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[Team Andromeda]

Dude, you still haven o games.

Chum its 4 months. Come back to me in 4 year's

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

Arguing to ignore everyone who has not bought your product yet, and to only listen to people who already bought in, is not in any way, shape or form putting MS corporate interests at heart. That is calling for MS to make existing fans happy by stifling corporate growth. That is antithetical to MS business interests imo.

That's not what I'm arguing for: what I should've better phrased is that there is a segment of those who may be outside of the Xbox/GamePass ecosystem, who are so ardently married to a different brand that they would not consider to invest in the Xbox/GamePass ecosystem no matter what and only support the software that'd otherwise be exclusive to that ecosystem, if it came to their preferred console brand ecosystem, and THOSE people are both an extreme minority of gamers and aren't worth Microsoft's time to be listened to.

And make no mistake, the majority of people who are using misguided "anti-competitive", "monopolistic", "unethical", "unfair business practices", "leaving money on the table" etc. talking points to argue against any possibility of these Zenimax games being Xbox/PC/GamePass-exclusive, fall exactly into that definition of the extreme minority of gamers I was referring to. They are not the same as gamers who may be outside of the Microsoft ecosystem but otherwise are open to investing into it (either by purchasing a Series X, Series S, playing on a PC, or through smartphone/tablet/smart TVs etc. via Xcloud streaming) if the content is there and exclusively so.

 

[NickFire]

That's not what I'm arguing for: what I should've better phrased is that there is a segment of those who may be outside of the Xbox/GamePass ecosystem, who are so ardently married to a different brand that they would not consider to invest in the Xbox/GamePass ecosystem no matter what and only support the software that'd otherwise be exclusive to that ecosystem, if it came to their preferred console brand ecosystem, and THOSE people are both an extreme minority of gamers and aren't worth Microsoft's time to be listened to.

And make no mistake, the majority of people who are using misguided "anti-competitive", "monopolistic", "unethical", "unfair business practices", "leaving money on the table" etc. talking points to argue against any possibility of these Zenimax games being Xbox/PC/GamePass-exclusive, fall exactly into that definition of the extreme minority of gamers I was referring to. They are not the same as gamers who may be outside of the Microsoft ecosystem but otherwise are open to investing into it (either by purchasing a Series X, Series S, playing on a PC, or through smartphone/tablet/smart TVs etc. via Xcloud streaming) if the content is there and exclusively so.

Why do you include leaving money on the table with those other words / phrases? We are talking a 7.5 Billion purchase. That is a very legitimate topic to question when you are talking that kind of money.

 

[Banjo64]

Dude, you still haven o games.

At the end of this year, in terms of original new AAA games, there will literally be 1 on each console; Halo and Ratchet and Clank.

 

[NickFire]

At the end of this year, in terms of original new AAA games, there will literally be 1 on each console; Halo and Ratchet and Clank.

If we define AAA by the finished product, I am not sure either console will have an AAA console exclusive in 2021. But I think your general point is a fair one. The lineups of existing and near future releases are so underwhelming that I have given up trying to get any next (current) gen console at the moment. It's just not worth the chase right now.

 

[saintjules]

 

[NullZ3r0]

Which is on Xbox?

And PC and mobile.

 

[Clear]

But Sony still leveraged the tools available at the time, and which were in their means of use through financial capacity. Microsoft is doing the same today. Yet for some reason people want to excuse the former as being perfectly valid and the latter as being a potentially unfair business practice, on the grounds of an ethical argument....in relation to a corporate-standard, corporate structure-centered business practice.
AFAIK unless actual human or civil rights are violated, or legal laws are broken, a deal's a deal and any method is potentially one worth pursuing, and valid under the legal definition.

I'm not complaining about unfair business practice, I'm theorizing about financially prudent business practice. I hate to keep restating this but if you or anyone thinks the outcome of MS decision matters to me emotionally, you're really barking up the wrong tree. If I get irritable its because getting lectured by people for whom the full extent of their experience is playing some games or putting together their own PC components is aggravating when I myself worked for decades in the business.

The 3 most important things to the games biz are money, money and money. Its always been high risk, high reward. Unlike film and tv bonded financing has never been the norm and as such its always been a struggle to discipline the process. Hiding under a corporate umbrella takes off some of the strain because its rarely a case where money is simply going to run out, however what you have to concern yourself with in that environment are unexpected shifts in corporate steering coming in top-down, and/or finding your team shuttered or merged with another unit because your productivity or profitability was deemed not up to snuff.

The point of all this is that although MS Studios itself will endure, individual groups within it absolutely will need to continually justify their existence. So yes, while MS can absorb even extreme losses in earnings, you cannot assume the same for their acquisitions.

This is not a monolith. IP is more valuable than assets and labour because its transferable with a flick of the pen.

