Hi-Fi Rush was a fantastic game, won major awards, showed off the promise of XBox Game Pass… and for their efforts their studio has been shut down. There have multiple instances of this in just the past few weeks; are publishers really going to just bet on their prime AAA titles (Call of Duty, Halo, GTA6, etc) and nothing else? And those games either take a lot of rotating studios and a long development cycle to release. What’s going to fill the gap?
The current tech meta seems to be coalescing around this notion of "even high-performance isn't enough to spare you from layoffs, be afraid!" It wasn't that high-performance always guaranteed your job would continue, but at least there'd be the idea that you'd get moved to a new team if you were a great performer.
To me, that just reinforces the notion that these layoffs are mostly about sending a message to workers and Wall St more than anything else.
Game development is in a really weird place. Insanely over-saturated but almost all AAA games are extremely derivative, stale, bland games with a coat of pretty graphics
Indie games are awesome right now, but they don't have the budgets to produce AAA games. So there is a huge gap. Innovative indie games with cool, new gameplay concepts, but always simple or retro graphics, and AAA games with shiny graphics on the other end but gameplay that hasn't changed in over a decade.
I'm just waiting for any AAA studio to provide something new with the AAA games. Maybe AI to improve NPCs in an open world game? Anything besides the same old gameplay with new skins on it.
It's just risk aversion. Companies want to turn video games into a factory line golden goose, but struggle to reconcile that each iteration through that factory line makes the final product relatively worse and worse, even if it continues to look better and better. Now even Call of Duty can't find a Call of Duty killer. But these same companies are terrified of trying anything new because new things do, on occasion flop. It would also entail scrapping the factory line, because creating a new game, instead of reskinning and old with a few new tweaks, is a way different beast.
That said, I don't really think the stereotypes of indie games are very valid anymore. Valheim looks great, has a massive open world, and is multiplayer. [1] It also started entirely as a result of one guy's pet project, until he grabbed a coworker and then set off to make it what it became. The graphics are stylized, but I think in a broadly aesthetically appealing way, as opposed to e.g. pixel graphics which are very off-putting to many people, myself among them. Pixel graphics came from an era of CRTs with interlaced scanning, and various other visual artifacts, that naturally blurred, antialiased, and blended them. Sharp jaggy edges never really existed, and I fail to understand why that's a popular style now.
For me indie gaming is going through its own aggravating phase right now, but it seems most people aren't bothered by it. The quality of the games is better than ever, but every indie title now goes through Early Access, sometimes for several years. By the time the game is released the hype cycle has already finished.
For people like me who play games just a couple of hours a week, I have no interest in playing an unfinished game. I have a library of games bigger than I could ever play and I will always skip the EA stuff.
Insanely over-saturated but almost all AAA games are extremely derivative, stale, bland games with a coat of pretty graphics...
People have been saying this for decades at this point. I'm not seeing it.
Innovation is largely overrated. It can be a good thing, but the vast majority of games, whether AAA or indie, can't be truly innovative. And innovative doesn't translate directly to a game being enjoyable. Conversely, a game being "derivative" doesn't automatically make the game not fun to play.
AAA basically just means nice graphics at this point. You can't dump more money into a piece of art to make it better, that's why all the innovation comes from indie games. Look at Balatro, a guy made a poker roguelike and became a millionaire overnight. I think if big game studios, rather than dumping their copious amounts of money into single, giant-scope games, dealt it out amongst a variety of smaller teams for smaller-scoped projects, they'd be way better off.
Everyone keeps suggesting AI NPCs. I'm sure someone's gonna take a crack at it and it'll go about as well the Humane AI pin or the Rabbit R1 before everyone realized how horrible of an idea it is. If anything it'll make for a silly novelty like the VR games where you clumsily try to perform basic tasks with VR motion controls. But in this case you argue with an in-game LLM and see how quickly you can make it get defensive or start gaslighting you with made up facts about household cleaners you can combine to make a delicious cocktail.
Some independant studio or publishers have their fans base : Amanita Design, Playdead, Zachtronics, Devolver Digital, Annapurna Interractive are for me the folk to watch.
