oh good, hes self aware and willing to admit to his mistakes, i actually respect that.
I’ve met Mr Carmack a few times along with religiously reading his dev journal in the 90’s. Never got to know him personally but always seemed like an alright person. I am biased as I directly attribute QuakeC and the Quake mod scene for accelerating my career in programming.
I still don’t believe he ever genuinely thought that. Microsoft hasn’t even been a good steward of its own brands.
Everything they touch turns to shit in a uniquely Microslop way.
RIP Nokia smartphones
Nokia was struggling already when MS took over.
Back in the Windows 7 era it was. But not anymore
When was Microsoft ever??? Sorry but you knew back then what you know now.
Microsoft’s gaming division was pretty respected in the industry for a long time. Lots of people give them (deserved) flack over Kinect for the Cbox One, but what really drove them over the cliff was buying all these studios to make Gamepass more attractive. It was actually a good deal for everyone when it was mostly games that were older, but when they started doing day-1 releases of first party games and buying studios to add to the number of games getting that day-1 release it turned sour.
A bunch of games that early adopters would previously have paid 60 bucks for were suddenly included in theit $7/month subscription, so tons of people who would have been buying 10 games a year were suddenly spending less than a hundred bucks on new Xbox games because enough new stuff was coming to Gamepass they could stay busy, so all these AAA releases that cost $100 to make were losing money.
So they raised the process of gamepass to try and keep up, but didn’t. Then they bought Activision and lost their lunch when Call of Duty sales plummeted because millions of people with Gamepass who had been buying it annually didn’t.
So they increased the price of gamepass so high everyone canceled, removing the only reason many of them were still using Xbox over Playstation, and at the same time the consoles skyrocketed in price.
Now they aren’t including Call of Duty from Gamepass for the first year and taking the price partway down, which was a good start to righting the ship but too late.
Chasing the Netflix model doesn’t work if you do it dumb. Netflix didn’t buy all the other studios to make their original programs. They did make some internal studios, but they mainly partnered with existing studios to make specific programs. Instead of buying Bethesda, they could have partnered with them on specific games, which would have been better for the games, the studio, Microsoft, and Xbox customers. But buying Bethesda was a simpler brute-force solution they employed dozens of times.They became an even dumber Embracer Group. Embracer at least they had a (dumb) plan to sell off the assets. Microsoft bought a bunch of studios with no plan for how to make it profitable.
The problem with what you’re saying is that they’ve always bought out other studios and then fucked them up. Going all the way back to their original IP Halo; Halo was a product of Bungie, a Mac exclusive game company at the time. Halo was originally going to be Apple’s big jump into gaming. The release of Halo was delayed to port it to the Xbox and today… today Bungie barely exists and all of their IPs are owned by MS.
Xbox was a passion project, Bill Gates was obsessed with getting Microsoft into the living room. Once Bill Gates left, and later Steve Balmer left, there was nobody left who gave a shit about this passion project and it became a money grab. So Microsoft went back to doing what it does best, buying people out and running their IPs into the ground.
Phil Spencer was a good steward (edit: of Xbox) I think for a long time, but he didn’t make the decisions to buy all the studios.
I reckon that’s less about Microsoft and more about Bungie though. Bungie are primarily responsible for their own downfall with some terrible management decisions.
Microsoft were very good to Bungie from the beginning in terms of finance and support, and Halo on Mac would never have had the same impact as Halo on Xbox.
It’s been nearly 20 years since Bungie left Microsoft. In this case, I think it’s unfair to blame Microsoft for what they’ve since become.
I was blaming Microsoft for what they became 20 years ago.
They became wildly successful under Microsoft. As far as I remember, it was Bungie who were the driver behind leaving Microsoft because they wanted to move on to other IP, as opposed to being “The Halo company”.
I can’t blame them for that, but it’s not Microsoft’s fault that what they did afterwards was a shadow of their former glory.
Then they shouldn’t have allowed themselves to be bought out.
I mean, I literally said it was Bungie making terrible management decisions.
But there’s no way Halo would have had the same impact on Mac as it did on Xbox. The Microsoft purchase was win-win. Leaving Microsoft let them pursue other IP and give greater creative control, but they also never reached those heights they did under Microsoft either before or after their stewardship.
Edit: don’t get me wrong, clearly recent Microsoft game studio acquisitions have been a bad thing for the industry, but I just don’t think the Bungie example is a good one. I think it’s rewriting history a bit to say that Bungie may have suffered under Microsoft.
This is a company that became industry rockstars with an incredibly successful franchise and were given an inordinate amount of money and support at the time. Them believing they’d be better off on their own was partly a fallacy, and only really resulted in going full circle and letting Sony purchase them.
Microsoft was always buying companies to drive them off the cliff. Or rather to lead them behind the barn. There’s even an older Simpsons bit about Microsoft’s cut throat methods. Nothing about this is new or surprising.
Honest question: What were the best games developed directly by ms on it’s own. I can only think of flight simulator, and that’s not really a game. I just genuinely don’t think I’ve played any.
