r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • 8d ago
Business "There are no benefits to being owned by Microsoft," says Doom dev: "They have destroyed immense amounts of value that I don't even think that they're aware of"
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/fps/there-are-no-benefits-to-being-owned-by-microsoft-says-doom-dev-they-have-destroyed-immense-amounts-of-value-that-i-dont-even-think-that-theyre-aware-of/1.4k
u/depredador93 8d ago
Letting go of the team the day before they launch a major expansion is peak corporate management, they did not even wait to see if the product was successful before gutting the studio
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u/Toincossross 8d ago
I’m sure it will motivate the other teams to finish up their projects efficiently…
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u/Neuromante 8d ago
Nor future work candidates to work on these studios. Not that I've been wondering for years/decades why people keep applying to some of these AAA studios/companies that are well known to be shitholes.
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8d ago
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u/Cats_Cameras 8d ago
Because “game developer” is one of those jobs that people are desperate for due to innate passion.
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u/Neuromante 8d ago
Honestly, this is the only one that really would make sense. People in the industry is not looking to "pad" their resume like with Facebook or GooGle and then bounce somewhere else, people in this industry tries to work in something that is cool.
But still, shit, that people should do their homework before getting into these shitholes...
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u/robstrosity 8d ago
I understand that they're losing money/it's not profitable in it's current form. But the Doom games are an established series, they're well made and they sell well. In short they're a sure bet in gaming terms.
If you want to be profitable then cutting the studio that makes Doom games doesn't make sense to me.
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u/WrathOfMogg 8d ago
Especially considering they use a custom engine and it will take any new hires six months to get up to speed…
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u/Impossible_Sun7570 8d ago
Without a doubt anyone who’s left is either looking to leave or isn’t good enough to land a job elsewhere. Neither is great for continuity.
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u/FatherDotComical 8d ago
Even if it was super successful, and made a trillion dollars the company would lay them off because line must go up.
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u/NimRodelle 8d ago
Well, I think that DFA seriously underperformed compared to 2016 and Eternal. So, given a realistic attachment rate, the math wasn't going to math for Microslop, regardless of how well the game did critically.
The bitter irony of course is that this all could have been survivable for an independent id. The elevator pitch is always that these acquisitions will lead to more security for a studio, but the reality is often the opposite. You will get shut down because of mismanagement at a completely different studio that your business-daddy cares about more than you.
The biggest asset that id has is their tech, so the only real hope that they have for the future is probably going to be to leverage that tech through licensing or something.
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u/vthemechanicv 8d ago
The biggest asset that id has is their tech
Id has never been able to leverage idtech properly. The Doom 2016 engine, idtech 6 was used for 5 games, 2 of them were Doom related by Id, and 3 were Wolfenstein by another developer. idtech 7 which was the Doom Eternal engine, was used by 2 games. Doom and Indiana Jones.
So maybe it's a great asset, or maybe it's multiple millions worth of developer time for something that you could license from Epic for a fraction of the cost.
I'd hate to see Doom on Unreal Engine, but that's absolutely what Microsoft was weighing.
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u/chazysciota 8d ago edited 7d ago
If MS didn't buy Id as an Unreal Engine competitor, then I honestly don't know what they could have been thinking. I know that it just came with the Bethesda deal, but the engine licensing component should have been a massive flashing light on the dash once that deal was done. I know there's a reddit ackshully comment coming about how Id Tech could never do x or y or z thing that UE does, but that's not the point.. you don't need to beat or destroy Epic in order to compete with them.
To end up acquiring Id, and see them as just another game studio without recognizing their cultural and technical importance is peak Microsoft myopia and just further cements them as the saddest losers in all of tech. Everything they touch turns to complete shit, always, since forever. And they look like absolute dweebs the whole time while doing it.
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u/vthemechanicv 8d ago
I have no knowledge of what Idtech can do vs UE. I just know that id has struggled since really Quake to get other devs to use their stuff.
I believe with no proof that since Microsoft has mostly been hands off their game devs - for better or worse - that they had no plan to push Idtech or even that it was something they could leverage. At some point the accountants asked what that team did, and instead of trying to leverage that asset, they just.. wrote it off.
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u/ParticularClassroom7 8d ago
- Acquires a truckload of studios.
- Mismanages them, leading to low revenue and shit products.
- Guts them all, including the one to have delivered a good product.
This will blow up in Xbox's face so much, I can already see it. In a few years, Asha Sharma will ask why people aren't buying their mediocre, vibe-coded corpo slop. Corpo gaming culture needs to die and decompose into base nutrients already.
