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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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[–] 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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