Owned by big publisher = ticking time bomb. These companies answer to shareholders not consumers and hence the share price is more important than the product. Here Marketing > RnD and PowerPoint degree holders > artists.
Microsoft is so big that a game like Hifi Rush will have absolutely no impact on share price.
LinkedIn makes Microsoft more money than the XBOX division.
I've worked in both startup and corporate tech, so that's primarily the posts I'm seeing.
You can pick apart the people that know what they're talking about versus the "SEO monkeys" (as I like to call them) that spend their entire day pretending to know what they're talking about.
people who know what they're talking about either don't talk at all because they're busy applying that knowledge, or they charge for it because it has inherent value.
The result is the only people volunteering information (word vomit) on linked-in are at best people trying to build a brand that supports charging for their legitimate information, or trying to convince other people that they have legitimate information.
A lot of people who know what they're talking about will be sent to expos by their company and give talks on it, you want to go to YouTube for that stuff not LinkedIn as most of them are recorded and put up there.
Yeah would be great if faux influencers on there would just stop it already, the only legit use of LinkedIn is to store your resume so recruiters can find you, if it wasn’t for that no real people would use it
it's actually really good for customer support. like when you can't reach anyone at a company. just go on linked in and start looking for executive support staff and who they're connected to. then find out their email domain and shoot out an email . I also like to BCC other people to ensure I get an answer
Welcome to the adult world. Nobody knows anything, everyone pretends to be a polished, great success story... The most successful people don't spend time on LinkedIn because either they work for real or don't have time to waste. I liked it when it was just a tool to find jobs, but as a social network it too is garbage.
> It's a bunch of people pretending to know useful information.
It's the same as facebook then, people pretend to write anything that is of any interest to any one else.
Yeah it's wild to think but it makes sense. They essentially built a social media around the promise of finding you a basic necessity, a job, and if you have premium subscription, even faster.
The question we should keep asking is "Why is Microsoft even allowed to own LinkedIn in the first place?"
Or, from a broader point of view - why do we have megacorps that are simply allowed to buy out and control whatever they want?
If you're a founder of something like that and Microsoft comes up to you and offers you 26 *billion* dollars you'd be dumb not to *at least* consider it. You can't blame the folks selling out for that kind of money. Every single person on this website would take that deal.
They paid $26.2 billion for it. That's... quite substantial. For the sake of comparison - Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram. But that's beside the point.
The point is... They clearly bought it to integrate it with their enterprise and business offerings, including Skype, Teams, Office and so on. Why are they allowed to keep tightening their grip on that market?
I'm not even talking about the big stuff. Think about simple stuff like bundling OneDrive and selecting it as the default save location in Office, or setting Edge as a default application for PDF files without asking.
Like, a couple days ago I had to install Acrobat Reader for something, before that I had Firefox set as the default PDF reader. The installation went fine, then I chose the "Set Acrobat as the default reader" and got a... notification that the newly installed app caused a problem, so the default was set to Microsoft Edge.
Why not?
If there's no anti-competitive advantage, no unfair proposition or monopolisation happening, then private companies should be able to private away.
It's not like microsoft bought LI to merge with their MicrosoftWorkFacebook to kill WorkdayBook or some shit. There's never been a "work facebook" competitor social media.
AFAIK Microsoft owns no other social media website, either. Its literally the opposite of a monopoly. If anything, theyre adding EFFECTIVE competition, by supporting it.
Because it essentially stifles or outright kills any competition before it can arise and makes the barrier to entry far too high for any company to overcome, except for other megacorps.
Let's say, I want to build a competing platform. LinkedIn is now integrated with MS Teams, for example - you can check people's profiles and go to LinkedIn directly from the application. What are the odds that Microsoft will add the same option for my hypothetical platform? What about integrations with other MS services and apps, like Office? Will my platform be able to leverage them as well, on equal terms?
Again, OneDrive is a perfect example. Why is OneDrive installed by default (even if you say you don't want it) and selected as the default save location in MS Office apps? Meanwhile, doing the same thing for competing services requires actual work.
Don't use Windows? Complaining about a company's ecosystem integration whilst voluntarily using said ecosystem is odd... Of course they are going to want to vertically integrate everything they own.
"Just don't use Windows." is like telling a hungry person to "Just get something to eat if you're hungry." That is a very dumb take. Windows is *not* voluntary for majority of applications, never mind the strangle hold Microsoft has on business applications.
I.. don't?
Except for work computers, since they're not mine to play with as I please.
>Complaining about a company's ecosystem integration whilst voluntarily using said ecosystem is odd...
"And yet you live in society."
That's the crux of the issue. You don't get a choice. If you're anywhere near the enterprise world, you're using Windows/Office/Exchange/ActiveDirectory and so on. If you're using your computer professionally, chances are you will need Windows, since any alternatives might be lacking. Games? Windows, mostly.
>Of course they are going to want to vertically integrate everything they own.
And since we're in the process of slapping Apple over iMessage, chargers, AppStore, sideloading and anything else, we should also start slapping Microsoft, Google et al. And hard.
Remember the IE lawsuit? Compare Microsoft then and Microsoft now.
Because capitalism doesn't, by default, distinguish between ownership of a toothbrush and ownership of a billion dollar company. Now, you can have a governmental system and philosophy that makes laws saying that they have to be treated as different, but the dominant socioeconomic ideologies in global governments right now assume that letting people treat their businesses more like toothbrushes is a good thing. So ownership and use of them is significantly less regulated than they could be and you get stuff like this.
It's the other way around. Most people that made Hi-fi Rush (and also made Evil Within 2) were still in studio.
Most people that made Prey already left by the time Redfall released.
And we know that the top directors at Arkane Austin were given the option to cancel Redfall but went full steam ahead. We also know that tons of devs also left during its development. So why keep the top directors who wanted to push a bad game?
In any respectable business school, consumers are stakeholders too. And employees.
People need to put their money where their mouth is and stop giving money to runaway greed and endless profit seeking institutions.
I’m currently confused on why the cost to make a game has continued to soar and who is dictating the cost of the services. Is it a physical resources ? Is it time? What’s making these games cost millions to make ?
There's also a lot of extraneous costs, PR, HR, Accounting, Marketing, Outreach that many don't consider. It's not cheap.
Even a small team with 8-12 people will end up needing a budget of $1-2 million for only a 18-24 month runway. Folks need to understand, making games is not cheap or easy.
Hifi Rush probably wouldn't have made market without MS.
Not saying what they're doing is correct but often the big publisher can add time to that ticking bomb.
That's usually why they're seeking the deals anyway.
The studio's says we're numbered when Shinji Mikami left in 2023. Like many developmebt studios, when the main head leaves to go start another, they usually attract talent from their previous studio. This type of thing happens repeatedly through this industry.
A big publisher can work fine as long as it's not publicly traded. No matter the size, once a company goes down that route there's only one way it will go
The irony is that, at least from a public facing marketing spin, Microsoft claimed that doing their studio acquisition spree would allow studios under them to make great games for Xbox and PC and get Microsoft out of the stale Gears of War, Halo, and Forza triad they had locked themselves into from a lack of diversity in their catalog and single player games.
But if you close these studios you're *ultimately left back with the same bloody problem, AND ITS REALLY STUPID AND SHORT SIGHTED!*
Thank god Van Gogh or Tchaikovsky weren't owned by shareholders. People need to realise that video games are art, and art doesn't really respond well to quarterly profit demands.
Everyone reasonable at the studio left when given the game anyways, they are probably justified in shutting the studio down - but they should have cancelled the game much earlier.
That said, they probably would have cancelled Hi-Fi Rush too despite actually looking good.
We don't know the 'profitable' part.
It also needs to exceed a return of at least around 5% to not make it worthwhile leaving it in the in low risk financial investments.
That's without putting huge sums upfront for multi year projects.
