You have to look at this from a standpoint of slow motion controlled destruction of every studios and independent, buisenesses in the west, then all you are seeing since 2019 finally makes sense.
@@maximvsdread1610Yeah, you're right! Fuck regulations! Let them do whatever they want, free country!!! There's no problem in the game industry, everything is going fine, those fail are just not good enough, that's how it is!
I nearly gagged when I heard Bond call video games a "long term industry" when every AAA publisher has shown they never look any further than the next fiscal quarter
@@davidspring4003 Gotta get dem Pre-Order sales, bois. If we don't make a billion 6 months before launch, we're trashing this failed franchise and blaming the Gamers! Don't worry, they'll eat each other alive as soon as we say the game wasn't financially profitable to continue support past 24 hours!
@@BedinsisNintendo has its flaws, but it’s probably one of the few gaming companies that still thinks about making games and making a profit without screwing over the employees that make their products. Now, if they could get their heads out of their butts about emulation and fan content, then we’d be swell.
Utterly maddening how many gamers will watch studios abuse their staff, bleed talent and be shut down in real time, and then still find a way to blame everything on wokeness
It's a shortcut to avoid culpability; humans can't conceive threats at grand scales but can latch onto individual concepts that represent a personal threat.
Companies are probably realizing they don't have to make excuses anymore. They aren't going to be punished by their actions as 98% of video game people do not even know studios make video games. They just think they appear magically at the store or appear on the online store to be purchased.
@@xcwarrior Gamers already can't be bothered to even learn the difference between developers and publisher, so you're not wrong. I'm just begging people to fucking learn *something* related to the gaming industry besides "new game coming out soon", so that my blood pressure doesn't have to continually go up whenever I hear some blithering idiot say stuff like "I'm shocked that Hi-Fi Rush is so well made considering it's Bethesda!". FFS.
@@bunnylizard2717 not just the difference between publisher or developer, I had to explain to a guy that "Frostbite" is the tech that drives the Battlefield games, not name of some group of individuals... But hey, it appears on the splash screen when you launch the game and in all the marketing blurbs the traditional games media keeps showering us in, so it must be important!
"Games are too expensive to make" as they spend $70 billion to buy whole publishers. The reason that those Bethesda studios are gone is because that purchase is small compared to ABK. They became expendable.
"Games are too expensive to make" they whine as they routinely get upstaged by indie developers with no more resources than 2 people and a dog between them.
The biggest, most valuable company on the planet just had to shut them down. How do you expect little Microsoft to keep those studios running with a market cap of a mere $3 Trillion?! /s And like Steph said, MS and all the other big tech companies like Apple, Google, Nvidia etc are now obsessed with AI. Hence why Microsoft has invested $10 billion into ChatGPT/OpenAI. Created MS Co-pilot etc. And in May 2024, Microsoft announced a $3.3 billion investment to build an artificial intelligence hub in southeast Wisconsin.
10:53 "Shit rolls downhill, and the moment you go from indie studio to corporate subsidiary, you've put yourself at the foot of Mount Rectum, with your mouth wide open." Love it!
At a certain point, “AAA” will be a boogeyman. Mothers will tell their children if they grow up to be a game developers to NEVER sign a contract with a AAA company.
@@mesektet5776That's been the arc of capitalism for some time, at least since the era of financialization & the rise of vulture capitalism but it's more likely embedded in the entire ideology. The motives & incentives are no longer rational or pragmatic to the the long term interests of capital itself. The system is not in any sense sustainable, from food production to water to war profiteering to energy, fossil fuels & climate to media & entertainment to (in the United States) healthcare, education & democracy now being monetized industries, the consequences of immediate increased wealth for a vanishingly small class of people are not considered on any larger scale or timeline. The long term costs to society & human civilization generally are irrationally out of proportion to the ever-increasing appetite of the capitalist class. Beyond the amount of waste, inefficiency, corruption, precarity, misery, and death it produces, it will almost certainly become necessary for the survival of our species at some point to abandon capitalism as an organizing principle; and I'm pretty sure they know that and are slashing & burning as much as they can in the relative short term to accrue as much wealth & power as possible to fight back against change and prolong it as far as possible.
If you've built a successful business, NEVER sell it. You never know if it will find its way into the hands of a publicly traded horror show made to keep shareholders happoy until the next quarter.
If the industry is curious about how game creation works after getting rid of the creatives, they can ask Konami about how the Metal Gear brand is going.
How can you have a union... when your company itself is at danger of being asset stripped if it looks good on the bottom line of somebody's corporate growth report? Unions are great for local control... but these companies are not being closed by local control. We need something BIGGER than the local union. a worker's united type union. Hell, when we struck as graduate students for better health care as student employees, we had support from the trucker's union, and that was back in 1990.
@@thomasneal9291 No one said anything about a "local" union. You need a union that covers the whole industry (or more) that works in solidarity with other unions so that if they try to shut down a studio for stupid reasons, EVERYTHING grinds to a halt.
That reminds me of when someone claimed Arkane Lyon was safe because they were working on Marvel's Blade... I pointed out Arkane Lyon is probably safe because it's located in France.
It's antithetical to all life on earth. Not to be melodramatic, but humanity won't go with a bang, of even a whimper, but with the sound of eating. Capitalism is a cancer eating a body alive from the inside.
Or human life, frankly. It's kind of amazing how billionaires and capitalists are wringing their pearls about crashing fertility rates across the globe, when the evidence for their soul-grinding economic system being the primary driver of those crashing rates is pretty much irrefutable. It's almost like laborers who are expected to work endlessly to support the 'unlimited growth' of the wealth of the investment class don't have time to have kids, or something. What a surprise... /s
Closing down Tango was a very difficult decision. Think of how hard it was for the Microsoft executive to decide what yacht to buy with the bonus money they got for making number go up after shutting down Tango!
I'm not sure they even buy things with their money anymore. I seriously believe they just jerk off while looking at their account balances going up. Spending and enjoying the money would be too normal of a thing for them to do.
@@InsanoRider777 Cue up the South Park clip of the detective showing the children all the poor celebrities who have to buy a slightly less expensive airplane or yacht because they pirated a couple of songs.
Are we gonna seriously ignore what Phil Spencer said about how Microsoft needs more gamss like Hi-Fi Rush after shutting down the studio and firing the talent that MADE Hi-Fi Rush!?
Nope, but we need to wake up and realise CEOs like Phil Rectum and Todd Coward are glorified, overpaid salesmen who's sole job it is to be the mouthpiece and enforcers of the Shareholders, who are themselves a shadowy, nameless, unaccountable cabal of ghouls, vampires and other blood-sucking parasites. The CEO's are the Mouth of Sauron, but it's the Shareholders who are Sauron.
he said smaller/cheaper, yet still prestigious/award winning games (hifi rush never being mentioned in this context) from their perspective hifi rush only covers the second half of that - it wasn't a small thing to develop the consequence of that ought to be publishing tons of actual small games with a shotgun approach, but I doubt they will find the developers willing to do that under their thumb - those projects can be funded through more trustworthy means
Even when I was much dumber I was calling this guy a pos as far back as 2015 lol. He defended the lack of split screen in halo 5 yo! Realities of the day lol eat my ballz!
@@Yin2FalconAt this point, I don't think future Call of Duties and Elder Scrolls VI aren't gonna grow Microsoft. Just look at how they and Studio 353 handled their flagship franchise. I don't even think Starfield got as much acclaim as Bethesda's previous games.
And as if literally the largest company on the planet with a $3 trillion dollar market cap can't afford to keep these studios open. But they got $10 billion laying around to invest in ChatGPT/OpenAI, creating co-pilot etc. And in May 2024, Microsoft announced a $3.3 billion investment to build an artificial intelligence hub in southeast Wisconsin.
@@sean8102 That was kind of alluded to in the video. If you don't care about quality, and want to re-release variations on the same crap over and over again: AI is ideal.
it's sad to see a black female executive talking like this, I know I shouldn't expect them to be any better then a straight white male exec but it still sucks.
I've seen it theorised that the decision to close Tango was made before Hi-Fi Rush even released, due to Ghostwire: Tokyo and The Evil Within 2 not being big enough successes. Not that either game failed, by any normal person's standards - they just weren't successful *enough*. Hi-Fi Rush wasn't ever supposed to be a success, so the theory goes, it was supposed to limp out unnoticed allowing Microsoft to close Tango much sooner and more quietly, and the fact it was a massive success was a problem for Microsoft because it meant they had to delay the closure. I don't know how much I actually believe it, but it's plausible with how publishers behave, and that's damning enough.
that prolly makes sense tbh. Still sucks tho. But thinking of it. Hi-Fi Rush was shadowdropped with no advertisment at all. If it wouldn't have been for word of mouth I wouldn't have played it at all. It still sucks that they couldn't have saved them with a success tbh.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft’s entire goal in buying these studios was to shut down the competition. Lie to the government, knowing they’re unlikely to be held accountable, then make up excuses to shut down studios they never intended to keep. Additionally, their subscription service functionality gave it away for free to subscribers, further undermining the game’s success, by making it less profitable.
Remember. If a person honestly appreciats your time and business, they will act in a way that reflects that. If a company worships on the alter of SHAREHOLDER VALUE, they'll piss on your support, your nostalgia, your passions, your friends, your family, your worst impulses, themselves, their people, their products and the entire planet to get an extra fraction of a percent on a quarterly report.
Read 'The Man Who Broke Capitalism' by David Gelles. I knew about 'fiduciary duty' and 'shareholder value' as terms before, but never really understood how they've taken over industry until I read that book.
Microsoft also told the ftc they would protect jobs and not just shut down studios after the buy them.... Wonder if the us govt and ftc has the balls to follow up on this now???
Until the corporate shills still sitting in power get ejected from office. They are the biggest group of insider traders out there. Making far more than the average of their investments than the market actually trends. Why would they harm their own financial self interest even though all of them have a automatic lifetime retirement pension that kicks in the second they leave office. THEY WANT ALL THE MONEY!
I suppose the only way to find out is bombard the FTC website with complaints about Microsoft closing studios they swallowed up just to make line go up.
I remember seeing a comment stating that microsoft was always planning to shut the studio down when then they bought it out. Thinking about it that way, I cant help but feel like the bubble is about to burst, where even a game they admit is a success "by every metric" isnt as valuable to them as the tax break they get from laying off an entire studio.
@user-sl6gn1ss8p On the off chance you're earnestly asking how the metrics are affected: Studio has just released a game, in order to develop a new game the staff will need to be paid for at least 2-3 years without an additional product being made. Microsoft elects to close the studio because they already have hifi rush on sale and can avoid paying staff for those 2-3 years. They cut expenses while still having the product to sell, they just won't have a new one from that team in 2-3 years. This is why Steph and many in the comments are calling it a short sided strategy, it boosts short term profit margins and uproots lives and careers, and deprives the world of the art that group of creatives would have made next.