We don't know how much has been earmarked for PlayStation ports of games, nor do we know how far any of those versions are. I think you are overestimating the impact of those costs in spinning down PlayStation versions in development to what is essentially a revitalized Xbox division, that now has more support from the main company. Dev kit prices aren't anywhere near as high as they used to be for consoles back in the '90s or '00s, relatively speaking, because now much more of the bulk work can be done on general-purpose PCs.

No it can't. It doesn't work that way. Again: Dev stations are leased by the platform holder and can remotely deactivated. Lay people always confuse this with Test Units, which are sold and are essentially just retail units with modified firmware. There is a big difference as all the system-level debugging and profiling is done on the former, and as such its immaterial where the code is written or the assets created, the dev-stations are where the builds are compiled and tested. Wiithout one of those you have nothing.

Companies handle internal reorganizations/reassignments often; I'm certain there are contingency plans in place if certain versions of games are cancelled, as it's not like cancellations of ports haven't happened before in the industry. This is actually something that happened somewhat frequently with the Sega Saturn back in the '90s, even in 1997 (when the system was still commercially viable and still somewhat competitive with PlayStation in the West). Even at that time, when Saturn ports of certain games like Tomb Raider 2 or Resident Evil 2 (both of which had planned Saturn ports, and other games with Saturn versions at decent rate of dev that still got those versions cancelled) would have recouped their porting costs, publishers (some at the behest of Sony via exclusivity deals) still cut those versions loose.

Platform-holder or third-party run "internal" studios are infamous for their inefficiency. Man-years of effort get wasted on rejected prototypes and experiments that go nowhere. This is why the ones that tend to last are those that do a single franchise and stick to it, and those that are more creative tend to die off. The sad truth is that the outcome tends to be getting mired in the corporate swamp and getting shut-down, or becoming a franchise factory.

I could name names, but it should be pretty obvious which studios fall into each category and their fates. Do some research and maybe you'll realize why I dislike consolidation irrespective of whom is doing it.

(And yes, I'm fully aware of Bernie Stolar's (idiotic) statements regarding Saturn at E3 1997 which led to a lot of Western software cancellations for Saturn. However, a decent deal of those ports were somewhat decently along, and could've sold to Saturn users desperate for content to recoup dev costs...and yet were still cancelled.)

This is with keeping in mind that you needed to do actual full rewrites of code for ports back in the day, which incurred major relative costs for software development and R&D. It's not like today where the systems share a lot of the same architectural and feature-set DNA, so porting costs, while likely being higher in a raw comparison to costs back in the day, are a lot cheaper platform-to-platform in a modern relativistic context, mainly influenced by the size of the porting team and salaries/paychecks to cover for the time invested in porting.

Back when we were writing in assembler you'd rarely have more than a couple of coders per project, its just not like that anymore and utterly pointless to try and draw a comparison.

I just did all of that above

But with that said, you're not considering the impact allowing Zenimax studios to continue releasing software on competing console platforms/ecosystem will have to their new parent company and its console platform/ecosystem AND subscription service (GamePass).

You've heard this before: if fervent publishing of most major Zenimax games is allowed to occur on Sony or Nintendo platforms, and Microsoft has no inroads for GamePass being available on those platforms, both Xbox AND GamePass suffer. The only benefit for Microsoft to take this approach would be if they planned a full transition into a third-party publishing company.

And hey, maybe for all we know that's something they're considering. But it'd be a wild theory, with no proof to corroborate it at this time, and runs contrary to many statements from top figures. The only way to even begin considering that being an option is if Sony and Nintendo allow GamePass, as-is, to come to their platforms. Which last I checked, isn't happening.

Never mind the argument of MS doing this, in some appeal to go 3P, completely cuts them out of royalties of 3P software sales in their own established ecosystem, which would negatively impact them, at least as things are right now.

As evidenced by MS strategy with iOS, they don't need an inroads. A web portal is sufficient.

And agaim you are getting sucked into monolithic thinking. What may work for MS may not work for the former Zenimax studios, whom will have carry their own water or get downsized/merged.

So you say the opportunity cost in putting their software on PlayStation and Switch is low, yet your earlier statements I quoted above contradict this belief. Which one is it? If the opportunity cost is low, then cancelling versions of software in-development for other consoles is also low, while the earning potential for making those games exclusive to their platforms and platforms that support their ecosystem/services is high, potentially even higher because it will drive those on competing console platforms to consider jumping into the Xbox/PC/GamePass ecosystem to get access to these games.

Hold on.

For a start off I was specifically referring to Playstation ports, not ones Switch which are by definition higher opportunity cost because of the major re-tooling involved in moving to such a dissimilar architecture.

That you chose to throw this in there shows you simply are not taking onboard what I mean by opportunity cost and how it relates to producing multi-platform software. Your outlook is way too simplified.

