Xbox continues its “reset” with dramatic restructuring

Posted by dgrin91 10 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by YuechenLi 9 hours ago

>For Halo, our goal is clear: make the greatest Halo game ever, worthy of its universe and legacy, while staying true to what made players love it in the first place.

I seriously doubt that is going to happen. 343 Industries, now Halo Studios, has the dubious distinction of being the only AAA game studio that has somehow never made a universally acclaimed game over almost 20 years. Sure, there are some good parts of Haloes 4 and 5 and Infinite and MCC, but all of these games have a giant asterisk next to their quality.

You would think Campaign Evolved would have been a lay-up, but despite multiple studios working on the at a drastically smaller scope than even the original Halo, it still currently has a "Mixed" review on Steam.

"Make the greatest Halo game ever" is too high of a bar to cross, I think a slightly more realistic goal for would be "make a decent Halo game that majority of players like", which at this point, I'm not sure if it is achievable.

Comment by pennomi 6 hours ago

The ironic thing is you could pass the IP over to a passionate indie dev and they’d be more likely to churn out “the greatest Halo game ever” than any AAA studio.

Comment by downrightmike 8 hours ago

Part of Halo CE failing is boycott, I was interested until MSFT did all their shenanigans and cost people their livelihoods.

Comment by fidotron 9 hours ago

The astonishing thing with the Halo franchise is that 343 kept being given chances to go again, and again, when it clearly just wasn't working. By the time they get round to releasing a great new Halo people that loved the original will be taking out their pensions.

It cannot be understated the extent to which the console industry, including third party publishers and devs, needs Sony and Microsoft to both stay competitive. In that light the drastic moves being done at MS are long overdue, but maybe not sufficient. It's also an open question if consoles (outside of the Nintendo universe, which is a very different audience) have a future at all.

Comment by theandrewbailey 9 hours ago

Halo used to be what everyone wanted (both to play and dethrone), but now it's sitting in the corner eating glue. Moving it under Activision is certainly an extreme measure, but if it means everyone who touched on it in the past 15 years can't anymore, I'm listening.

Comment by Forgeties79 9 hours ago

Well now activision gets to make Call of Halo so we’ll see how that goes!

Comment by autoexec 9 hours ago

I really don't understand the point of Xbox.

Nintendo has the worst hardware, but consistently delivers a small number of really great games you can't play anywhere else. Any game you can play on a Xbox you could also play on a real PC and have a vastly better experience and far more utility. Xbox is just a shitty, ad infested, crippled gaming PC. Playstation is heading in that direction as they lose more exclusives, but at least their hardware is better than Microsoft's so the games look/play better.

Microsoft might as well give up and just sell a bunch of low-mid range gaming PCs in console shaped cases, running windows, ship them with controllers and just brand them as Xboxes. At least for now. Eventually Microsoft wants games as a service, where you buy a dumb terminal/cheap thin client and they stream games you pay excessively high prices for but never actually own to your screen.

Comment by andOlga 9 hours ago

What you described with the "might as well give up" is literally the idea behind Project Helix. It's a PC branded as Xbox with some compatibility layers glued in.

Xbox now is a game studio, not a console manufacturer. Look at them through that lens. Doom, Halo, Overwatch, Fallout, whatever else, whether you are into them or not, they own a lot of franchises and those are their core now.

Comment by autoexec 9 hours ago

Depending on the hardware, if they let you get to a desktop, and you can run regular windows programs (especially steam and emulators) it might actually be worth it for some people. Especially for households where nobody owns a desktop/laptop, just phones and tablets.

Comment by andOlga 7 hours ago

As far as I'm aware so far, the plan is to have Windows boot into "Xbox mode", like the Steam Deck boots into "big picture". And have an exit button to get a normal desktop and other stores/games.

Basically just trying to challenge Valve on the scale of Microsoft's access to hardware and undercutting their price while doing the same thing with a different default store. Also compatibility with actual Xbox games, which won't be a thing on the steam deck.

