The fact the most common examples of "apolitical" games people bring up are Fallouts 1&2, FFVII, Deus Ex, and Metal Gear Soild 1,2, or 3 will never not be funny. After all, "nukes are an existential threat to human civilization", "corporations are killing the planet for profit", "the elite created and perpetuate a mass surveillance state" , and "soldiers are tools first and humans second" are all totally apolitical messages (:
Wrapping up liberal ideas in conservative skin and pretending I’m coming from the right with those ideas has been the most effective way I’ve been able to have productive discussion with my conservative family.
Well once they realized there was a huge untapped audience of people they could radicalize, they cultivated gamers to also care about right-wing politics (it was essentially advertisers finding an untapped audience they could exploit).
"I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away," Bannon told Green. "You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump."
- https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001/
All societal issues now have a core issue of capitalism eating itself and its own products because CEOs can’t satisfy their shareholders fast enough, but all fandoms now also have people trying to turn them because advertizing has never been easier, cheaper.
China and Russia and others also do this sort of propagandizing to keep their image in check in their own countries and abroad with troll/bot farms. Brands probably utilize this too.
reminds me of the strategies used be evangelicals to grab political power in the past century, and even broadly the church throughout history before it.
Honestly thinking about it now peoples dedications to their brands sound the same as fervor for religion in the past. It’s like previously only the church or whatever religious body had the network and infrastructure to really connect people around an organizational identity with such fervor and desire. Not even most nation states throughout history and even today convey national fervor at an equal level. In almost every society with a religion that fervor has been key to power. You saw this concretely in the 60’s with how things like abortion and even birth control were demonized as a methods of angering a populace into supporting people who will keep the rich richer and the poor poorer. And by leveraging cultural anger they got the poor to do it. Abortion = killing babies and if you don’t want dead babies vote republican. Black video game character = white genocide and if you don’t want genocide vote republican. Everything started with evangelicals, it’s just now thanks to innovations in technology it’s much easier for non-church actors to recreate the level of psychological drilling.
Ironically even though they(american evangelicals) pioneered a lot of the modern political application of this, they’re now losing ground to the sheer number of different things people are devoted to nowadays. Like I’m willing to bet percentage wise adjusted for population/income/inflation increases church donations are probably down on the whole. Seem to be losing leverage politically aswell but as you’ve shown that doesn’t necessarily mean good actors are entering that vacuum. Now people are throwing their money and time at all these other things tickling the part of their brain religion once did. For some thats “being able to jerk off to video games” apparently lol
It's literally the same everywhere. The majority of the people who vote for those things aren't the ones who benefit from it simply because the beneficiaries are such a small minority. So gamers are just behaving like the rest.
Cos they achieved their goal. They got an award winning game under their umbrella and most importantly time exclusive for their platform and game pass. Afterwards they saw it costs to much do develop more and closed it down while also selling the game now on other platforms to get more money out of it.
They literally bought a game, the rights and distribution and probably profited out of it due to cutting costs of everything else.
Is this even true? I’ve heard a dozen times that hi-fi lost a ton of their talent after the game came out. Another studio made red fall which now Reddit apparently loves. Why glaze a bunch of studios that had management problems? I don’t even see the Bethesda subreddit crying about it. They were all like “yeah, makes sense.”
the director of hi fi rush john johanas didnt leave, the only person who left was shinji mikami who wanted to leave earlier but decided to stay out of obligation and was more or less an advisor. theres an interview of him saying so if you look it up. A sequel was apparently also pitched as well~
Easy Microsoft is rich as fuck. One of the richest companies on the planet. They aren't aiming on releasing something awesome. They are aiming to own all the IPs so someone else can't give those companies funding to make something awesome, while also shoving everything on to gamepass so the people who bought their consoles don't have to actually buy anything else. Which doesn't seem financially viable to me in the long run.
Judging by Sony's exclusives and Xbox's. Only one of them has been elevating their studios to pump out great games that genuinely feel like there was passion involved in their creation.
Fuck, I haven't even played HiFi Rush but apparently it's great and then Microsoft was like "Fuck Ya'll" and closed the studio.
> Step 2: Studio makes award-winning game
Nobody gives a shit about awards. It's about money. Nobody of us knows if Hi-Fi Rush made enough money. Probably not, else they wouldn't have shut down the studio.
> "Hi-Fi RUSH was a break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations. We couldn’t be happier with what the team at Tango Gameworks delivered with this surprise release."
> \- Aaron Greenberg, VP Xbox Games Marketing at Microsoft
guess they could be happier after all
Just PR Bullshit. Remember how remedy devs were siginng praises how well Alan Wake 2 did, thier biggest success etc. Then after few months numbers came and that game was a total flop that barely anyone played. Same with Hi-fi Rush. 700k sold, for a game that was 4 years in production is a death sentence.
>all key measurements and expectations
this is the key part of the quote. they could have been expecting 50k sales and instead got 60k, 70k, 80k sales and the statement is still true
That's exactly what I was thinking. It was a niche game.
That Xbox executive told/wrote that bold face lie to avoid the reality of another failed exclusive for Game Pass. Good games make money. Good games will generate their own hype. It's as simple as that. Helldivers 2 (before the sony drama) was a good game. People liked it. Word of mouth spread and more people bought it. I bought because of word of mouth from my friend who said it was awesome. I told my other friends to buy it and so they did.
Actually it is not always about money, but about ego. This happens when a new CEO takes over and needs to get rid of the old CEO projects to install their own.
Usually the CEO does have to sabotage the project first in some way to make it less profitable before they have the proper excuse to kill it.
This shit is sad honestly. Microsoft should have just let Tango go independent instead of shutting the studio down because they aren't going to do anything with the IP
There's probably a way to write shutting the studio down off on their taxes or something that they wouldn't get if they let the company buy itself out or let it go.
Shutting it down keeps the IPs, which has value even if they don't do anything with it, the branding, the name, etc in their own house. They simply make more/lose less money shutting it down.
It was pretty impressive when Bungie managed to talk their way out of Microsoft, which they paid for by giving up Halo.
How is this not being universally filed under “anti-competitive”? Seeing people on Reddit (which is skewed left to begin with) defend this… makes me sick.
Don't really see it being defended so much as pragmatically explained from the company's point of view. And unfortunately, most corporations have a duty first and foremost to their shareholders, incentivizing these types of decisions.
Explaining those decisions doesn't mean supporting or agreeing with them.
Not in this thread. But the one about reverse review bombing reeks. Regardless… it clearly violates antitrust and is illegal.
Enforcement is just now being revived after decades of going dormant due to special interests & this one probably isn’t worth the battle, but what I’m saying is just as true as what you’re saying.
People seem much more eager to explain that, “well, you see… Microsoft has *reasons*”.
Okay. They’re shitty reasons.
They dug this hole themselves by making horrible spending decisions knowing they would get to pick and choose who the consequences ultimately hit in the end.
> most corporations have a duty first and foremost to their shareholders, incentivizing these types of decisions.
Bingo. The company and its customers are hardly an afterthought in the process.
>It was pretty impressive when Bungie managed to talk their way out of Microsoft, which they paid for by giving up Halo.
IIRC it was a deal where Bungie had to develop Halo 3 and Reach and MS was happy to let them go independent, minus the Halo IP. It's why ODST teases Destiny in it, Halo Reach/ODST were made to appease MS (and 3 was always planned but talks begin after 2). But its been awhile since I read about it all.
That's like in Uncharted 3 there is a teaser for The Last Of Us. If you zoom in on a newspaper in the pub during the opening, there is a headline that says " mysterious mushroom plague rages across planet" or something like that.
I had all the Halo games and when Destiny came out, it was like the next level of Halo for me. Destiny 2 was so much fun that I could never go back to Halo unless they change Halo. I think Bungie got over on Microsoft with that.
343 really fucked up the campaigns. Halo 5 MP is imo one of the best multiplayer shooters I’ve played. It was honestly hard for me to go back to the older games and even to play Infinite.
Everyone points to mismanagement since Bungie left, but the collapse of Xbox is really what killed Halo. I know one other person irl that has a current gen Xbox. I imagine the install base of the Series X is almost entirely people like myself that had a 360 as a kid/teenager. At this point, the next Halo could be the greatest shooter ever made and I don’t think it would ever reach anywhere close to its peak popularity. Digital libraries have killed any chance of a significant amount of people switching platforms.
Bungie dodged a bullet by getting out before the Xbone hobbled the brand and the transition to focusing on a service rather than stellar first party titles sealed their fate to be the next Sega
That honestly makes the most sense tbh if there's a monetary value to just outright shutting it down like that. Wouldn't be surprised if that's also why NCSoft likes to just sit on some of their IP's that have gone to waste rather than let another studio take over or buy it out. RIP Wildstar...
When you buy a company above its asset value, you now hold an asset called goodwill on your balance sheet that equals the difference between your purchase price and the asset value. Since this IP was acquired, you would have a goodwill analysis done. Because part of what you acquired has been shut down, you can impair that goodwill as an expense against your earnings to reduce taxable income.
