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[Heshinsi]

We don't know the story yet.

It is way too easy to slate MS.

Perhaps Platinum could not get the job done? Who knows? Who is talking?

Three devs in less than two years, starts to look a lot like a pattern. That Phantom Dust story, Jesus Christ.

 

[Net]

Where there's this much smoke, there's likely to be fire.

Weird how Scalebound caused all this fallout.

One does not simply fuck an industry legend like Kamiya without repercussions.

He's up there in stature with the likes of Kojima and Sakurai. Names every gamer knows.

 

[Withnail]

I'm sure Phil will wear a nice t-shirt and talk it straight.

FWIW I'm 100% sure that Spencer is a straight up decent guy and a positive contributor to the industry.

The problem is that because of the size and nature of MS they will have teams of crack lawyers fighting to the wall over every contract clause, and MBA grads applying project management processes to everything, etc etc, and there's probably very little Spencer can do to influence what happens.

I think at a corporate level within MS there is probably a lack of understanding of the creative media and that sometimes you just need to give auteurs some breathing room - even if it goes against the standard practice.

 

[deadscreensky]

There's so little we know about these projects, it's hard to tell. Like I feel really bad for the folks that worked on the Phantom Dust remake, I was looking forward to that, but we only have their side of the story. Even assuming everything they said was 100% true (and I'm not suggesting it wasn't, though that would be surprising just with how perspective and memory works), it's still only a small view of a much larger object. There could have been so many problems in the mix, only some of them totally on MS.

Burned devs might be able to go around telling horror stories, but big publishers like MS have a professional reputation to maintain and generally don't say anything substantial, even in defense. Maybe Scalebound was a total disaster, maybe Platinum pulled a Level 5 or Atlus -- I'm not suggesting this is actually the case, only an obvious possibility -- but MS isn't going to go out and say that. We only hear one side at best.

My guess is much of it is MS's fault, or at the least they should have managed whatever problems that did occur better because they are the publisher. But again, we know so little, I wouldn't bet on any non-insider having a particularly accurate view.

 

[ShockingAlberto]

The remake is obviously gone... but the actual original game, Phantom Dust is coming out this year on XBO/Win10.

Not sure why people talk about it like it's gone. I'd rather have the rerelease of a known quantity than a reimagining of it which could be terrible.

Because it is important we only get one thing and nothing more.

Let's never release new games, they could be bad.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Oh that too. Though with MS's PR, it's hard to place the blame on fans for getting excited.

They show a very short vagueish trailer with a launch date 1.5 years away and people lose their shits from that moment on? Do people find that trailer filled with subliminal messages or something ?

 

[Grassy]

Im off the Xbox train.

We've taken a lot of shit, but it was Forza 6's bullshit "Ultimate Edition" that broke me. The Ultimate Edition did not include the Car Pass. Oh, and the Car Pass doesn't guarantee you every car pack, because there are specialized car packs not included in the Car Pass.

It is $90 fucking dollars and with that, riddled with little annoying notification of micro transaction (oh, this cool car for $2, we'll just add it right here in the roster of selectable cars so you will know you're missing content every time you browse for cars) and you will never get the "complete" game.

Bull crap.

You're angry and confused about nothing. The Ultimate Edition absolutely contains the 'Car Pass' which it clearly states is 6 months worth of car packs, anything after that must be paid for separately including the Nascar and Porsche expansion packs...

Anyway, on-topic, it's going to be interesting hearing the fallout of this from both sides.

 

[Shpeshal Nick]

FWIW I'm 100% sure that Spencer is a straight up decent guy and a positive contributor to the industry.

The problem is that because of the size and nature of MS they will have teams of crack lawyers fighting to the wall over every contract clause, and MBA grads applying project management processes to everything, etc etc, and there's probably very little Spencer can do to influence what happens.

I think at a corporate level within MS there is probably a lack of understanding of the creative media and that sometimes you just need to give auteurs some breathing room - even if it goes against the standard practice.