Comment by surgical_fire 4 hours ago

> Xbox now is a game studio

A shitty one at that.

Comment by philipkglass 9 hours ago

I find modern Windows very frustrating. The Xbox lets you play games that might be available on PC/Windows but you don't have to deal with Windows. That's why my sister has an Xbox. She ditched Windows for a Mac years ago because Windows kept getting more annoying, but the Xbox was easily usable in 2013 and it still is today.

Comment by kyriakos 6 hours ago

bought an xbox series x + gamepass at the start of covid lockdowns. been playing since. before that i hadn't played video games in like a decade. maybe there aren't a lot of people in my category but to me gamepass + xbox is the closest thing to netflix for games. series x brought some nice things like quick resume which is fantastic for someone who only can dedicate a little time per day on gaming. for people who are not hardcore gamers it really ticks a lot of boxes.

Comment by autoexec 32 minutes ago

I can only see gamepass being a good thing for the most casual gamers. It hurts developers and gamers alike. It's basically the ultimate DRM for games. You never own your games. You have to beg a company for their permission to play them (revocable at any time, for any reason). The games can be censored or modified without notice. Games can be removed and made unplayable at any time without notice. Prices to access whatever games they do allow you to access can increase at any time. It gives them yet another way to force ads on you. They have an endless number of ways to enshittify the service to pressure you to subscribe to higher tiers at higher prices. I certainly don't want to think about how I'm running up a meter while I play or have to worry if I have enough "gaming minutes" left this month or if I'll get cut off. That's just the issues with gamepass. Console gaming in general involves a growing list of compromises.

Most of those same arguments can be made for Netflix, but it's a lot less expensive to buy a DVD or Bluray to get around that restriction for the shows that matter to you. I think most people who are serious about movies have some kind of collection of physical media.

I know that leveraging that kind of control over what games people are allowed to play and keeping their hands in players wallet at all times pulling out cash at regular intervals forever is where Microsoft wants things to go for everyone, but it'll feel like a massive loss as someone who loves games and enjoys the fact that when the mood strikes me I can pull out my PS1 and replay Symphony of the Night or even my old Atari 2600 and play a game of Night Driver or Riddle of the Sphinx. As long as the hardware holds up I can enjoy my old games or loan them out to friends and family (props to old hardware by the way, most of my old consoles including both the Atari and the PS1 are still working fine while I'm already on my third PS5 controller).

I'm with you on the quick resume feature though. The PS5 actually had that when I got it, and it was handy, but they removed it in an update for some reason. I'm guessing it was either breaking saves or it took more effort to keep working with new titles than they wanted to expend.

Comment by AtlasBarfed 9 hours ago

Microsoft runs monopolies. Business software Monopoly specifically.

They cannot make user and customer focused software. They cannot make user and customer focused hardware. They do not care about customers.

Although I guess they have proven to be okay at data centers.

What should the Xbox be if Microsoft was a competent organization, like half of what apple is? And I'm not an Apple fan by the way

- since they have a monopoly of PC gaming, much to the pain of PC gaming users, that should afford them the ability to effortlessly Port x86 base games to an x86 gaming console platform

- because of their extensive relationships with PC hardware manufacturers, it should afford them the ability to produce a very powerful but cost-effective gaming platform

- Maybe even since steam runs primarily on x86, Microsoft could have partnered with steam to get their games onto that platform relatively seamlessly

- The PC gaming has several decades of dos and windows games that could have been updated, remade, or the like, so there should have been a wealth of ip available to them

- and with good coordination, should have been able to bootstrap dozens of software gaming studios to make actual good games exclusive to their platform

Well Microsoft succeeded at some of this. They did not succeed to the necessary degree, especially with treating their own custom games

Comment by tonymet 9 hours ago

every platform is also a community. a network of players, like a neighborhood, or a bar. Your friends & acquaintances are there. The whole is more than the sum of it's parts. It's more than just hardware, or exclusives.

