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Xbox Game Studios Stupidity Hate Thread Game Pass Edition
A quarter of Obsidian are losing their jobs.
That also includes their art director of 21 years, Daniel Alpert.
But what's this in that thread? The former co-founder Chris confirming that Matt Hansen is also gone when correcting some misinfo?
You might remember him from his greatest hits.
Welcome home, Matt.
It feels like they're all being sent into the killing fields to die on their own so Microsoft can claim it's not their fault. Which isn't entirely unfair: if you can't sell/sustain your studio on the strength of your portfolio you probably don't deserve to be in business.
Now that they are trying to get rid of all the dead weight, did the buying spree that Microsoft went on over a decade ago lead to anything significant?
Don't quote me on this, but I've heard they've laid off most of their engineers and programmers, possibly as a pivot away from id Tech and towards Unreal Engine dogshit.
They're also one of the few competent developers they had under their banner, who actually could deliver a fun game, aimed at the actual gaming demographic, in under a decade.
Scott Miller is the founder of Apogee/3D Realms and not some random. George Broussard who was Miller's business partner at Apogee/3D Realms is also reporting major layoffs, especially programmers.
Not sure if they're speaking to the same sources at id, but they'd almost certainly be from the main id office in Texas. Now this is purely speculation on my part, but it's possible their sources are only taking about id in Texas. But id also have a Frankfurt office where many of the engine programmers are based. It could be possible id tech is kept alive if the Frankfurt programmers haven't suffered layoffs like the Texas programmers.
A quarter of Obsidian are losing their jobs.
That also includes their art director of 21 years, Daniel Alpert.
But what's this in that thread? The former co-founder Chris confirming that Matt Hansen is also gone when correcting some misinfo?
You might remember him from his greatest hits.
Welcome home, Matt.
Axing id's programming team while Obsidian being "barely" touched (and Avowed 2 STILL BEING IN DEVELOPMENT LMAO) in comparison is a travesty. Microsoft can atp get rid of Xbox entirely, because every game they're going to put out is going to be absolute shit. The only thing that might be good is GOW: E-Day. That's it. And maybe they should port Gears 2 + 3 to PC already. That might get some money in.
However, there is a silver lining here. id's programmers can apply to emptyvessel, who is developing DEFECT, and is made out of former id employees. And they don't have to subject themselves to Marty Stratton anymore. He is competent, but an absolutely detestable faggot.
Was that only made because Microsoft bought Double Fine ? Didn't they have the intention to do a sequel regardless or were they preparing to close done before being bought ?
All of these layoffs and “restructuring” are for naught if XBOX leadership isn’t getting inside the decision room of these studios and going “no girlbosses, no shoehorned minorities, no trannies” etc… which obviously they won’t do so they’re just delaying the inevitable.
Also if the rumors about activision taking control of Halo is true, then what the fuck is the point of of 343 aka “Halo Studios” if they are having Halo yanked out of their DEI tranny hands?
Was that only made because Microsoft bought Double Fine ? Didn't they have the intention to do a sequel regardless or were they preparing to close done before being bought ?
Psychonauts 2 was crowdfunded, and DF was over budget and behind schedule, and it still took 2 more years after MS bought them for the game to be finished and released. Tim Schaeffer has always sucked at time and scope management, which was why MS dropped the original Pyschonauts from its publishing deal back in the day.
>Be Xbox
>Buy up every available game studio you can and hoard as much talent as you can so that Don't or some other big corporation can't own them
>Refuse to do anything or put out any Ames with half the studios and the games do come out are rushed underdeveloped steaming piles of shit
>Realize owning shit tons of game studios that aren't making money from releasing games is expensive and not financially stable as the the games industry is on fire and nobody is buying consoles
>Shutter, sell or restructure most of your newly acquired studios and have all the talent and IPs leave for work somewhere else or leave the games industry forever
Sony and Xbox and really having a competition on who can shit the bed harder in 2026. The Sony strategy is just dump assloads of terrible games out and Xbox is trying to do the Gabe Newell strategy of doing nothing but it fails because you can't do nothing when you own half of the AAA industry
Psychonauts 2 was good, but it was worse than the original in literally every regard other than "polish".
1 is a classic. 2 is a forgettable sequel that features a gay wedding.
