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.
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.
I absolutely hate how on the nose this is. sigh
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”.
TIL about the second definition
We are the lucky ten thousand.
“Wow, I hate how on the nose this is”. Line goes up.
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.
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.
What I’m worried about is some of those greedy fuckhead parasites would start courting big indie studios and AA games and ruining a part of that scene
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.
Embrace. Expand. Extinguish.
That implies careful planning.
In this case, MS thought just mindlessly throwing money around will somehow bring in massive profits.
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
Yep. They don’t understand games so they buy studios that DO understand games, and then turn them into divisions of Microsoft instead of game studios and are surprised that they no longer can make games.
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?
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.
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.
That seems like a bad business model to me.
It’s been working so far
Only ‘working’ to make a few rich cunts even richer, which is not what I’d call working.
But you know what I mean right?
Yeah. Working as intended. :|
Still seems like a long way around to make videogames, but I guess that’s not their primary business at this point.
You have to remember that the only person who ever really wanted Microsoft to get into console gaming was Bill Gates and this was largely an extension of his own love of video games and obsession with getting MS into the living room. Other efforts included things like WebTV, MSNBC, and a device that led to the creation of TiVo. Ballmer cared about Bill’s legacy but once the two of them were gone nobody was left who gave a rat’s ass about Xbox.
Probably true, although Ballmer didn’t screw it up and Nadella did screw it up for one simple reason. He’s a 1 Cloud Pony. He came from the cloud and that’s all he really knows, and his narrow Senior VP perspective helped him extract earnings from cloud but nothing else at Microsoft.
Yeah, this isn’t news and the studio owners who can cash big checks to sell don’t care.
Microsoft has a lot more problems than that, but I suppose that’s the only one Steve Jobs would care about.
Steve engineers developed the iPod Touch in secret because they thought he would look at the ugly prototype and can the whole project Jobs
Steve so impossible to please as a boss that his worker developed an application for him to develop a calculator layout because nothing the other designer did was ever good enough Jobs.
Steve the iPad won’t get a calculator for fourteen years even though his corpse is long since dead and buried Jobs.
MS shot itself in the foot: MS gutted the team, then the game didn’t come out right and this resulted in bad sales.
Here are the Steam sales numbers:
- DOOM (2016): 5.4M
- DOOM Eternal: 4.7M
- DOOM: The Dark Ages: 1.2M
FYI Doom The Dark Ages was available day 1 on game pass and they were boasting on social media that they had over 3 million players on the first week if I remember right.
It’s Microsoft’s fault the game didn’t sell. Most people (me included) opted to subscribe to game pass for a month instead.
Effectively it was a cost to increase and sustain subscriber numbers.
If they didn’t gain more for the costs spent, they didn’t have a viable marketing plan, or they did and it just failed horribly. Incompetence at the top.
Wait, there’s a new doom game? (Not joking, just noting that I’ve missed any mention of this whatsoever)
Been out for almost a year and just received a new DLC a few weeks ago.
Huh, TIL, and I learned it because it is, I’m guessing, really bad.
Tbh Doom TDA Revelations has been the most fun I’ve had with a game in years. It’s really good. But what M$ did to id software is disgusting. On release day of the DLC over half their employees got fired.
Good job guys, you finished the project. Now pack your stuff and go.
“We got your labor; you got a paycheck. Now fuck off so we can make the profit from what you made”.
Ain’t capitalism just grand? /s
Not really. It’s actually pretty good. Microsoft just did jack all to market it for some reason.
It also did have some controversy at the start.
First is because of a granular difficulty customization, down to even having a slider to slow or increase the speed of the game itself. Some elitists got butt hurt over it.
Second is that it is a slower pace overall compared to the experience that 2016 and Eternal were. So, when it didn’t play like people expected, it caused some friction.
Oh also, Microsoft forced it to be $70. So a lot of gamers just didn’t buy it out of principle.
It’s not bad, it’s just not great and is also a mechanical deviation from what doom games usually are.
