I remember when Microsoft bought GitHub everyone was worried.
And then, they actually made it a little better while not burning it down.
There was a time during the 2010s that seemed like big companies had learned not to ruin a good thing.
No, but that was the time when every tech company could basically generate money out of big userbases and empty promises. If you don’t have to worry about making money, you don’t have to enshittify something. Companies like uber would not exist in todays market because investors wouldn’t subsidize that company for years until it finally turns a profit. Hell, I think uber just turned profitable in early 2024, so 11 years of losses, and I highly doubt that in todays market, investors will subsidize companies like OpenAI for 11 years.
I think about this all the time.
“Why can’t I just make an app or a service that is that successful? I know some very intelligent people, why did it work for those companies and not for us?” And it really all comes down to that.
They can hemmorhage money for decades and still be going because of investor support. Its a wonder anything works at all ever honestly. Its a weird system
If you compare the reactions and statements of John Romero and John Carmack you really get a feeling for who of them is a empathetic human being with interest in his fellow humans and their work and who isn’t or in other words, John Carmack please bugger off to your useless AI company.
John Romero aged like fine wine.
I don’t think John Carmack is sociopathic. He just thinks differently, and isn’t the most socially-adapt person. He was trying to reason out why the decision was made in the first place:
“Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal.”
He’s definitely not wrong. I still think Microsoft’s decision was pretty fucking stupid, but disposable entertainment options are at an all-time high, and even with gaming, you can throw a stick up in the air and have it land on a game studio.
oh good, hes self aware and willing to admit to his mistakes, i actually respect that.
I still don’t believe he ever genuinely thought that. Microsoft hasn’t even been a good steward of its own brands.
<insert YouDontSay.jpg here>
For a man I always believed to be extremely intelligent, that was a moronic thing to say at the time and sounds even more stupid now. I am sure the large amount of money he received for that deal made him did a lot of encouraging him to be optimistic. I mean I get it, people that pay me millions of dollars would likely seem pretty good to me in the moment, but come the fuck on.
that was a moronic thing to say at the time
I assume he wasn’t genuinely thinking that, but rather didn’t want to burn any bridges with microsoft. That company is so big that you never know when you might come across it in the tech space.
When was Microsoft ever??? Sorry but you knew back then what you know now.
Microsoft’s gaming division was pretty respected in the industry for a long time. Lots of people give them (deserved) flack over Kinect for the Cbox One, but what really drove them over the cliff was buying all these studios to make Gamepass more attractive. It was actually a good deal for everyone when it was mostly games that were older, but when they started doing day-1 releases of first party games and buying studios to add to the number of games getting that day-1 release it turned sour.
A bunch of games that early adopters would previously have paid 60 bucks for were suddenly included in theit $7/month subscription, so tons of people who would have been buying 10 games a year were suddenly spending less than a hundred bucks on new Xbox games because enough new stuff was coming to Gamepass they could stay busy, so all these AAA releases that cost $100 to make were losing money.
So they raised the process of gamepass to try and keep up, but didn’t. Then they bought Activision and lost their lunch when Call of Duty sales plummeted because millions of people with Gamepass who had been buying it annually didn’t.
So they increased the price of gamepass so high everyone canceled, removing the only reason many of them were still using Xbox over Playstation, and at the same time the consoles skyrocketed in price.
Now they aren’t including Call of Duty from Gamepass for the first year and taking the price partway down, which was a good start to righting the ship but too late.
Chasing the Netflix model doesn’t work if you do it dumb. Netflix didn’t buy all the other studios to make their original programs. They did make some internal studios, but they mainly partnered with existing studios to make specific programs. Instead of buying Bethesda, they could have partnered with them on specific games, which would have been better for the games, the studio, Microsoft, and Xbox customers. But buying Bethesda was a simpler brute-force solution they employed dozens of times.They became an even dumber Embracer Group. Embracer at least they had a (dumb) plan to sell off the assets. Microsoft bought a bunch of studios with no plan for how to make it profitable.
The problem with what you’re saying is that they’ve always bought out other studios and then fucked them up. Going all the way back to their original IP Halo; Halo was a product of Bungie, a Mac exclusive game company at the time. Halo was originally going to be Apple’s big jump into gaming. The release of Halo was delayed to port it to the Xbox and today… today Bungie barely exists and all of their IPs are owned by MS.