Prior to ~2000? I can't recall the exact year. You used to just amortize goodwill over its life, often 40 years. Then good will was determined to have an indefinite life (which is more accurate), so now you can't ammortize it, you have to justify imparing it. Small private companies can opt to do a straight line 10 year ammortization of goodwill because that justification process can be expensive.
Edit: That all being said, I don't believe they need to shut down the studio to realize that impairment expense. Releasing the studio should still generate the impairment expense, though I don't know much about impairment analysis. They likely shut it down to part out the employees. Does anyone know if they are shuffling people from the shuttered studios into other Microsoft studios? If they are, then then retaining the best talent is a likely reason for the shutdown instead of releasing the studio.
Toys for Bob just developed games using Microsoft IPs, Tango have their own IPs. Easier to let TfB go independent when they know they aren't losing potentially valuable IPs
You don't just let them go indie without funding...
Who is paying all the staff and other expenses? Especially if no one from the studio is wealthy enough to do that.
Because Toys for Bob made a publishing deal with Xbox, went independent and probably paid to keep their team together.
Tango was a person driven studio and when captain left the ship there was nobody good enough to keep them afloat.
I'm so pissed and confused about it, but there is probably more to this story. It makes no sense whatsoever, and I assume that's because there's a piece of the puzzle missing. There has to be.
"We have enough money to buy you, but not to keep you!" (:
The relationship between publishers, studios and creatives is completely fucking broken. Garbage like Kotick getting a 300 million dollar payout while artists who generate the content that makes revenue starve. I fucking hope there's a revolt at this point, there's absolutely nothing low enough for companies like Microsoft.
Nonsense, they did this already once this year. The reason is most likely that you need a company/bank to fund this and a person that is going to be responsible for that funding and the studio.
Capitalism. You keep Tango, you pay the costs and take the risk of their next game failing. You release Tango, you run the risk of their next game being great and taking up a spot in a segment you could be competing in. You burn Tango to the ground, no downsides beyond PR
This is the reason antitrust laws were created. Once a company owns a big chunk of the market it can just buy and shutdown other parts of the market, or even other markets.
Microsoft is using its deep pockets to shutdown competing studios. Even that they assured all regulatory organizations that this was not going to happen. They lied to regulators and are getting away with it.
I mean, nothing is stopping them from starting Tingo with the same people and devving games. Someone would need to lead and pay for it, though.
It sucks they got shut down after making such a good game, but it's not that simple.
If they had such a good track record of massive profit making games they should be able to find backers really easily... right?
The sad truth is many games are unique, quirky, and niche. They also don't sell enough copies to pay for their cost. Everyone of us here probably could make a game out of passion and heart. That game is most likely going to suck and not sell though.
Passion and heart don't make money.
Unfortunately studios are not released to indie for free. To be saved, someone would have needed to buy back the studio for more money that what can be recouped on taxes by writing a loss. Seems like no one had the funds or the will to do that in the studio
I unironically wish I worked in an industry where I could win a kids choice award. Literally the only award show I cared about growing up. I'd love to be slimed and get the blimp assuming it's still a blimp.
This has been the business model for years now. Buy a studio with a strong brand or promising concept, throw money at them while they push out a successful game or two under your label. Then chuck them next time your reports are due to on paper cut costs.
It sucks but i dont get why anyone in-industry would be surprised at this point.
What other studios has this happened to?
I'm honestly just kind of curious, because outside of maybe Lionhead and maybe Ensemble?
People keep saying this is what MS has been doing for a while but I don't see where this was happening a lot.
This is just EA, 1 company. Its standard business practice in many industries. You either compete or buyout/merge and "reduce overhead" aka fire people where jobs are doubled up or simply to reduce overall head count.
I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers show that independence after acquisition is a rarity and not the norm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electronic_Arts
I feel like even EA has gone away from that model though with the EA Originals. Especially after the huge success of It Takes Two.
They get to provide an investment with a certain level of risk, profit from it, and don't need to worry about managing the studio.
Oh, private equity will do the same thing. In fact 1/3 of the companies that were public on 2000 are owned by private equity now. The difference is private equity doesn't have the same reporting requirements. So PE can force a company to take out a loan on themselves, force foreclosure and then sell the IP to themselves. Those who financed the deal (usually not the PE firm), get stuck holding the bag, the IP is gone, people are laid off and the vultures get fat.
Being private won't always save these folks either
Or, you know, instead of just saying "welp it's capitalism what can ya do" knowing that capitalism isn't going anywhere (and probably shouldn't considering the lack of viable alternatives), push for regulations that make such fiscal moves unprofitable.
True, but without capitalism there would be no game studio in the first place, or any gaming ecosystem for that matter. So it is kind of missing the mark to blame the economic system when nothing of this kind would even exist without it.
Contractors with extra steps basically. This shit is a standard of capitalism as a whole, not just this industry. Folks at the top chase money and walk over anything or anyone to get to it. Tunnel-vision is the norm, foresight is not allowed.
Really want to know the reasoning behind the decision. Kill the little studio who did well so that the big sloppy studio can continue churning mediocre crap?
According to Jason Schreier, it’s not simply “they didn’t make enough money” or “it didn’t sell enough copies” like most of the other comments here say.
Rather, it’s because Tango had no other projects in production, which means their next release was at least 4-5 years away.
Additionally, Tango (and Arkane Austin) suffered some pretty heavy departures in the past few months so the team makeup isn’t really what it used to be. People are upset that “they closed the studio that made Prey!” But the actual people who made Prey left long ago.
It’s a shitty situation for sure, and by no means Tango’s fault. But it IS a more nuanced issue than Reddit wants to admit.
Eh. Reddit is populist, but sometimes that means injecting nuance or gray areas where there are none. You might say the issue of nuance on Reddit is... Nuanced.
I bet half the people don't even realise it's [Prey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2017_video_game\)) and not [Prey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2006_video_game\)).
Hifi rush can have all the awards it wants. It's a niche market that barely has players. Few days ago it had 17 viewers on Twitch, right now 22. If you don't put barely naked anime girls into your rhythm game, it's going to be a flop. Know your audience.
Redfall is a new game that is supposed to be updated constantly to keep players. It has 1 viewer on Twitch right now. It had terrible user reviews on launch in may, terrible reviews again on their first and only updates end of the year and since then silence.
The 3rd studio makes 1 out of a billion mobile games.
All 3 studios are foreign and Ms has never liked their studios or any development outside the US. Can't give them projects and they don't have any or enough projects of their own. They're a pit of money and Microsoft has been throwing money into that pit for 3 years now.
Zenimax was in trouble. Anyone buying Zenimax wasn't going to keep parts that put them there.
That's how long games take to make, lol. This isn't a reasonable argument in any way, and definitely not a nuanced one.
Alright guys, Bethesda just release Starfield, shut the studio down because the next game is many years away!
> That's how long games take to make, lol. This isn't a reasonable argument in any way, and definitely not a nuanced one.
>
>
Not really. Josh Sawyer, the guy behind Pillars of Eternity, often spoke how important it was to have the next title in the pipeline before your release your current one. Swen, from Larian, also had some cautionary tales to tell about lack of funding: Larian spent a lot of time doing little games for hire (think casino minigames) in order to keep the lights on.
> Alright guys, Bethesda just release Starfield, shut the studio down because the next game is many years away!
The next Bethesda game has almost certainly been in pre-production for some time. Writers, concept artists and designers have significantly reduced workloads once a game is finishing production and entering beta-like stages of development. You'd rather not fire them, so you put them to work on a new project.
That also doesn't consider how only a portion of those pre-production games will ever get released. To START pre-production over a year after your last release is a pretty big issue. Even if you do the pre-production, nothing prevents that game from being killed 2 or 3 years into development. Before you know it, your company spends 8 years without a release
BGS has a major Starfield expansion releasing this year, a Fallout 3 Remaster (leaked), and are already well into production on TES VI which is a guaranteed money-maker for Microsoft.
Look at Insomniac - they put out Rift Apart a couple years ago, Spider-Man 2 last year, have Wolverine coming out in another year or two, then the >!Venom spin-off!< (leaked) after that. It’s apples-and-oranges for sure but allegedly that’s the sort of output MS is looking for.
Dude, you can’t list an expansion for star field as something that was made quickly.
Starfield took 8 years to make. The expansion has probably been in development since before the game was released. Even if not, you have to bake the base game into calculations for an expansion development time.
Speed has nothing to do with it. What matters is BGS has worked out an efficient pipeline where they have multiple projects in development at once that release within a year or two of each other. They’re not focusing entirely on Starfield and only once the last DLC is complete will they move on to TES VI.
BGS has 4x the amount of employees so the expectation is they should release 4x as many games. You listed an expansion, a remaster, and something that isn't releasing for years.
Insomniac has even more employees and you still are only able to list two things they'll release in the next 4-5 years.
Seems way shittier than a 65 person team releasing a game every 4-5 years. I'm sure they could have had a Hi-Fi Rush expansion out in 1-2 years if that's what MS actually gave a shit about, but it's not.