I tried that and Spencer replied to me on twitter that he refuses to pull the "higher ups" card and that it's all on him.

 

[Rymuth]

I was working on a similar thread. The gist of it is this: When Sony ends a party relationship, it's usually amicable.

Rime: Still coming to PS4

Evolution Studio: Gave them time to find a new publisher, Rushy and company spoke well about Sony and did one final patch for Driveclub as well as commenting that their next game will be on Ps4.


On the other hand, with Microsoft

- Crytek: wanted the IP, relationship went to shit

- Insomniac: Wouldn't let them bring SSOD over to Steam, let alone W10 store

- Access Games: No D4 season 2 as promised

- Darkside Games: Unreasonable demands, caused them to be shuttered

- Square-Enix: Reneged on their Tomb Raider marketing deal, accuses Yoshi-P of doing business deals with Sony to keep FFXIV from Xbox

- Remedy: Cuts them off, ends up with an interview putting the lack of Alan Wake 2 on Remedy despite Remedy outright saying they want to make it

- Indie Developers: Both Phil and Chris Charla are on record, not so subtly calling any indie developer liars because 'there is no parity clause'

- Platinum: 'nuff said

MS with 3rd parties this gen

 

[Orca]

One does not simply fuck an industry legend like Kamiya without repercussions.

He's up there in stature with the likes of Kojima and Sakurai. Names every gamer knows.

Kojima is the only name there that I would say many gamers - not even most - would know. There's a whole world outside of GAF.

 

[Spiral Insanity]

RDR 2 with the best visuals will sell Scorpio. Picture the sun setting in HDR and a nice folk song playing....

SOLD.

What is this doing here?

 

[Hoo-doo]

FWIW I'm 100% sure that Spencer is a straight up decent guy and a positive contributor to the industry.

The problem is that because of the size and nature of MS they will have teams of crack lawyers fighting to the wall over every contract clause, and MBA grads applying project management processes to everything, etc etc, and there's probably very little Spencer can do to influence what happens.

I think at a corporate level within MS there is probably a lack of understanding of the creative media and that sometimes you just need to give auteurs some breathing room - even if it goes against the standard practice.

I don't think Spencer is a bad guy either.

Microsoft is just a slow lumbering corporate giant that really doesn't give much fucks about its gaming division, and Spencer doesn't have the influence to do anything about that.
If he's having to juggle heavy budget restraints (like a lot of sources say he has to) he's going to have to make hard calls like this and be on the hook for it too.

It's going to get extremely hard to run the Xbox platform when the higher ups don't give a rat's ass about the entire division and investors would love to see it sold off. Next few years are going to be crucial.

 

[KampferZeon]

Uhm.. actually he has a point, I work as a contractor for a big company which has a very limited headcount, therefore they can't hire internal employees, so they hire IT consultant companies for IT services.

more from the link ...

not saying you are wrong but I just think

Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon are supposedly a Microsoft funded 3rd party exclusive.

everyone would think Money / Budget shouldn't be a concern when Microsoft was spending their warchest at the start of the 360 era.

We couldn’t use Microsoft employees to complete the projects because their overhead was very expensive. So we had no choice but to create a separate company. … It was a paper company just to hire developers.

