And what is Microsoft going to do with this purchase? Seriously, Microsoft is buy all these game studios and fail to utilize them probably. They own all the IP required to do a followup to Fallout New Vegas and NOTHING.
Regarding at least the Blizzard side of the acquisition, I feel like Microsoft ownership may end up being a good thing for their underused IP. Microsoft has strong incentives to release RTS (StarCraft, Warcraft) games to bolster PC usage for gaming and maybe bring more attention to the Windows Store (IMO forcing minecraft onto the Store was a blunder as the upgrade experience was fucking terrible) if they choose to use it.
The rumor mill suggests the opposite is true. Bethesda intended to ship the game over a year ago and Microsoft delayed it to make sure it wasn't the next No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk.
Bethesda continues to ride on the ideas of talent hired-and-fired much more than a decade ago.
I wish it was the next Cyberpunk. I've gone back and forth between Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 / Phantom Liberty and Starfield, and I like Cyberpunk 2077 so much better. It looks better, it has a way more captivating story, it has so much more interesting characters and it just plays much nicer.
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/cyberpunk-2077-glitch-refun...
Starfield launch has been bug-free and majestic in comparison.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/starfield-is-bethesdas-low...
Re: playercount comparison - Cyberpunk wasn't split between Steam + XBox, and also wasn't 'free' on XBox to lure players there vs Steam.
https://steamcharts.com/app/1091500 Looks like you inflated the # by ~50% regardless; as CP soon dipped under 10k players.
Re: user review score - user reviews on Metacritic/etc are honestly almost meaningless now for any game that does anything to annoy anyone. Starfield pissed off the legion of sony loyalists and has been getting review bombed continuously since well before launch. Dog piles gain traction.
I'm not saying Starfield is the perfect game or has no problems, just that 'worst launch than cyberpunk' is simply insane and revisionist.
Yeah, it wasn't. It was split between Steam, GOG, Stadia, PlayStation 4 (one of the best-selling consoles of all times), Xbox One, PlayStation 5 (the best-selling console of its generation) and Xbox Series. Starfield on the other hand is split between Steam and PC Xbox and Xbox Series (which has like half the unit sales of the PS5). I don't get why you would argue that Starfield is "more split up" when it's a console exclusive and Cyberpunk 2077 was as multi-platform as it could be.
The best argument you can make is that it's more popular than the numbers would suggest because it was available for "free" – but there's no numbers to back that up since Microsoft doesn't publish them, and usually companies don't publish numbers that make them look bad (look up when they stopped publishing Xbox console sales).
>Looks like you inflated the # by ~50% regardless
No, I just used a source that has more granular data than "monthly". https://steamdb.info/app/1091500/charts/
>as CP soon dipped under 10k players
What, six months after release? How many players did Starfield have six months after release?
>user reviews on Metacritic/etc are honestly almost meaningless now for any game that does anything to annoy anyone. Starfield pissed off the legion of sony loyalists and has been getting review bombed continuously since well before launch. Dog piles gain traction.
Do you have any data to back that up or is this just something that you feel deep up in your ass?
> Yeah, it wasn't. It was split between Steam, GOG, Stadia, PlayStation 4 (one of the best-selling consoles of all times), Xbox One, PlayStation 5 (the best-selling console of its generation) and Xbox Series. Starfield on the other hand is split between Steam and PC Xbox and Xbox Series (which has like half the unit sales of the PS5). I don't get why you would argue that Starfield is "more split up" when it's a console exclusive and Cyberpunk 2077 was as multi-platform as it could be.
You're conflating irrelevances. You're talking specifically about Steam player count. Cyberpunk on PC was Steam and Epic. Both at same price. At launch, Starfield on PC at launch was split between Steam (70usd) and XBox App (0usd for ~30m GP subs, or ~16/mo). Of course GP will take a bigger chunk sales from Starfield as if you don't expect to play a game forever, it's cheaper to buy GamePass and play it for 4 months than to buy it on Steam.
Bethesda has been consistently simplifying their games since Morrowind and I don't think they've ever had smooth launch.
