• supersquirrel@lemmy.caEnglish
    2 months

    More like ‘carpet bombed a lot of bridges’ repeatedly while condescending all the screaming.

  • Sabata@ani.socialEnglish
    2 months

    Evil corpos purchasing creativity just to see the soul flee.

  • CoolSouthpaw@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2 months

    That’s right. Can’t trust the legacy of Bill “Epstein Island” Gates to be a good company.

  • SapphironZA@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3 months

    They also don’t understand their customers.

    But they do understand what they care about. Short term “Shareholder value”

  • spacegoat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 months

    All developers should refuse to develop for Microsoft. Starve them out

    • alessandro@lemmy.caEnglish
      3 months

      The problem with employees and employed is that the thing goes the other way around… unfortunately.

  • QueenHawlSera@piefed.socialEnglish
    3 months

    Why did Microsoft buy all these studios if the plan was to never actually have them make anything?

    I’ve been asking that since they bought Rare and proceeded to do nothing with them.

    • moopet@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2 months

      It’s just like destroying all the health pickups in a multiplayer game so the other team can’t heal, I guess.

    • belated_frog_pants@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2 months

      Looking for exclusivity of games to “beat” other companies. As always is their model of “force people to pay us” instead of “make something compelling”. Its the Microsoft way.

    • reka@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 months

      my best guess is the people who signed off the purchases aren’t the same people who evaluate the value of the things they have purchased

      • Jako302@feddit.orgEnglish
        2 months

        Thats something you use to stop competitors before they get big, but MS was never part of the game publisher circle and doesnt’t seem to try either.

    • Banzai51@midwest.socialEnglish
      2 months

      Fear of missing out. It is institutionally ingrained into Microsoft when they were publicly burned for “missing out on the internet.”

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 months

      For a long time, their value proposition was “use us because what else can you do?” Trying to monololize the gaming industry by buying up whatever good studios they can is just a part of that.

    • CrypticCoffee@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3 months

      They wanted to own existing IP. Not make new stuff. Buy an asset, milk it, and that’ll do. Any words about long-term maybe were lies.

      • QueenHawlSera@piefed.socialEnglish
        3 months

        Yes, but what’s the point of owning the IP if you’re not releasing any new media with it, or even re-releasing the old stuff.

        It’s not like we get a bunch of HD Collections out of it. Hell Activision’s take on Wolfenstein hasn’t even been re-released even though with Id and Activision owned by the same company there should be no issues.

        • CrypticCoffee@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3 months

          Effort vs profitability to rework. Any content immediately releasable as part of gamepass was probably highest value to them.

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 months

      Because it’s run by fucking idiots with MBAs who have no connection whatsoever to the company’s profits and losses.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 months

    Playing devil’s advocate, sometimes the blame is not solely on Microsoft.

    Bethesda Softworks is a good example. They’d basically doomed Arkane to dev hell with that vampire game, and kept that little detail hidden during the acquisition; Microsoft gave them total leeway when the Arkane team supposedly hoped a “rescue” instead, and never got it.

    It’s a hard argument though.

    Take Phil Spencer. Just Phil Spencer. Thats an incredible crater, right there, and he failed upwards for it.

  • FluidBeef@quokk.auEnglish
    3 months

    Remember when Microsoft bought Rare and did basically nothing with them for two decades?

    • popcar2@piefed.caEnglish
      3 months

      FYI Doom The Dark Ages was available day 1 on game pass and they were boasting on social media that they had over 3 million players on the first week if I remember right.

      It’s Microsoft’s fault the game didn’t sell. Most people (me included) opted to subscribe to game pass for a month instead.

      • CrypticCoffee@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3 months

        Effectively it was a cost to increase and sustain subscriber numbers.

        If they didn’t gain more for the costs spent, they didn’t have a viable marketing plan, or they did and it just failed horribly. Incompetence at the top.

    • grrgyle@slrpnk.netEnglish
      3 months

      Dark Ages is meh. 2016 was legitimately fresh, and Eternal went a kind of interesting direction, but they legitimately need to take some time and go in a brand brand new direction if they want to make more than four of these games, because the “push forward” formula + lofi sf&f aesthetic alone is not going to cut it on its own.

    • BlackLaZoR@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 months

      I think that’s Bethesda being incompetent as fuck. They burned bridge with Mick Gordon, after Doom Eternal then instead of making dynamic well optimized game they made I’d make Dark Ages.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      2 months

      I bought Doom 2016 and it literally wouldn’t even get past the loading screen. I tried every suggestion I found online and none of them worked. I ended up refunding. It’s why I never even considered the next two.

