I actually think this is the wrong diagnosis of this situation. The studios in Microsoft gaming appear to have been given a lot of room to take risks under previous leadership, build passion projects, etc. while letting big franchises sit on the side. Those things ended up being anywhere from abject failures to small successes - where some players and critics loved them - but most don't seem to be commercial successes.

In the meantime we haven't seen a new Quake, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Perfect Dark, Fable, Banjo, Conker, or the myriad of other mainstream IP they owned in decades. Most of these franchises have lost a ton of value after sitting on the shelf for so long without releases.

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tayo42 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm confused, do people want endless sequels or not?

	▲	pjc50 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The lesson of Nintendo is yes. Note that this is different in gaming than film because of technical progression. But also Nintendo are very good at "same charm, familiar characters and plot, different feel".
	▲	eightysixfour 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		People will tell you they do not want endless sequels. Sales numbers will mostly disagree with them.
	▲	zamadatix an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It's like phones with smaller screens: they always sell poorly in comparison when available and then it's all you hear about online when it's not. The usual tricks of "noise signals how many are really upset in absolute terms, not the relative popularity", "people will still make noise about what they don't like regardless if that's more popular overall", and "people who hate one attribute of the product can often still like it enough to buy overall".
	▲	runako an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		If Microsoft didn't want to use IP of existing studios, they should not have bought those studios. Why buy id if not to get more id? Disney + Marvel offers a roadmap for extending existing IP. (Keep in mind that the Marvel acquisition was in 2009.)
	▲	HDThoreaun 19 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Obviously people want sequels, that's why hollywood makes so many of them.
	▲	Melatonic an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Its Microsoft - why not both?

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lenerdenator 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The thing is, every time you take a swing on one of those big IPs, you take a risk.

Sure, you can do well: Skyrim was a big step up from Oblivion, for example. But you can also screw things up (see: Halo), or fall into the trap that Valve has fallen into with Half-Life 3 where the expectations of the public can never be truly met.

I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.

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eightysixfour 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The thing is, every time you take a swing on one of those big IPs, you take a risk.

I think the entire content production industry, no matter the medium, is aware of the risk/reward of rerunning existing IP vs creating new IP. There's a reason we get retreads of retreads elsewhere, existing IP is lower risk, higher reward, pretty much always.

Halo is a good example - they fumbled with Infinite. It just wasn't very good. Yet the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a ton of attention from the fanbase and broader gaming community. If the next Halo is good, that fanbase will come back around.

> I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.

This is what they now want from Mojang and Minecraft. Asha even called it out in her letter.

	▲	WorldMaker 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Yet the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a ton of attention from the fanbase and broader gaming community. If the next Halo is good, that fanbase will come back around. The fanbase already has the Master Chief Collection. The remake seems doomed to fumble worse than MCC's notorious launch issues and it should be obvious to anyone looking at the project on paper. MCC was a team with ownership trying to learn the ins and outs of decades of work on the Slipspace engine to recreate each step of the Halo journey in an upgraded/consolidated form of its own engine. The new remake is a mostly outsourced team that basically owns nothing trying to recreate Halo mechanics in UE5 with the help of LLMs and other AI upscalers. That's nothing like what the real fans should want for the franchise. It reeks of corporate mismanagement misunderstanding what IP is for. It also reeks as a slap in the face for the hard work on the MCC (and yeah 5 and Infinite, fumbles and all).

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throwaway27448 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree.

Sure, who doesn't want that? You don't get there by gutting the veterans who can rapidly iterate and know the technology and gaming landscape well. In my eye these kinds of layoffs are simply their giving up.

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xboxnolifes 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Making the next wow is not low risk. Making a largescale, successful MMO is probably the riskiest endeavor in video game development.