Microsoft has never been good at running game studios, which is a problem when it owns them all
Microsoft has never been good at running game studios, which is a problem when it owns them all
23 Comments
People were saying this before and when they bought activision. This isn’t a new revelation.
Microsoft bad at managing studios and converting there IP to games. I AM SHOCKED I SAY. no way they would fumble multiple generations of software and hardware causing them to call into questions Xboxs identity in general.
/s
Article makes a bit of sense but the title is horrible lol. Makes it sound like Microsoft owns every single game company out there and are running a monopoly.
All that money just to screw gaming over they need to just pack it up and stop acquiring ips for no reason
Duh. Microsoft has been a blight on gaming since long before Xbox.
I mean if anyone is at fault for not delivering what they promised its the Studios. They had plenty of time to pump something out, most of these proj3cts that got them wiped was announced 2018-2020.
If you were paying someone to make you a product and they delivered nothing or tried to bs you heavily like the Perfect Dark team, you would easily clean house.
This is also good for us as customers, it means the remaining teams won’t be screwing around. Just like how we cant fail at our jobs, they cant either.
I wonder if the MS trolls will downvote this as well. Not a fan of polygon but at least the first of the sentence is true.
Let’s buy as many studios as possible to fire their stuff
I think initially people were excited to see Microsoft (a company with near infinite money) gain control over flailing studios marred in monetization greed because they thought Microsoft could afford to cut back on the egregious monetization scams by pumping their own capital into the studio to allow the developers to go back to focusing on creativity and expression.
Sadly, what it actually ended up doing was exposing that all the “talent” at the studios has LONG been gone and pumping money into the existing studios just exposed that the developers left at these studios are incompetent.
* Redfall
* Starfield
* Diablo 4
* WoW’s recent Trilogy
* COD Black Ops 6 and rushed Black Ops 7
* Overwatch 2’s death / E-Sports failure
* Halo Infinite
These are just some examples but the point simply is – No amount of money fixes “talent”. The Talent is gone…”firing” 5,000 Xbox Studio developers isn’t REALLY that big of a deal because the “developers” you have fond memories of and think can make great games haven’t been there in a decade.
What you are scared about is the IP’s you are nostalgic for…getting sent to the graveyard with the incompetence of the developers still there. Which is valid.
People seem to forget that nearly all of Xbox’s biggest exclusives were existing IP that MS bought up.
Yes, even Halo. It was going to be a Mac exclusive until MS bought Bungie mid-development.
Yeah no shit, been saying that since they bought Rare.
Capitalists running art departments never works in any industry
reminds me of the Hellblade situation
First one was a groundbreaking game full of nuance and emotional impact, second one feels more like a tech demo with everything overstated.
For example – the voices in the first one were really interesting, they would pop in randomly to make you question reality or expose an inner conflict…..but in the second one the voices are for pink elephants “someone is currently trying to drown you, you should not let this happen ok”.
I could just imagine some Microsoft executive sending an email to the studio asking for 5x the voices – “we need content content content”.
Microsoft shows the clear difference between a software company and an entertainment company
When you are too big to actually make good decision for saving an investment but instead you prefer cutting budget over underperforming studio since it is the easiest solution to please your investor since they all want you to move to AI instead.
no shit doesn’t help people actively defend them
The more things pan out the way they are I think we are going to see the near death of AAA at some point soon.
The cost cutting / inflation and global recession is just getting going and could potentially get much worse in the nearish future and all these giant monopolies are going to cause a lot of damage. AAA won’t go away obviously but it’s going to take a lot of damage. Hell it has taken a lot of damage already.
I hope that the things that can rise in the shadows afterwards can be more sustainable.
The job loss and even less security is imo driving away talent right now and these large companies are banking on technology to make their labour costs less which ultimately is not how games are made period. This is happening all over anything computer or entertainment related and that a huge sign of a very sick economy. This is a canary in the coal mine and Microsoft imo has just accelerated it with their horrible ability to run game studios.
I think we are going to see the AA and indie space absolutely turn into the future of gaming.
Will be interesting how all the people that were always saying “Nah I don’t care, I love Gamepass, let them buy everything” will look at this in a couple of years. I still think that this excitement was incredibly short sighted because the way other streaming services have developed is the same direction that games are headed with this
Crazy how sony had had failures recently and no one bats an eye. When sony lays off people despite being the industry leader, they dont get articles like this. The amount of people in the industry that want to see xbox fail is sad.
Tell that to people who shot on Kotick.
Kotick is a slime but hes been in the business longer that lots of peoples entire life.
He knows when a game is a flop or not and when to cut the losses
Iv gotta to the point that I just want the AAA to die off. I want MS to buy all the big names just so I know they will go in the storage bin. And we can move on. Cuz if there gone. Newer smaller devs will get more eye them.
They haven’t been since day one
Shit article. Completely ignores how Sony does literally the same thing. Nintendo probably would too but they’re a much different ecosystem.