Doctor_MG said:
There is a lot of outsourcing with AAA game development, but not codevelopment. Don't conflate the two. Developers help projects, but are not assigned to the project in the same way the lead development studio is. For example, 343 is credited as the development studio for Halo Infinite despite outsourcing content from The Coalition and other development studios. It wasnt 7 years to create Horizon Zero Dawn, it was less than 6, meanwhile the studio still had a a major release in that period because most studios take on multiple projects at once. This is in addition to creating a new engine. Turn 10 will have released Forza with an updated engine (not a new one) with no major releases in that period. Let's not forget that Horizon is also a new IP in an open world whereas Forza is an existing IP in a very linear one. I didn't just credit playground games. I said they are building off some of that work. Which means they aren't using a completely brand new engine or a very old engine that is completely outdated. Turn 10 gets credit for what they do, but PG should get credit for what they have done. MS recently laid off 1000 workers, which is the second time this year they've had major layoffs. Some of these workers are from their Xbox division. They reported record breaking revenue in this time period. MS has the capability to support these developers with more staffing. They don't. I didn't pretend the pandemic didn't have any impact. I said it's not JUST the pandemic. Other publishers are still able to put out multiple AAA games in this time period. It's an excuse for having a slow year. It's not an excuse for not having a single AAA game releases in a year timeframe. We can also look at other development studios, such as 343, that are horribly mismanaged. A six year wait for Halo Infinite, delayed multiple times, while creating an engine and they still didn't deliver much of what they promised (e.g. coop) and, technically, it is not a good engine. Or, at least, it isn't good for infinite given the huge technical issues it has. As I said before, development studios often take on multiple projects. Just like Guerilla did with Zero Dawn and Shadowfall. These studios also arent creating new engines like Naughty Dog, Guerilla, or Sony Santa Monica. PG is using ForzaTech for Fable and the Coalition is using Unreal 5. Yes it takes a while to make games, but MS has had 13+ studios for over 4 years with nothing to show for it this year. |
Gave you multiple examples of Co-Development though, World's Edge + Relic Entertainment, The Coalition + Splash Damage, Ubisoft Studios on AC Titles and Activision Studios on CoD titles. Besides, I'm not sure what the major difference is at the end of the day, Perfect Dark will end up with the same number of employees on it as every other AAA on average. Games nowadays are made up by 10+ studios, if Crystal Dynamics is free and available, why wouldn't you take them onboard?
The Initiative is STILL the lead studio on Crystal Dynamics, they lead the creative aspect, Crystal Dynamics does the rest. Co-Development is NOT a thing to worry about, it's becoming more and more common in the industry, and it doesn't show that there's something wrong with the project, as I said, it was always in the plans for The Initiative to co-develop with another studio.
Co-Development - Keywords Studios
What is Co-Development? | Studio Gobo
What is Co-Development and Why Should You Care? – Ringtail Studios
Effective Co-Development Really Does Make for Better Games
343 is the lead on Halo Infinite, The Coalition provided less than ~30 employees to the project. Again, not a bad thing, AAA's have thousands of employees nowadays across dozens of studios. 343's major development partners were Certain Affinity (who are leading the Battle Royale mode), Sperasoft (who created some Multiplayer maps) and SkyBox Labs (Who are creating Forge under 343's creative lead) and 343 themselves call Skybox Labs a true development partner rather than just an assistance studio.
Horizon: Angie Smets: How Guerrilla Games Made Horizon Zero Dawn in 7 years | VentureBeat
IGN says that development began in 2011 which would make it 6 years, but Angie Smith (Studio Director) said it took 7, it's likely that IGN is talking strictly about Production while Angie is including Pre-Production and my point is that from Pre-Production to Release, AAA's take on average about 3-5 years and that's mostly for sequels and not during a pandemic, a lot of them can take even longer depending on various factors.
I don't think we know when Guerrilla Games even started working on their new engine, it was first used for Shadow Fall and that's all we know.
Again, you're ignoring the work that Turn 10 does on Forza Horizon or ForzaTech for both Forza Horizon and Fable, it isn't like Turn 10 have sat around doing nothing for years, not to mention, Turn 10 is half the size of Guerrilla Games. Turn 10 is on multiple projects at once with ~200 employees. I'm aware that their engine isn't new, it's a heavily upgraded of their previous engine, no engine is entirely brand new if it's an iteration of another, not Slipspace, not Creation 2, not Unreal Engine 5, etc. I'm aware of that.