@@wctgttm yeah, it was earnest, so thanks for the answer, but I was thinking more mid-to-long term. Short term what you said definitely makes a lot of sense, but this has been a recurring practice for a while now, hasn't it? And the line has in fact been going up afaik (at least for the huge guys who are swallowing up everyone else). So I was kinda wondering how does that circle get squared. Like, is it that they can effectively replace the people later, or maybe that they get "investor confidence" which translates to more resources in the future, or maybe just acquisitions and IPs being more valuable to them than employees, etc? To be clear, I'm definitely not trying to defend the practice, I just think that it either has to be acknowledged that it somehow ends up working for them or it has to be shown that in fact no, it doesn't, in order to go further in discussing this practice, you know?
So essentially, if you’re a game developer, you should show up to work, do as little work as possible, collect your check, and go home, cause you’re gonna get fired no matter what.
Hey, they're just following the example set by executive management, especially when they make bad and stupid decisions, some of which are copycatting from other companies! But the big difference is that these executives typically have "golden parachutes" after they're FINALLY fired after multiple fuck ups, a luxury that *doesn't* exist for all of the other employees!
@@evilbarrels2506 Sekiro was long before Microsoft bought Actiblizzard, and the comment you're responding to is making the point that, since the buyout, Actiblizzard has not produced any bangers, keyword being "since" that is clearly readable in the original comment between the words "have" and "produced". Reading comprehension 101
Yeah it seems like Activision bought Microsoft instead of Microsoft buying Activision. This is the kind of decission one would associate with Bobby Kotick instead of Phil Spencer who has been crowing all the right pro gamer and pro industry things in the last while. (I know its just PR speak)
I genuinely can't decide if Tango gameworks or Arcane pisses me off more. Obviously Tango is inherently more outrageous considering they made one of Xbox's only truly successful games in recent memory, but it almost seems MORE insulting for Arkane to be shut down as a result of Redfall, because that was a game they NEVER wanted to make, and every part of it that caused it to fail was entirely the fault of corporate higher-ups... but those people are too "important" (wealthy) to fire.
both of these deeply hurt me. Ghostwire: Tokyo is a fuckin masterpiece. I love EVERY Arkane game except Redfall. I'm sick and fucking tired of these companies destroying things and people I love in the name of pleasing shareholders who should be in jail.
@@HadalStreetlights Redfall was OK, it had it's fun moments but it should've been a single player game and it really feels like it was being held together by duct tape and bailing wire.
You know that part in the Matrix where Morpheus tells Neo, 'people still hooked into the Matrix are the people we're trying to save, but for now they're our enemy. They're so dependent on the Matrix they'll even fight to defend it'? I'm finding it harder and harder not to look at people still buying AAA games that way.
@@jadedheartszCan't argue that, I'm still looking forward to the inevitable PC release of Spider-Man 2: Glider-Men. But there's less and less keeping me hooked in, every year. And one day, I too will awaken.
@@jadedheartsz Yeah, and they're also 'allowed' to scream and yell when they're asked to put on a mask during a pandemic, as well, or insist that the world is flat despite all evidence to the contrary. But at some point, their feeding of a broken and toxic system doesn't just affect them, it hurts everyone. Just because something is 'allowed' doesn't mean it's ethically defensible.
I can't believe Microsoft bought up too many studios and stopped caring about funding them and their projects because of diversity. I've actually had someone tell me this.
It's an easy answer that people don't have to think about. Thinking can get hard, painful, and depressing. It's easier just to sink in a relaxing bath of bubbling chud piss.
Ah yes! Because nothing screams diversity like buying up game companies filled with sex pests and r**ists! What a very inclusive game studio that Microbrain company is!
Disney used to simply not credit artists, claiming that it spoil the "magic". AFAIK they only started crediting them because they were legally required to. That really is the platonic ideal for megacorps.
this is why piracy is justified with ALL games from activision, nintendo, square enix, microsoft, ubisoft, 2K, take-two, embracer, etc. these corporations have no soul. the gaming industry is making more money than any previous time in history, and paying their executives the highest bonuses in history.
In a manner of speaking it absolutely is. The longer someone is employed at a company, the larger their salary tends to become. Eliminating their sense of job security by dismissing them can force them to accept a similar job for lower salary, or reduce their expectation of raises. So, if both company A and company B maintain their workers, they expect to face steadily rising operating costs, generally in line with inflation. However, if A and B both fire 50% of their workers, and then largely re-hire each other's dismissed workers over the next few years, this can reduce salary demands by those dismissed workers, who feel very uncertain about their career prospects, while the employees who were retained at both companies likewise are less likely to demand raises due to similar fears. In the end, company A and B and up rehiring to the same staffing levels as before - possibly with many of the same people swapped between them, but now they have 'controlled' costs through fear. So yes, fear and cruelty is very literally part of the system.
Nintendo, for all the dumb shit they tend to do, really are going to be Luigi Wins By Doing Nothing simply because they aren’t as aggressively shortsighted as literally every other big gaming company in terms of game development. It’s not that they don’t indulge in some of the bad tendencies of the industry, it’s just that they mostly go do their own thing while the other guys blow off their fingers with fireworks and honestly do a better job treating their developers comparatively. It’s a low bar to clear at this point honestly.
yeah nintendo is fucked for other reasons but weirdly enough this is one of their stronger points , and thats ignoring iwata taking a pay cut all those years ago
I don't know how many this has happened to, but it isn't that nintendo doesn't make a bunch of people workless. It's that the people loosing their income are contract workers. So it dosen't tecnically count as mass layoffs, which Japan has comparitavelly strict laws against. It's "letting their contracts run out", but the harm is the same. Dosen't help that their contract workers have been said to be treated as second class citizens... It sucks that nintendo are doing shitty things to their workers, but the rest of the tripple a industry is so ghastly that they sound like saints in comparison!
Nintendo is evil and working culture in Japan absolutely terrifying. But at least they don't feel like incompetent morons, which sadly telling about modern state of gaming industry.
Microsoft's Sea of Thieves developer team has been shutting down casual folk telling them exactly how to include more players and bring in new ones. Cause they say making the game more accessible and allowing people who wish to not be hassled to have a full rewarding experience is "not a part of their vision". The individual studios and corporate can't even get on the same page for wanting all the monies.
Counterpoint: not every game has to be risk-free to be enjoyable and if a game is not for you, that is not always the fault of the game. That's just personal taste coming into play. Although, yes, Sea of Thieves is a buggy mess of a live-service game that is somehow enjoyable to me.
@@gjshomeofsilliness9391 Counterpoint, I don't think they should. Those companies should absolutely not be claiming to want more players while ignoring would be players. Especially with the way they implemented Safer Seas and claimed to be doing so on behalf of players like me who have been pushed away from the game from hostile players while ignoring those people. I'd respect the vision if it wasn't surrounded by PR statements and marketing telling me they want me to play it. edit: I remeber when Dead Space advertised itself as gross and it'll scare your nan, so I didn't play it. Not for me. I don't do horror. Just want people to be honest.
I'm glad I never stopped making fun of that crap game. Shame it got popular because dumb kids enjoy watching a streamer in a pirate hat.... Goodness we are pathetic lol.
@@gjshomeofsilliness9391 They got my money once and fed me to the wolves. Last time I buy a Rare, Xbox Studios, or indeed Microsoft product in general. They could make it accessible to those they duped and redeem their name but they've chosen a different vision to pursue. It'd be nice if they kept accessibility out of their public messaging.
Scientists use a cancer culture that has long outlived the person who originally had it. Cancer can live forever as long as it's fed. Scientists have also contracted tumors and cancers from handling such cells that came from others. Only starvation or purifying fire stops it.
Just watched the GDC for Hi-Fi rush. That game, the fact it came out so well polished, so well made is honestly incredible. It was the first game that they made with Unreal Engine It was the first time they ever did any kind of game that had any kind of rythm based mechanics It had a single very solid vision of how the gameplay should feel and be done and it didn't end up getting sullied by some corporate wank. The lead dev didn't just want to make a rhythm game, he wanted to make and action rhythm game and knew exactly what that meant in terms of gameplay. Which also meant creating all kinds of specific animation timings to ensure everything happened on the beat of the song. I don't doubt that other studios will be scrambling to get ahold of the people who were on that team. But also it shouldn't have been that way... They should be the new studio that new devs are flocking to hoping to be able to join such an incredible studio.
The fact that I can look at the game, no music, and still keep the beat is literally amazing. I hate the fact that we got one of tge best rhythm games PERIOD and it still got smoked.
Proud to be one of the five people watching JSS :D You're doing incredible work keeping the spotlight on this fucked up industry's flea-bitten underbelly. It's very much appreciated, even if it sometimes feels like it's not.
AAA games companies still panicking because the most successful game of last year was from a studio that treats it's employees like human beings, has zero microtransactions or paid DLC and wasn't even a AAA studio. No coincidence the only full priced game I have bought in the last 12 months was Baldur's Date.
As much as Redfall makes their closure more comprehensible than Tango's (not that MS needed the excuse though, obviously), it's criminal that this is how Arkane Austin ends. After dragging the immersive sim genre back from the dead and creating a genuinely great new universe to boot, being unceremoniously executed as part of a corporate acquisition with their last game being a dud that seemingly nobody at the studio actually wanted to make is a miserable end for a studio with so much talent.
I thought Prey 2017 was a masterpiece or at least the first half was. It could have been marketted much better and maybe the story could have been done better but its still an amazing game. Sad to see Arkane closed.
Hopefully the Development Heads get to re-recruit (i.e. all the talent that got fired, then choose a different publisher, or even [gasp] go indie) but anyone saying like "we're getting the band back together" now is going to be told where to go, IMHO. Sad.
It's depressing how these kinds of videos have slowly gotten over the last decade. At this point the government I seriously need to regulate this industry. It's getting out of control to the point the industry is imploding onto itself only getting the employees and consumers.
The American government needs to regulate a shit ton of stuff in America, but they won't because some idiot will claim it's communism just to score some votes with the fucktards who are driven by fear instead of, you know, reason and what actually benefits them. The state of : - The aeronautic industry - Healthcare - Social programs - Abortion clinics - Job market etc. wouldn't be the bloody omnishambles it is if the government did what they're actually fucking paid to do, which is REGULATE.
@@Kaylakaze This is where we the people must come in. We can't just complain on the internet anymore. We need to take actual, organized steps towards change. If you really want to contribute, now would be the best time to join a socialist organization or any other group that best fits with your beliefs. The country is going through a crisis; it's not enough to be on the sidelines anymore.
@@guardmaster9620 Okay. What actual, organized steps? We can't do anything via elections, the only people on the ballot are in corporate pockets. We can't do our own lobbying, corporations can easily outspend us. We can't do mass reporting to government agencies, they do the smallest of smol bean fines that changes nothing at best and do nothing at worst (see all the updates to Ross Scott's campaign over The Crew, every government is blowing him off) Do you have any meaningful actions people can take, or are you just spouting off useless ideological drivel?
Tango Gameworks deserved better. Hi-Fi RUSH is an amazing game with loveable characters. Also, the game poking fun at how corpo management works is on point.
