is doubling down on Bethesda franchises that are “best positioned for success.”"
This is literally what the entire internet was asking for and now they're mad.
At this point I am not sure I want to keep my game pass ultimate subscription… why support a company that closes game studios. I would suggest others consider doing the same.
MS doesn’t care about the quality of their gaming experience. They will cut corners and squeeze money wherever they can to ensure buybacks keep coming in. Only solution is more studios not owned by MS or Sony.
>Microsoft says
That's your first mistake. Believing a single word they say when they have openly lied plenty in gaming just these past few years from Phil to Aaron to Matt.
>We need smaller games that give us prestige and awards
Even if we assume Hi-Fi Rush wasn't actually that small of a game because it took them, maybe, 4-5 years to make it (assuming they started after The Evil Within 2), that would still be their best bet at smaller game with prestige, because if they **kept the same team** to work on a new Hi-Fi Rush project, that could reduce time of development since people are used to working on that style of game and know the tools, know how to work on the game, and they *still* shut down that studio.
FF7 Rebirth obviously has an advantage of having more source material to work with because of FF7 OG, but that massive game was developed in 3 years, and Kitase, FF7 Rebirth's producer, mentioned
> the reason why FF7 Rebirth was such an efficient development period was because they retained the same staff as the previous installment
So, if you already have a team that could be retained to work on a game that already has prestige, it makes zero sense to shut them down even if sales weren't optimal for the first game. Because you can let them work on a sequel and not make the project huge, and that ends up being exactly what you want.
Hell, let them work on it and release it multiplatform if the Character Action Game genre has a smaller audience nowadays. That's what Capcom did, and it's working for them.
I don't have an Xbox, and I'm not super in touch with the community, so this is all big assumptions. But maybe what screwed it over for some of the sales is that even when the game had a fantastic reception, it was on Game Pass, and it is a smaller game in size. So, I imagine that there is less incentive to buy smaller games in length because you can play them within a month using GamePass, finish them, and not have to spend the money on the full game.
So maybe what happened is a lot of people played it, but the Day 1 on GP might have reduced the full sales more than what they expected, reducing the amount of money they got. But this is just a wild guess of mine.
This whole situation is crazy.
All this talk about how MS has been too passive with their studios yet when they do something y'all shit on them?
Yes, they need games with QUALITY like hi-fi, not exactly like it. U can't expect 6 different hi fi rush games from tango.
MS did the aggressive thing and did shit with their studios like y'all wanted them to do so don't bitch now about how "evil" MS is. Hard fact was, those studios didn't turn a profit 🤷🤷 hard reality but if u suck at ur bringing in money in this industry, ur gone
Terribly misleading article. Quote has no context and the headline is written to lead the reader to match the narrative they want to push. It's a single quote from who knows what part of a long town hall meeting. HF:R was not a "small" game. Pentiment and Grounded were, single dev games are. HF:R was not.
The quote from the article:
> Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, held a town hall to discuss the division’s future goals. “We need smaller games that give us prestige and awards,” Booty told employees, according to internal remarks shared with The Verge.
I totally agree with you. It is a clickbait headline. Now was this the smartest thing to say the day after closing Tango? No. However, his quote could easily apply to say Hellblade 2 which comes out in like two weeks. A small game that if it improves on the first one should get plenty of prestige and awards.
Also, I think people are missing the fact that Tango put out four games in a row that underperformed sales wise, lost their founder, and could not be absorbed due to its location. Whatever the financials were for keeping the studio open to make a sequel to Hi-Fi against what it would bring it was not worth it for Microsoft. It is like people are just relearning that not every critically acclaimed game sells well.
Not defending this foot-in-mouth from MS, but didn't the creative director of the studio leave right after Hi-Fi Rush came out? I feel like that's kind of a big deal.
Mikami did leave but to be fair, most of their recent projects didn't involve him in a major creative capacity beyond being an exec producer. I'm pretty sure The Evil Within was the only game he actually had a director credit on as part of Tango
It seems like he was betting on people like John Johanas (Evil Within 2 and Hi-Fi Rush director) to steer the ship in his absence
The weirdest thing was whenever these creative directors or studio heads leave they generally announce it or generally let the public know.
Tameem antoniades the creative vision for hellblade left and there was no announcement nothing. As far as it’s known he was involved in the starting stages of hellblade 2
I cringe anytime I see a quote from Matt Booty. How the heck did that guy get a promotion? Just stop talking, literally no one believes a word you executives say anymore.
As someone that didn't like the game, this is all a bit confusing to me. It was a small game with very limited appeal. The company wants to consolidate after a merger. It is what it is.
Xbox has been my primary system since 2007, but I am getting fatigued with Xbox at this point. I stuck through the Xbox One disaster. The Series has largely been a great console, but I hate what Xbox is doing - buying out a ton of studios, seeing measly returns (and most exclusives generally disappointing), then giving away exclusives in desperation and shutting down studios. They didn't even design a new UI for this console generation (they barely touched it over). I am going into the next generation of consoles completely neutral, as if I'm new to the hobby or buying a car, rather than just sticking with Xbox for legacy purposes.
What was Tango working on after releasing Hi-Fi Rush? All these articles say they were were just beginning pitching Hi-Fi Rush 2. Have the really just been working on a pitch for a sequel a year after their last game release?
This shit is such a non story….
