- cross-posted to:
- pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
- games@lemmy.world
- gaming@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- pcmasterrace@lemmy.world
- games@lemmy.world
- gaming@beehaw.org
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Why did Microsoft buy all these studios if the plan was to never actually have them make anything?
I’ve been asking that since they bought Rare and proceeded to do nothing with them.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish
Thats something you use to stop competitors before they get big, but MS was never part of the game publisher circle and doesnt’t seem to try either.
I agree.
It didn’t stop M$ trying the strategy though.
Because it’s run by fucking idiots with MBAs who have no connection whatsoever to the company’s profits and losses.
They wanted to own existing IP. Not make new stuff. Buy an asset, milk it, and that’ll do. Any words about long-term maybe were lies.
Yes, but what’s the point of owning the IP if you’re not releasing any new media with it, or even re-releasing the old stuff.
It’s not like we get a bunch of HD Collections out of it. Hell Activision’s take on Wolfenstein hasn’t even been re-released even though with Id and Activision owned by the same company there should be no issues.
Effort vs profitability to rework. Any content immediately releasable as part of gamepass was probably highest value to them.
Fear of missing out. It is institutionally ingrained into Microsoft when they were publicly burned for “missing out on the internet.”
If you buy up all your potential competition, you have no competition.
Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard were never competition though
It was about xbox and windows vs other consoles/steam etc
Never know if they’d start doing exclusivity deals with Sony shrug
I miss when Phil Spencer was talking about reviving Heroes of the Storm and Skylanders, he was never gonna do it, but I liked the hopium.
It’s just like destroying all the health pickups in a multiplayer game so the other team can’t heal, I guess.
Looking for exclusivity of games to “beat” other companies. As always is their model of “force people to pay us” instead of “make something compelling”. Its the Microsoft way.
my best guess is the people who signed off the purchases aren’t the same people who evaluate the value of the things they have purchased
Evil corpos purchasing creativity just to see the soul flee.
More like ‘carpet bombed a lot of bridges’ repeatedly while condescending all the screaming.
That’s right. Can’t trust the legacy of Bill “Epstein Island” Gates to be a good company.
They also don’t understand their customers.
But they do understand what they care about. Short term “Shareholder value”
Microsoft are the EA of yEAsterday
Microsoft has always been a law firm in a full body silicon merkin.
All developers should refuse to develop for Microsoft. Starve them out
The problem with employees and employed is that the thing goes the other way around… unfortunately.
The only thing that matters to MS is money.
Micro$oft
Playing devil’s advocate, sometimes the blame is not solely on Microsoft.
Bethesda Softworks is a good example. They’d basically doomed Arkane to dev hell with that vampire game, and kept that little detail hidden during the acquisition; Microsoft gave them total leeway when the Arkane team supposedly hoped a “rescue” instead, and never got it.
It’s a hard argument though.
Take Phil Spencer. Just Phil Spencer. Thats an incredible crater, right there, and he failed upwards for it.
Basically: The thing everyone worried about and quite frankly knew would happen when Microsoft started buying every studios they could get their hands on… happened.
Embrace. Expand. Extinguish. It never went away. Careless incompetence. The shareholders way.
Extend but that works too.
Shareholders: “Wow, Microsoft is really expanding by buying up those studios, promising great output for them in the future!”. Line goes up.
Microsoft then does nothing except investing all of their money into AI.
Shareholders: “Wow, Microsoft is really streamlining their organisation by dumping all of those useless dead weight studios. Excellent management”. Line goes up.
I absolutely hate how on the nose this is. sigh
TIL that this is a valid use of “on the nose” (definition 1). I was genuinely confused, I’m only familar with definition 2 there, “unimaginative; overliteral; lacking nuance; unsophisticated”.
TIL about the second definition
We are the lucky ten thousand.
“Wow, I hate how on the nose this is”. Line goes up.
“predictable investment”
Yeah. I would look at Microsoft’s aquisition of studios as those studios exiting the space in the long term. Gaming is thriving but it’s not the big studios, it’s the myriad of indies and smaller games that are where the innovation and interest is. The monolithic AAA gaming space is in a crisis of it’s own making - driven by shareholder demands and the view of games as nothing more than franchises to milk every year.