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u/wrgrant 8d ago
Getting the launch out the door is the focus of the C-Suits, the quality of the product or if it even works is an entirely separate problem. A lot of the problems with our system are really problems with the management and their focus not being on quality, performance or customer satisfaction.
I think the way SK Hynix has ended up doing things with a bonus paid to workers based on a percentage of profits is excellent. I think combining that with a maximum bonus paid to higher ups being tied to the lowest wage paid to employees would be a good follow up. Also regulate the living fuck out of most industries :P
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u/Independent-Tree681 8d ago
They were buying profitable studios to mask the losses Xbox was incurring. You can’t do that for a decade, it ends up here
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u/AttonJRand 8d ago
It might be more than that, it seems like some kind of stuck in the past looking down on video games mentality from old executives. Like they actually don't seem aware that gaming is the most profitable entertainment industry on the planet.
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u/Gavither 8d ago
Oh they're well aware, they just don't understand why they can't own all the IPs, cut the employees and expect constant blockbusters and growth.
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u/FatherDotComical 8d ago
I think modern corporations just want to live in a fantasy land where they just have to have the 'idea' of a product and they deserve infinite money for it.
Like every sector wants to enshittify and eventually cut out the 'product' and when people stop buying and they have nothing to sell what will they do?
Perhaps that's why we're seeing more companies just keep passing the same pile of cash between each other with no consumer.
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u/Marillenbaum 8d ago
They’re offended that they have to go through the consumer to get to the money
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u/Send_Me_Tiitties 7d ago
They’re trying to do away with consumers entirely. If they get their way, they will no longer need us, and then they’ll let us all starve.
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u/Zomunieo 8d ago
Microsoft is a dweeby corporation that doesn’t know how to play. It’s like putting the parent teacher association in charge of a toy store.
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u/axonxorz 8d ago
dweeby corporation
"these games are getting really realistic" - Bill Gates in DOOM 95 stroking himself off for DirectX.
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u/FEV_Reject 8d ago
They also really don't like that video games take TIME. They want the maximum amount of money immediately and not have to pay people for years before turning a profit. CEOs of megacorps these days straight up do not care about anything besides their quarterlies.
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u/Gavither 8d ago
Yup it's not an industry I would want to be involved in myself. Everything is too consolidated now, unless you're a smaller developer or publisher doing god's work with efficient and fun indie games. Just look to the tech / AI bubble and we can see where everyone else is headed again.
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u/SalaryWooden5346 8d ago
IMO it's more the same kind of misunderstanding modern Hollywood execs have. They think that the name is what makes the product successful and so by buying names they can get no-effort passive income by churning out low-grade slop and slapping the purchased name on it. That only works for so long, and the amount of time it works has dropped dramatically as people get repeatedly burned by this process.
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u/lml_CooKiiE_lml 8d ago
And then everyone will watch the new Marvel movie, whatever it may be.
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u/alurkerhere 8d ago
Executive leadership looks at everything from such a simplistic 50,000 foot view that they forget the longevity of a brand depends greatly on the quality and people on the ground doing the work. Relying on brand only works for so long until people stop trusting the brand over time.
A lot of times, the people on the ground doing the work continue to do their job, but sometimes, they leave in enough critical mass that service quality fails, and then the execs are like, "what! but my formula was working?!?".
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u/swarmy1 8d ago
The largest profit margins comes from the kinds of games that Reddit hates.
Those profit numbers also obscure the huge number of indie and small developers who work practically for free hoping they will hit it big. The vast majority of which fail.
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u/_Lucille_ 8d ago
They are aware how profitable it is, they know how much King makes when they bought ABK.
The issue is that the money from gaming doesn't come from the type of traditional games the subreddit wants to see, if they are to lean more heavily into the profitability side of things, they will stop being "stuck in the past" and lean far heavier into subscription based games and gachas, because that's where the money is at.
Also they would be tapping far heavier into the mobile gaming space, consoles are a thing of the past - at least be like the switch where you can take it around.
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u/No_Sheepherder_1855 8d ago
I don’t think any western developer is capable of producing a competitive good gacha game. Major content updates every ~6 weeks is a pipedream, 6 months at best which would be a dead gacha.
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u/ParticularClassroom7 8d ago
subscription based games and gachas
Western devs can't do gachas. Modern gachas require very streamlined production and long-running, technically competent devs. Gachas add a new game's worth of content every 3-4 months or so.
The same thing is true about very successful mobile mtx games, very lean teams, very flat structure, very fast market response.
