Three devs in less than two years, starts to look a lot like a pattern. That Phantom Dust story, Jesus Christ.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.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?
Where there's this much smoke, there's likely to be fire.
Weird how Scalebound caused all this fallout.
I'm sure Phil will wear a nice t-shirt and talk it straight.
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.
Oh that too. Though with MS's PR, it's hard to place the blame on fans for getting excited.
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.
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.
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.
RDR 2 with the best visuals will sell Scorpio. Picture the sun setting in HDR and a nice folk song playing....
SOLD.
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.
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.
We couldnt 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 werent 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 thats 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 couldnt get our devs. And I dont 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 anybodys interested in taking this team on, were 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 didnt, 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 didnt 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 whats in it. We wont be able to customize it. Yadda, yadda, yadda. So we have 10 engineers from Nautilus, 10 plus engineers from Microsoft, and theyre not talking to each other.
Because it is important we only get one thing and nothing more.
Let's never release new games, they could be bad.
MS with 3rd parties this gen
Lets say that they do a job thats not good, or a job that they didnt finish, or a job that was way late. Ill deduct from their contract, absolutely. Thats what the country should be doing.
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.
Good thing you've come to set the record straight then,lol.
But Scorpio?
when was the last time Sony canceled a major 3rd party AAA exclusive that has had multiple stage showings?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 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.
This is how I feel to.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.
But Scorpio?
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 cant, I don't know what happened. Do you, does the OP?
Wow all these people on the "blame MS" wagon we don't know what happened yet.
https://kotaku.com/how-a-small-game-studio-almost-made-it-big-1696997142Yeah 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.
Critically I think there's more. Mad World, Anarchy Reigns, Star Fox (we can blame Miyamoto)
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.
Another thing from another journalist (Nathan Brown, deputy director of Edge), unused Inaba quote from a Nier interview:
https://kotaku.com/how-a-small-game-studio-almost-made-it-big-1696997142
You should actually read the article.
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.
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.
(...) 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.