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'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.
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'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.