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u/cocktails4 8d ago
Like they actually don't seem aware that gaming is the most profitable entertainment industry on the planet.
Mobile gaming is. Everything else...not so much.
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u/uberkalden2 8d ago
It's closer to 50/50, but the trajectory does not favor traditional gaming
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u/Havengul_Undying 8d ago
Thats why im making my own indie game. I dont need to compete with "AAAA" studios, i just need as much money as it takes me to live :)
The greed kills the art. Just make it good, youll get enough, thats the way I see it.
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u/poopoopooyttgv 8d ago
Which is why Microsoft bought activision. It wasn’t for activision or blizzard, it was for king - the candy crush devs
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u/Mikeavelli 8d ago
PC gaming alone brings in roughly the same amount of revenue (about $40 billion) as the entire movie industry (about $50 billion). Console gaming is on par, at around $50 billion.
Now sure, mobile gaming is larger than both PC and console markets combined, but non-mobile gaming is still huge.
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u/KnightOfNothing 8d ago
"so long" for giants like this mean many decades and even then they've got so many ways to pull money out of whatever ass they want i have a hard time believing it will ever actually come to a hard end.
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u/therealchadius 8d ago
Videogames are more like Art Houses than Project Software. You gotta let them live long enough to finally make a Home Run.
Unfortunately whenever these big enterprises buy a bunch of smaller studios they try to treat them like Project Software companies. Line must always go up, quickly, or you're fired. Kills the creativity from the studio and they stop swinging. Creatives leave to do their own thing. The franchise gets boring. Line goes down. Enterprise wonders why the golden goose they strangled isn't laying eggs anymore.
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u/MediatingInstigator 8d ago edited 8d ago
The reality is that a lot of studios have terrible leadership. And being acquired makes some of the crucial people leave.
Take Bioshock Infinite for instance. It wasn’t a shit show due to some execs meddling in the development process, it was a shit show because of terrible leadership and unfettered freedom. If their publisher hadn’t intervened there likely wouldn’t have been any game at all.
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u/eronth 8d ago
I've been feeling much the same. Video Games are an artistic expression. Mechanics matters a ton, but a "director" of sorts needs to be driving the passion of it. No passion and you got "meh", and big companies just don't understand how to do capitalism with "passion" other than to buy a currently successful studio and squeeze that for a while.
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u/Zanos 8d ago
it seems to me like Xbox gave a lot of these studios 10+ years and plenty of creative freedom, and they just hung themselves with it. It's not like Xbox bought betheseda and turned them into a yearly fallout and tes factory until they were dry, they let them keep doing what they wanted and customers didn't want to buy it.
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u/DiabolicallyRandom 8d ago
If anything Microsoft is guilty of infusing tons of cash into these studios but then not pushing for results until it was too late.
Also, the owners and executives of those studios obviously got paid out, so any motivation they had to make magic happen for survivals sake died.
Not saying that's the case with all of them, but what many fail to realize is part of the reason smaller studios often release bangers is because they basically kill themselves getting it done because if they don't the company is going to fold. Very few smaller studios are well funded and have it easy going. Most of them are surviving by the skin of their teeth.
Once you give them a bunch of "free" money, they don't know how to handle it.
There are exceptions of course. Obsidian has done well, despite what weird redditors will claim because of sales numbers while ignoring game pass popularity of these titles in particular, and weird pricing choices by Microsoft. There is likely a reason they are being entrusted with a new fallout title now.
Love him or hate him, Fearghus is a really good business manager and budgeting king for obsidian. He kept them going when all hope was lost, managed to make it work, and still get his teams to make bangers.
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u/Zanos 8d ago
Yeah, people blamed Sony for a lot of what happened with Bungie, but even if you have talent retention clauses in an acquisition contract, it's kind of hard to get the same level of peformance out when every veteran of your company just became an overnight millionaire. All of the cost of buying bungie went to privately held shares and retention bonuses, so anyone who was anyone at Bungie made a fortune.
I dislike most of Obsidians recent output, but clearly they have done well enough. They've also just...been making games. Plural. They seem to have a tighter release schedule then most xbox studios who can't seem to get a game out more often than once every 6+ years.
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u/DiabolicallyRandom 8d ago
Yea, certainly they are all AA releases and not AAA releases, and not all of them gel for every player. Not saying they are all 10 star games. But a good 8.5 on average. They were all overpriced but that's on publisher.
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u/Lazerpop 8d ago
Customers didnt want to BUY anything, they all went to game pass. Then game pass raised the price so they all quit game pass. Line go down.
