Wow! 70% of the staff left. That’s a bad sign. The saddest part is that online games get pulled of the servers within 8-10 yes. So we pay for a game that we will never have.
What’s your take on LOTR:Gollum and Forspoken? With the news article you shared, it seems like they’ve both had some similar issues to Redfall. I’d love to see a video on your perspective of these, and the elephant in the room. The Day Before, as well. Greed is killing gaming.
The question, of course, is why would companies acquiring developers not do due diligence before making their purchase? It is understood that companies seeking to be bought out will do varying amounts of window dressing. But as a buyer, it is your duty to your shareholders to make sure that the window dressing doesn't come at the cost of brand destructive behaviour. Either the purchasing company has no business valuing and purchasing game development companies or they're only interested in buying out competition so that they can make even shittier games to sell at higher prices.
Talent retention the opposite to talent loss is a massive part of the reason why supergiant has always made top quality games even when the mechanics in each of them may change drastically.
Honestly your explanation about boost numbers for a big pay day makes sense and I think most people in their position would do the same because why would they care about anything else other than their own families and setting themselves up to never work another day including their kids. By doing what they did all that happens is some bad games are made and companies that they no longer have anything to do with suffer. As long as no one was getting hurt or dying then why not cash out? As a gamer and a fan of arkane especially it sucks and I hate seeing this but my life isn't in danger and my life won't change a bit so while I wish none of this happened in the first place we have to expect this kind of behaviour in a society and system that places massive profits over anything else.
They dont think we are dumb, they know allot of us are predictable. They know gamers complain and then buy the game anyways. In case of redfall, even the head of the developer knew its not gonna work. Thats why they released the game, to get rid of the bad game all along to work on something else. They tried at the end to make as much money as possible
@@Heisen_burger-dude Feels similar to the Gollum game. If I was a dev I wouldn't want to work on these games either. I hope these devs are able to move on to something better
They just don’t really care about anything but making money, and that mindset gets greatly rewarded in the industry unfortunately but it’s funny that they ignore the advice from the creatives who’s actual job it is to know if the game is good or not.
The fact that 70% of devs working on Prey would not be in the company anymore, because of a single shitty game, sends shivers down my spine. That’s devastating. We might not see anything like Dishonored or Prey for a long time because of this.
The devs for Prey also came out later and mentioned that Prey was not the original title of the game and a corporate decision made them change it to Prey. Which of course led to some gamers being like, "this is not prey" and not want to buy it.
I was just going to say that. The upper ups always find a way to f*ck with the project and when it goes wrong, the first thing they blame is the studio/devs.
@@kritikalgamerThe second sentence reads like you are calling out the gamers saying "this is not prey". If you had written something like "No shit they are gonna say it's not prey" or "They were absolutely justified in saying it's not prey" it wouldn't read like a callout.
They are attempting to do the same thing with features in cars. BMW is leading the charge and i have heard Ford is looking into doing this with the Electric F150 and the Mach E.
@@HennyVenny It is not a problem of capitalism. It is the problem of stupid people. If life service games were not profitable, no studio would develop them. But because there are enough money cows/whales who are willing to pay in games like Fortnite, Diablo Immortal and similar crap, studios decide to do that. But hey, this is nothing new. Star Wars Episode 9 managed to make over a billion while being a steaming pile of garbage. And even after that people were waiting for new Star Wars movies/series wiling to pay for even more of the same.
Valve is not a perfect company, but they are a great example of how really deep internal play testing with honest feedback matters to the overall vibe of the game
@@ronthorn3I'd rather one game of that level of quality every 10 years than pushing out cash grabs every 2 personally. That, and Valve gets to have their cake and eat it. CSGO and TF2 monetisation is HUGE and nobody really complains about it. Hell, CSGO still has straight up loot boxes, but CSGO is such a well made, beloved game that it gets a pass. Kinda telling, right? If a game is genuinely excellent, people will not only forgive lootboxes and excessive monetization, but buy into it and like it. The problem for people is that the mtx comes at the expense of the quality of the games.
I imagine the feeling of 'hating what we are building' is more common nowadays inside developer studious. Especially with so many news of Publisher's having piles and piles of abusive leadership in every possible way
"Abusive" is pretty disingenious, suggesting that they forced them to make this game exactly how it is. They made that terrible game bad themselves. Sure, maybe you were provided faulty train tracks with cracks and all but you didn't have to lay the tracks in front of a cliff.
@@Icetea-2000 i've been noticing that most of the issues with AAA videogames nowadays have been caused by the big shots at the top demanding what to do to the game the devs are making, causing the entire thing to break down like a skyscraper build with rly faulty support beams.
@@WokioWolfy But is that actually true or is it just your feeling? It’s easy to say that because they’re at the forefront of the project and and take responsibility for it with leadership they ruin AAA games, but is it that easy? I think what it really is is the changing societal landscape in general, the decisions made by companies, on all managerial levels from top to bottom, are a result of the changing environment they find themselves in
@@Icetea-2000 Certainly plays a role sure, but just about everything you hear regarding completely dumbshit decisions that baffle everyone its always the fault of upper management, like the recent cancelation of Overwatch 2s PvE mode.
@@mrshadowduh9394 Do we know that? Yeah they announce it, because that’s their job, but do we know that it wasn’t some developer teams being too incompetent or the middle management team leaders being too incompetent? Idk
Redfall managed to have the problems of Anthem (intense intervention by execs leading devs not knowing what the game even was), Babylon Fall (a single player studio being forced to make something outside their skillset) and Battlefield (massive exodus of employees) at the same time, it's almost impressive how bad management was
Execs didn't intervene with Anthem's concept, the devs were stuck for years thinking what the game should be and not making any progress, until it came to a point of EA financing the non-existent development for countless years and having to release a cobbled together game in less than 2 years, in this case it was actually Bioware's Anthem team's fault mostly
one thing you got wrong. Platinum Games was the one that wanted to make a live service game. Even though it failed Platinum themselves said they are going to try and keep making live service games. that is insane
I didn’t realize Dishonored 2 and Prey where financial flops. Both of those games are just phenomenal. And hearing how Arkane got fucked over hard is heartbreaking. Hopefully they get a chance to make another immersive sim on the scale of Dishonored and Prey.
I remember people throwing tantrums because the Prey remake wasn't exactly like the original. Seemed rather childish when the remake was pretty damn good.
@@Blackemperess Naw, waiting for a sequel for years and then reacting to getting shit in your mouth isn't childish, it's normal. It's the sycophants defending bethesda's horrible practices that are childish.
Sad truth is that a significant number (if not all?) of the important people who worked at Arkane have left. Including the studio's founder Raphaël Colantonio. Not a great chance we'll ever see another good immersive sim from them. Also because I doubt that Bethesda will ever fund another IS.
As soon as todd said 16 times the detail, i got worried!! I mean u just dont set such high expectations!! 3 times the detail is more believable, 4 times 5 times is a more manageable amount to imagine. 16 times is just laughable and it turns out it was laughable.
@@nickremer6142 I played it and the writing do be shit but I didn't even notice microtransactions, I feel like if you someone play the game without even noticing it's not that big of a deal
Seems like Arkane itself has lost it’s identity with 70% of the Prey devs leaving. Hard to see how a company can come back to greatness with that sort of loss. This seems to happen with lots of studios (DICE, Bioware come to mind) and they never really recover.
@@Sumunuhriginal yes many worse games out there but coming from their past games it was really a let down. It just wasn't fun and should have taken a lot from prey moon crash for how the time loop could have worked. The ai was really bad as well.
The only point i disagree on is publicly traded companies being less likely to engage in harmful monetization because their goal is to maximize shareholder wealth. To me, that makes it even more likely that they would start an exploitative live service money printing machine because shareholders don't necessarily care to make less today so they can make more 5-10 years from now. Its a constant pusher of unsustainable limitless growth OR ELSE and results in some of the worst customer and game developer experiences in the video game industry.
This is what happened with world economy, lol. Closing subdivisions (profitable ones!) for tax cuts, firing employees to maximize profits... Just so investors at the top would be happy even if it doesn't make sense and ruins lives
The problem of greedy managers exists throughout the IT Industry. Every IT company whether a simple dev shop or game studio has managers who are not passionate about their work at all and just wants to maximize their bottom line.
@@DubberRucks yes I know but it is most obvious in the IT industry. In just one group meeting you can pretty much tell which manager is just there for a pay day and nothing else
@@DubberRucks it’s a just a LITTLE different with IT, but it does generally apply to “Technical Fields” You can be motivated by money or whatevs, but like, there’s really a “mountain of information” a person HAS to know in order to manage these depts. but big uppers keep hiring these guys who literally know fudging nothin about the technology they’re managing 😂 Actually, it DOES kinda happen in every field lol u right ❤
Since Arkane is practically a dead body of a great studios reanimated by the souls of greed, I think we should support WolfEye studios, look them up, they made Weird West. The game shows it's "new studio" cracks but it's got an unwavering dedication to their creative direction and I hope to see more from the studio.