And that's why what I've done is maintain my classic 360, got its disk reader replaced while I still could, added the biggest hard drive I could, all while largely not bothering with Xbox LIVE games or anything else online. I saw this coming before the XBone nickname was first being shared. I saw this coming when Halo 4 was first announced, and I am someone who has never cared for Halo. Even my PS4 Pro was mainly so I could play the few games for that consoles that I genuinely wanted to play, and I did not get it until the PS5 was set to come out, so I figured that was the best time to get a 4 Pro. Seriously, do NOT buy anything new when it comes to game consoles. The Switch might have been the only exception for a time, but with what Nintendo has been pulling lately (and in more sense than one), I cannot recommend it anymore, and I just no longer feel any desire for one. Why bother with consoles when they're being sold as if they're smartphones, with a new variant of a variant of that week's new model? F^^^ Microsoft, f^^^ Sony, f^^^ Nintendo, f^^^ AAA(A) publishers, and thank God for James Stephanie Sterling, kid.
Ah yes, yet another episode of AAA management openly admitting that they're incredibly shit at managing and that's somehow issue of everyone else but them and their employer.
I believe the so-called AAA game industry sees how dangerous these up and coming indie and AA competitors are, and this is part of a conserted push to cripple them and consolidate. The message couldn't be clearer.
Between the mass layoffs in the video games, animation, and entertainment industries in general, all of the studios and finished projects that were destroyed without remorse by executives to pursue the myth of perpetual growth, I can’t help but wonder what the final straw is going to be. Because at least thousands of people have seen their passion for the art form they have chosen for themselves undermined by their employers, and the idea of having any form of long-term financial stability and employment is proving to be just that: an idea. I don’t work in the industry, but I am getting sick and tired of all this senseless and cruel treatment directed towards people who just want to live and make art that they’re proud of. I don’t know what the answer is, but I sincerely hope that if a massive industry wide-strike does take place in the near future, we owe it as people who genuinely love video games to support the people who actually make those games, not the brands. On a related note, it is *very* difficult to feel excited for the forthcoming gaming events next month. How can I “get hype” when so many people continue to lose their jobs for no reason other than a corporation’s absurd, unrealistic, and unreasonable expectations?
Man the game industry makes me sad sometimes. Hi-Fi Rush was legitimately one of my favorite games in years, and for me matched Baldur's Gate 3 as my favorite to come out last year. It's really just heartbreaking to see such a good team be broken up because some soulless exec decides they should be closed for no reason at all. Fuck Microsoft.
Not being able to get Hi-Fi Rush was quite literally the only disappointment I had when buying the PS5. But now that Microsoft has finally recognized their consoles are failures, I can get it.
Games Publishers : Making games is haaaaard, and too expensive. Some guy in his bedroom : Makes Flappy Bird and gets so rich so fast he loses his god damn mind.
@bunnylizard2717 now imagine Noem on her knees right below the Mount Rectum of Bobby Kotick, lasciviously slurping all the shit that makes her cu-Skeleton Warriors!
For sure. I was very excited to see what their next project after Hi-Fi rush would be. Like their next bigger budget game. But oh well. Hope all involved land on their feet and find a new job as quick as possible. As really sad about Arkane.
@@sean8102 i was SO excited for Tango's next game, sequel or not. Seeing them learn from the phenomenal last game would have been incredible. ;_; And yeah, I'm sad about Arkane Austin too. Prey was the best Immersive Sim I've ever played. Worthy of being a successor to System Shock.
Well he apparently used to work at Disney before he got fired in 2020. Maybe it's something to do with that? A victim of pointless corporate worker cuts?
The word "capitalism" was actually created by socialists to define multiple economic systems. They all had three distinct things in common: They all revolved around gaining capital, they all either all started or ended up corrupt and they all weren't communism (let alone the corrupt version Stalin created that is a far cry from what Marx wrote in his manifesto and especially far from the anarcho-communist pipe dream he envisioned). One of these systems was mercantilism, which fell out of favor because of the actions of the East India Company leading to the British Raj and partition of India, which made it wildly unpopular amongst the average person. In spite of this, as time went on, the system that replaced it (which I do not know the name of), the version of capitalism we have right now, is going in exactly the same direction. What we have isn't so much "late stage capitalism" as much as it is "the inevitable result of unchecked human greed and stupidity." It's all happened before and it will all happen again. No revolution is going to change that fact. Especially not with all the opportunists pretending to support the left for their own personal gain and all the people dumb enough to fall for their schemes.
I’m tired of having new reasons to boycott Microsoft. My reasons date back to the 90’s, and the only reason it doesn’t go back further is because I haven’t bothered looking. As far as I can tell it’s been built into it’s corporate structure from the ground up. Other corporations may occasionally make worse decisions, but no corporation has proven itself to be so consistently EVIL.
What remains especially mind-boggling to me is that we see actual examples of how a company can and should be run with places like Larian Studios, where the pursuit isn't ever-growing profit, but instead in ACTUAL growth of the company itself by investing in its workers and focusing on making great products in a market they specialize in. The pursuit of artificially inflated, ever-increasing profits by investor-driven companies like Microsoft is causing them to literally shrink, losing experienced workers and reducing both the quality and speed of their output because they rely on "cheap" contract labor to get anything done.
AAA gaming publishers are really showing how dynfunctional the profit incentive is, especially in combination with creative work. The hunt for ever growing profits is causing studios that otherwise would have been fine to shutter, regardless if their game is good or not.
"Games are to expensive to make" says the largest company on planet earth. With a market cap of a mere $3 trillion dollars. Also the same company investes $10 billion into ChatGPT/OpenAI. Created MS Co-pilot etc. And in May 2024, announced a $3.3 billion investment to build an "artificial intelligence hub" in southeast Wisconsin.
I was thinking the same thing! He specifically left his corporate job for RUclips. Seems like he's the opposite of the problems Steph was pointing out.
Proposal for any corporate higher up whose position contains the word "officer", "chief", or board member status: You may only begin layoffs of people below your position IF all of you take a pay cut up to 99% first. This includes any bonuses, any stock options, any method of which you make income. If reducing your wages to that level is not enough, THEN you may consider layoffs. If your salaries are high enough that firing you would save an entire dev team, then it's simple maths: fire one who made the decisions before the people who actually create the things that bring in revenue. This especially after the incident where ABK hired a new CFO with a 5 million dollar sign on bonus right before firing 800 people to prop up revenue.
What's the over/under that the studios being shuttered were also forced to crunch to meet arbitrary deadlines? The sheer amount of abuse being levied at game devs, who are told to grin and bear with it because they're following their "passions" is disgusting. Who ever decided to equate passion with suffering and precarity to begin with? I doubt it was ever the artists, and only ever the people profiting off of them. This is why we need a union. We don't just need the programmers, animators, musicians, designers, etc. to be safe against their own employer, we need a union that can organize an industry wide strike against publishers who pull this nonsense.
I graduated high school in 2000. Just before graduation, and with too little time to take advantage of it, someone told me about a scholarship competition. It was like $1000 to write an essay on the importance of brand recognition/brand-name products. Even if I could've done it, I wouldn't have, because I'd've gone full Daria and explained the exact opposite of what the sponsor wanted. Which is to say, it depresses me that these are all lessons we collectively learned generations ago, but we have to re-learn them as a whole every 15 minutes apparently. What a stupid species we are.
I remember reading that one of the reasons layoffs in the tech sector have been so high compared to other sectors is because the main investment in tech is staff and staff are much easier to hire and fire on a whim compared to say large investments into a factory. I genuinely believe a lot of this nonsense would stop if we simply had better labour protection laws. It shouldn't be more impactful to close a factory than it is to fire 1000s of people!
Over the past 20 years, XBOX has passed on: - GTA III (Rockstar pitched it to them as an XBOX exclusive) - Gyration motion controls (XBOX literally laughed the inventor out of the room, and so Nintendo bought the patent for the upcoming Wii console) - Insomniac's Spiderman game (pitched by the developer as an XBOX exclusive) - FF16 (same) Plus at least one other really big fuckup I can't remember
Didn't know that about GTA 3 or Spider-Man, fascinating. Xbox also turned down Heavy Rain cause they didn't like the plot about the kid being kidnapped(which might've been the fuckup you're thinking of), not a very smart move considering how well Quantic Dreams games sold. Honestly i'm not the big on motion controls so I can't say that i'm too bummed about Xbox not going in that direction, in fact that was actually a big factor in me getting a 360 over a Wii as I was not at all sure about the motion controls thing. FF16 I don't care about so kinda eh on that one.
@@jadedheartsz Over 5 million copies of heavy rain sold? I played it for a hour and my kid got run over while I was busy being a lost moron in the mall. Fffffk that game yo! Then the guy who made it went on to make detroit become human. Another game that wishes it was deeper than it actually is but this one is even worse lol. Aren't humans complex and silly the game gets old pretty quick if you ask me lol. Also when are gamers going to realize that video game story lines, even the best one's are AZZ compared to something like better call saul so the bar is quite low lol. So this kind of a video game is going to have to do a lot more than promise a cute story to get me buying em up...
@@soyborne.bornmadeandundone1342 nah it's a good game you crazy. Detroit Become Human is also damn good you are insane. When are elitists going to to realize how crappy and overrated the storylines in most prestige dramas are, Better Call Saul is alright but it didn't blow me away or touch me like some game stories did, certainly not the way Last of Us 2 did.
Hi, Sterling. You are the only bell I have ever clicked as of today because RUclips refuses to show your videos. Even after binging like 20 videos, it will recommend one I watched 10 minutes ago or an hour ago and when I don't click the same video I just watched again, it refuses to show any other videos
To pile on… I used to think that these soulless corporations simply didn’t care about the impact of layoffs on the morale of people who are still with the company. That they didn’t recognize that misery in a workplace (from seeing your friends and colleagues sacrificed to the god of short-term profit) has a negative impact on the quality and profitability of the company’s products. Now I realize that this is all true, but it’s a feature, not a bug. These “leaders” love to rule by fear. The remaining workforce gets overworked and underpaid, because they are terrified they’ll be next. “I’m just grateful to still have a job” is the sign that corporate Stockholm Syndrome is operating as intended. Keep pounding it, Steph.
Yeah the Fact that the Devs of High Fi Rush got Shuttered even after it was PRAISED to high heaven is very telling of how close we are to the CLIFF that is the AAA "industry" falling off said cliff. LONG LIVE INDIE AND AA GAMES!
Thank you for covering this. Every expansion is followed by a contraction, and in the contraction phase, only the companies expected to put revenue on the bottom line in this year's financial report are safe. Sorry Ninja Theory, you're next.
