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Comment by ChocolateGod | Hacker News Reader

I think some of these game studios got so content with Microsoft constantly paying that they forgot to make games that would actually sell.

South of Midnight took 7 years to make and cost $100 million to make... yet sold hardly any copies and I'm not even sure who they were trying to make it for.

Meanwhile you have studios like Sandfall and Warhorse pumping out games on a fraction of the budget that ship millions (and imho, make better games).

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Compulsion Games was also a strange acquisition / team to decide to put $100M + 7 years of trust into. They had two games by that point, neither with amazing reviews.

Millions of people played South of Midnight even if sales didn't reflect it. Xbox Game Pass has done a lot to make Xbox sales figures hard to compare.

How many people would have played if it wasn't on Game Pass though? I doubt many.

Expedition 33 was on game pass and still sold 8 million copies.

At least from what I saw the game had a huge amount of hype leading up to its launch and the thing that kept people from buying it was just playing enough of it on Game Pass. For some players it was too short and everything they wanted to accomplish was easily done with Game Pass shortly after its launch. For other players like me we bounced off of its tone while playing it. The stop motion animated intro felt like a bait and switch going into its game play, and I had a bunch of uncomfortable feelings about cultural appropriation from a Montreal studio trying to capture a "deep South bayou" aesthetic and failing at some of the subtleties, from what I saw.

Expedition 33 was released across multiple platforms simultaneously.

SoM was an Xbox/PC/Game Pass exclusive for a year.

It's not a perfect comparison.

I find that extremely hard to believe given that South of Midnight peaked on Steam with only 1.5k players.

Let's be honest here.

There's no sourcing for that South of Midnight number. You should treat it as fictional.

Judging by the credits [1] it indeed looks very conservative.

1. https://www.mobygames.com/game/240054/south-of-midnight/cred...

> I think some of these game studios got so content with Microsoft constantly paying that they forgot to make games that would actually sell.

I mean, if you're assuming that Microsoft had a fully hands-off approach to managing these companies after buying them, then sure. It's not clear to me that you can make a compelling claim about whether the issues were from the bottom or the top just by looking at the final outputs.

Plus there's plenty of evidence that Microsoft hasn't been hands off across that time period. At the very least we've seen them cancel a Rare game and layoff a bunch of Rare staff because of it, The Initiative shut down for not meeting game development goals, 343 Industries stripped apart for low results versus expectations with Halo Infinite and the "new" Halo Studios is basically just a shell and an outsourcing venture in direct line with ActiVision's old Call of Duty tactics.

I agree; I mostly just didn't want to spend time trying to cite a bunch of evidence of the alternate interpretation when it seemed sufficient to point out that they didn't really provide enough to form a conclusion one way or another.

Microsoft's executives lacked time to be hands-on with every acquisition. They were very involved in the decision process at the big studios, and the favoured children, but left the smaller studios without enough input.

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