HeyListenWatchOut
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Don Mattrick left Xbox in 2013. It was more than a decade ago. He may have ruined the XOne launch, but Spencer has had all the time and money in the world to rectify his mistakes and, so far, has only worsened them to the point that most doubt that a new Xbox will exist at all.
Xbox’s brand was one that gained all of its clout basically as a result of Halo for the original console, and then pretty much almost the entirety of the 360 era. Damaging a brand is easy to do, and the consequences are long-standing. True that plenty of time has passed… but I still think that the main issue is that Microsoft is still pulling the strings that damage the Xbox brand.
Nintendo was on the brink of disaster after the Wii U, and managed to turn their fates around in half the time and with a fraction of the money. Why couldn’t Spencer?
Because Nintendo is completely independent, and is controlled wholly by their own CEO… they are not a division of a larger shitty company interested in Copilot and Window 11 subscriptions.
In all these years, Spencer’s legacy has been of failed deals, shutting down/letting go multiple studios, and moronic attempts at building AAA and GAAS games on the back of seasonal contractors. We should stop blaming Mattrick for things that happened a decade after he left the company.
I’m not blaming Mattrick DIRECTLY for anything that’s happened in the last 10 years… but I AM blaming Microsoft as a whole probably forcing Phil’s hands, based on the interviews I watched with both Mattrick and Phil back in the day.
I really do think Phil likes games and is basically having to fly a plane that Microsoft keeps taking away parts from. I don’t think someone who actually worked on games like Phil did early in his career wanted to close the studio that made HiFi Rush.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d love to see some evidence showing Phil coming across as even half as bad as ANY interview or stage presentation with Mattrick.
I may be in the minority here, but I still like Phil Spencer… I feel like he’s a good dude who has been hamstrung by Microsoft from a larger overall management angle.
He’s certainly better than Don Mattrick, but admittedly Xbox has continued to suffer even after Don left.
Every time I saw an interview with Phil, he was amicable, seemed to actually understand game dev and the challenges, and he pushed to do things like Game Pass which have largely been successful.
Meanwhile Don was the guy who tried to copy off Nintendo’s motion gaming, pushed for making the Xbox do TV shit moreso than be a fun gaming console, and essentially said “get a 360” when people complained about lack of reliable internet access potentially preventing their ability to play any XB1 game.
I’m a little torn on this.
On the one hand, let’s be real - clearly PalWorld takes more than a little “inspiration” on a bunch of different Pokemon IP. The illustrations, modeling, and just visual style overall matches in many ways almost perfectly for many of the creatures. They are like off-brand versions of Pokemon with the exact same eyes, mouth types, etc. in many cases as if they were illustrated by Ken Sugimori himself
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Additionally, the game involves using handheld ball devices thrown at wild world-roaming creatures you capture after cutting down their health by some amount to increase the catch percentage and different “grade” balls have increased chance for capture.
There is also a nefarious organization competing with you for capturing these wild creatures like Team Rocket.
But on the OTHER hand, the leveling up, breeding, base-building, the various ability tech-trees, item crafting, and just overall engine complexity is VASTLY superior to what appears to now be an almost EMBARRASSINGLY behind set of game design mechanics in the actual Pokemon games… it’s sort of a Saints Row vs GTA IV situation here where they were an obvious copy off, but improved in enough ways that ended up being a fun game in itself.
Copying off exact art asset styles is one thing you shouldn’t do… but taking Nintendo’s gameplay ideas and expanding upon them vastly and being told to remove said mechanics as if they stole code is asinine and sets a bad precedent.
Every time there’s been a popular game, there are a thousand copies off them that twist and evolve those mechanics until something else comes along.
Nintendo came along with platformers after Pitfall on Atari. Sonic copied 2D platforming basics from Mario like running to the right and jumping on enemies but changed so much. Final Fantasy copied off Dragon Quest, which itself was a digital idea based off of Dungeons & Dragons. Doom to games like GoldenEye to Halo to Call of Duty to PUBG to Fortnite to APEX Legends…
This feels like taking advantage of grey area in the realm of visual IP similarity to shut down someone making their gameplay design mechanics look antiquated by comparison.
