Hi-Fi Rush was basically the only outright "success" Xbox Studios has had in over a decade. While not a massive money maker, I know it made well over expectations and had actual positive buzz for once.
Shutting that down in a throwaway line in the same email you shut down the retards behind Redfall shows just how fucking retarded everyone in this company is.
They stealth launched it during a game award stream.
They made it digital only for a good 90% of it's life. Only recently did it get physical releases (in the last 30 days) on Xbox Series X and PS5. It's still not on Switch. And given their "It'll be available on all current platforms that it's on" it might not get to Switch at all.
It was day one on gamepass, so you never had to buy it digitally anyway.
There was zero marketing for it that I ever saw outside of the game award stream, and when it had a splash page at launch on Steam (Same day as the gaming stream)
I mean, it's kinda obvious why it failed. Which is a shame because it's got near zero ESG crap in it, (there's one danger hair in it that rescues you at least once) and it plays genuinely well. It's a bit campy here and there, but it's got a fun charm to it.
Did it even fail though? Its hard to know because Xbox counts Gamepass downloads with sales, but between the two it had over 3 million "sales". Which is massive for a AA game. And considering it had no marketing budget at all, they had a much lower bar to reach to succeed.
I doubt it was a success on the level that everyone got bonuses that year because of it, but its hard to imagine it actually failed.
I do believe they did sabotage it. Maybe not intentionally, but it feels as though it should have done better. 3 million should have been a success, even for a AA title.
Last August they were praising it. MS said that they were happy with it.
They closed the studio that made it not even ten months saying that.
It's the whole Square Enix shit all over again. They just flatly don't know how to manage that product and too focused on AAA grandeur. HI-Fi was perfect for a niche rhythm beatem up franchise. But nah. That's not AAA.
What's even dumber is that the game was a shadow drop, so they didn't even have to spend much of anything on marketing or promotion. So it had a lot more raw revenue than anything else too.
But you don't understand, they need way more focus on making TES lame and gay for the modern audience, and those fucks with their innovative 'fun' were ruining the lame and gay culture Bethesda has spent so much time cultivating.
TES6 is going to be absolutely fucking AWFUL, and I don't know if I'm terrified of seeing how horribly it's going to play/function or excited for how angry everyone will be about it. I'm ignoring the disgusting normies that will eat it up anyway, they don't count, we know they will eat the slop. I'm fully expecting racial propaganda and a Guild Wars 2 style 'typical fascist behavior' line drop.
It's going to be littered with Modern Day proselytizing, there's no way in the world it will have any respectable quality or staying power. Starfield showed us all what we have to look forward to from more Bethesda products.
It will be about as bad as Starfield but probably even more woke. It will be destroying a beloved existing IP and is a long-awaited sequel. The shit show will be Biblical.
It's because Microsoft spend 70 billion dollars to buy Activision-Blizzard-King and Bethesda. Microsoft wants that money now. Having medium or small sized game companies not turning much profit (either by being small successes or a little in the red) was previously not an issue because the real goal was to keep up Game Pass subscriptions.
But now Microsoft has this debt, but the market is saturated so there is no way to get a huge load of new Game Pass subscriptions. So Microsoft wants everything to be either making Call of Duty numbers, or to cut things down to the bone by closing entire game studios.
This is also why Microsoft refused to stop production of Redfall even though Arkane Austin warned that it was a mess: because IF Redfall was a success they would be making gangbusters off of a multiplayer game filled with MTX.
Redfall failed, to no one's surprise but Microsoft, so gotta make money this year some other way, so let's close down the studio. Tango, similarly, had a modest success with Hi-Fu Rush and pity that's not Call of Duty numbers, so they were put on the chopping block too.
A lot of people want this big AAA game companies to fail, but to prevent their own failure the companies will sacrifice everything below them first.
Losing Tango Gameworks sucks, though. Maybe after Starfield they could shutter Bethesda instead? After how thoroughly they’ve raped and dismembered Fallout it’s nicer than anything they deserve.
Shutting Bethesda down and letting competent developers handle their IP is about the only way to handle them. Nobody still at Bethesda has what it takes to actually make good games any more.
As an OG TES and Fallout player who prefers Daggerfall and FO1+2, I can admit Skyrim was a good, if simplified, game and Fallout 3 was a fun adaption into 3D for the series. Fallout 4 is derivative. Taken alone it's fine but anyone could have created that with the wealth of assets and IP they were building on, so it's not a sign of competence. So sometime between Morrowind and FO4 is when they lost their mojo.
In the history of "safe bets" I'd say that has to be one of the safest. All of the real talent got chased off by DEI faggotry or retired and was replaced with DEI faggots and other equally worthless token employees.
