Why MS buying all of these Studios is bad for Gaming

[kapone32]

As we all know MS is trying (and succeeding) to become the Walmart of the PC Gaming scene. I was reading an article about Forza Motorsport and it struck me exactly how dangerous this actually is.

A person that worked on Forza responded to questions like why are they using the same assets from the previous Game? They said that what MS does is never keep anyone working on the Game for more than 18 months. After 18 months MS would have to offer them health benefits so they would rather reset the employees than reward them for their dedication. If you step back and think of all of the studios they now own it makes what the developers of BG3 said at the latest Gaming awards even more compelling.

I could bring GamePass into it and what it is doing to AAA but that is another conversation all together. Just think in the Age of Magazines Maximum PC, if they gave you a DVD of all the newest full copies of the most marketed Games for the month would have done to the industry. It is not the same analogy but pretty damn close.

 

[cvaldes]

Consolidation in any industry (not just gaming) is usually bad for the consumer, bad for quality, bad for innovation. It can often be good for increasing shareholder value which is why it is so heavily practiced.

But it is really important to understand that the videogame industry is not alone with these challenges.

 

[kapone32]

Consolidation in any industry (not just gaming) is usually bad for the consumer, bad for quality, bad for innovation. It can often be good for increasing shareholder value which is why it is so heavily practiced.

But it is really important to understand that the videogame industry is not alone with these challenges.

Exactly. I worked for Maple Leaf foods. They bought all of the smaller food providers and then bought Schnieders and now that Company has no real workers. Just about everything to do with Maple Leaf has no workers but everything is now 3rd party. I mentioned Walmart because they are the example that everyone used to used to make that. If you don't know the same family owns Canada Bread, that entity provides about 90% of the bread you find in the Grocery store in Canada.

I even remember when Free Trade broke our banking system by allowing Canadian banks to buy Insurance Companies and Trust banks. All that did was destroy over 100000 direct jobs where people were making over 50K in 1989. It also meant that you had to be squeaky clean to get a loan over $5000. It also meant that you could not get a line of credit without a credit card from the same bank.

It got so bad that the foolish Govt (not current) opened our domestic housing supply to the World. Today there are "encampments" in every city in Canada and 2 generations of Canadian kids born after free trade almost have no avenue for home ownership. The sad thing is Canada is no place to live outside.

 

[#22]

MS buying studios gives me more negative impression due to ones not well treated by them in the past. Examples like Lionhead forced to do some online game instead of what they (and fans) wanted. But it was long time ago and things change. Being bought by big fish is always balancing between potentially increasing studio's capabilites and being forced to do what big fish wants. I think that MS is now 2-3 years from time when they bought many great studios, so we should be about to start seeing results instead of just wondering like that.

 

[silentbogo]

The Microsoft situation is a two-sided coin. On one hand you have a very obvious monopolization of gaming industry, which will give them leverage over all competitors. On the other - they actually kept their word on giving studios more than enough autonomy to do things their way (with the exception of few attempted hiccups with "inclusivity", which they've already backpedaled after some bad publicity).
This resulted in many good things, like inXile making their biggest project to date, Ninja Theory getting enough cash to fully expand their creative wings in Senua's Saga, S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 actually being a thing even after all the Hryhorovych's f%^ups which pretty much destroyed the company(I mean it literally, and not "nearly" destroyed but "completely", with barely any staff left just before the announcement of the game), and of course Minecraft still being a thing nearly 15 years after initial release. Bethesda acquisition also didn't change things much. Bethsoft still makes very buggy but epic RPGs, iD still finds ways to shoot itself in the foot regardless of how successfull DOOM franchise is, and Arcane Studios is being exploited by Bethsoft in unrelated projects, just like before the acquisition.

 

[cvaldes]

It's important to list Microsoft gaming failures next to their successes to frame their situation. There are turds like Redfall (often zero viewers on Twitch) and Starfield (often less than 100 Twitch viewers). The problem is that some of these turds cost as much to develop as the winners.

I stand my opinion that consolidation in any industry generally results is poorer quality. We are seeing it here with Microsoft. I can't predict the timing but my guess is that the next Xbox console will be the last physical hardware with the Xbox name. Unless Microsoft/Xbox can massively turn around this ship, there's probably a good chance that Zenimax/Bethesda will be put up for sale in five years. And Microsoft will exit out of yet another consumer business that it massively cocked up. We already know Microsoft's track record on their consumer efforts.

