M76
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Too bad most Star Trek fans didn't get to see it, because it was buried in the third season of a show that was garbage up to that point.
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Dev at id Software says Microsoft 'burned a lot of bridges' in the industry
Comixbooks
Fully [H]
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After what Happen with the MMO Ashes of Creation nothing really surprises me if that wasn't the biggest Con Artist game that made everyone miserable don't know what is.
We aren't the ones who tried to change the subject now are we?You guys could take your own suggestions.
Anyway, Sony and Nintendo aren't having the issues that Microsoft is having. The big 3 all purchased tons of studios, but there's only one that decided to start cutting and laying off developers of studios that were not failing. ID in particular has pretty much always made money.
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M76
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I'm pretty sure it was Aurelius, who first mentioned women and minorities before anyone else. He pre-emptively tried to shut down an argument that wasn't even made yet.We aren't the ones who tried to change the subject now are we?
Nintendo is playing by different rules and Sony definitely has the same problems, it's just not gotten to the point where XBOX is at yet. Many of SONY's projects underperformed or outright bombed more recently. They are no longer makers of flawless single player experiences that sell consoles.
People who make video games can generally do math. Global PC and console sales of video games is about $90 billion. MS spent about $85 billion buying studios. Then they put all their stuff on game pass. The people they should be pissed at are the people who said yes when MS backed up the dump trucks full of cash with an incredibly bad business plan. Nothing good was going to come of that deal for those who stayed. The best possible outcome is that people with good ideas are no longer shackled to a good idea they made years ago and are forced to keep remaking, and have been freed while handed buckets of cash.
M76
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Returnal, Saros? And then there are games that if didn't bomb but underperformed enough for sony to put them on the back burner, like Last of Us, or Horizon. They aren't working on a mainline 3rd game for either. That is not a sign of thriving. And the wolverine game is getting ripped to shreds as we speak, although it remains to be seen how much the apparent lack of quality will affect sales.
DukenukemX
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You do see this as developers leave and create more successful games. Take RIOT for example which took talent from Blizzard who began to decline over time due to them being bought by Activision
and Bobby Kotick. Which is funny because a number of employees left RIOT to make their own studios, like Odyssey Interactive who made Omega Strikers. Odyssey Interactive didn't get the memo to make their games for modern audiences. I do think Dark Ages was profitable, but obviously not massively profitable. I also think Dark Ages would have sold more copies if the game wasn't $70. We are in a recession and charging that much for a game that is not as good as Doom Eternal is not going to get you sales.
I don't think it'll happen 100%, but too many companies are ready to file for bankruptcy. GTA6 is selling like crazy and that's before the game is released.
Only two MMO's have ever been successful and that's World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy Online. Every other MMO was only successful for a brief amount of time. While I haven't play WoW in over a year, I still don't see it going anywhere. Chris Metzen is actually steering the game is a better direction, but not enough for me to play retail WoW, but does seem like he's trying for WoW 2.0 which is smart.
You don't mention things like women and minorities unless you want to derail the thread. Stop taking his bait.
Sony's problem is a bit different because they started to hire people who clearly have a hatred for gamers, and who clearly have almost no experience playing games. I just started to play The Last of US Part 1 and I'm not a fan. Good looking game but it's far too cinematic for my taste, and the gameplay is just moving me from one kill room to another. Even then, the game pulls me out of immersion too often. I killed a guy with a more powerful gun but I can't pick it up or the ammo. I'm in a history museum where there's swords while I walk around with a 2 by 4 as a weapon. This is the same setup as Uncharted 4. There's only so many times you can do this before gamers take notice.
Nintendo's problem is they don't have the money and hardware to pull off the kind of games people want. BOTW and TOTK was shocking good in terms of graphics when you consider the WiiU and Switch hardware. Every other Nintendo game looks like it could run on a PS3.
Star Trek fans were also fed Starfleet Academy though.
We aren't the ones who tried to change the subject now are we?
Anyway, Sony and Nintendo aren't having the issues that Microsoft is having. The big 3 all purchased tons of studios, but there's only one that decided to start cutting and laying off developers of studios that were not failing. ID in particular has pretty much always made money.
Sony and Nintendo are also Japanese companies who haven't entirely lost the script to a constant injection of identity politics and don't have young staffers trying to turn their company into their personal social activism platform. They've been giving the audience what they want, not a lecture on how they want them to think.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some push ups to do after accidentally "pulling a Bharv".