Xbox was a passion project, Bill Gates was obsessed with getting Microsoft into the living room. Once Bill Gates left, and later Steve Balmer left, there was nobody left who gave a shit about this passion project and it became a money grab. So Microsoft went back to doing what it does best, buying people out and running their IPs into the ground.
The problem with what you’re saying is that they’ve always bought out other studios and then fucked them up.
Just replace “they” with “all publicly-traded companies”. That is the nature of buyouts and short-term stock market thinking. Just look at all of the buyouts EA turned to shit. Or Activision. Or countless other smaller studios that have died to larger buyouts.
If a company gets bought out by a corporation like this, they know what they are getting into.
Phil Spencer was a good steward (edit: of Xbox) I think for a long time, but he didn’t make the decisions to buy all the studios.
I reckon that’s less about Microsoft and more about Bungie though. Bungie are primarily responsible for their own downfall with some terrible management decisions.
Microsoft were very good to Bungie from the beginning in terms of finance and support, and Halo on Mac would never have had the same impact as Halo on Xbox.
It’s been nearly 20 years since Bungie left Microsoft. In this case, I think it’s unfair to blame Microsoft for what they’ve since become.
I was blaming Microsoft for what they became 20 years ago.
They became wildly successful under Microsoft. As far as I remember, it was Bungie who were the driver behind leaving Microsoft because they wanted to move on to other IP, as opposed to being “The Halo company”.
I can’t blame them for that, but it’s not Microsoft’s fault that what they did afterwards was a shadow of their former glory.
Then they shouldn’t have allowed themselves to be bought out.
I mean, I literally said it was Bungie making terrible management decisions.
But there’s no way Halo would have had the same impact on Mac as it did on Xbox. The Microsoft purchase was win-win. Leaving Microsoft let them pursue other IP and give greater creative control, but they also never reached those heights they did under Microsoft either before or after their stewardship.
Edit: don’t get me wrong, clearly recent Microsoft game studio acquisitions have been a bad thing for the industry, but I just don’t think the Bungie example is a good one. I think it’s rewriting history a bit to say that Bungie may have suffered under Microsoft.
This is a company that became industry rockstars with an incredibly successful franchise and were given an inordinate amount of money and support at the time. Them believing they’d be better off on their own was partly a fallacy, and only really resulted in going full circle and letting Sony purchase them.
While this is a great detailed explanation, it still sounds like very poor decision making that would be obvious to anyone except out of touch execs.
Buy it back, John!
(I have no idea how business actually works)
"You can’t rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn’t be your default belief. I don’t think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from id games.“Could they have gotten more with a different pricing strategy? Could they have created more things for fans to buy? Could they have cost-effectively marketed in a way that reached more players that would have loved and bought the games? Could they have changed the game designs and broadened the appeal to more players without alienating existing ones? Could they have produced the games at a lower cost, faster or cheaper? I really don’t know.”
I’m no expert, but ya doy. Microsoft’s play to pursue low-cost, high-return recurring revenue by shoving their extraordinarily talented single-player studios (Rocksteady, Arkane) at OBVIOUSLY terrible live service titles is bad enough on its own but is also a telling reflection of the executive mindset (this goes for Sony too). Profit is king, data is infallible, and development talent is best directed at our behest and is easily expendable when needed.
Let game devs do what they want. Some games will fail, but jesus, not at the scale and volume that they’re failing at right now.
Maybe he shouldn’t have fucking left out of nowhere because he wanted to work in an industry that has hit a brick wall
The thing i am hyped here for is Arcane possibly going independent. This was never a studio for being confined to the hard structure of a company like Microsoft or Bethesda, who put monetization first.
I really hope we get a revival of a studio thats comparable to “Through the looking Glass” out of this. Nowadays they have probably more options of being profitable, when i look at projects like witchfire.
At least Arcane can create new IPs. Id Software are kind of tied to existing IPs. Doom is iconic and now its in the hands of someone who laid off most everyone who worked on it. If those developers decide to go independent and create something new that would be interesting but the loss of the Doom franchise is significant.
I thought Shwarma was supposed to be halal.
