Xbox | Zenimax Development Studios | Activision | Blizzard | King

[kitler53]

I was meaning that US and UK are similar to each other. But a lot of these games don't even really have appeal in the US anymore. (And I'm quite aware that most of the world didn't really have much interest in Xbox - and on the other end, MS barely ever tried in a lot of these regions.)

There has basically never been a chance for them to be more popular than PlayStation, but if they'd at least put out incredible games worth playing, at least they'd be doing well in the US/UK. 

This entire generation, it feels like the only real reason to get into the ecosystem is because of Gamepass (or because you're already in the ecosystem with a backlog of older Xbox games.)

I'm not sure how good MS's advertising has been here, but at least before today, people have generally seemed to like Phil Spencer and thought he was a genuine gamer guy. And quite a few people here were under the impression that Sony was the anti-consumer guy and MS was the pro consumer guy.

I think they would have been at least worth having a conversation about, if the games were showstoppers.

But they've been failing on all the important fronts.

personally i get the feeling this growing resentment goes well beyond xbox.

like, if xbox was bleeding money people would be sad but people would understand that layoffs are needed.   but that's not even close to the situation.  microsoft is reporting record profits and record profit margins.   ...but massive layoffs are occuring anyways.   

this feels soo much bigger than xbox to me.   i think people are getting really angry how companies literally ruin the lives of the people that actually work so that a tiny minority of people (the top 0.1%) can see the value of their stock go up.

the stock market has become a modern form of slavery.   like not in every way but like in the specific way that slaves were exploited by their slaver owners to take all of the value the slaves were creating to enrich themselves and live lavish lives while the slaves had nothing.   we're reaching a "let them eat cake" level of wealth concentration and that ended with a lot of people losing their heads.

like, think about it for a minute.   a guy assassinated the CEO of a health insurance company and no one cared even a little.   many people cheered it.  that's where we are today and literally today is a massive reason why.

[Legend]

This is an Xbox pic.twitter.com/K3WfXF9cYC

— Ant (@antdude92) July 2, 2025

[Legend]

I love my series x. I play it so much more than ps5.

But oh boy have they sucked.

Halo 5: kinda trash
Halo Infinite: kinda trash
Starfield: kinda good
Indy: kinda great

I think those are the only first party xbox games I have bothered to finish, covering two generations. Just crazy since I pay for gamepass and could play more, but none are worth the time.

[kitler53]

tbh i don't know anything about this but seems like MS's downsizing is affecting non-MS studios as well.  romero games had their funding cut along with "several other unannounced projects at other studios"

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:cxumluk6uferxhndrp5wugky/post/3lt2io5pmfk2v?ref_src=embed

[the-pi-guy]

This'll be a mess, I'm pulling a bunch of Neogaf posts - Schreier is corroborating on the claims about the Zenimax Game that got cancelled.  So I'm sharing some other things. 

The contingency plan for projects that are making it out the other end of this is to supplement the loss of manpower & experience by training management of all levels on proper applications of CoPilot/ChatGPT. Videos on how to prompt LLMs for assets and new potential workflows are being produced as we speak.

In layman's terms: the expectation is the surviving projects will come out on time tables, now at lower budget levels, and at quality levels that were established before the cuts.

Also - this is not the last round of layoffs for XGS by a long shot.

I have been told in clear terms that, outside of a few quarters in the 2nd half of the 360's lifecycle, the only time Xbox has operated at something resembling profitability was after ABK's earnings were integrated into their reporting.

It is not hyperbole to suggest that Xbox as a division likely would've become simply 'Microsoft Gaming' as a brand and had all of their HW positions folded over, with a handful of software studios (think Mojang tier) remaining on the studio front, had the ABK merger not gone through.

Based on the convos i've had, I think the future of Xbox overall is likely a combination of a handful of teams at the tier of Blizzard, CoD, and Minecraft, with a slow-bleed of every other team and studio slowly dying off as layoffs and budget cuts reduce everything as time marches forward.

The reason why so much effort is being poured into maintaining the charade is because theres a 10-20m userbase of very diehard users who all have an absurdly high likely hood of maintaining their higher tiers of GP subscriptions through this.