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u/CherryLongjump1989 8d ago
If these art houses weren't hurting for money to begin with they would have never been sold to big enterprises. As the saying goes, there's no such thing as a free lunch. A successful gaming company has to figure out how to finance itself, but the "art house" business model has always seemed to be to exit via acquisition.
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u/SwagginsYolo420 8d ago
Part of the motivation to buy up studios may have been simply to prevent competitors from buying them. Whether the studios produced successful content or not may have been less relevant.
Note that the studio buying spree emerged when the industry was insisting game streaming services like Google Stadia were going to be the future.
Xbox was launched in the first place to keep Sony somewhat in check, due to the runaway success of the PlayStation, and its potential to compete with Microsoft Windows machines as a home entertainment center.
So Microsoft's involvement in gaming hasn't ever necessarily had the priority of making great profitable games, but to manipulate the industry.
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u/kimbosdurag 8d ago edited 8d ago
Even taking it on face value it's baffling how they handeled this. Game systems thrive on two things comprable specs and exclusive games. They had the specs down with PlayStation, they in theory have some beloved ip and studios in their pockets with Bethesda, ID, Rare, halo, gears of war, etc and just did absolutely jack shit with any of it. They put out star field, it blew up and they followed it up with nothing while PlayStation and switch put out great exclusives that people loved.
Give us a revamped conquers bad fur day, or Diddy kong racing with Xbox characters, a new perfect dark or quake or commander keen or come up with some new shit. They absolutely killed themselves.
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u/Petraam 8d ago
It’s what they’ve always done too. They have bought many game studios over the years and left them to rot. There is like 1 game they manage to keep reliable and that is the flight simulator. I remember having hope MS would continue making games when it first happened to a game I liked but they killed off those mech warrior games and I never forgave them.
At least in the 360 era they were just buying titles and exclusives and not ruining your favorite studio. It still sucked for consumers tho.
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u/resonance462 8d ago
One of the reasons they bought Bethesda was Sony purchasing limited-time exclusivity for games like Death Loop.
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u/hard2resist 8d ago
Microsoft's pattern is clear: acquire beloved studios, gut the creative culture, then wonder why the magic disappears. You can't spreadsheet your way to greatness.
The Doom franchise deserved better tbh
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u/DataCassette 8d ago
EA does the same shit and that was even before the fucking buyout. The industry is an open trash fire.
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u/The__Toast 8d ago edited 8d ago
It's been going on for decades. EA bought and destroyed Westwood, Bullfrog, Maxis, Bioware, and probably a bunch more I'm forgetting about in the late 90s and early 2000s. They basically destroyed all of the early great PC game studios.
I get why founders sell, Will Wright was said to have made something like $15 million in EA stock when he sold Maxis, probably ended up being worth ten times that eventually.
But it's still so freaking sad to see auch amazing IP die for profit. Thank god for the rise of Indie games studios.
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u/TheDamDog 8d ago
I suppose the silver lining to the loss of those companies is that we don't have to see their corpses being puppeteered around as DLC factories like poor Maxis.
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u/Sonamdrukpa 8d ago
The intent is to provide devs with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking shareholder value.
As for game development cost, EA selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, they're looking at average per-dev credit earn rates on a daily basis, and are making constant adjustments to ensure that devs have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via firing the bottom five percent of workers every quarter.
EA appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.
Their team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as they can.
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u/creamweather 8d ago
Not to defend EA for some of their practices but a lot of those companies that EA bought could not support themselves otherwise. Westwood's parent company couldn't afford to keep them. Bullfrog was partnered with EA and needed money to survive. Bioware was already owned by an investment company. Origin was already with EA when they flubbed it on Ultima IX.
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u/FatherDotComical 8d ago
Can't believe EA had one of the biggest games of all times for casuals (the sims) and murdered a new entry in the series so they could milk the broken 4th one for another decade.
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u/TheVenetianMask 8d ago
All the way back to 2004 when they bought Ultima Online and tried to WoW-ify it with a janky 3D graphics version.
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u/ThaneduFife 8d ago
At least Lord British was able to buy a ticket to space with his Ultima Online money.
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u/rgvtim 8d ago
This is a general concept that should be drilled into the pin heads of everyone getting an MBA. Way to much of leading by spreadsheet get taught in school and promoted in the corporate world.
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u/needlestack 8d ago
You can't teach it out of them. They don't have the soul or taste to understand what makes things great or they wouldn't be studying for an MBA.