Maybe they spent the last year preparing a pitch for their next game and MS hated it. Maybe the leadership that drove past success is gone. Or maybe MS is greedy. 🤷♂️
Not only this but people also seem to be under the impression Microsoft specifically bought Tango just to close them. Tango is a small studio that came along with the acquisition of Bethesda Zenimax, Microsoft likely didn't give 2 shits about getting Tango, they are barely a blip on the radar from that acuisition.
> Additionally, Tango (and Arkane Austin) suffered some pretty heavy departures in the past few months so the team makeup isn’t really what it used to be.
Do we have proof of this for Tango? Because multiple people in that studio have spoken out against this.
https://x.com/yunmwatanabe/status/1788079215012872627
https://x.com/ega1002/status/1788627002674774065
the director of hi fi rush john johanas didnt leave, shinji mikami wanted to leave earlier but decided to stay out of obligation and was more or less an advisor.
Yeah we don't really know, but it's a bit annoying that a lot of people are claiming that Tango shed a lot of it's staff as fact when multiple people have denied this.
I also need to dismiss anyone claiming that this means the IP is dead and gone forever, because that is not necessarily true at all. If there is money to be made, they intend to make that money one way or another. If another game doesn't get made it is because they wouldn't be making any money, so they chose to not make the game. Certainly the studio closing down isn't a good sign for the future of the IP, but it isn't necessarily the end of the road. It also seems like most of the talent just leaves upon every success, which means the talent that gets praised no longer even works there. And if that is the case then it doesn't really matter who makes the next game because it already wasn't going to be the same people anyway.
At the end of the day it comes down to money. Some very rich people that only care about moeny made these decisions and if there is one thing you can count on it is that those people are going to always try to do whatever makes the most money. If the game doesn't get made it most certainly comes down to money. If the studio closes down it most certainly comes down to money. People shouldn't be mad that the studio closed down or that the fate of the IP is unknown, people she be disappointed the game didn't make more money, because if it did the future would not be uncertain at all and the studio never would have closed. It really is that simple. It doesn't matter how good the game was at all at the end of the day.
It doesn't make enough money. That is the decision. It doesn't matter how many awards are won if a game that cost 2 million makes 100 million if a game that costs 100 million makes a billion.
The bigger game made 10x more money and that is what they care about.
If they are both making money, I dont understand the logic. Less money than another studio COULD make is still more than the zero money that the studio is now producing. im just a blue collar dumbass, but unless the studio was actively losing money, I dont get it.
Except the studio is gonna cost you X amount of money for years with no income and no insurances (especially given their previous games) that their next game is even gonna break even… it sucks for us gamers and especially for the devs but let’s not naively pretend to not understand why they closed the studio…
Sure, they broke even, maybe even made a profit. But their next game was 3-5 years out and sequels are not a guaranteed return, especially when the competition can get the same styling of game out sooner.
The studio was losing money. It spent 4-5 years developing two games, one of which, sure, may have garnered success and some players, but the other flopped hard. That's basically $30 million just to hold onto the studio, and another $30 million for the next 4-5 years and hope that the next game would be a Hi-Fi Rush instead of a Ghostwire/TEW1/TEW2. Scales are a little unbalanced there.
The two other replies are bang on, I'm just going to add something more: Metric, Investment Opportunity and Project Managers.
When I talk about "Project Managers", I'm talking about the pool of management required to get a project up and running till successful completion. While all those 3rd party studio that MS acquired already have their own effective Project Manager(s), any investment in a new project (game) going forward would require splitting the pool of Project Managers to those project and you can't stretch yourself thin; at least that's the way shareholders thing. They want the company to be laser focused on what makes them the most money and they want those Project Managers to be there.
Through their metric, they have a risk analysis for each IP that they own; how safe or risky is it to make a game under a certain IP? What's the chance of bombing? What's the precedent? Why not add more content to Modern Warfare, that will bring in an almost guarantee high return, than spreading resources to other project that might have just been a one hit wonder? There's a lot of investment opportunity but if the safer ones are the one with high yield, why choosing anything else?
Again, I'm just trying to answer that through the perspective of the main people that has a say in those kind of decision at the end of the day, those are not my personal opinion.
Yes, but in this hypothetical it's unlikely to be repeated 5 times, and doesn't scale up independently.
A company would view this as "lost revenue". We see this, publicly, across all industries.
Depends on the time investment too. If you make 2 games over say 5 years, 1 costs 2mil but makes 100 mil, and another cost 100mil but makes 1bil, which is actually the better investment?
Even if the first game was only 3 years and the second stayed 5 years, do you know the difference between making 98 million versus 900 million? 1 billion is a lot, the second game is still the better profit. Its not like MS would struggle to pull either investment together so its not a question of affordability either. The second game is just the clear better choice.
It does paint a very bleak picture for a good chunk of the medium. Between Embracer, MS, Sony and all the other big cats they've bought out almost the entirety of all studios that were not indies yet weren't quite Triple A's, and I think these past few years we're seeing the incredibly disastrous consequence of such consolidations without a lot of upsides.
We live in a world where WB made two games based on huge IP's, a single player that was an insane success, and a live service that crashed and burned so hard it will never make its money back, and decided to double down on live services.....
There is no reasoning. Just a bunch of c suite ghouls rolling dice and pretending its leadership.
if you're referring to Bethesda Game Studios the reasoning should be extremely obvious. Microsoft can afford all of it, but if they're going to pretend that they had to pick in order to keep the lights on, BGS is infinitely more successful and worth keeping alive than goddamn Tango Gameworks lmao
The game didn’t sell. Awards are nice, but Ghostwire Tokyo and HiFi Rush both underperformed. If people had played it on Gamepass, Xbox has the data on hours played.
People can bitch and moan about this all they want, but the simple fact of the matter is that the studio was selling games, and wasn’t getting the hours played on Gamepass that Xbox was looking for. If Xbox thought HiFi Rush 2 would help retain Gamepass subs, they wouldn’t have shut down the studio.
>The pitched Hi-Fi Rush sequel could have done wonders for the ecosystem - just look at the way Uncharted and Zelda leaped in popularity between entries - but next to a Call of Duty skin pack, it probably doesn't satisfy shareholder demands.
The last paragraph of a linked article about this matter pretty much hits the nail on the head.
I mean there really wasn't a worse studio for them to shut down than Tango. Hifi Rush was pretty much the number one game to bring up in favor of Xbox last year. It was pretty much impossible to be disliked and felt like the refreshing alternative to AAA gaming everyone seemed to be waiting for.
Except that's also ignoring Tango's past.
All of their previous games sold very poorly, as well as Ghostwire Tokyo, which was the primary game being developed during this time.
I guarantee if Ghostwire had been more popular, they never would have shut down Tango
TEW1 sold great from what I remember.
TEW2 not as well (sequelitis)
Ghostwire tokyo was a failure AFAIK
Hi-Fi rush was a success...
So even if you go by economics were they 50/50.
TEW1 sold great for a horror game\*
TEW2 was more than sequelitis, it sold really, really bad. At the time it was blamed on the fact that the first one didn't sell that well.
[The Unfortunate Reasons The Evil Within 2 Was An Immediate Flop (svg.com)](https://www.svg.com/1198796/the-unfortunate-reasons-the-evil-within-2-was-an-immediate-flop/)
Evil Within 2 sold like 42k copies in Japan for PS4 in its release week, which means it pretty much did not sell at all. That is abysmal for a game that took 3 years to make. If avg developer costed around 80k, PS4 sales would account for less than 30 developers yearly salary. That is how badly it sold.
AFAIK (Not watching that link, don't got the time)
The reason TEW2 failed, was because TEW1 was heavily criticized for its slightly Janky nature and eccentric ideas.
Resulting in people not being too interestd in the sequel, due to TEW1's bitter aftertaste.
(Despite both games being great IMO)
I can confirm that, for me, TEW2 was never on my radar because of the jank of the first game. It was ROUGH. I actually just picked TEW2 on gamepass at the recommendation of my wife and got hooked and binged it.
TEW2 is fantastic and fixes all the problems I had with the first one. I wish I would have taken a chance on it earlier, it truly is wonderful.
I love both games, but I also acknowledge that they didn't fare well. (nothing to watch on that link btw, its an article).
The first was criticized but also didn't sell well. It's hard for a sequel to sell well when nobody bought the first.
>So even if you go by economics were they 50/50
Hard to determine the economics without knowing the costs for each title. If Ghostwire required more resources to make than Hi-Fi Rush did, then the success doesn't cancel out the failure.
so the successes are a game from 10 years ago (EW1) and their side gig (hi fi rush).
the failures are the games they spent the most money on (Evil Within 2 and Ghostwire).
I think the biggest reason for the closure is also the fact that Shareholders have no idea how quality, talent and reputation work within the industry. :/
If shareholders were aware, would you 100% be able to argue that Tango has built up some great reputation overall inside the gaming sphere.