Great video, Luke. Prey is such an incredible game. Nothing better than climbing up a wall with the Gloo gun. The exploration and the worldbuilding is second to none. I’ve noticed the game getting a lot of love online over the years. It’s definitely developed a cult following. It’s sad and unfortunate that when it comes to games like this that have a slow burn that spreads through word of mouth over time like Alien Isolation or Mad Max, corporate executives will rarely ever see pass those launch sales figures. How disappointing to see this studio go this route.
Deus Ex had far better world building, and the reality is that the gameplay wasn't anything special. People are fond of it because it's one of the few games they've played but not because it's a game that stands out or stands through the test of time. I agree that Alien Isolation and Mad Max were done a bit dirty on the marketing side, especially Mad Max, but to their credit that had unique enough gameplay to stand out and stand apart from the crowd, and hold up even to today's standards, especially Mad Max, which I wholly adore.
I love the game but I refuse to call it prey, I want to respect Arcanes original dream by calling it NeuroShock. Prey will always be Tommy's adventures back at 2006.
When you got to that bit about "Arcane Magic" my jaw dropped.. i knew exactly what you were gonna say next, and its so incredible, you know its true.. cdpr magic.. bioware magic.. lmao, executives are so worthless, siphoning money away from the project to themselves, and they just blame the devs for their utter lack of everything necessary to create a good game.. its like you said man.. Evil.. i mean, what is there to say.. narcissists gonna narc?
Arkane should have developed a single player vampire game like Bloodlines. I bet that would have been a fantastic success. All vampire lore lovers are waiting for a new Bloodlines-like game.
@@howdoyoudo5949 It currently is. The point is.. I desperately want another game like that. I have played bloodlines at least 13 times, beginning to end. :) Just imagine what a game like Bloodlines could be like with current technology. Or imagine a free roaming open world rpg Bloodlines game. I would pay almost anything for that.
@@Quothmorgan The development of that game failed. It was halted last year. I am not sure where it is at right now. The fact that we have heard nothing new about it does not give me confidence.
@@Quothmorgan There's no good news, only bad news. Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has been out of development for multiple years. There's no game, no alpha build or anything. It's just a trailer and some teaser images. It might eventually come out like Duke Nukem Forever and Dead Island 3 but at the moment the release date is going to be years away.
Side note: My friend who was a Level Architect at Arkane Austin left around 2019. Also incidentally I noticed some of their devs like Level and Environment Designers and Artists left Arkane Austin for other studios like Retro Studios, Bluepoint Games, and Archetype Entertainment in Austin to name a few...
Minecraft. The purchase of Minecraft by Microsoft was the big driver in how it managed its game development studios, which let Arkane have enough rope to hang themself. Microsoft learned that by letting a studio be independent, it usually flourished. Mojang even uses open source in key areas more than Microsoft stack. But it also makes insane amounts of money/growth. After that success, Microsoft let off the reins on dev studios and allowed them to operate almost independently. They aren't even forced to use MS stacks (but I think Mojang was nudged off AWS to Azure...not sure) Concerned the RedFall fiasco might change that, but they also have successful studios flourishing under this approach.
There's a very delicate balance that must be achieved. You have to be involved enough in the project to ensure it is coming together smoothly and appropriately, but you have to stay far enough away to let it grow organically and "simmer" on it's own. The overwhelming majority of business management owner types are fundamentally incapable of achieving this, because they can only see things in terms of how many dollar signs are attached to it. They are completely oblivious to the fact a balance scale exists, nevermind what it means to be off the balance point on it.
Nothing better then accidentally killing a quest npc because you had the "mind blast" ability bound while looking at them. 10/10 would fry a man's brain again.
I loved the game, but I’ll never play it again. Got all the way to the final section of the game before I hit a game-breaker, and I was never able to finish. Sucked, because it was such a unique experience until then.
@@awesome3139 That's a damn shame. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have some technical issues with it myself but then again I did put a couple hundred hours in the game and rarely were they game breaking.
This situation has me wondering if the Last of Us live service Multiplayer game was truly Naughty Dog’s vision or if Sony tried to force it on them like what happened to Arkane here
Considering Sony's current investment model leaning more toweards Live-Service/Games as a Service....It might be. All I think is Sony is doing very good, please don't get comfortable and fuck it up for the sake of greed. Just because you made legendary games doesn't meant you can't make shitty games.
I would say that's not the case. Actually probably quite the opposite since ND made factions 1 probably just was a much better version of that, but it wouldn't be great sticking power or much to monetize off of.
@@SinisterPlaugesyeah man, its almost like those games were made BEFORE Sony made the decision, crazy. Also, i heard their focus is shifted from 50:50 (single:multi), into 40:60; and the funnier thing is, out of (allegedly) 12 multi game, 2 is already in shambles...and naughty dog, on of their top dog, is also still in muddy water with their game. So yeah, thats that, I guess.
@@SinisterPlauges live service games are built on a foundation of nickel and dining the consumer and generally the quality is much lower. GOW is a single player driven experience, same with horizon, Spider-Man. They do have expansions with extra content but they don’t rely solely on the extra content. Halo infinite is a live service and look how that turned out. A game released in pieces and barely any content.
Management (or lack of) seems to be the recurring theme with a lot of the major failures in recent times. The guys that did the level design on Gollum literally said (on video) that their managing director gave them "buzzwords" to go off of when designing the levels of the game. Very similar situation here,where the management were like "oh like Borderlands" or whatever. No clear direction and lack of identity, combined with tight deadlines and crunch is always going to be trouble. Just like in any walk of life, game developement is the same-everybody's manager is either incompetent or not very good to work for. Or both.
You really see the shift in management's attitude toward their employees and products in the early 2000s, as those who obtained their business degree in the 90s climbed the corporate ladder with the idea of perpetual growth that has been pushed in business schools since the late 80s came into fruition.
It would have been a major success if it's just called NeuroShock just like the devs wanted. Fans of the cancel game Prey 2 felt like executives are dancing on their dead games grave, which did not help Arcane at all
@@carlosortiz8764 Eh, that's not the only problem. It was an immersive sim. And immersive sims don't sell well, despite their complexity and creativity.
People should remember that game studios/devs aren’t to blame for bad games like this, it’s the suits making the calls and forcing them to monetize. Yet, fans give them the most shit
@bobduckington68Corporate forced them to change the type of game they had to make, if they'd made another immersive sim then it probably would have been good. Corporate also forced them to change their last games name to "Prey" implying it was a sequel to another game that it had no relationship with, which caused a lot of controversy around that game and shot it in the foot despite the fact it was amazing.
@bobduckington68 This analogy is reversed. The person pulling the trigger would be the suits as they are what caused the gun to actively do it's task. The devs would be the gun as they are what projects the owner's intentions. Also if you actually did pay attention to the video, you would know the cause of why the studio couldn't come together was because of management's choice on the matter. One side wanted to make a multiplayer coop live service, the other wanted a singleplayer immersive experience; so is it not the management's job to make it so both sides find a compromise or find cohesion? They are called _management_ after all. A production problem would be the devs all contacting a flu for example, something that management has little influence in. A side note, team problems almost always lead back to management and it's really just how severe the problem is and how much management could've done to prevent such problem that would determine how much blame is put on them. In the example of the flu, if for example management forced sick workers to continue working which caused the flu then the blame is put all on management. Also, Corpo/execs/management include the higher ups of Arkane taking the orders from the greater higher ups (Bethesda) who also take orders from even greater higher ups (Zenimax/Microsoft). The actual devs who coded and created assets for the game are just taking orders.
We need games like redfall to happen. Hopefully the bigger studios take notice that one bad game can sink your company because all your talent will leave.
It's almost like this is a industry problem. This kind of failure we keep seeing will never stop until the employees have actual power over the production of the games they make. Unionizing all of these companies is a must before any kind of change can be made.
Or, somehow convince the morons actually buying these games and buying loot boxes and skins to stop giving companies money for sub par games. Won't happen but whatever.
My heart sank the moment I saw that red fall was being developed by Arkane. At that moment I just knew that something was wrong. They are supposed to be the antithesis of loot and shoot. No wonder Ralph left.
im new to you but i really enjoy your content, its weird to call it professional but i like how you detail all the shit i want to know without spending 10 min of the video giving extremely opinionated rants about the topic; you manage to make a long video engage my attention, without filler, every time i watch
This is the EXACT story I expected. You can't look at Redfall and think there's any level of joy or passion on display, or even a reason to get up in the morning. It's not just hollow, it's literally lifeless. Not a single dev actually wanted this game to exist. As soon as I realized that, I understood what had happened.
Honestly it's good to get this news but I suspected about 90% of this before the story ever came out. The only thing i think is that MS likely allowed this game to release knowing full well how bad it was (which means phil lied) and decided for GP sake it was going to come out anyways
@@DubberRucks i think the major problem is MS clearly knew that this game wasn't worth the 70 dollar price tag but to put it out for less would be admitting it was an inferior product. I don't blame MS for it's existence but at some point the decision should have been made that "we can't sell this game at 70" had they done that then it's condition would have been completely on Zenimax. This whole Idea that they spent 7 billion and didn't bother to see what products they were getting for that price tag is absolute horse shit
@@highcouncil1302 Any appreciable difference between the two seems to be have vanished along with the reputation your former favorite AAA studio that was ruined by greed
Prey is my most favorite game from Arkane. The intricate Metroidvania esque level design, the gloo cannon, environmental storytelling, and player choice. Such a criminally underrated title. Such a far cry from the utter dumpster fire of Redfall...