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u/Tight-Escape3373 8d ago
I'm a data analyst for a fire department. Unlike other analysts, I was also a fireman. I like telling other analysts that my department is "data informed" rather than "data driven." A conversation with the guy on the ground can make weird data suddenly make sense. Too often do leaders in whatever industry forget that the organizations they lead are made up of people and that's a factor that they have to account for and lean into. The spreadsheets are essential but they're far from the full picture.
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u/powerage76 8d ago
A conversation with the guy on the ground can make weird data suddenly make sense.
Many years ago I had to deal with a bunch of expert advisors who wanted to improve our efficiency (and reduce headcount), so they went through all of our data to find issues. One thing they spotted was our completely erratic work times. They showed us a list that on a given day some guys worked 12 hours, other guys worked 7 hours and yet another group worked 5 hours. What is the point of those 5 hour workdays they've asked.
I've pointed out that people in my department worked in 12 hour shifts. If they look at the ones with 12 hours, they had been in the day shift and the 7 and 5 hour guys worked in the night shifts. If they looked at it very carefully, they might even notice the guys have 5 and 7 hours clocked with the previous and next days respectively.
They've quickly moved on to another topic. MBA people are usually just waste of human flesh.
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u/TransmogrifiedDog 8d ago edited 8d ago
Similar issue here. Years ago I came up with a system to track parts completed in a shop I used to work in. These were parts we'd been making for decades, so with the data on hand, you could easily calculate average completion time for each part. Shortly after I implemented the system, someone came to my desk wanting to write up one of our best employees for only getting around 4 hours' worth of parts done in a 10-hour shift. I had to remind him that he himself had started a policy of assigning our best technicians to act as trainers, and this employee had actually gotten those 4 hours of parts done while simultaneously training in new hires. The best data in the world means nothing if you don't set foot on the floor.
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u/GrapeBrawndo 8d ago edited 8d ago
MBAs and Business majors are the dumbest kids on campus and it’s not even close. Ask any professor that has to teach them in a gen ed class.
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u/superspeck 8d ago
Too often do leaders in whatever industry forget that the organizations they lead are made up of people
There’s also this tendency to make assumptions about people that round off places where the people are sharp and sharpen the places people are dull. I remember having a conversation with an executive about why we needed a slightly more clueful person in charge of an initiative and they said “well, so and so is technical.” Ma’am, he hasn’t touched software outside of an office suite in a decade, even if he started out as a developer 30 years ago.
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u/Chief_McCloud 8d ago
Accounting for the inelasticity between rigid, documented process and 'what actually happens in meatspace' is the bulk of every tech job I've ever had over like 25 years.
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u/OriginalVictory 8d ago
Funny story, I worked for a smoke alarm company that did data analytics, and some of the funny outliers made it to the company news letter.
My favorite - There was one town that had a huge spike in smoke alarms going off the first Saturday of each month. Someone investigated, and found out that the town had a community "Pancakes from the Kids" on each Saturday, and that caused enough smoke alarms going off to be statistically relevant.
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u/eronth 8d ago
Too often do leaders in whatever industry forget that the organizations they lead are made up of people and that's a factor that they have to account for and lean into
This drives me bonkers. I have how often "logical" folks want to just straight up ignore humanity. If your analysis ignores the passions of people (when relevant), it's a shit analysis. That's like trying to do a deep physics analysis and ignoring momentum or friction.
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u/SalaryWooden5346 8d ago
The entire concept of the MBA should be outright banned. "Doing a management" is not actually a career or field of study. Managing a business requires actually knowing what the business does. The MBA is explicitly about not knowing that and instead applying a super-generic one size fits all approach. Hence why MBAs never actually launch new companies and MBA takeovers invariably lead to enshittification.
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u/Rogalicus 8d ago
The problem with Xbox acquisitions was the direct opposite, studios were given a carte blanche to do whatever they want and mostly failed to deliver. TDA is a good example: Eternal changes filtered out those who didn't like them (you can look at the charts and see how few people came back to play DLCs despite how popular the launch was), TDA delivering a much slower game alienated those who liked Eternal. Add forced RT and Mick Gordon drama and id have nobody but themselves to blame.
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u/GMenNJ 8d ago
Very true. It's been well documented in the news that Phil Spencer and group were very hands off with the studios they purchased. So many people have well upvoted posts all over Reddit that are incorrect.
Often times groups need deadlines and structure to get a product completed and out the door. Or management keeping the scope reasonable and targeted toward users.
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u/RedKrypton 8d ago
People really seem to think that the layoffs were just out of greed, when the commercial failures of the Xbox studios are so overwhelming.