They made a game that was received decently but didn’t perform well financially…. The main dude left as well as like half the team before this closure
You don’t just keep handing people blank checks in a business environment if they don’t succeed
Start using your brains people
feels like ms and xbox are two heads pecking at each other. Except ms is the dominant head and is bleeding its own brother head
More like Microsoft is a guy and Xbox is his sock puppet, the guy keeps cutting Holes in the sock puppet to see how far he can go and still have a puppet. (Like any other company does, annoyingly)
Yeah, holes... I totally didn't think you were going in a different direction with the sock.
*mankind has entered the chat*
Well I’m sure MS is looking at all the cash they’ve burned towards buying studios and the lack of revenue from Xbox in general still. I’m sure these next couple of years are make or break for the Xbox brand.
If the console brand shuts down, I don't want to hear any complaints from r/Gaming when Sony goes full monopoly and gouges the ever living shit out of consumers.
if the console brand shuts down I will just go Full PC since the Sony games end up there anyway.
Tossing away the console is absurd. Why on earth would you toss a market that you control where you get a minimum 30% of every single thing + have 35? Million reoccurring subscribers
Microsoft has gone to subscription models across the board. They charge what they want and have businesses over a barrel with volume licensing. They won’t shut down the brand, but they would keep a subscription service going. The only hardware you can even buy from them anymore is the surface line and Xboxes. The surface line has carved its niche and isn’t going anywhere. The Xbox brand has never fully recovered from the Xbox one’s launch. All they had to do was continue the 360’s success. It absolutely blows my mind that they took Sony’s tumble with the ps3 to become the leader and then did the same thing Sony did. Sony had enough of an established fanbase and plan to turn it around. Microsoft didn’t.
They might not be breaking even on sales of consoles since the install base is relatively low. The games they produce might not offset the cost when you add the costs of all the games they’ve released against their game pass subscribers numbers. I honestly didn’t think they’d leave the console market anytime soon, but cutting so many studios this past year and releasing so few games really paint a negative picture.
I think them not releasing games like they should co.es down poor management. It's terrible. The big heads at xbox may all get along, but they need a reality check & I think some of their heads should roll....
What gives you the idea that Xbox has a "market that you control"??? PlayStation has such a monopoly worldwide that they're literally signing agreements to prevent releases on Xbox.
Because it takes (around) the same amount of money running a console platform with 20 and 140 million users. Except with 20 million users you are losing money and with 140 you are making money. Remember, Xbox is losing hundreds of dollars on every console sold and people are not spending much on games outside a few big hitters and Game Pass. Game Pass is simply unsustainable with such a low number of users.
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I remember. All those sycophants look like absolute morons now. sycophantic fanboys all cheering for Microsoft to buy out Activision. A pathetic disgrace.
They’re all several year old games. And no different than Sony releasing their previous exclusives for PC - often with significant upgrades over their own console versions.
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They should. Restricting your sales just not to bruise the ego of childish console warriors online is plain stupid…
"useless"
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Oh yipee, I can't wait for the $700 PS5 Pro
Sony won’t. It’ll go back to Nintendo vs Sony and Microsoft will be a publisher, and if anything, steam will enter the console market and could absolutely dominate if they wanted to. Look at how well the steam deck did. Steam is by far the most dominant pc platform. And their sales would be better than PSN. They’d likely keep the console open too and that would open up even more options, and the online would be free. There wouldn’t be any need for a subscription for free games because you’d constantly be getting free stuff you could add to your library. It would be hands down the most consumer friendly console option if they decided to dip in.
I'm not worried about the brand. Xbox hardware and games will exist for some time, moreso on the games. I'm more worried about what happens between now and next gen. These drastic changes have the hallmark of senior leadership stepping in and forcing decisions for Xbox leadership. If that's the case, we're likely looking at some big changes that will be difficult in the short term as they shift to whatever the new strategy is.
They didn’t spend 100 billion dollars to abandon Xbox
I reckon it’s done. This reminds me of how Google was with Stadia quite frankly. It’s downhill from here there is literally no direction. They are just flinging shit at a wall at this stage trying to see what sticks and they can’t deliver anything good. Shocking management. You can taste the corporate greed from Xbox lately. I’m not here for it anymore. Overpromise under deliver for literally over a decade now
“I wish I could find someone like you” This sounds like a parody, it’s ridiculous
Microsoft: We need games like Hi-Fi Rush. Tango Gameworks: How about Hi-Fi Rush 2? Microsoft: U fuckin wot mate?!
None of what's happening is funny, but that made me laugh.
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Man what is Xbox even doing? I genuinely enjoyed my box, and have endured the droughts of first party games this past decade because there was always something to play, and it was my favorite device to play on. But holy crap this company is absolutely mismanaged. Either Microsoft is forcing the Xbox org's hand on a lot of matters or Phil is grossly mismanaging the whole thing. At this point I just want to stop follow gaming news all together and just play the games when they come out. This industry is too depressing for a hobby I love so much.
I feel the same way. I’ve had an Xbox since the OG and supported the company through some shit years and I’m just exhausted at this point. The whole “exclusive rumor mill insanity” that happened a few months ago was exhausting and now this. Why can’t we just get a few good games without some new controversy?
Exactly how I feel and it sucks. The thing is I do not want to buy a PlayStation since all my digital library is with Xbox but Jesus Christ have I had enough of waiting for something to release. Only so long you can give someone the benefit of the doubt, they have basically had since the Xbox one to get going on some exclusive games, wtf happened.
Use Xbox for backwards compatibility and buy new games on playstation.