This is honestly a far better explanation than any of the culture war fluff (sorry for my part in derailing things earlier).
Microsoft was betting that Game Pass would be a must-have if Call of Duty and other major titles were always present. But not enough people subscribed, and outside of CoD there aren't many games big enough to warrant a membership. Doom is good, but not $15-per-month good.
Throw in Microsoft's general inability to 'get' gaming (it often treats gaming as a way to push other products) and it's no wonder the company is gutting or selling brands, even if they're reasonably successful like id. I'm still hoping Asha Sharma's reset makes Xbox interesting again; I just know it's going to take a while, and that Project Helix isn't guaranteed to bring people back.
I am honestly puzzled by this. I just watched a Wolverine trailer for the first time and man the action looks good, brutal combat, and loaded with toxic masculinity in a good way.
EDIT: I get it now, I just saw a leaked pic of Jean Grey and xhe looks like a linebacker for the 1985 Chicago Bears.
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Yes and no…
Game pass is a double edged sword.
Assuming the average gamer buys 2 games a year then they spend more on gamepass than they do on buying individual games.
Any game purchase they make while they have GP is just bonus money.
But that only remains true if MS can keep a decent subscriber count.
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I think is about to be a renaissance of Indie Games in the gaming industry. Obviously, we have seen a lot of those folks get axed lately. They are not going to stop making games. Also, the fact that no one is the damn world can afford a video card, we are going to see a lot of those games not being concerned with "photorealism." No NV in their ears with funding for RTX. Games built to run on anything GPU-wise. Anyway, I could write a thesis on this, so I will just leave it at that.
DukenukemX
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Really depends on the games, but yea GamePass math is really hard to justify. I beat Last of Us Part 1 in a week but Doom Dark Ages took me a few weeks so GamePass would make sense. On the other hand Elden Ring takes me 2 months to finish and that's not including the multiple runs I do in Elden Ring. I must have spent half this year just rerunning Elden Ring, and plan to do it again. In that situation the math doesn't work in favor of GamePass. Especially if you buy indie games which are very popular right now.
Just to give you an idea, I'm going to list the top trending games right now on Steam and their price.
- Yet Another Zombie survivor is normally $15 but is on sale for less than $10.
- Zombie Army 4 is $50 but on sale for $2.49. That's a crazy sale.
- Amarillo's Butt Slapper, which is FREE! And yes, the game is about butt slapping anime playboy bunny girls.
- Global Rescue is $25.
- Stalker 2 is $60 but on sale for $42.
If we go by the most played games, it's even worse. Some games are free and some games are old and therefore cheap, with Palworld being a "new" release but also still cheap. By new I mean it reached 1.0. You're not using GamePass in 2026 unless you really want to play a lot of bad AAA games. Mortal Shell II was just released and it's $50. Steam's not always the best price either as there's multiple other places you can buy Steam keys for usually a much lower price.
If ID Software sold Doom Dark Ages for $50 then they'd see more sales, and of course avoid having your game on GamePass, not that ID Software has much of a choice now. I doubt ID Software thought less of Dark Ages in terms of game quality, but Eternal is still a much better game with much better DLC and it's cheap for $30. Dark Ages is still $70 on Steam for a game released 1 year ago.
I don’t think I would buy another Doom in its current state. I’m really not a fan of the ammo damage mechanics they introduced. The story has never been a strength in their games, but the gameplay used to be flawless.
Maybe they could shift back to a war time setting for their next game. Set it around the Russian revolution because they aren’t politically popular at the moment, and have it so you go around shooting lots of Bolsheviks with various weapons.
Maybe they could shift back to a war time setting for their next game. Set it around the Russian revolution because they aren’t politically popular at the moment, and have it so you go around shooting lots of Bolsheviks with various weapons.
Doom The Dark Ages strayed too far from what Doom was supposed to be. I won't say it's a bad game, but it's the weakest of the modern Doom games IMO. I do like the id Tech engine, and honestly what I'd really like to see is a reboot of the Heretic / Hexen franchise with that engine. That's something I'd jump on in a heartbeat.
I think it's already underway. Hollow Knight: Silksong is probably the best example. The game meets all of the criteria you just described, it's $20, and it's blowing past AAA studios right now with 7 million copies already sold. A flood of people on the market with experience making games for gamers will no doubt accelerate this trend.