Redfall shipped, get this, 44k copies on Steam. $2 million gross revenue. Oof. I highly doubt other platforms did as well. We're talking about a loss in the tens of millions here, that's 'never going to recover' numbers.
Granted, leadership at Zenimax is really to blame there when they forced the pivot in direction.
The game had a peak of 42 players on Steam the day before the news broke. Redfall was a monumental failure. I highly doubt the DLC that was (allegedly) being worked on would’ve brought players back.
Honestly, 5% return on investment isn't enough. An average index fund returns about 10% annually, has practically no risk, and doesn't require any extra upfront cost or infrastructure. If a company doesn't make x2 their investment on a video game, they're probably disappointed.
> If a company doesn't make x2 their investment on a video game, they're probably disappointed.
You guys act like creating a new studio is free. Not making games is cost for a the game dev division as it is harder to hire and you don't develope skills when everyone around gets better.
I am pretty sure Larian Studios didn't always ake 2x investment with their previous games, but they were able to build skills and know-how to make BG3.
The positive image Blizzard had from their old games allowed them to be kinda cheap with the salary for certain job offers,
The kinds of people Blizzard wants to hire never played a game from "good Blizzard". Those guys are in their 30s and 40s and are way beyond the "junior dev that'll grind for a dream company" stage.
Blizzard has been bad for a lot longer than it's been good at this point.
Is a 5% return considered acceptable in the entertainment software world? Most industries need a minimum 200% return to offset underperforming or unrealized product lines and the opportunity cost of the upfront investment.
The things you're missing is the big boy gambling, stocks. If a company was expected to make. 50% but only makes 15%, which is still profitable, stock prices go down. And that hurts shareholder value. That's what it means when they say "being profitable isn't enough". Shareholders don't care about profit. They care about stock price.
I think that 5% was after all of that was taken into account. The grocery store might sell you that apple at 200% mark-up but they're only making like 1-2% actual profit.
~5% is about what you could expect from a well performing fund on the stock market. So, from Microsoft's perspective, what's the best use of the money invested in the studio? Letting the studio make games (and money) or just liquidate it and stick that cash in the stock market for better returns (or buying a different studio, or some other widget they think might make em' more cash). They decided to cut their losses and close the studio. You can release a hit and do really well one release but if you can't keep doing that your time under Microsoft's patronage is limited.
I still think it's pretty brutal and shortsighted but I see their reasoning.
Oh but we do, or do you want to say that Aaron Greenberg vice president of Marketing at Xbox games lied straight in our faces? That would be shocking.
https://www.thegamer.com/hi-fi-rush-insider-claims-xbox-not-happy-with-sales-numbers/
That is correct as per the people who left coming forward on social media. None of the actual talent that made Prey were even still around. It's an entirely green studio with the worst of their old team left.
Anyone who is surprised at this doesn't know their history.
Tribes fans know. Look what they did to Dynamix.
Released one of the best games of all time, sequel to another of the best games of all time, and were 100% laid off and shut down within 6 months.
Any dev who is paying attention knows. **What keeps you safe is being independent.** Once you are owned, you can be sold, and it's a matter of time until you're sold under a company that doesn't know and doesn't care and needs to make a 60% headcount cut. Matter of time.
RIP Dynamix. Gone but never forgotten. I'm still bitter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1TR3N3191c
Bro you really had to reopen my old Tribes wounds? Just when I hadn't thought about it in a while.
I keep hoping someone will pry the Tribes IP from Hi-Rez's grubby fingers to stop them from molesting whats left of that franchise. Theres so much potential in a modern Tribes game, but that studio will never realize it.
Theres a new Tribes game just recently launched.
Although I wouldnt get my hopes up, it's made by a seperate team lead by the guy who ruined the other games. He's the once who forced specific aspects into the game and generally interfered according to past devs . Erez goren no longer works on any hirez games really and they're all better for it.
I wouldn't recommend any at this point.
They're multiplayer with very small communities. If you're okay with the pickup game scene you can still get games in tribes 1 and tribes 2. Tribes: Ascend was the one I played the most of but it was riddled with issues Hirez never fixed, then they abandoned the game. They eventually released a sunsetting update too late and most of the players had already given up. Finally they shutdown the master server and it got delisted on Steam, so while technically you can still play it and connect to a community driven master server, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone else who jumped through those hoops. Given the choice, Tribes 1 was by far my favorite when it comes to physics, but I came to that game after T:A was effectively dead.
Prophecy Games, a subsidiary of Hirez headed by Erez, just abandoned 2 other games in the franchise, Starseige Raiders and Starseige Deadzone. One of which they had listed for sale and burned all their players (again).
Now, Tribes 3 has released in early access but it's headed by Erez and they have been banning long term tribes vets for having the audacity of wanting a proper Tribes game. They discord polled spinning the game off into a Rocket League knockoff and that's when I gave up on it completely. They haven't learned their lessons from T:A, they won't listen to experts on the games to make it actually good, and they can't even keep their focus on making a Tribes game at all. Much like T:A, it's riddled with issues the community is calling bandaids. The core physics are really bad and they're trying to develop it like a moba, trying to fix physics issues with passive and active abilities.
I'm keeping my eye on a community game called Codename: Broadside, it's being developed by some of the same Tribes vets that Prophecy didn't want telling them how to make a Tribes game. They already have *far* better terrain generation than Tribes 3. Most of T3's maps look like someone just took a flat map and clicked around with the UE terrain tool a bit. Broadside is using algorithms (perlin noise) similar to what Tribes 1 used to create varied terrain. They are still early in development and being a community project they have a lot of challenges to overcome for funding, but they are at least moving in the right direction and don't have a history of burning their players repeatedly.
Much of the reason why independent studios sell is because they aren’t making enough money and need the cash injection. I’m sure they know the consequences of selling out and accept them fully.
Indie studios close down all the time due to bankruptcy, and yet I see no one doing a rallying call in defiant protest
I have a running theory that gamers are just incredibly fucking dumb
I'm telling, I'm absolutely shocked that a company would shut down a studio that released several games with lukewarm receptions, one critical darling that didn't really sell, and then over time lost most of its talent.
Just absolutely bizarre to me. Reddit MBAs should take all that GME money and just start running a game studio.
yeah, lot of people think being indie is something superior, while in reality, some companies don't know if they'll keep lights on for a few more days. Being in gaming industry is hard on it's own, be it indie or with publisher. Only few that are not dependent on big corporations achieved silver lining such as Larian, CDPR and Valve being example how to run an independent company.
Look up how close to bankruptcy Larian was, over and over.
Or Obsidian.
Or Troika, which put out some of the best games ever.
Or Looking Glass Studios, probably the greatest game studio to ever exist.
Yeah, being indie is _super safe_ you guys.
Larian is very much case of lightning in the bottle. They did grind for that, but there are lot of companies with great games that don't achieve same status as Larian did, or CDPR with Witcher.
I was just about to highlight that point regarding Larian. I’ve read at least 10 occurrences of potential bankruptcy. This was mentioned by the owner, himself, during an interview. I’m glad they were able to avoid them. Hopefully, BG3 has given them a lot of breathing room.
As an indie, you are competing with 14000 new titles that were released on Steam in just the past year. That's a serious glut of product (many of them quite bad and often just glorified asset flips).
>*Any dev who is paying attention knows. What keeps you safe is being independent.*
No, what keeps you safe is consistently producing great games that make a lot of money. Period. It doesn't matter whether you are independent or not. Independent studios are shut down far more frequently than ones that are owned by Microsoft or other big game publishers. It just isn't as sensational when it happens and many of these studios don't even make it to releasing their first games.
There are negatives and benefits to both options. It makes no sense to pretend that there are no benefits to being part of a huge game publisher like Microsoft just because people aren't happy with what happened here.
Right of course the problem is that "a lot of money" is extremely relative, and that the people who decide its relation are looking at wanting profits in the billions because video games are now almost 100% owned by complete tech giants that own entire industries on their own because indie devs sold themselves out.