While it's true Microsoft rushes many releases, I don't think they're entirely to blame in this case
In fairness to Microsoft, "half-baked" would be how I describe all of Bethesda's previous releases as well. I don't think Starfield is that far off how Skyrim or Fallout 4 was on release. Starfield's a long shot from where Skyrim and Fallout are now after years of patches and DLC, but I think not far from where they started.
> Regarding at least the Blizzard side of the acquisition, I feel like Microsoft ownership may end up being a good thing for their underused IP. Microsoft has strong incentives to release RTS (StarCraft, Warcraft) games to bolster PC usage for gaming and maybe bring more attention to the Windows Store (IMO forcing minecraft onto the Store was a blunder as the upgrade experience was fucking terrible) if they choose to use it.
Blizzard needs focus, though time will tell if Microsoft can help with that.
Overwatch is a mess right now. The release of Overwatch 2 has gone poorly. The balance is poor. They only do patches like twice a quarter, so it feels like they always have to make very conservative changes because who knows how this change interacts with the 30 other ones in the patch notes. It means heroes that are broken or unplayable tend to stay so for months on end. The pro league is in shambles in the best case, and dead in the worst and most likely. They've been losing players. PvE never really launched, and now they're charging extra for the shitty scraps that came out of it.
Diablo 4 is basically dead. 5 million players on launch, 300k last month. They're down to ~5% of the players they started with a year after launch. The core gameplay was not fun, and I can't believe no one noticed it forever ago.
WoW is WoW, but it's stale. The most exciting thing they've done in ages was re-releasing old versions of the game. They're basically just waiting to get upended by something actually innovative.
At this point, I love Blizzard's characters and worlds, but I think their games are D tier. They have the half-finished feel of a Bethesda game, but they don't have any of the fun. They don't resemble the same Blizzard that originally released SC2 and WoW.
Diablo 4 was launched less than ~4 months ago. Feels much longer. lol.
Jedi Survivor has been out for 6 months and it's still got major problems. Imagine being in the middle of a saber battle and the game stops responding to your attack key/button. I've paused the game, gone into Control Panel, tested that my controller is still good, gone back to the game, it just won't respond to the command. And then suddenly it will start again. Same with any button, they randomly fail. And it's got to compile all the shaders EVERY time you launch the game, no caching. All AAA game studios push out broken games on launch.
Man, I've never been happier to use Steam on Linux. Since every game's shaders are transpiled to Vulkan, the Steam Vulkan shader cache works for games with this kind of BS problem even if they were written for DirectX
I've got friends that go deep into Bethesda releases on launch and they all agree that Starfield was much more polished than Skyrim or Fallout 4 (or Fallout 76) at launch. They are convinced that Microsoft must have actually attacked Bethesda with QA resources.
I sincerely hope that MS will put a lot of time in to make the next elder scrolls good, but my money is on another flop.
Word on the street is that the principals at the top of Obsidian and Bethesda still hate each other, Microsoft keeps them at arms distance, and Obsidian isn't in a rush to do a new Fallout game even if "Daddy Microsoft" forced Bethesda to share its toys with the other studios (just like "Daddy Interplay" used to do, which is part of what led to the mess of Obsidian, inXile, and Bethesda all having crazy drama with each other before Microsoft became the new Interplay of RPG company owners).
I think that Obsidian's Outer Worlds was a very good F:NV successor. It had most of the hallmarks of the Fallout universe, just tweaked with a bit more space sci-fi and a weirder sense of humor. One of the interesting things about Starfield to me is how often I'm comparing it to Outer Worlds (and how often it feels like Outer Worlds was the better more coherent story/RPG in a similar way to F:NV fans like to compare Fallout 3/4 on either side of F:NV).