Also, AAA is struggling with games being too large. Every game is so expensive and has so many years of development that it’s hard for a studio to survive a flop without a major publisher. But the major publishers are pushing for studios to pursue games that have a really high flop rate (live-service, competitive shooters/etc). Additionally because every game has so much money invested in it, the studios are scared to try anything too different or unique, resulting in the games having a bland “design-by-committee” and not offering anything meaningfully different from what’s already out there. Features are intentionally held back so that the game will have content to drip-feed the players later, resulting in lacking content at launch.
I really think the AAA industry needs to downside, split up many AAA studios into multiple AA projects.
What I’m worried about is some of those greedy fuckhead parasites would start courting big indie studios and AA games and ruining a part of that scene
I assume that Microsoft is trying to appeal to two different groups of shareholders. The first sees Microsoft buying up studios and assumes that the studios will be able to put out better games cheaper (by firing support staff like HR). The second group sees Microsoft cutting low performing workers and assumes that Microsoft will be able to get more profits by cutting lots of cost without losing much income. If they time it right, they can get the second group to start buying just as the first group starts selling.
Im not even sure the extinguish part is intentional here. I think they are just genuinely this incompetent, but Greys Law applies here imo.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
What we gotta do is start going after the people selling the studios and companies and pillars of society. Make selling off unprofitable or even downright dangerous again and we’ll see companies that compete to grow instead of compete to sell inferiority while intentionally poisoning competence.
See also: the US government
Embrace. Expand. Extinguish.
That implies careful planning.
In this case, MS thought just mindlessly throwing money around will somehow bring in massive profits.
Also pretty sure embrace extend extinguish doesn’t apply to a straight up buyout, it’s about taking a competing (often opensource) technology, embracing it and supporting it, then moving to take control over it by extending it (thus becoming the de facto main implementation, as others struggle to keep up with changes), waiting for competition to die out before finally dropping support, thus killing the technology
Its just a vestigal instinct at MSFT these days lol.
Yep. They don’t understand games so they buy studios that DO understand games, and then turn them into divisions of Microsoft instead of game studios and are surprised that they no longer can make games.
Except, game dev companies are not competitors for MS (meaning XBOX), but essential for their survival. What’s the point of extinguishing your source of supply?
They’re probably banking on the fact that devs love making games, and when a bunch get laid off, some of them will inevitably go start some new studio that Microsoft can swoop in and buy again in 5-10 years, wring another game out of, then toss aside like trash again.
It’s the EA strategy. Wait for a studio to get public recognition, buy it out and milk it until the devs break for the exits, start a new indie studio, rinse the blood off and repeat. Frankly every “Creative Industry” since they invented the Victrola has operated the same way, and it’s only a hair’s breadth different from how noble patronage worked (and arguably more exploitative). And every time anyone tried to build a more co-operative style system, they burn it to the ground with market manipulation and regulatory capture.
That seems like a bad business model to me.
It’s been working so far
Only ‘working’ to make a few rich cunts even richer, which is not what I’d call working.
But you know what I mean right?
Yeah. Working as intended. :|
Still seems like a long way around to make videogames, but I guess that’s not their primary business at this point.
They also don’t understand software.
I can’t imagine a company founded on its operating system, now deciding vibe coding that flagship product is a good idea… Especially vibe coding literally all of their software products… Dumb as shit.
Also everything they make is now a web browser shell with the app running inside which makes everything slow and memory hungry.
Or user privacy.
Or valuing their own workers.
Or how to respectfully be a part of the F/OSS ecosystem.
Or humanity’s desire to not live in a pollution stream from their AI processing centers (they’re not really “data centers”).
Or that we all wish LinkedIn would self-destruct under the weight of its own bullshit, and magically blink itself out of existence.
Or consent.
You have to remember that the only person who ever really wanted Microsoft to get into console gaming was Bill Gates and this was largely an extension of his own love of video games and obsession with getting MS into the living room. Other efforts included things like WebTV, MSNBC, and a device that led to the creation of TiVo. Ballmer cared about Bill’s legacy but once the two of them were gone nobody was left who gave a rat’s ass about Xbox.
