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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

> Then they did not have to give away popular games day one on Game Pass

A company that sells consoles complaining about not having enough games after 25 years in business and acquiring most popular game studios is hilarious.

They keep cutting game studios, killing games and then set ambitious profit margins. At some point you have to question, do the people in charge understand their own business at all?

They just gutted bungee and basically killed Destiny 2, not because the game won’t sell, but because it won’t generate the profits they unrealistically set.

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Point of clarification:

While Bungie had historically been tied to Xbox / Microsoft during the Halo era, Bungie spun out to be its own company in 2007, and then was bought by Sony in 2022. It was Sony, not Microsoft, driving the most recent layoffs at Bungie.

This attitude seemed prevelant at Blizzard too based on a book I read (Play Nice)they wouldn't fund anything that wasn't a billionaire dollar idea.

Never ending growth and profits just seem to ruin everything

It seems like a simple fact is often overlooked: you can't just throw money at art and expect it to be good, no matter the form. Netflix tried it and ended up with a lot of weak stuff, Microsoft did the same with similar results. Most games these days are just copies or rehashes of others, not original, full of clichés or old-fashioned mechanics. Acquired studios tried to mash up different ideas, hoping it would stick, often with really bad results, like Redfall. It's like the E.T. game disaster, but forty years later and spanned across the whole company. Hardware is great, GamePass is great, but Microsoft can't produce games.

One thing money can do is enable polish - you might not be able to directly force the next great game, but you can make your games excellently coded and polished.

Polish and Microsoft is a funny pairing over the last few years. More and more things are coming apart at the seams as the vibe-coded duct tape is failing.

Sadly, the only real remnant of the old Microsoft polish seems to be "we'll extensively document how our code fails, and do nothing about it."

The result is that everything in the american economy is getting squeezed.

That’s because the risk of making novel games is large.

Which is a problem for smaller studios but something that should average out at microsofts scale if they kept individual games reasonably small.

No amount of averaging makes upfront dev investment + massive marketing + targeting faddish and trendy consumers into a risk free business.

Another way to think about risk is opportunity cost. What other investments would give me the same return?

Edit: even though i inaccurately associated Bungee with MS, they are not. However, the comment stands when you replace it with any of the other successful studios like Bethesda, Id software, Blizzard etc. A bunch of studios and their ips were gutted not because their games sucked, but because they didn’t meet the profits Microsoft expected, which is ridiculous.

Bungie is not a MS studio since 2007.

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