Ben_H

This has big "jangle keys in front of shareholders to distract them" energy. We already know most shareholder-types already completely lack object permanence and anything resembling foresight so this might do just enough to make them forget about the complete disaster of a week Xbox had last week.

But seriously, this makes no sense. I'm glad these developers have jobs and all, but it doesn't make up for Microsoft closing multiple studios or any of the other stupid things they've done the last 2... err... 5 uhhh... 10 years or so. They've entirely destroyed any trust left in them to have a realistic plan for the future beyond hoping their sacred cows they bought for $70 billion keep providing for them. Phil's a smooth talker but it's increasingly hard to look at his tenure at Xbox as anything other than a massive failure. The only thing they have going for them now is that they've been able to use their parent company's largess to bail them out when needed. They had Game Pass but apparently that wasn't good enough so they destroyed their content pipeline for it instead of investing more in it.

I'm playing the DS version of this game right now in my quest to play all the old Final Fantasy games. They did the black mage so dirty in this DS version. They're kind of useless for the first few hours. I've tried switching between with the black mage and the red mage to compare, and for this early bit of the game the red mage is massively better in every way.

I came to this game just after finishing FF1, so I was used to the black mage absolutely wrecking everything all the time. Suddenly now the black mage has a basically unusable physical attack so your ability to progress in dungeons and grinding is limited by the black mage's MP since if they run out you're down an entire person. At least in FF1, if you needed, if you used physical attacks with the black and white mages they could combine to roughly equal the damage output of one of the dedicated physical attack classes for most of the game.

As an aside, this DS version of FF3 does not play around. I was not expecting this big of a change in difficulty between these games (I cruised through FF1 and FF7, which both felt like they had a similar level of combat difficulty). The boss in the intro section of the game is harder than any boss in FF1 barring the final boss. I thought I had overlevelled my team for that intro boss and still struggled to beat it. I died in the intro section multiple times, including once where I went into a cave, walked about two steps, then got one-shotted by a few skeleton dudes who could hit for an entire lifebar of health. I'm starting to get a hang of the game now though so I'm enjoying the difficulty a bit more.

So basically Microsoft want to be the Netflix of games but are being too cheap to adequately support the people and studios that provide the content that is vital to their service actually working. Cool. Skimping out on hiring the extra staff necessary to keep Zenimax and the studios functioning properly was definitely worth tanking Xbox's entire reputation for. In a backwards way, they probably would have provided a lot more value to shareholders by just hiring the people Tango, Arkane, and others were asking for. Instead, Microsoft's reputation as a games publisher and service provider is in the dumps.

Every third party that Microsoft is approaching for Game Pass licensing deals should be demanding more money now for future deals. If things are as dire as it seems with Microsoft's game development and publishing pipeline, they are now going to have to rely more than ever on others signing content deals for Game Pass. They'll either have to pay up or Game Pass will lose subscribers.

It's like they've completely ignored how Netflix has grown and changed over the last 15ish years. Netflix built their gigantic content pipeline because licensing content from others was far too expensive to rely upon heavily. Microsoft looked like they were in the process of setting up a similar pipeline but now it seems like they're backing out and getting rid of everyone but those that work on the biggest things. Netflix, Amazon, and all the other streaming services crank out tons of shows and movies they know probably aren't going to be huge hits because the steady stream of new content, even if it isn't all gangbusters huge, is vital to the service continuing since it shows subscribers that there's new things to watch whenever they open the app.

Every bit of new information that comes out about this thing paints a worse and worse picture of the people in charge at both Xbox and Microsoft itself.

OK sure, but that gets back to my point of what does Microsoft actually want from their games? I wouldn't be shocked if this game sold poorly because it was one of the main games they used in marketing for Game Pass last year. I would bet far more people played it on Game Pass than bought it outright. But at the same time, it makes one wonder what Microsoft expects of games like this from a sales perspective. Do they expect it to sell just as well as if it was not a Game Pass game or do they factor in that Game Pass is probably going to heavily slow the sales of many of their self-published games?

