ZombiePie

Yeah, I can ping @dtoast, but when you say "frequent" what time gap are you suggesting?

The official Sony blog released its list of best-selling PS5 digital games and last month Rare, Ltd.'s Sea of Thieves was the best selling PS5 game in the EU and the game was third on PS5 in the US and Canada. Previously, other Xbox titles have done well of PS5 as well. They have done so well that even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took note and commented to the press that with Xbox “We are committed to meeting players where they are by bringing great games to more people on more devices” and praised their multi-platform efforts by stating “Earlier this month (April, 2024), we had seven games among the top 25 on the PlayStation Store, more than any other publisher.” Regarding that second quote, in April, Modern Warfare 3 was the second best selling PS5 game, Overwatch 2 the seventh, Sea of Thieves the 12th, Fallout 4 the 16th, Minecraft the 19th, Fallout 76 the 20th and Grounded the 23rd.

The last week has definitely been a tumultuous and confusing one with the Xbox brand and consoles to say the least. Microsoft's management has been sending incredibly mixed messages in the aftermath of its decision to shutter Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks. Xbox Games Studio leader, Matt Booty, was caught saying “We need smaller games that give us prestige and awards,” the day after it closed the studio that made Hi-Fi Rush, a game that is very much that. Likewise, Sarah Bond, President of Xbox, was interviewed by Bloomberg and while she laid out ambitious plans for cloud gaming, mobile, and affirmed that Xbox remains a console brand first and foremost, she completely dodged questions about recent studio closures and mass layoffs.

“You know, it's always extraordinarily hard when you have to make decisions like that ... I'll go back to what I was saying about the industry. And when we looked at those fundamental trends, we feel a deep responsibility to ensure that the games we make, the devices we build, the services that we offer are there through moments, even when the industry isn't growing and when you're through a time of transition. And the news we announced earlier this week is an outcome of that, and our commitment to make sure that the business is healthy for the long term.

“But that said, our commitment to having our own studios and working with partners to have games large and small, we're a platform where you can play GTA, but you can also play Palworld, where you can play Call of Duty and you can also play Pentiment, that doesn't change. And frankly, our commitment to Bethesda and the role that it plays is part of Xbox and everything we do.

Furthermore, while she attempted to affirm that many of the difficult decisions Microsoft has made regarding cuts, closures, and layoffs have been in response to console game sales and hardware sales being flat for all manufacturers and publishers, most seem to have missed that this graph was in the background as she was saying that.

So, with Sea of Thieves and virtually every other Xbox and Activision game Microsoft has released on PlayStation 4 and 5 doing well, is this the future of Xbox?

A variety of sources are reporting and confirming that the PC release of Ghosts of Tsushima: Director's Cut is being pulled from Steam, but more specifically in non-PSN countries. Earlier, developer Sucker Puck confirmed that a PSN account would be needed to access the game's co-op and multiplayer features, but playing the single player campaign would not require a PSN account. After Sony walked back linking the ability to play Helldivers II to a PSN account on PC, Ghosts of Tsushima became delisted in all countries that do not have PSN support as the game draws near its May 16th release date. It still remains unclear if Steam, Sony, or developers Sucker Punch have elected to pull the game from non-PSN regions. It could be that creating a workaround for the PSN requirement in select countries and regions presented too much of a technical hurdle, but we simply don't know. As it has been mentioned elsewhere, an alternate solution seems to have been to make the multiplayer and co-op features DLC that's only downloadable in countries where PSN is supported.

All of this news comes shortly after the Helldivers II PC-PSN debacle. However, there's a slight update on that situation after Sony decided to waive its PSN requirement for PC Helldivers II players. Helldivers II is no longer purchasable in Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. All three are prominent EU countries that do not have PSN support.

With Sony's PC efforts being a mixed bag in general, do you think this is the future when it comes to how they release their bigger games outside of the PS5 ecosystem?

As articulated by @bigsocrates in their thread discussing the topic, big game developers these days are on shaky grounds, or that's at least what the leaders of those companies want you to believe. It always bear repeating that while Microsoft cut thousands of jobs and recently shuttered Arkane Austin AND Tango Gameworks, the company as a whole posted continual revenue growth as it became, at least by the metrics of some sources, the most valuable company in the world.

EA now finds itself in the same situations other big tentpole studios in the industry are in. They made game investments and some of them did not pan out and its leadership is needing to own up to that while global trends suggest that console consumers are spending less. In a report to investors, EA is now claiming that it entirely missed its Q1 financial goals. In response to that and the company's stock dropping by 2.5%, CEO Andrew Wilson authorized a new three-year stock buyback plan totaling $5 billion.

