"The closure of any team is hard obviously on the individuals there, hard on the team," Spencer said. "I haven't been talking publicly about this, because right now is the time for us to focus on the team and the individuals. It's obviously a decision that's very hard on them, and I want to make sure through severance and other things that we're doing the right thing for the individuals on the team. It's not about my PR, it's not about Xbox PR. It's about those teams.
"In the end, I've said over and over, I have to run a sustainable business inside the company and grow, and that means sometimes I have to make hard decisions that frankly are not decisions I love, but decisions that somebody needs to go make.
"We will continue to go forward. We will continue to invest in what we're trying to go do in Xbox and build the best business we can, which ensures we can continue to do shows like the one we just did."
The whole piece is worth a read but to me this paragraph sums it all up:
“Who even knows what would please these people? They say they’re focusing their resources on bigger games, then they say they need smaller games. They say they love your games, then they shut your studio down. They make more money than they’ve ever made before, then they cut costs repeatedly, drastically, and cruelly. They buy more studios than they can manage, so the answer is not to use that aforementioned money to hire more (or perhaps better) managers, but to have fewer studios so management’s job can be easier.”
Give it a year. Thankfully Toys for Bob was able to buy themselves out, otherwise surely they would have either been shut down or put to work in the Call of Duty mines.
Xbox is offering voluntary severance agreements to producers, quality assurance testers and other staff at ZeniMax as part of a broader cost-cutting initiative
There have been rumors and speculation, but that’s not what MS is saying.
"More interestingly, [Xbox President Sarah] Bond teased a roadmap focused on next-generation hardware.
“'And what we’re focused on there is delivering the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation, which makes it better for players and better for creators and the visions they’re building,” Bond explained in the recent episode of the Official Xbox Podcast.'"
Microsoft has released its latest financial results, showing significant growth in gaming revenues — thanks in no small part to the acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
However, Xbox hardware sales continue to decline and saw the steepest drop since the Xbox Series X and S launched in 2020, down 31% year-on-year.
I hope everyone who plays Call of Duty next year on Game Pass takes a moment of silence for the ~2000 people that had to lose their jobs to make it possible.
This is a fascinating deep dive into the development of the game, with many people involved giving interviews. Instead of being in a long development hell, Lionhead knocked out the game in a stunning 18 months - which made Microsoft happy, but resulted in the cutting of a ton of content.
> Crucially, the creator allows players to make modifications that aren't always possible in other RPGs, letting them modify a characters genitals (choosing between preset options), identity (male, female, non-binary/other), and voice. [Lead character artist Alena] Dubrovina says including those options was about giving players the ability to create characters that, while grounded in the lore of Dungeons & Dragons, are "relevant today."
> "Gender is not defined by your body, genitals or your voice in our game, we want everyone to be who they want to be and build their own unique identity. If you want to play as a bearded non-binary dwarf with a masculine voice and green hair, why not?
"What's more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield's code without official modding tools and support. This isn't helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year."
"Assuming Arkane will continue development, clearly there are many areas for technical improvement, with some annoying visual glitches, oversights and outright bugs remaining in the updated code. I'm not sure that any amount of patching will make Redfall a truly good game, but Arkane has at least delivered the performance level it should have delivered at launch."
There are some great stories from legendary program Giles Goddard (Star Fox, 1080 Snowboarding) in this piece.
> He remembers one time that he blew up a power supply in a new development PC, because he plugged it in at the wrong voltage. And Miyamoto noticed. "And Miyamoto got really angry and said, 'You need to go and apologise to blah-blah-blah now.'" But Goddard had other ideas.
> Quick as a flash, he went to his desk and swapped the fried power supply for his computer's, and then - as if making a sudden, surprise discovery - announced, "Actually no it's fine - it's not broken." And it worked: Miyamoto was calmed. "But I did actually break it," Goddard tells me. "I just fixed it before he found out."
—-
> The SGI Indy had a bonus feature Goddard was excited about too: a webcam. I know that doesn't sound exciting now, but back then, webcams were new, so Goddard started experimenting with it. He put ping pong balls on his face, because the camera picked them up well, and ended up creating a mo-capped facial animation prototype. He was impressed. Miyamoto was impressed. So much so, Miyamoto announced, "Well let's try and get a Mario face into that."
> So, Nintendo did. Yoshiaki Koizumi took the prototype and added "bones and everything" for Goddard to use. "Then I just skinned all the polygons together - skinning was a new thing as well - and I got it all spongy, and then we just iterated on that to see what was fun." And that's how the famous N64 Mario face - the one you can pull around at the beginning of Mario 64 - came to be.
> While Elon's then-partner Grimes was recording her part in the game as cyborg popstar Lizzy Wizzy, the erratic tech billionaire turned up with an antique firearm to "insist" on being included in the game. "The studio guys were like sweating," Grimes is quoted as saying. Musk adds "I told them that I was armed but not dangerous".