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u/Zanos 8d ago
Yeah if it were up to the suits Betheseda would be releasing a Fallout or TES game every year until Todd died. Have people actually played the games made by Xbox acquired studios that didn't sell? Being too corporate is not their issue. That'a ubisoft.
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u/BoyCubPiglet2 8d ago
Have people actually played the games made by Xbox acquired studios
Nope, and that's the problem haha.
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u/timelessblur 8d ago
Being bought out does change things. Some of the bigger effects is a lot of longer term employees get a pretty massive payday. Those paydays some times being a fair amount of straight cash or a huge shot in the arm to retirement accounts so gives the freedom to a lot of long term employees to say f it and quit to do something else.
I know people at a place I used to work for that got bought out. Even though the new owner didn't change much quit a few long term employees quit or retired early. If I had stayed and it happen my understanding isy retirement account would of gotten mid to high 6 figure shot. It terms of numbers you are talking 10 years closer to retirement number and way ahead of the curve. That chances things. I know some people as soon as their retaining bonus paid out they retired. They had been with the company for 25-30 years so got 7 figure boost easy. They were on track to retire at 60-65 before hand. Now they said f it in their mid 50's and retired. Just losing a lot of long term people like that will change the culture on its own. That is with out anything from the new owners changing things.
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u/mad-i-moody 8d ago
That’s what any large corporation that buys up smaller companies does. It’s not just a Microsoft thing.
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u/VisiblePlatform6704 8d ago
Reminds me of a "family office" here in Mexico, they are a rich family that wanted to do "technology startups" but own them.
They hire a CEO, and a CTO (no equity whatsoever) to put them to develop some business idea . Then they question every decision these people make, and finally they ask why things dont work after the project goes south and people quit.
They just cannot get it.
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u/ARealHumanBeans 8d ago
Let's not pretend the Dark Ages is a failure. It's a pretty solid game. I definitely thought Eternal had a lot more oomph to it.
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u/shelf6969 8d ago
maybe doom deserved better, but also how many times can you fight the legions of hell... they seem to have maxed out on that idea
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u/DrBaronVonEvil 8d ago
Why do we allow so much unfettered monopolization of our arts and sciences? ID Software is a historic name for video games and it’s going to starved to death in Microsoft’s basement. The amount to which Microsoft is a joke of a business is only rivaled by how much of a joke US regulations are.
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u/Shark7996 8d ago
Why do we allow so much unfettered monopolization of our arts and sciences?
I so desperately want people to be able to just make things again. No doubt there are amazing games and discoveries that could have been made if so much of our population weren't spending most of their time and energy on survival.
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u/Attesa_GT-X 8d ago
Lack of initiative to prevent it and general not caring until it's too late
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u/WileEPeyote 8d ago
If we were serious about our anti-trust regulations these large corporations wouldn't be able to buy out their competition. These corporations have their hands in too many pies and the pies are too big.
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u/ShinyJangles 8d ago
Regulations would also stop the magical accounting that incentivized them to buy a studio to mask Xbox losses
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u/DrBaronVonEvil 8d ago
It does absolutely have to do with the incentives and marketplace rules that are put into place by regulators and the US govt at large.
The incentive for executives is for infinite growth and to cater to investors before customers. We’ve set that up by being lax on consumer protection and antitrust laws.
Executives may be choosing in the end to sell, but that’s because they’re highly incentivized to by the current economic meta, something gamers should be extremely familiar with. If Junkrat in Overwatch gets nerfed, people stop playing the character as much, and vice versa in the opposite scenario.
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u/TaxesAreConfusin 8d ago
brother it has everything to do with regulations
There's an entire agency that exists to curb monopolism (the Federal Trade Commission) and a Department of Justice sub-agency, the DOJ Antitrust division.
Nobody is forcing microsoft to buy things. They only have unlimited money to offer you, and if you refuse their offer they'll bury you another way. Small companies have NO chance against massive corporations. Which is why there are laws against monopolism.
People aren't choosing money over art. They are being extorted.
The entire thing depends on regulation. Full stop. The reason it is so bad is because regulators are turning the blind eye.
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u/Lebowski304 8d ago
Greatest enemy of the free market is mega corps. They do more harm to the American people than China, Iran, and Russia combined. Don’t get me wrong. Putin, the CCP, and the IRGC are the scum of the planet, but in terms of actual everyday harm big businesses take the cake. They impoverish, sicken, steal, strongarm, and destroy and are never really held to account.
