You have a team and insights, connections. It would be interesting to see a video on the topic of how much did it cost to run Arkane over the years since development of Dishonored began. Dishonored sales were about 9million with the sequel around 3. Add whatever Prey cost to develop in that period too. A 100-150 people studio, how much would that cost to run and support and did the sales of the games in the last 10-15 years really made them self-sustainable? Then add on top the huge blunder that Redfall was and how it was pure loss.

Fresh change: Helldivers 2 and Ghost of Tsushima went from not having price and purchase button a day ago to no longer having store page in non-PSN regions. They also no longer appear in Steam search.

It's like deja'vu all over again... Sooner or later, something's gonna break.

if it was that easy... You have 100 studios, 75 are obedients and follow instructions : huge profit, copy paste game each years, nobody have talents... regular business. And then you have few of them that experiments and do things differently... That's a bother... Some produce good results... That's a crisis... No man, no problems... A tip, read the statement and she think exacly the opposite...

Hey, let’s be fair. Some of that money is going to an AI incubator in an American swing state, which will almost certainly not result in anything approaching adequate job growth. Not all of it is going to the C suite. 😂

This is why we’ll pirate games from now on. Get 10 million people playing a new pirated game, that’ll hurt.

It's not just a greedy move. It's a moronic move. It's like they have no idea how to run a business at all. A short term drug dealer screws people out of product. A smart long term dealer builds trust and goodwill. Even kids in the street understand how to run a business better than any CEO out there. Being paid for a skill set? Hah! They fail to prove anything.

Facts. If you expect to make more profit than last year , every single year you will eventually “fail”

It's almost like ever expanding markets aren't actually a real thing. Who knew?

... yet still far far to many people buy stuff from companys that have been known to be shitty and delivering shit. Games are not an essential goods and there is also enough double A and indie studios producing games than are objectively just better than today Triple A games. Guess all the high budged of triple a goes into marketing instead of the game itself ... "Triple A" has become a warning sign for bad quality .... dont get fooled They is no exuse. Vote with your walltet ... everything else is embarassing hypocrisy

Capitalism moment

​​​​​@@jordanconrad3261Microsoft wants to grow they should stop selling Steam Decks by removing ads and AI in Windows 11 which only grows Valve by gamers buying Steam Decks instead of Windows license cause gamers hate AI that we don't use and ads on our paid not free product. and they won't have to shutdown more gaming studios.

They laid off the PR Department to make sure their executives got their yearly yacht.

This is what they should have said.. We shut down Tango because they're a Japanese studio that makes Japanese styled games that don't resonate with Japanese players & never sell in their domestic market! You know who else got shut down for exactly that.... Japan Studio & London studio by PlayStation. Ghostwire tokyo did nothing on Gamepas, PC & playstation and lost money, and they followed that up with Hi-fi rush which also did nothing on Gampass, Steam & Playstation and lost money. That is on top of The evil within 1 & 2 losing money. Studios don't get to go a decade losing money without consequences.

Because this isn't Xbox's decision, this is MS. They were undermined and blindsided.

@@budala1969 Turns out Azure has howitzers and all divisions of Windows are pointing guns at each other. Xbox 1 was a really, really, bad idea and this Xbox Mobile isn't going to convert gamers over it. Leadership at Microsoft needs to change or it's gaming division is done.

@@budala1969 They were not undermined nor blindsided, Microsoft and other big companies have done that for years, buy smaller companies, and close them so the competition doesn't have it, there is no more to it, it's a mentality of "better gone than in my competitors home", it's nothing new, and it's not going to change, the fact that every time Microsoft buys a small company everyone that cares about it just leaves should tell you all enough about it, everyone knows what happens when a company like Microsoft buys you, and it's game over.

it's not a positive. It's the bad position they're starting from. "It's a pain in the ass to go sell physical consoles in that country" would have actually made sense when it was that. Shift to PC and the balance changes, but they are not so quick to react that they can just open up PSN to everyone immediately.

Probably that a lot of those 180 countries aren't going to be huge game markets. Like, say, Bhutan. ...That being said, the Baltics are hardly backwaters.

I’d say china isn’t a small market

@@basedsneedclave175 You caught the part where I said 'a lot of those', and how I noted the Baltics aren't backwaters. That logic also covers China.

@@krspaceT1 You still not understand the problem, they restrict A PC GAME on those countries at the same time with the logic that console market is not huge there? That why is dumb to think that a PC game need a PSN account.

I say everyone should pirate their games

@@sheepfly Gotta leave some room for plausible deniability here mate.

You think they arent already?

​@@sheepfly huh? I'm a game developer- if EVERYONE pirated, no one would be able to make games anymore. The market only works because only a small slice of people pirate them and even some who do end up going and buying them afterward if they like it. I'm not anti-piracy but saying everyone should pirate their games is a wild take? Do you want more (justified, this time, unlike the current reality where execs are just writing them off for taxes) layoffs?