My only complaint about prey is how boring the enemy designs are. I will always hate shadow monsters because its such a lazy simple design. Instead of somthing intimidating trying to kill you, you get a black fart cloud
Yeah the fact that prey is talked about so little when it’s an utter masterpiece is such a shame. When games as amazing as prey flop and then propel question why devs only make soulless cash grabs the irony is just too funny
Agree. But i also mean the people who are investigating such things, like the news or even youtubers. As If they do not want to tell the names out of fear or something. Its not like their names are secret ...
You're right, Luke. Just wishing for Prey 2 is just not realistic at this point; as much as we all would like it to be. Hopefully they can be given some autonomy and make something they actually want to make.
Wow... As someone close to Arkane, I'm blown away by the thoroughness of this video. You take time to explain everything down to the separation between Lyon and Austin. LukiePoo has grown so much while I wasn't looking !
That 70% of the Prey team left is so depressing, I love that game. Looking forward to Starfield, but it looks like I'll never see anything like Prey again. I don't blame them for leaving at all, hopefully they can come together & make another great game.
@@adventuresingamedevelopment I'll have to check that out then, don't know much about it but I've heard about it, didn't know that some of that team worked on it.
I feel like this is happening so much recently. Crystal Dynamics went from amazing single player Tomb Raider games, to live service Avengers. Bathesda with Fallout 76, now Arkane with this game, and presumably rock steady with Suicide Squad. Why are so many studios who are amazing at single player being forced to make crappy live service games. I feel like most people want good single player games and are tired of everything trying to be live service multiplayer with microtranctions crap.
found you because of your gollum review and I must say none of the others told well enough how bad it was the pause you took to just let us see how boring slow and painful it was, was 10/10 subscribed
Love the irony, redfall devs were annoyed the game was being compared to every other game, while the anthem devs had to deal with higher ups that wanted to never talk about every other similar game.
I'm not sure I follow the whole "public vs. private" thing. The goal of a publicly-traded company is to maximize shareholder value _for that quarter._ It's a pretty well-known fact that shareholders don't care about the long-term health or sustainability of a company, in fact it's _illegal_ for a public company to prioritize their own health or reputation over increasing quarterly value. Honestly, this whole mess wouldn't have avoided if Zenimax were public. In fact, it probably would've started a decade ago back when all the other publicly-traded AAA companies were milking MTX and laying the groundwork the GaaS. Zenimax being private is probably the reason Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Dishonored didn't launch with in-game shops or forced multiplayer.
Arkane was among my last few hopes from AAA developers. Really sad to see the same old greed ruin them too. At this point, are there any big companies that didn't rot from the inside?
Just get a playstation dude. Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Sucker Punch, Santa Monica, Guerilla all deliver great AAA titles. Plus FromSoft will always develop for Sony, Bloodborne was the start of their ascension.
It's a pity that nobody wanted to play their games and that they were financial failures. Greed is the result of what people will pay for. What people pay for is Diablo Immortal, not Prey and Dishonored II.
You know what would probably be a good policy to adopt when acquiring studios? Ask every member of that studio to fill out an anonymous questionaire on the state of the studio and current projects. That would allow devs to warn you if a project is just a desaster waiting to happen and if a majority of devs shares that sentiment, even if management claims that all is fine and dandy, then you could put the project on ice, put the studio under new management, decide whether to reboot or scrap it entirely and so on. I'd argue that the long term cost of having a catastrophic launch after a studio was freshly acquired is higher than the cost of abandoning a project that someone else started.
The Dishonoured series and Prey are absolutely amazing games and some of my favourites of all time. If you can, I would suggest playing them, they're fantastic. The intro to Prey alone... is awesome. This is incredibly sad... Yet another reminder that it's not the developers, it's always the execs. Always.
It's really quite sad. Prey was a fantastic game, harkening back to System Shock with a twist. It takes a very strong team to make a game like that...all basically gone now, and for what... Edit: Congrats and good luck with the new addition to the family!
I think we are seeing a slew of games being shown now that were planned as live service games four or five years ago but now the mood around them has completely shifted and developers don't know what to do.
_"We do mock reviews for every game that we launch, and this is double digits lower than where we thought we would be with this game"_ ~ Phil Spencer Complete lies.
It's just insane to me to think that executives really believe microtransactions in shitty soulless games that no one will play for more than a month could ever make more money for them than a good, well marketed game that people fall in love with, share with all their friends, and buy all the DLCs for for the next decade.
Riddle me this Batman, How in the hell do you make a good game, ANY game good when the people MAKING it hate it? You're so smart Batman, answer me...that.
As with pretty much 100% of these kinds of stories, it boils down to executives being useless and being exactly the wrong people to lead a game. What really makes my blood boil is that I can virtually guarantee that this will be blamed on the devs, who will be laid off while the executives make bank and learn nothing.
Prey flopped because of the name of the game .. everybody was disgusted and disappointed that it wasn't anything to do with the 2006 game.. it's the reason I didn't buy it until it was in the bargain bin
This makes me so sad and mad that corporate greed is so prominent in not just gaming but all industries but they don’t fix it and they end up suffering from moral, ethical and financially woe like, we have seen this happen over and over and over again but corporations never do anything about it.
I'm french and I'm livin' in Lyon. Despite the fact that I love the way you say the name of the city, I have met some Arkane's employees when Deathloop came out. These people are incredible and are passionnate by their work. Clearly, the Arkane's actual problem is not their team !
Oddly reminiscent of Bioware and Anthem: Management wouldn't make up their mind what the game should be, they tried to capitalize on trends and how they could make money, were forcing a team that made single player games to make a pile of dogshit, and in the end the majority of the talent that made the company what it was have left, making the company a shell of it's former self.
Well, management did know what the game should be - immensely profitable! Or at least, plausibly profitable. That whole thing about gameplay, fun and other stuff can surely be added in later, once the pay piggies have given their credit cards to the store, right? Seriously, though, do I need to set up some LinkedIn scraping to be able to see when devs abandon a certain company in order to foretell when the game isn't going to be good? Why can't companies decide to just, I dunno, sell a good game and make a bunch of money, instead of aiming to be the next Candy Crush or Fortnite? At least aim to be Call of Duty, that seems to make money and still be fun for people to play. Why settle for these lifeless, hollowed out zombies of games? I finished Redfall (on the Game Pass) because I wanted to see the story. Seeing how it 'ended' just made me shake my head and shrug. From a certain point of view, a Game Pass game is an excellent vehicle to deliver episodic content (gotta keep the gamers subscribing) but doing it with this lacklustre shell of a game? It's more sad and disappointing than it is an appallingly bad game, but then again I played it solo so I got to avoid a lot of bugs. YMMV. Don't buy Redfall.
I wouldn't really say they're similar. One from the get-go was designed with the intention to focus purely on sales using an established formula while the other struggled to find any sort of identity. Iirc, the identity crisis of Anthem also partially stemmed from the Frostbite engine, which was near impossible for devs to many any sort of progress on. I recall that it was one of the few rare cases where higher ups gave them as much time as they want to make anything, but ended up delivering nothing.
Redfall needed to be cancelled before it was even announced. Instead, Xbox took a bad game, marketed it as AAA in 2021, delayed it out of 2022 for "polish," and released it in 2023 to disastrous results. Xbox fails again.
Who is to say the same thing isn't happening in Activision right now? The mass talent loss, the over monetization. This could be why things are bad right now for Activision.
Same happened with Bioware. The founders sold to EA and retired with hundreds of millions in the bank. Zeschuk & Muzyka cashed after Mass Effect 3. Drew Karpyshyn, who wrote the stories left after ME2 (now you know why ME3's story was subpar)
I guess the main problem with Studios (normally developing single player games) changing to multiplayer is a disconnected management. The hired staff is hired for single player games. And if you are going to develop a multiplayer game you need to train your staff for this new technology as well as hire many more workers for everything thats needed in mulitiplayer. But more people and more training of existing staff is very expensive. So it doesn't matter, because the management does not understand how underlying technology works or that not every employee is a specialist on every subject needed.
22:42 - 48 Don't juggle the baby, dude! What is wrong with you. 😅 Okay but seriously, congrats and best wishes for you and your little family. Praying mom and baby are both healthy!
To me, Redfall seemed (via what I heard) to be very similar to what Fortnite Save the World (the original PvE before battle Royale) can be summarized as.
I really wanted to like red fall for some reason but after putting like 2 hours into it I don't think I'm gonna be playing much more unless it gets a massive overhaul of some sort. If I had actually bought this game instead of just playing it on game pass I would be absolutely livid.
For me I didn't give a fuck about it. Installed it anyway since it didn't cost anything extra (a simple install since I have gp). I actually got more into it after the first couple of hours and near the end now. Feel like I'm the only person who doesn't hate it lol. Which is fine with me btw.