 

[Space Lynx]

I agree with @cvaldes consolidation is bad, case in point, see here:

Embracer Group is breaking into 3 smaller companies... lol who saw this coming, what a joke

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/embracer-will-split-into-three-companies-including-middle-earth-friends gobble up every company, assure everything will be fine, can't handle it after all, and break apart into 3 smaller companies. lol hey everyone don't worry, just get an MBA and get those six...

www.techpowerup.com

 

[Frick]

They said that what MS does is never keep anyone working on the Game for more than 18 months. After 18 months MS would have to offer them health benefits so they would rather reset the employees than reward them for their dedication.

Source on this, because it sounds very strange.

 

[evernessince]

I'd have to agree that consolidation is essentially never good, particularly when it's a big company that's doing the consolidation. They are just seeking to leverage a greater portion of the market to force it to bend to their will. It's eliminating competition so that they don't have to put out a better product and it's eliminating choices so that customers are forced into accepting higher prices, lower quality, or all of the above. All the big tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google horde talent and have them do nothing simply to prevent them from going to competitors and making something better. When there is a profit motive to stifle innovation that's precisely what we get in a economy that doesn't regulate big businesses anywhere near enough.

 

[Beginner Macro Device]

economy that doesn't regulate big businesses

Correct even without the words coming afterwards. No doubt m$ will try their worst.

We gotta vote with our wallets. They feed us dirt, we feed them zero cash. Simple as that. Smothering progress should be met with a sharp and putrid pitchfork.

 

[thesmokingman]

Anything MS touches tends to end up bad. /s

 

[Space Lynx]

Anything MS touches tends to end up bad. /s

yeah Blizzard said they were never forced by them to do anything, but Blizzard also took away my manual download of Warcraft 3 and forced me to use a launcher, after many many many years of owning it outright and downloading it with my key manually... and I have Warcraft 3 Collector's Box still to prove it... fucking assholes.

it looks different than the manual download too. it looks worse. why would they do this? M$ told them to of course. to consolidate everything into the launcher and they complied, cause, asshole.

 

[kapone32]

Source on this, because it sounds very strange.

Do a Google search on it. I am sure by now there are even videos on this. Do something like Ex Forza developer leaks why updates don't work.

 

[64K]

MS is bad news for PC gaming imo.

 

[chrcoluk]

Seems quite often dev buy outs best case is redundancies, worst case entire studios get shut down, so I for sure dont like them.

Can see as well how much less diversity we have in games now.

 

[Fourstaff]

To understand the profitability (therefore survivability) of a game studio, I think we have to stop looking a game studio as a "perpetual company". For smaller studios, one failure can mean financial doom, for larger studios they can afford a string of failures. Faced with this constant never ending threat, it is not difficult to appreciate the allure of being part of a megacorp with almost endless amount of resources.

As for people who are complaining about the lack of diversity in gaming, I am not sure where they have been browsing. Over the last 10 years we are getting extremely well made (and creative) games from small and/or independent studios such as Witcher 3 (mostly Gwent), Stardew Valley, Palworld, Baldur's Gate 3 and Stray. From big studios we have Zelda:BOTW and TOTK, Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and others. Even long running franchises such as Amored Core VI are well received.

That said, we do have a lot of sub par games like CoD franchise, those are more reflective of the team leadership and project direction than the quantity/quality of resources they have. Its very hard to produce hit after hit, year in year out. These franchieses are tired, and the only way they can survive is to get absorbed by big megacorps able and willing to fund another stab at reviving the IP.

 

[Remeca]

After 18 months MS would have to offer them health benefits so they would rather reset the employees than reward them for their dedication.

This is nothing new. Except it's only 12 months in my state, which is when I had to stop working for WoTC. In the early 2000s.

 

[chrcoluk]

To understand the profitability (therefore survivability) of a game studio, I think we have to stop looking a game studio as a "perpetual company". For smaller studios, one failure can mean financial doom, for larger studios they can afford a string of failures. Faced with this constant never ending threat, it is not difficult to appreciate the allure of being part of a megacorp with almost endless amount of resources.

As for people who are complaining about the lack of diversity in gaming, I am not sure where they have been browsing. Over the last 10 years we are getting extremely well made (and creative) games from small and/or independent studios such as Witcher 3 (mostly Gwent), Stardew Valley, Palworld, Baldur's Gate 3 and Stray. From big studios we have Zelda:BOTW and TOTK, Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and others. Even long running franchises such as Amored Core VI are well received.