I was writing a research paper on generative AI and its potential negative impact on the video games industry when Microsoft announced it was shuttering multiple studios, including Tango Gameworks. This announcement, and about a dozen news stories from this year alone about the mass firing of thousands of employees from across multiple studios, helped me argue that this is an industry that cannot be trusted with anything it gets its hands on. Publishers in the video game industry (and at least some notable developers, too) are plagued with an executive class that will do anything they can to obtain more money at the expense of both employees and customers alike. Hi-Fi Rush is a brilliant, beautiful, joyous game, and to know that all the people who worked so hard on it--to both commercial success and critical acclaim--have been fired from jobs they are clearly excellent at and passionate about breaks my heart. I know it is not necessarily surprising, but it still hurts. I believe that the video game industry is heading for a collapse as corporations run out of studios to sacrifice for short-term profit. There is no solace in that, as the executive class will be largely unaffected by the destruction of an industry their unceasing avarice and indifference drove into the abyss. The only losers are all of us who enjoy playing games and all of the people who care about making good games. I wish I had a positive note to end this on. I can only advise that we all enjoy the games that we really love, the ones that connected with us in some way, and try our best to hold on to them. Because I don't know how many more of those kind of games we will be able to see in the future of this industry.
@@TheElzingaiv i think Miller lost his job at disney during the pandemic while Disney was collecting supportmoney from the state to keep him, but luckily he started his channel
@@PonyusTheWolfdude Nah, he quit the job because his channel was doing well enough to sustain him. He essentially had to choose between keeping his job at Disney or to run his channel full-time, and he chose his channel.
Editor here. I was watching the episode about "perpetual stew" and paused the video to go do something. When I came back I liked how Max's face looked like he was having a concerned thought about something, so I screen capped it. I have a ton of screen caps with similar origin stories in my "Jimquisition Images" folder.
"games are too expensive to make" is actually code for "investors think they'd get higher returns if they invested into something else, even though we're making piles of money"
Editor here. God this question is all over the comments, lol. Anyways I was watching the episode about "perpetual stew" and paused the video to go do something. When I came back I liked how Max's face looked like he was having a concerned thought about something, so I screen capped it. I have a ton of screen caps with similar origin stories in my "Jimquisition Images" folder.
That's the thing about "going public". Sure, list your company on the stock exchange and sell shares. Just know, that from that exact point in time and space, from then on and forevermore, you MUST post increased profits and growth every fiscal year quarter OR ELSE face ruination and destruction. Maybe last quarter you had an unprecedented and extraordinary surge in sales thanks to a game receiving a handful of great reviews and going viral? Well, better somehow beat it next quarter or you're fucked. TURBOfucked, in fact. Everyone fired and the studio shuttered. "But we made strong profits every year for 17 years, then we had one extraordinary quarter because something we made had viral sales and now you want to kill us?" Yes. Do better next quarter or join the queue for foodstamps.
I saw that Multiversus was “releasing” and I had three questions: 1. Multiversus still exists? 2. Hasn’t this game been fully playable for, like, years now? 3. How many more shitty games are they going to try to save by cramming the Joker in it?
To the first two questions, the answer is no. Last June they announced the open beta was ending and the game went offline. Don't worry, no one playing the game knew it was a beta either...
@@AkumaKristian Hey truth stretcher, you could have told him that Multiversus was coming back in 6 days but you chose not to mention it for agenda reason.
@@floatingkites2420 Chill mate, I just figured that's what they meant when they said the game was "releasing" and didn't think I needed to reiterate that. Honestly, Multiversus wasn't my cup of tea but I don't think the game is that bad or anything. Go ahead and have fun with it.
The great thing about the Arya v Bugs rant is that Warner just announced they’re adding Jason Voorhees to Multiversus today to really put that R rated stamp on their cartoony brawler gamer…
"Games are just too expensive to make" Bruh like 99.9% of my fav games of the last few years have been indie games. Just make smaller, cheaper games. It shouldn't be that hard lmao
Not to mention we are talking about literally the largest company on planet earth. A $3 trillion dollar market cap. But they can't afford to keep these studios open. Got $10 billion laying around to throw at ChatGPT/OpenAI though. And in May 2024, Microsoft announced a $3.3 billion investment to build an artificial intelligence hub in southeast Wisconsin.
Games would still be too expensive to make. Anything other than a zero dollar investment with literally infinite returns is too expensive to make. They don't want to make games, they want a money fountain.
Microsoft has disappointed me so much, I bought a Series X despite all my friends having moved over to the PS5. I had hope for Microsoft. All they had to do was make good games
Sell it. Try to recoup some money. Save for a good GPU or a gaming laptop. You'll be better off. Steam sales, better gaming quality, the open seas of piracy, etc.
PS5 and Sony didn't end up any better, arguably worse. Glad I moved onto a PC a few years back instead. Publishers don't want to make games anymore. They want to make "services" that can be infinitely monetized and unplugged at any moment without warning or repercussion. They don't want games to be a product you own anymore.
I find it so painfully ironic that the game about pushing back against corporate greed and valuing progress and comradery had its studio shut down because of corporate greed. Congrats Microsoft for being a perfect example of exactly what the game's narrative is criticising.
It’s kinda interesting how Microsoft after all these decades hasn’t really changed. It like what they did to ARM, Apple and Amiga with Risk Machines or with OS that led to monopoly charge. Being arsonists to a sector to reduce threats of competition with disintegration of sector.
As someone who just started a career in the game industry and got laid off promptly almost 6 months ago I can say the industry is dying. Most of the people I worked with no matter the status are either laid off trying to get work or they have moved onto a new industry. This is alarming.
Editor here. I was watching the episode about "perpetual stew" and paused the video to go do something. When I came back I liked how Max's face looked like he was having a concerned thought about something, so I screen capped it. I have a ton of screen caps with similar origin stories in my "Jimquisition Images" folder.
@@ZMannZilla Zilla! you sweet child! What is that at 12:04 ??? I suddenly remember watching it when I was 3 years old. Such a nostalgia punch to the testcls. What is it? Where can I get it? Please please please help a poor soul out.
I'm starting to think Hi-Fi Rush wasn't supposed to be a hit. Like, they wanted it to go out and die, and when it survived, they took the devs out back and popped them. How dare it be a success when the big Bethesda game failed!
Do bad? Youre fired. Do good? Youre fired
"Nobody wants to work anymore"
This is why capitalism needs strict regulations.
You have to look at this from a standpoint of slow motion controlled destruction of every studios and independent, buisenesses in the west, then all you are seeing since 2019 finally makes sense.
@@ElBandito Strict Authoritarian Regulations just like Singapore.
"we need more games like hi-fi rush to get us awards"
fires studio that made them quite a few awards anyway
@@maximvsdread1610Yeah, you're right! Fuck regulations! Let them do whatever they want, free country!!!
There's no problem in the game industry, everything is going fine, those fail are just not good enough, that's how it is!
I nearly gagged when I heard Bond call video games a "long term industry" when every AAA publisher has shown they never look any further than the next fiscal quarter
Next fiscal quarter? They barely care about the next fiscal day.
for these asshats. that is long term.
@@davidspring4003 Gotta get dem Pre-Order sales, bois. If we don't make a billion 6 months before launch, we're trashing this failed franchise and blaming the Gamers! Don't worry, they'll eat each other alive as soon as we say the game wasn't financially profitable to continue support past 24 hours!
Nintendo seems to have the long term in mind.
@@BedinsisNintendo has its flaws, but it’s probably one of the few gaming companies that still thinks about making games and making a profit without screwing over the employees that make their products. Now, if they could get their heads out of their butts about emulation and fan content, then we’d be swell.
Very unfair to say game publishing execs just sit on their arses. They spend a lot of time abusing and harassing their employees!
That's right. They work very hard to actively make the end product worse.
im sure.theyll outsource the abuse to AI macros any day now
So they spend the rest of their time on other people's asses.
And covering for literal therapists without the "the" !
@@OneWingedRose The analyst/therapists, it you will.
Utterly maddening how many gamers will watch studios abuse their staff, bleed talent and be shut down in real time, and then still find a way to blame everything on wokeness
But the wokerati killed my dog with diversity!
It's a shortcut to avoid culpability; humans can't conceive threats at grand scales but can latch onto individual concepts that represent a personal threat.
@@joshuamartin4349 Tell that to the people that believe in Jewish space lasers.
BECAUSE WOKENESS KILLED MY GRANDMA, OK?
I'm not sure what's being said here, are you saying that we should buy games just to keep studios open?
They couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a PR line for closing the studios, the cost cuttings gone that far.
Companies are probably realizing they don't have to make excuses anymore. They aren't going to be punished by their actions as 98% of video game people do not even know studios make video games. They just think they appear magically at the store or appear on the online store to be purchased.
@@xcwarrior Unfortunately you are correct.
@@xcwarrior Gamers already can't be bothered to even learn the difference between developers and publisher, so you're not wrong. I'm just begging people to fucking learn *something* related to the gaming industry besides "new game coming out soon", so that my blood pressure doesn't have to continually go up whenever I hear some blithering idiot say stuff like "I'm shocked that Hi-Fi Rush is so well made considering it's Bethesda!". FFS.
@@bunnylizard2717 not just the difference between publisher or developer, I had to explain to a guy that "Frostbite" is the tech that drives the Battlefield games, not name of some group of individuals... But hey, it appears on the splash screen when you launch the game and in all the marketing blurbs the traditional games media keeps showering us in, so it must be important!
They laid off the guy who normally writes those lines.
"Games are too expensive to make" as they spend $70 billion to buy whole publishers.
The reason that those Bethesda studios are gone is because that purchase is small compared to ABK. They became expendable.
The embracer group solely buying so many IPs to bloat the selllput and then the foreign investors pulling the seal.
"Games are too expensive to make" they whine as they routinely get upstaged by indie developers with no more resources than 2 people and a dog between them.
@@MareSerenitis a dog, i thought that was a cat! lol
The biggest, most valuable company on the planet just had to shut them down. How do you expect little Microsoft to keep those studios running with a market cap of a mere $3 Trillion?! /s And like Steph said, MS and all the other big tech companies like Apple, Google, Nvidia etc are now obsessed with AI. Hence why Microsoft has invested $10 billion into ChatGPT/OpenAI. Created MS Co-pilot etc. And in May 2024, Microsoft announced a $3.3 billion investment to build an artificial intelligence hub in southeast Wisconsin.
While accidentally purchasing a second Lamborghini
10:53 "Shit rolls downhill, and the moment you go from indie studio to corporate subsidiary, you've put yourself at the foot of Mount Rectum, with your mouth wide open." Love it!
At a certain point, “AAA” will be a boogeyman. Mothers will tell their children if they grow up to be a game developers to NEVER sign a contract with a AAA company.
@@auturgicflosculator2183 I know, but even on the curve of capitalism, signing up with these people is just no longer pragmatic.
That day needs to be right now
@@mesektet5776That's been the arc of capitalism for some time, at least since the era of financialization & the rise of vulture capitalism but it's more likely embedded in the entire ideology. The motives & incentives are no longer rational or pragmatic to the the long term interests of capital itself. The system is not in any sense sustainable, from food production to water to war profiteering to energy, fossil fuels & climate to media & entertainment to (in the United States) healthcare, education & democracy now being monetized industries, the consequences of immediate increased wealth for a vanishingly small class of people are not considered on any larger scale or timeline. The long term costs to society & human civilization generally are irrationally out of proportion to the ever-increasing appetite of the capitalist class.