Dark Ages is meh. 2016 was legitimately fresh, and Eternal went a kind of interesting direction, but they legitimately need to take some time and go in a brand brand new direction if they want to make more than four of these games, because the “push forward” formula + lofi sf&f aesthetic alone is not going to cut it on its own.
I think that’s Bethesda being incompetent as fuck. They burned bridge with Mick Gordon, after Doom Eternal then instead of making dynamic well optimized game they made I’d make Dark Ages.
Not a single fucking CEO understands art and games. They only thing they understand is profit$. That’s all that matters to them.
Of something can’t generate a profit, it’s essentially useless. Art? If you can sell it at a profit it’s good. Or doesn’t matter if nobody will ever see it. Oxygen producing trees, sea weed, algae? Not worth a damn until it’s cut down, collected, and sold. Food, water, shelter and basic human needs? Gotta make a profit. Don’t matter if we can produce tons and people are going hungry, homeless and thirsty, if we can’t generate a profit.
Capitalism is a fucking cancer. And these guys are the rogue cells that make it grow.
They are blinded by their own goals, and forget how things are interconnected. Or maybe its just arrogance.
I’ve seen it on the smaller business side too. They want immediate profit, so cut key staff when the work slows a bit, rather than carry the veterans till the next projects. Then complain that things aren’t getting done and the costs to outsource the missing skill set is high.
While the lower levels are like : this is exactly as we predicted it would go.
Why did Microsoft buy all these studios if the plan was to never actually have them make anything?
I’ve been asking that since they bought Rare and proceeded to do nothing with them.
Because it’s run by fucking idiots with MBAs who have no connection whatsoever to the company’s profits and losses.
For a long time, their value proposition was “use us because what else can you do?” Trying to monololize the gaming industry by buying up whatever good studios they can is just a part of that.
They wanted to own existing IP. Not make new stuff. Buy an asset, milk it, and that’ll do. Any words about long-term maybe were lies.
Yes, but what’s the point of owning the IP if you’re not releasing any new media with it, or even re-releasing the old stuff.
It’s not like we get a bunch of HD Collections out of it. Hell Activision’s take on Wolfenstein hasn’t even been re-released even though with Id and Activision owned by the same company there should be no issues.
Effort vs profitability to rework. Any content immediately releasable as part of gamepass was probably highest value to them.
If you buy up all your potential competition, you have no competition.
I miss when Phil Spencer was talking about reviving Heroes of the Storm and Skylanders, he was never gonna do it, but I liked the hopium.
Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard were never competition though
Never know if they’d start doing exclusivity deals with Sony shrug
It was about xbox and windows vs other consoles/steam etc
Embrace, extend, and extinguish
Thats something you use to stop competitors before they get big, but MS was never part of the game publisher circle and doesnt’t seem to try either.
I agree.
It didn’t stop M$ trying the strategy though.
Fear of missing out. It is institutionally ingrained into Microsoft when they were publicly burned for “missing out on the internet.”
It’s just like destroying all the health pickups in a multiplayer game so the other team can’t heal, I guess.
my best guess is the people who signed off the purchases aren’t the same people who evaluate the value of the things they have purchased
Looking for exclusivity of games to “beat” other companies. As always is their model of “force people to pay us” instead of “make something compelling”. Its the Microsoft way.
anyone who is hopeful about xbox’s new leadership probably isn’t terribly aware of microsoft’s past. they’ve done this dance a million times. “we’re improving!” -> people believe it yet again -> surprise, they found a way to suck even more now.
Poisonous leopards never change their spots after all.
In the future they will have difficulty recruiting talent for projects and as a result will have to pay people way more like Meta because of the stigma.
Microsoft are the EA of yEAsterday
They also don’t understand their customers.
But they do understand what they care about. Short term “Shareholder value”
Everyone should be able to talk about their current employer as openly as Hays here
Evil corpos purchasing creativity just to see the soul flee.
All developers should refuse to develop for Microsoft. Starve them out
The problem with employees and employed is that the thing goes the other way around… unfortunately.
The only thing that matters to MS is money.
Micro$oft