That said, we do have a lot of sub par games like CoD franchise, those are more reflective of the team leadership and project direction than the quantity/quality of resources they have. Its very hard to produce hit after hit, year in year out. These franchieses are tired, and the only way they can survive is to get absorbed by big megacorps able and willing to fund another stab at reviving the IP.

Well the games havent stopped, but they have dried up, for 10 years you probably should have been able to list at least 100 medium to big budget titles.

The industry is now dominated by games as a service, shooters, mmos, sports, esports. Making single player offline 3rd person non shooter story driven games is often seen as too risky. Eastern dev's have all started making dark souls DMC clones as well. Same game style with different skin, characters. I own 3 games on my PS5 which is pretty shocking, by this part of its life, I owned dozens of PS4 games, as many on PS3/360 as well.

 

[kurosagi01]

1.Studios consolidating
2.The western gaming market is shooting itself in the foot with politics
3.Individuals bringing their own politics into gaming creativity
4.Game prices gone up
5. Game development has gone up drastically
6.Lack of space from the big players wanting to create games to fill the gaps in-between major releases is clearly showing now that we are missing games (Looking at you Sony for closing japan studios)
7.Games having long development cycle but get a release all run like crap on day 1
8. Owning a physical copy of a game doesn't mean jack all now in the modern era
9.The lack of creativity in wanting to try something new is also lacking now

 

[Fourstaff]

Well the games havent stopped, but they have dried up, for 10 years you probably should have been able to list at least 100 medium to big budget titles.

The industry is now dominated by games as a service, shooters, mmos, sports, esports. Making single player offline 3rd person non shooter story driven games is often seen as too risky. Eastern dev's have all started making dark souls DMC clones as well. Same game style with different skin, characters. I own 3 games on my PS5 which is pretty shocking, by this part of its life, I owned dozens of PS4 games, as many on PS3/360 as well.

If you look at 2023 Wikipedia list you will be able to find all kinds of games in all genres. What I do not know is whether your taste in games have changed or not - have they become more discerning or exacting in their requirements? If you are looking at single player offline 3rd person non shooter story driven PS5 game (this sounds very specific to me), for 2023 you have: Assassin's Creed Mirage, Lies of P, Baldur's Gate 3, Armored Core 6 (is this a shooter?), FF XVI, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, Hogwarts Legacy among others. It doesn't look like a short list to me.

 

[kurosagi01]

If you look at 2023 Wikipedia list you will be able to find all kinds of games in all genres. What I do not know is whether your taste in games have changed or not - have they become more discerning or exacting in their requirements? If you are looking at single player offline 3rd person non shooter story driven PS5 game (this sounds very specific to me), for 2023 you have: Assassin's Creed Mirage, Lies of P, Baldur's Gate 3, Armored Core 6 (is this a shooter?), FF XVI, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, Hogwarts Legacy among others. It doesn't look like a short list to me.

I feel we need more 20-40 hour story telling/adventure games available than giant open world RPGs, I dunno about you guys but I feel fatigued from them and which is why Armored core 6 was my GOTY last year.
There are certain games that were 20-40hours get turned into a slog like Jedi survivor, that game has no right to be a giant open world game in my opinion.
Assassins creed needs to go back to being a 20-40 hour game as well.

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

I feel we need more 20-40 hour story telling/adventure games available than giant open world RPGs, I dunno about you guys but I feel fatigued from them and which is why Armored core 6 was my GOTY last year.
There are certain games that were 20-40hours get turned into a slog like Jedi survivor, that game has no right to be a giant open world game in my opinion.
Assassins creed needs to go back to being a 20-40 hour game as well.

So....let's talk about that. I'm not disagreeing with you...but why do you suppose that instead of a 20-40 hour AA game it's more common to push out a 60-80 hour AAA game? If we look at things from the financial side most of the AAA games are at that costing due to graphical fidelity...whereas the average AA game is that way because somebody knows they are making a niche game and have a market to target.