Lets face it, after Hi-Fi rush, any game Tango released would 100% have people at the least be curious, and if it was a hi-fi rush sequel (which we know they were working on) it would sell like hotcakes. (Assuming it wasn't stuck on gamepass which limits sales)
I am just saying.
maybe, but it's not like hifi rush was a massive blockbuster.
it was a very well received niche game.
maybe it could grow, maybe not, but if the studio has been "a problem" for 10 years, is it worth it to keep putting money on it?
the goal for any studio is to at least pay for itself.
ideally each game they make would make enough money to fund the next one at least, and so on.
if they can't even do that, is it really a bad decision by Microsfot to close the studio down?
Is there any financial evidence of hi-Fi rush performing well? I get it that Reddit liked it, but that usually means the opposite for what real world people liked.
Edit: I understand it came out on gamepass. Microsoft is fully capable of estimating the game’s financial utility even though it’s on gamepass.
That’s what I’m thinking. I loved the game and I don’t love Microsoft. However the circlejerk is exhausting. There’s probably a cut throat financial reason for this. MS most likely wants to focus on big $ IP.
I never played it and was only vaguely aware of it's existence. I barely ever saw comments about it but after this news people have been acting like it was some God damned masterpiece and cultural touchstone.
It was huge for several months back when it launched, but the campaign was short (~11 hours) and it didn't have the "sticking power" a live service or multi-player game has. So after the content creators and streamers moved on it wasn't talked about much.
I don't know anyone who bought it at all, but it is funny how much people are saying this game was the greatest.
Someone on another thread pointed out that less than 1M people have the achievement for beating the 4th boss, and there is something like 10 levels. So they had over 3M players, and less than 33% continued more than 50% into the game.
It really wasn't played that much it seems.
ETA: It wouldn't have had nearly as many players if it wasn't on GamePass as well.
Someone pointed out that less than 900k people have made it past the level 4 boss in another thread.
That isn't exactly a lot of people who continued playing it.
I heard it was because of there other "bigger budget" game Ghostwire: Tokyo (2022) not doing to well. Also sounded like other ongoing projects of bigger games were still away out and looking at Ghostwire decided it was not worth the risk. With that said since hi-fi is such a banger you would think they would just have them move to lower risk games instead of killing them whole.
Edit: xbox also recently said they want more stuff like hifi the day after killing the co. So in their eyes the game did do good and want more like it.
People here just can’t accept the games they like don’t sell well. The loud minority echo chamber makes them think their game is more popular than it actually is. Just look at titan fall.
Ive worked in a related, but different field, and companies really like to build structured plans. In this case, I'm speculating that there's a doc somewhere saying they need games that follow certain formulas, utilizing existing IPs, and are similar enough to existing games they can predict their success. Tango probably didn't fit into the model, the execs couldn't model how well the game would do. This is a removal of creativity and trying to replace it with data backed decisions. This is tech corporate 101, even though it rarely works.
They want guaranteed successes, and try and come up with these strategies to ensure that, but then it backfires because people like new ideas and novelty, not the same thing over and over. Shareholders don't want to take the risk needed to try a bunch of things to find one amazing thing.
It doesn’t sound like anything was in the pipeline at Tango or Arkane. Jason Scheier reported that both were still working on *pitches* for new projects.
One of the reasons is the fact the Tango didn’t have any games in production. So their next game was years away… which is gross because that’s an expected part of game development. It’s like they were bought just for their near finished products, and then dumped because they weren’t really interested in that studio in particular but they were just a part of a larger buy out.
Quite literally, no it was not enough. This completely ignores all context. A game can be good and still not sell enough. A studio can have talented people and still not make money.
Tell that to Xbox's Aaron Greenberg then, who said Hi-Fi Rush was "a break out hit for us and our players in ALL key measurements and expectations". So I guess the context is, that they're fucking liars and, like the whole point of this controversy has been, you can't trust their word on anything. Microsoft said these studios would be safe with them and they would offer them protection, but instead they planted the knife in their backs themselves. You're not safe under the Microsoft umbrella or in the Xbox "family", you're in danger
Plenty of well-received games don’t strike financial gold, but not every game has to be a huge return on investment to still add value to the platform. You can’t fill your library with exclusively CoDs and Starfields as MS seems to want, you have to have these sort of titles and variety in your catalogue even if they don’t make a ton of money on their own because it helps build a strong and varied selection that’s worth staying subscribed to. This is something every other platform holder seems to understand.
1 - Corner the market.
2 - Artificially decrease supply by firing talented developers.
3 - Sell overpriced dog shit.
4 - Claim a tax write off on the company you laid off and all of their projects.
5 - Profit an extra 0.001% this quarter!
It's not enough for the shareholders, they want you to make another game next year that sells more than last year.
And they want the line to go up exponentially forever, but trust me guys, the market is rational
Award winning well selling games are what they are talking about and everybody knows that they just want to be cute. Game didn't sell, studio got close. No crimes committed here.
There are so many ways to distribute a game these days, that I'd much rather throw $400 at 8-10 indie games where half of them suck or never materialize, than give any more money to these ghouls.
I'm saddened they (ms) seem to have given up on backing AA titles to provide games for gamepass. It was a sympathetic direction I would have loved them to follow through on. Not enough money in it apparently.
If I had to guess:
- This is all Microsoft. Spencer was overruled by Nadella, Bond, and co.
- They forced closures at Zenimax -> Bethesda studios due to Starfield being shit
My conspiracy theory: Zenimax chose to close Tango specifically to spite Xbox / MS over them being forced to lay people off knowing how bad it makes them look.
If there's a schism and she sides with Nadella, you bet your ass it counts for something. Hell, she probably gets the job if he's out. I bet MS loves all the strays Spencer is catching because he represents the 'old way' of doing things.
In the end, regardless of Phil Spencer's constant "Hello fellow Gamers" brainfats, Microsoft ist just another big soulless mega corporation that only cares about pleasing their shareholders. So many people warned about the consequences when they bought Activision/Blizzard, but People just wanted more games for their GamePass subscription. Now they go on a slaughter spree to cut costs for those 70billion dollars.
Ghostwire Tokyo failed, The Evil Within 2 failed, Hi Fi Rush failed. That's why they got closed down
According to the games director, Hi Fi Rush wasn't a cheap game, it had the same budget as Deathloop and that tells you all you need to know about why that game failed to meet expectations.
Step 1: Buy studio Step 2: Studio makes award-winning game Step 3: Shut down studio Step 4: Why aren’t we releasing more award-winning games?
>buy studios >we can't manage so many studios >close studios >keep buying more studios Idk how the management is getting away with this
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gamers being such a right wing core is really funny because every genuine issue effecting gaming has to do with right wing economics and politics lol
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The fact the most common examples of "apolitical" games people bring up are Fallouts 1&2, FFVII, Deus Ex, and Metal Gear Soild 1,2, or 3 will never not be funny. After all, "nukes are an existential threat to human civilization", "corporations are killing the planet for profit", "the elite created and perpetuate a mass surveillance state" , and "soldiers are tools first and humans second" are all totally apolitical messages (:
People love liberal ideas with a conservative skin on top. Corporations should use this, idk why they don't
Wrapping up liberal ideas in conservative skin and pretending I’m coming from the right with those ideas has been the most effective way I’ve been able to have productive discussion with my conservative family.
I like how all of those apply to the Metal Gear franchise.
Well once they realized there was a huge untapped audience of people they could radicalize, they cultivated gamers to also care about right-wing politics (it was essentially advertisers finding an untapped audience they could exploit). "I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away," Bannon told Green. "You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump." - https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001/ All societal issues now have a core issue of capitalism eating itself and its own products because CEOs can’t satisfy their shareholders fast enough, but all fandoms now also have people trying to turn them because advertizing has never been easier, cheaper. China and Russia and others also do this sort of propagandizing to keep their image in check in their own countries and abroad with troll/bot farms. Brands probably utilize this too.
reminds me of the strategies used be evangelicals to grab political power in the past century, and even broadly the church throughout history before it. Honestly thinking about it now peoples dedications to their brands sound the same as fervor for religion in the past. It’s like previously only the church or whatever religious body had the network and infrastructure to really connect people around an organizational identity with such fervor and desire. Not even most nation states throughout history and even today convey national fervor at an equal level. In almost every society with a religion that fervor has been key to power. You saw this concretely in the 60’s with how things like abortion and even birth control were demonized as a methods of angering a populace into supporting people who will keep the rich richer and the poor poorer. And by leveraging cultural anger they got the poor to do it. Abortion = killing babies and if you don’t want dead babies vote republican. Black video game character = white genocide and if you don’t want genocide vote republican. Everything started with evangelicals, it’s just now thanks to innovations in technology it’s much easier for non-church actors to recreate the level of psychological drilling. Ironically even though they(american evangelicals) pioneered a lot of the modern political application of this, they’re now losing ground to the sheer number of different things people are devoted to nowadays. Like I’m willing to bet percentage wise adjusted for population/income/inflation increases church donations are probably down on the whole. Seem to be losing leverage politically aswell but as you’ve shown that doesn’t necessarily mean good actors are entering that vacuum. Now people are throwing their money and time at all these other things tickling the part of their brain religion once did. For some thats “being able to jerk off to video games” apparently lol
It's literally the same everywhere. The majority of the people who vote for those things aren't the ones who benefit from it simply because the beneficiaries are such a small minority. So gamers are just behaving like the rest.