You should really start reviewing the non 1% of gaming , I feel like people are so hyper focused on the big triple A games that make up a fraction of the games that are out there.
@ashy idk man I would take Re4make, Elden Ring, and the upcoming ff16 over any indie game I can think of... Didn't even mean to make it a competition but whatever.
The business analysis is really good, and that made much more sense when you mentioned your education background lol. There's a great video by modern MBA on software as a service, and how it changed video games. It talks about CDPR, like you did. He mentions that for a company who releases two games a decade, like CDPR, having two flops means bankruptcy can be just around the corner. The interesting part is, that it worked, initially. They saw increases in revenue and profit. But now their stock price is lower than it was before the release of 2077. Players and the industry won't forget that. Their next game better be actually good, and finished, or they'll need to seriously consider a change in management and development procedure.
Its not just pride its the weird current gaming culture of not scoping shit out and trying to manage projects. Ehoever is in project management for all these guys is either stupid or non existent. It forces crunch and releasing unfinished un-stress tested games.
In hindsight, being great with critics means you're getting positive feedback from games journalists. IE the absolute most idiotic people ever tasked with playing, reviewing, or even talking about games. So that should've been a red flag from the start.
I think also it's consumers fault. They make great games like dishonored, prey and deathloop but they don't sell. I am not surprised corporate decision force them to try live service game...
Zenimax lost the people who made Dishonored and Prey forever, this is a big loss for my favourite type of games. Now without it's original devs the name of "Arkane" is the same as nothing. The same thing happend to battlefield, all of the best developers at DICE left, and now the new team is constantly trying to discover how to make a battlefield game. Hopefully Vince Zampella will make things right at Dice, but Arkane studios is now under Microsoft and even if they didn't like the game they have said no backlash will strike to the studio. what a shame :|
It's just dreadful imho to realize not many companies/managers appear to be able to understand that no matter the IP, you also need a team able to actually, and in a respectable way, deliver it. In truth, the ones most replaceable tend to think they aren't the ones that can or should be replaced, throwing those that are actual critical to an IP's identity under the bus or ignoring them to the point they'll leave for somewhere where they just might actually be valued anywhat more for what they are.
One of the wildest parts was the Arkane apologists, saying it was a different team that made this. Absolutely wild that people have so little understanding of the industry, thinking that there was 0 overlap between the teams and that 2 massive studios would never help eachother with tooling and advice. Now it's blatantly said that the leadership and half the staff on Redfall were the original Dishonored and Prey creators.
You see that a lot with fans under the BGS umbrella. Some of my worst conversations on youtube are with these people. It's all unthinking brand loyalty.
I forever remind people to not be mad at developers, but to be mad at the CEO's and management staff. But sadly, developers get the hate because people only see things at the basic level.
What is sad is with just a bit of thought one could make a truly badass Co-Op Vampire game. Imagine a cross between Salem's Lot and John Carpenter's Vampires, you are a group of slayers sent to clean up a town, now the familiars and minions can be killed day or night but Master's can ONLY be killed when they are weakened during the day, at night they are so damn strong it would be extremely risky to try to take them down without a hell of a fight and losing slayers. Now each master controls a territory, and that territory has NPC shops and if those NPCs get killed? Bye bye shop. So the whole game would be a balancing act, which Master do you think is the biggest threat, which one do you think you can slow down by killing his nests to buy you some time to work on the others, and you would also have to manage things like safe house security and sleep as just as the vampires are vulnerable during the day you can be at risk when you rest. It would be a tense as hell game with tons of replayablility as you could go for different Masters or different strats and they could still sell cosmetics and the like.
Zenimax' greed eventually won. They boosted the value of their assets by setting these studios towards this live service failures that would've been pitched as potential endless revenue stream for whichever investor they were pitching. Microsoft got duped and bought them up. Microsoft can still fix this issue though but that talent loss is a huge problem.
I think the problem with big companies making bad games is the managers treating the game as a product with certain parameters, and not a complex piece of art made for entertainment.
Fucking suits man, fucking suits. They never fail to fail. In defense of cyberpunk, it was only a bad launch because they made the stupid decision to launch it on old Gen hardware. I played it day 1 on PC and I was not seeing the bug and fuck ups like people were seeing at all. It wasn’t perfect but it no where near as bad on old Gen. If they would’ve just kept it for nextgen hardware they wouldn’t have gotten so much backlash.
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Check out my stream Highlights or I'll get ANOTHER keyboard: www.youtube.com/@lukestephenslive
Wow! 70% of the staff left. That’s a bad sign. The saddest part is that online games get pulled of the servers within 8-10 yes. So we pay for a game that we will never have.
What’s your take on LOTR:Gollum and Forspoken? With the news article you shared, it seems like they’ve both had some similar issues to Redfall.
I’d love to see a video on your perspective of these, and the elephant in the room. The Day Before, as well.
Greed is killing gaming.
The question, of course, is why would companies acquiring developers not do due diligence before making their purchase? It is understood that companies seeking to be bought out will do varying amounts of window dressing. But as a buyer, it is your duty to your shareholders to make sure that the window dressing doesn't come at the cost of brand destructive behaviour. Either the purchasing company has no business valuing and purchasing game development companies or they're only interested in buying out competition so that they can make even shittier games to sell at higher prices.
Talent retention the opposite to talent loss is a massive part of the reason why supergiant has always made top quality games even when the mechanics in each of them may change drastically.
Honestly your explanation about boost numbers for a big pay day makes sense and I think most people in their position would do the same because why would they care about anything else other than their own families and setting themselves up to never work another day including their kids. By doing what they did all that happens is some bad games are made and companies that they no longer have anything to do with suffer. As long as no one was getting hurt or dying then why not cash out? As a gamer and a fan of arkane especially it sucks and I hate seeing this but my life isn't in danger and my life won't change a bit so while I wish none of this happened in the first place we have to expect this kind of behaviour in a society and system that places massive profits over anything else.
It's always the corporate idiots thinking they're the smartest in the room, and ruining it for the rest of us.
They dont think we are dumb, they know allot of us are predictable. They know gamers complain and then buy the game anyways. In case of redfall, even the head of the developer knew its not gonna work. Thats why they released the game, to get rid of the bad game all along to work on something else. They tried at the end to make as much money as possible
@@Heisen_burger-dude Feels similar to the Gollum game. If I was a dev I wouldn't want to work on these games either. I hope these devs are able to move on to something better
They're almost all older than us by like 10-15 years
@@URLforme In years maybe but clearly not intellect lol
They just don’t really care about anything but making money, and that mindset gets greatly rewarded in the industry unfortunately but it’s funny that they ignore the advice from the creatives who’s actual job it is to know if the game is good or not.
The fact that 70% of devs working on Prey would not be in the company anymore, because of a single shitty game, sends shivers down my spine. That’s devastating. We might not see anything like Dishonored or Prey for a long time because of this.
I bet we will. Out of sheer corporate greed to milk a franchise. So they'll be a vast shadow of their former selves.
70 percent devs information is cap. It was made by Jason who hates xbox.
Feels like the same thing that has happened at Rockstar over the years, and im sure a lot of other studios.
Well austin made Prey not Dishonored
@@DubberRucks Neither dishonored 2 nor prey sold well (mainly due to betheada putting no marketing behind them) so no, they won't be milked
The devs for Prey also came out later and mentioned that Prey was not the original title of the game and a corporate decision made them change it to Prey. Which of course led to some gamers being like, "this is not prey" and not want to buy it.
No shit! The prey game has nothing to do with a original prey.
@Jernej Blatnik Yes, I just mentioned another fact that the devs didn't like. I have no clue why you are getting mad.
I was just going to say that. The upper ups always find a way to f*ck with the project and when it goes wrong, the first thing they blame is the studio/devs.
@@kritikalgamerThe second sentence reads like you are calling out the gamers saying "this is not prey".
If you had written something like "No shit they are gonna say it's not prey" or "They were absolutely justified in saying it's not prey" it wouldn't read like a callout.
@EndlessTrash It isn't. I explained the Devs reason & and then gamers. If gamers are gonna make that assumption, that's on them, not me.
"Gaming as a service" is the death of real gaming
Destiny 2 is a service game. Every game should not strive to follow that model. Just be the best EXPERIENCE that you can be.
@@CubanB1978 There are definitely worse models than that. I was so hyped for Anthem, and we all know how that turned out.
They are attempting to do the same thing with features in cars. BMW is leading the charge and i have heard Ford is looking into doing this with the Electric F150 and the Mach E.
@@HennyVenny It is not a problem of capitalism. It is the problem of stupid people. If life service games were not profitable, no studio would develop them. But because there are enough money cows/whales who are willing to pay in games like Fortnite, Diablo Immortal and similar crap, studios decide to do that.
But hey, this is nothing new. Star Wars Episode 9 managed to make over a billion while being a steaming pile of garbage. And even after that people were waiting for new Star Wars movies/series wiling to pay for even more of the same.
@@Redappolyon87That‘s the reason why I won‘t buy a BMW again, I don‘t want what‘s essentially DLC for my car.