Really embarrassing for Nintendo to be doing this, when clearly what Nintendo should be doing is doing like what Fortnite did when APEX came along and added location / enemy / weapon call outs and just STEALING the mechanics they weren’t clever enough to think of on their own and implement better versions in their own games… but clearly they’d just rather have a monopoly and continue lackluster work.
It DID outdo Nintendo’s equivalent - the previous mainline Mario entry - Super Mario Odyssey - in every way except maybe 4 :
- Quantity - Mario had more moons than Astro had Bots to rescue… so more collectibles.
- replayability - with the Luigi balloon challenges, they extended the game’s longevity with this feature and it is better than Astro Bot’s simpler “speed run challenges” because of Mario’s unique game mechanic of allowing players to create and compete by crafting one-of-a-kind challenges for each other.
- Nostalgia - Mario’s New Donk City party was absolute peak love letter to the origins of Super Mario and the sequence with the song sung by Mayor Pauline honestly brought me to tears…
Tap for spoiler
the Bowser hat body takeover sequence
…But everything else - the scale of and pure ingenuity of the boss mechanics, the visuals - from both a stylistic and technical standpoint, the Dual-Sense’s controller gimmicks, the complete lack of load times… it brought into stark contrast how far Nintendo has fallen behind - not so much from a game design perspective necessarily - but certainly at least from a hardware power standpoint.
Already lost interest in Assassin’s Creed after they abandoned the Desmond timeline…
Played a tiny bit of the Black Flag one for the fun shanty stuff but that’s been it for me now for probably a decade… so all this has done has lowered my already completely evaporated interest of “apathy” down now to “actively avoid as if it were a virus.”
Payday 2 was a really novel idea a long time ago. Highly scripted replayable missions with unique aspects but RNG for procedurally variable elements like guard patrol positions, locations and security aspects… in addition to dynamic changes based off how successful the player was at doing a job without letting security escalate the mission to going “loud.”
It made otherwise boring repetitive loops of missions feel new and different enough each time that it was exciting. Being randomly matched with others fed into the unpredictable heist aspect as well…
But instead of focusing on constantly further improving upon those systems, fixing terrible issues related to both friendly and antagonistic A.I. (I remember how for the longest time your teammates could not literally pick up a duffle bag), they saw dollar signs with in-app-purchases… and with Payday 3, they doubled down on that aspect… so no one got on board… and eventually longtime players like myself stopped playing Payday 2 as well.
Valve showed how to do this right years ago at this point with the Steam Deck.
- Force (or at least put a sizeable number of devices to be available for exclusive) purchase through their own store.
- Limit to only a single unit purchase per official account.
- Require the official account to have already been present before the device was announced to be available to purchase.
Boom. Scalper market collapsed for Steam Deck, PS5, etc.
My friend do I have some exciting news for you…
There is no perfect controller…
…But I do have a list of features I would want my perfect controller to have based off all the controllers that have ever been made :
- TMR joystick modules (successor to Hall effect sticks)
- adjustable tension springs and locking mechanism for varied stick cap types (Xbox Elite series 2 does most of this but uses magnetic caps which would interfere with the TMR sticks so ball bearing connections or other option would be preferable)
- 6 DOF / gyro sensors + infrared camera (Wii Motion Plus)
- Adaptive haptic triggers (PS5) which can be toggled to hair trigger mode via switches (Xbox Elite series 2)
- multi-touchpad on face (PS5)
- analog face buttons (DualShock 2 controller had this but only a few games utilized this… the best example was the PS2 era Metal Gear Solid games)
- customizable “per-button” color assignment / micro OLED or e-ink screens so button graphics can be swapped (PBTails new controller does the per button RGB color assignment)
- USB-C / 4 wired connectivity + charging
- baseplate contact-charging (PS5 controller has these so you can set them on charging docks)
- hot swappable battery pack + AA battery holder pack or ability to not have a battery on at all when connected via USB-C (Xbox 360 controller had this)
- swappable non-magnetic Zinc-alloy faceplates (PBTails new controller has these)
- removable back triggers with dedicated button assignments (like the Steam Deck’s L4/5 and R4/5 buttons; not just cloned face buttons like Sony and XBox do)
- integrated microphone with hardware toggle (PS5)
- proper “separate keys” d-pad… not the mushy type
- touch-sensitive surfaces for every button and stick (Meta / Oculus Quest controllers do this)
- per-finger-joint touch sensitive grips for each finger segment (Valve’s VR controllers did this)
- the ability to separate the halves of the controller so that each hand could hold one half independently and have them track similar to most standard VR controllers (think combining the switch controllers and Quest controllers)
- NFC communication (Amiibo-stuff for example)
If any single controller did even half of this, they’d easily be the GOAT.