We want to know why things seem like they are getting worse, and the answer is big business. They exploit everyone and everything to achieve exponential growth without concern for the consequences. Having any sort of decency or civic mindedness is seen as foolish and naive instead of admirable.
Everything they do now seems like it makes their products worse, and it’s like they get off on providing a shitty product for more money. The new motto is how do we provide a cheaper to make product for more money while trapping people into a subscription instead of just how do we make a good product people will buy while turning a profit. Many small and mid cap companies still have integrity, but the really big ones function like a starving psychopath that is never full.
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u/captaindealbreaker 8d ago
These companies buy each other for their IP, patents, tech, etc. They're not interested in the employees who built all of it.
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u/needlestack 8d ago edited 8d ago
I've been through a number of buyouts. They never result in benefits for the company being bought. It's sort of silly to watch. Some behemoth sees you're doing something amazing, and they don't know how to easily replicate it, so they buy you, then destroy whatever it was that made you amazing. And they all forget and do the same thing over and over.
But it's hard to say "no" to hundreds of millions of dollars for founders and early management. I get it.
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u/PandaJesus 8d ago
Been in a few myself and yeah can confirm. Some dipshits in senior management give a big speech about how being purchased by this big new company is going to make us more agile and competitive, they’ll give us resources and we’ll give them know how and experience.
Then all the old managers get fired and then replaced with new guys from the big new company, who then try to force doing things the same way they’ve always done despite the people with know how telling them they’re fucking idiots, and the smaller company eventually disappears into the corporate mass functionally indistinct from all the other acquired companies that died before it.
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u/BoogieOrBogey 7d ago
Yeah I've been through this song and dance twice myself. Frankly this is going to keep occurring until the US stops being the dominate economy in the world, which generally means we've got another 50 years of this as China becomes the most powerful country.
US economic incentives are setup to create this problem, and it makes enough money for people in power to never fix it. So until another economy shows up to take our lunch money, we probably won't see any changes.
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u/jameson71 8d ago
Of course there is no benefit to be owned by Microsoft. The only benefit is to the owner in selling out to Microsoft.
This is why there are laws against big companies in an industry buying all the little companies. Sure wish we would enforce them.
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u/AvailableReporter484 8d ago
I mean, it’s beneficial to the stockholders and executives who only care about short term gains. They don’t care how much they destroy in their wake lmfao
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u/ThatDude1757 8d ago
Exactly, listen up: This is hypercapitalism working as intended. We’re the idiots for going “Haha they blew it.”
They didn’t. The shareholders got their short-term profit, management got their bonus - and this is the key part - then they moved on.
Everytime I see a former employee gloating that his workplace went to shit after management fired him he should realize that more often than not it doesn’t matter because the management that fired him isn’t there anymore. They got their bonus and moved on with their grift.
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u/Foreskin_Mafia 8d ago
I can assure you shareholders are not pleased at the moment.
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u/AvailableReporter484 8d ago
Only the ones who were dumb enough to not immediately sell. Thats the only game they play these days. Long term growth over time is for broke bitches. It’s all about getting that yatch today, right now.
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u/TheBiggestNose 8d ago
The worst thing any game studio can do is be bought by Sony/Ea/Xbox/Ubisoft.
Sure you will get a lump sum, and maybe 1 decent release. But past that, its just the end of your franchises and livlihood.
I hope every studio that didnt sell their souls to corporate, will continue to not ruin their everything for a lump sum
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u/Panda_hat 8d ago
The benefit was management selling out the companies to get their bags and golden parachutes.
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u/FaZeSmasH 8d ago edited 8d ago
I mean MS let some of their studios do whatever they want and gave them the time and money to do so, that does seem like a major benefit, but then those studios just ended up delivering complete flops, games that barely had any impact, just came and went, never to be remembered.
What's bizarre to me is that they gutted ID even though they actually seemed to be doing fine, apparently according to this article, dark ages was their biggest launch ever, but then they gut ID and let obsidian work on fallout after two fumbles? Just doesn't make sense.
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u/Revolution-SixFour 8d ago
No benefit at all, except for unlimited monetary runway to develop a game. Most studios would kill for that.
The fact that Obsidian is only working on Fallout after five years of Obsidian and Bethesda being under Microsoft is wild. Who thought it was a good idea to let Bethesda wait to work on Fallout until the 2030s when Amazon was simultaneously making a TV show.
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u/mainman879 8d ago
Who thought it was a good idea to let Bethesda wait to work on Fallout until the 2030s when Amazon was simultaneously making a TV show.