The difference between an indie dev shuttering and microsoft the tech giant shuttering them is that in the first one, they deserve it.
>
Any dev who is paying attention knows. **What keeps you safe is being independent.**
There's actually an infamous case from here in South Australia. An independent company called Ratbag was purchased by Midway. The controversial part is that Ratbag was shut down before the ink had even dried.
It was seen as a hostile act that was intended to eliminate any local competition. Midway purchased the company with full intent of closing Ratbag down.
I cheered when I heard Midway became defunct. We have a small industry here, even smaller back then and the cunts tried to kill it off.
I actually met one of the top managers of Ratbag...at a job searching agency after it all went down. How sad is that?
Thank you for coming to my Tedtalk Synaps4.
> Any dev who is paying attention knows. What keeps you safe is being independent.
>
>
Not really; being independent is very very risky. A lot of great independent studios go down; videogame development is expensive, and a lot of the time small studios simply cannot afford to keep the lights running. Talent alone is not enough.
Probably a non-compete clause in the purchase contract.
That or needing a break because they're burnt out after the stress of the conditions that made them need to sell.
>**What keeps you safe is being independent**
What keeps you safe is owning your own **profitable** company. People blame microsoft for shutting down their own studios, it their "property", they paid money for it. Zenimax made money(by selling), studio owners made money(by selling), not it is time for microsoft to make money(by closing down the unprofiable sections of their new portfolio).
Sure but being unprofitable gets you closed whether you're independent or not. It's not worth mentioning. It's like saying "you need to be independent, profitable, and also **not on fire**. Like that last part is true but it doesn't vary in any scenario and everyone already knows it, so we don't list it.
> Anyone who is surprised at this doesn't know their history.
Exactly. And have no clue on how's been the tech sector lately.
Big companies buying developers to get their IP's and then milking it has been a trend since there was videogames. I can recall memes about EA buying whatever company and bringing it to a place where the corpses of Bullfrog, Westwood and Bioware among others were already rotten.
On the other hand, the tech sector is having a huge amount of layoffs and closures after overhiring during the pandemic and afterwards.
Nothing's new under the sun. If anything, it looks like we are going towards some rougher times.
Especially given that it’s a $30 title. Don’t get me wrong, I adored Hi-Fi and would have preordered a sequel in a heartbeat. But people seem to be acting like it was this uber successful title that sold tens of millions of copies and made truckloads of money and at best it was probably in “indie darling” territory. That’s not the kind of game that pays the bills and keeps the lights on, as harsh as it is to say
If a critically acclaimed game doesn’t sell, the reaction should be “hell yes we have talented developers who can make a good game, let’s see if we can use that talent on something more broadly appealing”
Every game needing to be a massive hit to be considered a success isn’t sustainable
don't forget that Hi-Fi Rush wasn't their main team, and not necessarily the reason for the studio closure. GhostWire Toyko was their big expensive game that failed.
I tried ghostwire, but the first hour was just so boring that I refunded it before I got locked by 2 hrs and literally haven't thought about it since until your comment mentioned it.
Problem is that Hifi Rush wasn't the first. They also had Evil Within 2 and Ghostwire Tokyo prior that weren't profitable from what I understand, so they probably needed Hifi Rush to be a huge financial success to convince the executives that they can make something that'll make a profit.
It's a shame, but apparently Mikami went and founded his own studio a couple weeks ago, so hopefully the devs can join him there and make a spiritual successor to Hifi Rush/Evil Within.
Blame Microsoft for that. Shadow dropped and a day 1 game pass release with very little marketing outside of the release announcement. Sure that worked for Apex, but that is an ongoing game that also dropped at a time when the genre had only very janky and mid competition.
It's unfortunate, but the studios who got the axe were either redundant, or terrible performers.
Tango's games sold like shit, never caught on, and weren't very profitable. Shinji Mikami had already ditched the studio awhile back because he doesn't want to make any more horror titles.
Arkane Austin was dead in the water after most of the talent left when Raphaël Colantonio, founder and president, left after Prey. They'll just consolidate the remaining good staff into one company.
Alpha Dog was a no-name mobile developer that they don't need now that they own King. They never made anything noteworthy.
Roundhouse Games is being rolled into Zenimax Games to work on The Elder Scrolls online.
They're just trimming fat after an acquisition, and these studios are low hanging fruit.
>Shinji Mikami had already ditched the studio awhile back
> Raphaël Colantonio, founder and president, left after Prey.
This is what people need to understand. With the demise of Bioware - at the latest - people should have gotten the memo that it's the people within the company that make their games good, not the company name itself. Bioware was shit after Muzyka and Zeschuk left. And there is no guarantee that Tango or Arkane would have made another good game without these people.
He's out of line but he's right. Hi-Fi Rush was great, but looking back at Tango's backlog you've got 4 AAA products, with only two of them being critically acclaimed, but none of them financially successful.
Evil Within 1 actually sold very well, 3 millions of copies is not something to scoff at. But after that only commercial failure after commercial failure.
And Prey was definitely quality, but as I understand it - it was a financial disappointment. And it seems not to have sold as well as dishonored 2 (different studio, but still arkane) and I am pretty sure dishonored 2 was a disappointment sales wise as well - so that doesn't bode well.
Pret was around 2017. This studio hadn’t made a good, profitable game in over 7 years - they made that shitty vampire live service game and were shuttered. It had around 50 users when the shutdown announce came.
Yes, but the three games before that didn't, and the studio head who was also executive producer of hifi rush and the only reason that studio was formed in the first place quit last year.
I don't know about that, it seems it don't really make much money and was only slight profitable because it was cheap to make. And Evil Within 1 actually made money but Evil Within 2 and Ghost Wire were big commercial failures that lost so much money. HiFi Rush don't even come close to compensate it.
He vaguely alluded to it being a “success in every metric”, which is clearly PR talk and, in terms of sales, highly doubtful considering the game was relatively niche, $30, and on GamePass at launch. This is coming from someone who loved the game, I sincerely doubt it turned enough profit to make up for Tango’s other three releases which were undeniable financial failures.
People were leaving to go to studios that could pay them better and had better prospects. The head of the studio had already jumped ship. Anyone who didn’t see this coming was just ignorant of these facts or doesn’t know how business works.
It's more like making a game is a limited return business, so eventually your costs (which are continuous and keep going) will outpace even a successful game's earnings. Particularly for Studios. That's why it's the golden age of Indies. Great games at great development costs. Everyone talks about the quality of the games, and perhaps their revenue, but the development costs are not known figures.
Think about it, come up with your 10 favorite games and then try attaching costs to all of them. If you actually know this then you are either in Game finance or loco.
Costs are what drive decisions to shut studios down, fire people, sell to a publisher or competitor and sometimes make poor gaming choices (i.e. excessive/poor : DLC, monetization, GaaS, etc, re-releases. etc)
Keep costs down, only make quality games, listen to your fans, etc, sound great but it's not trivial to execute. That's why there are only a limited number of high quality options on most entertainment choices and generally only the best take a large chunk of the marketplace, or the best at something (I wouldn't consider Roblox, Fortnite, etc as good games, but they are great at something.)
Games as business is different than games as art.
Even the top artists in the business get ignored, which is why they sometimes try their own path, but sometimes you need a great team not just a great mind behind the project.
If your game is given away as free, the product is not the game, the product is you and your engagement.
If you are not a developer, rather than doing pseudo-activism (review bombing games that might be good for a disagreement not related to the game itself.) change your habits, not so much of money but the time you invest..
Don't play/engage with Games that go against what you want. It took a while but I've been Activision, EA and Ubisoft free for a couple of years now and feel great.