      Edit: Why is this a controversial take?

          • Rolivers@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            3 months

            Tbh Doom TDA Revelations has been the most fun I’ve had with a game in years. It’s really good. But what M$ did to id software is disgusting. On release day of the DLC over half their employees got fired.

            Good job guys, you finished the project. Now pack your stuff and go.

            • Crankenstein@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3 months

              “We got your labor; you got a paycheck. Now fuck off so we can make the profit from what you made”.

              Ain’t capitalism just grand? /s

          • L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            3 months

            It’s not bad, it’s just not great and is also a mechanical deviation from what doom games usually are.

          • Crankenstein@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3 months

            Not really. It’s actually pretty good. Microsoft just did jack all to market it for some reason.

            It also did have some controversy at the start.

            First is because of a granular difficulty customization, down to even having a slider to slow or increase the speed of the game itself. Some elitists got butt hurt over it.

            Second is that it is a slower pace overall compared to the experience that 2016 and Eternal were. So, when it didn’t play like people expected, it caused some friction.

            Oh also, Microsoft forced it to be $70. So a lot of gamers just didn’t buy it out of principle.

  • anewfox@lemmy.zipEnglish
    3 months

    anyone who is hopeful about xbox’s new leadership probably isn’t terribly aware of microsoft’s past. they’ve done this dance a million times. “we’re improving!” -> people believe it yet again -> surprise, they found a way to suck even more now.

  • woelkchen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 months

    Yeah, this isn’t news and the studio owners who can cash big checks to sell don’t care.

    • faintwhenfree@lemmus.orgEnglish
      3 months

      I have talked to a mobile game Dev, a very drunker heart to heart. He had an India mobile game (like alto). He made about 120k in 5 years between two versions of the game. And then some tenent adjacent studio offered him 650k for the IP.

      In his words “All I could think was that in 650k, my house would be paid. My education loan would be paid and I would still have enough money to ensure my kid goes to college and not worry about an education loan. I knew selling game would mean enshittification of my baby. But then i looked at my actual baby and I knew I had to betray the digital one”

      That’s the first time I saw it from the dev point of view. He wanted to keep the project, but between choosing fans of his games that can’t keep a subreddit alive and doing right by no name, no face fan base vs 650k hard cash from a shitty studio that would concretely secure his family’s future. I am not sure if I would hold out.

      I know it’s not the same with the studio Microsoft bought… But I can’t help but wonder people who sellout might not be such horrible pieces of shit that we imagine them to be.

      • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.caEnglish
        3 months

        When you’re young you tend to think accepting money means you’re a sellout.

        When you’re an adult you think accepting money means you’re taking care of your family.

        Also adults are less likely to think video games are the most important thing in the world.

        • iegod@lemmy.zipEnglish
          3 months

          Absolutely. At the end of the day they’re just games. The rabid fans spewing vitriol have no perspective.

        • definitemaybe@lemmy.caEnglish
          3 months

          Yeah, right? Like, that deal sounds like a no-brainer, to me.

          Sure, the game could go viral and explode and make money hand over fist, and he’s missing out on that potential… But it probably won’t. And $650K is a lot of money, and he doesn’t need to keep grinding for years to make it happen.

          With a paid off house, it’s easy to stay afloat just coasting until he finds something new that excites him.

          Who wouldn’t take that deal?

          • paraplu@piefed.socialEnglish
            2 months

            It’s also plausibly enough money to make a new labor of love game for quite a while.

            Like even if you are in a position where you want to take care of the players or whatever, $650k helps towards doing that. Even with your priorities in a weird order like that, it still seems obvious that you’d take the money and start a new project.

    • WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3 months

      Microsoft has a lot more problems than that, but I suppose that’s the only one Steve Jobs would care about.

      • AppleTea@lemmy.zipEnglish
        3 months

        Steve engineers developed the iPod Touch in secret because they thought he would look at the ugly prototype and can the whole project Jobs

        • Leon@pawb.socialEnglish
          3 months

          Steve so impossible to please as a boss that his worker developed an application for him to develop a calculator layout because nothing the other designer did was ever good enough Jobs.

          Steve the iPad won’t get a calculator for fourteen years even though his corpse is long since dead and buried Jobs.

  • dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3 months

    In the future they will have difficulty recruiting talent for projects and as a result will have to pay people way more like Meta because of the stigma.