XBOX Series X | Series S - November 10, 2020

[Kaisha]

Double Fine's going to have a hard time preventing staff layoffs given where they're situated (San Fran) with their staff size (100~ish), given the performance of their recent games. I love the studio man, but jesus, they need to release more than one smaller-sized game a year to sustain. Especially given their recent games weren't mass appeal types of games (Keeper & Kiln).

Hopefully they can get a decent pitch going to a publisher.

[Mayareira]

Aim for a billion user/day, war cry about the importance of exclusivity and AAA's/returning to roots; than axe 1/2 of your biggest AAA franchises developer.

[Obsidian]

Doom is not their biggest AAA franchise, lol. It's probably not even in the top 5.

[Krandor]

Microsoft owns Candy Crush, Call of Duty, and Minecraft

The entirety of the Doom franchise probably doesn't even crack 10% of any of those in terms of revenue

[Mayareira]

meant *one of the lol

Their actions are not matching with their words tbh. They seem to be in a serious identity crisis.

[Obsidian]

I mean, you're comparing their current actions to their past words and ignoring their current words, which are "we are terribly bloated and gaining nothing from that bloat. We are going to slim down and refocus on core IPs and titles instead of allowing all these expensive studios to flail around with indie titles or less over the past decade."

I think the cuts to iD are a bit dumb because the new Doom trilogy is pretty universally praised, but a lot of these other studios have been essentially committing wage theft over the last 6+ years.

[Kaisha]

What I want to know is why they cut their idTech team down. Does MS already have an inhouse studio to share between their devs, or would they rather just give Epic royalties for Unreal Engine forever?
Honestly don't know why idTech wasn't expanded to cover more than just FPS games at some point and licensed out.

[Salodin]

Cause they don't know how to manage a video game developer nor a publisher. Just straight flying blind and not asking the right people the right questions

Sent from my SM-S936U using Tapatalk

[Krandor]

You can bring in any random dev for cheap and they know how to work with unreal engine.

idtech is a much better engine but anyone coming in blind wouldn't know what to do with it.

[Mayareira]

Well, Microsoft is not a multi-billion company anymore. It is a multi-trillion one and never good to see jobs getting axed because of a management that doesn't know wtf they are doing.

Are you trying to be a direct competitor to Sony w/ exclusives? Then why are you axing Doom developer, which has got potential to do much more than Doom w/ right budget?
Or simply killing of excellent franchises like Project Gotham Racing, Midtown Madness?

And how about not being able to develop the next Elder Scrolls game for....I really lost track of years.

Microsoft have always been a good software company. for example. rather than competing directly with Apple they developed key software for Mac OS, becoming the most profitable software developer in the Mac ecosystem.

Their decision to go multiplatform had been rather fruitful as well, with franchises like Forza becoming top sellers in Sony PSN for a while.

Why looking to retreat from this strategy (with a tweet actually, not a business plan) at a time w/ total Sony domination and completely skyrocketing hardware prices?

"If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable."

[Andalusian girls]

my man dropping Seneca in the xbox thread

[Mayareira]

I bet this xbox thread looks quite tiny from your IVORY TOWER.

[6souls]

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/busine...medium=bluesky

Asha is now a member of the Federal Reserve advisory task force.