What competent developers are left though realistically speaking? We can debate whether New Vegas and past Fallout games had actually good stories and dialogue and such, but they look like masterpieces compared to the garbage we get today.
A fair question. Unfortunately, I have no idea. That's why I didn't name anyone specific. It honestly feels hopeless so long as microsoft owns these series. Expect DEI, anti-White racism, pro-faggotry, other degeneracy and other ESG compliant bullshit to continue, regardless of who's name is listed as developer.
In an email to staff sent by Matt Booty, head of Xbox Game Studios, Microsoft blamed the cuts on a “reprioritization of titles and resources”. The email, verified by IGN, is below:
Today I’m sharing changes we are making to our Bethesda and ZeniMax teams. These changes are grounded in prioritizing high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda’s portfolio of blockbuster games and beloved worlds which you have nurtured over many decades.
To double down on these franchises and invest to build new ones requires us to look across the business to identify the opportunities that are best positioned for success. This reprioritization of titles and resources means a few teams will be realigned to others and that some of our colleagues will be leaving us.
Here are the changes going into effect:
Arkane Austin – This studio will close with some members of the team joining other studios to work on projects across Bethesda. Arkane Austin has a history of making impactful and innovative games and it is a pedigree that everyone should be proud of. Redfall’s previous update will be its last as we end all development on the game. The game and its servers will remain online for players to enjoy and we will provide make-good offers to players who purchased the Hero DLC.
Alpha Dog Studios – This studio will also close. We appreciate the team’s creativity in bringing Doom to new players. Mighty Doom will be sunset on August 7 and we will be turning off the ability for players to make any purchases in the game.
Tango Gameworks – Tango Gameworks will also close. We are thankful for their contributions to Bethesda and players around the world. Hi-Fi Rush will continue to be available to players on the platforms it is today.
Roundhouse Games – The team at Roundhouse Games will be joining ZeniMax Online Studios (ZOS). Roundhouse has played a key role in many of our recent game launches and bringing them into ZOS to work on The Elder Scrolls Online will mean we can do even more to grow the world that millions of players call home.
With this consolidation of our Bethesda studio teams, so that we can invest more deeply in our portfolio of games and new IP, a small number of roles across select Bethesda publishing and corporate teams will also be eliminated.
Those whose roles will be impacted will be notified today, and we ask that you please treat your departing colleagues with respect and compassion. We will provide our full support to those who are impacted in today’s notifications and through their transitions, including severance benefits informed by local laws.
These changes are not a reflection of the creativity and skill of the talented individuals at these teams or the risks they took to try new things. I acknowledge that these changes are also disruptive to the various support teams across ZeniMax and Bethesda that bring our games to market. We are making these tough decisions to create capacity to increase investment in other parts of our portfolio and focus on our priority games.
Bethesda remains one of the key pillars of Xbox with a strong portfolio of amazing games and thriving communities. As we look to the future, there is an impressive line-up of games on the horizon. In 2024 alone we have Starfield Shattered Space, Fallout 76 Skyline Valley, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, and The Elder Scrolls Online’s Golden Road. As we align our plans and resources to best set ourselves up for success in this complex and changing industry, our teams across Arkane Lyon, Bethesda Game Studios, id Software, MachineGames, ZeniMax Online Studios and the Bethesda publishing and corporate teams will be well-positioned to build new IP, explore new game concepts, and expand on our existing franchises.
- Matt
The concept was vampires take over a New England town, so it had potential. There's four characters you can choose from (only one of which being a white male). So you don't see afro chick at all if you don't pick her and play alone.
I played it for a couple days because it was on Game Pass. Other than NPCs in the bases, the town is completely deserted, so the entire town is like 20 people with only a few of those being quest givers. The majority of the story is told from notes and shit you find lying around.
Then the enemies were stupid retarded, like attacking nothing or standing there while you beat them to death retarded.
The whole thing reeked of corporate design by committee AAA titles.
Nah, they know they are not reaching more players. It's not about that. It's about flooding the market with this crap and then bundling up and removing legacy media into digital back catalogues as part of their "all digital future" that they touted about more than a decade ago.
We're seeing every major media company do this; sort of like how Disney is retroactively censoring some older material they move over to their Disney+ platform, or how Blizzard has been doing the same -- "updating" legacy games so you can only access them on their latest digital service.
It's death by a thousand cuts, and every time they make a woke disasterpiece, the current generation will mock and laugh at it, but the youth generation will grow up only knowing about these woke disasters. They will be inundated with it at every turn -- we even see it now where plenty of people praise a lot of terrible media made within the last decade because it's all they know.
Just like there is a startling amount of people who think those Jedi Survivor games are good, because they're the most recent Star Wars adventure games that some young gamers feel are competently designed.