Beyond the amount of waste, inefficiency, corruption, precarity, misery, and death it produces, it will almost certainly become necessary for the survival of our species at some point to abandon capitalism as an organizing principle; and I'm pretty sure they know that and are slashing & burning as much as they can in the relative short term to accrue as much wealth & power as possible to fight back against change and prolong it as far as possible.
If you've built a successful business, NEVER sell it. You never know if it will find its way into the hands of a publicly traded horror show made to keep shareholders happoy until the next quarter.
Should be now. You'd think developers would try anything else honestly.
If the industry is curious about how game creation works after getting rid of the creatives, they can ask Konami about how the Metal Gear brand is going.
Newsflash: Unions are a good thing!
How can you have a union... when your company itself is at danger of being asset stripped if it looks good on the bottom line of somebody's corporate growth report? Unions are great for local control... but these companies are not being closed by local control. We need something BIGGER than the local union. a worker's united type union. Hell, when we struck as graduate students for better health care as student employees, we had support from the trucker's union, and that was back in 1990.
@@thomasneal9291 No one said anything about a "local" union. You need a union that covers the whole industry (or more) that works in solidarity with other unions so that if they try to shut down a studio for stupid reasons, EVERYTHING grinds to a halt.
@@thomasneal9291 You do know unions can form without a company? Those are called trade unions. One of the biggest being SAG.
That reminds me of when someone claimed Arkane Lyon was safe because they were working on Marvel's Blade...
I pointed out Arkane Lyon is probably safe because it's located in France.
@@TheSylda Indeed!
Almost as if a socio-economic system built on the idea of profit at all costs is antithetical to genuine creativity.
Noooo, couldn't be, better start reciting McCarthyist mantras before I start thinking about inconsistencies!
It's antithetical to all life on earth.
Not to be melodramatic, but humanity won't go with a bang, of even a whimper, but with the sound of eating. Capitalism is a cancer eating a body alive from the inside.
or indeed long-term survival.
Or human life, frankly. It's kind of amazing how billionaires and capitalists are wringing their pearls about crashing fertility rates across the globe, when the evidence for their soul-grinding economic system being the primary driver of those crashing rates is pretty much irrefutable.
It's almost like laborers who are expected to work endlessly to support the 'unlimited growth' of the wealth of the investment class don't have time to have kids, or something. What a surprise... /s
or life in general.
what do we call cells that keep growing uncontrollably at the cost of everything else? fucking cancer.
Closing down Tango was a very difficult decision. Think of how hard it was for the Microsoft executive to decide what yacht to buy with the bonus money they got for making number go up after shutting down Tango!
I'm not sure they even buy things with their money anymore. I seriously believe they just jerk off while looking at their account balances going up. Spending and enjoying the money would be too normal of a thing for them to do.
Guys, they're feeling the crunch too! The yacht they bought was smaller than last year's yacht! Everyone's suffering in this economy! /s
Won't someone think of the executives?
@@InsanoRider777 Cue up the South Park clip of the detective showing the children all the poor celebrities who have to buy a slightly less expensive airplane or yacht because they pirated a couple of songs.
But now they're not going to get any new Evil Within or HiFi Rush moneys. 8C
Just a smidge but confusing.
It's terrifying and demoralizing that a 97% Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam apparently doesn't mean shit anymore.
The squawking at the end had a lot more substance to it than the entirety of Sarah Bond's corporate speech.
Was even able to make out a "Thank god for Her" near the end.
Eloquent and informative in comparison.
Are we gonna seriously ignore what Phil Spencer said about how Microsoft needs more gamss like Hi-Fi Rush after shutting down the studio and firing the talent that MADE Hi-Fi Rush!?
Phil Spencer is a bit of a hack so it comes as no surprise.
Nope, but we need to wake up and realise CEOs like Phil Rectum and Todd Coward are glorified, overpaid salesmen who's sole job it is to be the mouthpiece and enforcers of the Shareholders, who are themselves a shadowy, nameless, unaccountable cabal of ghouls, vampires and other blood-sucking parasites.
The CEO's are the Mouth of Sauron, but it's the Shareholders who are Sauron.
he said smaller/cheaper, yet still prestigious/award winning games (hifi rush never being mentioned in this context)
from their perspective hifi rush only covers the second half of that - it wasn't a small thing to develop
the consequence of that ought to be publishing tons of actual small games with a shotgun approach, but I doubt they will find the developers willing to do that under their thumb - those projects can be funded through more trustworthy means
Even when I was much dumber I was calling this guy a pos as far back as 2015 lol.
He defended the lack of split screen in halo 5 yo! Realities of the day lol eat my ballz!
@@Yin2FalconAt this point, I don't think future Call of Duties and Elder Scrolls VI aren't gonna grow Microsoft. Just look at how they and Studio 353 handled their flagship franchise.
I don't even think Starfield got as much acclaim as Bethesda's previous games.
"Games are too expensive to make."
Well if they're too expensive to make you're in the wrong fucking business aren't you.
And as if literally the largest company on the planet with a $3 trillion dollar market cap can't afford to keep these studios open. But they got $10 billion laying around to invest in ChatGPT/OpenAI, creating co-pilot etc. And in May 2024, Microsoft announced a $3.3 billion investment to build an artificial intelligence hub in southeast Wisconsin.
@@sean8102 That was kind of alluded to in the video. If you don't care about quality, and want to re-release variations on the same crap over and over again: AI is ideal.
"The name's Bond, Sarah Bond. License to kill hopes and dreams"
Lol hope that’s not a game also it will get shutdown by XBOX 😂😂😂😂😂
Unfortunately, people like Bond are not a rare ware in this biz
Sarah Bond: "Do you expect me tell the truth?"
Gamers: "No Miss Bond, I expect you to lie."
Remember, we have the discretion to remove your license. You are hiring it, not buying it, 008. Act with care.
- Q
it's sad to see a black female executive talking like this, I know I shouldn't expect them to be any better then a straight white male exec but it still sucks.
I've seen it theorised that the decision to close Tango was made before Hi-Fi Rush even released, due to Ghostwire: Tokyo and The Evil Within 2 not being big enough successes. Not that either game failed, by any normal person's standards - they just weren't successful *enough*. Hi-Fi Rush wasn't ever supposed to be a success, so the theory goes, it was supposed to limp out unnoticed allowing Microsoft to close Tango much sooner and more quietly, and the fact it was a massive success was a problem for Microsoft because it meant they had to delay the closure.
I don't know how much I actually believe it, but it's plausible with how publishers behave, and that's damning enough.
that prolly makes sense tbh. Still sucks tho. But thinking of it. Hi-Fi Rush was shadowdropped with no advertisment at all. If it wouldn't have been for word of mouth I wouldn't have played it at all.
It still sucks that they couldn't have saved them with a success tbh.
It is never enough
It wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft’s entire goal in buying these studios was to shut down the competition. Lie to the government, knowing they’re unlikely to be held accountable, then make up excuses to shut down studios they never intended to keep.
Additionally, their subscription service functionality gave it away for free to subscribers, further undermining the game’s success, by making it less profitable.
Remember. If a person honestly appreciats your time and business, they will act in a way that reflects that.
If a company worships on the alter of SHAREHOLDER VALUE, they'll piss on your support, your nostalgia, your passions, your friends, your family, your worst impulses, themselves, their people, their products and the entire planet to get an extra fraction of a percent on a quarterly report.
Read 'The Man Who Broke Capitalism' by David Gelles. I knew about 'fiduciary duty' and 'shareholder value' as terms before, but never really understood how they've taken over industry until I read that book.
I have a bad news about companies in America, and about Ford v. Dodge...
Microsoft also told the ftc they would protect jobs and not just shut down studios after the buy them.... Wonder if the us govt and ftc has the balls to follow up on this now???
Until the corporate shills still sitting in power get ejected from office. They are the biggest group of insider traders out there. Making far more than the average of their investments than the market actually trends. Why would they harm their own financial self interest even though all of them have a automatic lifetime retirement pension that kicks in the second they leave office. THEY WANT ALL THE MONEY!
Why would they? Our government IS Microsoft, and Tesla, Proctor and Gamble... Just puppets for these big companies.
As if the US govt has the balls for anything but genocide.
No, the people calling the shots are too busy eyeing their soon-to-be executive positions at Microsoft.
I suppose the only way to find out is bombard the FTC website with complaints about Microsoft closing studios they swallowed up just to make line go up.
I remember seeing a comment stating that microsoft was always planning to shut the studio down when then they bought it out. Thinking about it that way, I cant help but feel like the bubble is about to burst, where even a game they admit is a success "by every metric" isnt as valuable to them as the tax break they get from laying off an entire studio.
It's not the tax break, it's making the line go up
@@fluidthought42 how exactly does buying the studio and then closing it and firing everyone make the line go up?
@@user-sl6gn1ss8p
Growth period = acquisitions to make net value bigger
Crash period = closures to make expenses smaller, still own IP
@user-sl6gn1ss8p On the off chance you're earnestly asking how the metrics are affected:
Studio has just released a game, in order to develop a new game the staff will need to be paid for at least 2-3 years without an additional product being made. Microsoft elects to close the studio because they already have hifi rush on sale and can avoid paying staff for those 2-3 years. They cut expenses while still having the product to sell, they just won't have a new one from that team in 2-3 years. This is why Steph and many in the comments are calling it a short sided strategy, it boosts short term profit margins and uproots lives and careers, and deprives the world of the art that group of creatives would have made next.
@@wctgttm yeah, it was earnest, so thanks for the answer, but I was thinking more mid-to-long term. Short term what you said definitely makes a lot of sense, but this has been a recurring practice for a while now, hasn't it? And the line has in fact been going up afaik (at least for the huge guys who are swallowing up everyone else). So I was kinda wondering how does that circle get squared.
Like, is it that they can effectively replace the people later, or maybe that they get "investor confidence" which translates to more resources in the future, or maybe just acquisitions and IPs being more valuable to them than employees, etc?
To be clear, I'm definitely not trying to defend the practice, I just think that it either has to be acknowledged that it somehow ends up working for them or it has to be shown that in fact no, it doesn't, in order to go further in discussing this practice, you know?
So essentially, if you’re a game developer, you should show up to work, do as little work as possible, collect your check, and go home, cause you’re gonna get fired no matter what.
I think the real lesson is that if you work for any kind of subsidiary development studio, start looking for a new job.
Hey, they're just following the example set by executive management, especially when they make bad and stupid decisions, some of which are copycatting from other companies! But the big difference is that these executives typically have "golden parachutes" after they're FINALLY fired after multiple fuck ups, a luxury that *doesn't* exist for all of the other employees!
Execs after developers start doing this and the games don't get done - "nobody wants to work anymore"
id argue thats the case for any job nowadays imo
at least they bought actiblizzard, who have since produced bangers such as:
and:
Starfi.... Sorry, I fell asleep during my last sentence, what was I saying?
They published Sekiro. It's a good thing FromSoft bullied them into doing that.