Wilson also attempted to allay investor concerns by making a few comments about reducing workloads and exploring new revenue sources that definitely raised some eyebrows. First, he made some incredibly concerning comments about the company's employed artists and developers having "a real hunger" to use generative AI to reduce their workloads. Now, when I first shared that Andrew Wilson made some questionable comments about AI on some Discords, people pointed out that middleware like Speed Tree or using stuff from the Unity or Unreal Asset store amounts to using generative AI. Likewise, Adobe autofill is an AI-oriented tool and is almost ubiquitous in its uses in gaming and generalized art creation. However, when you look at what Wilson said exactly, I think you can get why I and others have some major concerns.

In regards to the FIFA games, Wilson stated:

“But the things I talked about in the conference were really both two-fold. One, how do we get more efficient? The stat I used was we’ve moved from being able to create stadiums from 6 months to 6 weeks. And my expectation is that will continue to shrink over time.

“Maybe even more profound than that – when we build a game we have animation and run cycles. In FIFA 23, we had 36 run cycles, which gave you a kind of believability of human performance inside of that game. When we launched EA Sports FC 24, we had 1,200 run cycles.

On top of that, as reported by our sister-site, GameSpot, Wilson stated that in-game responsive advertising was definitely something he and other leaders at EA have considered, but that EA would take a "thoughtful approach." The choice quote that they reported was:

"As we think about the many, many billions of hours spent, both playing, creating, watching and connecting and where much of that engagement happens to be on the bounds of a traditional game experience, our expectation is that advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us."

"We'll be very thoughtful as we move into that, but we have teams internally in the company right now looking at how do we do very thoughtful implementations inside of our game experiences."

Why is Wilson making such a big deal about advertising in EA developed games? Because during this largely negative earnings call, he promoted the next Battlefield as being a 'tremendous live service game' that will support the largest development team in 'franchise history.' When pressed on how the company could justify making such a massive investment at a time when most in the industry are contracting, Wilson brought up the topic of in-game advertising.

Unlike Phil Spencer or Embracer, EA and Wilson have venerable money makers like Madden and FIFA. Is Wilson simply trying to divert the attention of his shareholders to prevent them from advocating from a radical course correction? Who's to say, but EA already laid off approximately 5% of its staff as part of company-wide layoffs near the start of 2023.

Off topic, but why am I getting @-ed in every thread or blog you make?

As Schreier put it best, the context is that Xbox was told to either prioritize games currently in development or games that would be in development in the future. They elected to protect studios that had stuff in the pipeline for the future. I'm not saying I agree with it and if anything, this shows that the people calling the shots simply do not understand how this industry works, but it is context

The growing body of evidence seems to suggest that Microsoft's highest leaders felt the Xbox brand was falling victim to what has been plaguing overexpansion. Likewise, it also seems like MS CEO Nadella simply has buyer's remorse regarding the purchase of Activision:

Speaking about the closures more broadly, Booty said that the company’s studios had been spread too thin — like “peanut butter on bread” — and that leaders across the division had felt understaffed. They decided to close these studios to free up resources elsewhere, he said.

Booty added that the shutdown of subsidiary Arkane Austin, the longtime developer of games such as Prey, was not connected to the performance of its new multiplayer game, Redfall, a critical and commercial flop.

No, and the Forbes report paints an even more depressing picture. Arkane was in the process of building a case for an immersive sim and Tango was nearing a roadmap on a Hi-Fi Rush sequel. The projects did get presented to senior leadership, but they did not change anything as they "were years away." ZeniMax leadership sided with Microsoft because they agreed that their current structure was too cumbersome:

Jill Braff, head of ZeniMax studios, said in the town hall that she hoped the reorganization would allow the division, which also develops Fallout and Doom, to put more focus on fewer projects. “It’s hard to support nine studios all across the world with a lean central team with an ever-growing plate of things to do,” she said, according to audio of the meeting reviewed by Bloomberg.

“I think we were about to topple over,” she added.

Both Tango and Arkane released games last year and were looking to hire additional staff as they pitched new projects, which Booty and Braff suggested was the main factor behind their closures. Shinji Mikami, Tango’s founder and studio head, departed last year.

I can page @dtoast. As he explained in this thread, the engineers and managers made attempts to resolve the suddent return of the video issues.

@bigsocrates: are you aware that the work hours for the average salaryman are insane? The expected number of hours makes American look like it has EU labour laws. Japan has a forest and a bridge notoriously known as places where burnt out businessmen wander into in order to kill themselves, I don't think that's a stunning indicator of Japanese corporate culture, even if one CEO tried to save face over ten years ago.

Likewise, there should be a level of accountability directed at Spencer. If not now, when? You can't keep moving the goal post on when he deserves scrutiny over repeat studio failures and documented project mismanagement.

Also, yet again, I swear to God, if I see someone else share an Iwata anecdote amidst the industry layoffs, I am going to go insane. Sure, he would smile at the camera and seemed to get the industry, but he was acting IN ACCORDANCE TO NATIONWIDE regulations while operating a monolith. If he had the ability to fire people as freely as companies do in the USA and even most of Europe, he would have. You're a goddamn fool if you think Japanese corporate culture is "kinder" or less brutal or corrupt than what we experience.