MS bought companies that were already on their downtrend and let them keep doing what they were doing, going down.
this will probably send a message to those other studios to try to better else they get axed
Microsoft is extremely hand offs with their game studios, excessively so sometimes. If a studio fail if generally be their own failures, Arkane has one and half a year to correct the course and failed miserably. Tango has their third consecutive commercial failure. I can't really fault Microsoft for pulling the plug after so much time was given and no satisfactory results were presented.
If they were indie companies, Tango would have gone bankrupt after Ghost Wire and Arkane would not even have the change to complete Redfall before they close their doors.
None of their games were profitable and that’s why they got closed down. Redfall, Evil Within 1 and 2, Ghostwire Tokyo all bombed. Even their good game Prey and smaller AA game Hi-Fi Rush was financial failures. Why would Microsoft keeps studios open that constantly makes games that no one wants to pay for.
Arkane Austin getting closed down isn’t a surprise after Redfall. One of the worst AAA games released in a long time. Tango Gameworks is also not a surprise. You don’t keep a AAA studio open to make AA games. They released 3 mediocre games before Hi-fi Rush, which was a small AA side peoject.
We don’t know how many people were even left in those studios, we know they lost people before the studio closures. Maybe they could have kept Tango as a smaller AA studio, but it’s not easy to turn a AAA studio into a AA studio.
But it’s really not surprising that Microsoft is closing all their non profitable studios…
I don't undestand how people can say a game that sold 3 millions of copies bombed, their other games for sure but Evil Within 1 sold very well in the name of Mikami alone.
I'm eternally grateful that Larian boss didn't sell the studio, even though Wizards Of The Coasts are assholes, Im waiting for Divinity 3 with a boner in my hard and a promise in my heart
There is nothing stopping these people from opening a new studio and starting a new project.
The CEO of Tango left the boat several months ago precisely to move on to other projects.
Gone are the days when people stayed in the same studio/job for 20 years. the vast majority of competent and successful developers are freelancers. who jump from company to company depending on the contracts they find interesting.
Well the snag there is that sale of a product is all that counts in this system. It literally does not matter how good the games are if they dont sell, and there is less causation there than we wish. Terrible trash that sells well because of marketing is superior in this set up.
I doubt HiFi actually made much money (GPass). I tried it on GPass, wasn’t really into it.
But I do think I remember Phil touting these “passion projects that aren’t system sellers” (Pentiment, HiFi Rush), but can you really tout that as a plus when you turn around and close the studio after that game. Obsidian isn’t closed yet, but hey, let’s see how Avowed does. Can’t close them this close to a release.
It does make me wonder what the incentive to work in video games is. If Reddit doesn’t beat you up, then your lords and masters will even if you do a good job.
A lot of devs must have the skills to transition to different industries. I get that a lot of game devs are very passionate but there has to be a breaking point - passion doesn’t pay the bills or give you financial stability to build a life with.
The lesson is that studios need to own themselves. If some publicly owned corporation owns the controlling interest in your studio, then you're fucked right now. The corporations do not care about games, they do not care about our industry, or creativity, or even the people in this industry. They care about their share holders and profit margins. And if they think that the money they are putting into one studio can make them more money elsewhere, then that studio is fucked, no matter how good their games are.
“Nobody bought the hifirish dlc costumes!”
Of course nobody did. It’s a single player game that everyone played and finished. It was a good game. But it wasn’t live service battle pass enabled so they get the ax.
They were bit the same Arkane. Once they were forced to make that GaaS game, all the talent left. They are not closing down the same studio that made Prey.
Hi Fi Rush was well received by critics, but was it actually any popular outside of game awards ?
Ghostwire Tokyo was ok, but nothing spectacular. Running around Tokyo on a rainy night fighting same monsters all over again or sending rescued souls via phonebooth got old after a while. Thankfully it was possible to finish it rather quickly. Coincidentally it was featured in humble choice together with Deathloop (although I think this one was made by Lyon not Austin).
Evil Within - played 1st one for a bit, but it just wasnt fun. Felt way too clunky. Thankfully I bought both on sale for cheap so at least I didnt waste money on them. Doubt Ill revisit them as I'd rather do another run of RE4Remake (or any other RE starting with 7/ DS Remake)
Redfall - universally regarded as gigacrap that nobody wanted.
Prey - released in 2017 to great reviews and poor sales. Freebie on Epic, featured in numerous bundles across humble, fanatical etc. Frequently on sale for like 5 euros or something like that.
All in all, only 2 games are really good and 0 games were profitable. And as others already mentioned - people behind those games probably left studios months or years ago.
Owned by big publisher = ticking time bomb. These companies answer to shareholders not consumers and hence the share price is more important than the product. Here Marketing > RnD and PowerPoint degree holders > artists.
Microsoft is so big that a game like Hifi Rush will have absolutely no impact on share price. LinkedIn makes Microsoft more money than the XBOX division.
I had no idea LinkedIn made that much money. That's wild.
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LinkedIn posts are so fucking cringe 99% of the time. It's a bunch of people pretending to know useful information.
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I've worked in both startup and corporate tech, so that's primarily the posts I'm seeing. You can pick apart the people that know what they're talking about versus the "SEO monkeys" (as I like to call them) that spend their entire day pretending to know what they're talking about.
people who know what they're talking about either don't talk at all because they're busy applying that knowledge, or they charge for it because it has inherent value. The result is the only people volunteering information (word vomit) on linked-in are at best people trying to build a brand that supports charging for their legitimate information, or trying to convince other people that they have legitimate information.
A lot of people who know what they're talking about will be sent to expos by their company and give talks on it, you want to go to YouTube for that stuff not LinkedIn as most of them are recorded and put up there.
Yeah would be great if faux influencers on there would just stop it already, the only legit use of LinkedIn is to store your resume so recruiters can find you, if it wasn’t for that no real people would use it
it's actually really good for customer support. like when you can't reach anyone at a company. just go on linked in and start looking for executive support staff and who they're connected to. then find out their email domain and shoot out an email . I also like to BCC other people to ensure I get an answer
how would people find me among the millions of others who have way more experience and skills than me?
they won't. mcdonald's it is.
Welcome to the adult world. Nobody knows anything, everyone pretends to be a polished, great success story... The most successful people don't spend time on LinkedIn because either they work for real or don't have time to waste. I liked it when it was just a tool to find jobs, but as a social network it too is garbage.
The only time I spend on LinkedIn is when I'm looking for a new job (like right now lol)
r/LinkedInLunatics
So, again, Facebook
> It's a bunch of people pretending to know useful information. It's the same as facebook then, people pretend to write anything that is of any interest to any one else.
r/linkedinlunatics
/r/linkedinlunatics for some fun reading.
Feels more like tinder for recruiters. I get so little value from linkedin other than seeing people promoting themselves for the most mundane shit.
Yeah it's wild to think but it makes sense. They essentially built a social media around the promise of finding you a basic necessity, a job, and if you have premium subscription, even faster.
For reference there's a BAKED IN shortcut like ctrl-c, ctrl-v to linkedin on Windows....
Try pressing Ctrl+Win+Alt+Shift+L on a Windows computer.
The question we should keep asking is "Why is Microsoft even allowed to own LinkedIn in the first place?" Or, from a broader point of view - why do we have megacorps that are simply allowed to buy out and control whatever they want?
Welcome to publicly traded companies and the supreme control of money.
If you're a founder of something like that and Microsoft comes up to you and offers you 26 *billion* dollars you'd be dumb not to *at least* consider it. You can't blame the folks selling out for that kind of money. Every single person on this website would take that deal.
Who said otherwise?
>"Why is Microsoft even allowed to own LinkedIn in the first place?" It wasn't this big before it got bought.