So it came to this point where it was like … we just weren’t going to get the people we needed within Microsoft, so it would be better to spin the team off into a separate company. But creating a company from scratch would be risky, so we would like to have somebody ‘sponsor.’ And that’s where they found Cavia, who was willing to take the team on and sort of be a sibling of our team. [Even then] it was very difficult to convince people to move over.So despite having this new company … we were just calling it NewCo at the time, before it became feelplus — and although we had this shell of the company to work with, we still couldn’t get our devs. And I don’t know who got wind of it first, but … there was a role-playing game that was being developed by a company called Nautilus, who was a subsidiary of … Aruze, who was primarily into pachinko games in Japan. …I think they were no longer interested in maintaining that team. They were saying, “If anybody’s interested in taking this team on, we’re here to listen.” And they had a full dev team there, and the dev team had been making role-playing games at that point. So the powers that be thought, “Hey, why not just combine those guys with existing Microsoft guys and we now have double the capacity, so look out.”Well, unfortunately it didn’t, because the guys from Nautilus — I guess they were kind of given the cold shoulder. I mean, they were essentially being kicked out on the street, although they didn’t end up being on the street because we picked them up so quickly, but they were kind of treated that way, so they were very suspicious of the guys from Microsoft. And especially the devs were absolutely not interested in using Unreal. They were saying, “You cannot trust code written by a third party. We have no idea what’s in it. We won’t be able to customize it.” Yadda, yadda, yadda. So we have 10 engineers from Nautilus, 10 plus engineers from Microsoft, and they’re not talking to each other.

 

[Majestic 12]

But Scorpio?

 

[Head.spawn]

Because it is important we only get one thing and nothing more.

Let's never release new games, they could be bad.

Did you get drunk and reply to the wrong person?

 

[Dash_Riprock]

MS with 3rd parties this gen

Worst part? I remember a certain Japanese game company treating third parties like shit and then being humbled when they all left to a more amicable one.

History repeats.

 

[Jonnax]

“Let’s say that they do a job that’s not good, or a job that they didn’t finish, or a job that was way late. I’ll deduct from their contract, absolutely. That’s what the country should be doing.”

Looks like Microsoft's game studio management people went to the Donald Trump school of business.

 

[Augemitbutter]

this is all so very depressing.

 

[wolfhunter777]

Don't look good

 

[theclaw135]

You know how it goes. "eggs in one basket". If these third parties are staking their very company's fate to a single project, they're asking for trouble.

Naturally first party studios don't have that luxury. Microsoft deserves no sympathy for not finding other work for, let's say Lionhead, than to milk Fable dry.

 

[Net]

You know how it goes. "eggs in one basket". If these third parties are staking their very company's fate to a single project, they're asking for trouble.

Naturally first party studios don't have that luxury. Microsoft deserves no sympathy for not finding other work for, let's say Lionhead, than to milk Fable dry.

Many if not most independent developers live contract to contract. Any cancellation can be devastating.

That's why independent developers are a dying breed.

 

[Bits N Pieces]

Good thing you've come to set the record straight then,

Spoiler

lol.

I cant, I don't know what happened. Do you, does the OP?

 

[TheWasTheJoke]

MS vs Sony is like DC vs Marvel at the moment, there's a clear lack of vision, and while I like Phil and he has done many positive things, exclusives have been dissapointing. Scalebound was the game that could pull out the JPRG/AA Sony crowd and now..
Sadface

 

[Coxy100]

But Scorpio?

Ok?

 

[GameAddict411]

This will definitely impact MS significantly, and I think that the management team at MS don't even realize how deep the rabbit hole is. This story has been blowing up all over the media and it will not only piss off so many gamers, but might also might prevent MS from making future deals with other smaller(or in this case a medium size) developers. I would highly doubt any small start up studio would want to work with MS after what they did to darkside studios. I know that corporation only care about profits, but I don't think it ehtical to push people well beyond their initial agreements and also decide the fate of the dozens of people just out of the blue without taking responsibility.

 

[SolarMystic]

I find it funny people think this is a thing unique to Microsoft.

Welcome to the modern AAA console games industry. Perhaps the closures and cancellations Sony did a while back has already escaped people's minds.

 

[icespide]

I find it funny people think this is a thing unique to Microsoft.

Welcome to the modern AAA console games industry. Perhaps the closures and cancellations Sony did a while back has already escaped people's minds.

when was the last time Sony canceled a major 3rd party AAA exclusive that has had multiple stage showings?

 

[Harlequin]

I don't deny it happened mind you. And if it happened, MS are assholes. But christ at that type of scope creep being able to be added into the dev cycle without some massive push back or lawsuits.