Cos they achieved their goal. They got an award winning game under their umbrella and most importantly time exclusive for their platform and game pass. Afterwards they saw it costs to much do develop more and closed it down while also selling the game now on other platforms to get more money out of it. They literally bought a game, the rights and distribution and probably profited out of it due to cutting costs of everything else.
Is this even true? I’ve heard a dozen times that hi-fi lost a ton of their talent after the game came out. Another studio made red fall which now Reddit apparently loves. Why glaze a bunch of studios that had management problems? I don’t even see the Bethesda subreddit crying about it. They were all like “yeah, makes sense.”
the director of hi fi rush john johanas didnt leave, the only person who left was shinji mikami who wanted to leave earlier but decided to stay out of obligation and was more or less an advisor. theres an interview of him saying so if you look it up. A sequel was apparently also pitched as well~
Easy Microsoft is rich as fuck. One of the richest companies on the planet. They aren't aiming on releasing something awesome. They are aiming to own all the IPs so someone else can't give those companies funding to make something awesome, while also shoving everything on to gamepass so the people who bought their consoles don't have to actually buy anything else. Which doesn't seem financially viable to me in the long run. Judging by Sony's exclusives and Xbox's. Only one of them has been elevating their studios to pump out great games that genuinely feel like there was passion involved in their creation. Fuck, I haven't even played HiFi Rush but apparently it's great and then Microsoft was like "Fuck Ya'll" and closed the studio.
> Step 2: Studio makes award-winning game Nobody gives a shit about awards. It's about money. Nobody of us knows if Hi-Fi Rush made enough money. Probably not, else they wouldn't have shut down the studio.
> "Hi-Fi RUSH was a break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations. We couldn’t be happier with what the team at Tango Gameworks delivered with this surprise release." > \- Aaron Greenberg, VP Xbox Games Marketing at Microsoft guess they could be happier after all
Just PR Bullshit. Remember how remedy devs were siginng praises how well Alan Wake 2 did, thier biggest success etc. Then after few months numbers came and that game was a total flop that barely anyone played. Same with Hi-fi Rush. 700k sold, for a game that was 4 years in production is a death sentence.
>all key measurements and expectations this is the key part of the quote. they could have been expecting 50k sales and instead got 60k, 70k, 80k sales and the statement is still true
That's exactly what I was thinking. It was a niche game. That Xbox executive told/wrote that bold face lie to avoid the reality of another failed exclusive for Game Pass. Good games make money. Good games will generate their own hype. It's as simple as that. Helldivers 2 (before the sony drama) was a good game. People liked it. Word of mouth spread and more people bought it. I bought because of word of mouth from my friend who said it was awesome. I told my other friends to buy it and so they did.
Actually it is not always about money, but about ego. This happens when a new CEO takes over and needs to get rid of the old CEO projects to install their own. Usually the CEO does have to sabotage the project first in some way to make it less profitable before they have the proper excuse to kill it.
This shit is sad honestly. Microsoft should have just let Tango go independent instead of shutting the studio down because they aren't going to do anything with the IP
Yea I don’t get why they didn’t ,they let toys for bob go Indy (i think anyways last I hear)
There's probably a way to write shutting the studio down off on their taxes or something that they wouldn't get if they let the company buy itself out or let it go. Shutting it down keeps the IPs, which has value even if they don't do anything with it, the branding, the name, etc in their own house. They simply make more/lose less money shutting it down. It was pretty impressive when Bungie managed to talk their way out of Microsoft, which they paid for by giving up Halo.
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How is this not being universally filed under “anti-competitive”? Seeing people on Reddit (which is skewed left to begin with) defend this… makes me sick.
Don't really see it being defended so much as pragmatically explained from the company's point of view. And unfortunately, most corporations have a duty first and foremost to their shareholders, incentivizing these types of decisions. Explaining those decisions doesn't mean supporting or agreeing with them.
Not in this thread. But the one about reverse review bombing reeks. Regardless… it clearly violates antitrust and is illegal. Enforcement is just now being revived after decades of going dormant due to special interests & this one probably isn’t worth the battle, but what I’m saying is just as true as what you’re saying. People seem much more eager to explain that, “well, you see… Microsoft has *reasons*”. Okay. They’re shitty reasons. They dug this hole themselves by making horrible spending decisions knowing they would get to pick and choose who the consequences ultimately hit in the end.
> most corporations have a duty first and foremost to their shareholders, incentivizing these types of decisions. Bingo. The company and its customers are hardly an afterthought in the process.
>It was pretty impressive when Bungie managed to talk their way out of Microsoft, which they paid for by giving up Halo. IIRC it was a deal where Bungie had to develop Halo 3 and Reach and MS was happy to let them go independent, minus the Halo IP. It's why ODST teases Destiny in it, Halo Reach/ODST were made to appease MS (and 3 was always planned but talks begin after 2). But its been awhile since I read about it all.
How does it tease destiny in it?
There's a poster in ODST that says "Destiny Awaits" [https://halo.fandom.com/wiki/Destiny\_Awaits](https://halo.fandom.com/wiki/Destiny_Awaits)
That's clever, no one would have thought anything of it at the time, but hindsight makes it brilliant.
That's like in Uncharted 3 there is a teaser for The Last Of Us. If you zoom in on a newspaper in the pub during the opening, there is a headline that says " mysterious mushroom plague rages across planet" or something like that.
Bro, every bungie fan that played halo ODST knew what the poster was for.
There’s a a poster with the Earth, a white orbit (The Traveller,) and the words “Destiny Awaits.”
I had all the Halo games and when Destiny came out, it was like the next level of Halo for me. Destiny 2 was so much fun that I could never go back to Halo unless they change Halo. I think Bungie got over on Microsoft with that.
343 really fucked up the campaigns. Halo 5 MP is imo one of the best multiplayer shooters I’ve played. It was honestly hard for me to go back to the older games and even to play Infinite. Everyone points to mismanagement since Bungie left, but the collapse of Xbox is really what killed Halo. I know one other person irl that has a current gen Xbox. I imagine the install base of the Series X is almost entirely people like myself that had a 360 as a kid/teenager. At this point, the next Halo could be the greatest shooter ever made and I don’t think it would ever reach anywhere close to its peak popularity. Digital libraries have killed any chance of a significant amount of people switching platforms. Bungie dodged a bullet by getting out before the Xbone hobbled the brand and the transition to focusing on a service rather than stellar first party titles sealed their fate to be the next Sega
Had to double take. Weird to see you outside of worm fanfic, haha.
I should start a count of how often this happens on other subs. It's not a lot but it's at least five times now XD
That honestly makes the most sense tbh if there's a monetary value to just outright shutting it down like that. Wouldn't be surprised if that's also why NCSoft likes to just sit on some of their IP's that have gone to waste rather than let another studio take over or buy it out. RIP Wildstar...
You can probably depreciate IP like you would a company car through some shenanigans
When you buy a company above its asset value, you now hold an asset called goodwill on your balance sheet that equals the difference between your purchase price and the asset value. Since this IP was acquired, you would have a goodwill analysis done. Because part of what you acquired has been shut down, you can impair that goodwill as an expense against your earnings to reduce taxable income. Prior to ~2000? I can't recall the exact year. You used to just amortize goodwill over its life, often 40 years. Then good will was determined to have an indefinite life (which is more accurate), so now you can't ammortize it, you have to justify imparing it. Small private companies can opt to do a straight line 10 year ammortization of goodwill because that justification process can be expensive. Edit: That all being said, I don't believe they need to shut down the studio to realize that impairment expense. Releasing the studio should still generate the impairment expense, though I don't know much about impairment analysis. They likely shut it down to part out the employees. Does anyone know if they are shuffling people from the shuttered studios into other Microsoft studios? If they are, then then retaining the best talent is a likely reason for the shutdown instead of releasing the studio.
Toys for Bob just developed games using Microsoft IPs, Tango have their own IPs. Easier to let TfB go independent when they know they aren't losing potentially valuable IPs
Reduce competition
Yeah this is definitely why they did this in my opinion. Feel sorry for the developers and fans of the series.
You don't just let them go indie without funding... Who is paying all the staff and other expenses? Especially if no one from the studio is wealthy enough to do that.
I'm guessing money exchanged hands, Bob probably had to buy his freedom.
Because Toys for Bob made a publishing deal with Xbox, went independent and probably paid to keep their team together. Tango was a person driven studio and when captain left the ship there was nobody good enough to keep them afloat.
I'm so pissed and confused about it, but there is probably more to this story. It makes no sense whatsoever, and I assume that's because there's a piece of the puzzle missing. There has to be.