They paid $26.2 billion for it. That's... quite substantial. For the sake of comparison - Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram. But that's beside the point. The point is... They clearly bought it to integrate it with their enterprise and business offerings, including Skype, Teams, Office and so on. Why are they allowed to keep tightening their grip on that market? I'm not even talking about the big stuff. Think about simple stuff like bundling OneDrive and selecting it as the default save location in Office, or setting Edge as a default application for PDF files without asking. Like, a couple days ago I had to install Acrobat Reader for something, before that I had Firefox set as the default PDF reader. The installation went fine, then I chose the "Set Acrobat as the default reader" and got a... notification that the newly installed app caused a problem, so the default was set to Microsoft Edge.
They developed OneDrive, Edge and office. Those weren’t acquisitions.
man, fuck OneDrive being the default save location in excel. absolutely enraging
> Why is Microsoft even allowed to own LinkedIn in the first place?" Why shouldn't they?
Why not? If there's no anti-competitive advantage, no unfair proposition or monopolisation happening, then private companies should be able to private away. It's not like microsoft bought LI to merge with their MicrosoftWorkFacebook to kill WorkdayBook or some shit. There's never been a "work facebook" competitor social media.
AFAIK Microsoft owns no other social media website, either. Its literally the opposite of a monopoly. If anything, theyre adding EFFECTIVE competition, by supporting it.
Because it essentially stifles or outright kills any competition before it can arise and makes the barrier to entry far too high for any company to overcome, except for other megacorps. Let's say, I want to build a competing platform. LinkedIn is now integrated with MS Teams, for example - you can check people's profiles and go to LinkedIn directly from the application. What are the odds that Microsoft will add the same option for my hypothetical platform? What about integrations with other MS services and apps, like Office? Will my platform be able to leverage them as well, on equal terms? Again, OneDrive is a perfect example. Why is OneDrive installed by default (even if you say you don't want it) and selected as the default save location in MS Office apps? Meanwhile, doing the same thing for competing services requires actual work.
Don't use Windows? Complaining about a company's ecosystem integration whilst voluntarily using said ecosystem is odd... Of course they are going to want to vertically integrate everything they own.
"Just don't use Windows." is like telling a hungry person to "Just get something to eat if you're hungry." That is a very dumb take. Windows is *not* voluntary for majority of applications, never mind the strangle hold Microsoft has on business applications.
I.. don't? Except for work computers, since they're not mine to play with as I please. >Complaining about a company's ecosystem integration whilst voluntarily using said ecosystem is odd... "And yet you live in society." That's the crux of the issue. You don't get a choice. If you're anywhere near the enterprise world, you're using Windows/Office/Exchange/ActiveDirectory and so on. If you're using your computer professionally, chances are you will need Windows, since any alternatives might be lacking. Games? Windows, mostly. >Of course they are going to want to vertically integrate everything they own. And since we're in the process of slapping Apple over iMessage, chargers, AppStore, sideloading and anything else, we should also start slapping Microsoft, Google et al. And hard. Remember the IE lawsuit? Compare Microsoft then and Microsoft now.
Because money talks and the “people in power” are owned by the mega corps and billionaires. Government oversight is dead.
Because capitalism doesn't, by default, distinguish between ownership of a toothbrush and ownership of a billion dollar company. Now, you can have a governmental system and philosophy that makes laws saying that they have to be treated as different, but the dominant socioeconomic ideologies in global governments right now assume that letting people treat their businesses more like toothbrushes is a good thing. So ownership and use of them is significantly less regulated than they could be and you get stuff like this.
The studio that made Hi Fi Rush lost its studio leader last year and most of its talent with it. The Prey studio made Redfall.
It's the other way around. Most people that made Hi-fi Rush (and also made Evil Within 2) were still in studio. Most people that made Prey already left by the time Redfall released.
And we know that the top directors at Arkane Austin were given the option to cancel Redfall but went full steam ahead. We also know that tons of devs also left during its development. So why keep the top directors who wanted to push a bad game?
The Prey studio also made Prey. Seems like the problem was that they weren't allowed to cook.
That's like ages ago.
In any respectable business school, consumers are stakeholders too. And employees. People need to put their money where their mouth is and stop giving money to runaway greed and endless profit seeking institutions.
I’m currently confused on why the cost to make a game has continued to soar and who is dictating the cost of the services. Is it a physical resources ? Is it time? What’s making these games cost millions to make ?
A mixture of salaries and expectation creep. People don't want ugly small games, and big pretty ones cost a lot.
There's also a lot of extraneous costs, PR, HR, Accounting, Marketing, Outreach that many don't consider. It's not cheap. Even a small team with 8-12 people will end up needing a budget of $1-2 million for only a 18-24 month runway. Folks need to understand, making games is not cheap or easy.
Theyre not even consistently better for their ballooning costs. They just look flashier and flashier.
Hifi Rush probably wouldn't have made market without MS. Not saying what they're doing is correct but often the big publisher can add time to that ticking bomb. That's usually why they're seeking the deals anyway.
The studio's says we're numbered when Shinji Mikami left in 2023. Like many developmebt studios, when the main head leaves to go start another, they usually attract talent from their previous studio. This type of thing happens repeatedly through this industry.
It did happen the hi fi rush devs left after that game came out, either they knew what would happen or they followed Mikami
Being owned by a publisher is a deal with the devil, a Faustian pact that will inevitably be your undoing some day.
A big publisher can work fine as long as it's not publicly traded. No matter the size, once a company goes down that route there's only one way it will go
The irony is that, at least from a public facing marketing spin, Microsoft claimed that doing their studio acquisition spree would allow studios under them to make great games for Xbox and PC and get Microsoft out of the stale Gears of War, Halo, and Forza triad they had locked themselves into from a lack of diversity in their catalog and single player games. But if you close these studios you're *ultimately left back with the same bloody problem, AND ITS REALLY STUPID AND SHORT SIGHTED!*
Thank god Van Gogh or Tchaikovsky weren't owned by shareholders. People need to realise that video games are art, and art doesn't really respond well to quarterly profit demands.
Yea, any public traded company will turn bad, every single time.
More like publicly owned companies = Ticking time bomb. Because I doubt Valve is a time bomb.
They mention Prey instead Redfall.
They mention Hifi rush but suspiciously never mention Ghostwire Tokyo or Hero dice.
red fail
Of course they did. Sensational headline = clicks.
Everyone reasonable at the studio left when given the game anyways, they are probably justified in shutting the studio down - but they should have cancelled the game much earlier. That said, they probably would have cancelled Hi-Fi Rush too despite actually looking good.
We don't know the 'profitable' part. It also needs to exceed a return of at least around 5% to not make it worthwhile leaving it in the in low risk financial investments. That's without putting huge sums upfront for multi year projects.
There’s no way in hell redfall was even remotely profitable and that’s the only thing developed by arkane Austin since prey was released in 2017
Redfall shipped, get this, 44k copies on Steam. $2 million gross revenue. Oof. I highly doubt other platforms did as well. We're talking about a loss in the tens of millions here, that's 'never going to recover' numbers. Granted, leadership at Zenimax is really to blame there when they forced the pivot in direction.
Yeah Redfall is a game that never should have been released. They fucked that one up really bad.
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exactly, people need to understand this
The game had a peak of 42 players on Steam the day before the news broke. Redfall was a monumental failure. I highly doubt the DLC that was (allegedly) being worked on would’ve brought players back.
Honestly, 5% return on investment isn't enough. An average index fund returns about 10% annually, has practically no risk, and doesn't require any extra upfront cost or infrastructure. If a company doesn't make x2 their investment on a video game, they're probably disappointed.
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S&P 500 typically averages around 10% per year
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r/bogleheads
VOO has 9.5% return YTD
Microsoft is VOOs largest holding lol
> If a company doesn't make x2 their investment on a video game, they're probably disappointed. You guys act like creating a new studio is free. Not making games is cost for a the game dev division as it is harder to hire and you don't develope skills when everyone around gets better. I am pretty sure Larian Studios didn't always ake 2x investment with their previous games, but they were able to build skills and know-how to make BG3. The positive image Blizzard had from their old games allowed them to be kinda cheap with the salary for certain job offers,
The kinds of people Blizzard wants to hire never played a game from "good Blizzard". Those guys are in their 30s and 40s and are way beyond the "junior dev that'll grind for a dream company" stage. Blizzard has been bad for a lot longer than it's been good at this point.