As long as there are killer 1st party titles exclusive to a console platform, there’s a reason to buy one.
Personally, I love Zelda, Mario, and most recently I’ve been excited about the new Astro Bot game about to come out.
Outside of Steam Deck emulation, you need a console to play those, and I do enjoy the convenience.
The last Xbox worth buying was the 360, because all Xbox titles are released on other platforms now - eliminating the need for an Xbox console.
For those who don’t know…
You seem to be a decent person based on the fact that you refused to cheat someone, so I’m going to try to reply to each point you made. First, they should NOT have deleted something you’ve paid for.
Bungie literally deleted content I paid for. They can get bent, they have lost myself and my money, among others, as customers permanently.
As of 2 years ago, Bungie became owned by Sony. The 2 guys who founded Bungie are no longer in charge. One of them left, and the other is basically a recluse, but who when we HAVE seen on camera, comes across as a guy who just likes making good games.
As you may or may not have seen in the headlines with Helldivers 2, SONY - a massive multi-billion dollar corporation (like Microsoft, EA, Activision, Ubisoft, etc.) are all perfectly capable of making self-destructive monumentally stupid business-centric decisions and in pursuit of boundless greed have hurt their own IP, their industry, and their customers. Sony LITERALLY deleted licenses for movies people paid for, so I’d be willing to wager this a similar call some idiot Sony exec made that was out of Bungie’s hands.
And before you say “Who cares? They should have remained independent and not sold out to some big corporation then.”
If you like big games, this is the current reality you will have to contend with. Bungie is not a tiny studio. The games they make require a literal ARMY to build. The logistical reality of that means that - for them to be able to afford to even just purchase the equipment needed to build and maintain such big games - let alone hire and pay people to work on them for something like 7-10 years at a time before having something “shippable” - they need MASSIVE backing. 10s if not 100s of millions of $ in investment. Even with some of the most successful game launches ever, if they plan on doing it bigger the next time, they need more than they earned to make the next game’s investment back plus more.
The result of the company getting less money means people get let go. That’s how business works.
Not really. A company firing workers has nothing to do with whether or not the company is “getting less money.” A company does do whatever it thinks will make it the most money… Privately owned companies with decent owners - like Gabe Newell do want to make money, but also know their business is making things for people who like games… and he’s personally invested in making the company do that well. And because Gabe isn’t an asshole, turns out customers and most companies kinda like him and Valve and pretty much all their products. He also keeps good people, pays them well, and pretty much anyone working at Valve works there for the rest of their professional lives if they can.
HOWEVER… if the owner is an asshole who would, for completely random example, rather build himself a magic theater than provide his team members a decent salary and job security… or even worse… a company is publicly traded, their goal is to absolutely rocket the share price THAT QUARTER at ANY legally viable cost - even if it fucks them over long-term. So even if the publicly traded company made a billion dollars last quarter, if by firing 250 people they normally pay $50K a year, they make $1.00001 billion as a result and that makes the stock go up by $0.002… most CEOs will sign off on that. Hell, most CEOs would let their own children starve if it meant the share value went up by 5% that quarter.
Really a gigantic publicly-traded company letting people go has less to do with their success, and more to do with fiduciary responsibility to maximize share price each quarter.
Any person that keeps working with a company that actively harms its customers is not a person that I will support.
Objectively good take, though I also would suggest try to start from a point of empathy and assume no one LIKES working for an evil company (unless they’re something like a hedge-fund management company or something kind of inherently exploitative - then maybe they’re just an asshole).
My personal work ethic and integrity could never allow me to continue to work in such a dishonest place of work. I quit on the spot when one of my old bosses told me to lie and tell a customer that they needed parts replaced for their car that they didn’t need so he could charge them more.
Really awesome thing for you to do. Seriously, hats off to you for that.
