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Dev at id Software says Microsoft 'burned a lot of bridges' in the industry: 'They fundamentally don't understand art, they don't understand games' (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] 203 points 3 days ago (5 children)

Basically: The thing everyone worried about and quite frankly knew would happen when Microsoft started buying every studios they could get their hands on... happened.

Embrace. Expand. Extinguish. It never went away. Careless incompetence. The shareholders way.

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  • [–] 175 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    Shareholders: "Wow, Microsoft is really expanding by buying up those studios, promising great output for them in the future!". Line goes up.

    Microsoft then does nothing except investing all of their money into AI.

    Shareholders: "Wow, Microsoft is really streamlining their organisation by dumping all of those useless dead weight studios. Excellent management". Line goes up.

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  • [–] 80 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    I absolutely hate how on the nose this is. sigh

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  • [–] 19 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    TIL that this is a valid use of "on the nose" (definition 1). I was genuinely confused, I'm only familar with definition 2 there, "unimaginative; overliteral; lacking nuance; unsophisticated".

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  • [–] 27 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    Yeah. I would look at Microsoft's aquisition of studios as those studios exiting the space in the long term. Gaming is thriving but it's not the big studios, it's the myriad of indies and smaller games that are where the innovation and interest is. The monolithic AAA gaming space is in a crisis of it's own making - driven by shareholder demands and the view of games as nothing more than franchises to milk every year.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 days ago

    Also, AAA is struggling with games being too large. Every game is so expensive and has so many years of development that it's hard for a studio to survive a flop without a major publisher. But the major publishers are pushing for studios to pursue games that have a really high flop rate (live-service, competitive shooters/etc). Additionally because every game has so much money invested in it, the studios are scared to try anything too different or unique, resulting in the games having a bland "design-by-committee" and not offering anything meaningfully different from what's already out there. Features are intentionally held back so that the game will have content to drip-feed the players later, resulting in lacking content at launch.

    I really think the AAA industry needs to downside, split up many AAA studios into multiple AA projects.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago

    I assume that Microsoft is trying to appeal to two different groups of shareholders. The first sees Microsoft buying up studios and assumes that the studios will be able to put out better games cheaper (by firing support staff like HR). The second group sees Microsoft cutting low performing workers and assumes that Microsoft will be able to get more profits by cutting lots of cost without losing much income. If they time it right, they can get the second group to start buying just as the first group starts selling.

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  • [–] 37 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    Im not even sure the extinguish part is intentional here. I think they are just genuinely this incompetent, but Greys Law applies here imo.

    Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 days ago

    What we gotta do is start going after the people selling the studios and companies and pillars of society. Make selling off unprofitable or even downright dangerous again and we'll see companies that compete to grow instead of compete to sell inferiority while intentionally poisoning competence.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    Embrace. Expand. Extinguish.

    That implies careful planning.

    In this case, MS thought just mindlessly throwing money around will somehow bring in massive profits.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 days ago

    Also pretty sure embrace extend extinguish doesn't apply to a straight up buyout, it's about taking a competing (often opensource) technology, embracing it and supporting it, then moving to take control over it by extending it (thus becoming the de facto main implementation, as others struggle to keep up with changes), waiting for competition to die out before finally dropping support, thus killing the technology

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    Except, game dev companies are not competitors for MS (meaning XBOX), but essential for their survival. What's the point of extinguishing your source of supply?

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    They're probably banking on the fact that devs love making games, and when a bunch get laid off, some of them will inevitably go start some new studio that Microsoft can swoop in and buy again in 5-10 years, wring another game out of, then toss aside like trash again.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 days ago*

    It's the EA strategy. Wait for a studio to get public recognition, buy it out and milk it until the devs break for the exits, start a new indie studio, rinse the blood off and repeat. Frankly every "Creative Industry" since they invented the Victrola has operated the same way, and it's only a hair's breadth different from how noble patronage worked (and arguably more exploitative). And every time anyone tried to build a more co-operative style system, they burn it to the ground with market manipulation and regulatory capture.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    That seems like a bad business model to me.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    It's been working so far

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    Only 'working' to make a few rich cunts even richer, which is not what I'd call working.

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