At least we will get another Fallout from the hands of Obsidian right? Right?
Why don’t they just get out of the industry, they clearly don’t want to be in it anymore. It’s just been stupid decision, after stupid decision, they basically have a license to print money and instead of creating the games that people want, and then selling them for people to play on their confusingly named consoles, they instead muck around with it by raise prices, closed studios and discontinuing IPs.
Fucking hysterical how everyone was celebrating Asha Sharma and Xbox a month or two ago, even though SHE LITERALLY SAID 1,600 CUTS ARE ON THE WAY.
This is because their AI bet fucking failed, and so did gamepass.
Yet the only ones hurt are Devs, the gamers, and potentially IPs people adore.
What a shit timeline this is.
There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the game pass idea. But that there was never anything good in it, and they kept raising the price. Sometimes they had so much filler content in there that if you discounted the games you didn’t want and only looked at the games you did want, it would have actually been cheaper to just buy the game directly. Which is in what people did.
Nah gamepass is fundamentally flawed and it capped out well below their projections for a very simple reason they didn’t consider.
Games are long, you can’t binge 3 games a day. You might finish one a month, hell most people will finish one game every 2 months.
A subscription service for things where one of said things can take 20-100 hours doesn’t make any sense.
That’s letting alone the cannibalization of their own sales, a total lack of ownership for anyone exclusively on gamepass so they’re never really committed, and you have a recipe for complete and utter mediocrity.
I am surprised they actually didn’t see it. When gamepass was introduced, it seemed like insanity - how is $10 subscription with access to $60 titles is going to pay off, this makes no sense. Well… It didn’t.
Yep.
It’s also about control. Maybe it didn’t start that way, but Xbox absolutely wanted to get people into their ecosystem with gamepass and the deals, and then keep them there.
I’m so tired of these shitty underhanded practices.
I just want to buy a PC/console/handheld and then be able to go and purchase a game that I OWN. Whether physical or digital, the fact that ownership is even a question when we have hundreds of ways to verify digital ownership, is insane.
These companies built a shitty world and they’re finally paying a slight bit for it.
Nah, they’ll still somehow limp their way into the next generation because Sony is trying to one up MSFT in bad decisions.
If they just sat back and did nothing, then it’d would definitely be over lol.
Sony will announce the anti-piracy barbed rectal probe to fuck you in real time.
The next generation is the problem. With the component pricing being stupid up they’re having to put off releasing the new consoles. They’re raising the prices on existing hardware just to match the component crunch, so they’re not getting the mid-late generation bump of people buying the hardware once it’s come down in price, and the people willing to buy new hardware an a high price already bought this generation’s comsole.
Xbox bled money buying studios for gamepass, then failed to get casual people subscribed to gamepass, but the hardware people who bought new $70 games a couple times a month started spending way less money on Xbox due to Gamepass because of all the day 1 releases. And the Series S held back everything by being wildly underpowered.
Meanwhile Sony burned billions betting on live service failures back to back to back (Microsoft did this too, but to a lesser degree).
And now their “new console generation” parachute/reset is fucked due to hardware costs. They know they can’t make an even halfway decent “next-gen” console under $1000, so now they’ve burned mountains of money and don’t really have a plan going forward. And now they’re amputating limbs to create the illusion of cost-cutting.
Imagine your job being making games, and finding a way to ruin that. Both of the big console teams have shit the bed simultaneously. Truly awe inspiring, the collective dipshettery we get to witness.
Good thing popcorn is cheap as I need more of it to watch them constantly doing stupid things.
None of it really matters to be because I am never going to buy a console anyway, largely because of shit like this. I’ll just enjoy watching.
Holy moly.
That is basically the worst case scenario, no?
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The absolute last thing Obsidian needs is Bethesda presiding over them. Bethesda (the publisher) is pure toxicity, and don’t they hate Obsidian?
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They should have given Obsidian TES/Fallout, and folded Bethesda into Obsidian as a studio to farm work out to. BGS has some great level design teams, but the decision makers need to go.
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The absolute last thing Halo campaigns need is to be more like Call of Duty.
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They should have cut 343, and split the IP amongst specialized studios. Like an Arkane “special ops” stealth game, another Halo Wars, and/or a strictly multiplayer Activision game.
This is beyond even my worst expectations. It’s what I would have done if I was a corporate spy inside Microsoft, assigned to sabotage them.
It’s worse then that because studios aren’t names they are the people that make the games. All these studios are effectively dead The only good that may come of this are the devs that start their own indio studio and make the games they want. Not an easy path mind you.
Worst case but certainly expected. Microsoft paid a ransom for Bethesda and the Bethesda brand and their IP. Nothing was ever going to be rolled into a “lesser” brand like Obsidian. It’s naive to think otherwise, this is capitalism to a fucking T, decisions made by penny pinching sleezebags who assign value to names.