Walked across the street and got a job at the competing shop the same day, and ended up getting paid more.
Ok… here’s where you veer off a bit. Game dev studios are not car repair shops. There are literally only a HANDFUL of major game companies in the world. Look - here’s an interactive map that shows pretty much EVERY major (and many minor) game company… in the WORLD.
Car repair shops - as you clearly even provided with your own example - are literally on every street corner. I have a feeling that - in addition to being a pretty stand-up dude - you must be pretty great at your job to be able to literally walk into some place to get immediately hired for more money, but the idea that any person working in the game industry can just immediately quit and find another job across the street as easily as that is unfortunately just not how reality works.
To become a game developer, most people will have to go to some sort of higher education institution… whether a dedicated trade-style game dev school or some prestigious engineering program at a major university. Many would need to take out some sort of loan to learn this BUT EVEN IF THEY DON’T (because I can see you typing “not my problem they took out money for something they couldn’t afford”)… yes, you can self-teach (much more so these days than in the past), but most people will need to learn via some sort of program designed to teach the trade. And even if you are lucky enough not to need any loans, many companies will ask you to move, have decent computer equipment to at least do the portfolio-type work needed to even convince a game company to give them an interview for the job they are applying for, or provide some sort of credentials that cost money to show you are certified to even get your resume even in the middle (let alone the top) of a pile.
All of this means financial risk. Less places to work means it might be hard to stay in the same city if your company fires you (unless you’re in like Seattle, or San Francisco or New York - which is crazy expensive and makes people financially desperate on its own but that’s a whole different discussion).
Anyway, I personally know guys who moved and bought houses to start a new job with a game company where that was the ONLY game company in a 3-state radius… and it closed within a month, throwing them into financial ruin. When there’s financial risk for the workers, it’s MUCH harder to stand up and say “hey don’t do that” if you’re worried that you’re going to lose your job at the only shop in town.
If you are good at your job (as good as you seem to think all Bungie employees are), then finding another job will be easy.
Not necessarily… because you see - a SHIT-load of these companies are run by these fucking ghouls who have fired a collective of something like TENS OF THOUSANDS OF GAME DEV PROFESSIONALS over the past handful of years. These people didn’t lose their job because they aren’t talented. And neither did probably at least 25% (if we’re being assholes and assuming a fuckton somehow aren’t talented - which is asinine) of all the others who now those ex-Bungie folks will be competing with for LESS positions from the other companies who have cleaned house the past couple of years (again for no other reason than to artificially boost the share price of their publicly traded companies).
Sucks for the few good people that might work there, but if they get let go they will have the opportunity to work somewhere better. If they’re a good person, they will likely pick a place that doesn’t actively harm its own customers (and employees).
Yeah… I’m sure they all have a super long list of AAA game companies that aren’t publicly traded or run increasingly by private equity firms that they can apply to that are MUCH more ethical and don’t do things to actively harm their customers and employees.
Does any of what I’m rambling about here make sense?
You were wronged, my friend… and no one is trying to excuse that, but the issue is being caused by some assholes at the very top of ALL our favorite game companies… and basically saying “sucks to suck, if they’re cool at their job, it’s just as easy to find another as just walking across the street” to a bunch of lower-level people (who - again I can’t stress this enough speaking as someone who WAS one of those types of people before I quit making games - just wanted to make a fun game that they could see people like you share about how much they loved playing it) because the suits did something shitty that no one thinks is good - is not really understanding the reason as to why it occurred, and what can be done as a consumer, voter, citizen to make it so this sort of shit doesn’t happen anymore.
Bungie hasn’t made a good game since 2010, they deserve it.
No they don’t, you ghoul.
You don’t get hired at Bungie by being a shitty game dev.
You make shitty games or get fired by having shitty management or a parent company run by a shitty exec.
Shit like this is what is making the game industry suck and why you are seeing more bugs and more garbage and as long as companies fire people after every project, and no one sticks around, it’s likely to just keep worsening things.
Do you know why Elden Ring, Mario, and Zelda games are good?
It’s because the devs at Nintendo and From Software have people in charge who have been making games for like 30 goddamn years and have become literal masters of their craft.