I think you wrote your comments in invisible ink.
@@evilbarrels2506 Sekiro was long before Microsoft bought Actiblizzard, and the comment you're responding to is making the point that, since the buyout, Actiblizzard has not produced any bangers, keyword being "since" that is clearly readable in the original comment between the words "have" and "produced". Reading comprehension 101
Yeah it seems like Activision bought Microsoft instead of Microsoft buying Activision. This is the kind of decission one would associate with Bobby Kotick instead of Phil Spencer who has been crowing all the right pro gamer and pro industry things in the last while. (I know its just PR speak)
"Microsoft thinks you're all a bunch of gullible morons"
Gotta go with the statistics... they're right. *sigh*
I came here to say the same. Teh G@merZ gotta gAem.
Imagine interviewing with a cancer tumor on why it should be in charge of the body
Interviewer: “Shouldn’t succeeding in that way ensure the future of a studio?”
Microsoft CEO: “Hell no!”
I genuinely can't decide if Tango gameworks or Arcane pisses me off more. Obviously Tango is inherently more outrageous considering they made one of Xbox's only truly successful games in recent memory, but it almost seems MORE insulting for Arkane to be shut down as a result of Redfall, because that was a game they NEVER wanted to make, and every part of it that caused it to fail was entirely the fault of corporate higher-ups... but those people are too "important" (wealthy) to fire.
both of these deeply hurt me. Ghostwire: Tokyo is a fuckin masterpiece. I love EVERY Arkane game except Redfall.
I'm sick and fucking tired of these companies destroying things and people I love in the name of pleasing shareholders who should be in jail.
@@HadalStreetlights Redfall was OK, it had it's fun moments but it should've been a single player game and it really feels like it was being held together by duct tape and bailing wire.
You know that part in the Matrix where Morpheus tells Neo, 'people still hooked into the Matrix are the people we're trying to save, but for now they're our enemy. They're so dependent on the Matrix they'll even fight to defend it'? I'm finding it harder and harder not to look at people still buying AAA games that way.
people are allowed to enjoy AAA games genius.
@@jadedheartszCan't argue that, I'm still looking forward to the inevitable PC release of Spider-Man 2: Glider-Men. But there's less and less keeping me hooked in, every year. And one day, I too will awaken.
@@jadedheartszenjoying and buying is not the same if you know what i mean
@@jadedheartsz Yeah, and they're also 'allowed' to scream and yell when they're asked to put on a mask during a pandemic, as well, or insist that the world is flat despite all evidence to the contrary. But at some point, their feeding of a broken and toxic system doesn't just affect them, it hurts everyone. Just because something is 'allowed' doesn't mean it's ethically defensible.
Jackson, you're always in JSS videos being nothing but a contrarian, you really think we didn't notice?
So now that no money will go to the people who Actually made HiFi Rush, I should acquire it by… other means.
Gotcha.
I can't believe Microsoft bought up too many studios and stopped caring about funding them and their projects because of diversity.
I've actually had someone tell me this.
It's an easy answer that people don't have to think about. Thinking can get hard, painful, and depressing. It's easier just to sink in a relaxing bath of bubbling chud piss.
oof.
Well, what they meant to say was, "diversify their stock portfolios."
And if they can't believe that, they are pretty ignorant.
Cult member... That's pure mental gymnastics to try and connect those. Dude is sitting there trying to put his plugs in other plugs level delusional.
Ah yes! Because nothing screams diversity like buying up game companies filled with sex pests and r**ists! What a very inclusive game studio that Microbrain company is!
The whole Multiversus bit is even funnier in hindsight, as one of the new characters to be added to the game is Jason frigging Voorhees
Disney used to simply not credit artists, claiming that it spoil the "magic".
AFAIK they only started crediting them because they were legally required to. That really is the platonic ideal for megacorps.
this is why piracy is justified with ALL games from activision, nintendo, square enix, microsoft, ubisoft, 2K, take-two, embracer, etc. these corporations have no soul. the gaming industry is making more money than any previous time in history, and paying their executives the highest bonuses in history.
With corporate mass layoffs, I'm beginning to think cruelty IS the point.
-The Aristocrats!- The Neoliberals!
It is.
In a manner of speaking it absolutely is. The longer someone is employed at a company, the larger their salary tends to become. Eliminating their sense of job security by dismissing them can force them to accept a similar job for lower salary, or reduce their expectation of raises.
So, if both company A and company B maintain their workers, they expect to face steadily rising operating costs, generally in line with inflation. However, if A and B both fire 50% of their workers, and then largely re-hire each other's dismissed workers over the next few years, this can reduce salary demands by those dismissed workers, who feel very uncertain about their career prospects, while the employees who were retained at both companies likewise are less likely to demand raises due to similar fears.
In the end, company A and B and up rehiring to the same staffing levels as before - possibly with many of the same people swapped between them, but now they have 'controlled' costs through fear.
So yes, fear and cruelty is very literally part of the system.
@@Jesse_359 I'm glad that I work for a company that just gives me a good raise every year without me even having to ask.
Honestly I wouldn't doubt if that is a *part* of it. Scares people into thinking they will be next.
Nintendo, for all the dumb shit they tend to do, really are going to be Luigi Wins By Doing Nothing simply because they aren’t as aggressively shortsighted as literally every other big gaming company in terms of game development. It’s not that they don’t indulge in some of the bad tendencies of the industry, it’s just that they mostly go do their own thing while the other guys blow off their fingers with fireworks and honestly do a better job treating their developers comparatively. It’s a low bar to clear at this point honestly.
When you're not competing in a race in which the racers are at each other's throat, you tend to win by default when someone needs to declare a winner.
One thing that came out during the Activision acquisition is that ppl inside Microsoft hope to buy Nintendo at some point lmfao
yeah nintendo is fucked for other reasons but weirdly enough this is one of their stronger points , and thats ignoring iwata taking a pay cut all those years ago
I don't know how many this has happened to, but it isn't that nintendo doesn't make a bunch of people workless. It's that the people loosing their income are contract workers. So it dosen't tecnically count as mass layoffs, which Japan has comparitavelly strict laws against. It's "letting their contracts run out", but the harm is the same. Dosen't help that their contract workers have been said to be treated as second class citizens...
It sucks that nintendo are doing shitty things to their workers, but the rest of the tripple a industry is so ghastly that they sound like saints in comparison!
Nintendo is evil and working culture in Japan absolutely terrifying. But at least they don't feel like incompetent morons, which sadly telling about modern state of gaming industry.
Microsoft's Sea of Thieves developer team has been shutting down casual folk telling them exactly how to include more players and bring in new ones. Cause they say making the game more accessible and allowing people who wish to not be hassled to have a full rewarding experience is "not a part of their vision". The individual studios and corporate can't even get on the same page for wanting all the monies.
Counterpoint: not every game has to be risk-free to be enjoyable and if a game is not for you, that is not always the fault of the game. That's just personal taste coming into play. Although, yes, Sea of Thieves is a buggy mess of a live-service game that is somehow enjoyable to me.
@@gjshomeofsilliness9391 Counterpoint, I don't think they should. Those companies should absolutely not be claiming to want more players while ignoring would be players. Especially with the way they implemented Safer Seas and claimed to be doing so on behalf of players like me who have been pushed away from the game from hostile players while ignoring those people. I'd respect the vision if it wasn't surrounded by PR statements and marketing telling me they want me to play it.
edit: I remeber when Dead Space advertised itself as gross and it'll scare your nan, so I didn't play it. Not for me. I don't do horror.
Just want people to be honest.
I'm glad I never stopped making fun of that crap game. Shame it got popular because dumb kids enjoy watching a streamer in a pirate hat.... Goodness we are pathetic lol.
@@Stephen... That's the folly of Rare's advertising of their own game. They market it as a pirate game for everyone, when it is not for everyone.
@@gjshomeofsilliness9391 They got my money once and fed me to the wolves. Last time I buy a Rare, Xbox Studios, or indeed Microsoft product in general. They could make it accessible to those they duped and redeem their name but they've chosen a different vision to pursue. It'd be nice if they kept accessibility out of their public messaging.
Never forget: the only thing that grows without limit is cancer
Even cancerous growth has it's limitations, upon the death of its host. There's a moral in that story somewhere. 🤔
There is a limit when the host dies
And stupidity.
Scientists use a cancer culture that has long outlived the person who originally had it. Cancer can live forever as long as it's fed. Scientists have also contracted tumors and cancers from handling such cells that came from others. Only starvation or purifying fire stops it.
And your Mum.
It's the corporate games expression of 'catch and kill' for news stories. Buy up all the competitors, lay everyone off. Disgusting.
Just watched the GDC for Hi-Fi rush. That game, the fact it came out so well polished, so well made is honestly incredible.
It was the first game that they made with Unreal Engine
It was the first time they ever did any kind of game that had any kind of rythm based mechanics
It had a single very solid vision of how the gameplay should feel and be done and it didn't end up getting sullied by some corporate wank.
The lead dev didn't just want to make a rhythm game, he wanted to make and action rhythm game and knew exactly what that meant in terms of gameplay. Which also meant creating all kinds of specific animation timings to ensure everything happened on the beat of the song. I don't doubt that other studios will be scrambling to get ahold of the people who were on that team. But also it shouldn't have been that way... They should be the new studio that new devs are flocking to hoping to be able to join such an incredible studio.
The fact that I can look at the game, no music, and still keep the beat is literally amazing. I hate the fact that we got one of tge best rhythm games PERIOD and it still got smoked.
Proud to be one of the five people watching JSS :D
You're doing incredible work keeping the spotlight on this fucked up industry's flea-bitten underbelly. It's very much appreciated, even if it sometimes feels like it's not.
AAA games companies still panicking because the most successful game of last year was from a studio that treats it's employees like human beings, has zero microtransactions or paid DLC and wasn't even a AAA studio. No coincidence the only full priced game I have bought in the last 12 months was Baldur's Date.
As much as Redfall makes their closure more comprehensible than Tango's (not that MS needed the excuse though, obviously), it's criminal that this is how Arkane Austin ends. After dragging the immersive sim genre back from the dead and creating a genuinely great new universe to boot, being unceremoniously executed as part of a corporate acquisition with their last game being a dud that seemingly nobody at the studio actually wanted to make is a miserable end for a studio with so much talent.
I thought Prey 2017 was a masterpiece or at least the first half was. It could have been marketted much better and maybe the story could have been done better but its still an amazing game. Sad to see Arkane closed.
Hopefully the Development Heads get to re-recruit (i.e. all the talent that got fired, then choose a different publisher, or even [gasp] go indie) but anyone saying like "we're getting the band back together" now is going to be told where to go, IMHO. Sad.
Ohhh nooo diversity sloop should be subsidized Lol, you are outright making me syphatetic to capitalism wookies.
It's depressing how these kinds of videos have slowly gotten over the last decade. At this point the government I seriously need to regulate this industry. It's getting out of control to the point the industry is imploding onto itself only getting the employees and consumers.