Lawsuits like that are expensive. A small studio which has just lost their only project probably wouldn't be able to afford suing a company like Microsoft. Even if they have a legitimate case, Microsoft will just drag it out till they've run out of money. I mean, Human Head almost certainly had legal grounds for suing the crap out of Bethesda after the whole Prey 2 debacle but they didn't because they would've never been able to afford it.

 

[Coxy100]

People seem to forget there are two sides to these contracts. Nobody is forcing anybody to make a deal with Microsoft and if they didn't like the terms or felt things were unfair / unrealistic before they signed they should not have agreed and signed.

This is how I feel to.

 

[Daschysta]

This is how I feel to.

It's not a good look for MS logically devs will just stop signing contracts with them for exclusives. A publisher always has leverage, doesn't mean they should abuse it, partivularly when they have competitors.

 

[OléGunner]

But Scorpio?

All the teraflops™.

I find it funny people think this is a thing unique to Microsoft.

Welcome to the modern AAA console games industry. Perhaps the closures and cancellations Sony did a while back has already escaped people's minds.

I think it's just all the recent cancellation kerfuffle's since E3 2014.
Sure Sony has had to also make tough decisions but that's usually after they see a project through to completion e.g. Driveclub, Playstation All Stars.

At least Stigs cancelled project at SSM was never revealed publicly so the fallout isn't massively played out in the news and forums.

But yeah this scenario isn't unique to MS, they've just faced a lot of these issues the past couple years and now their exclusive portfolio is a little light but still ok imo for hardcore Xbox fans.

 

[Hypereides]

Just to add, there's been rumors circulating on 4chan, of Microsoft meddling with Crytek's, 343's and Rare's development and design proces.

Which might explain why some games (Ryse, Banjo & Kazooie, MCC etc.) have turned out to be less than great.

 

[LowSignal]

Wow all these people on the "blame MS" wagon we don't know what happened yet.

 

[GHG]

I cant, I don't know what happened. Do you, does the OP?

If you actually bothered to read the OP, it's well sourced. If you have a counter argument of similar quality I'd be interested in reading it.

If all you want to do is come and shit on the OP while making it personal then I'm really not interested in reading that.

 

[NaDannMaGoGo]

Those quotes concerning Phantom Dust...what the fuck.

 

[Dark_castle]

Microsoft used to be really cool during xbox 360 era. They even had a headstart over Sony when it comes to exclusive JRPG selections, such as:

Blue Dragon
Lost Odyssey
Tales of Vesperia
Magna Carta 2
Infinite Undiscovery

Now?

.....

 

[Rad-]

Wow all these people on the "blame MS" wagon we don't know what happened yet.

Yeah this. Would be interesting to hear the whole story, from both sides. Sounds to me some of these examples overused budget and then it was apparently fully MS's fault that they didn't give more? As someone who works with subcontractors and their budgets you can't just pull "more budget" out of thin air. These things are pre decided.

 

[Pennywise]

Yeah this. Would be interesting to hear the whole story, from both sides. Sounds to me some of these examples overused budget and then it was apparently fully MS's fault that they didn't give more? As someone who works with subcontractors and their budgets you can't just pull "more budget" out of thin air. These things are pre decided.

https://kotaku.com/how-a-small-game-studio-almost-made-it-big-1696997142
You should actually read the article.

 

[Zolbrod]

Critically I think there's more. Mad World, Anarchy Reigns, Star Fox (we can blame Miyamoto)

Madworld has 81/100 on Metacritic and 83% on Game Rankings (61 reviews).

 

[KooopaKid]

This whole situation is crazy to me. It really makes me think that MS is positioning themselves right out of the console space, whether they think they are or not.

Xbox with no exclusive games has no real reason to exist. And this focus on games as a service is crazy too. It sounds like they don't want to put any money behind anything thats not going to be a mega multibillion $ franchise like Minecraft that lives on in perpetuity.