I switched from PS to Xbox a few years ago, because my family and friends were playing there.

There's also some nice technical benefits, but compared to my friends, who cares?

Comment by guywithahat 9 hours ago

Xbox is designed for kids, who's parents don't want them to have full access to a desktop computer and don't know how powerful of a gaming computer they need (people like to claim its cheaper but it really isn't, and it's easier to spend more on fast hardware you don't really need).

Because of this eco-system for kids, xbox has great multiplayer support (including locally for friends), and the software was a clearer focus with less bloat. I don't see xbox market going away any time soon unless people stop having kids

Comment by rk06 9 hours ago

hmmm, that does not make sense. for one, xbox competes with playstation and playstation is definitely not designed for kids.

second, nintendo exists for "family friendly" market.

Comment by autoexec 9 hours ago

Nintendo's offering is absolutely the "for kids" console.

Comment by guywithahat 5 hours ago

I guess kids suggests someone quite young, but my impression was they (xbox and playstation) were built for people in high school and younger, which is why the product makes sense. As OP pointed out, if you were 35 just getting into gaming you'd just buy a desktop.

Consoles like Xbox serve parents who aren't tech-savvy enough to hunt for PC deals and don't want their kid to have free access to the internet.

For what its worth I used to work on a parental controls app startup and this is a consensus I found talking to customers (parents), they like their devices to do one narrow thing so they can control how their child spends their free time. There are of course adults who play it but this is the core of the market, and the strongest value-add in my opinion.

Comment by embedding-shape 9 hours ago

> Microsoft might as well give up and just sell a bunch of low-mid range gaming PCs in console shaped cases, running windows, ship them with controllers and just brand them as Xboxes.

But, that's exactly what they're doing right now, and you're still not satisfied? What would be different compared to today? It very much is exactly what they're doing.

Comment by autoexec 9 hours ago

I haven't seen it yet. Maybe I'll be satisfied when I do, but as of today it still makes no sense to buy an xbox and hasn't made sense for many many years.

Comment by Forgeties79 9 hours ago

The series S at launch, probably until year 3 or so, was arguably the greatest deal in gaming. Especially with how easy it was to get cheap (even free) gamepass.

Comment by datsci_est_2015 10 hours ago

Idiot directors and VPs don’t realize that the independence is what leads to the games being different enough to justify separate existences. Put the same teams on Halo and CoD and they’ll converge and cannibalize each other.

Or maybe they do realize this and are willing to sacrifice the IP at the altar of Moloch.

Comment by Rebelgecko 9 hours ago

TBH it seems like the Halo teams have been trying to copy COD for a while (going as far as adding COD mechanics to the Halo:CE remake).

If they're under the same roof, my optimistic hope is that they'll try to focus on how to differentiate the IPs. But realistically we'll probably just end up with even more micro transactions

Comment by dmix 8 hours ago

Even talented teams given lots of independence and a large budget can coast and meander during development, and more importantly not release the interesting stuff in a timely manner (see GTA6).

At least with the Netflix model they fund every director available, including independent and C-list directors, and release everything quickly, using quantity to mask quality issues. Bigco Gaming is addicted to the 5yrs+ in-development blockbuster model and it's not producing many hits and the public notices that sort of thing.

Comment by SllX 9 hours ago

What is there to sacrifice? There hasn’t been a new Halo game since 2010. Just fan fiction, remakes & anthologies.

Comment by sylens 9 hours ago

Eh, a lot of these studios have not performed well at all over the last 10-15 years. It seems like Phil Spencer was the type of boss that let these teams run wild and be creative, and all he got back was a bunch of late, over budget, underwhelming games.

Halo Infinite from 343/Halo Studios stands out in particular. They thought that game was ready to ship in late 2020 and showed it off on their summer showcase, where it triggered such an intense backlash they delayed the game for a year and it still came out with minimal content.