Is the Bethesda brand even valuable anymore? I feel like it might have been relevant 10 years ago but it’s kind of fallen by the wayside in recent years, mostly by their own hand.
Obsidian is doing fallout.
Halo needs ANYTHING. 343/Halo studios has never had a fucking clue.
Obsidian is doing fallout.
But under BGS now. To me, that is frightening.
Last good game by obsidian ? By Bethesda ? Commercial success now ? Obsidian dig their grave.
They made a bunch of good RPGs/RPG-ish games, and a bunch of “mid” ones.
My personal favorite is Grounded. It does sorta feel like classic Obsidian/BGS game, with its heavy implicit environmental storytelling, audio logs and such, and the survival aspect is great for coop.
No, none of them sold a zillion copies like Fallout 76 or Starfield, but I had more fun in them than either of those, by a long shot.
So one niche game 10 year ago… I know obsidian for being the studio with the art director proudly claiming he would not recruit withe ppl. Wich except the legal side is utterly retard since they are the majority of your audience. Go woke go broke
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What exactly is their plan? Just collect IPs so they aren’t being released on other platforms?
It is a very old strategy for monopolies to buy up competition when there are no anti monopoly protections so they can kill the competition, it’s how Microsoft was founded.
Founded? I know they did this as they grew, but founded?
Not quite. The founding is actually worse.
Bill Gates was shown, in good faith, a tech demo by, I think IBM but I may be wrong with that, for a new graphical user interface they were planning on releasing soon, and he just stole it and released windows, before they could get their product to market.
I looked it up as I was curious.
Apple and Microsoft both licensed some interface stuff from Xerox and they were both working on a windows like OS.
Apple was ahead, and gave them a sneak preview.
Then I guess MS wanted to do something like that and told Apple they’d give them time a frame they wouldn’t release anything in (like a year or two later after apple released it) and then they said fuck it and released it early.
Then Apple sued MS.
So MS stole good parts of windows from Apple.
I think it was Kodak they stole from, dos they bought
You can make good games to make people buy your games or you can destroy competition to make people buy mor games.
Don’t worry: their CEO was answering support calls. I’m sure things will be fine.
(Doomed.)
Yeah so historically PlayStation has had a lot of exclusives (Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, The Last of Us) that would be the deciding factor for a lot of players. So Microsoft wanted to ensure that Xbox/PC could synergize and compete against Sony by buying a stake in a ton of game studios, either to have their own exlusives or at least delayed release for PlayStation. But between bitcoin, AI and enshittification the gaming industry is in shambles so they’re cutting overhead.
Rip obsidian, I enjoyed pillars, avowed, and pentiment
Pentiment surprised me by being one of my favourite games I have played in years. There have no doubt been better, or more engaging, or more thought provoking games that I have played, but I struggle to think of many with as much care woven throughout it.
It made total sense to me when I later learned that Pentiment was Josh Sawyer’s pet project, one that he had been hoping to make for years. Apparently he basically said “let me make this game, or I walk”, and because of how Xbox gamepass affected funding stuff, he was allowed to make this cute, quirky game. Apparently they even had an on-call historian to ensure maximum authenticity.
Yeah that game was great a lot of people slept on, there’s another adventure game coming out soon “slime in the ice machine” that looks like it might be good too and I think Josh Sawyer is working on a fallout game hopefully they get the time to make it what they want.
Meanwhile black isle /interplay reborn
I still think they should sell Rareware to Nintendo. The fact that so many of those excellent oldschool games are stuck in IP limbo is a tragedy. Can’t play them unless you emulate them, or are lucky enough to find original hardware.
Rare collection exists and is fantastic.
Tons of rare games are also in Nintendo’s online subscription especially N64 including Goldeneye.At least they gave us a teaser for what Conker 2 would be like.
well, R.I.P. Elder Scrolls 6.
I swear if she also mess up with Mojang…
Mojang must have a pretty strong contract, given how little they messed with Minecraft Java Edition.
Yeah, either that or noticed that Mojang is one of the biggest cows and the community can be pretty harsh if java gets ruined especially considering that most of the youtubers use Java and Minecraft is alive just because of community content
It probably helps that Minecraft prints money; no one wants to be the one that breaks the infinite money machine. I bet though if Minecraft sales slowed then you’d start to see more interference.
Wow. This is what happens when you put someone without game industry experience in charge of your game division. Incredibly stupid decisions all around.
Obsidian, we hardly knew ye. 🫡
“I wonder what will happen if we put all of our eggs in the same basket?” - Famous basket-dropper.
closing down the division. seems like the head of xbox is there to do just that.
I’m keeping this one
These fuckers won’t rest until there’s nothing good left to play and all that’s left are multiplayer only games that cost $100 up front and still need several microtransactions a day forever in order to be in any way playable 😮💨🤬
You’re missing one major step. It’ll be 100 up front plus a monthly fee to your cloud gaming access to be able to play the game until they decide you don’t get the license to play it anymore and they take it away. You will own nothing and like it.