How many of those games can the market truly support and it's not exactly easy to predict what game will become the next cultural phenomenon.

It just seems like a recipe for failure. I feel like Nintendo is about to be fully 100% saved and Sony is licking their lips.

That's my impressions as well. I think Scorpio will flop quite hard, even in the US. Much below than XBO. If it's just a XBO Pro, it will flop, if it's next-gen, the industry just isn't ready.

 

[Net]

Three guesses who he was talking about:

Another thing from another journalist (Nathan Brown, deputy director of Edge), unused Inaba quote from a Nier interview:

 

[Rad-]

https://kotaku.com/how-a-small-game-studio-almost-made-it-big-1696997142
You should actually read the article.

Yeah this example seems to be MS's mistake then. That's quite a turn around in development plans compared to the beginning.

 

[Milly Osworth]

FWIW I'm 100% sure that Spencer is a straight up decent guy and a positive contributor to the industry.

The problem is that because of the size and nature of MS they will have teams of crack lawyers fighting to the wall over every contract clause, and MBA grads applying project management processes to everything, etc etc, and there's probably very little Spencer can do to influence what happens.

I think at a corporate level within MS there is probably a lack of understanding of the creative media and that sometimes you just need to give auteurs some breathing room - even if it goes against the standard practice.

I don't know really. He seems a wolf in sheep clothes to me. What he says in the boardroom and in public might be very different things. Why else would their line up be so dire? Unless he's a good guy, but just not very good at managing all the studios.

 

[Hypereides]

Hell if you go read the old Destiny contract there's poison pills all over that one, as an example.

Poison pills in publisher contracts are standard. Unfortunately pubs also intentionally market and get gamers to blame the dev.

The funny thing is people that run sites like Steamspy think they're helping when they're giving the big publishers even MORE leverage over developers. Because publishers will always obfuscate or straight up never share numbers, while if you're a small dev all your numbers are supplied to the publisher under the guise of whatever purpose sites like SS think they're filling, which is none.

The industry is more brutal than it used to be.

Alledgedly, the landscape for the game dev industry has changed dramatically over the course of the last decade.

Various testimonies, by some former game developers, have described it to be the last place they'd pursue employment.

(...) they seem like a really shitty partner who doesn't really get that sometimes big changes can't be made within budgets and time frames.

They know very well what they're doing.

In a sense if things don't work out for them, they eliminate a potential threat. For Microsoft its pure business, they aren't concerned for the people and lives involved.

 

[KooopaKid]

A brief glimmer of hope in the early days of the 360 aside, I've always considered Microsofts involvement in the gaming industry as a harmful one.

There are of course stories of healthy, successful partnerships and masterpieces of gaming that have come out of them, but the whole company, not just the Xbox division, has a sordid history of out of control egos, petty selfishness and toxic, incompetent or often even deliberately malicious mismanagement.

I've said it before, but what sets Sony, MS and Nintendo apart more than anything when it comes to games is their backgrounds as companies, and how it affects their attitudes toward the medium.

Sony has a history of providing entertainment, and building products that convey artistic mediums to people in an at least luxurious feeling manner. Their creative output in film, TV, and particularly music shaped the PlayStation devision, and Sony has always treated game developers as commercial artists, and embraced the more experimental and speculative side of gaming because of it.

Nintendo is of course a toy company. Play is at the heart of what they see as games purpose, and while that has often limited their scope and style, means they end up supporting many small developers with just a fun idea and themselves churn out well crafted, fun, family friendly titles at a constant rate.

And then there's Microsoft.

The software giant, the only real name in PC's to most of the planet, the ruthless cut throat business that sees everything as a disposable software product to be sold on a platform they can control people's access to, where programmers are a dime a dozen, bullying, intimidation and personal egos have always been actively encouraged by upper management, and they're always chasing the next big thing that will replace what came before it and maximise their profit margins.