Yes, that would be awesome!
Just intensifying an existing trend (possibly a lot, admittedly, with all the layoffs).
The last AAA game I got was Diablo IV. Before that? Probably Callisto Protocol, and I didn't even buy that, got it free with a video card. I have bought tons of indie stuff though. Brotato, Dredge, Dave the Dive, and so on. These are all potato graphics games, and none of them have giant teams of writers (to be fair, you can frequently tell. I'm not far into Dave the Diver yet but the dialog is both fairly bad and written like it was done by someone who's not fully familiar with English, which is not to say it's otherwise a bad game.)
I agree. I had the sense that the maps felt dumbed down in Dark Ages in some way, hard to explain. While I finished the game, I never really liked the color coded blocking mechanic, didn't feel like it belonged in a shooter.
Twisted Kidney
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I think it kind of went off the rails way back with the flashlight.
They've been trying to saddle Doom with a plot since Doom 3, but the plot of Doom is supposed to be that Doom Guy considers demons to be a type of flooring. That's it.
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Still play Doom, what we'd now call 1. Updated engine, still a blast. Literally!
About to be? I've been having a blast for the last two years and not a single AAA. Barely any AA. Running on a potato is going to be key given the state of computer/component pricing.
On paper, yes. But if you are the developer and that was a $45 sale vs $1.75 of gamepass revenue, The fact they spent an extra $100 or whatever doesn't keep you in business.
And this is the other side of it. If you aren't playing through a game a month or more, gamepass isn't worth it to the subscriber. If you are playing through a game a month or more, it's not worth it for the developer.
As access to first party titles that have entered the back catalog, it might be worth it long term as a business idea, but as is it is horribly fraught. Maybe the grand plan is to leverage obsolete AI GPUs for cloud gaming subscriptions that include a catalog.
But if you are a Microsoft owned developer and all the money is Microsoft’s anyways then does it matter?
Microsoft wants to become the Netflix of games.
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I guess a lot of what I said is going over your heads. Yes, I am very aware of the indie game market and where it stands currently. "I think is about to be a renaissance of Indie Games in the gaming industry. " The magnitude of changes from this moment is going to be something new. That is my two cents, you may need change.
Fire everyone with hair that has more than one color that isn't grey!
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there was no grand plan. Phil Spencer was a techie like Pat Gelsinger. useless as a manager. Asha Sharma seems more like LBT
But it will take a very long time to unwind the complications created by Phil
Well Microsoft may not need to have many game studios if they are going to drop XBox or the overhead. With current hardware roadblocks, losing to Sony in a big way, concentrating on AI. Games maybe not in the forefront or top ten for Microsoft. Plus has not game pass failed! Not even remotely delivering expectations? The goal post or posts moved away from games in other words.
I always assumed Microsoft would consolidate down to just Microsoft Games.
Keep specialized teams for each task and basically internally contract jobs to those teams so they have work all year round. That way they don’t need to do the hire/fire dance the other studios do.
Then they just grind out content.
Flogger23m
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You don't even need to do that, graphics can stay where they are for a while. I'd like them to continue improving graphics in games though we have reached a point where they can already look quite good even when trying to achieve realism. A game from 3-5 years ago doesn't look that different from a current game. With hardware costs skyrocketing even for consoles I think we're going to be stuck where we are for a while with less improvements. Even AA games will have to cater to whatever the next generation of consoles are and probably the current gen for longer than usual. I think most gamers will stay with their PS5 for a while if a PS6 is $800-900+.
If anything game developers can take more time cleaning up graphics and putting more effort into optimization. I don't think that will happen, but more and more games have graphical oddities, blurriness and stuttering. Red Read Redemption 2 still looks quite amazing and I recall the graphics being quite clean, without as much shimmering, blurriness or ghosting we see in many current games even when not using DLSS/upscaling.
M76
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Yes, Last of Us is one of the most popular franchises, thanks to the first game which was still made in the era when Sony was at the top of the world. It sold millions of copies even many years after release. Most of the Last of Us 2's sales were pre-orders or happened within weeks after release. Then it fell of like a brick. Analyze this, because this is worth analyzing instead of cherry picking figures in a vacuum that doesn't show the trend.
