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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?
It’s not enough to make money.
It’s not enough to make more money than last year.
You’ve got to make more money and at a faster rate of increase than last year, every single year, or else as far as the execs are concerned, you’re a fucking failure. Hence, everything getting worse, more expensive, and generally shittier all the time.
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!?
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.
You are aware that Sony makes lots of other things besides games too?
Take a look at Sony’s annual reports and then get back to me. PlayStation is the engine that drives the company.
Maybe you should take your own advice, according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/297533/sony-sales-worldwide-by-business-segment/ for the latest available year there (2022) the business segment “Game and network services” is only around 26 billion out of 88 billion total.
The sale figures are a bit misleading as the different sections also have different costs (sales make games look more important).
The corporate reports are archived here, and the equivalent per-section breakdown is on page 37 of the 2023 report.
https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/corporatereport/
When comparing operating revenue (i.e. profit) the breakdown is:
section billion yen games and network services 250 music 263 pictures 119 entertainment technology & services 180 imaging & sensing solutions 212 financial services 234 other 17 So it looks like they made a little more profit from music that year.
- Revenue is not profit.
- Gaming is by far the biggest bar in that graph.
I stand by my point.
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.
Actual Bethesda or Bethesda adjacent? Because Fallout 3 and 4 use warped map scaling while NV uses actual scale
Eithers fine IMO, maybe a bit more vertical. Im just saying around that size give or take.
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.
“id Software, you do Halo now!”
Id Software makes Doom skinned Quake games these days
They make whatever Microsoft tells them. That’s how being a subsidiary works.
Computerizing the console space. That was always the goal. And I think it worked.
Everyone sees Microsoft’s losing “the console war” and I ask you: what war? There’s two identical AMD laptops with different colored branding. Just like last gen. Upgrades keep launching in lockstep, so patience doesn’t mean better hardware. Most games are on both brands, looking basically the same. Even diehard PS5 fans joke about having no games, and what they mean is, the only games Xbox fans don’t get to play are the ones Sony bribed into existence.
The original Xbox was literally a PC. The 360 was a compiler target that made ports easy. The Xbone was both. Whatever this one’s called is a pretty straight upgrade. There’s no special sauce, anymore. It already doesn’t matter which console you own.
Microsoft’s not teasing Halo on Playstation out of desperation. They’ve nearly ended consoles. Yeah, Sony will sell you a box specifically for video games, but most of them can be run on any other box. Or your damn phone. The fact you need a specific box to play Spider-Man or Zelda or whatever will not be enough to sustain a brand. Even Nintendo knows that - that’s why they actively avoid competing, and try goofy shit nobody else offers. (Still not clear how “tablet with buttons” was an unexplored space. But now even that is competing with the Steam Deck, which is proudly just a PC.)
I’m not sure Microsoft gives a shit if you buy an Xbox. Like game devs making everything multiplatform, they see platforms as obstacles to selling you goods and services. (At least, other people’s platforms.) They want to sell Xbox services on Playstation. Watch them suddenly push against the 30% cut for first-party stores, and loudly opine about Apple’s monopoly on iOS.
Microsoft’s not teasing Halo on Playstation out of desperation. They’ve nearly ended consoles.
Which is kind of a good thing. The console wars have been large irrelevant for the past 20 years, because PC already won.
Really, Steam won. And if Microsoft isn’t careful, all of that planning to shift gamers towards PCs will have them land squarely into the Steam/Linux ecosystem. It really depends on how hard Microsoft wants to abuse their near-monopoly with Windows 11.
Which is kind of a good thing. The console wars have been large irrelevant for the past 20 years, because PC already won.
Nope, Mobile won. PC and Consoles combined are not even reaching the revenue, number of releases or players of mobile gaming.
Yeah, but mobile gaming is largely a very different animal. I don’t feel that comparing them is helpful at all. They’re very different audiences, and very different games. While I’m sure there’s some overlap they’re very much not interchangeable.
Any major studio releasing a AAA game with the level of microtransactions and blatant money-bait that mobile games regularly get away with would be absolutely annihilated by public outrage.
Comparing apples and turds.
Excellently written article that really sums up why I’m finally done with Xbox once my gamepass runs out. Been holding off buying a ps5 but they’ll be gaining a new customer for my console gaming.
Lol it’s funny cause after this week I’ve been thinking of dropping p PlayStation for Xbox. Ships passing each other in the night
Gpu off the trade on from game pass and extended with the reward points has been great value. But their current strategy and the games I can’t play on it that are on ps5 is tempting me, also about to upgrade my gaming PC, so maybe steam etc e will satisfy that
It passes butter.
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Buying the competition and then closing them is technically achieving it.
Except now that talent joins or forms more competition
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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.
Yes they are. A PS5 costs £389.99.
What gaming PC can you build for that?
That sorta money doesn’t even buy you a great GPU these days. Maybe a decent one. And then you only need a little more money for a CPU, RAM, Mainboard, storage and a power supply. And if you’re feeling fancy, maybe a case as well.
I love how you specifically say “gaming PC” because I know you and every so-called “gamer” these days have to have some over the top, expensive, overheating, power-sucking pile of trash to run games at ridiculous resolutions/refresh rates with blinding, ugly graphics full of so many garbage lighting effects and muddy megatextures that the game is nearly unplayable.
If you can’t run a game on a ~400 UKBucks machine, the game isn’t worth playing.
Why even bother with a PC when I have a stick and a hoop?
If it can’t be played with a few bits of wood and plastic, then the game isn’t worth playing.
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.
It’s cheaper than a PC and has almost all the same games (with new releases)?
Yeah, but my PC will last much longer.