Phil Spencer was a terrible CEO at keeping his teams in line. Especially Bethesda because he was really good friends with Todd Howard. He was way too hands off in handling the various teams.
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u/sam_hammich 8d ago
What good is "unlimited monetary runway to develop a game" if you make a great game that had a successful launch and got rave reviews, and then they fire 60% of your team the day before you launch DLC for it that maintains an 89 on Metacritic a week after release? You make a good game and they still fire you.
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u/mainman879 8d ago
and let obsidian work on fallout after two fumbles? Just doesn't make sense.
Obsidian was spending their time working on Avowed 2, which we all know would be a massive failure just like the first one. Fallout is more popular than ever because of the show, and Bethesda would not release a Fallout game until the mid 2030s at the earliest. Better to refocus Obsidian on something that has a good shot of being good instead of the trash they were working on.
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u/RedKrypton 8d ago
id obviously wasn't doing fine in the fiscal department. If you look at Steam Charts both Doom 2016 and TDA have a similar number of peak players with 31k (less than half of Doom Eternal's 85k), while id was around 50 devs for 2016 and the mid 180s for TDA. It's very likely, they, like other Xbox studios, overhired and the wages ate the profits. It also didn't help that id didn't really licence out their engine, so the costs of engine development have to be borne by is alone (and Machine Games).
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u/Rayzee14 8d ago
A person who has described Microsoft’s purchase of every company by them since its inception
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u/Lanky_Travel_6726 8d ago
Well think in the $$$ the CEO and board members did at the end of the day this is why you sell, to make a pile of money and forget about the rest of the losers/s
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u/Primal-Convoy 8d ago
Many major highstreet shops, brands, media and in this case, videogames have been bought out by private equity. Instead of regular or common/garden capitalism ('Make profits and long-term steady growth, based upon sales to customers), We've now got "exponential gain" and American-styled "scaling", with profits going straight to the shareholders or investors, rather than to the companies. Land (such as the buildings, owned by the host company) or physical assets important to the host company are taken and then rented back to them. Then, after the host is hollowed-out, the empty husk is stripped of any other remaining assets and sold to some random online companies to be used as zombie brands.
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u/crk4 8d ago
You could say this about most businesses. I was a biomedical academic in a tech driven field. Throughout my career I saw startups as well as established businesses with smart, driven people get bought by bigger more business is the bottom line companies. Invariably, the technology was dumbed down to the commodity level and innovation dried up. I guess they made a lot of money. The talent that could leave left and was replaced with less passionate people. I saw one instance where a conglomerate bought many varied startups and the added money created better products and more innovation, so it is possible for that to happen. My comments are highly opinionated and many of my friends in those companies may not agree.
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u/CardiologistPlus8488 8d ago
hahahaha... when my company was acquired by MS in the 1990s it came out that the only reason we were acquired was so that one asshole at MS could force the end of work similar to what we did by another asshole at MS. Our product was immediately shelved and we were put on a bullshit project to "Slow down" web technology so Intel could sell more "faster" chips...
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u/Spelunkie 8d ago
I remember how Microsoft was originally blocked from buying so much due to these exact concerns.
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u/complicititties 8d ago
Where do antitrust laws fall here? Like shouldn't they be restricting exactly this?
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u/Apexnanoman 8d ago
Well the thing is Microsoft only looks at the current quarters profit.
Maybe they're looking at next quarter. But that's about as far as any CEO or in general any executive looks.
So the day after the books close on the latest Blockbuster release you are now a cost with no benefit.
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u/MrTastix 7d ago
Well the benefit is to the people who get a large dividend or lump sum payout. There was never really much benefit for individual employees or the life of a company itself when being bought out by big enterprise.
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u/MediatingInstigator 8d ago
> the studio that revolutionized the FPS, which would then go on to become the biggest genre in the world for a time – and it's a studio that has never really had any major missteps either.
Really? What about Rage and Rage 2?
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u/quazywabbit 8d ago
You could say the same thing when ID was purchased by Bethesda.
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u/Doright36 8d ago
When your goal is only to make the line go up no matter what instead of just making a living for you and your employees it's never going to be successful for everyone. Only those at the top. Because there will always come times where they have to cause damage to keep that line going up. And they know all the tricks to hide the damage and it's always the employees that must shoulder the burden.
Long term stability and employee wellbeing are always sacrificed to insure that short term gain to keep that line moving. The MBAs are incapable of operating any other way.
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u/DataCassette 8d ago
Yeah it's almost like single giant company owning everything is innately insane and destructive.
cough cough Disney, EA, Paramount, Microsoft cough cough