Xbox |OT|

[Ryuu96]

Angelus said:

Ryuu96 said:

1. Negative PR can be detrimental to a company, as we've seen when Xbox went from Xbox 360 highs to being a joke with Xbox One. We still have people today bitching about Microsoft for Scalebound and they were slaughtered by the media and gamers at the time of cancellation even though we had no information, even when information came out, people still blamed Microsoft.

2. The article very much suggests that Harvey Smith and Ricardo DID want to make Redfall, so if they cancelled it you could very well end up with "Harvey Smith and Ricardo angry at Microsoft for meddling, both leave Arkane" They're damned if they do, damned if they don't, either way some group will be mad. Likely Microsoft didn't even know the state it was in (hence why they should be more hands on) to even consider cancelling it when both Zenimax Management and Redfall Management were hyping the project up behind closed doors and in public.

3. We have no idea when those "70%" left, as that is across the entire project, for all we know, the vast majority left before Microsoft even acquired Zenimax and by then it was obviously already too late to save them and the rest of the employees who remained were maybe the ones who believed in Redfall. I would strongly suspect most people who didn't want to work on Redfall would have left near the start.

Potentially detrimental effects are not as bad as guaranteed, real time detrimental effects of coming in and seeing a deteriorating studio. And it's not like devs don't talk to each other and between teams, friends they've made with various studios over the years, etc. That's a lot more meaningful "quiet" negativity and the "loud" buzz of some gaming journalist writing "HA! MS FAILS AGAIN!"

And yes, the best solution here may not have been to outright cancel the project, but I'm preeeetty sure that Harvey and Ricardo didn't wanna make the game as we've seen it launch. Cus it's not very good. So if you don't can it, you gotta reboot it and find a direction for the project that everyone can get on board with. The answer was, CLEARLY, not keep going as is. 

And yes, I'm aware that MS, due to the approach they took, were too out of the loop to actually be in a position to come in and see these things and take action, but the whole point is that they damn well SHOULD be in that position. You SHOULD be in the loop enough to be able to evaluate your studios and make these tough calls when necessary.

Course they didn't want to release a bad game, but the article straight says they wanted to make the game, multiplayer and all, and the multiplayer aspect is a reason why a lot of developers have left, so again, cancelling the project very likely just leaves you with a pissed off Harvey, Ricardo and a few other employees instead who remain and believe in the project. It's easy to say now with this information what Microsoft should have done but both scenarios can very easily end up with angry developers either way.

We don't have enough information on when those 70% left and thus it very well could be that the remaining employees believed in the Multiplayer project and wouldn't be onboard with rebooting the entire project back to a sim, I'm assuming they did hire multiplayer focused developers for a multiplayer focused title and thus they'd likely lose them too.

The project was too deep to do anything drastic to it without pissing off a group of developers no matter what, Imo. Best they could do and should have done is get in earlier, delay it a bit more for polishing (a year?), fix the technical aspects, add some more content, turn a 50 Meta title to a 60-70 Meta title. If they got in very early in development then by all means I would say cancel it or go back to the drawing board.

Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 01 June 2023