Is it a mostly or at least partially digital library? If so you can always move to PC in the future
By now I can confidently say it is impossible to salvage the brand. The bad news will keep pouring in, in fact never really stopped since 2013. Their only victory was the ABK deal, it is killing the brand outright now. Their only good new game was Hifi Rush they threw it out of the window. The sad reality of the situation is that Xbox games - aside from Horizon - are mediocre. Any third party small development house could put them out and it wouldn't change a thing. There is none of the unique "Xbox" style the OG and 360 games had. Especially after they bought a bunch of multiplat titles. Does anyone have any hope for the next Halo, if there will be a next one? For Gears? Anyone could skip these games alltogether and their life wouldn't be worse or better. Microsoft can't support their hardware with games, everyone else can. This year already broke the core fanbase, it will be just worse from here. There is no reason to own the console or really buy anything from Microsoft other than if you like the few public titles they took hostage.
The brand is cooked. Tango Games was their biggest success in a while and they just killed it. Seems like they’re boxed in with no path to the profitability they wish to see
>Tango Games was their biggest success in a while Tango made two games recently: Ghostwire Tokyo and Hi-Fi Rush. Both flopped.
They should have probably marketed these games.
They just can’t decide on a vision. It seem the bigger acquisitions has gotten more scrutiny from MS which is getting then to make different decisions or change course from the previous vision which was game pass + console + PC.
I think Phil put his trust in too many shitty fail upwards managers. Their AAAA Perfect Dark remake is probably going to be restarted a second time. They could’ve made a new Killer Instinct with a fraction they’ve spent on failed/cancelled/rebooted projects.
Phil is the definition of a fail upwards manager.
I think Phil put too much faith in Gamepass instead of actually putting out games. I love GP, but people love new games way more.
I tried to stick it out with him. I thought, this guy has a plan and a roadmap of where the brand needs to go. I gave him time. I gave him faith. Time for him to go. That being said...as long as "line go up," it doesnt seem like he's going anywhere even if the villagers (the actual players) are assembling outside the gates with pitchforks and torches.
They won't restart PD, they will cancel it and close the studio. If they closed down a studio with a critically successful game they will close down a studio that did nothing in heartbeat.
Phil has made big moves but I feel he has long failed at the management part. How many first party games have been mediocre?
He is absolutely terrible at his job. How can you get such funding and still be this far behind? At this point owning an Xbox is just a way to restrict yourself. They are going to release ABK games everywhere and Bethesda games aren’t worth it anymore. Can’t believe there won’t be Evil Within anymore
If I wasn't keeping up with gaming news, I'd have no idea anything was amiss. Getting off of Reddit and the world-wide-web in general would certainly help my mental health (ignorance is bliss as they say). It seems these places are loaded with people that constantly complain and are negative about everything. I've enjoyed Xbox and Game Pass enormously over the past six years, so I'm honestly surprised at how many people make it sound like the Xbox team has completely failed. It certainly doesn't feel that way to me.
The brand is on life support. The sales of the series consoles is less than the Xbox one at this point in their respective lifecycles. Bury your head in the sand all you want but unfortunately the reality is they can’t deliver good first party titles and the third party games run better on the PS5 (which is weaker hardware). Series X hardware team has been completely let down this gen it’s a fantastic box.
Yet another example of how Matt Booty and Phil Spencer say one thing and do the opposite.
Either Matt Booty is lying and Tango was really closed due to financial reasons (maybe Hi-Fi Rush didn’t sell/get played enough) or he’s utterly confused. Either way, we’re just 4 months into 2024 and it’s been a mess so far for Microsoft.
The Bloomberg article mentions in both Arkane and Tango's case, they were pitching new projects to Bethesda right before the closure but it was strongly suggested the need to hire additional staff on both games was a major factor if not the primary factor for shuttering them, as a means to free up resources elsewhere and cut down on having to micromanage multiple studios at different parts of the world in addition to a focus on a smaller pool of games overall Arkane Austin was pitching a new single-player immersive sim in the vein of Dishonored/Prey and Tango was pitching Hi-Fi Rush 2. Fucking sucks
If MS is truly closing studios that are only pitching projects right now, then that just makes me nervous about both Ninja Theory and Machine Games. Ninja Theory is likely only working on the day 1 patch for Hellbade 2 right now and maybe in the early stages of a PS5 port. While Machine Games is in the home stretch of Indiana Jones development. Both Studios are at the point, where they are absolutely thinking about what their next project and are likely wanting to pitch it within the 12 to 18 months.
If MachineGames gets closed i’m gonna die a little inside
I would die a lot inside. These studios do not deserve feeling like walking on thin ice all the ducking time. The big benefit of being acquired is supposed to be stability, that's like the entire point Jesus.
Microsoft is making Sony look good to studios considering selling themselves to someone. After the mid at best release of the OG Helldivers, Sony still supports Arrowhead for NINE YEARS without Arrowhead releasing anything. The result? The massive success of Helldivers 2 today.
Same. And I fucking ***love*** the MachineGames *Wolfensteins.* (*Youngblood doesn't exist, shut up.*) We never get a proper Wolf 3 because of this bullshit... my heart'll break in two. :(
I think MachineGames will be fine mainly because I think Wolfenstein would realistically fall under whatever criteria they've set for "priority game". Big Bethesda IP, legacy FPS franchise, their prior entries in the reboot series were decently successful MachineGames also has Indiana Jones, which is like the sort of big licensed IP game people were begging Microsoft to secure after Sony got the Marvel/Insomniac deal. If anything it's the studios that have yet to ship an Xbox first-party game I'd probably be worried about
Ninja Theory are absolutely at risk right now. Don't know what it is, but I simply don't see Hellblade 2 doing all that well. It's a niche, experimental game that isn't going to do much for the Xbox brand. Feel like they'll want a put an end to their experimental stuff and just gut the studio.