They wanna maintain that revenue stream as long as possible while they, over-time, restructure Xbox into a far leaner endeavor that focuses on a handful of mega-projects.

These cuts are gonna go on for a much longer while, and the sad part is - if the gaming community finally said 'enough is enough' and just all chose to divest, and tbh its hard to argue we're not already there given how returns have been (outside of ABK) the last couple of years - Microsoft would just expedite the process and close off even more teams now. To them, whether someone like 343, now Halo Studios, makes Halo versus just outsourcing it out is just semantics to them, plus Halo hasn't been 'Halo' since Bungie bought their way out.

MS is never gonna have the come to Jesus moment that media mouth pieces keep claiming just around the corner for team Xbox.

"Enough is enough"? I'm not sure which context you want this applied towards.

There are a variety of market factors affecting the Western Games Industry right now, driven significantly by MS but also just how capital markets and the games industry have intersected for decades at this point finally reaching a boiling point.

For Western game devs, short term, this is going to be abysmal, but this is gonna be look backed on as the period preceding a radical revolution for the Western Games Industry. If you're interested in getting into game development and don't mind putting in the time to work on prototypes and develop your technical skills working on an engine, as long as the USA's socioeconomic situation doesn't deteriorate into some really awful places (this has a much higher chance of happening than i'm comfortable with...), then i'd say that opportunity cost is going to pay out big time.

Sure, it means a lot of titles that we as a fanbase have emotionally invested in for decades are likely going to be lost in the IP/license hordes of these mega-corps, but there is gonna be a lot of new, amazing things coming out of this budding western game dev scene. Consumer purchasing will change, as it always does. Thats just a constant to business. Consumers still will flock to quality, now more than ever, even as the amount of money they have to spend on entertainment continues to decrease (and sharply).

That said - the way we make games is largely going to change, and there are some very hopeful signs of development structures that I am very excited about. I look at what Kepler and Sandfall pulled off with Expedition 33 as the blueprint for the Western Games Industry going forward, to be honest.

When it begins to come out just how fudgy incredible the title he was working on was that got axed today.

That game had some of the best reactions from folks who played it as playtest for an MP-focused title that i'd heard from in years. It takes an absolute truck load to have folks heap praise on an MP playtest in modern times. This game would've been spectacular.

Edit:

Typically, in situations where publicly-known games get cancelled, theres this sense in the fanbase of 'the thing we didn't get might've been so incredible', and finger-pointing amongst execs who just didn't get it. FOMO and all that. Well, this is one of the cancelled games that, by literally every account, sounded like it would've been a slam dunk in literally every sense. Felt like I should make an edit to clarify a little further.

Theres a lot that can and should be said about what went down with Xbox after ABK was allowed to go through. Many were too focused on Kotick and the board wanting to sell and how profitable it all was, and not what ABK themselves felt about where the direction had led them. Many folks conflated the sale going through due to the civil & potential criminal cases, and while it was a contributing factor, the larger issue was that ABK as a publisher, was on the other side of their crested wave and the board knew it.

It wasn't just that Blizzard was facing some major headwinds or that CoD's revenue stream, while profitable, had reached an unsustainable level of overhead and tech debt that eventually would need to be addressed. The real issue was that ABK as a publisher had long-since moved past the point of even bothering to diversify their portfolio, instead focusing on an ever-increasing small number of projects/IP that were having solid returns. With the ABK deal going through, many leaders in ABK found very welcome homes at MS, especially since their leadership was viewed as being so much more successful than MS'. So it absolutely doesn't surprise me that all we've gotten since the deal closed was a MS who is increasingly treating their portfolio like ABK treated theirs.

For any dev in a western studio who is under MS, any project is do or die for them. Any. If you think you're working on a sacred cow, you're wrong.