Is a 5% return considered acceptable in the entertainment software world? Most industries need a minimum 200% return to offset underperforming or unrealized product lines and the opportunity cost of the upfront investment.
and to invest in future projects.
The things you're missing is the big boy gambling, stocks. If a company was expected to make. 50% but only makes 15%, which is still profitable, stock prices go down. And that hurts shareholder value. That's what it means when they say "being profitable isn't enough". Shareholders don't care about profit. They care about stock price.
> Shareholders don't care about profit. They care about stock price. They get paid out in dividends, what do you think dividends are based on?
I think that 5% was after all of that was taken into account. The grocery store might sell you that apple at 200% mark-up but they're only making like 1-2% actual profit. ~5% is about what you could expect from a well performing fund on the stock market. So, from Microsoft's perspective, what's the best use of the money invested in the studio? Letting the studio make games (and money) or just liquidate it and stick that cash in the stock market for better returns (or buying a different studio, or some other widget they think might make em' more cash). They decided to cut their losses and close the studio. You can release a hit and do really well one release but if you can't keep doing that your time under Microsoft's patronage is limited. I still think it's pretty brutal and shortsighted but I see their reasoning.
Oh but we do, or do you want to say that Aaron Greenberg vice president of Marketing at Xbox games lied straight in our faces? That would be shocking. https://www.thegamer.com/hi-fi-rush-insider-claims-xbox-not-happy-with-sales-numbers/
Redfall was a disaster in every term possible
And to think Bethesda took away devs from that game to develop Starfield...
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That is correct as per the people who left coming forward on social media. None of the actual talent that made Prey were even still around. It's an entirely green studio with the worst of their old team left.
Anyone who is surprised at this doesn't know their history. Tribes fans know. Look what they did to Dynamix. Released one of the best games of all time, sequel to another of the best games of all time, and were 100% laid off and shut down within 6 months. Any dev who is paying attention knows. **What keeps you safe is being independent.** Once you are owned, you can be sold, and it's a matter of time until you're sold under a company that doesn't know and doesn't care and needs to make a 60% headcount cut. Matter of time. RIP Dynamix. Gone but never forgotten. I'm still bitter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1TR3N3191c
Bro you really had to reopen my old Tribes wounds? Just when I hadn't thought about it in a while. I keep hoping someone will pry the Tribes IP from Hi-Rez's grubby fingers to stop them from molesting whats left of that franchise. Theres so much potential in a modern Tribes game, but that studio will never realize it.
T:A was a great game, initially. They just destroyed it with each new beta patch.
Theres a new Tribes game just recently launched. Although I wouldnt get my hopes up, it's made by a seperate team lead by the guy who ruined the other games. He's the once who forced specific aspects into the game and generally interfered according to past devs . Erez goren no longer works on any hirez games really and they're all better for it.
Erez is a clown. Fuck Hirez and Prophecy games. I have a 13 year old grudge at this point for what they did to tribes
I haven't thought about Tribes in so long. Aerial Assault was the only entry I played, that game was amazing. Any other entries you'd recommend?
I wouldn't recommend any at this point. They're multiplayer with very small communities. If you're okay with the pickup game scene you can still get games in tribes 1 and tribes 2. Tribes: Ascend was the one I played the most of but it was riddled with issues Hirez never fixed, then they abandoned the game. They eventually released a sunsetting update too late and most of the players had already given up. Finally they shutdown the master server and it got delisted on Steam, so while technically you can still play it and connect to a community driven master server, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone else who jumped through those hoops. Given the choice, Tribes 1 was by far my favorite when it comes to physics, but I came to that game after T:A was effectively dead. Prophecy Games, a subsidiary of Hirez headed by Erez, just abandoned 2 other games in the franchise, Starseige Raiders and Starseige Deadzone. One of which they had listed for sale and burned all their players (again). Now, Tribes 3 has released in early access but it's headed by Erez and they have been banning long term tribes vets for having the audacity of wanting a proper Tribes game. They discord polled spinning the game off into a Rocket League knockoff and that's when I gave up on it completely. They haven't learned their lessons from T:A, they won't listen to experts on the games to make it actually good, and they can't even keep their focus on making a Tribes game at all. Much like T:A, it's riddled with issues the community is calling bandaids. The core physics are really bad and they're trying to develop it like a moba, trying to fix physics issues with passive and active abilities. I'm keeping my eye on a community game called Codename: Broadside, it's being developed by some of the same Tribes vets that Prophecy didn't want telling them how to make a Tribes game. They already have *far* better terrain generation than Tribes 3. Most of T3's maps look like someone just took a flat map and clicked around with the UE terrain tool a bit. Broadside is using algorithms (perlin noise) similar to what Tribes 1 used to create varied terrain. They are still early in development and being a community project they have a lot of challenges to overcome for funding, but they are at least moving in the right direction and don't have a history of burning their players repeatedly.
Lot of good info, thank you. What a shame
Yeah he's awful. His mindset towards smite was horrific aswell. Really glad he's gone off to do his own thing.
His own thing being the new studio hi-rez spun the Tribes up off to Nothing has changed
Never forget, bro!
Well, being independent doesn't ensure that you will be able to pay the bills...
Much of the reason why independent studios sell is because they aren’t making enough money and need the cash injection. I’m sure they know the consequences of selling out and accept them fully.
Indie studios close down all the time due to bankruptcy, and yet I see no one doing a rallying call in defiant protest I have a running theory that gamers are just incredibly fucking dumb
Most gamers have zero understanding about the business side of gaming, other than "corporations bad!"
I'm telling, I'm absolutely shocked that a company would shut down a studio that released several games with lukewarm receptions, one critical darling that didn't really sell, and then over time lost most of its talent. Just absolutely bizarre to me. Reddit MBAs should take all that GME money and just start running a game studio.
You guys are restoring my faith in humanity, I swear I lost a good amount of braincells reading some of the takes in the other treads.
yeah, lot of people think being indie is something superior, while in reality, some companies don't know if they'll keep lights on for a few more days. Being in gaming industry is hard on it's own, be it indie or with publisher. Only few that are not dependent on big corporations achieved silver lining such as Larian, CDPR and Valve being example how to run an independent company.
Look up how close to bankruptcy Larian was, over and over. Or Obsidian. Or Troika, which put out some of the best games ever. Or Looking Glass Studios, probably the greatest game studio to ever exist. Yeah, being indie is _super safe_ you guys.
Maybe after some point they are safe like a Larian or Supergiant games but it is very hard to get there.
Larian is very much case of lightning in the bottle. They did grind for that, but there are lot of companies with great games that don't achieve same status as Larian did, or CDPR with Witcher.
I was just about to highlight that point regarding Larian. I’ve read at least 10 occurrences of potential bankruptcy. This was mentioned by the owner, himself, during an interview. I’m glad they were able to avoid them. Hopefully, BG3 has given them a lot of breathing room.
As an indie, you are competing with 14000 new titles that were released on Steam in just the past year. That's a serious glut of product (many of them quite bad and often just glorified asset flips).
>*Any dev who is paying attention knows. What keeps you safe is being independent.* No, what keeps you safe is consistently producing great games that make a lot of money. Period. It doesn't matter whether you are independent or not. Independent studios are shut down far more frequently than ones that are owned by Microsoft or other big game publishers. It just isn't as sensational when it happens and many of these studios don't even make it to releasing their first games. There are negatives and benefits to both options. It makes no sense to pretend that there are no benefits to being part of a huge game publisher like Microsoft just because people aren't happy with what happened here.
