Microsoft closes several large Bethesda affiliated game studios

Hi-Fi Rush was a fantastic game, won major awards, showed off the promise of XBox Game Pass… and for their efforts their studio has been shut down. There have multiple instances of this in just the past few weeks; are publishers really going to just bet on their prime AAA titles (Call of Duty, Halo, GTA6, etc) and nothing else? And those games either take a lot of rotating studios and a long development cycle to release. What’s going to fill the gap?

What is extraordinary about the Microsoft games unit and Xbox is how immune their senior staff are to the repercussions of their bad decisions. They&#x27;re certainly not taking responsibility for the failed gamepass experiment, trashing the Xbox brand, or the acquisitions they now regret since successfully closing Activision.<p>Failing upwards has never been so conspicuously obvious as it is in modern corporate America thanks to the pervasive use of social media.

&quot;Thanks for the widely acclaimed mid-budget surprise hit, Tango. Now polish up your resumes, pack up your stuff, and get out.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s like AAA publishers have no notion of a game studio as an organic thing that can grow. It&#x27;s all just pieces on a board.

So... When does the government take action against Microsoft for lying about the Activision merger and how there wouldnt be layoffs?

The amount of layoffs the last two years is ridiculous.<p>My company just laid off 35 people (150ish employees) and gave them a whopping 2 weeks severance for <i>each year</i> that they worked there. Most of the people let go had only worked here for 1-2 years. Engineers and QA.<p>I was shocked when I heard that because I&#x27;ve always seen it as a great place to work and very forward thinking. That wasn&#x27;t publicly disclosed, of course, I heard it from a manager coworker&#x2F;friend.<p>Now I&#x27;m petrified.

This is quite a lot of studios to be dissolving and obviously a lot of good developers and artists. The silver lining, if any, is that usually some of those let off open up their own indie studios and release some absolute gems. So here&#x27;s to hoping and good luck to them!

Corporate prioritization is the ultimate cookie cutter, doomed to produce the most generic thing possible.

My guess is that because of the success of Fallout show Microsoft is trying to spin up resources to make another Fallout game as soon as possible while also keeping Elder Scrolls moving forward. Bethesda has always been a one game studio, but perhaps they will try to hire up to become a two game studio or they could go beef up Obsidian to pivot into a Fallout New Vegas to or other non-numbered Fallout game.<p>The casualties of this are two financially under performing studios.

I don&#x27;t even know why this makes news anymore. It&#x27;s so rare for a game studio to last a decade, most don&#x27;t, and even successful ones will be shut down after launching a huge title in order to keep more profits for the publisher. Publishers are slave masters in the games industry.

Looking Glass, Irrational Games, Ion Storm, Arkane. Wonder if immersive sims are fated to be an over-ambitious, under-sold, mass audience-unfriendly genre made by doomed studios.

I’m calling it now, in five years Bethesda will be making more money with Fallout and Elder Scrolls television shows than their games

I feel like AAA gaming has just gotten too big, the time between releases is way too long compared to back in the 2000s and try to hard to big massive open world or movie quality cinematic experience. I feel similar about Sony.<p>Nintendo on the other hand seems have a good balance of putting out quality games of various ambition with a good frequency

Just yesterday there was a poll going around on Twitter of which of the big 3 gaming companies, Nintendo, Sony, and MS is the &quot;least bad&quot; or something like that, and I saw a lot of people saying Microsoft. I figured they&#x27;d do something stupid soon to remind everyone how Microsoft operates, but didn&#x27;t think it would be so soon!<p>I can&#x27;t believe these studio acquisitions still aren&#x27;t being blocked. At what point will they finally acknowledge the blatant anti-competition Microsoft regularly demonstrates by buying any studio that gets too big, letting them rot, and then killing them off?

Looks like Shinji Mikami left Tango before he had to watch it get shut down.

Bring on the AI:<p>- Procedural worlds<p>- Realistic NPC conversations<p>- Dynamic and unpredictable encounters

FTC must be happy!

Anecdotally, as an avid gamer, I, personally do not miss the studios listed