Lots of young players also don't entirely mind Starfield either. When I read their comments and ask them about older space-faring RPGs like the original KotoR, or Mass Effect, or Anachronix, they have never played these games. So all they know are the terrible outings made by woke companies.
Hence, Microsoft will just ride through the wave of the current, jaded gamer abandoning the brand, and will suffice with the newer generation growing up into horrible woke media being the norm.
They have all made good games, but then middle managers demanded crap they could show they led. So, we see a bunch of games with boxes ticked by companies that don't make those games anyway. It wasn't going to end well even with a good crew.
It's recommended to pirate Hi-Fi rush because the game has a lot of licensed music, which means Microsoft will likely 1. let it expire entirely, causing the game to be delisted from digital stores or 2. do a clown job of scrubbing the game of its music and replaced by public domain shit, ruining how the game is meant to be experienced
Hi-Fi Rush was basically the only outright "success" Xbox Studios has had in over a decade. While not a massive money maker, I know it made well over expectations and had actual positive buzz for once.
Shutting that down in a throwaway line in the same email you shut down the retards behind Redfall shows just how fucking retarded everyone in this company is.
I think they sabotaged Hi-Fi Rush.
They stealth launched it during a game award stream.
They made it digital only for a good 90% of it's life. Only recently did it get physical releases (in the last 30 days) on Xbox Series X and PS5. It's still not on Switch. And given their "It'll be available on all current platforms that it's on" it might not get to Switch at all.
It was day one on gamepass, so you never had to buy it digitally anyway.
There was zero marketing for it that I ever saw outside of the game award stream, and when it had a splash page at launch on Steam (Same day as the gaming stream)
I mean, it's kinda obvious why it failed. Which is a shame because it's got near zero ESG crap in it, (there's one danger hair in it that rescues you at least once) and it plays genuinely well. It's a bit campy here and there, but it's got a fun charm to it.
Did it even fail though? Its hard to know because Xbox counts Gamepass downloads with sales, but between the two it had over 3 million "sales". Which is massive for a AA game. And considering it had no marketing budget at all, they had a much lower bar to reach to succeed.
I doubt it was a success on the level that everyone got bonuses that year because of it, but its hard to imagine it actually failed.
I do believe they did sabotage it. Maybe not intentionally, but it feels as though it should have done better. 3 million should have been a success, even for a AA title.
Last August they were praising it. MS said that they were happy with it.
They closed the studio that made it not even ten months saying that.
Kinda like sabotaging ff7 and stellar blade by making them ps5 exclusive. We will never know the true sell data if it got released on all platforms.
Not many people is gonna drop 500 dollars to play a game.
It's the whole Square Enix shit all over again. They just flatly don't know how to manage that product and too focused on AAA grandeur. HI-Fi was perfect for a niche rhythm beatem up franchise. But nah. That's not AAA.
What's even dumber is that the game was a shadow drop, so they didn't even have to spend much of anything on marketing or promotion. So it had a lot more raw revenue than anything else too.
But you don't understand, they need way more focus on making TES lame and gay for the modern audience, and those fucks with their innovative 'fun' were ruining the lame and gay culture Bethesda has spent so much time cultivating.
TES6 is going to be absolutely fucking AWFUL, and I don't know if I'm terrified of seeing how horribly it's going to play/function or excited for how angry everyone will be about it. I'm ignoring the disgusting normies that will eat it up anyway, they don't count, we know they will eat the slop. I'm fully expecting racial propaganda and a Guild Wars 2 style 'typical fascist behavior' line drop.
It's going to be littered with Modern Day proselytizing, there's no way in the world it will have any respectable quality or staying power. Starfield showed us all what we have to look forward to from more Bethesda products.
It will be about as bad as Starfield but probably even more woke. It will be destroying a beloved existing IP and is a long-awaited sequel. The shit show will be Biblical.
And pronouns!
...and vitiligo.
Redguard Revolution! Fight the power, brother. Daedra did nothing wrong.
It's because Microsoft spend 70 billion dollars to buy Activision-Blizzard-King and Bethesda. Microsoft wants that money now. Having medium or small sized game companies not turning much profit (either by being small successes or a little in the red) was previously not an issue because the real goal was to keep up Game Pass subscriptions.
But now Microsoft has this debt, but the market is saturated so there is no way to get a huge load of new Game Pass subscriptions. So Microsoft wants everything to be either making Call of Duty numbers, or to cut things down to the bone by closing entire game studios.
This is also why Microsoft refused to stop production of Redfall even though Arkane Austin warned that it was a mess: because IF Redfall was a success they would be making gangbusters off of a multiplayer game filled with MTX.
Redfall failed, to no one's surprise but Microsoft, so gotta make money this year some other way, so let's close down the studio. Tango, similarly, had a modest success with Hi-Fu Rush and pity that's not Call of Duty numbers, so they were put on the chopping block too.