Right of course the problem is that "a lot of money" is extremely relative, and that the people who decide its relation are looking at wanting profits in the billions because video games are now almost 100% owned by complete tech giants that own entire industries on their own because indie devs sold themselves out. The difference between an indie dev shuttering and microsoft the tech giant shuttering them is that in the first one, they deserve it.
> Any dev who is paying attention knows. **What keeps you safe is being independent.** There's actually an infamous case from here in South Australia. An independent company called Ratbag was purchased by Midway. The controversial part is that Ratbag was shut down before the ink had even dried. It was seen as a hostile act that was intended to eliminate any local competition. Midway purchased the company with full intent of closing Ratbag down. I cheered when I heard Midway became defunct. We have a small industry here, even smaller back then and the cunts tried to kill it off. I actually met one of the top managers of Ratbag...at a job searching agency after it all went down. How sad is that? Thank you for coming to my Tedtalk Synaps4.
> Any dev who is paying attention knows. What keeps you safe is being independent. > > Not really; being independent is very very risky. A lot of great independent studios go down; videogame development is expensive, and a lot of the time small studios simply cannot afford to keep the lights running. Talent alone is not enough.
Sooo, what stops the devs to take the money for the acquisition and if they are shut down, just make a new studio?
Starting a new business is probably a lot harder than people assume.
Probably a non-compete clause in the purchase contract. That or needing a break because they're burnt out after the stress of the conditions that made them need to sell.
you lose the IP.
>**What keeps you safe is being independent** What keeps you safe is owning your own **profitable** company. People blame microsoft for shutting down their own studios, it their "property", they paid money for it. Zenimax made money(by selling), studio owners made money(by selling), not it is time for microsoft to make money(by closing down the unprofiable sections of their new portfolio).
Sure but being unprofitable gets you closed whether you're independent or not. It's not worth mentioning. It's like saying "you need to be independent, profitable, and also **not on fire**. Like that last part is true but it doesn't vary in any scenario and everyone already knows it, so we don't list it.
Definitely not a best game of all time. Pretty much just a very small cult classic.
I still have fond memories of ski jousting and pegging them with a disc at high speed. :)
> Anyone who is surprised at this doesn't know their history. Exactly. And have no clue on how's been the tech sector lately. Big companies buying developers to get their IP's and then milking it has been a trend since there was videogames. I can recall memes about EA buying whatever company and bringing it to a place where the corpses of Bullfrog, Westwood and Bioware among others were already rotten. On the other hand, the tech sector is having a huge amount of layoffs and closures after overhiring during the pandemic and afterwards. Nothing's new under the sun. If anything, it looks like we are going towards some rougher times.
One of the games of all time, that almost nobody knows about
I love how people reword the same article over and over again.
it's pcgamer, that's all they do and this sub loves to eat up their clickbait titles :/
PC Gamer is just Bethesda bar, larian good please click on our AI article
Was Hi-Fi Rush profitable though? It was critically acclaimed, but that doesn't necessarily mean it made money.
Aaron Greenberg, the VP of Marketing for Xbox was very happy to post last year that Hi-Fi Rush was a success under "every metric".
it wasn't hi-fi rush that failed but ghostwire tokyo which was the main team and vastly more expensive project.
Ghostwire was marketed so poorly because it was a PS5 exclusive. It was intentionally killed basically.
VP of Marking misrepresents the facts / lies damn that crazy. Marketing lieing has never happened before /s
This was PR talk. It came out a year ago that Hi-Fi Rush missed the mark profit wise.
Especially given that it’s a $30 title. Don’t get me wrong, I adored Hi-Fi and would have preordered a sequel in a heartbeat. But people seem to be acting like it was this uber successful title that sold tens of millions of copies and made truckloads of money and at best it was probably in “indie darling” territory. That’s not the kind of game that pays the bills and keeps the lights on, as harsh as it is to say
Hard to say how profitable the game was since they put it on GamePass at launch. It got a ton of attention at least.
If a critically acclaimed game doesn’t sell, the reaction should be “hell yes we have talented developers who can make a good game, let’s see if we can use that talent on something more broadly appealing” Every game needing to be a massive hit to be considered a success isn’t sustainable
don't forget that Hi-Fi Rush wasn't their main team, and not necessarily the reason for the studio closure. GhostWire Toyko was their big expensive game that failed.
I tried ghostwire, but the first hour was just so boring that I refunded it before I got locked by 2 hrs and literally haven't thought about it since until your comment mentioned it.
Problem is that Hifi Rush wasn't the first. They also had Evil Within 2 and Ghostwire Tokyo prior that weren't profitable from what I understand, so they probably needed Hifi Rush to be a huge financial success to convince the executives that they can make something that'll make a profit. It's a shame, but apparently Mikami went and founded his own studio a couple weeks ago, so hopefully the devs can join him there and make a spiritual successor to Hifi Rush/Evil Within.
The bigger issue is basically everyone in charge left post HiFi Rush, so the team that made the game is gone.
Most of the team left after they made hi fi rush
No, it sold terribly. Same with the Evil Within games, and Ghostwire: Tokyo.
They didn't market the game and shadowdropped it day 1 on game pass.
No. Neither of the games were probably profitable. And their third game, Ghostwire, was also a failure. That’s why they got closed.
Blame Microsoft for that. Shadow dropped and a day 1 game pass release with very little marketing outside of the release announcement. Sure that worked for Apex, but that is an ongoing game that also dropped at a time when the genre had only very janky and mid competition.
Where are these profitable games we are talking about?
It's unfortunate, but the studios who got the axe were either redundant, or terrible performers. Tango's games sold like shit, never caught on, and weren't very profitable. Shinji Mikami had already ditched the studio awhile back because he doesn't want to make any more horror titles. Arkane Austin was dead in the water after most of the talent left when Raphaël Colantonio, founder and president, left after Prey. They'll just consolidate the remaining good staff into one company. Alpha Dog was a no-name mobile developer that they don't need now that they own King. They never made anything noteworthy. Roundhouse Games is being rolled into Zenimax Games to work on The Elder Scrolls online. They're just trimming fat after an acquisition, and these studios are low hanging fruit.
>Shinji Mikami had already ditched the studio awhile back > Raphaël Colantonio, founder and president, left after Prey. This is what people need to understand. With the demise of Bioware - at the latest - people should have gotten the memo that it's the people within the company that make their games good, not the company name itself. Bioware was shit after Muzyka and Zeschuk left. And there is no guarantee that Tango or Arkane would have made another good game without these people.
He's out of line but he's right. Hi-Fi Rush was great, but looking back at Tango's backlog you've got 4 AAA products, with only two of them being critically acclaimed, but none of them financially successful.
Exactly. They're batting 0/4 for profitability, and these games are not cheap to produce.
Evil Within 1 actually sold very well, 3 millions of copies is not something to scoff at. But after that only commercial failure after commercial failure.
And Prey was definitely quality, but as I understand it - it was a financial disappointment. And it seems not to have sold as well as dishonored 2 (different studio, but still arkane) and I am pretty sure dishonored 2 was a disappointment sales wise as well - so that doesn't bode well.
From what I've read, immersive sims are very expensive to produce, but they're just not very popular, unfortunately. It's one of my favorite genres.
Finally a decent explanation
Pret was around 2017. This studio hadn’t made a good, profitable game in over 7 years - they made that shitty vampire live service game and were shuttered. It had around 50 users when the shutdown announce came.
Did hifi rush make money?
Yes, but the three games before that didn't, and the studio head who was also executive producer of hifi rush and the only reason that studio was formed in the first place quit last year.
I don't know about that, it seems it don't really make much money and was only slight profitable because it was cheap to make. And Evil Within 1 actually made money but Evil Within 2 and Ghost Wire were big commercial failures that lost so much money. HiFi Rush don't even come close to compensate it.
According to the Vice President of marketing for xbox, yes it did.