The American government needs to regulate a shit ton of stuff in America, but they won't because some idiot will claim it's communism just to score some votes with the fucktards who are driven by fear instead of, you know, reason and what actually benefits them. The state of :
- The aeronautic industry
- Healthcare
- Social programs
- Abortion clinics
- Job market
etc.
wouldn't be the bloody omnishambles it is if the government did what they're actually fucking paid to do, which is REGULATE.
Except the government (at least in the US) is even worse, being a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of these and other corporations.
The ability to turn wealth into political power is what is going to kill humanity.
@@Kaylakaze This is where we the people must come in. We can't just complain on the internet anymore. We need to take actual, organized steps towards change. If you really want to contribute, now would be the best time to join a socialist organization or any other group that best fits with your beliefs. The country is going through a crisis; it's not enough to be on the sidelines anymore.
@@guardmaster9620 Okay. What actual, organized steps?
We can't do anything via elections, the only people on the ballot are in corporate pockets.
We can't do our own lobbying, corporations can easily outspend us.
We can't do mass reporting to government agencies, they do the smallest of smol bean fines that changes nothing at best and do nothing at worst (see all the updates to Ross Scott's campaign over The Crew, every government is blowing him off)
Do you have any meaningful actions people can take, or are you just spouting off useless ideological drivel?
Tango Gameworks deserved better. Hi-Fi RUSH is an amazing game with loveable characters. Also, the game poking fun at how corpo management works is on point.
That maybe why they closed the studio lol
And that's why what I've done is maintain my classic 360, got its disk reader replaced while I still could, added the biggest hard drive I could, all while largely not bothering with Xbox LIVE games or anything else online. I saw this coming before the XBone nickname was first being shared. I saw this coming when Halo 4 was first announced, and I am someone who has never cared for Halo.
Even my PS4 Pro was mainly so I could play the few games for that consoles that I genuinely wanted to play, and I did not get it until the PS5 was set to come out, so I figured that was the best time to get a 4 Pro.
Seriously, do NOT buy anything new when it comes to game consoles. The Switch might have been the only exception for a time, but with what Nintendo has been pulling lately (and in more sense than one), I cannot recommend it anymore, and I just no longer feel any desire for one. Why bother with consoles when they're being sold as if they're smartphones, with a new variant of a variant of that week's new model?
F^^^ Microsoft, f^^^ Sony, f^^^ Nintendo, f^^^ AAA(A) publishers, and thank God for James Stephanie Sterling, kid.
Some one who has always cared for halo. I TOO just stick with 360 haha.
Just wasn't as good after that : )
I still buy new stuff but i'm always prepared for this shit happening
It's good to know corporate greed and executive incompetence knows no race, age, sex, or gender bias
Ah yes, yet another episode of AAA management openly admitting that they're incredibly shit at managing and that's somehow issue of everyone else but them and their employer.
I believe the so-called AAA game industry sees how dangerous these up and coming indie and AA competitors are, and this is part of a conserted push to cripple them and consolidate. The message couldn't be clearer.
Between the mass layoffs in the video games, animation, and entertainment industries in general, all of the studios and finished projects that were destroyed without remorse by executives to pursue the myth of perpetual growth, I can’t help but wonder what the final straw is going to be. Because at least thousands of people have seen their passion for the art form they have chosen for themselves undermined by their employers, and the idea of having any form of long-term financial stability and employment is proving to be just that: an idea. I don’t work in the industry, but I am getting sick and tired of all this senseless and cruel treatment directed towards people who just want to live and make art that they’re proud of. I don’t know what the answer is, but I sincerely hope that if a massive industry wide-strike does take place in the near future, we owe it as people who genuinely love video games to support the people who actually make those games, not the brands.
On a related note, it is *very* difficult to feel excited for the forthcoming gaming events next month. How can I “get hype” when so many people continue to lose their jobs for no reason other than a corporation’s absurd, unrealistic, and unreasonable expectations?
"But it's now little more than intellectual property, known primarily for what owns it, rather than who made it."
That is a hell of a quote.
Man the game industry makes me sad sometimes. Hi-Fi Rush was legitimately one of my favorite games in years, and for me matched Baldur's Gate 3 as my favorite to come out last year. It's really just heartbreaking to see such a good team be broken up because some soulless exec decides they should be closed for no reason at all.
Fuck Microsoft.
I thought it was an OK game, didn't blow me away or anything so it wasn't a gut punch for me like it was for others, still sucks though.
Not being able to get Hi-Fi Rush was quite literally the only disappointment I had when buying the PS5. But now that Microsoft has finally recognized their consoles are failures, I can get it.
@@leejs nah their consoles are hits
If they openly admit nothing they make is successful enough to keep their studios open, it is not successful
Well, apparently I speak bird enough to understand 'thank god for me' in [repeated sqwawking]
Glad I’m not the only one, lolol XD
Games Publishers : Making games is haaaaard, and too expensive.
Some guy in his bedroom : Makes Flappy Bird and gets so rich so fast he loses his god damn mind.
Old Yeller except it's dozens of dogs on a (dis)assembly line.
Kristi Noem just came at the thought.
There's a mental image that will haunt me.
Lord that's dark. Fitting but DARK.
@@Kaylakaze a truly disturbing image
@bunnylizard2717 now imagine Noem on her knees right below the Mount Rectum of Bobby Kotick, lasciviously slurping all the shit that makes her cu-Skeleton Warriors!
These latest layoffs really made me sick to my stomach. Thanks for staying real. Thank God for you, James Stephanie Stirling.
Tango. Deserved. Better.
For sure. I was very excited to see what their next project after Hi-Fi rush would be. Like their next bigger budget game. But oh well. Hope all involved land on their feet and find a new job as quick as possible. As really sad about Arkane.
@@sean8102 i was SO excited for Tango's next game, sequel or not. Seeing them learn from the phenomenal last game would have been incredible. ;_;
And yeah, I'm sad about Arkane Austin too. Prey was the best Immersive Sim I've ever played. Worthy of being a successor to System Shock.
why have you got Max from Tasting History at the end? bit weird.
Yeah what's up with that?
Well he apparently used to work at Disney before he got fired in 2020. Maybe it's something to do with that? A victim of pointless corporate worker cuts?
@@NeoSaturos123 Doubt it
The word "capitalism" was actually created by socialists to define multiple economic systems. They all had three distinct things in common: They all revolved around gaining capital, they all either all started or ended up corrupt and they all weren't communism (let alone the corrupt version Stalin created that is a far cry from what Marx wrote in his manifesto and especially far from the anarcho-communist pipe dream he envisioned). One of these systems was mercantilism, which fell out of favor because of the actions of the East India Company leading to the British Raj and partition of India, which made it wildly unpopular amongst the average person. In spite of this, as time went on, the system that replaced it (which I do not know the name of), the version of capitalism we have right now, is going in exactly the same direction. What we have isn't so much "late stage capitalism" as much as it is "the inevitable result of unchecked human greed and stupidity." It's all happened before and it will all happen again. No revolution is going to change that fact. Especially not with all the opportunists pretending to support the left for their own personal gain and all the people dumb enough to fall for their schemes.
I’m tired of having new reasons to boycott Microsoft. My reasons date back to the 90’s, and the only reason it doesn’t go back further is because I haven’t bothered looking. As far as I can tell it’s been built into it’s corporate structure from the ground up.
Other corporations may occasionally make worse decisions, but no corporation has proven itself to be so consistently EVIL.
"Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist” -David Attenborough
What remains especially mind-boggling to me is that we see actual examples of how a company can and should be run with places like Larian Studios, where the pursuit isn't ever-growing profit, but instead in ACTUAL growth of the company itself by investing in its workers and focusing on making great products in a market they specialize in. The pursuit of artificially inflated, ever-increasing profits by investor-driven companies like Microsoft is causing them to literally shrink, losing experienced workers and reducing both the quality and speed of their output because they rely on "cheap" contract labor to get anything done.
most execs will only look at the massive gap between Larian's games.
AAA gaming publishers are really showing how dynfunctional the profit incentive is, especially in combination with creative work. The hunt for ever growing profits is causing studios that otherwise would have been fine to shutter, regardless if their game is good or not.
"Games are to expensive to make" says the largest company on planet earth. With a market cap of a mere $3 trillion dollars.
Also the same company investes $10 billion into ChatGPT/OpenAI. Created MS Co-pilot etc. And in May 2024, announced a $3.3 billion investment to build an "artificial intelligence hub" in southeast Wisconsin.
Reminded of the old phrase "Infinite *growth* in a finite system is the philosophy of a cancer cell."
Little weird to see Max Miller out of nowhere there at the end...
I was thinking the same thing! He specifically left his corporate job for RUclips. Seems like he's the opposite of the problems Steph was pointing out.
@@Allanon6666 I would very much argue the same.
@@Allanon6666 They were using him as a reaction image
Proposal for any corporate higher up whose position contains the word "officer", "chief", or board member status:
You may only begin layoffs of people below your position IF all of you take a pay cut up to 99% first. This includes any bonuses, any stock options, any method of which you make income. If reducing your wages to that level is not enough, THEN you may consider layoffs.
If your salaries are high enough that firing you would save an entire dev team, then it's simple maths: fire one who made the decisions before the people who actually create the things that bring in revenue. This especially after the incident where ABK hired a new CFO with a 5 million dollar sign on bonus right before firing 800 people to prop up revenue.
It's funny how things just cant keep inexplicably growing. It's almost as if there are finite resources in the world.
What's the over/under that the studios being shuttered were also forced to crunch to meet arbitrary deadlines? The sheer amount of abuse being levied at game devs, who are told to grin and bear with it because they're following their "passions" is disgusting. Who ever decided to equate passion with suffering and precarity to begin with? I doubt it was ever the artists, and only ever the people profiting off of them. This is why we need a union. We don't just need the programmers, animators, musicians, designers, etc. to be safe against their own employer, we need a union that can organize an industry wide strike against publishers who pull this nonsense.
And then there is the Mr. Plinkett cameo that made me spit my drink. Wonderful!
eh I personally can't stand RLM.
I graduated high school in 2000. Just before graduation, and with too little time to take advantage of it, someone told me about a scholarship competition. It was like $1000 to write an essay on the importance of brand recognition/brand-name products. Even if I could've done it, I wouldn't have, because I'd've gone full Daria and explained the exact opposite of what the sponsor wanted.
Which is to say, it depresses me that these are all lessons we collectively learned generations ago, but we have to re-learn them as a whole every 15 minutes apparently. What a stupid species we are.
I can't wait for the Hi-Fi rush sequal made by people who have no idea how to make Hi-Fi- Rush but were assinged by Microsoft to do it for cheap.
Why did you speak this into existence 😢? And then the incels are gonna be mad because *insert woke thing here*
@@maybemablemaples2144 I didn't speak it into existance its already being worked on and you know it.
I remember reading that one of the reasons layoffs in the tech sector have been so high compared to other sectors is because the main investment in tech is staff and staff are much easier to hire and fire on a whim compared to say large investments into a factory. I genuinely believe a lot of this nonsense would stop if we simply had better labour protection laws. It shouldn't be more impactful to close a factory than it is to fire 1000s of people!