Valve is not a perfect company, but they are a great example of how really deep internal play testing with honest feedback matters to the overall vibe of the game
Yeah when they decide to make a game very 10 years lol.
@@ronthorn3 Better that making a game for year with no new things
@@ronthorn3d rather a game every decade that's a banger then a mid-bad one every 3
@@gstellar96Id rather have 3 great games instead of 333 mediocre games
@@ronthorn3I'd rather one game of that level of quality every 10 years than pushing out cash grabs every 2 personally. That, and Valve gets to have their cake and eat it. CSGO and TF2 monetisation is HUGE and nobody really complains about it. Hell, CSGO still has straight up loot boxes, but CSGO is such a well made, beloved game that it gets a pass. Kinda telling, right? If a game is genuinely excellent, people will not only forgive lootboxes and excessive monetization, but buy into it and like it. The problem for people is that the mtx comes at the expense of the quality of the games.
I imagine the feeling of 'hating what we are building' is more common nowadays inside developer studious. Especially with so many news of Publisher's having piles and piles of abusive leadership in every possible way
"Abusive" is pretty disingenious, suggesting that they forced them to make this game exactly how it is. They made that terrible game bad themselves. Sure, maybe you were provided faulty train tracks with cracks and all but you didn't have to lay the tracks in front of a cliff.
@@Icetea-2000 i've been noticing that most of the issues with AAA videogames nowadays have been caused by the big shots at the top demanding what to do to the game the devs are making, causing the entire thing to break down like a skyscraper build with rly faulty support beams.
@@WokioWolfy But is that actually true or is it just your feeling? It’s easy to say that because they’re at the forefront of the project and and take responsibility for it with leadership they ruin AAA games, but is it that easy?
I think what it really is is the changing societal landscape in general, the decisions made by companies, on all managerial levels from top to bottom, are a result of the changing environment they find themselves in
@@Icetea-2000 Certainly plays a role sure, but just about everything you hear regarding completely dumbshit decisions that baffle everyone its always the fault of upper management, like the recent cancelation of Overwatch 2s PvE mode.
@@mrshadowduh9394 Do we know that? Yeah they announce it, because that’s their job, but do we know that it wasn’t some developer teams being too incompetent or the middle management team leaders being too incompetent? Idk
Redfall managed to have the problems of Anthem (intense intervention by execs leading devs not knowing what the game even was), Babylon Fall (a single player studio being forced to make something outside their skillset) and Battlefield (massive exodus of employees) at the same time, it's almost impressive how bad management was
343 industries
It’s all those problems rolled into one abomination of a video game that costs 70 dollars plus tax fucking hell man.
Corporate Fail Speedrun Any%
Execs didn't intervene with Anthem's concept, the devs were stuck for years thinking what the game should be and not making any progress, until it came to a point of EA financing the non-existent development for countless years and having to release a cobbled together game in less than 2 years, in this case it was actually Bioware's Anthem team's fault mostly
one thing you got wrong. Platinum Games was the one that wanted to make a live service game. Even though it failed Platinum themselves said they are going to try and keep making live service games. that is insane
I didn’t realize Dishonored 2 and Prey where financial flops. Both of those games are just phenomenal. And hearing how Arkane got fucked over hard is heartbreaking. Hopefully they get a chance to make another immersive sim on the scale of Dishonored and Prey.
I remember people throwing tantrums because the Prey remake wasn't exactly like the original. Seemed rather childish when the remake was pretty damn good.
Prey had zero to awful marketing.
they almost certainly wont, it'll be a slow, painful death for Arkane where they are forced to make games that they never intended to.
@@Blackemperess Naw, waiting for a sequel for years and then reacting to getting shit in your mouth isn't childish, it's normal. It's the sycophants defending bethesda's horrible practices that are childish.
Sad truth is that a significant number (if not all?) of the important people who worked at Arkane have left. Including the studio's founder Raphaël Colantonio.
Not a great chance we'll ever see another good immersive sim from them. Also because I doubt that Bethesda will ever fund another IS.
This definitely explains Wolfenstein Young Blood, Fallout 76, and Redfall.
Fallout 76 was Todd being Todd. The sad part is how many people are still going to pre-order Starfield.
"It just works!"
As soon as todd said 16 times the detail, i got worried!!
I mean u just dont set such high expectations!!
3 times the detail is more believable, 4 times 5 times is a more manageable amount to imagine.
16 times is just laughable and it turns out it was laughable.
What's wrong with young blood?
@@TheMrComentaristaIts full of microtransactions and hella cringe in its writing
@@nickremer6142 I played it and the writing do be shit but I didn't even notice microtransactions, I feel like if you someone play the game without even noticing it's not that big of a deal
Seems like Arkane itself has lost it’s identity with 70% of the Prey devs leaving. Hard to see how a company can come back to greatness with that sort of loss. This seems to happen with lots of studios (DICE, Bioware come to mind) and they never really recover.
Austin made Prey Lyon made Dishonored
Death loop was terrible. I knew they lost the way once I started playing it
@@Jim26D same company, different studio.
@@Jim26D definitely not terrible. Not Arkanes best work but to call it terrible is crazy. So many worse games have been released
@@Sumunuhriginal yes many worse games out there but coming from their past games it was really a let down. It just wasn't fun and should have taken a lot from prey moon crash for how the time loop could have worked. The ai was really bad as well.
I just have to admit that Arkane doesn't exist anymore outside of name only...this is the case for so many developers these days including Bungie.
Most of the studios we love have bleed talent because of mismanagement, so they become empty shells with names only used to make profit off nostalgia.
So goes the flow of time. Giants fall and new saplings sprout from their fallen seeds.
@@Fazeshyft lets hope the new saplings grow to great big trees... it will take a lot of time but im hopeful
@@sultanmahfries6402 There's always hope because new seeds always sprout.
Bioware and Bethesda, along with Bungie. Sad to say. At one point, these were my 3 favorite developers.
The only point i disagree on is publicly traded companies being less likely to engage in harmful monetization because their goal is to maximize shareholder wealth. To me, that makes it even more likely that they would start an exploitative live service money printing machine because shareholders don't necessarily care to make less today so they can make more 5-10 years from now. Its a constant pusher of unsustainable limitless growth OR ELSE and results in some of the worst customer and game developer experiences in the video game industry.
You are correct, this is what happened with Duolingo!
This is what happened with world economy, lol. Closing subdivisions (profitable ones!) for tax cuts, firing employees to maximize profits... Just so investors at the top would be happy even if it doesn't make sense and ruins lives
The problem of greedy managers exists throughout the IT Industry. Every IT company whether a simple dev shop or game studio has managers who are not passionate about their work at all and just wants to maximize their bottom line.
Let's be fair. It doesn't just stop at IT. Every sector has its dark and dingy ivory towers
@@DubberRucks yes I know but it is most obvious in the IT industry. In just one group meeting you can pretty much tell which manager is just there for a pay day and nothing else
@@DubberRucks it’s a just a LITTLE different with IT, but it does generally apply to “Technical Fields”
You can be motivated by money or whatevs, but like, there’s really a “mountain of information” a person HAS to know in order to manage these depts. but big uppers keep hiring these guys who literally know fudging nothin about the technology they’re managing 😂
Actually, it DOES kinda happen in every field lol u right ❤
Meat industry is like this as well. People who have never picked up a knife making rules up on how to cut.
Let's be really fair. The worst is the healthcare and insurance industry
Since Arkane is practically a dead body of a great studios reanimated by the souls of greed, I think we should support WolfEye studios, look them up, they made Weird West. The game shows it's "new studio" cracks but it's got an unwavering dedication to their creative direction and I hope to see more from the studio.
Weird West was a bit unfocused and had a mixture of great and awful parts, but I don't regret playing it. I'm looking forward to their next game
Arkane Lyon is still whole though.
That was the original Arkane.
Hopefully Blade is a good game...
Great video, Luke. Prey is such an incredible game. Nothing better than climbing up a wall with the Gloo gun. The exploration and the worldbuilding is second to none. I’ve noticed the game getting a lot of love online over the years. It’s definitely developed a cult following. It’s sad and unfortunate that when it comes to games like this that have a slow burn that spreads through word of mouth over time like Alien Isolation or Mad Max, corporate executives will rarely ever see pass those launch sales figures. How disappointing to see this studio go this route.
god i love that mad max game, no one ever talks about it :(
Deus Ex had far better world building, and the reality is that the gameplay wasn't anything special. People are fond of it because it's one of the few games they've played but not because it's a game that stands out or stands through the test of time. I agree that Alien Isolation and Mad Max were done a bit dirty on the marketing side, especially Mad Max, but to their credit that had unique enough gameplay to stand out and stand apart from the crowd, and hold up even to today's standards, especially Mad Max, which I wholly adore.
@LTNetjak money in hand now is literally more valuable than future potential earnings.
I love the game but I refuse to call it prey, I want to respect Arcanes original dream by calling it NeuroShock. Prey will always be Tommy's adventures back at 2006.
. I love that game Mad max I have played it 4 or 5 times and playing it for the first time on my Xbox Series X and I love it.
