Not to be outdone by Sony shooting themselves in the foot, Xbox has announced 3200 layoffs as well as the departure or closure of a handful of studios because what they’ve been doing is… not working.
If you ask me, things started going south the moment they shelled out such astronomical amounts to acquire Activision and Bethesda, putting more pressure on GamePass to keep bringing in subscribers. When that growth was slowing, Xbox panicked and started increasing the price of GamePass, basically killing its value in the process. So I’m not surprised they have to make some changes.
On the surface, cutting some of these studios loose struck me as drastic… Arkane, Ninja Theory and Double Fine are well-known studios responsible for some incredible content so we think of them with that value in mind. The flip side of that, I guess is… what have they brought to the table lately? They haven’t really been moving the needle in a big way since joining Microsoft. And I’m excited about State of Decay 3 from Undead Labs, but they announced that in 2020, and it still isn’t out yet. So that one is maybe easier to understand from a “cut your losses” standpoint.
Still, a bunch of studios and over three-thousand jobs is quite a bloodbath, and it’s hard to see Xbox doing much from here aside from shrinking down to focus on their handful of well-trod franchises. Just pumping out the incremental installments of Call of Duty, Elder Scrolls, etc that they know will bring in money with little risk.
And with so much senior talent laid off, the cynic in my expects they’re assuming they can lean on AI to shoulder more of the work, so the downward spiral of quality is likely to continue.
lol pretty grim
Only because we’re also preventing having your installation media and because we have got used to spending money for servers all over the place whenever we wanted and buying all these season passes, in-game buying, and expecting to have tens of millions from the first… yeah, we’re in bad trouble.
But if we have small studios, with installation media, games that play 40-50 hours of play, and you play with a few friends and someone provides the server. None of that needs the big companies.
Going to look forward in the 2027 for the Sony’s physical media blunder.
or the death of Bioware….
Yeah… don’t care about the delay of strips for Patreon, Tim deserves to make money. But honestly “current news commentary” style comics should probably just stop under the current model. Maybe make that Patreon exclusive or something. Getting these months late just feels like beating a dead horse by the time we see it
With so many devs out of work, there might be new indie studios arriving in the near future.
I mean its happened before. The old Bullfrog developers created a new studio and made a damn fine Theme Hospital remake. Though I really wish they’d redo some of their other classics.
But it could definitely happen here as well with other games
This is what I never got. By freeing dev’s from the corporate noose they create some times immediate competition for themselves in the form of indie devs and with tools getting better and faster an indie studio can get closer to AAA quality without having a work forces of thousands of people.
Well, I have a friend who has been working on a game for years… he is a game dev but he had to work with only little bits of time for his own passion game. The problem is that your fired devs don’t have huge piles of money. Even running a 6-12 person operation needed support from Quebec’s grants and investors. And that with the team not having huge payroll… That’s the problem. You could get the money back, or not… then the devs don’t get paid much and then they go down. Seen it happen. Working in a very… Read more »
It’s a PR move in a way that lessens the damage done to the company. It’s either that be like EA and get a reputation of being the company that kills off studios.
Can we agree that the decision makers (in general) are just continually making extremely poor decisions, everywhere, with such shocking consistency?
I am getting beyond tired of the complete and total enshittification of all facets of entertainment, and some aspects of daily life. Subscription based streaming being another specific sore point.
Some of it feels very deliberately. Leadership gets hired to maximize revenue as much as possible and by any means necessary so they and the shareholders can feast briefly before the company collapses and they all leave or sell their stocks and move on to their next victim.
On the surface, cutting some of these studios loose struck me as drastic… Arkane, Ninja Theory and Double Fine are well-known studios responsible for some incredible content so we think of them with that value in mind. The flip side of that, I guess is… what have they brought to the table lately? The alternate view of that is how much has whatever rules, restrictions, and expectations placed on them by the Xbox overlords limited what they were able to produce vs what might have emerged had they remained independent. It’s hard to be sure either way when some great… Read more »
Some of these studios’ good games didn’t make them all that much money even though they won awards. At the end of the day, it’s more about the money than awards that don’t mean anything really.
Maybe I’m wrong but, isn’t it BECAUSE they were bough by Microsoft that they didn’t make anything?
Big Tech are not known for their low pressure environment and creativity needs liberty, add a mismatch of corporate culture and you’ve got the usual recipe for disaster common to mergers. And the usual solution they go for is layoff too, its a classic.
For me Bethesda was dead the moment they were bought by Microsoft, it feels like I was right.