I mean ignoring minesweeper and space cadet pinball or whatever.
Oh maybe like forza motorsport? was that them?
It’s weird that they don’t brand them - I guess B2B is too important to them to risk reputation on frivolity. Which is odd because of all the f-words i could use about sharepoint, i think frivolous is about the nicest.
They had a bunch of great titles.
Age of Empires, Freelancer, Mechwarrior, and more.
Some of the studios were bought through acquisitions, but they received the backing and support they needed to make great titles in a way that was good for the games, the devs, Microsoft, and the gamers.
I think I had a demo of one of the mechwarrior games, but it ran slow on my PC, or was a bit boring, or something, I never got on with it.
It was in the doom era though , and very little could compete (from my perspective) - so probably i just played doom coop (until it turns into defacto deathmatch) anyway. I mean that was most of the 1990s the way i remember it.
Certainly the mechwarrior demo wouldn’t have had networking anyway - but i feel like maybe it got less out of my meagre hardware than doom did.
The old Mechwarrior games were more like simulators than modern mech games, so were pretty complicated to get into.
And they were very demanding performance-wise.
While this is a great detailed explanation, it still sounds like very poor decision making that would be obvious to anyone except out of touch execs.
What? The Kinect was the one cool idea they ever had.
A company I worked for made a simple flight sim that you could play standing in front of a video wall spreading your arms like a kid pretending to be a plane and steering like that. That stuff is gold. Shame it never took off.
kinect has a new life now in hospitals
I remember when Microsoft bought GitHub everyone was worried.
And then, they actually made it a little better while not burning it down.
There was a time during the 2010s that seemed like big companies had learned not to ruin a good thing.
No, but that was the time when every tech company could basically generate money out of big userbases and empty promises. If you don’t have to worry about making money, you don’t have to enshittify something. Companies like uber would not exist in todays market because investors wouldn’t subsidize that company for years until it finally turns a profit. Hell, I think uber just turned profitable in early 2024, so 11 years of losses, and I highly doubt that in todays market, investors will subsidize companies like OpenAI for 11 years.
I think about this all the time.
“Why can’t I just make an app or a service that is that successful? I know some very intelligent people, why did it work for those companies and not for us?” And it really all comes down to that.
They can hemmorhage money for decades and still be going because of investor support. Its a wonder anything works at all ever honestly. Its a weird system
If you compare the reactions and statements of John Romero and John Carmack you really get a feeling for who of them is a empathetic human being with interest in his fellow humans and their work and who isn’t or in other words, John Carmack please bugger off to your useless AI company.
John Romero aged like fine wine.
Yeah. Definitely would.
Will this guy ever shut up? Washed up has been working on his slop company. Fuck off John.
What kind of shitty GDPR-violating site is this? “Accept all tracking” as my only option? Completely unacceptable. And they dare call themselves Eurogamer?
Anyway, Microsoft hasn’t been a good steward of Minecraft or anything else either. They eventually kill everything they touch. Have they been a good steward of Windows even?
IGN kind.
"You can’t rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn’t be your default belief. I don’t think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from id games.“Could they have gotten more with a different pricing strategy? Could they have created more things for fans to buy? Could they have cost-effectively marketed in a way that reached more players that would have loved and bought the games? Could they have changed the game designs and broadened the appeal to more players without alienating existing ones? Could they have produced the games at a lower cost, faster or cheaper? I really don’t know.”
I’m no expert, but ya doy. Microsoft’s play to pursue low-cost, high-return recurring revenue by shoving their extraordinarily talented single-player studios (Rocksteady, Arkane) at OBVIOUSLY terrible live service titles is bad enough on its own but is also a telling reflection of the executive mindset (this goes for Sony too). Profit is king, data is infallible, and development talent is best directed at our behest and is easily expendable when needed.
Let game devs do what they want. Some games will fail, but jesus, not at the scale and volume that they’re failing at right now.
Wait, the plan was to get recurring revenue out of single player games by tying them to gamepass.
This failed, for entirely predictable reasons, and now MS is holding a load of very mature, stable game studios and needs them to make checks notes double the revenue (actually, profit). This simply isnt posssible.
Theres a story out from early in the year about MS requiring a 30% profit margin across the firm which when applied to games is just nonsense. Not ambitious or unrealistic, nonsense.
Games is a terrible fit for MS and the companies who allowed it to buy them for stability are realising that.
Maybe he shouldn’t have fucking left out of nowhere because he wanted to work in an industry that has hit a brick wall
VR was always a brick wall. That’s why he did it, because that type of challenge is exciting when progress can be made. Same reason that he’s now left that for basically AI (last I heard). Guy’s got an ego and ethical blindspots the size of Jupiter, though, same as musk, but smarter with maybe less ethical woes. However, I don’t hate him (Carmack), I’m just disillusioned and disappointed.
Buy it back, John!
(I have no idea how business actually works)
I thought Shwarma was supposed to be halal.