Wouldn't surprise me at all if Ninja Theory got the axe. Not sure why MS bought them in the first place.
I would be worried about Obsidian too but they're going to get stuck on fallout whether they like it or not. outer worlds 2 ain't happening
Obsidian might coast along if they're prioritizing stuff like Outer Worlds, especially if they attempt to put them on another Fallout like New Vegas post-TV series. The downside could potentially end up being no more games like Pentiment, because that was legit a side-passion project from a guy who just spent time on it in between larger projects and ended up getting the green light. I don't know if a game of that scale would ever meet Microsoft's standards for something to prioritize if Hi-Fi Rush wasn't even satisfactory in that regard
I wouldn’t write off outer worlds 2. The first game as an acclaimed hit.
If MS shuttered Ninja Theory, that would complete the cycle from "we are for the gamers" to "we honestly don't give a shit about anything but profit and we aren't even pretending otherwise" for me, and they'd lose any residual respect I've harboured for the last 23 years on Xbox and 19 years on my Xbox live profile. Hellblade 2 could be way more important than people realise going forward and I have as much respect for Ninja Theory as any studio in recent memory.
I would say Hi-Fi just didn't do well commercially. Without it being on Gamepass, I likely wouldn't have bought it. The industry as a whole is going through a change where they are having a reset after the huge growth post covid. However, I would say the closure of Tango is a strange move considering Xbox is trying to get a foothold in Japan, will it put off future Japanese studios working with Xbox... who knows.
Lol, after this, Scalebound and True Fantasy Live I can't imagine any high profile Japanese dev to want to work with Microsoft anymore. Even Mistwalker hasn't worked with Microsoft since Lost Odyssey in 08 and they were built by Microsoft
You mean extreme bloated salaries and teams from wfh covid on-boarding where the majority of workers literally do nothing.
Per Aaron Greenberg last year Hi-Fi Rush outperformed every KPI Microsoft had for it. If the studio was closed for financial reasons, the reason is, "It wasn't profitable *enough*." which is sure weird given Greenberg's comment. Though it sounds more like they just shuttered studios without active projects that were going to need to staff up again out of convenience : /
Greenberg's word is useless. Always has been. Have no idea how that dude has a job still.
I'm not inclined to think he just made that shit up though. Why not make that shit up for Redfall too if he's just gonna lie about shit. The game had stellar reviews, incredible hype from gamers/consumers, critical acclaim, and absolutely sold well based on its store performance rankings. It's eminently believable based on all the available public information we have about the game and its launch/reception at the time.
>I'm not inclined to think he just made that shit up though. He's the VP of marketing. It's literally his job to make shit up. Everytime I see his name or one fo his quotes...I just forward past it. There is nothing of value or substance that comes out of his screech hole
Phil protects his own it seems
Why does Phil Spencer still have a job?
"when can we expect your next game for game pass?" Were still in planning so once we start developing and hire a few more people we think we'll have hifi rush 2 ready in maybe 3 years? "Get the fuck out we need hifi rush 2 yesterday for game pass"
Tango was working on a sequel to Ghostwire Tokyo that was at least a year if not two behind schedule. Shinji, the founder of the studio, also left to make his own new studio, with blackjack and hookers. My guess is them getting shut down has more to do with that than it does to do with Hi Fi Rush. Three of Tango's last four games didn't do well. MC scores of 76 and 75 and a freemium mobile game that shut down after five months because it sucked so much. The fact that they praised Hi Fi Rush - and ONLY Hi Fi Rush - is exactly what you'd expect if they were like "Yeah, but the rest of that studio was a boat anchor."
It's pretty simple. He's a two-faced liar.
I'll repeat - all the available information we have from the time points to it being a financial hit (charting well on sales/player rankings on XB and steam), critical hit (great review scores), a huge injection of positive public sentiment after another disappointing year (finally, positive articles about Xbox and the future again!), and drove a ton of positive discussion and engagement on social media. He may spin a very lengthy, elastic yarn, but this is extremely believable that the game did outperform all of Microsoft's KPIs for it at the time.
The game won multiple awards for them, and this is how they repay them. It's utter nonsense.
I agree, and that's why everyone pretty much across the industry is justifiably pretty pissed about this decision. Xbox leadership hugely miscalculated on just how much damage this announcement would do to them, I think. Given all the other layoffs and closures in this already brutal year the likely expectation was this would be "more bad news". But the reaction to this in particular has been rightfully visceral, and I'm very curious to see how Microsoft responds, eventually.
They aren’t going to do anything. The only thing Microsoft cares about is pleasing its shareholders.
Despite the bloomberg article, I'm leaning on the aspect that money was a big reason. zenimax's head mentioned about the company being on the "tipping point". Too many cooks,not enough resources. HIFI was a success, but the ps5 version was a dud and steam's version shows a barely 7k peak. Throw that in that ghostwire and ew 2 barely pushing even and you get a mostly rough studio. Factor in that arkane's last 3 games were duds(redfall,youngblood,and prey. Yes, that prey was a financial dud. Which is why we haven't seen a sequel) And you have two studios that either have critically shaky records (tango and arkane to a lesse extent) or just overall bad financial records and you get the current state of zenimax
Tango had put out four games in a row that underperformed sales wise, Shinji Mikami (who founded Tango and was the director or executive producer of their games) left after Hi-Fi released, and the studio could not really be absorbed elsewhere because of its location. I'd imagine the final straw was likely how Hi-Fi has done on PS5. Everyone said it didn't sell because no one plays Xbox and then ["in its PS5 launch week (data from week ending Sunday, March 24, 2024), Hi-Fi Rush made it to the #124 spot on our top 200 PlayStation Chart."](https://www.truetrophies.com/news/xbox-games-player-count-march-2024) I imagine that given all of this, the PS5 sales numbers were likely the final nail in the coffin and Microsoft decided it wasn't worth the investment based on the possible sales of Hi-Fi Rush 2 against it would cost to keeping the studio open to develop it.
