- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
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I thought, yes we can. I said, look, just give us four years, proper finance, give us the chance Mass Effect has, Skyrim has, the games at the time. They’re getting four years and a lot of budget. Give us that, and we’ll give you something that’ll get you your players. Nah, you’ve had three shots and you’ve only tripled the money. It’s not good enough. Fuck off. That’s what I was annoyed about.
Fuck man, that’s like, summing up my entire corporate career right there. I want to buy this man a beer, I feel this so hard.
Good quote. Here is more of it for context:
Fable was profitable - “highly profitable”, Lionhead’s Simon Carter told Eurogamer - but in a now too-familiar story, it and its genre was seen by Microsoft as just not profitable enough. “That category is not the biggest category on the planet,” said Robbie Bach, who was the President of Entertainment & Devices Division at Microsoft before Don Mattrick assumed the role. “It’s not soccer. It’s not American Football. It’s not a first-person shooter sized category. So at a commercial level, I would say it was successful, but not wildly so.”
Wildly successful was what Microsoft was after. A pitch for Fable 4 was rejected. “It was like, you’ve reached your cap of players for RPG on Xbox and you need to find a way to double that, and you’re not going to do it with RPG,” Fable’s art director John McCormack told Eurogamer at the time. “I thought, yes we can. I said, look, just give us four years, proper finance, give us the chance Mass Effect has, Skyrim has, the games at the time. They’re getting four years and a lot of budget. Give us that, and we’ll give you something that’ll get you your players. Nah, you’ve had three shots and you’ve only tripled the money. It’s not good enough. Fuck off. That’s what I was annoyed about.” (Worth noting: Skyrim went on to sell 63m copies, as of June 2023, The Witcher 3 over 50m.)
Just absolutely greedy fucks that think entropy doesn’t exist and everything infinitely scales.
What is wild to me is that profit alone isn’t sufficient.
Like. You’re paying people to do a thing and you’re getting more money back.
Why shutter it?
Like oh no I can’t make MORE money off of this might as well make nothing?
why don’t they close down 343 next? they haven’t launched a good game in over a decade by now. that should have been high on the list of closures.
To be honest, as a huge Halo fan, I was surprised when seeing those studios closed that 343 wasn’t one of them. The studio is just cursed, even a leadership change isn’t going to save them.
Either make Halo games from all the studios under Microsoft or start a new one with people who are actual fans of the franchise
There’s so much potential for a Halo game that isn’t just a shooter.
I think a survival horror game based around the Flood would be amazing- something Dead Space-y but Halo. That would be incredibly difficult to make, and it’s never going to happen, but it would be cool.
Or a Mass Effect scale RPG
Hell even a Bethesda scale RPG, set it in a city during the Human covenant war where you have to move around using utility areas kinda similar to the subways in Fallout 3. Just dont give it to Bethesda, I dont trust them not to fuck it up after Starfield.
Yeah, the franchise has been on life support since Bungie left, they should have just licensed the IP to other studios.
I don’t entirely agree with that- I enjoyed some of the 343 games. They’re not the same quality as the original trilogy, but I would describe all of them but Halo 5 as ‘good’. Not great or amazing, but good.
I would love to see them license the IP out more, though, just so we could see more variety of games. I like Halo but “he kills all the aliens and doesnt afraid of anything” gets a bit old after the fifth time or so.
The only other Halo games are Halo Wars- which personally I enjoyed a lot- and the Spartan Assault twinstick shooter games that I never played.
As games sure, they were alright. But they werent Halo games. Its one of the best trilogies of all time and ODST and Reach were also great additons. I think 343 dropped the ball massively and at that point just licensing the IP could have yielded some good games too as it was already tarnished anyway.
I’m just loving the amount of bad press Microsoft is deservedly getting.
I think the studio closures was just the last straw. Like they spent almost $100 billion and they’ve made NOTHING. Like not one goddamn thing.
Say what you will about Sony and Nintendo but they have output and they care about gaming because they have to, it’s the only way they make money.
Microsoft could shutter their gaming division tomorrow and they would save money, not lose it. Whatever exec championed the buyouts for Game Pass is clearly gone or asleep at the wheel. So the end result is they own WoW, Candy Crush and CoD that print money and a bunch of franchises that haven’t seen a good release in 10+ years.
The fact that they bought inExile, Obsidian and Bethesda and didn’t immediately start work on a Fallout 1/2 remake or an FNV sequel is evidence enough they they have no fucking clue what they’re doing. How does a company own so many studios and make no games!?
What’s the point of consoles when PCs exist? I don’t understand how we have spent the entire modern PC era still clinging to locked down, limited consoles. And PCs aren’t expensive if you’re not buying some laughable top of the line garbage that runs games at super-ultra-mega-hyper high settings at 50billion pixels @ 4,096Hz.
I got a series s for £150 when my PC couldn’t run Elden Ring properly. It seemed cost effective vs a PC upgrade for playing the latest games.