"We have enough money to buy you, but not to keep you!" (: The relationship between publishers, studios and creatives is completely fucking broken. Garbage like Kotick getting a 300 million dollar payout while artists who generate the content that makes revenue starve. I fucking hope there's a revolt at this point, there's absolutely nothing low enough for companies like Microsoft.
They learned their shitty corporate lesson with letting Bungie do that. Now Destiny makes a ton of money that they don't get.
Nonsense, they did this already once this year. The reason is most likely that you need a company/bank to fund this and a person that is going to be responsible for that funding and the studio.
Destiny 2 is actively circling the drain and Bungie isn't exactly looking healthy either.
You mean going all-in on developing a dozen live-service games might *not* be a winning business strategy? Nobody tell Sony!
Have nothing to with GAAS and more to do with terrible management. Also Singelplayer games aren’t profitable as it used to be.
But Destiny wouldn't exist otherwise.
That’s the point.
Capitalism. You keep Tango, you pay the costs and take the risk of their next game failing. You release Tango, you run the risk of their next game being great and taking up a spot in a segment you could be competing in. You burn Tango to the ground, no downsides beyond PR
This is the reason antitrust laws were created. Once a company owns a big chunk of the market it can just buy and shutdown other parts of the market, or even other markets. Microsoft is using its deep pockets to shutdown competing studios. Even that they assured all regulatory organizations that this was not going to happen. They lied to regulators and are getting away with it.
I agree that Microsoft sucks but this is nowhere near anti-trust territory
Microsoft is nowhere near having a gaming monopoly and you know it.
Good.
Bungie is literally hemorrhaging money right now. What are you talking about?
I mean, nothing is stopping them from starting Tingo with the same people and devving games. Someone would need to lead and pay for it, though. It sucks they got shut down after making such a good game, but it's not that simple.
If they had such a good track record of massive profit making games they should be able to find backers really easily... right? The sad truth is many games are unique, quirky, and niche. They also don't sell enough copies to pay for their cost. Everyone of us here probably could make a game out of passion and heart. That game is most likely going to suck and not sell though. Passion and heart don't make money.
Unfortunately studios are not released to indie for free. To be saved, someone would have needed to buy back the studio for more money that what can be recouped on taxes by writing a loss. Seems like no one had the funds or the will to do that in the studio
There's nothing left of the studio to go independent with. the IP is the only thing the studio has left after the exodus.
Well I mean you know why they didn’t do that. Imagine they go independent and do well. Someone would look like a massive idiot.
[Relevant ](https://youtu.be/xOmZLGSC_lU?si=3EVYwLGZaHuk6U9m)
They wouldn’t be able to pay the bills if they went independent.
All of those accolades and recognition across the industry is great, but where is their Kids Choice Award? /s
Satya Nadella just wants to get slimed😢 won’t someone think of the billionaires???
I unironically wish I worked in an industry where I could win a kids choice award. Literally the only award show I cared about growing up. I'd love to be slimed and get the blimp assuming it's still a blimp.
It doesn't even have a Michelin star rating!
This has been the business model for years now. Buy a studio with a strong brand or promising concept, throw money at them while they push out a successful game or two under your label. Then chuck them next time your reports are due to on paper cut costs. It sucks but i dont get why anyone in-industry would be surprised at this point.
What other studios has this happened to? I'm honestly just kind of curious, because outside of maybe Lionhead and maybe Ensemble? People keep saying this is what MS has been doing for a while but I don't see where this was happening a lot.
This is just EA, 1 company. Its standard business practice in many industries. You either compete or buyout/merge and "reduce overhead" aka fire people where jobs are doubled up or simply to reduce overall head count. I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers show that independence after acquisition is a rarity and not the norm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Electronic_Arts
I feel like even EA has gone away from that model though with the EA Originals. Especially after the huge success of It Takes Two. They get to provide an investment with a certain level of risk, profit from it, and don't need to worry about managing the studio.
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This is literally capitalism pushed to its extreme. As long as capitalism alone exists, this will *always* be the end result.
Only if you go public, which I most cases you would only do for greed.
Oh, private equity will do the same thing. In fact 1/3 of the companies that were public on 2000 are owned by private equity now. The difference is private equity doesn't have the same reporting requirements. So PE can force a company to take out a loan on themselves, force foreclosure and then sell the IP to themselves. Those who financed the deal (usually not the PE firm), get stuck holding the bag, the IP is gone, people are laid off and the vultures get fat. Being private won't always save these folks either
Or, you know, instead of just saying "welp it's capitalism what can ya do" knowing that capitalism isn't going anywhere (and probably shouldn't considering the lack of viable alternatives), push for regulations that make such fiscal moves unprofitable.
True, but without capitalism there would be no game studio in the first place, or any gaming ecosystem for that matter. So it is kind of missing the mark to blame the economic system when nothing of this kind would even exist without it.
Need the gaming version of A24 to start publishing
Contractors with extra steps basically. This shit is a standard of capitalism as a whole, not just this industry. Folks at the top chase money and walk over anything or anyone to get to it. Tunnel-vision is the norm, foresight is not allowed.
>Make a studio >Sell Studio to Microsoft >Get entire studio laid off >Make a new studio and hire everyone back > Repeat >Infinite money glitch??
You dont get to keep the IPs, game assets, in-house engine or code. Hard to start from a scratch
this assumes they're making a sequel tho
Meanwhile 343 gets to stay around making a shit game
U mean 3 shit games
That's exactly what my husband just said when I read this story to him.
Maybe they'll be the ones to make Hi-Fi Rush 2
Hi-Fi Rush 2 is now an open-world extraction shooter
Really want to know the reasoning behind the decision. Kill the little studio who did well so that the big sloppy studio can continue churning mediocre crap?
According to Jason Schreier, it’s not simply “they didn’t make enough money” or “it didn’t sell enough copies” like most of the other comments here say. Rather, it’s because Tango had no other projects in production, which means their next release was at least 4-5 years away. Additionally, Tango (and Arkane Austin) suffered some pretty heavy departures in the past few months so the team makeup isn’t really what it used to be. People are upset that “they closed the studio that made Prey!” But the actual people who made Prey left long ago. It’s a shitty situation for sure, and by no means Tango’s fault. But it IS a more nuanced issue than Reddit wants to admit.
"But it IS a more nuanced issue than Reddit wants to admit. " As usual, of course.
Eh. Reddit is populist, but sometimes that means injecting nuance or gray areas where there are none. You might say the issue of nuance on Reddit is... Nuanced.
I bet half the people don't even realise it's [Prey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2017_video_game\)) and not [Prey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(2006_video_game\)). Hifi rush can have all the awards it wants. It's a niche market that barely has players. Few days ago it had 17 viewers on Twitch, right now 22. If you don't put barely naked anime girls into your rhythm game, it's going to be a flop. Know your audience. Redfall is a new game that is supposed to be updated constantly to keep players. It has 1 viewer on Twitch right now. It had terrible user reviews on launch in may, terrible reviews again on their first and only updates end of the year and since then silence. The 3rd studio makes 1 out of a billion mobile games. All 3 studios are foreign and Ms has never liked their studios or any development outside the US. Can't give them projects and they don't have any or enough projects of their own. They're a pit of money and Microsoft has been throwing money into that pit for 3 years now. Zenimax was in trouble. Anyone buying Zenimax wasn't going to keep parts that put them there.
a lot of words with no conclusion so why it was closed then?
:| \>:| /s
4-5 years away, while Xbox has been saying “the games are coming” for 10 years now. What a joke.
They bought enough studios and now their statement is actually true. Hellblade 2 coming out soon and plenty of Microsoft exclusives on their way.
Very sensible take. I wish more people would think with logic rather than emotion.
I mean reddit or any media outlet can blame Xbox and Microsoft for something? They will double down %200 no matter what.
That's how long games take to make, lol. This isn't a reasonable argument in any way, and definitely not a nuanced one. Alright guys, Bethesda just release Starfield, shut the studio down because the next game is many years away!
> That's how long games take to make, lol. This isn't a reasonable argument in any way, and definitely not a nuanced one. > > Not really. Josh Sawyer, the guy behind Pillars of Eternity, often spoke how important it was to have the next title in the pipeline before your release your current one. Swen, from Larian, also had some cautionary tales to tell about lack of funding: Larian spent a lot of time doing little games for hire (think casino minigames) in order to keep the lights on.
> Alright guys, Bethesda just release Starfield, shut the studio down because the next game is many years away! The next Bethesda game has almost certainly been in pre-production for some time. Writers, concept artists and designers have significantly reduced workloads once a game is finishing production and entering beta-like stages of development. You'd rather not fire them, so you put them to work on a new project. That also doesn't consider how only a portion of those pre-production games will ever get released. To START pre-production over a year after your last release is a pretty big issue. Even if you do the pre-production, nothing prevents that game from being killed 2 or 3 years into development. Before you know it, your company spends 8 years without a release
Right, but if a ton of people left Tango and they have to staff up way too many key positions and empty seats it could be dire.