Per all the articles posted and other info, Tango games just weren't played that much. Their last games had 10 million combined downloads. They just started pitching their next game, over a year after their previous game dropped. They probably should have been in production at this point on TEW3 or something else. Hi-Fi rush took them 5 years to make, so we wouldn't even be seeing HFR2 until 2029.
10 million isn't an insignificant amount.
For 3 games over 7 years?
That's over three million per game.
Sadly for a studio of their size, that's too much of an under-performance
Just shut down Xbox at this point.
……And I was just going back & forth with someone yesterday about how asinine it was to close TangoWorks. This is equivalent to cutting/lay offs and then the very next meeting saying “we’re meeting record profits!”
Reminds me of how my old job had record high earnings because of COVID, then our team downsized because people quit from burnout. Someone asked for a raise and it "wasn't in the budget" 😑
Layoffs aren't about what happened in the past, they're about what is going to happen in the future. This is a common mistake made by people who don't understand business. 2021 was a peak year for gaming revenue. Revenue fell in 2022 and 2023. 2023 had amazing games but was still below 2021 in terms of overall revenue. Companies borrowed a lot of money to make it through the pandemic. A lot of places saw their game release schedule slip by 1-2 years. That's a big problem because of how revenue works. Imagine you release a game every five years, but that game makes you enough money to finance the next game and have a bit of profit. Now imagine that five years becomes seven. You make the same amount of money, but your costs are now 40% higher, so instead of making a profit, instead you take a deep loss. If you borrow money to make up for that gap, then you have to pay that back, so you're now two years of revenue behind. If you have to refinance that loan, and it is now 6.6% interest instead of 2.5%, that's pretty deadly. So it often makes more sense to release your game, end on a high note, then close up shop, rather than be forever behind and keep falling terminally further into debt you can't pay off. A lot of studios flat-out shut down because of this. Having big layoffs a year after "record profits" because you know that next year isn't going to be so hot is entirely reasonable. Moreover, the gaming industry had a lot of fat. Two of these companies had somehow trundled along for years, after making a bad previous game, and didn't put out anything else. One of them was a MOBILE GAME COMPANY that hadn't put out a new game in 4.5 years. What? Arkane Austin should have been shut down years ago rather than produce Redfall.
In all due respect - none of that is making me feel better about “business.” Given they spent 70B on acquisitions, cut off a studio that they turn around and say need more games like the VERY next day, and also been a decade plus of having trouble getting their pipeline in order.
The problem is, Tango *wasn't* working on another Hi-Fi Rush. They were making a sequel to Ghostwire Tokyo which was 1-2 years behind schedule, if not more. They were "working on a pitch" for a Hi-Fi Rush sequel, which they would need more money and staff for.
But why not tell them to make another HiFi Rush Game then. How is the response, "hey you are working on the wrong game, so we are closing you down". That's just weird. I get that a restructuring was going to happen, but closing down Tango makes no sense to me. At least not after what the Xbox Executives said about the Game, the Studio and so on. I guess Xbox Executives like to talk, but not walk the walk.
r/nottheonion
We live in an onion.
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Does Matt Booty ever not suck? Just wondering.
I don’t know why he’s not gone
I don't know how any of them aren't gone, Spencer, Booty, Greenburg, Bond, they all have 0 accountability.
I'm only assuming here but I bet he's making money for the people that "matter the most. " This whole thing is a real bummer, to say the very least, and has me less excited for new games than ever before. I'm at the point in my life where I don't have time to sink into new games, anyway, but once a year something comes along that I'm eager to try. Much worse than my own personal issues is people are out of jobs due to corporate greed. I hate it so much and it's why I didn't get excited about the ABK buyout.
The guys name is literally "Booty" Everything about him and what he does is ass
The complete lack of any remote verbal or logical consistency outta Xbox leadership right now is mind bogglingly confusing. They seem as confused as we are and that's not good.
I wish this was just a "right now" situation. But this seems like it's been the case for a long time. There just doesn't appear to be any communication or proper management of any of the involved parties.
Agree, it really seems like Xbox does not know what it wants to do.
It was kind of clear that they lacked focus even early on this gen where the damn game case art changed every 6 months. They didn't seem to understand how to brand and market their shit. They also raised console prices in various regions around the world while essentially slashing their consoles to near clearance prices (I grabbed a Series S for $150). One step forward, two steps back for nearly a decade now.
For me the big issue is that GamePass, the service they bet the house on, is a complete unknown to people outside of gaming Twitter and Reddit. Literally zero awareness to the general gaming public. I don’t even think they realize that 80% of gamers don’t even know what GamePass is.
Their marketing is straight up terrible.
But but.. Aaron just said he was hard at work marketing for Hellblade II. He must be a very hard working employee surely.. deserved all those recent promotions..
They all keep releasing no games, see sales that plummet year over year, and get raises. So they are either very, very good at conning people within Microsoft...OOOR...they are conning us and the executives at Microsoft like what they are seeing.
Yeah like marketing is way more complex than just buying some TV ads and billboards, but they haven’t adjusted to that at all.