A lot of people want this big AAA game companies to fail, but to prevent their own failure the companies will sacrifice everything below them first.
Lol Matt Booty? No way.
Losing Tango Gameworks sucks, though. Maybe after Starfield they could shutter Bethesda instead? After how thoroughly they’ve raped and dismembered Fallout it’s nicer than anything they deserve.
Shutting Bethesda down and letting competent developers handle their IP is about the only way to handle them. Nobody still at Bethesda has what it takes to actually make good games any more.
when did they, morrowind?
As an OG TES and Fallout player who prefers Daggerfall and FO1+2, I can admit Skyrim was a good, if simplified, game and Fallout 3 was a fun adaption into 3D for the series. Fallout 4 is derivative. Taken alone it's fine but anyone could have created that with the wealth of assets and IP they were building on, so it's not a sign of competence. So sometime between Morrowind and FO4 is when they lost their mojo.
I wanna see it too.
I'd wager that description applies to every major studio in the industry right now.
In the history of "safe bets" I'd say that has to be one of the safest. All of the real talent got chased off by DEI faggotry or retired and was replaced with DEI faggots and other equally worthless token employees.
What competent developers are left though realistically speaking? We can debate whether New Vegas and past Fallout games had actually good stories and dialogue and such, but they look like masterpieces compared to the garbage we get today.
A fair question. Unfortunately, I have no idea. That's why I didn't name anyone specific. It honestly feels hopeless so long as microsoft owns these series. Expect DEI, anti-White racism, pro-faggotry, other degeneracy and other ESG compliant bullshit to continue, regardless of who's name is listed as developer.
His last name sounds like the place he puts any regard for quality, creativity, or depth at the current Xbox management.
Arkane.. those retards gonna fuck up other teams lol.
I didn't realize the updated this game at all. It pretty much was DOA.
The only thing I know about red fall is that it had a black woman with an annoying afro on the cover of the game box.
That’s an immediate hard pass no matter the context.
The concept was vampires take over a New England town, so it had potential. There's four characters you can choose from (only one of which being a white male). So you don't see afro chick at all if you don't pick her and play alone.
I played it for a couple days because it was on Game Pass. Other than NPCs in the bases, the town is completely deserted, so the entire town is like 20 people with only a few of those being quest givers. The majority of the story is told from notes and shit you find lying around.
Then the enemies were stupid retarded, like attacking nothing or standing there while you beat them to death retarded.
The whole thing reeked of corporate design by committee AAA titles.
I have been waiting for Arkane to be shut down since they brought Anita Sarkeesian in to consult. Good riddance.
Unfortunately that was Akane Lyon, not Arkane Austin. Austin got shitcanned while Lyon is making the Marvel's Blade game.
Microsoft is going to inject woke into any games they make, harder and harder, under the misguided hope to reach more players.
Instead, they will reach fewer and fewer of the boys and men age 12-50 that actually buy and play games.
Nah, they know they are not reaching more players. It's not about that. It's about flooding the market with this crap and then bundling up and removing legacy media into digital back catalogues as part of their "all digital future" that they touted about more than a decade ago.
We're seeing every major media company do this; sort of like how Disney is retroactively censoring some older material they move over to their Disney+ platform, or how Blizzard has been doing the same -- "updating" legacy games so you can only access them on their latest digital service.
It's death by a thousand cuts, and every time they make a woke disasterpiece, the current generation will mock and laugh at it, but the youth generation will grow up only knowing about these woke disasters. They will be inundated with it at every turn -- we even see it now where plenty of people praise a lot of terrible media made within the last decade because it's all they know.
Just like there is a startling amount of people who think those Jedi Survivor games are good, because they're the most recent Star Wars adventure games that some young gamers feel are competently designed.
Lots of young players also don't entirely mind Starfield either. When I read their comments and ask them about older space-faring RPGs like the original KotoR, or Mass Effect, or Anachronix, they have never played these games. So all they know are the terrible outings made by woke companies.
Hence, Microsoft will just ride through the wave of the current, jaded gamer abandoning the brand, and will suffice with the newer generation growing up into horrible woke media being the norm.
Never doubt how delusional a liberal woman in corporate can be.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/791/087/e51
They have all made good games, but then middle managers demanded crap they could show they led. So, we see a bunch of games with boxes ticked by companies that don't make those games anyway. It wasn't going to end well even with a good crew.
It's recommended to pirate Hi-Fi rush because the game has a lot of licensed music, which means Microsoft will likely 1. let it expire entirely, causing the game to be delisted from digital stores or 2. do a clown job of scrubbing the game of its music and replaced by public domain shit, ruining how the game is meant to be experienced