> Apparently, the developers relented at the time, though it's unclear if Musk did actually get the cameo in the end.
> Starbreeze insists it is "working hard" to keep servers online after Payday 3 players endured a second consecutive evening of disruption.
> After a three-day early access period for some players, Payday 3 released on 21st September, but players have struggled to get online at peak times due to continuing server issues that have shutdown matchmaking, making it impossible to play the always-online heist shooter.
It’s honestly hard to look at and one of the reasons I stopped going years ago (one of the guys’ repeated transphobic social media posts was the other.)
> I can say, unequivocally, if you're starting a new game project, do not use Unity. If you started a project 4 months ago, it's worth switching to something else. Unity is quite simply not a company to be trusted.
> It's on developers to sort through these two types of costs, meaning Unity has added a bunch of admin work for us, while making it extremely costly for games like Vampire Survivor to sell their game at the price they do. Vampire Survivor's edge was their price, now doing something like that is completely unfeasible. Imagine releasing a game for 99 cents under the personal plan, where Steam takes 30% off the top for their platform fee, and then unity takes 20 cents per install, and now you're making a maximum of 46 cents on the dollar. As a developer who starts a game under the personal plan, because you're not sure how well it'll do, you're punished, astoundingly so, for being a breakout success. Not to mention that sales will now be more costly for developers since Unity is not asking for a percentage, but a flat fee. If I reduce the price of my game, the price unity asks for doesn't decrease.
> IATSE's 2023 Gameworkers.org Rates and Conditions survey showed that most respondents said they worked an average of 40 hours a week, but a quarter of people who answered said they worked for 41 hours or more.
> The longest reported average was 95 hours a week.
> Over half (58%) of respondents said they were paid with an annual salary, and 26.4% worked under hourly pay. Many salaried developers reported issues with overtime pay, with some claiming they were "exempt".
It's disappointing to see this is still the normal state of things for developers, and not the rare exception.
The lolbugthesda meme exists because it’s true. There aren’t many games I’ve had to completely start over because of a game breaking glitch in a side quest, but that was Skyrim and the infamous thieves guild glitch.
They’re good games but pretending there are no bugs, either funny cosmetic ones or serious progress blocking ones, helps no one.
If you thought this was too good a deal to be true, I guess Microsoft agreed. A short excerpt:
"You can no longer claim a trial of Xbox Game Pass for £1/$1, just days ahead of Starfield, the year's biggest Microsoft launch.
"The option has been removed from Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass sign-up website (thanks, XGP). Now, you must simply pay the full amount for your first month."
I thought this was an interesting read. Fahey points out some of the potential risks and rewards of Xbox's current strategy of competition through acquisition. A small excerpt:
"The possible future that we originally saw for Xbox – the excitement about Microsoft’s renewed commitment to building up its studios to the point where it could be a genuine rival to Sony’s software slate – hangs in the balance. The alternative, in which almost a hundred billion dollars in total is spent to buy enough publishers to make Microsoft a major player, is probably the reality we’re getting.
"The extent to which that will hamper further development of Microsoft’s own game studios and first-party publishing remains to be seen, but it’s highly unlikely that the effect will be zero; no company, not even Microsoft, has unlimited bandwidth to keep every plate spinning all at once."
I’m actually pretty salty about this. I paid for early access knowing there’d be bugs and unfinished content, but I didn’t think a week after launch I still wouldn’t even be able to play it.
"The urge to play a violent video game in the midst of the most brutal land war in Europe since World War II may seem baffling. But it’s a way to cope."
I think my friend Mike Zimmerman and I may have beaten it… But it’s been so long it’s impossible to say for sure. All I know it was one of the hardest games out there back then, and hard games were not in short supply in the 80’s.
Yep and a lot of times, we won’t even hear about it. It’ll just be another game that happens to be on Playstation and not Xbox, a defacto exclusive of sorts.
"Today, PlayStation revealed that its PS5 has sold 40 million units. Microsoft doesn't share hardware numbers typically, but court documents, math, and slides from an ID@Xbox in Brazil seem to suggest the Xbox Series X|S line-up is around 20-23 million units sold globally. That essentially puts the PS5 at a 2:1 advantage against Xbox, but perhaps the split is even worse than that beneath the surface. "
"We are pleased to announce that Microsoft and @PlayStation have signed a binding agreement to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation following the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. We look forward to a future where players globally have more choice to play their favorite games."
https://twitter.com/XboxP3/status/1680578783718383616
No word on how long the deal is for, but my guess would be 10 years.
Game Pass used to mean all first party games, day one, and now 2/3 tiers on console won’t have that. It’s a pretty shocking turnaround.