Double edged sword

on one side .. and I have to word this carefully.

I don't think the good change this year would have happened if certain things hadn't of happened due to xbox BUT

on the other hand yes I believe all the staff would still have been here at zos


I hate microsoft right now....

It's hard to say what would have happened if MS hadn't bought Zenimax.

I will say this: I think the game would have done better if it hadn't coasted for several years. There was a period of stagnation, where the focus was clearly on the blackbird project, and it was taken for granted that the money would just keep rolling in from ESO. There was no real innovation. Then the leadership changed, and we got a glimpse of how different things could have been if that had happened earlier. If it had, I believe the game would be in a much stronger place than it is now. The neglect/coasting had nothing to do with MS.

Zenimax was put up for sale because the former owners wanted to sell up and retire, and as far as I know there was no attempt by the employees at the time to buy it out and go independent. Which means if Microsoft hadn't bought them someone else would have.

We could speculate on which company that might have been, and what they might have done differently but considering the problems Microsoft are having aren't unique to them I'm not sure being part of a different big company would necessarily be any better.

Edit: apparently the previous frontrunner to buy Zenimax was EA, so it would probably have been a company like that.

Just imagine this:

Starfield is kind of a flop.

The Elder Scrolls 6 would still be years away.

I think Zenimax definitely would be worse off if Microsoft wouldn’t have acquired them.

To focus on Starfield and completely ignoring Elder Scrolls and Fallout massively hurt them and they can be thankful that Microsoft eased the commercial failure of Starfield.

All the overreacting and doomsang because Gina posted that half of the PR department got fired remember she came back and clarified that it was not all of zennimax eso team that got fired but it was half of her team which was the pr team.

The reasons are getting delayed is also these studios are having to put together action plans future development costs etc and submit them back to Microsoft this is how business works when you're doing a major reset.

Sure it sucks seeing people get fired but it's not the end of Xbox or Microsoft or gaming in general. This is across the industry Ubisoft gutted a bunch of its studios and the same thing with Sony with a Concord team and with Bungie. The only difference is when Microsoft does it everybody screams the sky is falling into the doom of Microsoft.

Microsoft gave way too much leeway to studios under Phil Spencer and Matt booty. They had a hands-off approach and just approve whatever the studios wanted to make.

Now there's going to be accountability for what the studios are making and everybody's going to have to file reports and show what they're spending the money on.

While it may hurt in the short term it's going to be more healthy in the long term.

old_mufasa wrote: »

All the overreacting and doomsang because Gina posted that half of the PR department got fired remember she came back and clarified that it was not all of zennimax eso team that got fired but it was half of her team which was the pr team.

It wasn't Gina and it wasn't a member of the PR team.

It was Senior Content Designer Katherine Souze who made that post. She's on the Content Design Team and according to her, 1/2 of *that* team is gone. Very different impact on the game than the PR Department...

As others have said, it’s not a cut-and-dry easy answer.

Microsoft’s ownership was not unproblematic, but the industry a few years back was all about gobbling up smaller studios. If Microsoft hadn’t done it, Sony may have done so instead, and we’ve seen how they handle things.

Microsoft/XBox under Phil Spencer made a lot of mistakes and overreached. XBox was always far behind in the console wars (XBox uptake outside of the US is negligible. In the US you have a decent mix, but outside it’s basically 99% PS). And with pretty well no games, well… it’s understandable that they’re tightening their belts.

Game prices also haven’t gone up drastically. I remember games for N64 were like $50ish in the 90s, and that does not at all account for inflation. But game budgets are so much higher now and rival Hollywood blockbusters. Again, it makes sense that that was unsustainable.

But.

[snip] AI. A lot of the “hardware crunch” is self-inflicted since every tech company is in a giant arms race with each other to see who can kill the environment/humanity/etc the fastest and make the most money while doing so. Of course there’s a hardware shortage for consoles when all of the tech companies are buying the RAM for their data centers. Of course games aren’t moving because people don’t have money right now and all of these oligarchs are just laying people off and paying peanuts while giving billions to executives.

ESO, pretty well since just before COVID, was not doing well. There was a large culture of “we know better than you” from above that drove a lot of people off. And the Chapter model was rigid and unable to adapt to the players. As such, every release felt more and more rushed and less and less like something for the players. Add to that the combat balance which was somehow simultaneously too swingy and too unchanging, and ESO was obviously in an unhealthy spiral for a while propped up by sycophants and glazers.

But the reshuffle last year, devastating as it was, did put ESO on a better track. Yes, there was a certain amount of corpospeak in “we want to reduce FOMO” while only tripling down on it in reality, but the increase in communication (from everyone except the combat team…) and the player experience team were making great changes and people were coming back. ESO did look like it was regaining its footing.

This one though? Cut everything that players were coming back for. It was too soon after the last round of cuts, before anyone could properly see how effective things were. Pruning too much only kills the plant.

MMOs are not the groundbreaker they once were, but Live Service games are essentially still money printers for their studios. It takes a lot of capital to get them started (see all of the failed attempts recently to get one set up, most notably the Avengers game or Concord), but then it’s just paying a team to keep it going while players dump cash into it. Microsoft should have realized that cutting a living Live Service game, especially so soon after the last set of cuts, would be more likely to kill off their money printer so they could save some cash into the short term. See also the decimation of id, when Doom is one of the biggest names in gaming and they literally just released a big DLC that day.

The Microsoft cuts may have been necessary… but they cut the wrong people. They should have kept the ones actively making them money alive, and cut more in XBox HQ, starting with the inflated executive salaries and golden parachutes there.

Remember that story of the Nintendo CEO taking a pay cut of like 50% just to avoid layoffs? That’s the kind of executives we need in this world.

LadyGP wrote: »

LalMirchi wrote: »

I'm wondering what would have happened if Sony had succeeded in their bid.

XBox hardware sales are 1/3rd of Playstations, so would that play a role?

Destiny 2 and Marathon would like to have a word with you.

I see, so Sony would probably do the same. Just read about Bungie's dismal fate as I usually do not follow news about games.