But the sickness of xbox started before Spencer. When 7th gen started and xbox started gaining massive ground, entered Don Mattrick, who ultimately ends up killing what we know as xbox, and all of the hard work and incredible advances that came before it.
2007-2010 Xbox, xbox 360 pushes the gaming industry when two, actually three giant players were battling it out, over the most lucrative industry. Xbox was not just a giant leap, it was legendary push by any measure. 2005 360 launches, and then 2007 enters Mattrick as vice president of xbox games div or xgd. He ingratiates himself with Balmer, the guy after Gates, the push of windows 8, and who helps kill win explorer. These two decide that gaming would be nothing but social media games like farmville, zynga games, bejeweled, etc and that there would only be a few publishers, and multimedia games. What would be left would be nothing but motion control gimmick games. Thus, Balmer makes Mattrick ceo of xgd in 2010. Those two then push out all of the talent at xbox management, and kill off all 1rst party developers, partners, and betray indies, that xbox helped establish on the 360.
2010-2013 xgd under Mattrick, just didn't cut ties with devs/pub they salted the fields. cutting funding on IPs in progress. It was brutal. By now xbox one was launching with kinect, and $100 more, and no future for exclusive content. Only games that were already completed or close to gold were exclusives to xbox one. After the failed launch and cancer riddled body of xbox, Mattrick was forced to leave in 2013- Balmer shortly after. Two dumbshits that promised the world and delivered nothing but burnt corpses.
2013 -> P Spencer takes over, and does little, but constant press interviews and promises, he had no hope of making them happen. Game development cycles are long. xgd cannot just turn a spicket and get new AAA exclusives. they have to wait 4 yrs for them to complete current games, 4 years to make new games. That is if anyone would even trust to work with xgd after what they did to them late 7th gen. So what devs/pub would work with xgd, were subpar to say the least, and so were the games.
Spencer probably could have done more, but the disease started way earlier. And the 3 trillion MS corp, wants results or xgd will disappear. NO blank checks to rebuild xbox, show results, or hit the door.
I am a huge fan of xbox, nothing makes me as unhappy, as watching this history unfold, as it has.
@BassMan: A stop motion experience in a video game, can still run smoothly with high FPS.
The combat, what little was shown, looks like regular combat, not stop gap motion combat, and seemed to run normally.
If everything else, cut scenes, story elements, etc was like a stop gap animated movie like Wallace and Grommet, Fantastic Mr Fox, Coraline... sounds fun.
@guibova: That does sound interesting, and I can get on board. If the game looks like a Coraline movie, it would be very interesting indeed.
As for FPS, I prefer a faster framerate with any game that has action combat, that does not mean it cannot also still have a stop motion animation look to it. I agree that not everything has to be AAA budgets, and the baggage along with them, just to tell an adventure story.
This AA game is very very much Kena: Bridge of Spirits it would appear in the trailers. If it incorporates a lot of Voodoo, the Rougarou, and the practice of traitement... I'm on board. I like the high fantasy weird stuff.
That catfish is going to get eaten.. for sure.
Interesting, I will give it a try, as long as it is not a $70 launch product. Will play it on GP PC.
@punkndrublic: Not .... exactly true. While he is the head of MS gaming division, he does have to follow mandates handed down from up high in the corporate chain.
The call for showing a profit, is not MS alone, as the entire industry has found out the sky is the limit ... well they found the glass ceiling and it was within arms length. Now that investment funding has dried up, everyone is call upon to 'actually' show a profit.
https://microsoftgraveyard.com/
The link above will show you a very long list of divisions that are either bought up to kill or just killed because it could not perform. Xbox gaming division feels the dirt getting thrown on it. I have problems with Spencer, but this is more related to don mattrick/ steve Balmer's and their decisions late 7th gen leading into 8th gen, hard to recover from that. Now with the tech bust, the call is to show results or its six feet under.
Miyamoto, you are indeed... genius, or simply: whatever choices you have made in your career have indeed advanced gaming at every step, not only for the gaming industry but also us gamers. Plenty of people are talented in the gaming industry, plenty of people are talentless but successful in the gaming industry, (Bobby Kotick). Miyamoto consistently has made all the right choices. But no one is perfect, Miyamoto is genius in his career, I cannot think of any one else who can close to his body of work, over the amount of time he has been doing it.
Would any other human on this planet have created just the right IPs at just the right time, hired and assemble just the right talent, to have created everything he has. What are the odds, and chances.
@xfinafire2: Disagree, with most of your comment, but agree with the spirit.
Sadly, live service games is still the genre the gaming industry chases. Why... well Fortnite still brings in $300 million a month... (gimme a sec, got some throwup in my throat) Not to mention, all of those genshin impacts, and destiny and whatever are also doing well. Even world of Warcraft as badly supported as it is now, still brings in 2.1B net revenue each year 22', 23' , Heck even that one amazon MMORPG New World is still alive and kicking, another expansion, and they said even with low active players (one time fee, with no sub) ... profitable.
Sony, Tencent act as publishers, and investors. They sure lost their ass on concord, and I bet the last of us online. With a bloody nose they will pull back on investing tons of -- well they are still going to chase live service games, who are we kidding-- but not to the point they once were. Meanwhile the entire gaming industry has seen a huge reduction in investment funds used by publishers to create games. But there is still a large majority of money out there chasing to be the next live service game, all chasing that $$$.
I read an article on Polygon, that publishers have just about fished out the known amount of whales out there. They are restricted (a little bit) in grooming gambling in new consumers that are under age by new regulations, world wide... Save for America, still wide open. Investment funding for live service games are retracting, (not because these corporations care for us) because they are seeing the limits.
Live service games are not dying... oh I wish they were, I wish this fad would shrink even more and we gamers would see a larger variety and bold risk taking in the AAA space. It reminds me of the overly amount of FPS and bro games of the 7th and 8th gen.
One more thing... Sony, MS, Nin, you name it, could care less what we .. gamers want, or what is best for this hobby we love called gaming. Makes one really think about where that $70 price of a game goes towards.
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