@@Orionhart If you don’t want people to pirate your game then be someone people want to suppot. A company like Sony has lost all respect of the general public and as such nobody particularly cares what happens to them except the people who own a PS5, which has no games in the first place.

Seeing as you have had TV shows cancelled because they got the wrong type of fans and they wouldn't pivot to make merchandise for them (something Hasbro's surprisingly not guilty of, see the Bronies), its a likely problem.

Literally this. Micro transactions & other scummy sh!z is there wet dream. If it ain't that, getting it gone is clearly all they think about rn.

its the toxic exec attitude; there are no consumers or customers, who you have to respect and create product thats good for. there are only faceless prey and resources, not people, who you must milk for every cent they have rapaciously. and none of them stop to think people only get one paypacket a month, and EVERY corporation thinks they can take the maximum from that without realising it has to be split multiple times for each of them first. thats unsustainable. for example: water, electric, gas companies each think they can raise their bills indefinitely, by as much as the payrise that customer got that year - only that customer may well have gotten 15 extra per week but it has to be split 3 ways to the utilities who each raised their bills by 15 to take that money, and they only get 5 of it. the customer has to cut spending elsewhere to pay an extra 30 in bills and eventually some other business closes because this happens with everyone and they all decided not to go out at night to restaurants this then spirals if left unchecked, and you get a spreading collapse of sectors of the economy and job losses, undermining confidence in companies who dont replace staff who leave just in case a recession happens and all this greed to boost exec pay and keep shareholders happy CAUSES the recession.

I mean at that point it should just kinda be their downfall. the bigwigs of microsoft can try screw over the public if they want for a quick buck but eventually they'll just lose all trust and have to rely on being too big to fail.

To be un/fair (same with films and TV) they just repeating the same game / story over and over again with little gain to use as consumers

Control, not money.

money is not more important bad take

If anyone thinks money is more important than time or people, they might be a sociopath.

They were.......untill they didn't for the most part, at least we have Nintendo despite there.....flaws, and the indie scene is just all kinds of awesome!

@@gamerbeast3616 @cyxceven you both likely misunderstood what @alabonefy meant. I took his comment as meaning "[within the industry] money would ultimately become so much more important [to those in leadership positions] than [the craft of] making better games."

Martin O'Donnel, worked in the incredible music for Halo and is both very talented an very cool. He had an interview with a youtuber called Noodle and that phrase comes up. It sheds a lot of light on the mindset of the cooperate higher ups, because when he said that to one of them, the guy responded along the lines of "sometimes there's nothing better than a good foie gras."

I made a comment similar to that, but I think it's just the fable of "The Golden Goose" with the exception of the person being punished not learning their lesson in the end. It hard for these mega-corpses to figure out what not to do when they know where to find more Golden Geese and have the money to buy them...

Nobody ever said rich executives in charge of large companies were smart lol they just have a lot of money

@@zztzgza This seems like someone make a decision while looking at a spreadsheet without taking anything other than math into consideration. Somebody made it look like a good idea in Excel and the rest of the execs just rolled with it.

​@@wesleytoone9479This so much this. Solutions are more than what can be captured in a simple spreadsheet.

Sony imitating a Helldiver much too accurately...

The kind of person who works in the games industry is either too afraid to go on strike or is ideologically opposed to organized labor

@@tehbeernerd Yeah, there’s a fair amount of tech bros in tech. I’d hope that game developers would be more artistically inclined and therefore more pro labor, but idk. Personally, I just think that game developers are either too privileged to care or they’re scared of being blackballed from the industry.

I'll still be buying the games of one of those, because they at least are releasing good games (I'm obviously speaking about Sony, just in case someone doubted it), I've played almost all Sony exclusives they released since PS5, except Returnal, and maybe some other I can't recall now, and all of them, have been without a doubt, very good games, and all of them diserve to be in a top 10 of best games of the past decade, the only games I would maybe put higher than them, are, The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and of course, Elden Ring, so in my opinion, even if Sony might be doing some shit, I will still buy the games, because they're good, no matter how bad the company is. Yes, I know I didn't name, for example Baldur's Gate 3, I'm just not a fan of that genre, didn't appeal to me one bit, so I just can't rank that game, will give it the honorary mention because so many people love it, and I know people will hate that I didn't put the game in the list xD

the sales for hi-fi rush might be great, for a shadowdrop. but Microsoft wants to please their investors at all times. not with a 5 or 10 year plan

Then it's doubly idiotic. Because the game was released without promotion or fanfare. It was literally released at the same time it was announced. If anything as a small shadow dropped side project, it should've blown the money metric out of the water. Because the expectation was zero given the effort MS put into promoting it.