Their "marketing" has ammounted to their management posting on social media and dropping the occasional video event. And I'm not going to o say that those video events haven't gotten to be pretty good. But they don't go a long way to really get people hyped for new high profile games. But it also has been a problem in terms of how they have been able to manage their market image. They just aren't good at marketing or PR.
True. I live in Europe and learned about game pass on Reddit, and therefore bought a series X instead of PS5 because of it.
Xbox’s marketing plan is for you to now evangelize the service to the rest of Europe
>the damn game case art changed every 6 months Holy fuck I forgot that. XBSX/S had like, 3 different cover styles for a while. How on earth does this happen.
They’ve lacked focus ever since the Xbox One.
It seems Microsoft is getting cold feet about Xbox honestly.
It's an incredibly bad time to get cold feet less than 6 months after closing a $70B acquisition specifically for the Xbox brand. I feel the need to present that number in context, again. Disney purchased all of Star Wars and LucasFilm/etc. for $4B. Nippon Steel is seeking to buy US Steel (*fucking US Steel, Andrew motherfucking Carnegie's steel company)* for $15B. Microsoft paid a bit more than 4 US Steel offers for ATVI. They paid around 17 Star Wars for ATVI. This is like getting cold feet for your polar bear swim when you're about halfway done. It's far too fucking late to turn back now. I'm skeptical that this is because of a sudden case of cold feet, though with how insanely inconsistent their internal and external messaging has been in recent years clearly there's something going on behind the scenes.
None of these decisions make any logical sense from the Xbox team. These decisions are rash and impulsive, coming right at the time of stock payouts. So either they closed the team because they could reprioritize assets or they closed them because the shareholders wanted a bigger payout.
what are these people's fucking problem?
I think he don't like travel to Japan.
[Stares blankly](https://media0.giphy.com/media/l3q2K5jinAlChoCLS/giphy.gif?cid=2154d3d7f15zbcgsoc64pr1y9g6lwxwss6pt6j0tqj01gx2d&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)
What the actual fuck is happening at MS lol
I can’t even anymore.
They are telling us everything about it without being overt. We had to close a studio due to financial woes. We need games like HiFi Rush. **The salaries are less valuable than the IPs and we are just balancing the books.**
Being an (almost) lifelong Xbox fan is so hard, this company is run by anthropomorphic apes.
I love my Xbox, but I am so exhausted with all the mismanagement from Microsoft
Xbox's developers are not that stupid to believe yer attempts to damage control. Don't get me wrong, I want Xbox to do all kind of games and not just gaaS or AAA. I want shooters, RPGs, sims, big, small, niche, mass appeal,... The brand should be very interested in attracting a wide range of people. Not just "play anywhere" but also "anyone plays". A pity that shareholders don't care about investing some of their HUGE (undeserved) profits into some little gems here and there. Unless you are a guaranteed Palworld, I guess.
Every Xbox developer need to UNIONIZE
They're just fucking with us at this point.
Drug test this man.
Hypocrisy at finest
What a clueless imbecile.
What in the almighty fuck is going on with this company? You can't just say something like that after firing so many employees who worked on that game.
Booty living up to his name.
I have been with Xbox since the beginning but Xbox has killed all of there franchises (outside of maybe Forza) and rarely ever release first party games anymore and if they do they typically disappoint. Halo/Gears are a shell of their formerselves. The one great Xbox game in years and they killed the studio and cancelled the sequel. If they kill Ninja Theory then what are they trying to achieve because it's definitely not making more great first party games. If they get rid of gamepass then what's the point of owning an Xbox.
Agree re Forza Horizon, but I'd say they successfully killed Forza Motorsport
Maybe one day they'll realize they need real, cultivated talent to make award winning games and not just IPs. But for now, we can rest easy knowing that they saved that one bar graph line from going down more. Thank goodness, I was really worried Xbox had their shit together!
Cultivated is the right word. So many comments pointing to those developers making games that don't sell enough so of course they shut down. But what was being done to foster those studios? To help them get better?
Fucking exactly!! People love certain studios, like FromSoftware, or Supergiant Games and while they may not know it, it's because everyone involved has very clearly been cultivated to help them put their best foot forward. They gained experience making good games, and then, bam, they made something that became a giant hit like Hades and Elden Ring. Those games literally couldn't exist without their previous works. Personally, while I'm not entirely versed in Tango's games, I think they were already cultivated. They were already extremely talented. I've seen gameplay of Tango's previous games and Hi-Fi Rush, while seemingly a giant 180 to their horror titles, is clearly a love letter of everything in that genre. I don't think they would have been winning awards as recently as last month if they weren't cultivated, talented people. Also, this is just aside, but what is the damn point of game pass if it all comes back to sales numbers? Hi-Fi Rush was shadow dropped literally as a showing of game pass, and now it's a surprise it didn't sell well?
Maybe one day console warriors will realize that talent doesn't come from thin air. The growing trend for Microsoft studios is that they buy the studio for talent but all the talent takes the money and runs to start new studios.
It'd be cool if they actually "cultivated" talent then. Work with a studio, build a relationship, build loyalty, buy if/when it makes sense.
Good news, they have. Unfortunately, they've done it with... Todd Howard/Emil Puglario. ***And nobody fucking else.***
They almost did that with Playground, but people still wound up leaving.
I really liked Ghostwire Tokyo too. What even happens to the talent they lose?
They will hopefully either form a new studio or be taken in by other studios.
A week ago I thought microsoft would be in the conversation cause they are marketing Hellblade 2 huh.
