Forum - View topicNEWS: Microsoft Closes Tango Gameworks Studio
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light turner
Posts: 123 |
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Yes. And then Bomb Rush Cyberfunk came out later in the year which was even more like Jet Set Radio from what I've been told. I haven't played either game and never touched The Evil Within either to know how it compares to classic Resident Evil either but I've also heard some mixed things as well and it clearly wasn't a breakout hit. Even name-brand series are struggling these days and under performing so it's not like titles like Final Fantasy are guaranteed successes either. .
If you're going to act incredibly condescending and snarky you could at least make sure you're right before doing so. For a game like Battletoads and Dynamite Headdy with limited continues, the reason likely comes down to the rental market. Masato Maegawa from Treasure even said as much when talking about Dynamite Headdy’s difficulty. If your game could be completed comfortably in a weekend, you ran the risk of people renting it, completing it, then never making a purchase. In order to prevent sales from being affected by this, cheap tactics, like the limiting of continues, were used to ratchet up the difficulty and prevent players from actually finishing the game. Video game rentals were basically outlawed in Japan thanks to the 1984 Japanese Copyright Act, which means that Dynamite Headdy and Battletoads could ease up on the artificial challenge without the fear of it costing them sales.. https://www.destructoid.com/a-look-at-the-early-days-of-regional-difficulty-changes/ Whether they've played it or not, most gamers know that The Lion King is hard, but what most people don't know is that the developers made the game extremely difficult on purpose. Disney actually told the developers to make the game so difficult that people wouldn't be able to beat it during a rental period. The game came out when rental stores were immensely popular, and Disney didn't want people to get more than halfway through the game so that the chances of them buying it would be higher. The developers disagreed with Disney's decision, but went back and tweaked the levels to make things more difficult even though the game targeted a younger audience. A few developers would later apologize to fans for how hard the game is. https://www.cbr.com/lion-king-brutally-difficult-platformer/ Let's not forget Nintendo's entire crusade against the rental industry with lawsuits and litigation back in the late 80s and 90s. I have no idea why people would think video game companies would love the idea of people beating their game in a rental weekend instead of buying it. |
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jdnation
Posts: 2007 |
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Sure, but there is a big differentiator. Sony has enough consoles on the market to make their 30% cut off everyone else. Significantly more so than Microsoft. So as a platform holder, they are fine, meaning their small profit margins on big budget IP are at least doing their job of moving hardware. Their recent losses are a result of declines in PS5 hardware sales following historic highs. And they can't keep that momentum because they can't cut price because they can't cut costs and don't want to take losses on hardware. The other reason was no 1st party established franchises are expected to release for this next fiscal year. Their rising internal costs are a concern, and they have cancelled long in dev projects like Last of Us Online, and laid off staff and shut down studios like London. As well their investment in Bungie and a few other GaaS titles have not turned out. Not to mention, PS5 isn't doing as well in Japan. But they are certainly not in Microsoft's position, where PlayStation is historically in the red, and Sony's HQ relies on PlayStation and gaming as one of it's main pillars, unlike Microsoft, whose higher ups are perfectly willing to end Xbox altogether if necessary and it won't impact the company much, other than the loss of their only big hardware consumer brand, but which is at the bottom of their list of priorities. In any case, the point is that Sony rightly saw the Gamepass model as not a financially viable service, considering their costs and how much they'd lose in otential sales. Microsoft's bitious titles would cost just as much. The F2P model of games has also conditioned new gamers to not spend money on games. So Sony seems to be tailoring their Gaas services to a purchase up front strategy, such as Helldivers 2. And getting more involved with 3rd party exclusives from Square Enix and Konami to get more content without as big of an investment. Expansions into film and other branching media is also an option they are looking at to make the most out of their brands. Basically, Sony is maintaining the exclusivity and retail release model they've always had, with PC ports and PS+ releases being limited and coming long after the fact, excepting consideration for 3rd party console exclusives and GAAS. The high risk but low margins on titles like Spider-man are also looking to be amended by splitting the next game into two parts and separating online as its own thing to try and mitigate risk, according to the Insomniac leaks. Spider-man is a proven IP that sells, so they know they can expect a good amount of sales and adjust accordingly. |
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enurtsol
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Those are on Game Pass too, BTW. Again, being on Game Pass doesn't prevent people from buying the game outright, whether on Xbox, PC or other platforms.
It's because MS gave Xbox a lot of money for acquisitions that they're expected to be on a shorter leash. And nobody but nobody eats losses for eternity, not even Sony, or lest we forget that this happened, despite Sony selling 21+ million PS5s in a year and tens of millions units of first-party games - YET they still the need to fire 8% of their workers and closing the London Studio (who btw just got a new renovated studio the year before): "Sony announces plans to layoff 8% of gaming division workers" 
So what's Sony's excuse for taking it out on the actual workers? Oh, just because they're expecting to sell fewer PS5s than the year before? |
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jdnation
Posts: 2007 |
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The problem is Microsoft makes no money from sales of it's own games on Xbox. Hence the need to make the games available on their competitor's platforms. Also Microsoft is apparently, and logically, looking to add additional tiers and raise the price of Gamepass as a result.
And it is apparent that this was conditional on it driving sales of hardware and subscriber numbers. It didn't, hence what is going on.
The layoffs had nothing to do with slowing PS5 sales after several record-breaking quarters and which would alleviate themselves a year later with possible price reductions and certainly more 1st party releases. The layoffs were due to cutting down on expenses as game budgets were already high, as you pointed out, as well as industry-wide layoffs after over-hiring during the government lockdowns, while more people were gaming more, loans were cheap, and also due to some games/services underperforming and the natural result of cutting redundancies after acquisitions. More details have emerged today regarding Microsoft's recent closures. Bethesda were told that 2 studios had to be shut many months ago, and apparently they chose Arkane and Tango, simply on the grounds that they had no big projects in active development, rather than kill studios that were actively invested in finishing big projects. Arkane was only busy trying to fix issues with their already-released game and deliver on promised DLC (which is now cancelled), while Tango was pitching Hi-Fi Rush 2. So while Sony's lay-off decisions were more targeted at addressing certain issues specifically, Microsoft's recent closures were simply bad luck for these studios who drew the wild card of having completed their jobs. This indicates that Microsoft is severely trying to cut expenses in a way that Sony isn't, and doesn't see investing in them further for the precise reason of why they bought all these studios for in the first place - putting out steady content for Gamepass. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5964 |
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Guess someone really wanted to put Singstars out of it’s misery. |
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i got the shivers!
 Posts: 77 Location: Brazil |
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Starfield is another game that was cited as selling amazing despite being on Gamepass. Starfield was the best-selling game of September and instantly becoming the 7th best-selling game of 2023 in it's debut moth. Side note: Man, some of y'all really hate Starfield here though for some reason... Did it kick your dog or something? I can see Gamepass hurting the smaller games that are only a few hours long and not a lot of people would be willing to pay full price for or only worth playing through once, but overall I've also seen tons of games do amazing despite it. It probably depends on the specific game. I would say it's like the 2 hour refund window on Steam. If it's a small indie game you can beat very quickly and refund it to get your money back then it'll hurt you but longer more in depth games it wont matter. Sea of Thieves, Call of Duty, or Starfield which people would spend hundreds of hours playing are safe from people just playing the game over the weekend on Gamepass then never touching it again. Just a theory though |
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