Halo and Rare going under Activision could be a good thing. But if you want to be cynical, they are moving all of these studios out of "Microsoft Gaming Studios" and into Activision, Bethesda, King, etc. to make it easier to sell each of those individually or spin off the whole thing altogether.

Comment by duped 9 hours ago

They're essentially closing 343/Halo studios because they had independence for a decade and did nothing but flop.

Comment by Iridiumkoivu 9 hours ago

Guys, there’s now a non-zero chance that we will see a proper official Halo game running on top of a Quake 3 Arena derived game engine within our life-time. Childhood fantasy might become real. “:D”

Comment by asdff 9 hours ago

There hasn't been a proper official Halo game since Reach though.

Comment by BanazirGalbasi 9 hours ago

I honestly didn't think that the story of 4 was bad (outside of the QTE fight at the very end), and I enjoyed the character growth in Infinite. If you jump from 3 to Infinite then you'll probably hate Chief, but the way he's gradually been forced to accept his humanity has actually made him more interesting to me. He's definitely not the original character he was intended to be (he kept his helmet on so that anybody could imagine themself inside the suit) and I think a lot of original fans are mad at that.

I remember people hated on Reach because it didn't follow Chief and they added all the gadgets, then people hated 4 because of the weird undersuit Chief wore and a bunch of other nitpicks. Infinite has been hated for a slew of other reasons, but now Reach is considered good and 4 has a rising reputation. It seems to me that PvP players and story players have two extremely different outlooks on where the games went wrong, but at least we agree on one thing - keeping 5/Guardians on Xbox only was stupid (I still haven't played it).

Comment by asdff 8 hours ago

People hated on it because it was very much not 3 with stuff like bloom, sprint, armor lock etc. No masterchief story another blow. Armor lock was just annoying; people would pop it to block your stuck grenade, but all you had to do was just wait until its done then you kill them with the jump you have on them. Just delayed the game and made gunplay awkward. Kind of funny when you play a reach playlist in mcc now a days, no one is picking any armor ability but sprint, rest are kind of gimmicks or just make you a target.

Comment by BanazirGalbasi 6 hours ago

People loved ODST despite it not being a Chief story, so honestly I think that's just an excuse players came up with after the fact. The rest is a PvP complaint, so for those of us who seldomly played online the game felt fine. I'm not saying there weren't problems, but I think PvP players are a very loud group whose input overrides people who enjoyed the PvE experience.

Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 9 hours ago

I thought Infinite was quite fun but you could tell they cut a lot of content.

Comment by Forgeties79 9 hours ago

It was so aggressively mid. I enjoyed hunting HVT’s with my buddy but that was about it.

Comment by 6SixTy 9 hours ago

The next game is officially Unreal Engine based, so not quite the same swapping out Quake with Unreal.

I really would have liked Halo games based on idTech though. I can't see why idTech can't be a complete package for Halo, especially 7 and 8.

Firing a bunch of id staff probably crushes that idea more than it was previously though.

Comment by officeplant 9 hours ago

Given they just laid off most of the id team I wouldn't hold any hope.

Comment by unethical_ban 9 hours ago

>“For Halo, our goal is clear: make the greatest Halo game ever, worthy of its universe and legacy, while staying true to what made players love it in the first place,”

Are those opposing goals? Why say "while" as if they are in competition with each other?

Comment by AlexandrB 8 hours ago

Because 343 studios, quite obviously, doesn't think very highly of the original Halo trilogy. Paraphrased, their pitch is:

> Our goal is to make an actually good game for a "modern audience", but we'll leave some nods to the originals so those fans come back too.

Comment by seanclayton 4 hours ago

343? Do you mean Activision?

Comment by pipes 8 hours ago

Laura Fryer, ex Xbox executive, her channel on YouTube has some really great insights into all of this.

Comment by kelvinjps10 9 hours ago

Xbox360 was so good. Kinnect Halo 3 halo 4 were good (more halo3) And had many coo op games.