When you got to that bit about "Arcane Magic" my jaw dropped.. i knew exactly what you were gonna say next, and its so incredible, you know its true.. cdpr magic.. bioware magic.. lmao, executives are so worthless, siphoning money away from the project to themselves, and they just blame the devs for their utter lack of everything necessary to create a good game.. its like you said man.. Evil.. i mean, what is there to say.. narcissists gonna narc?
I think a couple of years from now the same "magic" sentence is going to be used for Rockstar. And that I will be excited to see
That's not what narc means xD
Arkane should have developed a single player vampire game like Bloodlines. I bet that would have been a fantastic success. All vampire lore lovers are waiting for a new Bloodlines-like game.
Vampire the Masquerade is the only Bloodlines
@@howdoyoudo5949 It currently is. The point is.. I desperately want another game like that. I have played bloodlines at least 13 times, beginning to end. :)
Just imagine what a game like Bloodlines could be like with current technology.
Or imagine a free roaming open world rpg Bloodlines game. I would pay almost anything for that.
Good news is there is a Bloodlines 2 game supposedly releasing this year. Bad news is there isn't much news on it lately and no set release date
@@Quothmorgan The development of that game failed. It was halted last year. I am not sure where it is at right now. The fact that we have heard nothing new about it does not give me confidence.
@@Quothmorgan There's no good news, only bad news. Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has been out of development for multiple years. There's no game, no alpha build or anything. It's just a trailer and some teaser images. It might eventually come out like Duke Nukem Forever and Dead Island 3 but at the moment the release date is going to be years away.
Side note: My friend who was a Level Architect at Arkane Austin left around 2019. Also incidentally I noticed some of their devs like Level and Environment Designers and Artists left Arkane Austin for other studios like Retro Studios, Bluepoint Games, and Archetype Entertainment in Austin to name a few...
I'm sure the guys who left for Retro totally don't regret being stuck working on Metroid Prime Forever assuming Retro still even exists
Minecraft. The purchase of Minecraft by Microsoft was the big driver in how it managed its game development studios, which let Arkane have enough rope to hang themself. Microsoft learned that by letting a studio be independent, it usually flourished. Mojang even uses open source in key areas more than Microsoft stack. But it also makes insane amounts of money/growth. After that success, Microsoft let off the reins on dev studios and allowed them to operate almost independently. They aren't even forced to use MS stacks (but I think Mojang was nudged off AWS to Azure...not sure)
Concerned the RedFall fiasco might change that, but they also have successful studios flourishing under this approach.
Arkane doesn't seem to be that big to leave large enough impression on microsoft with their failure. At least I hope so
Like microsoft has much bigger fish to herd than arkane
There's a very delicate balance that must be achieved. You have to be involved enough in the project to ensure it is coming together smoothly and appropriately, but you have to stay far enough away to let it grow organically and "simmer" on it's own. The overwhelming majority of business management owner types are fundamentally incapable of achieving this, because they can only see things in terms of how many dollar signs are attached to it. They are completely oblivious to the fact a balance scale exists, nevermind what it means to be off the balance point on it.
Few things make me more sad than Prey's bad sales. I adore the game, one of my favorite of all time.
Nothing better then accidentally killing a quest npc because you had the "mind blast" ability bound while looking at them. 10/10 would fry a man's brain again.
@@corruptjet6134 😂😮💥
I loved the game, but I’ll never play it again. Got all the way to the final section of the game before I hit a game-breaker, and I was never able to finish. Sucked, because it was such a unique experience until then.
@@awesome3139 That's a damn shame. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have some technical issues with it myself but then again I did put a couple hundred hours in the game and rarely were they game breaking.
@@awesome3139 what was the game-breaker?
20:02 "If Zenimax had been publicly traded"
They would have done this 10 years ago.
This situation has me wondering if the Last of Us live service Multiplayer game was truly Naughty Dog’s vision or if Sony tried to force it on them like what happened to Arkane here
Considering Sony's current investment model leaning more toweards Live-Service/Games as a Service....It might be. All I think is Sony is doing very good, please don't get comfortable and fuck it up for the sake of greed. Just because you made legendary games doesn't meant you can't make shitty games.
@@bladelazoe GOW for sure is live service right? So is Horizon, Spiderman, and FF16, def live service game model games there.... smh
I would say that's not the case. Actually probably quite the opposite since ND made factions 1 probably just was a much better version of that, but it wouldn't be great sticking power or much to monetize off of.
@@SinisterPlaugesyeah man, its almost like those games were made BEFORE Sony made the decision, crazy.
Also, i heard their focus is shifted from 50:50 (single:multi), into 40:60; and the funnier thing is, out of (allegedly) 12 multi game, 2 is already in shambles...and naughty dog, on of their top dog, is also still in muddy water with their game.
So yeah, thats that, I guess.
@@SinisterPlauges live service games are built on a foundation of nickel and dining the consumer and generally the quality is much lower. GOW is a single player driven experience, same with horizon, Spider-Man. They do have expansions with extra content but they don’t rely solely on the extra content. Halo infinite is a live service and look how that turned out. A game released in pieces and barely any content.
Management (or lack of) seems to be the recurring theme with a lot of the major failures in recent times. The guys that did the level design on Gollum literally said (on video) that their managing director gave them "buzzwords" to go off of when designing the levels of the game. Very similar situation here,where the management were like "oh like Borderlands" or whatever. No clear direction and lack of identity, combined with tight deadlines and crunch is always going to be trouble. Just like in any walk of life, game developement is the same-everybody's manager is either incompetent or not very good to work for. Or both.
You really see the shift in management's attitude toward their employees and products in the early 2000s, as those who obtained their business degree in the 90s climbed the corporate ladder with the idea of perpetual growth that has been pushed in business schools since the late 80s came into fruition.
Shame prey sold poorly. Such a great game
It would have been a major success if it's just called NeuroShock just like the devs wanted. Fans of the cancel game Prey 2 felt like executives are dancing on their dead games grave, which did not help Arcane at all
It's a great game, fucked over by terrible marketing
Wasn't prey
@@carlosortiz8764 Eh, that's not the only problem. It was an immersive sim. And immersive sims don't sell well, despite their complexity and creativity.
@@amberbaum4079
Dishonored sold well. I think Deus Ex HR did too. People like them when they know they exist.
People should remember that game studios/devs aren’t to blame for bad games like this, it’s the suits making the calls and forcing them to monetize. Yet, fans give them the most shit
Whether you blame the hitman or his employer you're still minecraft'd.
@@calculator91 huh?
@bobduckington68Corporate forced them to change the type of game they had to make, if they'd made another immersive sim then it probably would have been good. Corporate also forced them to change their last games name to "Prey" implying it was a sequel to another game that it had no relationship with, which caused a lot of controversy around that game and shot it in the foot despite the fact it was amazing.
@bobduckington68 This analogy is reversed. The person pulling the trigger would be the suits as they are what caused the gun to actively do it's task. The devs would be the gun as they are what projects the owner's intentions.
Also if you actually did pay attention to the video, you would know the cause of why the studio couldn't come together was because of management's choice on the matter.
One side wanted to make a multiplayer coop live service, the other wanted a singleplayer immersive experience; so is it not the management's job to make it so both sides find a compromise or find cohesion? They are called _management_ after all. A production problem would be the devs all contacting a flu for example, something that management has little influence in.
A side note, team problems almost always lead back to management and it's really just how severe the problem is and how much management could've done to prevent such problem that would determine how much blame is put on them. In the example of the flu, if for example management forced sick workers to continue working which caused the flu then the blame is put all on management.
Also, Corpo/execs/management include the higher ups of Arkane taking the orders from the greater higher ups (Bethesda) who also take orders from even greater higher ups (Zenimax/Microsoft). The actual devs who coded and created assets for the game are just taking orders.
@@calculator91 touch grass 😅
We need games like redfall to happen. Hopefully the bigger studios take notice that one bad game can sink your company because all your talent will leave.
It's almost like this is a industry problem. This kind of failure we keep seeing will never stop until the employees have actual power over the production of the games they make. Unionizing all of these companies is a must before any kind of change can be made.
Or, somehow convince the morons actually buying these games and buying loot boxes and skins to stop giving companies money for sub par games. Won't happen but whatever.
Wow the real story is how the success of Destiny set back videos games by 10 years as money hungry companies chased that live service money
My heart sank the moment I saw that red fall was being developed by Arkane. At that moment I just knew that something was wrong. They are supposed to be the antithesis of loot and shoot. No wonder Ralph left.
im new to you but i really enjoy your content, its weird to call it professional but i like how you detail all the shit i want to know without spending 10 min of the video giving extremely opinionated rants about the topic; you manage to make a long video engage my attention, without filler, every time i watch
This is the EXACT story I expected. You can't look at Redfall and think there's any level of joy or passion on display, or even a reason to get up in the morning. It's not just hollow, it's literally lifeless. Not a single dev actually wanted this game to exist. As soon as I realized that, I understood what had happened.
At least we have games like Rdr2. Which has a world brimming with Life.