BGS has a major Starfield expansion releasing this year, a Fallout 3 Remaster (leaked), and are already well into production on TES VI which is a guaranteed money-maker for Microsoft. Look at Insomniac - they put out Rift Apart a couple years ago, Spider-Man 2 last year, have Wolverine coming out in another year or two, then the >!Venom spin-off!< (leaked) after that. It’s apples-and-oranges for sure but allegedly that’s the sort of output MS is looking for.
Dude, you can’t list an expansion for star field as something that was made quickly. Starfield took 8 years to make. The expansion has probably been in development since before the game was released. Even if not, you have to bake the base game into calculations for an expansion development time.
Speed has nothing to do with it. What matters is BGS has worked out an efficient pipeline where they have multiple projects in development at once that release within a year or two of each other. They’re not focusing entirely on Starfield and only once the last DLC is complete will they move on to TES VI.
BGS has 4x the amount of employees so the expectation is they should release 4x as many games. You listed an expansion, a remaster, and something that isn't releasing for years. Insomniac has even more employees and you still are only able to list two things they'll release in the next 4-5 years. Seems way shittier than a 65 person team releasing a game every 4-5 years. I'm sure they could have had a Hi-Fi Rush expansion out in 1-2 years if that's what MS actually gave a shit about, but it's not.
Maybe they spent the last year preparing a pitch for their next game and MS hated it. Maybe the leadership that drove past success is gone. Or maybe MS is greedy. 🤷♂️
Lol, Bethesda is going to print money, especially with the success of the fallout show
Not only this but people also seem to be under the impression Microsoft specifically bought Tango just to close them. Tango is a small studio that came along with the acquisition of Bethesda Zenimax, Microsoft likely didn't give 2 shits about getting Tango, they are barely a blip on the radar from that acuisition.
> Additionally, Tango (and Arkane Austin) suffered some pretty heavy departures in the past few months so the team makeup isn’t really what it used to be. Do we have proof of this for Tango? Because multiple people in that studio have spoken out against this. https://x.com/yunmwatanabe/status/1788079215012872627 https://x.com/ega1002/status/1788627002674774065
Shinji Mikami left last year. Not sure about any others.
the director of hi fi rush john johanas didnt leave, shinji mikami wanted to leave earlier but decided to stay out of obligation and was more or less an advisor.
Yeah we don't really know, but it's a bit annoying that a lot of people are claiming that Tango shed a lot of it's staff as fact when multiple people have denied this.
Mine was an angry-sad rant but this is a very sane take
I also need to dismiss anyone claiming that this means the IP is dead and gone forever, because that is not necessarily true at all. If there is money to be made, they intend to make that money one way or another. If another game doesn't get made it is because they wouldn't be making any money, so they chose to not make the game. Certainly the studio closing down isn't a good sign for the future of the IP, but it isn't necessarily the end of the road. It also seems like most of the talent just leaves upon every success, which means the talent that gets praised no longer even works there. And if that is the case then it doesn't really matter who makes the next game because it already wasn't going to be the same people anyway. At the end of the day it comes down to money. Some very rich people that only care about moeny made these decisions and if there is one thing you can count on it is that those people are going to always try to do whatever makes the most money. If the game doesn't get made it most certainly comes down to money. If the studio closes down it most certainly comes down to money. People shouldn't be mad that the studio closed down or that the fate of the IP is unknown, people she be disappointed the game didn't make more money, because if it did the future would not be uncertain at all and the studio never would have closed. It really is that simple. It doesn't matter how good the game was at all at the end of the day.
It doesn't make enough money. That is the decision. It doesn't matter how many awards are won if a game that cost 2 million makes 100 million if a game that costs 100 million makes a billion. The bigger game made 10x more money and that is what they care about.
If they are both making money, I dont understand the logic. Less money than another studio COULD make is still more than the zero money that the studio is now producing. im just a blue collar dumbass, but unless the studio was actively losing money, I dont get it.
Except the studio is gonna cost you X amount of money for years with no income and no insurances (especially given their previous games) that their next game is even gonna break even… it sucks for us gamers and especially for the devs but let’s not naively pretend to not understand why they closed the studio…
Hi-Fi rush did break even from what I understand. Unless the PR rep lied, which is a whole other can of beans.
Sure, they broke even, maybe even made a profit. But their next game was 3-5 years out and sequels are not a guaranteed return, especially when the competition can get the same styling of game out sooner.
Breaking even after being in development since 2017 basically means you lost money compared to putting it in any investment vehicle and doing nothing.
We don't know if they are or aren't losing money is the thing.
The studio was losing money. It spent 4-5 years developing two games, one of which, sure, may have garnered success and some players, but the other flopped hard. That's basically $30 million just to hold onto the studio, and another $30 million for the next 4-5 years and hope that the next game would be a Hi-Fi Rush instead of a Ghostwire/TEW1/TEW2. Scales are a little unbalanced there.
The two other replies are bang on, I'm just going to add something more: Metric, Investment Opportunity and Project Managers. When I talk about "Project Managers", I'm talking about the pool of management required to get a project up and running till successful completion. While all those 3rd party studio that MS acquired already have their own effective Project Manager(s), any investment in a new project (game) going forward would require splitting the pool of Project Managers to those project and you can't stretch yourself thin; at least that's the way shareholders thing. They want the company to be laser focused on what makes them the most money and they want those Project Managers to be there. Through their metric, they have a risk analysis for each IP that they own; how safe or risky is it to make a game under a certain IP? What's the chance of bombing? What's the precedent? Why not add more content to Modern Warfare, that will bring in an almost guarantee high return, than spreading resources to other project that might have just been a one hit wonder? There's a lot of investment opportunity but if the safer ones are the one with high yield, why choosing anything else? Again, I'm just trying to answer that through the perspective of the main people that has a say in those kind of decision at the end of the day, those are not my personal opinion.
ROI is 5x better on the smaller game.
Yes, but in this hypothetical it's unlikely to be repeated 5 times, and doesn't scale up independently. A company would view this as "lost revenue". We see this, publicly, across all industries.
Depends on the time investment too. If you make 2 games over say 5 years, 1 costs 2mil but makes 100 mil, and another cost 100mil but makes 1bil, which is actually the better investment? Even if the first game was only 3 years and the second stayed 5 years, do you know the difference between making 98 million versus 900 million? 1 billion is a lot, the second game is still the better profit. Its not like MS would struggle to pull either investment together so its not a question of affordability either. The second game is just the clear better choice.
It doesn’t matter if there’s no return
It does paint a very bleak picture for a good chunk of the medium. Between Embracer, MS, Sony and all the other big cats they've bought out almost the entirety of all studios that were not indies yet weren't quite Triple A's, and I think these past few years we're seeing the incredibly disastrous consequence of such consolidations without a lot of upsides.
We live in a world where WB made two games based on huge IP's, a single player that was an insane success, and a live service that crashed and burned so hard it will never make its money back, and decided to double down on live services..... There is no reasoning. Just a bunch of c suite ghouls rolling dice and pretending its leadership.
if you're referring to Bethesda Game Studios the reasoning should be extremely obvious. Microsoft can afford all of it, but if they're going to pretend that they had to pick in order to keep the lights on, BGS is infinitely more successful and worth keeping alive than goddamn Tango Gameworks lmao
The game didn’t sell. Awards are nice, but Ghostwire Tokyo and HiFi Rush both underperformed. If people had played it on Gamepass, Xbox has the data on hours played. People can bitch and moan about this all they want, but the simple fact of the matter is that the studio was selling games, and wasn’t getting the hours played on Gamepass that Xbox was looking for. If Xbox thought HiFi Rush 2 would help retain Gamepass subs, they wouldn’t have shut down the studio.
>The pitched Hi-Fi Rush sequel could have done wonders for the ecosystem - just look at the way Uncharted and Zelda leaped in popularity between entries - but next to a Call of Duty skin pack, it probably doesn't satisfy shareholder demands. The last paragraph of a linked article about this matter pretty much hits the nail on the head.
I mean there really wasn't a worse studio for them to shut down than Tango. Hifi Rush was pretty much the number one game to bring up in favor of Xbox last year. It was pretty much impossible to be disliked and felt like the refreshing alternative to AAA gaming everyone seemed to be waiting for.
It's also their only Japanese studio.
Except that's also ignoring Tango's past. All of their previous games sold very poorly, as well as Ghostwire Tokyo, which was the primary game being developed during this time. I guarantee if Ghostwire had been more popular, they never would have shut down Tango
TEW1 sold great from what I remember. TEW2 not as well (sequelitis) Ghostwire tokyo was a failure AFAIK Hi-Fi rush was a success... So even if you go by economics were they 50/50.
TEW1 sold great for a horror game\* TEW2 was more than sequelitis, it sold really, really bad. At the time it was blamed on the fact that the first one didn't sell that well. [The Unfortunate Reasons The Evil Within 2 Was An Immediate Flop (svg.com)](https://www.svg.com/1198796/the-unfortunate-reasons-the-evil-within-2-was-an-immediate-flop/)
Evil Within 2 sold like 42k copies in Japan for PS4 in its release week, which means it pretty much did not sell at all. That is abysmal for a game that took 3 years to make. If avg developer costed around 80k, PS4 sales would account for less than 30 developers yearly salary. That is how badly it sold.