(As something of an aside/tangent, as a failed game developer I've always wished for the ability to "scout" locations in other people's games. Hollywood keeps a number of backlots of standing sets that just about anyone can rent to use. Plus real world cities can be shot by anyone looking to fill out the right permits. But games still rarely to never "share backlots" and game players and reviewers/critics still generally "punish" games that do [compare reviews of Saints Row 3 and Saints Row 4, for instance]. Imagine if movies got bad reviews every time they were set in New York. "Can you believe yet another movie set in New York? How uncreative," said no one ever. It could be incredible if as a game story writer I could "shoot" a deep story somewhere in Starfield. Sure mods exist and sort of fill that role some of the time, but mods still have that too strongly bound association with the parent game [can't sell it standalone] and monetization for mods is still complicated and players/reviewers/critics still look down on their noses for mods. "Imagine if this modder had built their own game for this story how much better it could have been?" That story might not exist to be told without "sets and costumes" to easily borrow as a foundation. I don't have any easy solutions to this conflict between wide and deep games, but I do think more access and better reviews for people trying to write deep stories in someone else's wide sandbox could be a start.)
Nuts & Bolts was a good Banjo game and close enough to "actual" for me. Sure, all the "building" mechanics were silly, but all the classic platforming was still there and the building mechanics just added more collectathons to series infatuated with collectathons. That felt very true to Banjo-Kazooie to me.
Rare's love affair with Kinect and building a lot of Kinect games would have never been questioned if it was a love affair with the Wii in the same time.
Similarly, overlooked treasures like Kameo and Viva Pinata would probably have tons of fans if they had released on Nintendo platforms.
Rare Replay reminded me that Rare has done three big pirate games in their history plus one of the most beloved sections of Banjo-Kazooie is pirate themed, so Sea of Thieves is just about the "Most Rare" that Rare has ever been. It's a delightful game and deserves the following that it has now. Hopefully "Safer Seas" in December will open up Sea of Thieves for more children and family play and for more players that can't yet see past the open-PvP to all the delightful Rare details and treasures inside.
Outside of that it's simply to try and narrow the (surprisingly large) Exclusives gap Sony has been enjoying the last decade or so.
> They own all the IP required to do a followup to Fallout New Vegas and NOTHING
I mean - didn't the team that would work on that launch Starfield in the last month?
Yep. Although one could argue there are are other studios who could be tapped to make a sequel.
Obsidian put out two games in the past two-ish years: Grounded (a co-op survival shooter) and Pentiment (a point-and-click murder mystery set in the middle ages). Both were well-received. In addition, Obsidian has also announced The Outer Worlds 2, a sequel to a game that (fairly or unfairly) was compared to F:NV.
Obsidian seems to be thriving under Microsoft, doing all sorts of crazy things that their previous history hinted at that they were capable of but never had the resources or the publisher buy-in to explore. It's fascinating to watch so far. I'm curious to see what they do with the bigger budgets of Avowed and Outer Worlds 2.
They'll only step in directly if the studios are having problems they can't handle themselves, or performing very poorly.
They want the profit, not as much to direct everything on a micro-level.
EDIT: They will of course make more titles Windows/XBox exclusive too, which makes sense considering the investment.
They'll only step in if the studio is floundering and their couple releases have been flops. Then they'll offer direction, and shut them down if they can't fix it.
That's what we've seen from MS so far, and it makes the most sense from their perspective.
Are you sure about that? MS required Starfield to be exclusive after purchasing Bethesda
They have some contractual obligations that prevent them from doing it for everything, but they'll do it for anything they can.
That's just business sense.
"[Microsoft] submits that Microsoft has strong incentives to continue making ZeniMax games available for rival consoles (and their related storefronts). [...] Therefore, according to [Microsoft], Microsoft would not have the incentive to cease or limit making ZeniMax games available for purchase on rival consoles."
https://ec.europa.eu/competition/mergers/cases1/202124/m1000...
They were just making statements like that hoping that the deal would go through. Everything that they are legally able to, from now on, will most likely be MS exclusive.
I think we're way past "until"...
Most of all, MS wants a steady revenue stream. Buying lots of studios helps even out any less profitable titles that come out.
Now, they will likely make more titles Xbox/windows exclusive. That's expected.
Yeah, it's not like Microsoft ever bought a game studio that was making a highly-anticipated game, then made them release it as an XBox / PC Exclusive or anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(franchise)
https://www.halopedia.org/Halo:_Combat_Evolved_for_Macintosh
https://www.ign.com/articles/oblivion-remaster-fallout-3-rem...
MSFT will ensure that every possible MSFT product is adopted by the entire Activision organization.