>Be Xbox
>Buy up every available game studio you can and hoard as much talent as you can so that Don't or some other big corporation can't own them
>Refuse to do anything or put out any Ames with half the studios and the games do come out are rushed underdeveloped steaming piles of shit
>Realize owning shit tons of game studios that aren't making money from releasing games is expensive and not financially stable as the the games industry is on fire and nobody is buying consoles
>Shutter, sell or restructure most of your newly acquired studios and have all the talent and IPs leave for work somewhere else or leave the games industry forever
Sony and Xbox and really having a competition on who can shit the bed harder in 2026. The Sony strategy is just dump assloads of terrible games out and Xbox is trying to do the Gabe Newell strategy of doing nothing but it fails because you can't do nothing when you own half of the AAA industry
>Lose money for decades because your parent company ignores your existence as long as the losses aren't TOO big
>Try to sell your console division to Samsung, only to have the deal fall apart once Samsung sees how much money the division has actually lost for its existence up to that point
>Start putting all your games on PC to totally make your platform pointless due to having no exclusive content
>Start subscription service to curry favour with parent company CEO who wants to make everything subscription-based
>Go on acquisition spree to try to spend the competition out of business because history proves you won't succeed any other way
>Buy a bunch of critical darling indie teams that are on their way to bankruptcy due to their games not selling
>Fuck up your supply chain by making two different system specs from day one of a new generation resulting in having the model worth buying not being available while the shitbox model piled up in stores
>Have your flagship franchise title be in such bad shape it misses the launch of the new generation by a full year and still be undercooked shit when it does finally release
>Show trailers for games that don't even have design documents yet, giving release timeframes that will definitely be missed
>Have your diehard fans use exploits and loopholes to get your subscription service for $1 a year or free while spending hundreds of millions on content for the service
>Buy the biggest third-party publisher in the world, bringing corporate scrutiny down on your division because spending $90 Billion in one shot is a lot more noticeable than losing $100 billion over a decade
>Have the worst third holiday season sales for an active console in history. (Dreamcast sold better in it's third holiday quarter, and it had been officially discontinued before that!)
>Make vague statements about your subscription service being "sustainable" while hiding financials and not reporting system sales or actual subscriber numbers
>Have third-party devs drop support for your console unless you foot the bill for the port
>Have retailers drop your consoles due to lack of demand
>Roll your online gaming subscription into your game content subscription to pad subscriber numbers for the game service, but still miss your targets for subscribers by millions of users
>Start porting your exclusives to other consoles because the board of directors wants your division to start making money after spending so much in one shot buying that big publisher
>Have your former exclusives sell better on your main competitor than on your own system because your user base no longer buys games
>Announce a boutique PC-based system as your next generation making absurd promises only your fanboys are dumb enough to believe, then have computer parts prices skyrocket
>Fire your cult of personality division CEO after over a decade of fuck-ups, replace him via Jeet nepotism with air headed serial-CEO from AI division and fake a gamer identity the fanboys publicly expose as fake within 24 hours
>Show games during showcase event, then announce the closure/spin-off of the studios making them 2 days later
>Cancel announced port of a former exclusive to leading competitor, resulting in loss of hundreds of thousands of preorders
>Lay off more staff than the entire headcount of your main competitor in one day
Because it's almost certainly not arranged like that. At least when I contracted at EA in the late 2000's, we had a QA tester assigned to our tiny little side project, who technically answered to his manager for "boss decisions" related to his job, but reported issues to an internal tracking system and summarized daily finds to my boss (and cc'd to my team). It was a very small project, and although the QA tester wasn't officially on "our team," we all worked very closely together (and surprisingly effectively -- we smashed more bugs in a month than the entire team that hogged the rest of our floor did in a year).
The QA guy didn't answer to me, we just worked together on the "found bug, fixed it, checked it, yup it's fixed, nice" loop. So that's QA tester, QA manager, developers (junior and senior), team lead and then department head, and though it amounted to six "ranks" on the org chart if you viewed it that way, it ran a lot smoother than it sounds.
Your scope was just project (terminating on the project) but Xbox has it setup so there's an entire second company sitting on top of that. So your six ranks would go up a few more (project director > CEO/Decision maker) then over to the bottom of Xbox's Partner scale (Director of Partners > blah blah blah > President of Xbox).
It's all cope because even if Xbox had 1,000 studios - they still had a whole suite of executives who's job was to do nothing but partner with studios and not a single one of them apparently asked Rare for a playable demo of Perfect DarkANYTHING or thought they should have one inside of ~9 years.
It's to avert people blaming Xbox for mismanaging so many studios. Just literally trying to explain why "Yeah no one talked to rare for 6 years but it's just so many layers".
Isn't avowed just a top down static rpg in first person? All they gotta do is allow players to switch perspectives, increase the difficulty, better dungeons, and a better story. Add some actual generic rpg elements that were missing or make the world feel alive and they'll have a good game.
I remember enjoying avowed. It was just barebones. But the gameplay was decent. Better than their flagship title.
The problem with Avowed is that Skyrim exists - if you can't make a better game in a genre (even though Skyrim is almost 20 years old) you should probably just not bother. Carrying dev salaries for ~6 years to have a worse version of a game that came out in 2011 isn't going to make anyone happy.
The same with Outer Worlds (compared to something like Fallout 3 even) - and even after they were able to blame the acquisition for how bad Outer Worlds 1 was, released an even bigger bomb in Outer Worlds 2 with no such limitations or issues.
Obsidian is not the studio they used to be but just the fact they released games firmly plants them as one of the best studios that Microsoft actually acquired.
@Tanner Glass The new Perfect Dark wasn't being made by Rare, it was The Coalition with most of the heavy lifting being done by Crystal Dynamics.
Rare's big cancellation is Everwild, a game for which multiple trailers were shown, but which apparently had no gameplay loop figured out as recently as late last year.
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