@@ThisChannelIsAbandoned300Lmao 💀
Honestly it's good to get this news but I suspected about 90% of this before the story ever came out. The only thing i think is that MS likely allowed this game to release knowing full well how bad it was (which means phil lied) and decided for GP sake it was going to come out anyways
Plus he could say "hey, it wasn't our idea to make in the first place" having already been in process when they were acquired.
@@DubberRucks i think the major problem is MS clearly knew that this game wasn't worth the 70 dollar price tag but to put it out for less would be admitting it was an inferior product. I don't blame MS for it's existence but at some point the decision should have been made that "we can't sell this game at 70" had they done that then it's condition would have been completely on Zenimax. This whole Idea that they spent 7 billion and didn't bother to see what products they were getting for that price tag is absolute horse shit
@@DubberRucks dont forget that ms came in and cancelled the Ps5 version of the game (which costed time and manpower aswell).
Watching one AAA studio after another rot from within due to unsustainable greed is almost a perfect microcosm of Late Stage Capitalism.
The problem is they will continue to acquire and kill more companies in an attempt to fill the space left behind by the other failures.
More like late stage corporatism
@@highcouncil1302 Any appreciable difference between the two seems to be have vanished along with the reputation your former favorite AAA studio that was ruined by greed
@@highcouncil1302 literally the same thing.
@@bwatson77 disagree there is a difference
Prey is my most favorite game from Arkane. The intricate Metroidvania esque level design, the gloo cannon, environmental storytelling, and player choice. Such a criminally underrated title. Such a far cry from the utter dumpster fire of Redfall...
My only complaint about prey is how boring the enemy designs are. I will always hate shadow monsters because its such a lazy simple design. Instead of somthing intimidating trying to kill you, you get a black fart cloud
Yeah the fact that prey is talked about so little when it’s an utter masterpiece is such a shame. When games as amazing as prey flop and then propel question why devs only make soulless cash grabs the irony is just too funny
I wonder why, from a certain level of "the ladder" in these Companies, you never read or hear their names.
Probably because the company always has to have a face so that they can be the first out when it goes a.o.t. instead of the bigwigs
Agree. But i also mean the people who are investigating such things, like the news or even youtubers. As If they do not want to tell the names out of fear or something. Its not like their names are secret ...
You're right, Luke. Just wishing for Prey 2 is just not realistic at this point; as much as we all would like it to be. Hopefully they can be given some autonomy and make something they actually want to make.
Yeah plus anything called Prey 2 would be that in name only with most of the team's departure
Dou mean pray 3 not 2. The first one was released in the mid 2000s the second game was it 2017 ans the Next would be Pray 3
@@kevinbaumhoer7359 Technically you're right, yes. I always wondered why nobody really talks about that mid-2000's Prey anymore. I rather enjoyed it.
Wow...
As someone close to Arkane, I'm blown away by the thoroughness of this video. You take time to explain everything down to the separation between Lyon and Austin.
LukiePoo has grown so much while I wasn't looking !
That 70% of the Prey team left is so depressing, I love that game. Looking forward to Starfield, but it looks like I'll never see anything like Prey again. I don't blame them for leaving at all, hopefully they can come together & make another great game.
They sort of did. Some of the team that left went and made "weird west"
@@adventuresingamedevelopment I'll have to check that out then, don't know much about it but I've heard about it, didn't know that some of that team worked on it.
If you like ImSims, go give System Shock a try. Beautiful remake
@@IAmLeMonke hell yeah I’m picking that up, the gameplay looks like something I’ll definitely enjoy. Thanks!
@@IAmLeMonkeOne of the best remakes ever tbh
I feel like this is happening so much recently. Crystal Dynamics went from amazing single player Tomb Raider games, to live service Avengers. Bathesda with Fallout 76, now Arkane with this game, and presumably rock steady with Suicide Squad. Why are so many studios who are amazing at single player being forced to make crappy live service games. I feel like most people want good single player games and are tired of everything trying to be live service multiplayer with microtranctions crap.
It’s amazing that studios constantly want live service games, even though they are a consistent track record of fuck ups.
The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.
Nothing like jumping on last Year's trend to guide a game that takes 5 years to develop
found you because of your gollum review and I must say none of the others told well enough how bad it was the pause you took to just let us see how boring slow and painful it was, was 10/10
subscribed
Love the irony, redfall devs were annoyed the game was being compared to every other game, while the anthem devs had to deal with higher ups that wanted to never talk about every other similar game.
“Hype makes you stupid” indeed. Looking at you, Starfield.
There hasnt really been a legitimate hype beast in the industry in a long time
I'm not sure I follow the whole "public vs. private" thing. The goal of a publicly-traded company is to maximize shareholder value _for that quarter._ It's a pretty well-known fact that shareholders don't care about the long-term health or sustainability of a company, in fact it's _illegal_ for a public company to prioritize their own health or reputation over increasing quarterly value.
Honestly, this whole mess wouldn't have avoided if Zenimax were public. In fact, it probably would've started a decade ago back when all the other publicly-traded AAA companies were milking MTX and laying the groundwork the GaaS. Zenimax being private is probably the reason Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Dishonored didn't launch with in-game shops or forced multiplayer.
The talent has quite literally left the building
Quite literally. Exactly.
Arkane was among my last few hopes from AAA developers. Really sad to see the same old greed ruin them too. At this point, are there any big companies that didn't rot from the inside?
From Software?
FromSoft? It's only a matter of time until the rot takes hold in all studios though.
Just get a playstation dude. Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Sucker Punch, Santa Monica, Guerilla all deliver great AAA titles. Plus FromSoft will always develop for Sony, Bloodborne was the start of their ascension.
@@richierich9943 Yeah, that's true, for now. Hopefully they stay that way.
It's a pity that nobody wanted to play their games and that they were financial failures. Greed is the result of what people will pay for.
What people pay for is Diablo Immortal, not Prey and Dishonored II.
You know what would probably be a good policy to adopt when acquiring studios? Ask every member of that studio to fill out an anonymous questionaire on the state of the studio and current projects. That would allow devs to warn you if a project is just a desaster waiting to happen and if a majority of devs shares that sentiment, even if management claims that all is fine and dandy, then you could put the project on ice, put the studio under new management, decide whether to reboot or scrap it entirely and so on. I'd argue that the long term cost of having a catastrophic launch after a studio was freshly acquired is higher than the cost of abandoning a project that someone else started.
The Dishonoured series and Prey are absolutely amazing games and some of my favourites of all time. If you can, I would suggest playing them, they're fantastic. The intro to Prey alone... is awesome. This is incredibly sad... Yet another reminder that it's not the developers, it's always the execs. Always.
It's really quite sad. Prey was a fantastic game, harkening back to System Shock with a twist. It takes a very strong team to make a game like that...all basically gone now, and for what...
Edit: Congrats and good luck with the new addition to the family!
I saved money by not even knowing this game was coming out the money I've saved by not bothering with games anymore is amazing
I think we are seeing a slew of games being shown now that were planned as live service games four or five years ago but now the mood around them has completely shifted and developers don't know what to do.
_"We do mock reviews for every game that we launch, and this is double digits lower than where we thought we would be with this game"_ ~ Phil Spencer
Complete lies.
It's just insane to me to think that executives really believe microtransactions in shitty soulless games that no one will play for more than a month could ever make more money for them than a good, well marketed game that people fall in love with, share with all their friends, and buy all the DLCs for for the next decade.
Riddle me this Batman, How in the hell do you make a good game, ANY game good when the people MAKING it hate it? You're so smart Batman, answer me...that.
As with pretty much 100% of these kinds of stories, it boils down to executives being useless and being exactly the wrong people to lead a game.
What really makes my blood boil is that I can virtually guarantee that this will be blamed on the devs, who will be laid off while the executives make bank and learn nothing.
Prey flopped because of the name of the game .. everybody was disgusted and disappointed that it wasn't anything to do with the 2006 game.. it's the reason I didn't buy it until it was in the bargain bin
This makes me so sad and mad that corporate greed is so prominent in not just gaming but all industries but they don’t fix it and they end up suffering from moral, ethical and financially woe like, we have seen this happen over and over and over again but corporations never do anything about it.
Too bad that good intentions and artistic vision aren't enough to make money.
It's so frustrating that prey probably would have done twice as well if they just used a different name.
I'm french and I'm livin' in Lyon. Despite the fact that I love the way you say the name of the city, I have met some Arkane's employees when Deathloop came out. These people are incredible and are passionnate by their work. Clearly, the Arkane's actual problem is not their team !
Oddly reminiscent of Bioware and Anthem:
Management wouldn't make up their mind what the game should be, they tried to capitalize on trends and how they could make money, were forcing a team that made single player games to make a pile of dogshit, and in the end the majority of the talent that made the company what it was have left, making the company a shell of it's former self.
Well, management did know what the game should be - immensely profitable! Or at least, plausibly profitable. That whole thing about gameplay, fun and other stuff can surely be added in later, once the pay piggies have given their credit cards to the store, right?
Seriously, though, do I need to set up some LinkedIn scraping to be able to see when devs abandon a certain company in order to foretell when the game isn't going to be good? Why can't companies decide to just, I dunno, sell a good game and make a bunch of money, instead of aiming to be the next Candy Crush or Fortnite? At least aim to be Call of Duty, that seems to make money and still be fun for people to play. Why settle for these lifeless, hollowed out zombies of games?