Literally the 2nd time in an hour we've seen that Matt Groening comic lol
That saints row 3 menu theme unexpectedly hit right in the feels
Over the past 20 years, XBOX has passed on:
- GTA III (Rockstar pitched it to them as an XBOX exclusive)
- Gyration motion controls (XBOX literally laughed the inventor out of the room, and so Nintendo bought the patent for the upcoming Wii console)
- Insomniac's Spiderman game (pitched by the developer as an XBOX exclusive)
- FF16 (same)
Plus at least one other really big fuckup I can't remember
Resident Evil 4
@danhectic5629 that's it!!!! LMAO
Didn't know that about GTA 3 or Spider-Man, fascinating. Xbox also turned down Heavy Rain cause they didn't like the plot about the kid being kidnapped(which might've been the fuckup you're thinking of), not a very smart move considering how well Quantic Dreams games sold.
Honestly i'm not the big on motion controls so I can't say that i'm too bummed about Xbox not going in that direction, in fact that was actually a big factor in me getting a 360 over a Wii as I was not at all sure about the motion controls thing.
FF16 I don't care about so kinda eh on that one.
@@jadedheartsz Over 5 million copies of heavy rain sold? I played it for a hour and my kid got run over while I was busy being a lost moron in the mall. Fffffk that game yo! Then the guy who made it went on to make detroit become human. Another game that wishes it was deeper than it actually is but this one is even worse lol. Aren't humans complex and silly the game gets old pretty quick if you ask me lol.
Also when are gamers going to realize that video game story lines, even the best one's are AZZ compared to something like better call saul so the bar is quite low lol. So this kind of a video game is going to have to do a lot more than promise a cute story to get me buying em up...
@@soyborne.bornmadeandundone1342 nah it's a good game you crazy. Detroit Become Human is also damn good you are insane.
When are elitists going to to realize how crappy and overrated the storylines in most prestige dramas are, Better Call Saul is alright but it didn't blow me away or touch me like some game stories did, certainly not the way Last of Us 2 did.
Hi, Sterling. You are the only bell I have ever clicked as of today because RUclips refuses to show your videos. Even after binging like 20 videos, it will recommend one I watched 10 minutes ago or an hour ago and when I don't click the same video I just watched again, it refuses to show any other videos
The closing remarks were especially poignant this week. Bravo and thank God as always for Steph!
To pile on…
I used to think that these soulless corporations simply didn’t care about the impact of layoffs on the morale of people who are still with the company. That they didn’t recognize that misery in a workplace (from seeing your friends and colleagues sacrificed to the god of short-term profit) has a negative impact on the quality and profitability of the company’s products.
Now I realize that this is all true, but it’s a feature, not a bug. These “leaders” love to rule by fear. The remaining workforce gets overworked and underpaid, because they are terrified they’ll be next. “I’m just grateful to still have a job” is the sign that corporate Stockholm Syndrome is operating as intended.
Keep pounding it, Steph.
Just wanted to say that the completely/complete Lee gag at 11:02 is funny as hell
Yeah the Fact that the Devs of High Fi Rush got Shuttered even after it was PRAISED to high heaven is very telling of how close we are to the CLIFF that is the AAA "industry" falling off said cliff. LONG LIVE INDIE AND AA GAMES!
Thank you for covering this. Every expansion is followed by a contraction, and in the contraction phase, only the companies expected to put revenue on the bottom line in this year's financial report are safe. Sorry Ninja Theory, you're next.
The sqeaking at the end sent my dogs into an absolute meltdown
12:57 Mr. Plinkett sighting!
I was writing a research paper on generative AI and its potential negative impact on the video games industry when Microsoft announced it was shuttering multiple studios, including Tango Gameworks. This announcement, and about a dozen news stories from this year alone about the mass firing of thousands of employees from across multiple studios, helped me argue that this is an industry that cannot be trusted with anything it gets its hands on. Publishers in the video game industry (and at least some notable developers, too) are plagued with an executive class that will do anything they can to obtain more money at the expense of both employees and customers alike.
Hi-Fi Rush is a brilliant, beautiful, joyous game, and to know that all the people who worked so hard on it--to both commercial success and critical acclaim--have been fired from jobs they are clearly excellent at and passionate about breaks my heart. I know it is not necessarily surprising, but it still hurts.
I believe that the video game industry is heading for a collapse as corporations run out of studios to sacrifice for short-term profit. There is no solace in that, as the executive class will be largely unaffected by the destruction of an industry their unceasing avarice and indifference drove into the abyss. The only losers are all of us who enjoy playing games and all of the people who care about making good games.
I wish I had a positive note to end this on. I can only advise that we all enjoy the games that we really love, the ones that connected with us in some way, and try our best to hold on to them. Because I don't know how many more of those kind of games we will be able to see in the future of this industry.
Yeah ! Bird is back !
I have to give this video a 10/10 for the "Life in Hell" comic reference. Absolutely brilliant.
What is the context for max miller looking sadly off-screen at 13:19 while talking about executives?
I came to the comments hoping someone would know!
@@TheElzingaiv i think Miller lost his job at disney during the pandemic while Disney was collecting supportmoney from the state to keep him, but luckily he started his channel
@@PonyusTheWolfdude Nah, he quit the job because his channel was doing well enough to sustain him. He essentially had to choose between keeping his job at Disney or to run his channel full-time, and he chose his channel.
Editor here. I was watching the episode about "perpetual stew" and paused the video to go do something. When I came back I liked how Max's face looked like he was having a concerned thought about something, so I screen capped it. I have a ton of screen caps with similar origin stories in my "Jimquisition Images" folder.
@@ZMannZilla Cool, thank you for explaining! :D
"games are too expensive to make" is actually code for "investors think they'd get higher returns if they invested into something else, even though we're making piles of money"
Am I missing something on the Max Miller bit at the end ?
It was certainly a surprise to see him in there but I am also struggling to figure out why he's there at all!
was thinking the same thing!
it's certainly not a stock image!
@@T.E.S.S. chicken stock maybe
Editor here. God this question is all over the comments, lol.
Anyways I was watching the episode about "perpetual stew" and paused the video to go do something. When I came back I liked how Max's face looked like he was having a concerned thought about something, so I screen capped it. I have a ton of screen caps with similar origin stories in my "Jimquisition Images" folder.
That's the thing about "going public". Sure, list your company on the stock exchange and sell shares. Just know, that from that exact point in time and space, from then on and forevermore, you MUST post increased profits and growth every fiscal year quarter OR ELSE face ruination and destruction. Maybe last quarter you had an unprecedented and extraordinary surge in sales thanks to a game receiving a handful of great reviews and going viral? Well, better somehow beat it next quarter or you're fucked. TURBOfucked, in fact. Everyone fired and the studio shuttered.
"But we made strong profits every year for 17 years, then we had one extraordinary quarter because something we made had viral sales and now you want to kill us?"
Yes.
Do better next quarter or join the queue for foodstamps.
I saw that Multiversus was “releasing” and I had three questions:
1. Multiversus still exists?
2. Hasn’t this game been fully playable for, like, years now?
3. How many more shitty games are they going to try to save by cramming the Joker in it?
To the first two questions, the answer is no. Last June they announced the open beta was ending and the game went offline.
Don't worry, no one playing the game knew it was a beta either...
They called it a beta since day one. They also happily took your money.
@@AkumaKristian Hey truth stretcher, you could have told him that Multiversus was coming back in 6 days but you chose not to mention it for agenda reason.
@@floatingkites2420 Chill mate, I just figured that's what they meant when they said the game was "releasing" and didn't think I needed to reiterate that.
Honestly, Multiversus wasn't my cup of tea but I don't think the game is that bad or anything. Go ahead and have fun with it.
The great thing about the Arya v Bugs rant is that Warner just announced they’re adding Jason Voorhees to Multiversus today to really put that R rated stamp on their cartoony brawler gamer…
"Games are just too expensive to make" Bruh like 99.9% of my fav games of the last few years have been indie games. Just make smaller, cheaper games. It shouldn't be that hard lmao
Not to mention we are talking about literally the largest company on planet earth. A $3 trillion dollar market cap. But they can't afford to keep these studios open. Got $10 billion laying around to throw at ChatGPT/OpenAI though. And in May 2024, Microsoft announced a $3.3 billion investment to build an artificial intelligence hub in southeast Wisconsin.
Games would still be too expensive to make. Anything other than a zero dollar investment with literally infinite returns is too expensive to make. They don't want to make games, they want a money fountain.
I'm actually offended she used long term as an excuse when it's all about bending over backwards to worship those short term profits.
Microsoft has disappointed me so much, I bought a Series X despite all my friends having moved over to the PS5. I had hope for Microsoft. All they had to do was make good games
Making good games is hard and requires investment, when has Microsoft done this responsibly since.... Before 360 ended? So you kind of fucked yourself
Sony isn't being any better right now.
Sell it. Try to recoup some money. Save for a good GPU or a gaming laptop. You'll be better off. Steam sales, better gaming quality, the open seas of piracy, etc.
I didn't buy either. I am done with consoles and modern games
PS5 and Sony didn't end up any better, arguably worse. Glad I moved onto a PC a few years back instead.
Publishers don't want to make games anymore. They want to make "services" that can be infinitely monetized and unplugged at any moment without warning or repercussion. They don't want games to be a product you own anymore.
I find it so painfully ironic that the game about pushing back against corporate greed and valuing progress and comradery had its studio shut down because of corporate greed. Congrats Microsoft for being a perfect example of exactly what the game's narrative is criticising.
It’s kinda interesting how Microsoft after all these decades hasn’t really changed. It like what they did to ARM, Apple and Amiga with Risk Machines or with OS that led to monopoly charge.
Being arsonists to a sector to reduce threats of competition with disintegration of sector.
As someone who just started a career in the game industry and got laid off promptly almost 6 months ago I can say the industry is dying. Most of the people I worked with no matter the status are either laid off trying to get work or they have moved onto a new industry. This is alarming.
Max Miller isn't an Xbox exec, he actually kicks ass! I am utterly confused
Editor here. I was watching the episode about "perpetual stew" and paused the video to go do something. When I came back I liked how Max's face looked like he was having a concerned thought about something, so I screen capped it. I have a ton of screen caps with similar origin stories in my "Jimquisition Images" folder.
I was gonna say, I think the facial expression was why that got grabbed. That was still crazy to see.
I was looking for someone to mention Max, I assumed the confused look was the point. Great dude.
@@ZMannZilla
Zilla!
you sweet child!
What is that at 12:04 ??? I suddenly remember watching it when I was 3 years old. Such a nostalgia punch to the testcls. What is it? Where can I get it?
Please please please help a poor soul out.
@MH-hu5pi is from one of the Minds Eye videos. The second one I think.
I'm starting to think Hi-Fi Rush wasn't supposed to be a hit. Like, they wanted it to go out and die, and when it survived, they took the devs out back and popped them. How dare it be a success when the big Bethesda game failed!