Xbox continues its “reset” with dramatic restructuring

datsci_est_2015

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.

unethical_ban

>“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?

Iridiumkoivu

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”

fidotron

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.

lain98

MS as a company remains perpetually in reset mode.

2OEH8eoCRo0

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.

lenerdenator

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'."

autoexec

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.

kelvinjps10

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

YuechenLi

>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.

adamrezich

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.

pipes

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