Comment by butlike 9 hours ago

Xbox360 was the second best system behind PS2 in my mind. PS4, Switch, and Super Nintendo get honorable mentions.

Comment by adamrezich 8 hours ago

Remember when we had a robust Western AAA video game industry? Man that was awesome. Too bad it had to die a slow death over the past decade and a half for various completely unnecessary reasons.

AAA games got too big to fail, so they had to be made to appeal to everyone, even if that meant they no longer appealed to fans of previous franchise titles. You Just Can't Make A Game About Things Like Space Marines With Dudes As The Primary Target Audience Anymore, apparently!

Crunch had to die because even though every game everyone's ever loved was made under crunch, crunch is stressful, it's bad to work hard on making something good, so that had to go, so millions could be wasted on making unsuccessful games.

Then, all the studios had to get bought up and consolidated and then laid off—who could've seen that coming a mile away?

It's been such a bummer to watch an industry I once cherished for its incredible output in terms of both technology and entertainment die a slow decade-and-a-half-long death, but, here we are.

Comment by lain98 9 hours ago

MS as a company remains perpetually in reset mode.

Comment by theandrewbailey 9 hours ago

Fixing blue screens must be hard.

Comment by 9 hours ago

Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 9 hours ago

I think they have an impossible task. Make a good product that is a pleasure to use for players and devs while being more profitable.

Comment by schnevets 9 hours ago

I'd argue the entertainment industry is reaching a ceiling on the quality that inflated budgets guarantee. Microsoft could throw a billion dollars at Halo 6 and then get an unfavorable response because Master Chief doesn't get the shotgun early enough in the campaign.

Somehow I doubt merging once-competing-now-heavily-downsized studios will be a recipe for success (see also the merging of Bethesda and Obsidian Software). Not that managing an army of game developers among one of the world's largest armies of developers is an easy task... but it does seem like the key is smaller teams with more creative liberty (hopefully working without the burden of an existing IP with such lofty expectations)

Comment by biglyburrito 6 hours ago

We'll know more after GTA 6 launches.

Comment by rk06 9 hours ago

it is easy: give up on hardware and focus on games

Comment by lenerdenator 9 hours ago

Their only goal is to be more profitable.

Comment by lenerdenator 9 hours ago

Obsidian became a part of Bethesda, huh?

The Fallout TV show probably had to be the final straw for how much independence Bethesda gets to have. Boy, to have been a fly on the wall in that conference room.

"The TV show is doing gangbusters and you're telling me you don't have any F*CKING RELEASES IN THE CAN?!?! Stick Starfield, Todd, you're done with your 'art'."

Comment by mikestew 9 hours ago

I mean, I'm not even asking for a new installment, but the TV show is in New Vegas now, and not even a remaster of Fallout: New Vegas? In a world gone mad with advertising, I'm truly shocked that the single tie-in was a remaster of Fallout 4.

Comment by butlike 9 hours ago

Maybe Todd's more a champion of the people than I originally realized. Not retreading ground with remasters is admirable in my book.

Comment by officeplant 8 hours ago

>Not retreading ground with remasters is admirable in my book.

Are we gonna ignore Bethesda reselling Skyrim in different coats for 15 years?

Comment by lenerdenator 7 hours ago

Hey, man, like... something's gotta fund the next game.

No, not TES VI. Starfield.

In all seriousness, I've not played Starfield, and I'm sure it's at the very least a serviceable game (at least by my Bethesda fan standards), but regardless, it wasn't the right game to make at that point in time, no matter what Todd thinks.

Prior to the release gap between TES V and TES VI, the longest gap there had been between new mainline games in that franchise was six years. They're now fifteen years deep.

Comment by zrobotics 5 hours ago

I mean, they released an oblivion remaster last year and it appears they are planning on a fallout 3 remaster, so probably retreading that ground as much as they can.

Comment by jasonmp85 10 hours ago

[dead]