I suppose that's fair. If this is the real Phil Spencer, he's not any better than Mattrick.
Xbox is shutting down Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, and Alpha Dog Games. Roundhouse Studios absorbed by ZeniMax Online Studios.
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I suppose that's fair. If this is the real Phil Spencer, he's not any better than Mattrick.
I think they're just hoping to squeak by to June for the next Xbox showcase and that everyone would if mellowed out by then.
He's busy trying to nuke the people who blew up his base in FO76
Apologies are for the relocated and laid off staff.
This is a company re-organization and as a consumer nothing has happened yet that would warrant an apology to consumers. No prices have been raised; content removed, etc..
That will likely change, but it has not for the moment and the latest announcement for Gamepass this month is absolutely amazing.
This is where Phil should be following Sony and Nintendo and stop trying to make his image as gamer of the people and accept, he is a corporate shill.
They just shut down the studio that shipped the best game in their portfolio last year. This thread wouldn't have more than 6,000 posts in it if people didn't care. The value proposition of Game Pass does change if smaller, more creatively ambitious games stop being made since that was touted as a benefit of these studios joining Microsoft Gaming in the first place.
Of course people care, I am talking about the expectation of Microsoft aka Phil issuing some sort of public apology when they already classified this as a re-organization.
They actually did cancel the Redfall DLC, which people paid for. So this has materially effected consumers.
Cutting one of the studios and getting Lyon to make a third-person comic book game is probably the only way to support Arkane. The Austin studio got a rough deal with Prey not doing as well as it deserved and being forced to make a GaaS they didn't want which bombed, but there's no real way to justify keeping it open with like a decade of being in the red.
Probably because their strategy is in the process of being entirely re-evaluated.
I really don't think anything complicated needs to be said, though.
They're clearly looking to reorganize their development portfolio to be leaner and more profitable.
why would she? just from a cursory glance it's not like she was posting anything important so why post even the most benign of things now and stir up a hornets nest?
It's best to stay low. Anything else they say right now will be met with vitriol. She probably gave us the best corporate-approved answer she could during that Bloomberg interview.
Besides, I think Spencer has an interview coming up with IGN? Let him catch the heat.
I think this is why the news has hit me so hard. The direction of Xbox under Spencer has received a lot of flak, but I enjoyed it. I liked the commitment to backwards compatibility, the Game Pass game selection, and particularly the Play Anywhere initiative. I loved that they were willing to greenlight a game like Pentiment, something I'm not sure any other major publisher would have done. But if a studio like Tango has no place at Xbox after delivering a game like Hi-Fi Rush, I'm pretty sure that era of Xbox is over.
Those devs deserved better. But more than that, whatever Xbox's new direction ends up being, I suspect it won't be for me.
Very true, I see they are giving partial compensation but should really offer the full game refund for those who purchased.
I was one of the few here that loved Stadia but it really was a pleasant surprise to get a 100% refund on everything, that should be the standard
I think the mask just slipped.
Then they are more tone deaf than their recent actions show. The anger isn't going anywhere and letting it fester is just going to make things worse. And it will overshadow anything they are trying to sell during that showcase if they don't address it sooner.
I think if they have a great June showcase, the anger will mostly die down and people will be hyped again. Consumers will mostly care about the product pipeline, and if it looks good, people will be satisfied. As unhappy as I am with Xbox, if they would just show some games I'm interested in (with like, real trailers), I'd be open to buying the console. Good software can turn a bad news cycle around pretty quickly.
They already have their unpaid marketing guys talk about "those sick gamepass drops" as it looks like.
This will be forgotten in a few days and Spencer is back to being the Hero.
Sadly this is how this will go and nothing will change.
This will be forgotten in a few days and Spencer is back to being the Hero.
Sadly this is how this will go and nothing will change.
I'm not shocked they haven't said anything. Can't think of anything they could say that would make the situation better, as Xbox has royally fucked up here.
Honestly rather they keep their mouth shut than whatever Ybarra was doing with that "stop being mean to Phil, shutting down those studios really hurt him" bullshit tweet.
Honestly rather they keep their mouth shut than whatever Ybarra was doing with that "stop being mean to Phil, shutting down those studios really hurt him" bullshit tweet.
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Sorry, had to look it up. Seems it's right after the upcoming show.
Ugh. That seems like a little too far out.
A lot has changed already. It is not just the recent studios closing; with that and all of the firings, XBox's developers have lost a lot of faith and their sense of stability. XBox's games have not delivered in the way they want. Microsoft is now staring hard at XBox instead of ignoring them. Activision's acquisition took a lot more time and money than anticipated. We are still missing many games that XBox has showcased over the years.
If anything, this just goes to show that the success of XBox has nothing to do with how people view Phil Spencer.
Phil's still busy picking out his next T-shirt to get his cred back.
I was rooting for Phil and Xbox since he took over. It's just been disappointment after disappointment. The only thing I can confidently say that he did good with was backwards compatibility and gamepass. When you're a developer and your game can be praised but can still lead to a shutdown is fucked.
I was rooting for Phil and Xbox since he took over. It's just been disappointment after disappointment. The only thing I can confidently say that he did good with was backwards compatibility and gamepass. When you're a developer and your game can be praised but can still lead to a shutdown is fucked.
I met tango only with Hi-Fi Rush and I feel so bad I only just discovered them. I had no idea Shinji Mikami had created another dev studio and no idea the bastard brother of Resident Evil was so good!
Leave it to Microsoft to ruin a company with so much potential.
Leave it to Microsoft to ruin a company with so much potential.
It can and has, but I don't know about now. I think the broken trust runs much deeper than that and this time will prove to be different. I think we have finally reached the show me stage and it is going to take a lot more than a single showcase and a bunch of trailers to turn things around. People will need games in their hands. They have had some really good showcases in the recent past and yet we are still here. Let's not forget that Hi-Fi Rush was released during one and was universally praised then, and now Tango is no longer a studio some 17 months or thereabouts later. There have been too many broken promises, games released in a beta state and few true breakout hits for Phil and company to be banking on June's showcase to calm things down.
And at this point, who could take them at their word? Better yet, why would anyone?
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I was in HR for a few years and one of my directors never fail to tell people in his introductions about how he successfully performed a retrenchment exercise in a big company and claimed it as one of his key achievements. Even other HR people found it disgusting.
A super far cry from this other lady that I had as a trainer for a course I took. Said she joined a company and within days they got her to do the dirty work of having to let go a significant amount of people at a small company. She said she did her best to link up those who lost their jobs with employment agencies, recruiters, other HR contacts, and offered counseling to those who needed. Even after the people were fired, she took it upon herself to do a wellness call to check on them every month for a few months, to see if she could offer help.
Sometimes it's inevitable that someone has to be the bad guy and fire people but no one should list it down like it's some kind of achievement.
Of course, people will need the games. I'm just saying a strong showcase would overshadow what has occurred this month whether Phil comes out and makes a statement about it or not. The strongest move they can make to change the tides is to put out great software, and of course they'll have to show it first. It's also why I said they need to show real trailers this time, not logos or trailers where the game is obviously 5+ years away/may never even release.
It won't be. It's with Ryan McCaffrey and therefore will be as soft and chummy as you could imagine. McCaffrey's got all this stuff out of his system in his Soul of Xbox piece/video (and even then he couldn't help adding in how much he admires the man and reeling off all the wonderful things he thinks he's done in the past).
This will be pre-approved & rehearsed questions only discussing stuff from the show.