As for Halo Studios, i'm honestly not entirely convinced that game ever ships. Thats not me speaking on the quality of the project, mind you, just more speaking to the publishing reality MS is faced with; they own Call of Duty, the FPS IP that basically took over Halo's entire presence in the FPS market genre as the years ticked by. As far as market impact, Halo has not had a large market hit in a long time, and the studio has faced nothing but turmoil since 4 shipped. I feel like you can pick basically any year since 2018 and say that was the worst year for Halo as an IP and you'd be on the money for the most part. Despite folks always thinking budgets somehow don't exist for Xbox, they always have, and when you have Call of Duty, which is more a production pipeline than it is a game, a pipeline which requires ever-increasing investment in order to be maintained, while Halo hasn't come close to sniffing that level of RoI, you eventually are gonna have to make a decision on which one has a future and which one doesn't.

Even if this new Halo project ships - it would need to recapture a market in a way that I just haven't seen occur since maybe Doom 2016, with the added bonus that Halo's success is really not measured by the quality of its SP campaigns, and more about its presence as an online MP shooter, so it can't even stand out in the way that Doom 2016 did (focusing on a solid campaign), cause even if its the best Halo campaign thats ever been produced, if the online MP doesn't catch on, then thats basically a wrap.

MS throughout the years but particularly since Bungie walked, has always been open to the idea of just licensing out Halo as an IP for others to develop should they have a strong enough pitch for it. We almost got a major Halo release that wasn't helmed by then-343i not even a couple of years ago. Mind you, Halo Studios got impacted today despite both wanting to ship a title next year, a title that is being made on an engine they've never shipped on (Unreal), and now with the added bonus of having to ship on more platforms than you ever have before. From the outside looking in, Halo Studios is being setup to fail. You wouldn't ever cut resources at a marquee team that is, on paper, within 16 months of shipping. Thats just a recipe for disaster.

[kitler53]

The contingency plan for projects that are making it out the other end of this is to supplement the loss of manpower & experience by training management of all levels on proper applications of CoPilot/ChatGPT. Videos on how to prompt LLMs for assets and new potential workflows are being produced as we speak.

In layman's terms: the expectation is the surviving projects will come out on time tables, now at lower budget levels, and at quality levels that were established before the cuts.

Also - this is not the last round of layoffs for XGS by a long shot.

ugh.  

[nnodley]

Bad time to try to get into AAA game space, but perfect time to develop smaller unique indie games. Some even in the scope of expedition 33 if you can find some decent funding or doing it on the side.

In general though, the game industry is a HUGE risk right now

[Legend]

ugh. 

Yeah sure sounds like hopes and dreams, not an actual battle plan.

Bad time to try to get into AAA game space, but perfect time to develop smaller unique indie games. Some even in the scope of expedition 33 if you can find some decent funding or doing it on the side.

In general though, the game industry is a HUGE risk right now

Yeah I think video games are pretty healthy right now and have been improving. It's just AAA and the industry side that is really having trouble.

Doubt western AAA will learn what to do anytime soon. I think one problem is that these big huge teams just don't work unless you get super lucky or have a Kojima/Cory/Druckman that can lead as if it was a smaller team.

[nnodley]

I am hoping this will lead to a renaissance of smaller linear titles again.  Late ps3 and early ps4 were the golden years of those type of games.  We need that back. It's much more sustainable and I think gamers/buyers have shown a tendency to really come out in force to buy if your game is great.

[the-pi-guy]

But Blackbird's cancellation was particularly shocking because it had blown away executives at Xbox just a few months ago. During the demonstration in March, Spencer was enjoying the game so much that Matt Booty, the head of Xbox Game Studios, had to pull the controller away so they could keep the meeting going, according to two people who were in the room.

Despite some technological hiccups and a lengthy development cycle, the game appeared to be making good progress. Employees were stunned to see it get caught up in the bloodbath."

Xbox Executives Were Blown Away by an Upcoming Game. Then They Canceled It.

[Legend]

I bet Blackbird will get cult like status similar to other cancelled games like Star Wars 1313, but I doubt it was actually as good as people are making it out to be.

[Legend]

Former Turn 10 Employee Says Forza Motorsport Series is Canceled https://t.co/LjIueTPTt8

— Insider Gaming (@InsiderGamingIG) July 4, 2025