@@FireFr0ggy Let's be real adding an advertisement budget to that game would've cost more money hence more losses from the company's eyes.

Capital. They did not grow capital for xbox

The story makes fun of big corporations chasing money and could have been personally offensive to the shareholders.

At least it's high quality alfoil.

You need to become incorporated to enforce that

​@@zztzgza all he needs to do is not give them money, and alot more people need to do the same. Your wallet is the only thing that you can vote with that these companies care about

@@mr_the_hulk_fist9220 If they continue to release good games, I'll buy them as far as they don't do some really bad shit, don't care about them not selling the game in some countries, or them asking for an account, it's nothing new, a lot of companies do that, and no one cared before, if they add high prices, I'll just pay the one that I see worth and not too expensive, after that I will enjoy my game, and be done with it. I understand wanting to boycott Sony for doing something, but Sony is one of the few companies, that in the past years, didn't disapoint with their releases, their games have all been gold standard, and been in any list of the best games released (any respectable list at least), I'm voting with my wallet, that I want them to keep making those games.

nintendo hasnt made a console in 7+ yrs. they arent relevant

Fun fact, Nintendo's profits in the Switch era are apparently so high they match the profit of Sony's entire console history. ...yep. Of course because they don't care for the PC you rarely hear that here.

I mean, Nintendo still has their problems, but they are the only main line console that still makes in-house games instead of endlessly eating studios to substitute a lack of creativity. If there were a console war, Nintendo and Valve are technically the winners right now.

@@markguyton2868 lmfao not even close. what a shill

@@cloudnine5651 Not really shilling, just saying its hard not to see it when Valve and Nintendo are just sitting there while MS and PS are constantly finding more feet to shoot.

It's because the people who complain never get their voice to the people who buy, which are normally people who aren't aware of industry issues and just see a cool game and buy it.

That is so unbelievably corrupt and scummy and I completely believe it.

Sounds possible. I know that this is a calculus done in the movie industry.

Thanks never thought about that.

More lickely, the success of hi fi was people playing it on Game Pass, and it didn't sold any copies, so at the end of the day, it didn't make even half the money the game should've made, Game Pass is bad for business, and Tango had to pay for that. But, I wouldn't discard your option either. It could also be the typical big company strategy of buying smaller companies to close them, so theit competitors can't get them, Microsoft has done that a lot, they've buried a lot of companies, so it wouldn't be anything new either, we will never know, since I don't think they will ever tell the truth about this.

The switch/deck are pretty good

none cares

I say pc only all other are meh. Nintendo is mixed due to how Anti consumer they can be

@@DaRip74 ye xbox and sony are now 10x worse then nitendo, sony blocked 2 games in 170 counties and they are probably not going to stop and xbox is just dying

​@@gamerbeast3616 you care 😂😂😂

Imagine if MS looked at all the executives' salaries and decided to trim the fat there, instead of laying off developers :-)

I’m from Estonia same seems we are back cccp

Xbox expanded into 20 new regions in 2023, sitting now on 84 regions. But since they are all looking at Netflix - Netflix and Steam are both in maximum regions (190+). So, all three console makers are way behind in availability.

@@marciusnhasty Seems like consoles are many years behind in terms of availability. Ultimately seems like they still live in the physical copy age of gaming. Again one thing to note is that in the Baltics (possibly many other PSN restricted regions) all of these consoles are sold already so its insane how customer support literally tells them to pick a different region when its against their TOS and suddenly only when they expand to PC it becomes a problem.

@@jingsterling That's really a good point. I didn't even think about it. It tracks, it's very difficult for me to get a physical copy. No local distribution at all. There was an attempt of it, but it died out more than a decade ago. Meanwhile, consoles themselves are in most electronics shops.

Sony and Nintendo, two of the *worst* companies in gaming, are Japanese.

Not even remotely true. Blind nonsense

@@j.jbinks9669​​⁠I wouldn’t call Nintendo among the worst. It had an amazing response to poor 3DS sales. However, that was a long time ago and I haven’t really paid attention to their most recent policies.

@@j.jbinks9669Sony is not a Japanese company any more. They moved their HQ to California in 2016 and they shut down their Japanese studios. Nintendo’s CEO took a pay cut to keep employees on staff. You’re just objectively wrong.

@@j.jbinks9669 Sony is giving up their Japanese values and going all in on that American capitalist mindset. Nintendo was a dictator in their early years, but they’re kind of bearable now. It’s more of their legal department everyone despises these days.

I'm not sure how Capcom managed to avoid the same fate so far, though, despite being a public company. Might be because the CEO is the founder of the company.

Pretty much.

I didn’t notice it until I read this. Now I can’t help but pick up the sound.

@@DukeHaza You're welcome. :P