Gerstmann brought up the exact same point on his podcast today (though he was, let's say, a bit more animated about it than me). He was completely puzzled by what Microsoft was doing and now has an extremely pessimistic view of them. Like me, he couldn't figure out what Xbox's current direction is or what they expect from the games they publish. He was concerned that if their sales expectations are as out of whack as it's looking, then Ninja Theory's probably doomed too since Hellblade 2 is unlikely to be a blockbuster hit. That Indiana Jones game has big flop potential too given how few younger people care about that franchise.

Xbox has no direction and no matter how many charm offensives their leadership team go on they never actually seem to do anything to clear up the misgivings people have of them.

Microsoft and Embracer are in a boxing match to see who can be the shittiest. This bout could go the distance. We still have many months left in the year. Microsoft is up in score but Embracer could land the knockout punch at any time.

Didn't Hi-Fi Rush do fairly well? It was a big enough hit that they spent the resources to have it ported to other platforms. It was a big focus in their Game Pass marketing since release. This is so stupid.

Like what do Microsoft actually want from their games now? They need games for Game Pass so they buy studios to make those games, the studios make the games, the games end up being well received, but then Microsoft shuts the studios down anyway. It makes no sense.

But this also is a general issue for Microsoft. The company has no actual direction anymore beyond """AI""" (which, the AI bubble seems like it is going to pop soon. The hype cycle for AI has hit the point where people are already acknowledging that it isn't what they thought and is kinda useless outside of specific uses) and sentiment towards Microsoft, especially outside of the games space, is becoming extremely negative. They are pushing hard with the "extraction" phase of enshittification on many of their products and services, especially Windows 11. They're about to add even more ads to the OS in the next update on top of the many ads and pre-installed apps that already are in it (you know that "Recommended" section in the new Windows 11 start menu? Several of those entries are about to be filled with apps that pay Microsoft to be put there as advertisements. That definitely won't make things confusing for less tech-savvy folks using the OS).

Yup. It's no coincidence to me that I've been mostly playing indies and older games the last few years. These big publishers are destroying the industry in pursuit of metrics that don't actually make any sense or matter. They're trying to treat the games industry like it's tech rather than a media industry. The increasingly small output of these major publishers is generally extremely boring and dull. It never seems like the developers are at fault either since it's obvious that they're being forced to try to make games including features that don't make sense in context to those games. It never made sense that Redfall had a GaaS component to it. It was a game that could be played entirely single player and at most it could have copied Borderlands' multiplayer setup. Same with the most recent Forza Motorsport. They ripped out everything that made the old Forza games good and replaced it with a GaaS-like content treadmill and poorly thought out car levelling mechanics that both ruined the game.

It's all so stupid and frustrating. We're watching an entire industry get ruined by a bunch of clueless business people who don't seem like they actually even care about games beyond extracting money from the people that like them. It's like when your favourite restaurant gets bought by some rich asshole who doesn't actually care about the restaurant. On the surface, everything looks the same, but the second you eat there you notice that it isn't as good anymore because the staff were forced to cut costs so said rich asshole could make a few more pennies. Sooner or later, the restaurant will go under because people will stop going to it when they have multiple disappointing meals in a row. The rich asshole guy won't suffer beyond a slight hit to his cheque book but all of the people who made that restaurant what it was in the first place will be out of the job and looking to do something else instead, hoping to shelter themselves from the whims of other rich assholes.

There's no consequences for being a shitty business person anymore. It's awful.

I haven't played Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door since release. I remember nothing about it other than at one point you become a pseudo-wrestler(?).

Maybe they should have not laid off all of those people who had ties to various studios they were working with. It's almost like those people had jobs that were actually important to the functioning of the company.

One of the Larian people specifically mentioned having their direct contact within Hasbro/WOTC laid off being a big cause of friction since communicating with them had become a massive hassle as a result.

