Xbox Game Studios Stupidity Hate Thread Game Pass Edition

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Belvedere said:
There is the saying: "Nature hates a vacuum" and I'm wondering with the upcoming absence of Xbox in the console hardware space if another company may step up to offer an alternative.
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To what end?

To come into the console space - a large enough company would feel like they can innovate in the space. While Nintendo has been thriving with motion controls, portable consoles, all age games, and various other gimmicks - what could another company do that would set them apart from Sony, Nintendo, Steam, or Phones?

Early Xbox 360 had a strategy though Xbox Live that worked for a while, but everyone caught up fairly quickly and they never developed another strategy. Sega already tried and failed as their ability to leverage arcade titles withered and died as arcades withered and died. Google tried and failed because Google hasn't successfully finished a project in ~15 years. The only company I could reasonably see trying it would be Nvidia, but they're busy milking the AI bubble and gouging datacenters and video card consumers to try and give it another go.

The big shift is going to be in how studios are handled. AAA studios have been climbing up a "bigger is better" approach for the last 10 years that's going to culminate in GTA6 being the most expensive mid game ever produced but you can already see the signs of the model failing in 2025's "Game of the Year" horizon. Silksong, Expedition 33, Blue Prince, Hades 2, and Split Fiction were all made by very small teams and KCD2 is not some huge studio or franchise. Clearly most studios have been finding out the logical end of this idea by becoming just too monstrously big to succeed.

Your standard "big money, big push" games like Ghost of Yotei, Borderlands 4, etc just all kind of landed flat to no fanfare.

Once the studios shift - some larger company might try and carve out a new niche, but ultimately going into consoles is currently a great way to lose a whole lot of money.
 
Belvedere said:
It is utterly insane to me to look at what Xbox was in their prime and what Xbox is right now. It is a train wreck in slow motion and everything points to be entirely intentional. So next round it is going to be Sony and Nintendo in the console space and their strategies are so different there is barely any overlap in their audiences. They are going to squeeze dry their own users for every red cent they can.

There is the saying: "Nature hates a vacuum" and I'm wondering with the upcoming absence of Xbox in the console hardware space if another company may step up to offer an alternative.

We know Valve is working on their Freemont set-up box for the living room but it is just a PC with SteamOS at the end of the day. Are there even any other companies that may want to venture into this space? or I'm over thinking it and it is is not a viable business model for a newcomer?
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I bet Apple could sucker a bunch of people into buying a console.
 
The absolutely insane part of this is that Microsoft could have cleaned up this generation simply by going "Right, Bethesda I know you're dedicating a lot of staff to Starfield/Elder Scrolls 6 but I'd like four games in smaller scope released per year starting next year. I don't care what they are but they need to be released." Then did the same to Activision and all their other developers.

Then they'd have been able to drip feed exclusives all year round to keep the wheels spinning while they pour resources into the big guns. Would the bulk of them have sucked? Sure, but some would have been sleeper hits. I just find it incredibly funny how every major developer dedicated their entire teams to their BIG GAME as to not devalue their brands, only for BIG GAME to suck devaluing their brand and creating a mammoth flop.
 
Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
The absolutely insane part of this is that Microsoft could have cleaned up this generation simply by going "Right, Bethesda I know you're dedicating a lot of staff to Starfield/Elder Scrolls 6 but I'd like four games in smaller scope released per year starting next year. I don't care what they are but they need to be released." Then did the same to Activision and all their other developers.

Then they'd have been able to drip feed exclusives all year round to keep the wheels spinning while they pour resources into the big guns. Would the bulk of them have sucked? Sure, but some would have been sleeper hits. I just find it incredibly funny how every major developer dedicated their entire teams to their BIG GAME as to not devalue their brands, only for BIG GAME to suck devaluing their brand and creating a mammoth flop.
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With modern game devs, that 3 hour long AA quality game would end up with 6000 people working on it for 4 years with a budget of 100 million dollars
 
Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
The absolutely insane part of this is that Microsoft could have cleaned up this generation simply by going "Right, Bethesda I know you're dedicating a lot of staff to Starfield/Elder Scrolls 6 but I'd like four games in smaller scope released per year starting next year. I don't care what they are but they need to be released." Then did the same to Activision and all their other developers.

Then they'd have been able to drip feed exclusives all year round to keep the wheels spinning while they pour resources into the big guns. Would the bulk of them have sucked? Sure, but some would have been sleeper hits. I just find it incredibly funny how every major developer dedicated their entire teams to their BIG GAME as to not devalue their brands, only for BIG GAME to suck devaluing their brand and creating a mammoth flop.
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it seems obsidian is releasing pieces of shit like every month now. that isnt the problem. the problem is that every AAA studio fucking sucks
 
Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
The absolutely insane part of this is that Microsoft could have cleaned up this generation simply by going "Right, Bethesda I know you're dedicating a lot of staff to Starfield/Elder Scrolls 6 but I'd like four games in smaller scope released per year starting next year. I don't care what they are but they need to be released." Then did the same to Activision and all their other developers.

Then they'd have been able to drip feed exclusives all year round to keep the wheels spinning while they pour resources into the big guns. Would the bulk of them have sucked? Sure, but some would have been sleeper hits. I just find it incredibly funny how every major developer dedicated their entire teams to their BIG GAME as to not devalue their brands, only for BIG GAME to suck devaluing their brand and creating a mammoth flop.
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I would love all these giant game projects to be scoped down but IMO the companies we are familiar with are way past the point where that's viable.

What we need is to see more releases turn into massive flops that make Concord look small to see a radical shift towards fun-first small scope games as a baseline. Maybe then we can get back to cheap, subsidized consoles packed with exclusives too.
 
Tom Nook's Gloryhole said:
The absolutely insane part of this is that Microsoft could have cleaned up this generation simply by going "Right, Bethesda I know you're dedicating a lot of staff to Starfield/Elder Scrolls 6 but I'd like four games in smaller scope released per year starting next year. I don't care what they are but they need to be released." Then did the same to Activision and all their other developers.
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They can't really sustain that.

As it turns out, you can't just slap a team together and go "make a game". This is actually something that some larger studios have tried to mixed success but have some glaring issues around people with talent going "why don't we just do this ourselves" and breaking off. There are some successful stories (Dave the Diver from Nexon, Hearthstone from Blizzard) but most of them just kind of land in the dirt instead. I had a specific Square title but I literally could not google what it was it was so generic.

The studios are too big to manage and Xbox is also too big to even begin to manage their subsidiaries in any meaningful way.
 
Baraka Obama said:
What we need is to see more releases turn into massive flops that make Concord look small to see a radical shift towards fun-first small scope games as a baseline. Maybe then we can get back to cheap, subsidized consoles packed with exclusives too.
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That’s be sweet. Maybe we’ll finally see a major crash in the video game sphere when it comes to new releases where it takes more studios and Xbox/Playstation with it.
 
Another huge MS success

Screenshot 2025-10-18 at 10.02.17 AM.png
 
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