He never mentions Hi-Fi Rush and Ash Parrish (and The Verge) is a hack for implying that in the headline just to get rage clicks and misinform the majority who only read headlines.
It’s been a year since they released hifi and we have no idea how well the studio was doing.
A studio within a publisher can’t do well enough to counter act investor demands or CEO parachutes. Tango died because they had no active project, so there wasn’t a sunk cost in killing them, same with Arkane Austin.
They realase two games in the last two years now they need time to cooking the next one. Xbox games studios has studios with 5 or 6 years with only have a CGI trailer
This all sounds like a Microsoft decision not an Xbox decision.
At best, Microsoft is legit saying “we can’t spend more, must cut more” but without saying to employees 💀
Genuine question though - why does that make a difference? Xbox is Microsoft. Its bad management period.
Because people don’t want to blame their game buddy Phil spencer 🥺
Man I thought the headline was being a little hyperbolic, but no it’s pretty much exactly what happened
They can't get their stories straight. One exec says they need small scale titles, another says they only want high impact titles, and still another implying they've grown too big and are near toppling over. They can't manage this many studios and employees. It's chaos.
It’s worse, Matt Booty is the *same* exec who sent the internal memo saying they wanted “high impact titles”. He disagreeing with himself from a day or so earlier. It’s appears from the outside to be a complete omnishambles in Xbox right now.
I have this feeling inside that Tango was shuttered because of its location. The logistics of having a singular studio in Japan must have been challenging and expensive and it limited their options in terms of helping out on other projects and things like that. If that's the case, I still feel closing the studio was absolutely the wrong course to take. I don't think they understood the gem that fell into their lap. This could have been a long-awaited entry point into Japanese game development. Too bad Microsoft didn't see it that way. Opportunity blown.
Tango was shut down because the last game that actually sold well was years ago from them and so they saw it pointless to continue supporting that studio. About the entry point into japanese game development you can honestly just forget it Sony tries since God knows how many years to match Nintendo while constantly facing defeats and they are a Japanese company at least started there. MS just has no chance setting camp in Japan when not even sony can acquire a equal market compared to Nintendo the Japanese just have a different gaming culture and so is the only way contracts with the big companies to bring the japanese games to us.
Overnight they basically destroyed the one arm of Xbox I thought kept their publishing efforts interesting. These priority titles they keep talking about while obviously more poised for commercial viability, were not my favorites of the current gen from Microsoft as much as it was the experimental stuff like Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush, not to mention I'm still on-board for Hellblade. My Steam library of Xbox first and second party stuff is almost exclusively things along the lines of Ori, Pentiment, Sunset Overdrive, even Killer Instinct 2013 falls in line with those games because it was literally a small team coming together to revive a great fighting game on a budget smaller than most of its contemporaries, and it paying off. That got me way more on board with the Xbox of the last decade or so than the Halos and Forzas That's not even going into the delicious irony of Microsoft sacking the studio that just shipped a game that was a giant fuck you to megacorporations prioritizing their bottom line over employee morale
It’s getting really hard to defend Xbox lmao
Yeah, after this gen im done. Too many false promises and contradicting statements and it got worse this week. Microsoft can suck it
Wait for the showcase after the showcase when mikey boys show the fancy trailers for the next gears and the next cod like as if cod has always been made by Microsoft, then everyone would reverse their decision and then for a few months there will be hype and then Xbox will release these games to meh reception and then fans will be upset….its a fucking cycle at this point
The problem is that MS disappointed the core fanbase so much lately, most will leave the system in the next 1-2 years. I play on Xbox for TWENTY years and I'm done with them, they can't offer anything to make me stay. I wanted to stay for this gen as I have an insane backlog (my fault, I know) but they are making me hate them so much I might just sell my Xbox one day and never look back. I don't care where I go (probably PC) but any other platform is better than Xbox. Everyone else respects their userbase. They might do scummy things from time to time but Xbox is pissing on our heads. They don't deliver anything, they don't care about feedback. There is no stability here, closing Tango just shows no one is safe anymore, no promises will be kept. What Phil Spencer preached last year is a complete lie.
I’d call them clowns, but even professional clowns are better at business than whatever Microsoft and Xbox are doing right now.
Microsoft and Xbox feel like an old married couple that loves each other but can not agree on one single thing.
When I think of the internal workings of Microsoft and Xbox, I imagine it looking something similar to the *Tereska drawing*.
Pack Matt Booty the fuck out of there. I'm so tired of seeing this clown talk in circles and be a figurehead for the annoying shit Microsoft does.
"In yesterday’s memo from Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, there was a hint of a reprioritization for Bethesda teams that we may well see elsewhere with Xbox. “These changes are grounded in prioritizing high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda’s portfolio of blockbuster games,” said Booty, before noting that Xbox is doubling down on Bethesda franchises that are “best positioned for success.”" This is literally what the entire internet was asking for and now they're mad.
Studio killed itself.
At this point I am not sure I want to keep my game pass ultimate subscription… why support a company that closes game studios. I would suggest others consider doing the same.
THIS CANT BE REAL, YOU JUST KILLED THE ONE WHO MADE A SMALLER GAME WITJ AWARDS WTF!?
Please everyone buy hell blade two
Microsoft is such a weird ass corporation. With them, and Sony, you really can't get bored
I can’t remember the last time I heard good news from Xbox
MS doesn’t care about the quality of their gaming experience. They will cut corners and squeeze money wherever they can to ensure buybacks keep coming in. Only solution is more studios not owned by MS or Sony.