I finished Redfall (on the Game Pass) because I wanted to see the story. Seeing how it 'ended' just made me shake my head and shrug. From a certain point of view, a Game Pass game is an excellent vehicle to deliver episodic content (gotta keep the gamers subscribing) but doing it with this lacklustre shell of a game? It's more sad and disappointing than it is an appallingly bad game, but then again I played it solo so I got to avoid a lot of bugs. YMMV. Don't buy Redfall.
I wouldn't really say they're similar. One from the get-go was designed with the intention to focus purely on sales using an established formula while the other struggled to find any sort of identity. Iirc, the identity crisis of Anthem also partially stemmed from the Frostbite engine, which was near impossible for devs to many any sort of progress on. I recall that it was one of the few rare cases where higher ups gave them as much time as they want to make anything, but ended up delivering nothing.
Reminiscent of Bioware and Anthem you say? That is QUITE a statement.
*Arkane:* Hold my brain.
Dishonored 2 not making Emily the only player character made the story weaker. That and the whole emotional backstory is reserved for the tutorial.
How hard is it for publishers to let devs make the type of game they want to make??
@@micshazam842 ok but if you’re are forcing a dev to make a game they don’t want to make 90% of the time that is flushing money down the drain.
Prey wasn't even suppsoed to be called Prey, it was only done by Zenimax in order to keep the copyright of the name.
Best casual game reviewer out there! Keep the grind going!
Bot comment. So sad!
@@MichaelDoesLifebro calls someone else a bot yet you name yourself starfield is life even tho the game aint even out 🤡
Looking at that Dishonoured gameplay at 60 fov hurts my eyes
Redfall needed to be cancelled before it was even announced. Instead, Xbox took a bad game, marketed it as AAA in 2021, delayed it out of 2022 for "polish," and released it in 2023 to disastrous results. Xbox fails again.
_”An open world Far Cry game”_
Imagine going into a gaming studio and pitching your idea with that as your hook.
You are by far one of the most underrated channels. Keep up the good work and good luck with the baby!
Who is to say the same thing isn't happening in Activision right now? The mass talent loss, the over monetization. This could be why things are bad right now for Activision.
You know what? good on those developers. We need more of them not taking greedy ass publisher's bs.
Same happened with Bioware. The founders sold to EA and retired with hundreds of millions in the bank. Zeschuk & Muzyka cashed after Mass Effect 3.
Drew Karpyshyn, who wrote the stories left after ME2 (now you know why ME3's story was subpar)
I knew it. I felt like Arkane's management in a way "took xbox's money and ran"
I guess the main problem with Studios (normally developing single player games) changing to multiplayer is a disconnected management. The hired staff is hired for single player games. And if you are going to develop a multiplayer game you need to train your staff for this new technology as well as hire many more workers for everything thats needed in mulitiplayer. But more people and more training of existing staff is very expensive. So it doesn't matter, because the management does not understand how underlying technology works or that not every employee is a specialist on every subject needed.
22:42 - 48
Don't juggle the baby, dude! What is wrong with you. 😅
Okay but seriously, congrats and best wishes for you and your little family. Praying mom and baby are both healthy!
To me, Redfall seemed (via what I heard) to be very similar to what Fortnite Save the World (the original PvE before battle Royale) can be summarized as.
I really wanted to like red fall for some reason but after putting like 2 hours into it I don't think I'm gonna be playing much more unless it gets a massive overhaul of some sort. If I had actually bought this game instead of just playing it on game pass I would be absolutely livid.
For me I didn't give a fuck about it. Installed it anyway since it didn't cost anything extra (a simple install since I have gp). I actually got more into it after the first couple of hours and near the end now. Feel like I'm the only person who doesn't hate it lol. Which is fine with me btw.
Weird how every studio bought by microsoft lose what they made them great
You should really start reviewing the non 1% of gaming , I feel like people are so hyper focused on the big triple A games that make up a fraction of the games that are out there.
I can't play indie games the physics is always so bad.
@ashy idk man I would take Re4make, Elden Ring, and the upcoming ff16 over any indie game I can think of...
Didn't even mean to make it a competition but whatever.
How could this change? Because we don't buy but the suits up there never get punished
I hate micro transactions but there is proof that they can be removed from a game with out destroying it look at shadow of war and battle front 2
The business analysis is really good, and that made much more sense when you mentioned your education background lol. There's a great video by modern MBA on software as a service, and how it changed video games. It talks about CDPR, like you did. He mentions that for a company who releases two games a decade, like CDPR, having two flops means bankruptcy can be just around the corner. The interesting part is, that it worked, initially. They saw increases in revenue and profit. But now their stock price is lower than it was before the release of 2077. Players and the industry won't forget that. Their next game better be actually good, and finished, or they'll need to seriously consider a change in management and development procedure.
Its not just pride its the weird current gaming culture of not scoping shit out and trying to manage projects. Ehoever is in project management for all these guys is either stupid or non existent. It forces crunch and releasing unfinished un-stress tested games.
In hindsight, being great with critics means you're getting positive feedback from games journalists. IE the absolute most idiotic people ever tasked with playing, reviewing, or even talking about games. So that should've been a red flag from the start.
It's actually not the same team though. From what I understand, most of the talent left. So it's "Arcane" in name only the same as Bioware.
Source?
Luke says this in the video. It helps me understand that the hate doesn't always need to go to developers but instead to corporate.
Why are you repeating what he already covered in the video?
I think also it's consumers fault. They make great games like dishonored, prey and deathloop but they don't sell. I am not surprised corporate decision force them to try live service game...
Zenimax lost the people who made Dishonored and Prey forever, this is a big loss for my favourite type of games. Now without it's original devs the name of "Arkane" is the same as nothing.
The same thing happend to battlefield, all of the best developers at DICE left, and now the new team is constantly trying to discover how to make a battlefield game.
Hopefully Vince Zampella will make things right at Dice, but Arkane studios is now under Microsoft and even if they didn't like the game they have said no backlash will strike to the studio. what a shame :|
Yep. The original talents are gone, replaced by diversity hires.
It's just dreadful imho to realize not many companies/managers appear to be able to understand that no matter the IP, you also need a team able to actually, and in a respectable way, deliver it.
In truth, the ones most replaceable tend to think they aren't the ones that can or should be replaced, throwing those that are actual critical to an IP's identity under the bus or ignoring them to the point they'll leave for somewhere where they just might actually be valued anywhat more for what they are.
Arkane magic is preventing me from buying this game. What do i do?
Do not resist. Let it keep stopping you. 😂
You have to crouch and sneak around it.
One of the wildest parts was the Arkane apologists, saying it was a different team that made this. Absolutely wild that people have so little understanding of the industry, thinking that there was 0 overlap between the teams and that 2 massive studios would never help eachother with tooling and advice. Now it's blatantly said that the leadership and half the staff on Redfall were the original Dishonored and Prey creators.
You see that a lot with fans under the BGS umbrella. Some of my worst conversations on youtube are with these people. It's all unthinking brand loyalty.
I forever remind people to not be mad at developers, but to be mad at the CEO's and management staff. But sadly, developers get the hate because people only see things at the basic level.
What is sad is with just a bit of thought one could make a truly badass Co-Op Vampire game. Imagine a cross between Salem's Lot and John Carpenter's Vampires, you are a group of slayers sent to clean up a town, now the familiars and minions can be killed day or night but Master's can ONLY be killed when they are weakened during the day, at night they are so damn strong it would be extremely risky to try to take them down without a hell of a fight and losing slayers. Now each master controls a territory, and that territory has NPC shops and if those NPCs get killed? Bye bye shop.
So the whole game would be a balancing act, which Master do you think is the biggest threat, which one do you think you can slow down by killing his nests to buy you some time to work on the others, and you would also have to manage things like safe house security and sleep as just as the vampires are vulnerable during the day you can be at risk when you rest. It would be a tense as hell game with tons of replayablility as you could go for different Masters or different strats and they could still sell cosmetics and the like.
Suicide squad going through same thing. Made at the peak of live service. Finally releases when everybody has moved on lol
Pride came before the "Red" fall, you could say
Zenimax' greed eventually won. They boosted the value of their assets by setting these studios towards this live service failures that would've been pitched as potential endless revenue stream for whichever investor they were pitching. Microsoft got duped and bought them up. Microsoft can still fix this issue though but that talent loss is a huge problem.
I think the problem with big companies making bad games is the managers treating the game as a product with certain parameters, and not a complex piece of art made for entertainment.
Fucking suits man, fucking suits. They never fail to fail. In defense of cyberpunk, it was only a bad launch because they made the stupid decision to launch it on old Gen hardware. I played it day 1 on PC and I was not seeing the bug and fuck ups like people were seeing at all. It wasn’t perfect but it no where near as bad on old Gen. If they would’ve just kept it for nextgen hardware they wouldn’t have gotten so much backlash.
Good luck with the brand new family member and I wish you all lots of happiness!