Oh for sure. AAA games require too much effort and too much returns while indies can spend 1 year and 1 person and deliver hit being multiple time more profitable.
Conversely, the recently released surprise hit Helldivers 2 is a very prominent AA game has sold millions of copies and seems well poised to win a bunch of game of the year awards (recently concluded PSN account linking controversy notwithstanding).
A regression to the mean where mean is just whatever makes most money. I can understand if they are at the risk of going bankrupt but this seems so premature
I can't remember a single AA game that was great. Actually, I can't remember a single AA game other than the ones I remember because of how bad they were.
I think AA in games has, for a long time, meant "We want to do a AAA but don't have the money or time" and this can only end in disaster.
Condition Zero and Source released in 2004. Global Offensive released in 2012, eight years later. Counterstrike 2 released in September 2023, eleven years later. Counterstrike isn't the game to point to for re-releasing the same thing over and over.
The vast majority of games that get released each month are straight-up garbage. And for the minority that aren't, I'd hope that people in a YC-affiliated forum of all places would see that a product getting released does not equal financial viability.
I really don't understand why they would shutter Tango, a small / low cost house producing influential art that people actually want, while behemoths that burn cash and produce soulless products that no one wants survive.
Shut down Bethesda, they're the ones with awful gameplay and writing. Don't shut down the darlings.
“Influential art” vs “soulless products” tends to map pretty well to “niche products that return poorly compared to costs to produce while earning critical accolades” vs. “reliable cookie-cutter moneymakers”, and Microsoft isn't in the business to win critical awards for stockholders, but to make money for them.
what do you mean by "just"? millions if not billions of USD profit @ the 3 titles cited between the brackets? people play GTA V till these days, even Skyrim...
either the way, hope it paves the way for more small studios titles...
The economics of traditional AAA game development just don't make sense, and the market conditions right now are just acting as a forcing function to expedite their (current) collapse. You have insanely high development costs (50-100m on the low end to 200m+ on the high end) where the _only_ opportunity for return is to release a hit or polish the game to a hit (read, more $$$), but even being able to predict what will or won't be a hit is near impossible. So you have high burn on teams for long dev cycles (2-3 years+) that can't even really time the market because of their slow releases, with audience expectations for what a title means also insanely high, and also that their are both very good free options like Fortnite and large discounted backlogs of "really good games" that you're also fighting against. You also have weird calculus now where you're fighting against your own bets on live service games — spending 100m on expanding GTAV some more is likely a better return than working on GTA6. In the email announcing this from Microsoft's own words, you can see this:
"In 2024 alone we have Starfield Shattered Space, Fallout 76 Skyline Valley, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, and The Elder Scrolls Online’s Golden Road. "
3/4 of those titles are old games that are live services, where it's a better investment and dev cost to pump engaged players than build new audiences. It's VERY hard to beat a 5% (even more for an MS-sized deposit) return on a savings account, so closing studios that made Good Games isn't about the games at all, it's just looking at the balance sheet. Everyone always knew they were creating on borrowed time, and now that time is unfortunately up.
The solution of this is to not let private companies dictate cultural production for a nation, but the US is piss poor at arts funding and all our billionaires want to squirrel away wealth overseas rather than building libraries, museums, or cultural production funds.
>are publishers really going to just bet on their prime AAA titles (Call of Duty, Halo, GTA6, etc) and nothing else?
I guess so. I don't fully understand it either. An indie-ish scoped game won GOTY in 2022, Helldivers costs half as much as a AAA title and is probably selling better than any of the other dozen GaaS Sony was trying to break into, Take Two has (had) several breakout hits under their wing. But they seem so hellbent on being the Fortnite, instead of just "really damn good (and presumably making money)"
It's strange that we know super successful "indies" can sell millions and be just as acclaimed as any AAA title but those metrics don't matter to a company that should be trying to foster a full portfolio.
>What’s going to fill the gap?
GTA has shark cards and COD us a yearly releases rotating around 4 or more studios now. Those will be fine. Halo? No idea, I don't think the battle pass format can sustain these levels of budget. it juse seems to all be a mess.
I don't understand it either. Maybe there's more going on behind the scenes that we don't know about, but on the face of it seems like a really poor decision.