Ryan accidentally outing pot smokers at his hotel and then feeling bad about it is up there.

edit: Let's also just chuck this whole Bombcast in here too since Ryan did the editing. It's the first one they did after they were in the CBS office so Ryan leaned heavily into the fact they were owned by CBS: Bombcast from March 20th, 2012

(sorry for the long post. I didn't intend for it to be this long. I've played Starcraft 2 and thus followed Blizzard fairly closely for a long time now so it's something I have more thoughts on)

It's hard to say. Blizzard games are still quite popular and have a diehard audience that would go to an event like that, especially if they went back to having tournament finals at it. The fact that events like Tennocon still exist and do well suggest that Blizzard could put on Blizzcon-like events, even if they were more modest, and probably draw a crowd since they also have a heavily devoted audience. This being the first year under Microsoft ownership and what I imagine are a lot of changes behind the scenes happening also making a Blizzcon probably a lot more work than normal too. I could see them coming back next year once the ship has settled back on course a bit and their direction under Microsoft is set.

On the other hand though, Blizzard hasn't really put out a true hit new game in approaching a decade now. Most of their current games are coasting on their popularity and from what I've seen, not really growing all that much. The other thing here is that the competitive Blizzard games already have in-person competitions that replicate a Blizzcon-like experience for the hardcore fans (IEM, etc. have events that Blizzard games are still part of. Despite fewer people playing Starcraft 2 than a few years back, the game still gets great viewership numbers and as a result has been a fixture of all of the big competitive game events for a long time now, for example. This is unlikely to change any time soon). When these competitive games were more popular, often their end of year final tournaments would take place at Blizzcon. Blizzard eventually stopped making the efforts for this to be possible and as a result the tournament holders do their own things instead.

The giant question mark here also is Microsoft. Under Microsoft, similar titles like Age of Empires 2 have had a massive resurgence in popularity after getting support from Microsoft to be developed, run tournaments, have dedicated online infrastructure, etc.. Given that most of the main online Blizzard titles are more popular than AOE2, even a small-to-moderate investment from Microsoft could help them out a ton and bring Blizzard games back in a big way. Before the potential Microsoft acquisition and after Morhaime left, Activision management were basically neglecting Blizzard and were putting the squeeze on them and their continued support of their online and competitive games since those games didn't make Call of Duty or Candy Crush money. During this time, Blizzard's contributions to prize pools and support in their competitive games dropped massively and they were being forced to cut back on the in-person and online events that catered to their hardcore audience. Activision were fully in squeezing water from a stone mode with Blizzard and trying to force a shrinking staff to support their games while spending the bare minimum to maintain or patch them (for example, SC2's multiplayer ladder was broken for a huge amount of time and most APIs related to the game didn't function for a long time. This has now been fixed). This approach started to change around the time Activision started being looked at for sale to Microsoft since ABK wanted to make their portfolio more appealing. As an example, after several years of neglect, suddenly the sole intern keeping the SC2 servers from imploding got budget to actually fix the myriad issues with the game's online service along with other other meaningful things and as a result the game has had several balance patches that have been hugely popular which has brought back a lot of players and attracted new ones. I'm now a WoW person, but from what I've heard, the community has been relatively happy with how things have been handled with the game lately as well compared to a few years back. The games started doing better once they stopped being starved of funding so if Microsoft keeps this up, there is the potential for them to make a comeback.

Blizzard's games are still good and with the right investment, I do think the company could make a comeback. They're no longer the neglected middle sibling of ABK and from what I've read, substantial change has been happening at Blizzard. It's been enough that people like the oldschool streamer Day9, one of the people who popularized Starcraft 2 (and Hearthstone) and in a way Twitch-style game streaming in general, has ended his 5+ year boycott of the company (he boycotted Blizzard after all of the bad news came out about Kotick and awful things going on at Blizzard came out. He knows lots of people at and around the company so he must have heard enough good to change his mind).