Meanwhile, all the companies making shitty games are firing people as soon as their game ships and chasing trends instead of focusing on fundamentals of good game mechanics and gameplay design.
…And so then the next quarter when they need more warm bodies to ship something, they basically have to hire a bunch of 20-something fresh graduates who generally have no idea what they’re doing, pay them next to nothing, give them unrealistic deadlines, crunch the shit out of them, burn them out, and then repeat the cycle.
That’s at least one of the reasons why even industry celebrities like Cliff Blezinski got out of making games.
Not a fan of Joe Rogan, but go watch John Carmack - one of the singular greatest programmers of the last 40 years and basically also one of the creators of the FPS - tell Rogan that game dev is harder and less secure and pays less than Facebook.
It’s why most game studios’ average tenure is around 5 years… and why a lot of people (myself included) left… because the pay and job stability is better in adjacent careers like just general software dev.
These people are trying to make games that they are passionate about. No game dev gets into it to make money or micro transactions… especially not someone who would want to work for a studio that once crafted flagship titles like Bungie or Blizzard or any of the other big name studios.
People telling game devs that they “should lose their jobs” really need to redirect their ire toward the private equity bean-counting suits - who are making off like bandits while absolutely gutting the future of an industry I fucking guarantee is having its legs cut out from under it by shit like this.
Edit : Holy shit some of the absolute chirplords in the thread below really make me happy I got out of making games. To anyone still soldiering on in the trench that is video game dev work, I salute you… I really wish you had the fortitude to still do it, but I’m a mere mortal. Here’s to hoping you guys are able to get what you need and that the suits just get out of the way.
Such an incredible game and a great humble developer. Honestly, there’s nothing I can think of to do to improve the game from a gameplay mechanics standpoint, but there are a few technical back-end things I do wish it had :
- Cross-platform compatible cloud-based save support. I want to be able to play in my same game save regardless of what system I play on. I don’t even mind paying for the game multiple times, but I want to have a singular Stardew account that I can sync somehow between PlayStation, Steam Deck, iOS, etc.
- Cross-platform multiplayer. If I want to play on my Steam Deck and hop into my spouse’s farm on the Switch or whatever… or have them be able to do so on mine.
- Mixing local and online co-op. If my kid wants to play with my spouse split-screen and I want to play on my desktop, again - would love to just be able to do so more seamlessly.
- Dedicated server support.
I know at this point doing those things would be very hard from a technical standpoint since they’d probably require a lot of deep work in a code base that was not built to do any multiplayer to begin with, but I still would love if they could somehow do so or fork the base game to allow it to be done by the community.
When I bought my buddy’s used GameCube for like $50 back in 2005, he gave me an extra controller and Smash Bros. Melee with it.
Just on that game alone I logged more than 2,000 hours playing almost literally every day for 4 years alongside my dorm-mates and buddies.
That’s like… $0.02 and a half cents per hour… for a whole ass GameCube and a game.
…Best purchase I ever made.
The problem is the idea of working on games sounds amazing… and it allows them to pull in a constant fresh young pool of eager workers willing to completely destroy themselves to make their mark on the world and release something they’re passionate about…
And all these publicly traded ghoulish-MBA-run companies would rather have more cheap inexperienced “Pikmin” type workers to throw at endless “copycat-chase-whatever-concept-is-popular-and-constantly-pivot-toward-the-popular-right-now” type game projects than experts in their field with dozens of titles under their belt, decades of design, or artistic, or programming experience.
Actually Nintendo is one of the few companies who hasn’t burned out their designers - as easily exemplified by people like Shigeru Miyamoto literally having been there his entire life for more than 40 years at a single company.
This is something unheard of outside of companies like Nintendo, but also Japan in general. Even major industry figureheads like John Carmack, Ken Levine, Jason West and Vince Zampella (the guys who made Call of Duty that Bobby Kotick fucked over and then started Respawn and made Apex Legends - whose features Fortnite stole and added to their own game - just like Fortnite also did with PUBG) - all of whom no longer are at the original companies where they made multi-billion-dollar IPs possible… and then there’s guys like Cliff Blezinski who were on the literal front pages of game magazines and keynote speaking roles at industry events like E3 in the mid-2000s with Gears of War… who just literally quit making games after leaving Epic and then starting a studio that went out of business a few years back.