Large publishers keep reiterating the importance of successful IPs these days, and Hi-Fi Rush was like lightning in a bottle. Here Microsoft had a new IP with critical acclaim, suitable for a large audience, and ripe for a sequel. You'd think they would cling to it for dear life, especially given how their other IPs are doing (Halo, Redfall, Starfield...)
Closing the studio doesn't necessarily mean they're ditching the IP, but it doesn't bode well.
Yeah, I have a hard time understanding the push to consolidate everything into a small set of core titles.
Consider private label brands on Amazon, which at least maintain numerous distinct brand identites focusing on different categories.
Having a portfolio of actually distinct companies with unique personalities and signature approaches to design and gameplay is exactly what you want if you are trying to maintain a thriving ecosystem.
Money? When 90% of revenue comes from yearly sports, FPS, etc. refreshes, it’s easy for middle managers to get the idea that cutting the fat will increase margins. Unwittingly, they are missing the opportunity to find that new hit franchise that needs to be tested and refined outside of the mainstream.
> consolidate everything into a small set of core titles
This already happened in the early 2000s. If you were around back then, you might remember how everything was sequels and rehashes for a while. Diversity of ideas returned to the industry only after it became practicable to publish and monetize indie games (post-Braid).
Microsoft and Embracer recently bought the whole industry. Now they might be about to light a match and set fire to the whole thing. OK, but fortunately, all the talented passionate people with the ideas and drive to create new things still exist in the world. I believe many players will find their way back to them, no matter how sufficent "garbage" is for the majority of people. If milking the uncaring baseline consumer was all that mattered to videogame creatives, they'd all be making ad-driven smartphone shovelware.
They also developed The Evil Within games and Ghostwire: Tokyo, but their founder and CEO left the company last year to found a new studio. The writing was on the wall honestly.
Yeah, I'm hoping to find some type of image AI service that can produce passable art assets for 2D game development. Just good enough to do POC work. I have started a few gaming projects over the years and always ran into a brick wall needing assets.
What is extraordinary about the Microsoft games unit and Xbox is how immune their senior staff are to the repercussions of their bad decisions. They're certainly not taking responsibility for the failed gamepass experiment, trashing the Xbox brand, or the acquisitions they now regret since successfully closing Activision.
Failing upwards has never been so conspicuously obvious as it is in modern corporate America thanks to the pervasive use of social media.
For the Xbox brand they have failed to release quality versions of every major Xbox franchise bar Forza Horizon (Halo Infinite, for example), and this mismanagement has been ongoing for so long the sales figures of the Series consoles are dire. (And the Series X is not bad by any stretch). Now they are having to release their games on their major competitor, the PS5, making the point of buying into the Xbox ecosystem . . . what exactly?
And to emphasise here Sony are not exactly doing stupidly well with PS5 software and support, they just aren't actively screwing it up completely.
I think it is popular but not growing as fast as Microsoft would have hoped. When I talk to some of my friends about it they don't seem to realize how deep the catalog is and just buy games that they could have played on GamePass, but most of those games are third party games that happen to be on GamePass.
The Xbox brand issue at this point is a lack of quality first party games. They can never seem to nail a release. Even when a game is pretty good there is a caveat.
- Halo Infinite was pretty good, but buggy and they struggled to release new content.
- Starfield is Bethesda's most ambitious game yet with the best combat, graphics and polish from the studio to date, but the exploration loop that defines their games is broken by interplanetary travel. It is still pretty good, but just not what it should have been.
- Forza Motorsport launched buggy and while technically proficient is perhaps of the most joyless games I have ever played.
- Redfall was hyped as a first party release and is absolutely mid
I do think that both the Xbox and PlayStation brands have put themselves in strange positions strategically. People buy consoles to play certain games and if you know that you can play those games on PC (eventually) why would you ever buy a PlayStation or Xbox?
From what I understand gamepass has heavily undercut actual game sales (why buy a game for $70 when it'll probably be on gamepass at some point, and most games are a month of play or so).
I don’t think it failed yet, but I’m not renewing my subscription, gifted to me by a friend, for the following reasons:
1. Too many game choices without having to think about spending money for each one is very expensive when the currency is time.