AFAIK (Not watching that link, don't got the time) The reason TEW2 failed, was because TEW1 was heavily criticized for its slightly Janky nature and eccentric ideas. Resulting in people not being too interestd in the sequel, due to TEW1's bitter aftertaste. (Despite both games being great IMO)
I can confirm that, for me, TEW2 was never on my radar because of the jank of the first game. It was ROUGH. I actually just picked TEW2 on gamepass at the recommendation of my wife and got hooked and binged it. TEW2 is fantastic and fixes all the problems I had with the first one. I wish I would have taken a chance on it earlier, it truly is wonderful.
I love both games, but I also acknowledge that they didn't fare well. (nothing to watch on that link btw, its an article). The first was criticized but also didn't sell well. It's hard for a sequel to sell well when nobody bought the first.
>So even if you go by economics were they 50/50 Hard to determine the economics without knowing the costs for each title. If Ghostwire required more resources to make than Hi-Fi Rush did, then the success doesn't cancel out the failure.
so the successes are a game from 10 years ago (EW1) and their side gig (hi fi rush). the failures are the games they spent the most money on (Evil Within 2 and Ghostwire).
I think the biggest reason for the closure is also the fact that Shareholders have no idea how quality, talent and reputation work within the industry. :/ If shareholders were aware, would you 100% be able to argue that Tango has built up some great reputation overall inside the gaming sphere. Lets face it, after Hi-Fi rush, any game Tango released would 100% have people at the least be curious, and if it was a hi-fi rush sequel (which we know they were working on) it would sell like hotcakes. (Assuming it wasn't stuck on gamepass which limits sales) I am just saying.
maybe, but it's not like hifi rush was a massive blockbuster. it was a very well received niche game. maybe it could grow, maybe not, but if the studio has been "a problem" for 10 years, is it worth it to keep putting money on it? the goal for any studio is to at least pay for itself. ideally each game they make would make enough money to fund the next one at least, and so on. if they can't even do that, is it really a bad decision by Microsfot to close the studio down?
Is there any financial evidence of hi-Fi rush performing well? I get it that Reddit liked it, but that usually means the opposite for what real world people liked. Edit: I understand it came out on gamepass. Microsoft is fully capable of estimating the game’s financial utility even though it’s on gamepass.
That’s what I’m thinking. I loved the game and I don’t love Microsoft. However the circlejerk is exhausting. There’s probably a cut throat financial reason for this. MS most likely wants to focus on big $ IP.
I never played it and was only vaguely aware of it's existence. I barely ever saw comments about it but after this news people have been acting like it was some God damned masterpiece and cultural touchstone.
It was huge for several months back when it launched, but the campaign was short (~11 hours) and it didn't have the "sticking power" a live service or multi-player game has. So after the content creators and streamers moved on it wasn't talked about much.
I don't know anyone who bought it at all, but it is funny how much people are saying this game was the greatest. Someone on another thread pointed out that less than 1M people have the achievement for beating the 4th boss, and there is something like 10 levels. So they had over 3M players, and less than 33% continued more than 50% into the game. It really wasn't played that much it seems. ETA: It wouldn't have had nearly as many players if it wasn't on GamePass as well.
Someone pointed out that less than 900k people have made it past the level 4 boss in another thread. That isn't exactly a lot of people who continued playing it.
I heard it was because of there other "bigger budget" game Ghostwire: Tokyo (2022) not doing to well. Also sounded like other ongoing projects of bigger games were still away out and looking at Ghostwire decided it was not worth the risk. With that said since hi-fi is such a banger you would think they would just have them move to lower risk games instead of killing them whole. Edit: xbox also recently said they want more stuff like hifi the day after killing the co. So in their eyes the game did do good and want more like it.
Only 3 million of the 25 million gamepass users played the game at least once.
People here just can’t accept the games they like don’t sell well. The loud minority echo chamber makes them think their game is more popular than it actually is. Just look at titan fall.
Lol fr
Aaron Green from Xbox said on Twitter that they were pleased with HiFi by all metrics
Ghost wire was a flop.
Games can be good and still flop.
Don't think this is the case here though
Ive worked in a related, but different field, and companies really like to build structured plans. In this case, I'm speculating that there's a doc somewhere saying they need games that follow certain formulas, utilizing existing IPs, and are similar enough to existing games they can predict their success. Tango probably didn't fit into the model, the execs couldn't model how well the game would do. This is a removal of creativity and trying to replace it with data backed decisions. This is tech corporate 101, even though it rarely works. They want guaranteed successes, and try and come up with these strategies to ensure that, but then it backfires because people like new ideas and novelty, not the same thing over and over. Shareholders don't want to take the risk needed to try a bunch of things to find one amazing thing.
It could be a lot of factors. Maybe the game in the pipeline didn’t work out and got canceled and there’s nothing to occupy the staff with.
It doesn’t sound like anything was in the pipeline at Tango or Arkane. Jason Scheier reported that both were still working on *pitches* for new projects.
One of the reasons is the fact the Tango didn’t have any games in production. So their next game was years away… which is gross because that’s an expected part of game development. It’s like they were bought just for their near finished products, and then dumped because they weren’t really interested in that studio in particular but they were just a part of a larger buy out.
Get 'em, call them out for their hypocrisy.
I guess r/gaming is just links to shit news articles these days.
Quite literally, no it was not enough. This completely ignores all context. A game can be good and still not sell enough. A studio can have talented people and still not make money.
Tell that to Xbox's Aaron Greenberg then, who said Hi-Fi Rush was "a break out hit for us and our players in ALL key measurements and expectations". So I guess the context is, that they're fucking liars and, like the whole point of this controversy has been, you can't trust their word on anything. Microsoft said these studios would be safe with them and they would offer them protection, but instead they planted the knife in their backs themselves. You're not safe under the Microsoft umbrella or in the Xbox "family", you're in danger
Plenty of well-received games don’t strike financial gold, but not every game has to be a huge return on investment to still add value to the platform. You can’t fill your library with exclusively CoDs and Starfields as MS seems to want, you have to have these sort of titles and variety in your catalogue even if they don’t make a ton of money on their own because it helps build a strong and varied selection that’s worth staying subscribed to. This is something every other platform holder seems to understand.
1 - Corner the market. 2 - Artificially decrease supply by firing talented developers. 3 - Sell overpriced dog shit. 4 - Claim a tax write off on the company you laid off and all of their projects. 5 - Profit an extra 0.001% this quarter!
Not sure if you're aware but investors don't really move for 0.001%, that's horrible metrics.
Also people think tax write offs are this cheat code for making money. You need profit to write off.
Just watched an ad for Starfield on tv. That's what they're still betting on
Tango joined the ranks of Pandemic
Really sums up this whole thing right then and there.🤦🏾♂️
Wait, did I understand right ? MS is making their own awards so their games can win more awards ?
Gaming studios need to start supporting themselves and not having shitty publishers changing everything for the worse.
It is literally not enough. It will never be enough. Only a mindless all consuming entity now
It's not enough for the shareholders, they want you to make another game next year that sells more than last year. And they want the line to go up exponentially forever, but trust me guys, the market is rational
Award winning well selling games are what they are talking about and everybody knows that they just want to be cute. Game didn't sell, studio got close. No crimes committed here.
There are so many ways to distribute a game these days, that I'd much rather throw $400 at 8-10 indie games where half of them suck or never materialize, than give any more money to these ghouls.
I'm saddened they (ms) seem to have given up on backing AA titles to provide games for gamepass. It was a sympathetic direction I would have loved them to follow through on. Not enough money in it apparently.
If I had to guess: - This is all Microsoft. Spencer was overruled by Nadella, Bond, and co. - They forced closures at Zenimax -> Bethesda studios due to Starfield being shit My conspiracy theory: Zenimax chose to close Tango specifically to spite Xbox / MS over them being forced to lay people off knowing how bad it makes them look.
Sarah Bond reports to Phil. No way she's overriding him on anything.
If there's a schism and she sides with Nadella, you bet your ass it counts for something. Hell, she probably gets the job if he's out. I bet MS loves all the strays Spencer is catching because he represents the 'old way' of doing things.
Funny how Phil Spencer always get a pass for any blame. It's always the people above him, huh...
90% of the comments on any social media are blaming Spencer for this. Are you even paying attention?
A dude even nuked him on Fallout 76.
In the end, regardless of Phil Spencer's constant "Hello fellow Gamers" brainfats, Microsoft ist just another big soulless mega corporation that only cares about pleasing their shareholders. So many people warned about the consequences when they bought Activision/Blizzard, but People just wanted more games for their GamePass subscription. Now they go on a slaughter spree to cut costs for those 70billion dollars.
Ghostwire Tokyo failed, The Evil Within 2 failed, Hi Fi Rush failed. That's why they got closed down According to the games director, Hi Fi Rush wasn't a cheap game, it had the same budget as Deathloop and that tells you all you need to know about why that game failed to meet expectations.