The reason you've gotten static over it is because the POV itself has flaws in it, and we're discussing those flaws with these responses.

You're entitled to your opinion of course, but no I don't think that's the case at all. Its because I'm arguing with people ignorant of the intricacies of the topic at hand and with far too much emotional investment to be even handed.

That is valid for third-parties, but we're speaking of a publishing firm that is now technically a first-party entity. Naturally, first-party studios enjoy privileges, financial security, resource access etc. that third-party developers generally do not have. Microsoft will be providing all of that to the Zenimax studios going forward, there is no doubt about that.

Swings and roundabouts as I explained above.

For first-party studios, lifetime exclusivity tends to be the favored approach by far, and we have both Sony and especially Nintendo's own 1P library to prove why. Firstly, it creates a vested interest for people to come to your platform-ecosystem and stay within it (that doesn't mean they ONLY use your platform-ecosystem, just that yours will be one they utilize in addition to others, most likely). Secondly, it adds perception of product value by the customer base; valuation by the customer base within the ecosystem or willing to join the ecosystem translates to increasing the valuation of the IP the exclusive software in that ecosystem belong to.

Mergers and acquisitions tend to work when both parties share the same vision, if not... well you get Westwood and EA.

The only real benefit of corporate ownership is assurance of reliable funding. That's it.

Thirdly, it acts as a means of securing the platform holder from certain types of market volatility. Third-party support can come and go, or not prioritize your platform/ecosystem in comparison to a competitor. Having first-party content that remains exclusive to your own platform-ecosystem allows the first-party studios to hone their development to a specific platform (hardware or software dev chain, or both) and leverage the most out of its capabilities. This is exactly something that benefits Sony's own first-party developers, so if they seem to understand that...why wouldn't Microsoft? Especially considering Microsoft was hurt the most by lack of curating consistent 1P content last gen?

This is true, but it also becomes contingent on the platform holder/conglomerate owner to harmonize their output. You tread on one of your sister studios toes (like SCE London did with 8 days versus ND's Uncharted) and your project gets shit-canned. This is why I see trouble brewing given the sameyness in genre of the studios MS has acquired.

Now I can seen an argument for stating that, since Microsoft has so many first-party studios now, they can simply afford to have some of these prioritize multi-platform for competing console platform-ecosystems (or service-ecosystems, i.e Amazon Luna) because they have sheer volume of studios. Maybe there's some truth to that, but this is where I can probably give my own perspective on that "case-by-case" statement made months back. To me, "case-by-case" means late ports of very specific titles Microsoft would like to leverage to bolster attention to the Xbox/PC/GamePass ecosystem, to act essentially as "advertisments" and appetizers to Sony and Nintendo gamers...

...or in other words, almost exactly what I see many people frame Sony's increased expedition of select 1P content to PC as: "advertisements" and appetizers to PC gamers to jump into the PlayStation ecosystem (i.e buy a PS5) to play their other 1P content and sequels to those older ports, or squeeze out some last profits from the games. That last bit, at most, would maybe factor for some of these Zenimax games as well, so even if they were to come to Sony and Nintendo platforms, I would not expect that until the games have essentially run their course on Xbox/PC/GamePass, likely 2-3 years after initial release at earliest (and again, only for very select pieces of software).

The opportunity cost versus projected return equation is why Sony is doing what its doing. The key though is that from Sony's standpoint PC has always beem there and isn't going away, so why not monetize it?

The same logic should apply in inverse with MS studios (PC+XBOX+CLOUD) and Playstation.

Or we can compare them to the examples I mention in this post that I feel have poked holes in your own logic on this topic and shown at least some element of (likely ironic/unintentional) contradiction within your POV here

At the very least tho, it is very clear you've put a lot of thought into framing your POV and I commend that. I just simply don't agree with it and I believe to have made very clear now with this particular post.

Its all good, but I hope you've gathered from my response why my position hasn't shifted a bit, and why whether I'm right or wrong it doesn't bother me personally. I'm good either way!

I feel very sure that the main lasting impact of the merger will be accelerated mortality for several of MS recent acquisitions through further rounds of lay-offs and consolidations. MS has done a far from flawless job managing their original dev-group and trying to absorb all of Zenimax on top of their other recent buys is going to prove chaotic *unless* they loosen the corporate choke-chain.

If they decide against keeping Zenimax as a semi-autonomous unit within the MS Studios umbrella... Expect the worst.

 

[lame gag1990]

Might have something to do with the millions of gamers who don't play on PC or mobile?

Exactly my point.

 

[VCAwe]

Dont mind me, just taking salty notes for future reference.

I see a nerve was struck Probably cause of the whole mother fucking thing.

 

[The_Mike]

I see a nerve was struck Probably cause of the whole mother fucking thing.

It took you 9 days to come up with this?

C'mon, you could do better.

Don't mind reply to me, you are on ignore.