2. Video games will never be Microsoft’s primary business, while video game players and makers are Valve’s. This is why Steam is so much better than Xbox/PC Game Pass.
Xbox was at their prime on the 360 era, they sold almost as many consoles as Sony did PS3. Ever since then they are selling half of PlayStation and their current consoles are tracking behind the previous generation in sales launch-aligned. Even with GamePass which is undeniably great value for gamers.
Seems they are now seriously considering becoming a third party publisher and release all their games or at least most on PlayStation and Switch, which honestly makes sense considering the amount of new development studios they acquired that used to release their games for every platform available, there are not enough Xbox consoles with paying customer to sustain all those studios I think.
I'm amazed that this is a question. Gamepass is essentially so low cost as to be an incredibly costly giveaway, only it has proven that this devalues everything that touches it.
For context, Hifi Rush had 3 million players on Gamepass last August, and today they shut the studio. So even when they get a break out hit they cannot justify keeping the studios around to try and do another; that's not a success.
It is current high value for consumers, but that’s all it is, and in cases where MA is just a third party vendor to the publishers, high value for consumers is bad for the publishers. If it is ever deemed a success, that value will diminish extremely fast.
But Hi-Fi Rush did well and invigorated the market. Starfield cost an order of magnitude more and only had the opposite effect. It's like shutting down your successful competitor for your screwup because you're their boss. Almost like the result of an anticompetitive practice.
With Tango/Hi-Fi Rush, MS decided to make it free with Game Pass at launch, which obviously hurt its sales.
If you sell chips but charge people $1 for two weeks for unlimited chips, then just $10/mo for unlimited chips, you might be disappointed with direct chip sales.
Part of the reason the merger was allowed was because they promised it would not result in layoffs for either company. They have now done multiple rounds of layoffs. They lied.
The amount of layoffs the last two years is ridiculous.
My company just laid off 35 people (150ish employees) and gave them a whopping 2 weeks severance for each year that they worked there. Most of the people let go had only worked here for 1-2 years. Engineers and QA.
I was shocked when I heard that because I've always seen it as a great place to work and very forward thinking. That wasn't publicly disclosed, of course, I heard it from a manager coworker/friend.
This is quite a lot of studios to be dissolving and obviously a lot of good developers and artists. The silver lining, if any, is that usually some of those let off open up their own indie studios and release some absolute gems. So here's to hoping and good luck to them!
My guess is that because of the success of Fallout show Microsoft is trying to spin up resources to make another Fallout game as soon as possible while also keeping Elder Scrolls moving forward. Bethesda has always been a one game studio, but perhaps they will try to hire up to become a two game studio or they could go beef up Obsidian to pivot into a Fallout New Vegas to or other non-numbered Fallout game.
The casualties of this are two financially under performing studios.
If Microsoft plans to bring a lot of new people into a Bethesda game, I hope they invest in new engine tech and QA. Old Bethesda fans know what to expect by now, but newcomers with any modern game experience are going to be in for a rude surprise if the next Fallout game ships with typical Bethesda quality.
They've had this problem with their last several releases too, but I think the TV show will make it a lot worse.
Readit News
To me, that just reinforces the notion that these layoffs are mostly about sending a message to workers and Wall St more than anything else.
What message?
Indie games are awesome right now, but they don't have the budgets to produce AAA games. So there is a huge gap. Innovative indie games with cool, new gameplay concepts, but always simple or retro graphics, and AAA games with shiny graphics on the other end but gameplay that hasn't changed in over a decade.
I'm just waiting for any AAA studio to provide something new with the AAA games. Maybe AI to improve NPCs in an open world game? Anything besides the same old gameplay with new skins on it.
That said, I don't really think the stereotypes of indie games are very valid anymore. Valheim looks great, has a massive open world, and is multiplayer. [1] It also started entirely as a result of one guy's pet project, until he grabbed a coworker and then set off to make it what it became. The graphics are stylized, but I think in a broadly aesthetically appealing way, as opposed to e.g. pixel graphics which are very off-putting to many people, myself among them. Pixel graphics came from an era of CRTs with interlaced scanning, and various other visual artifacts, that naturally blurred, antialiased, and blended them. Sharp jaggy edges never really existed, and I fail to understand why that's a popular style now.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSVbXgBJIuI
For people like me who play games just a couple of hours a week, I have no interest in playing an unfinished game. I have a library of games bigger than I could ever play and I will always skip the EA stuff.