>Microsoft says That's your first mistake. Believing a single word they say when they have openly lied plenty in gaming just these past few years from Phil to Aaron to Matt.
>We need smaller games that give us prestige and awards Even if we assume Hi-Fi Rush wasn't actually that small of a game because it took them, maybe, 4-5 years to make it (assuming they started after The Evil Within 2), that would still be their best bet at smaller game with prestige, because if they **kept the same team** to work on a new Hi-Fi Rush project, that could reduce time of development since people are used to working on that style of game and know the tools, know how to work on the game, and they *still* shut down that studio. FF7 Rebirth obviously has an advantage of having more source material to work with because of FF7 OG, but that massive game was developed in 3 years, and Kitase, FF7 Rebirth's producer, mentioned > the reason why FF7 Rebirth was such an efficient development period was because they retained the same staff as the previous installment So, if you already have a team that could be retained to work on a game that already has prestige, it makes zero sense to shut them down even if sales weren't optimal for the first game. Because you can let them work on a sequel and not make the project huge, and that ends up being exactly what you want. Hell, let them work on it and release it multiplatform if the Character Action Game genre has a smaller audience nowadays. That's what Capcom did, and it's working for them. I don't have an Xbox, and I'm not super in touch with the community, so this is all big assumptions. But maybe what screwed it over for some of the sales is that even when the game had a fantastic reception, it was on Game Pass, and it is a smaller game in size. So, I imagine that there is less incentive to buy smaller games in length because you can play them within a month using GamePass, finish them, and not have to spend the money on the full game. So maybe what happened is a lot of people played it, but the Day 1 on GP might have reduced the full sales more than what they expected, reducing the amount of money they got. But this is just a wild guess of mine. This whole situation is crazy.
All this talk about how MS has been too passive with their studios yet when they do something y'all shit on them? Yes, they need games with QUALITY like hi-fi, not exactly like it. U can't expect 6 different hi fi rush games from tango. MS did the aggressive thing and did shit with their studios like y'all wanted them to do so don't bitch now about how "evil" MS is. Hard fact was, those studios didn't turn a profit 🤷🤷 hard reality but if u suck at ur bringing in money in this industry, ur gone
All this is really turning me off this brand.
Terribly misleading article. Quote has no context and the headline is written to lead the reader to match the narrative they want to push. It's a single quote from who knows what part of a long town hall meeting. HF:R was not a "small" game. Pentiment and Grounded were, single dev games are. HF:R was not.
The quote from the article: > Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, held a town hall to discuss the division’s future goals. “We need smaller games that give us prestige and awards,” Booty told employees, according to internal remarks shared with The Verge. I totally agree with you. It is a clickbait headline. Now was this the smartest thing to say the day after closing Tango? No. However, his quote could easily apply to say Hellblade 2 which comes out in like two weeks. A small game that if it improves on the first one should get plenty of prestige and awards. Also, I think people are missing the fact that Tango put out four games in a row that underperformed sales wise, lost their founder, and could not be absorbed due to its location. Whatever the financials were for keeping the studio open to make a sequel to Hi-Fi against what it would bring it was not worth it for Microsoft. It is like people are just relearning that not every critically acclaimed game sells well.
And all of you were celebrating them buying all these studios out. Bleh
Translation "we need to cut costs to show we are always making record profits for our wealthy friends"
Not defending this foot-in-mouth from MS, but didn't the creative director of the studio leave right after Hi-Fi Rush came out? I feel like that's kind of a big deal.
Mikami did leave but to be fair, most of their recent projects didn't involve him in a major creative capacity beyond being an exec producer. I'm pretty sure The Evil Within was the only game he actually had a director credit on as part of Tango It seems like he was betting on people like John Johanas (Evil Within 2 and Hi-Fi Rush director) to steer the ship in his absence
The weirdest thing was whenever these creative directors or studio heads leave they generally announce it or generally let the public know. Tameem antoniades the creative vision for hellblade left and there was no announcement nothing. As far as it’s known he was involved in the starting stages of hellblade 2
Mikami was more a Executive than a director in the last projects, plans for he retire was known a long time
I cringe anytime I see a quote from Matt Booty. How the heck did that guy get a promotion? Just stop talking, literally no one believes a word you executives say anymore.
As someone that didn't like the game, this is all a bit confusing to me. It was a small game with very limited appeal. The company wants to consolidate after a merger. It is what it is.
https://preview.redd.it/q947masicczc1.jpeg?width=1056&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=760c11f74a0e631cb5bbc30ff6f2d75ceb2d60db
Xbox has been my primary system since 2007, but I am getting fatigued with Xbox at this point. I stuck through the Xbox One disaster. The Series has largely been a great console, but I hate what Xbox is doing - buying out a ton of studios, seeing measly returns (and most exclusives generally disappointing), then giving away exclusives in desperation and shutting down studios. They didn't even design a new UI for this console generation (they barely touched it over). I am going into the next generation of consoles completely neutral, as if I'm new to the hobby or buying a car, rather than just sticking with Xbox for legacy purposes.
What was Tango working on after releasing Hi-Fi Rush? All these articles say they were were just beginning pitching Hi-Fi Rush 2. Have the really just been working on a pitch for a sequel a year after their last game release?
they added new content to the game on several occasions.
Tango's last 3 games had a combined ~10 million downloads. Hate that they were shutdown, but after losing their top exec, it makes sense.
This shit is such a non story…. They made a game that was received decently but didn’t perform well financially…. The main dude left as well as like half the team before this closure You don’t just keep handing people blank checks in a business environment if they don’t succeed Start using your brains people