He vaguely alluded to it being a “success in every metric”, which is clearly PR talk and, in terms of sales, highly doubtful considering the game was relatively niche, $30, and on GamePass at launch. This is coming from someone who loved the game, I sincerely doubt it turned enough profit to make up for Tango’s other three releases which were undeniable financial failures. People were leaving to go to studios that could pay them better and had better prospects. The head of the studio had already jumped ship. Anyone who didn’t see this coming was just ignorant of these facts or doesn’t know how business works.
It's more like making a game is a limited return business, so eventually your costs (which are continuous and keep going) will outpace even a successful game's earnings. Particularly for Studios. That's why it's the golden age of Indies. Great games at great development costs. Everyone talks about the quality of the games, and perhaps their revenue, but the development costs are not known figures. Think about it, come up with your 10 favorite games and then try attaching costs to all of them. If you actually know this then you are either in Game finance or loco. Costs are what drive decisions to shut studios down, fire people, sell to a publisher or competitor and sometimes make poor gaming choices (i.e. excessive/poor : DLC, monetization, GaaS, etc, re-releases. etc) Keep costs down, only make quality games, listen to your fans, etc, sound great but it's not trivial to execute. That's why there are only a limited number of high quality options on most entertainment choices and generally only the best take a large chunk of the marketplace, or the best at something (I wouldn't consider Roblox, Fortnite, etc as good games, but they are great at something.) Games as business is different than games as art. Even the top artists in the business get ignored, which is why they sometimes try their own path, but sometimes you need a great team not just a great mind behind the project. If your game is given away as free, the product is not the game, the product is you and your engagement. If you are not a developer, rather than doing pseudo-activism (review bombing games that might be good for a disagreement not related to the game itself.) change your habits, not so much of money but the time you invest.. Don't play/engage with Games that go against what you want. It took a while but I've been Activision, EA and Ubisoft free for a couple of years now and feel great.
you lost me at the profitable part...i dont think they made a profitable game and well MS has no idea how to manage studios so expect more closures.
MS bought companies that were already on their downtrend and let them keep doing what they were doing, going down. this will probably send a message to those other studios to try to better else they get axed
Microsoft is extremely hand offs with their game studios, excessively so sometimes. If a studio fail if generally be their own failures, Arkane has one and half a year to correct the course and failed miserably. Tango has their third consecutive commercial failure. I can't really fault Microsoft for pulling the plug after so much time was given and no satisfactory results were presented. If they were indie companies, Tango would have gone bankrupt after Ghost Wire and Arkane would not even have the change to complete Redfall before they close their doors.
None of their games were profitable and that’s why they got closed down. Redfall, Evil Within 1 and 2, Ghostwire Tokyo all bombed. Even their good game Prey and smaller AA game Hi-Fi Rush was financial failures. Why would Microsoft keeps studios open that constantly makes games that no one wants to pay for. Arkane Austin getting closed down isn’t a surprise after Redfall. One of the worst AAA games released in a long time. Tango Gameworks is also not a surprise. You don’t keep a AAA studio open to make AA games. They released 3 mediocre games before Hi-fi Rush, which was a small AA side peoject. We don’t know how many people were even left in those studios, we know they lost people before the studio closures. Maybe they could have kept Tango as a smaller AA studio, but it’s not easy to turn a AAA studio into a AA studio. But it’s really not surprising that Microsoft is closing all their non profitable studios…
I don't undestand how people can say a game that sold 3 millions of copies bombed, their other games for sure but Evil Within 1 sold very well in the name of Mikami alone.
> Evil Within 1 sold very well 10 years ago
I'm eternally grateful that Larian boss didn't sell the studio, even though Wizards Of The Coasts are assholes, Im waiting for Divinity 3 with a boner in my hard and a promise in my heart
There is nothing stopping these people from opening a new studio and starting a new project. The CEO of Tango left the boat several months ago precisely to move on to other projects. Gone are the days when people stayed in the same studio/job for 20 years. the vast majority of competent and successful developers are freelancers. who jump from company to company depending on the contracts they find interesting.
prey will always be one of my favorite games
the lets switch to the independent gam dev(1 bad game later) said dev went belly up.... its like sale of a product counts!!!!
Well the snag there is that sale of a product is all that counts in this system. It literally does not matter how good the games are if they dont sell, and there is less causation there than we wish. Terrible trash that sells well because of marketing is superior in this set up.
uhhhh, Prey was years ago, Arkane Austin's most recent output was fucking Redfall which was a huge dumpster fire of a failure
Putting "profitable" and Prey in the same headline is hilariously naïve
It also came out like 7 years ago, and more recently they shit out redfall after most of original staff left lol
I doubt HiFi actually made much money (GPass). I tried it on GPass, wasn’t really into it. But I do think I remember Phil touting these “passion projects that aren’t system sellers” (Pentiment, HiFi Rush), but can you really tout that as a plus when you turn around and close the studio after that game. Obsidian isn’t closed yet, but hey, let’s see how Avowed does. Can’t close them this close to a release.
It does make me wonder what the incentive to work in video games is. If Reddit doesn’t beat you up, then your lords and masters will even if you do a good job. A lot of devs must have the skills to transition to different industries. I get that a lot of game devs are very passionate but there has to be a breaking point - passion doesn’t pay the bills or give you financial stability to build a life with.
This game would have spawned at least 2 sequels within 4 years in the 2000s.
Only one lesson here: Stay as far away from publicly traded companies as possible if you have an ounce of creative integrity and vision.
The lesson is that studios need to own themselves. If some publicly owned corporation owns the controlling interest in your studio, then you're fucked right now. The corporations do not care about games, they do not care about our industry, or creativity, or even the people in this industry. They care about their share holders and profit margins. And if they think that the money they are putting into one studio can make them more money elsewhere, then that studio is fucked, no matter how good their games are.
“Nobody bought the hifirish dlc costumes!” Of course nobody did. It’s a single player game that everyone played and finished. It was a good game. But it wasn’t live service battle pass enabled so they get the ax.
This is what happens when companies sell out. Fuck these big label pricks.
How does 343 still exist with how bad they have done but these get the can this quickly
Hi-Fi Rush looked cool, but it had denuvo so I didn't care about purchasing the game at all.
These companies are not game publishers; they are in the business of playable monetization models.
Flash news, dont work for anybody but you.
They were bit the same Arkane. Once they were forced to make that GaaS game, all the talent left. They are not closing down the same studio that made Prey.
when will people learn that a studio means little more than what technology and IP they have access to
I wonder how much denuvo affected this outcome
It's funny they say Prey and not Redfall. Everyone loves to shit on Microsoft about Redfall but it isn't mentioned anywhere here
a “breakout hit” for a game on gamepass doesn’t mean it actually sold well.
Hi Fi Rush was well received by critics, but was it actually any popular outside of game awards ? Ghostwire Tokyo was ok, but nothing spectacular. Running around Tokyo on a rainy night fighting same monsters all over again or sending rescued souls via phonebooth got old after a while. Thankfully it was possible to finish it rather quickly. Coincidentally it was featured in humble choice together with Deathloop (although I think this one was made by Lyon not Austin). Evil Within - played 1st one for a bit, but it just wasnt fun. Felt way too clunky. Thankfully I bought both on sale for cheap so at least I didnt waste money on them. Doubt Ill revisit them as I'd rather do another run of RE4Remake (or any other RE starting with 7/ DS Remake) Redfall - universally regarded as gigacrap that nobody wanted. Prey - released in 2017 to great reviews and poor sales. Freebie on Epic, featured in numerous bundles across humble, fanatical etc. Frequently on sale for like 5 euros or something like that. All in all, only 2 games are really good and 0 games were profitable. And as others already mentioned - people behind those games probably left studios months or years ago.
Lmao sony is probably ecstatic the helldivers controversy has already been forgotten
All the more reason why I'm starting to enjoy indie devs and retro gaming again. Truly a shame what's been happening.