People have been saying this for decades at this point. I'm not seeing it.
Innovation is largely overrated. It can be a good thing, but the vast majority of games, whether AAA or indie, can't be truly innovative. And innovative doesn't translate directly to a game being enjoyable. Conversely, a game being "derivative" doesn't automatically make the game not fun to play.
Everyone keeps suggesting AI NPCs. I'm sure someone's gonna take a crack at it and it'll go about as well the Humane AI pin or the Rabbit R1 before everyone realized how horrible of an idea it is. If anything it'll make for a silly novelty like the VR games where you clumsily try to perform basic tasks with VR motion controls. But in this case you argue with an in-game LLM and see how quickly you can make it get defensive or start gaslighting you with made up facts about household cleaners you can combine to make a delicious cocktail.
Some independant studio or publishers have their fans base : Amanita Design, Playdead, Zachtronics, Devolver Digital, Annapurna Interractive are for me the folk to watch.
I can't remember a single AA game that was great. Actually, I can't remember a single AA game other than the ones I remember because of how bad they were.
I think AA in games has, for a long time, meant "We want to do a AAA but don't have the money or time" and this can only end in disaster.
Why even bother producing anything at all when you can just put a fresh coat of lipstick on the same pig and sell it all over again?
Dead Comment
Shut down Bethesda, they're the ones with awful gameplay and writing. Don't shut down the darlings.
either the way, hope it paves the way for more small studios titles...
"In 2024 alone we have Starfield Shattered Space, Fallout 76 Skyline Valley, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, and The Elder Scrolls Online’s Golden Road. "
3/4 of those titles are old games that are live services, where it's a better investment and dev cost to pump engaged players than build new audiences. It's VERY hard to beat a 5% (even more for an MS-sized deposit) return on a savings account, so closing studios that made Good Games isn't about the games at all, it's just looking at the balance sheet. Everyone always knew they were creating on borrowed time, and now that time is unfortunately up.
The solution of this is to not let private companies dictate cultural production for a nation, but the US is piss poor at arts funding and all our billionaires want to squirrel away wealth overseas rather than building libraries, museums, or cultural production funds.
I guess so. I don't fully understand it either. An indie-ish scoped game won GOTY in 2022, Helldivers costs half as much as a AAA title and is probably selling better than any of the other dozen GaaS Sony was trying to break into, Take Two has (had) several breakout hits under their wing. But they seem so hellbent on being the Fortnite, instead of just "really damn good (and presumably making money)"
It's strange that we know super successful "indies" can sell millions and be just as acclaimed as any AAA title but those metrics don't matter to a company that should be trying to foster a full portfolio.
>What’s going to fill the gap?
GTA has shark cards and COD us a yearly releases rotating around 4 or more studios now. Those will be fine. Halo? No idea, I don't think the battle pass format can sustain these levels of budget. it juse seems to all be a mess.
Large publishers keep reiterating the importance of successful IPs these days, and Hi-Fi Rush was like lightning in a bottle. Here Microsoft had a new IP with critical acclaim, suitable for a large audience, and ripe for a sequel. You'd think they would cling to it for dear life, especially given how their other IPs are doing (Halo, Redfall, Starfield...)
Closing the studio doesn't necessarily mean they're ditching the IP, but it doesn't bode well.
So there is no gap in available player time, as it's impossible for there to be more than 24 hours of demand per day.
Consider private label brands on Amazon, which at least maintain numerous distinct brand identites focusing on different categories.
Having a portfolio of actually distinct companies with unique personalities and signature approaches to design and gameplay is exactly what you want if you are trying to maintain a thriving ecosystem.
This already happened in the early 2000s. If you were around back then, you might remember how everything was sequels and rehashes for a while. Diversity of ideas returned to the industry only after it became practicable to publish and monetize indie games (post-Braid).
