Microsoft never really got gaming like Sony and Nintendo. Yes, at the end of the day all 3 exist to make as much money as possible, but Microsoft has been the most consistent in pushing the shittiest stuff into the gaming landscape. Paid online, DLC, live service games, even their dashboard since the 360 era has been all about how they can extract the most amount of money from gamers.
Sony and Nintendo have done their fair share of crappy things, but they also have just as many awesome games that "respect" gaming. I can't think of a single recent MS game that hasn't been an absolute flop in terms of just providing a great experience.
All my experience with Microsoft in gaming in the last 5-10 years felt like the "corporate gaming" experience. The Minecraft migration, logging into games using Microsoft accounts, and various small intricacies, all give a corporate user experience compared to others in the (PC) gaming space.
That Xbox subscription has been the by far most affordable way to play games though. Thousands of games for $15/month, on both Xbox and PC is way cheaper and pro-consumer then anything Sony or Nintendo ever did.
Yeah, I really miss the old 360 Blade UI rather than the New Xbox Experience UI. From then on, it just sort of got worse. It's ironic since Microsoft also has Windows and DirectX and corners the PC gaming market in this regard.
Hopefully this serves as a wake-up call to small and mid-sized studios to stop letting themselves be acquired.
I get that it must be grueling to be an independent studio constantly jumping from one project to the next, worrying that a single misstep could mean people don't get paid. I've read the history of Obsidian studios.
But the alternative of not being under someone else's thumb is that it is less likely you are told, "Your team delivered everything we asked for--a stellar game, well-received, and it hit sales targets; but someone upstairs wanted more, so you're all fired."
A lot of people see being acquired as an exit opportunity, they're not thinking about the employees. Unless you're able to make use of the increased capital, or expertise of the people buying you to great effect, being bought will pretty much always mean that life will get worse.
IMO, this is continued evidence that large gaming companies are broadly dumbheaded. Are there any non-shitty non-indie studios worth really investing in anymore? I even think larger IP like Halo, Team Fortress, DOTA, etc. could really benefit from being sold off to smaller, passionate, hungry teams.
Small/hungry teams make great games, but they don't make great money. Games from small teams will develop massive fanbases (KSP, Factorio, subnautica, early minecraft) and people will buy their games. But that doesn't matter. Those small teams do not have the corporate power to capitalize on the microtransactions and subscription services that pull the real money.
I bought Factorio long long ago. I still play it occasionally. If the developers asked me for money, say for an updated version, I would send money without question. But they haven't asked. Good game. Bad at making money.
Maybe the kind of people who are drawn to those different kinds of games from smaller studios are not the kinds of people who will go for bullshit like microtransactions and subscriptions and the developers of those games know that.
Prior to the release of Subnautica, Unknown Worlds spent years developing and promoting Natural Selection 2, an innovative RTS/FPS hybrid that was the sequel to their crowd hit mod for Half Life.
They anticipated yuge money from turning the game into a frantic but predictable eSports thing meant for mass consumption with flashy paid skins and the like.
It was a failure.
The fanbase rejected it and it ultimately killed the game. They learned from that experience and delivered a totally different game which was based on the traditional business model of making a good single player game, selling it as a complete product and then if it's successful making and selling a sequel. That game was called Subnautica and it's probably the only reason you ever heard of Unknown Worlds.
There's no way I'm subscribing to Factorio, and I doubt there was ever a path to success for a game like Factorio that involved subscriptions just like there was ever a path to success for an incredible game like NS2 through eSports.
I've not played Subnautica, but I had loads of fun playing the original Natural Selection. Still one of my favorite games from those days. Thanks for making the link!
According to vginsights, Factorio made $123 million on Steam. Maybe they didn't make the maximum amount of money possible, but they are good a making money.
Factorio is a massive success and only made $123M. For a company funding a lot of things, you are going to be putting out mostly flops that lose money, and then hoping to get it back on the successes. But it doesn't look like the successes are good enough to fund all the failures. Unless you mostly take super boring safe options.
> By March 2012, Minecraft had sold five million copies, amounting to US$80 million in revenue. In November, Mojang had 25 employees, and total revenues of $237.7 million in 2012. [In 2013], Mojang recorded revenues of $330 million, of which $129 million were profit.
> In 2014, Mojang and the Minecraft intellectual property were purchased by Microsoft for US$2.5 billion.
That's been my thought too. All the big studios are competing for an incredible amount of money each game. Isn't there a decent formula for producing hi-fi rush games "cheaply"? How many people are needed?
If Google is addicted to reduction in personnel through automation, Microsoft is addicted to disposability. Almost all the work done on Microsoft-developed titles like Halo Infinite is performed by temporary workers who are employed for a period of months and then terminated. Microsoft thinks creative success is a commodity to be bought and sold, and it isn't.
I wonder if there's room for some kind of 'video game YC', where a company would shotgun invest in a bunch of promising indie titles in the hopes of finding the next Stardew Valley / Factorio?
Historically, Valve has acquihired promising mod makers or smaller game companies and told them to take their ideas and make a full game out of that. Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, TF2, Alien Swarm, DotA, I might not even know of them all.
... Except in the rare case that the returns you want are in the form of good games, rather than cash. Then invest all you want in companies that don't constantly make excuses about why they need to exploit their workers and customers.
I loved the original xbox and 360, but Microsoft has mostly lost its way when it comes to gaming, and since losing the console wars these days, is left as only a publisher for all the game companies they've acquired to whatever ruin is happening now, even selling to competing hardware platforms. Microsoft still seems to have a habit of ruining everything they touch, this looks like a tailspin for xbox and the game studios acquired they can't even figure out what to do with.
Most high-profile games have been disgustingly bad for years, particularly looking at like Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft that puts out crippled AAA(A) titles laden with micro-transactions, game passes, and DRM as invasive as malware if released to PC. People are sick of getting poor value from expensive games.
Since Valve has been involved with Proton in Steam, finally making Linux gaming a real possibility, I find I buy and play lots of smaller indie games with a $5-10 price point that I would never have considered playing on a console. I laugh at games selling for $70-100 now, but I'll gladly spend $70 for 10 smaller games that will bring me far more joy overall.
Most expensive AAA titles also don't tend to work under Linux at all due to DRM, MTX integrations, etc that only serve to anger and frustrate me, whereas smaller games work almost universally, and increasingly more offer native Linux clients as well that we'd simply never see from EA, Ubisoft, and particularly Microsoft. Usually they have problems even working natively under Windoze well enough, asking for or expecting Linux support just makes them laugh.
I feel a lot better about supporting indie studios than the mega game and media cartels, and Valve/Steam always for their Linux support. Sony and Microsoft can feel free to die off already.
Sony and Nintendo have done their fair share of crappy things, but they also have just as many awesome games that "respect" gaming. I can't think of a single recent MS game that hasn't been an absolute flop in terms of just providing a great experience.