Horizon is a new IP in an open world from a studio with no experience in that genre, and that is why it took so long, and I make no criticism towards Guerrilla, but it is similar as to why Fable is taking so long, from a studio that built their team for it from the ground up during a pandemic and are currently repurposing a racer engine to an open world RPG engine.
Playground do get credit from me but Turn 10 created ForzaTech and are heavily involved in adapting ForzaTech for Forza Horizon and they are also now involved in adapting ForzaTech for Fable, the lead engineer for ForzaTech at Turn 10 is working on Fable among others because they know more about the engine that they made than Playground.
Those layoffs were shit, I can't remember the 1st time this year that they had layoffs, but I did look and the only Xbox area which was hit was the Serious Gaming Initiative which was working on military contracts for the US army, the entire team got laid off, as far as I know, Xbox (aside from that military team) wasn't hit at all.
Every major tech company right now is either laying off or freezing hiring due to inflation, it sucks, and I agree that it's shitty for billion-dollar companies to lay off whilst making huge profits. Microsoft has partly frozen hiring for now, Xbox is still hiring internally but slowly, across the past two years there were hundreds of positions opened across all of Xbox and they've done quite a lot of hiring but there is more to be done, for now, they'll have to partner and outsource a little more.
The hiring freeze also didn't affect Zenimax at all, I think it's due to how they're integrated into Microsoft, Zenimax employees don't receive Microsoft benefits either, they're still on Zenimax benefits. Zenimax isn't fully integrated into Microsoft. This partial hiring freeze won't last forever though, and I suspect once lifted the jobs will be flowing again, it also doesn't affect all studios, Playground for example still has 50+ open positions.
It's not just the pandemic for sure but I said that too, it's a combination of multiple things, as I keep saying, Microsoft had to practically reset and start fresh on their Xbox Game Studios starting in 2018, they only had around 5 studios back then and only 343i, The Coalition and Mojang were above 300 employees, Turn 10 and Rare were at the time around 100-200 so they were pretty small all things considered.
So, Satya finally pulls his finger out, hugely increases Xbox's budget (there were many reports of Xbox being underbudget/underfunded prior to 2018) and promotes Phil to the Microsoft Leadership Team, Xbox goes and acquires a bunch of developers but most of them were mid-sized, quite a few of them under 100 employees and barely scraping by, Obsidian and Playground were the largest at about 200-300 and the 3rd largest IIRC was Ninja Theory at 120 but the rest were ~100 employees.
Few of them pivoted to AAA development (Obsidian, InXile, Undead Labs) and a few of them released projects after acquisition but they were multiplatform (Obsidian, InXile, Double Fine, Compulsion Games), a few of them have released exclusives (343i, The Coalition, Obsidian, Playground Games, World's Edge) and a few continue to support already released projects which I think is ignored when these conversations come up, that takes manpower too.
If Microsoft ripped away the multiplatform releases and made everything exclusive things would look better, but they'd never do that, an issue is that a lot of them have yet to release their big guns, Obsidian has released Grounded and Pentiment (soon) but Avowed is their AAA. Another issue is that Microsoft revealed the projects far too early, I will say again, these development times aren't anything out of the unusual, it's more that Microsoft revealed the damn things when they were in pre-production, Lol.
Then during this rebuilding of Xbox Game Studios, the pandemic came, literally right in the middle of it, that would have had an impact on hiring, expansion and development schedules, it hit a lot of companies and there have been multiple delays due to the pandemic or titles released in a mess, 2022 isn't exactly great for major 3rd parties either, some publishers were better prepared for it though by simply having a better pipeline of content, if something was delayed it didn't matter because they have enough to backup, Xbox didn't, their studio situation prior to 2018 was absolutely dire so when they get hit by delays, they really don't have much to save themselves.
Eventually, they will get into a groove of releasing content on a regular schedule, and I fully expect that to be 2023, I do think 2022 is awful but it happens to everyone, every single publisher has had a year this bad before, I am very excited for 2023 though and believe it could be one of Xbox's best ever.
Edit - Also, Satya/Microsoft can be blamed for not investing sooner than 2018.
Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 02 November 2022