He never liked gaming he just saw another market opportunity. Stop whitewashing fucking bill gates lol.
It’s neither untrue or whitewashing to point out the well documented fact that Gates like to play video games and perhaps you should check out my other comment in this thread.
Guess it’s all good Microsoft does an EEE on the AAA companies then I guess, because bill “liked to play video games”.
It’s just not relevant, so yes maybe he (like everyone) liked to play videogames, I should have put that differently, he wasn’t a game nerd.
You do know bill gates had a PR section dedicated to himself, right? Making the image of this “goofy guy”.
I don’t know why you’re looking for an argument but I didn’t say it was good and I’m officially done with this conversation.
Well go and rub bill gates shoulders then, maybe he’ll share his billions with you. I mean you’re not doing his publicity for free, right?
OK, you’re either a bot or a troll and I don’t have time for you so you are getting blocked now.
Bye!
They had vision and knew how to build a brand. The current CEO’s idea of branding is to name their products after a tool that absolutely no one will be using.
I get what you’re saying, but it’s probably worth pointing out that the Xbox was built on the ashes of the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast ran Windows CE, a precursor of sorts to Windows Mobile. Microsoft was perfectly happy using an already wounded Sega, who had mismanaged their last two console generations and lost a lot of users to the then fairly new PlayStation line, as the test bed for the software platforms that would eventually power the Xbox, though under a slightly different hardware platform. This is why, among other things, the Duke controller looks very much like a Dreamcast controller.
Like a lot of things that Gates did, he was standing on the shoulders of giants.
fwiw very few DC games used WinCE, though I do agree that the Xbox is basically the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/916412-dreamcast/79453073
Probably true, although Ballmer didn’t screw it up and Nadella did screw it up for one simple reason. He’s a 1 Cloud Pony. He came from the cloud and that’s all he really knows, and his narrow Senior VP perspective helped him extract earnings from cloud but nothing else at Microsoft.
Yeah, this isn’t news and the studio owners who can cash big checks to sell don’t care.
I have talked to a mobile game Dev, a very drunker heart to heart. He had an India mobile game (like alto). He made about 120k in 5 years between two versions of the game. And then some tenent adjacent studio offered him 650k for the IP.
In his words “All I could think was that in 650k, my house would be paid. My education loan would be paid and I would still have enough money to ensure my kid goes to college and not worry about an education loan. I knew selling game would mean enshittification of my baby. But then i looked at my actual baby and I knew I had to betray the digital one”
That’s the first time I saw it from the dev point of view. He wanted to keep the project, but between choosing fans of his games that can’t keep a subreddit alive and doing right by no name, no face fan base vs 650k hard cash from a shitty studio that would concretely secure his family’s future. I am not sure if I would hold out.
I know it’s not the same with the studio Microsoft bought… But I can’t help but wonder people who sellout might not be such horrible pieces of shit that we imagine them to be.
When you’re young you tend to think accepting money means you’re a sellout.
When you’re an adult you think accepting money means you’re taking care of your family.
Also adults are less likely to think video games are the most important thing in the world.
Absolutely. At the end of the day they’re just games. The rabid fans spewing vitriol have no perspective.
Yeah, right? Like, that deal sounds like a no-brainer, to me.
Sure, the game could go viral and explode and make money hand over fist, and he’s missing out on that potential… But it probably won’t. And $650K is a lot of money, and he doesn’t need to keep grinding for years to make it happen.
With a paid off house, it’s easy to stay afloat just coasting until he finds something new that excites him.
Who wouldn’t take that deal?
It’s also plausibly enough money to make a new labor of love game for quite a while.
Like even if you are in a position where you want to take care of the players or whatever, $650k helps towards doing that. Even with your priorities in a weird order like that, it still seems obvious that you’d take the money and start a new project.
💯
Remember when Microsoft bought Rare and did basically nothing with them for two decades?
Not nothing. They remade a bunch of games worse than the originals.
(Some people did enjoy Viva Pinata, but I didn’t play that.)
Viva pinata was absolutely dope
It’s one of my fondest memories on that console