Microsoft are not in gaming for anything other than profit. Sure, it drives Sony and Nintendo too, but there's an underlying understanding that, whether it's as an art form or a toy, there's a fundamental relationship relationship between the creator and the consumer in games that goes beyond a simple numbers game of product to profit that MS simply lacks.

Apple are another example of the same. Apple have made it clear, time and again, that they do not give the slightest shit about gaming beyond what money it makes them. They've cultivated a toxic environment on mobile that lets festering free to pay, whale focused, addictive, low brow, race to the bottom shovelware drown out quality in favour of maximising revenue.

And the only difference between Apple and Microsoft, is that Apple are better at managing their brand image, and they don't feel the need to bother putting on a song and dance with their own gaming division to pretend they're an active, willing participant in the creative process.

Microsoft are never going to get, or even respect games. Individuals at the Xbox offices, sure, but the company itself, the people holding the purse strings and setting policy, they're what matters, and they will only ever have their own interests at heart, and those will always be at odds with what is undeniably a creative medium, and you'd have to be blind to not see all the evidence of that over the course of Xbox's history, Scalebound, and its ramifications for Platinum, are just the latest example, and won't be the last.

Well said. I'm off the Xbox wagon for good after this. Too many precedents.
A Halo box just isn't enough nowadays. My agenda is to see them exit the video-game business ASAP.
(Bought an Xbox for Halo and KOTOR, a 360 for GTA IV, Bayonetta and Halo 3 BTW)

 

[jelly]

Phil comes across well but I would say he is same old Microsoft suit being there that long. It was his first proper job or something. He is the Microsoft culture.

I do think the suits above are putting pressure on Xbox to be a service money spinner more than ever and think big not small. That is Nadella 100%. He doesn't want 20 games making a billion dollars, he wants 4 games making a billion dollars and leveraging Xbox to make the Windows Store a success so mobile goes somewhere. Less investment in games the better, high return value on a small stable of properties that is enough to advance their ecosystem. Phil has to lump it but probably agrees it's for the greater good of Microsoft.

 

[scitek]

MS can get fucked if those Phantom Dust quotes are true. What they did was completely unfair and ridiculous, and it's absolutely no wonder they're in such a shitty state with their limited output if that's how they conduct business.

 

[Regret Upon Approval]

MS can get fucked if those Phantom Dust quotes are true. What they did was completely unfair and ridiculous, and it's absolutely no wonder they're in such a shitty state with their limited output if that's how they conduct business.

Yeah, starting to look like the common denominator here is them fucking everyone over.
They won't do shit to clean up their act if they don't get called out hard or see loss of business.

 

[ElBoxyBrown]

Well said. I'm off the Xbox wagon for good after this. Too many precedents.
A Halo box just isn't enough nowadays. My agenda is to see them exit the video-game business ASAP.
(Bought an Xbox for Halo and KOTOR, a 360 for GTA IV, Bayonetta and Halo 3 BTW)

And my agenda is to stick with them and hope for the best. I'm too invested into the Xbox ecosystem. I can't jump ship and I hope they don't either. I got way too much stake in this.

 

[Haganeren]

I dunno, how many? Do you count stuff like Okami? Is Wonderful 101 a great game? Even Bayonetta is an evolution of DMC to me with more tits and ass. It didn't blow my mind, it was just better than similar games from the previous gen. Lets not kid ourselves, Platinum games is not a hit factory and even if MS had kept funding and released the game there's no way to know it would have been good, MS obviously didn't think it was.

"Platinum Game is not a hit factory".... I have heard everything now. Just because they were able to give us two "good" games with a very tight budget we should forget about everything before ? About Madworld ? About Metal Gear Rising ? About Vanquish and the Bayonetta Serie ? You bet Wonderful 101 is good, it's my favorite 3D BTA of all time now ! Even the less known Infinite Space was really good.

So i will not trust Microsoft on the subject...