Cool...so you've decided to forego the AA mire for the AAA mire. That means you'll need some form of monetization....because $70 isn't enough anymore. That's fine though, slap on some random loot boxes, crafting, or maybe even content passes. The former two items are one and done...but with a pass system you can halve the development team and charge the consumer basically for a new AAA game every single year...$5 at a time. You've now doubled profitability by halving labor investment and effectively decreased quality expectations because "we'll get it in the next patch." I laugh while writing this...because it's basically why AAA is dying...and the publishers are too greedy to see 10 blockbuster AA titles are infinitely healthier for the system than a single Fallout 4. Despite it being that obvious, you know we'll be getting Fallout 5 as a Fallout 4 clone...so why even try to be positive?


Put more succinctly, I agree with you. The problem is that you cannot make all the money with a game only most people will buy...so there's no reason to do that. I know that's a gross simplification, but as I spend longer on this earth I find that more and more people aren't happy with sustainable and profitable...they want insanely profitable at the cost of sustainability... The problem is that they are getting it, and I don't think Starfield has taught Bethesda anything yet.

 

[kurosagi01]

So....let's talk about that. I'm not disagreeing with you...but why do you suppose that instead of a 20-40 hour AA game it's more common to push out a 60-80 hour AAA game? If we look at things from the financial side most of the AAA games are at that costing due to graphical fidelity...whereas the average AA game is that way because somebody knows they are making a niche game and have a market to target.

Cool...so you've decided to forego the AA mire for the AAA mire. That means you'll need some form of monetization....because $70 isn't enough anymore. That's fine though, slap on some random loot boxes, crafting, or maybe even content passes. The former two items are one and done...but with a pass system you can halve the development team and charge the consumer basically for a new AAA game every single year...$5 at a time. You've now doubled profitability by halving labor investment and effectively decreased quality expectations because "we'll get it in the next patch." I laugh while writing this...because it's basically why AAA is dying...and the publishers are too greedy to see 10 blockbuster AA titles are infinitely healthier for the system than a single Fallout 4. Despite it being that obvious, you know we'll be getting Fallout 5 as a Fallout 4 clone...so why even try to be positive?


Put more succinctly, I agree with you. The problem is that you cannot make all the money with a game only most people will buy...so there's no reason to do that. I know that's a gross simplification, but as I spend longer on this earth I find that more and more people aren't happy with sustainable and profitable...they want insanely profitable at the cost of sustainability... The problem is that they are getting it, and I don't think Starfield has taught Bethesda anything yet.

The problem I have with a lot of the AA games is they are either being released from indie studios or from japanese studios.
A lot of the "bigger" studios(Bethesda, EA, ubisoft, most of Sony studios now all prioritised on AAA games since they shut down Japan studio etc) used to release AA games to fill in the gaps for their AAA release.
But now its all focused on only releasing AAA games, I don't really have a problem with microtransactions or loot box mechanics or even dumb DLC practices(refer to the whole Dragons dogma 2 thread I posted).
I feel like a lot of them need to learn from FromSoft in terms of "open-world", because a lot recently open-world just feels like a waste of space and graphics fidelity.
I'm not spending 10 minutes staring at the ground all the time or looking at the fidelity of a water or mountain.
I want to see more creativity in story narrative and slight change/improvement in gameplay mechanic.
I'm bored of seeing remakes as well now or pointless remasters that don't need it(looking at you Last of us)

 

[kapone32]

in manner of speaking similar just like critical race prior to it. Does it ever stop? I hope in my kids time it does but I won't hold my breathe. Hate sells and gets clicks but I do believe every generation does a better job than the previous one for inclusion.

Youtube is showing me videos that people are complaining about Warhammer 40K because they made a female a high level character. What I don't understand about the argument is that in Rogue Trader you play as a Woman as a main character. As a side note I totally enjoyed having a Sister of Battle in my group as well. Hate is foolish and is not needed in our community Games are about having fun. I wish TPU would call it out more. This stupid narrative made HZD a resounding success and Forspoken a dud, even though those Games share the exact same controls. I can also speak on how someone with dark skin could have built and programmed the ICs that control the F22 and International Space Station to belie the created narrrative.

 

[dirtyferret]

You mean exclusion?

I don't know your age and I hope you don't feel excluded. I just know in my time how we treated people who were different, how teens and colleges do it and now how my kids do it. From an overall perspective it seems each generation does a better job of inclusion.

Hate is foolish and is not needed in our community Games are about having fun.

the PC gaming community, PC hardware, (really any community) is at its strongest when more people feel they have a seat at the table.