Where have you heard that? Maybe in pre-production, since the studio is working on Hunter's Gathering, which is about to be canceled, maybe then they'll go full production on a third mainline game, they certainly aren't rushing into it.
So smug, yet so off base. A game in a popular big name franchise opens pre-orders, of course it will top the pre-order charts, what else is there to compete with it for that spot, indie games? Or crickets?
This is the typical paid engagement bait / shill post on twitter, bragging about stats that doesn't mean anything, and certainly doesn't support what they are trying to imply.
depends. if you consider xbox as a platform or not. the whole point of xbox is the X, which is directX
dx13 is a major rewrite including work graphs. rdna 5 (the next xbox) should support dx13. they now need the games to support this dx13 platform
Microsoft has an extremely bad track record with client hardware (ex: windows phone). asha sharma & matthew ball are like a hail mary pass. as long as they are there, the focus will be on platforms (which means more exclusives and / or tie in to Microsoft services such as gamepass / xcloud)
once asha & ball leave that is the end of xbox. hardware, software everything. Microsoft is an azure company. azure has made them the most profitable company in the universe. they make $200 loss on each xbox. gamepass also is a huge loss for first party game sales. the whole xbox stuff makes absolutely zero sense for an azure company. the entire thing has to go away. hardware, software, games everything. Microsoft makes no or little money from xbox compared to azure. neither is it the core for the company
DukenukemX
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That doesn't make sense. Maybe the name originated from DirectX and Xbox does use custom developer kits with DirectX, but this doesn't help DirectX on Windows. The only reason Microsoft now ports games to Windows is because Xbox One collapsed in sales. To give you an idea, Halo 3 was released on Xbox 360 in 2007 but the PC version took until 2020. For a game franchise that started off on MacOS was now exclusive to Xbox? Microsoft don't care about DirectX on Windows.
Microsoft was so behind in graphics technology that AMD had to create Mantle to push Microsoft to create DX12. And yes, DX12 takes a lot of influence from Mantle. Apple beat Microsoft with Metal. I don't know what DX13 will be like but it'll likely force people to get newer graphic cards.
I wish Microsoft luck with those ideas because they're likely to fail.
Your timeline is a little off, DX12 was in the works for years before Mantle was even a thing.
Microsoft didn’t see Mantle then go OMG then dump out DX12 in a year.
DX12 was on the drawing while DX10 was still being worked on. Some sources indicate DX12 started some time in late 08 early 09.
DX13 to the best of my knowledge incorporates a lot of “AI” into the render pipeline.
Currently, Frame Generation tech needs to scan a frame for textures and pull motion data, and all that other jazz, to create those in between frames.
DX13 should give the AI direct access to texture assets and incorporate it directly into future engines, making it part of the render process with better accuracy and cleaner results.
An example I’ve seen is for character movement.
The AI knows the character, it knows the mesh, it knows the skeleton, it doesn’t need an animated process to perform an action. It knows what a person looks like when they take a running jump. So instead of “rendering” the process it just does it.
It will also incorporate the new neural texture tech, so texture memory will get slashed.
In the few demos I’ve seen it results in smoother graphics with significantly reduced issues over existing Frame Generation tech, with none of the latency increase as they are actual frames, all while halving VRAM usage.
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DukenukemX
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In the works but AMD must have been impatient and went ahead with Mantle.
Does look like it.
I'm sure Microsoft has a roadmap for DirectX but it did take them a while to catch up to something that both AMD and Apple beat them.
Another reason to be worried for DX13.
That sounds interesting. Maybe this means a universal AI upscaler that does away with DLSS and FSR?
That's also interesting, and hopefully not brand specific.
I'm hoping this also means smaller installation sizes? Reduced texture memory should also mean lower storage size.
Microsoft management can’t agree on a font in a year let alone an API, and coding it…. A year wouldn’t get them through the block quotes at the beginning of their first file.
It’s not really upscaling at that point but I don’t know what to call it.
But it would remove the need for it, but I don’t know what Anti Aliasing looks like under the new setup.
Not GPU brand specific at least, they require lots of matrix math ( rules out RDNA 3 and below) to work with but that’s generic… I’m sure the algorithms will be licensed, Epic will probably do one under RAD Game Tools, I’m sure someone will get it added to the Basic Universal set soon enough.
Yes, on average half the install is texture data and that could see an 80% reduction so that would be something like a 40’ish percent reduction to install sizes.