Nintendo’s biggest problem is that the old master game designers running the place basically don’t seem to “get” the internet… so they have dumb ideas about emulation and ROMs, online fan interactions and e-sports, terrible support for modern ancillary features indirectly related to gaming like voice chat, complex parental controls, advanced technical features like Dolby ATMOS sound, HDR color space, DLSS and modern shader pipelines.
The only thing I do NOT like about Elden Ring (and the From Software games in general) is the truly missable stuff that isn’t clearly shown as permanently missable until after you watch some YouTuber’s video talking about how after you cross this invisible line suddenly a bunch of NPCs die or disappear because of a story bit that action triggers without saying anything to you or warning you… this is real by the way and this is that line on the map.
If you go north of it, the DLC IRREVERSIBLY changes a lot of stuff with pretty much every NPC you have met up to this point
Another example of this though - in the base game, I really wanted to get that “raging wolf” armor set that you see in so many videos and images promoting the game but it turns out I progressed the story and killed the NPC who gives you that quest line before he gave it to me and I can’t go back and get it now unless I want to NG+ it and make the game even HARDER for myself…
…all that does is make me try harder, learn move sets, and watch videos from pros.
Yep. Same. I beat the first 🔥🗑️ this evening. Not a pro, but did make a how-to video.
To be fair, I learned it watching one of VattiVidya’s recent videos. Just summarized that one part and recorded myself on my PS5 doing it.
Oh, right. 🤣 WAIT HE updated it with a longer one!
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Here’s a video showing everything iD worked on related to what was referred to as “DOOM 4” from like 2007 to 2013 before scrapping a huge part of it and coming out with the critically acclaimed 2016 version (which was only shown starting around 2015 at QuakeCon and E3).
Note that not EVERYTHING was scrapped, as you can see things like the super-shotgun model are close to the final release - as well as what you can tell were early slower iterations of the execution-style animations the game became famous for doing, but a lot of what is shown in that trailer was never to be seen again outside of these old videos people have attempted to archive.
I’m guessing they went back to the drawing board several times - probably because they felt their sequel wasn’t really as evolved or as fun as what they had hoped it would be, so they shifted I’m guessing from their overhead view to the behind the player 3rd person style game we know now at some point after churning at it for a couple years at least…
Like you know that Doom 2016 was the 3rd complete from scratch redo from what they originally started working on after Doom 3, right?
This sort of thing sometimes happens in creative projects; like when you hear a movie took like 7 years to make, it’s not necessarily that they literally shot scenes every week for the same film that whole time. It’s that the project was shelved, or they changed directors, or the studio lost interest for a while or they got a new script or something.
They also have some of the longest tenured pros of game design and programming in the industry in its entirety… something sadly far more rare outside of Nintendo… but especially Japan.
Shigeru Miyamoto, for example, has been designing at Nintendo for literally 4+ decades at this point.
Turns out you can master a craft after doing it for a majority of your adult life.
But - in the US at least - the executives at publicly traded game companies would rather shut down literal smash hit dev studios like the guys who made Hi Fi Rush than cultivate a few master class devs of their own over a few decades…
“Newer” does not necessarily equal “better.”
The real problem is how basically game dev is an untenable long-term career from a AAA standpoint… or at least it is outside of Japan.
Almost every major dev is not being run by anyone with more than 10-ish years of dev experience.
Why? Because studios shut down and fire everyone, or they get bought… and fire everyone… or the grizzled vets get burnt out, or find out that work-life balance shifts when they get old enough to want to start a family, or discover (like I did) that general software pays better, has less turnover, and doesn’t shut down as often.
Look at all the major players in the FPS game for example from the past 15 years… The guys who made Perfect Dark, the original GoldenEye, Killer Instinct, Banjo Kazooie, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day? Mostly not in the industry anymore or struggling while working on small indie projects. Some of the companies still exist, but the guys who’d be in their 60s with 30 years of game dev and design mastery under their belts? Gone.
Cliff Blezinski isn’t working on games anymore. John Carmack isn’t at id. Half of Bungie’s OG staff has moved on to other stuff or switched to 343 or some other smaller studio.