Microsoft and Embracer recently bought the whole industry. Now they might be about to light a match and set fire to the whole thing. OK, but fortunately, all the talented passionate people with the ideas and drive to create new things still exist in the world. I believe many players will find their way back to them, no matter how sufficent "garbage" is for the majority of people. If milking the uncaring baseline consumer was all that mattered to videogame creatives, they'd all be making ad-driven smartphone shovelware.
Its part of this months "choice" offering on humblebundle.com
Failing upwards has never been so conspicuously obvious as it is in modern corporate America thanks to the pervasive use of social media.
Similarly, how did they trash the Xbox brand? I've always been a PlayStation or Nintendo user so my view is quite tainted here.
For the Xbox brand they have failed to release quality versions of every major Xbox franchise bar Forza Horizon (Halo Infinite, for example), and this mismanagement has been ongoing for so long the sales figures of the Series consoles are dire. (And the Series X is not bad by any stretch). Now they are having to release their games on their major competitor, the PS5, making the point of buying into the Xbox ecosystem . . . what exactly?
And to emphasise here Sony are not exactly doing stupidly well with PS5 software and support, they just aren't actively screwing it up completely.
The Xbox brand issue at this point is a lack of quality first party games. They can never seem to nail a release. Even when a game is pretty good there is a caveat.
- Halo Infinite was pretty good, but buggy and they struggled to release new content. - Starfield is Bethesda's most ambitious game yet with the best combat, graphics and polish from the studio to date, but the exploration loop that defines their games is broken by interplanetary travel. It is still pretty good, but just not what it should have been. - Forza Motorsport launched buggy and while technically proficient is perhaps of the most joyless games I have ever played. - Redfall was hyped as a first party release and is absolutely mid
I do think that both the Xbox and PlayStation brands have put themselves in strange positions strategically. People buy consoles to play certain games and if you know that you can play those games on PC (eventually) why would you ever buy a PlayStation or Xbox?
1. Too many game choices without having to think about spending money for each one is very expensive when the currency is time.
2. Video games will never be Microsoft’s primary business, while video game players and makers are Valve’s. This is why Steam is so much better than Xbox/PC Game Pass.
3. It’s bloody difficult to take screenshots!
Seems they are now seriously considering becoming a third party publisher and release all their games or at least most on PlayStation and Switch, which honestly makes sense considering the amount of new development studios they acquired that used to release their games for every platform available, there are not enough Xbox consoles with paying customer to sustain all those studios I think.
I have friends at Microsoft who worked on it and they all seemed to think it was going well last I checked (about a year ago).
I'm amazed that this is a question. Gamepass is essentially so low cost as to be an incredibly costly giveaway, only it has proven that this devalues everything that touches it.
For context, Hifi Rush had 3 million players on Gamepass last August, and today they shut the studio. So even when they get a break out hit they cannot justify keeping the studios around to try and do another; that's not a success.
It is current high value for consumers, but that’s all it is, and in cases where MA is just a third party vendor to the publishers, high value for consumers is bad for the publishers. If it is ever deemed a success, that value will diminish extremely fast.
...based on what?
It's like AAA publishers have no notion of a game studio as an organic thing that can grow. It's all just pieces on a board.
If you sell chips but charge people $1 for two weeks for unlimited chips, then just $10/mo for unlimited chips, you might be disappointed with direct chip sales.
https://www.polygon.com/24065269/ftc-microsoft-activision-de...
My company just laid off 35 people (150ish employees) and gave them a whopping 2 weeks severance for each year that they worked there. Most of the people let go had only worked here for 1-2 years. Engineers and QA.
I was shocked when I heard that because I've always seen it as a great place to work and very forward thinking. That wasn't publicly disclosed, of course, I heard it from a manager coworker/friend.
Now I'm petrified.
Company #1, nothing.
Company #2, this.
Company #3, 1 month (TBF I was only there a year, so I guess it was as good as #2).
#2 only wins out because I had partially vested stock. But otherwise, my severance history is paltry.
Not sure why this is not a more common point in AI doomsaying discussions.
[0] Why you would go hard on data-driven design in a creative field instead of trusting the instincts of creators I will never know.
The casualties of this are two financially under performing studios.
They've had this problem with their last several releases too, but I think the TV show will make it a lot worse.