You need employees, that is why they were hired after all. These are usually short term cost cuts that can really hit profit long term.
Tis but a scratch
EA comes into the chat Hold my beer. Proceeds to fire 400 employees and shut down Bioware
I used to say this sort of thing too. However, in a lot of cases, the companies would have gone under without being bought out. Origin, having produced the Wing Commander series, was one of my favorites but they would have gone under after Wing Commander 2. Without EA, Westwood would have only produced one C+C game and one Red Alert game. More often than not, a lot of the games that we remember EA-purchased studios for were produced while they were under EA. It sucks when they get killed off (like when Eidos killed off Kronos Interactive) but it… Read more »
Except we know from many, many, many reports from games journalists that the reason present day Bioware is not the same company that it was before EA bought them is because most of the veterans quit the company because of EAs management decisions. You can blame the studio for flops only when the studio wasn’t already gutted by corporate greed and decision making before they produced those flops to begin with. Every two weeks during anthem’s development we had another news report about another twenty year veteren dev quitting the company because of the toxic culture EA was creating. It’s… Read more »
Deserved, what has Bioware done in the past Decade worth playing? The past 2 dragonage games were insulting. Let somebody else buy the IPs, the people responsible for the games we grew up playing at Bioware werent there when they shuttered the thing.
The last good thing they did was Mass Effect, and even 3 shit the bed with the ending.
On top of this, EA kills off Bioware…
It was already dead, they just buried it.
tbh its not like Bioware has covered itself in glory at all recently, nor has any of the game devs responsible for the great titles of yesteryear. Frankly, after what they’ve been making for the past decade, its overdue.
More accurate to say EA already killed bioware, they just finally disposed of the corpse. In case we didn’t remember the period during Anthem’s development when every two weeks we had another Schrier report that another six veteren devs left the company because of abusive toxic workplace practices from EA.
If everyone wants to play these huge, hundreds of hours (or thousands) with all these amazing visuals… that’s expensive. Also, with impact from wars and resources being horded in the real world. And with US running around changing their plans without a decent plan and the amount of money that’s cost… the whole societies are getting suffering. But if you want to have work on some sort of fun game that’s only going to give you 40-50 hours (like we did in the early days) of fun for a reasonable amount…. and if the studio isn’t aiming to sell out… Read more »
Steam isnt a publicly traded company. They arent bound by pure profit motive. They have been keeping the other companies honest. Think about every shitty thing in a mobile game that isnt in a console or pc game. Steam is responsible for keeping half of that out, because they wont sell your game if you do that shit.
Tis but a flesh wound
It’s gonna be rough being a gamer for a while. Hang onto your old systems.
Only if you don’t have a backlog of games to fall back on or only get AAA games.
Honestly, this was inevitable. Besides their relatively recent purchase of Activision, their next biggest purchase was Bethesda, and look at how terrible their output has been in the last decade. They were given more resources than ever before and all they managed to do was shit out Starfield. They had enough people to develop a new Fallout and Elder Scrolls simultaneously, but nope.
Not all the studios are as poorly run as that, and Xbox absolutely cut some that they shouldn’t have… but Bethesda wasn’t the only one excelling at mediocrity over there. This was inevitable.
At least with the Activision/Blizzard/King deal, Blizzard is doing okay now and has a solid line up planned for the future. Can’t say much about Activision or King though.
And thus Nintendo wins the console wars by staying the course and letting their rivals devour each other in an impossible arms race.
This is truly a “Luigi wins by doing absolutely nothing” scenario.
More like the rivals devour themselves instead of each other. Still, it Nintendo isn’t seen in a good light either, they just made fewer/smaller blunders than Sony and Xbox.
You’re really going to have to either give up on these topical comics or come up with a different way of presenting them, Tim. It’s going to be March by the time your inevitable Bioware closure comic comes out.
This particular one happens to almost feel topical because of Bioware, but thats an entirely different studio and parent company. You’re 100% right, he’s going to have to determine which ones remain in the archive and which topical ones roll out sooner.
I suppose if free users want to have time appropriate topical comics, they have to shell out.
I personally see the gutting of the triple A studios as a good thing. You can see the bloat from orbit. Games from our childhoods were made with dozens of people at most, and these leviathans with hundreds produce games not nearly as fun, and have sat for decades on IPs doing nothing, or worse, running them into the ground.
If you’re a game studio and you want a sure fire way to crater your IP, demoralize your staff, and generally die out a slow death measured in the span of a decade or two – let yourself get bought up by a publisher.