| VersusEvil said: Xbox studios should take lessons on cancelling stinkers before release from Sony 👀 |
To be fair, Xbox hasn't really released too many stinkers recently. Redfall sure, but it wasn't an Xbox game to begin with (greenlit by Zenimax like 3 years before the acquisition was announced), and cancelling it wouldn't have been the right move at all, to Zenimax employees it would have looked like Xbox was being tyrannical after they had promised Zenimax a high degree of freedom during acquisition talks, even as it is some at Zenimax were questioning Xbox, some of which came out during the ABK trial. Such a move so soon after the acquisition could have triggered mass turnover at Zenimax studios, developers leaving for job offers elsewhere. Instead of cancelling it, Xbox would have been better off delaying it and investing more resources into the game to turn it into a proper co-op looter shooter, bringing in a 2nd studio with more looter shooter experience to co-develop the game with Arkane Austin, instead they kept completely hands off and just let the game release to poor reviews just so that they could get Arkane Austin onto their next game sooner (please let it be Dishonored 3).
The last stinker from an Xbox first party studio before Redfall was Bleeding Edge in 2020, and I personally don't think it was a stinker even if the critics didn't like it, many of us here in Xbox Empire played it and enjoyed it, myself included. The issue wasn't the game itself, the game had a solid foundation, the issue is that Xbox rushed it out with too little content because they wanted Ninja Theory staff on Hellblade 2 and Project Mara instead, Xbox's failing wasn't that they should have cancelled it, as cancelling a passion project game by a small team is never a good idea, rather they should have taken the reigns somewhat and convinced the game director that they needed to expand the dev team working on the game, Xbox knew that a 25 person team wasn't enough to keep up the steady flow of post-release content that a multiplayer game requires to keep gamers playing, they instead allowed Ninja Theory to maintain complete creative control and keep the dev team on the game at 25 people even though the small dev team was a death sentence for the game.
Before Bleeding Edge, the last first party Xbox game to get poor reviews was Crackdown 3. Again, I don't think cancellation would have been the right call there. Xbox One had barely any exclusives as it was, they couldn't afford to go around cancelling them willy nilly. Least of all was Crackdown 3, a carrot that Xbox had been dangling from the end of a stick the entire generation, the backlash from cancelling it would have made the Scalebound cancellation backlash seem tame by comparison.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 15 December 2023