I said “outside of Japan” earlier btw because meanwhile Shigeru Miyamoto is still at Nintendo. Dude’s an absolute elder god of game design, and all he’s been doing is working on them for more than 4 decades at this point.
Kojima’s been making games since the 80s, so has most of the folks at Capcom, and the From Software guys have been doing the same thing for 15+ years at this point.
And then there’s the rare tiny studio or re-org of a once awesome team like Respawn after all the Activision / Call of Duty stuff or indie effort like the guy behind Stardew Valley… but other than those handful of exceptions, there’s no one but 20-something recent grads that pad out the teams at these giant game companies like Ubisoft, Activision, EA, etc. Even Blizzard is a pale shadow of what it once was. And Valve doesn’t really make games anymore b/c they don’t have to…
They aren’t making great games - but NOT because they’re “stupid…” they’re making bad games… because they just started… and all the old farts who they should be apprenticing under like you do with ANY other respected artisan type career are gone.
And every year some $10 million / year bonus paid suit shuts down an Ensemble Studios, or a Telltale Games, or fires half of the team at Square Enix b/c the new Tomb Raider 6-year project didn’t make a bajillion dollars after some exec decided that should be their target since “Clash Royale” only took 1 year to pump out and just basically prints piles of money.
This is like saying to any sort of person involved in commercial agriculture “don’t buy a John Deere tractor if you don’t like their draconic business practices.”
Like… there’s not really many other choices if you want to make a game that can do simultaneous cross-platform networked multiplayer and want to be able to launch on any console.
I mean, unless you want them making something that has massive difficulty coming to console… like maybe Lethal Company is the only recent example I can think of that’s a small non-major publisher-backed title that has networked 4-player multiplayer… and even then i’m not sure what sort of challenges that dev had when trying to implement any sort of netcode for gameplay.
Said this in another thread :
First off - yes Sony is in the wrong.
Second - Helldivers ain’t Flappy Bird. Making an online multiplayer game that needs the ability to do reliable matchmaking across multiple platforms with hundreds of thousands of players out there needs MASSIVE network and infrastructure support…
So you may say “don’t take money from the mob,” but this is more a situation of where if they HADN’T taken Sony’s support, they likely wouldn’t have been able to have the resources to have done all that themselves which could have made the difference between their great success and failure.
Remember that the first helldivers game was also a Sony published title where everything worked out fine for everyone then… but mostly because it wasn’t near as big a success story and making headlines but was instead a far more niche title lost mostly in the noise of smaller dev Sony titles.
I’m sure arrowhead has learned its lesson now and it will likely able probably to flex its muscles in the future thanks to its success financially - as I’m sure lots of publishers will be now coming at them with much more lucrative and favorable contract deals going forward, but they probably would not have been able to do what they wanted to do at the scale that they have been able to had Sony not been there to help provide that initial capital and infrastructure support.
This is Sony’s fault fully. The guys at Arrowhead are just wanting to have the means to make good games. They needed the resources to launch successfully and pretending it would have been feasible otherwise without said resources is sadly… naive.
Not defending Sony, but I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to make a game that can have hundreds of thousands of players playing multiplayer matches simultaneously all over the world, but it needs a lot of infrastructure, and network support and other expensive hard to do stuff that you can’t just shit out like it’s Flappy Bird.
The problem is is they probably needed capital and support to get it off the runway, and Sony attached strings to the capital and support they gave them.
Now that it’s a hit, Sony is trying to flex its legal power via said strings - I’m guessing - and probably have all but threatened this relatively small dev with pulling the rug or taking them to court if they don’t follow orders.
TL;DR - Making games is expensive. Sony probably offered the small dev with limited resources a Faustian bargain and now the Devil is calling for his dues. They probably never had a choice.
True that no matter what - Phil IS a CEO, which means he’s not a good dude… but I guess I just look at it as shades of gray.
I think Microsoft decided it doesn’t want to do ANY kind of hardware, because of how poorly they did both in the X era, and in international markets like Japan…
And like you said - if Xbox becomes a brand rather than an actual piece of hardware, then there’s no reason to buy an Xbox. I had a 360 starting right before Halo 3 came out in 2007, but with every single one of their games being fully multi-platform with ZERO exclusives I never had a reason to get any of their systems after my original Elite.