Honestly their directors were getting sidelined alot even without Xbox involvement, Chris Parker hasn't directed a game that actually released at Obsidian since 2014's South Park, after that he seemed to be largely on the sidelines at Obsdian until Avowed began development in 2018, but then development got rebooted on Avowed in 2021 as I recall, with Carrie Pattel taking over as director of Avowed, so I guess Chris Parker is back on the sidelines again. Who knows what Josh has been doing since Pentiment released, I guess he is probably sidelined as well right now, at least until enough of the studio is available for Xbox to put him in charge of a Fallout game. Obsdian is a studio with too many directors and not enough development teams at present.

I'm not saying they should go Fallout only, but having Obsidian and inXile trade or Obsidian and Bethesda trade (or even trading Fallout between all 3) probably isn't a bad idea to allow for quicker Fallout releases while still allowing Obsdian and inXile to work on their own games sometimes. 

Empire of Dirt.

I voted hybrid model because I'm struggling to think of how timed or long-term exclusives trapped on Xbox Series X/S helps players. Most people aren't going to buy 3 platforms, and some probably won't even buy 2.

You reminded me of Johnny Cash with that.

"What have I become, my sweetest friend. Everyone I know goes away in the end. And you could have it all, my empire of dirt. I will let you down, I will make you hurt."

Tango get shutterd coz of commercial flops then WTF they gonna do to my Arkane? I swear if Lyon gets shuttered and I never get a Dishonoured 3 … and this pretty much guarantees everything going multi platform.

Embracer 2.0

I'd rather every single game goes fully multiplatform than shutting down studios but even that didn't save Tango but it might save others, it's clear that Game Pass is not a safety blanket and every studio needs to be profitable, the best chance of that is full multiplatform, Microsoft has gone into cutthroat mode and look at P/L on an individual studio basis which makes no sense because how do you calculate that with Game Pass?

So many studios will die on an exclusive approach with this new Microsoft. They're basically in a position now of killing hardware sales or killing studios and making hundreds of people jobless and at the end of the day, the developers who make our games, the human beings, are a lot more important than a piece of plastic.

I think Phil & Co are just puppets at this stage doing whatever the fuck MS tells them to, but have some damn respect for yourselves, try to keep your dignity at least, if I was in their position I would tell Microsoft to piss off, what they're doing is wrong and quit the damn company, I wouldn't have my reputation tarnished because Microsoft wants to be greedy, it's not worth it.

Roundhouse being merged into Zenimax is fine, in fact, I'd argue it's a good thing.

Alpha Dog could have been cross-merged into King, they had like fucking 10-20 employees.

Arkane Austin should have been merged into Arkane Lyon to assist on Blade, recuperate after Redfall and try splitting off again after Blade.

Tango should have never been shutdown, it was likely an incredibly cheap studio to upkeep as well.

Someone made a comment that every publisher is going to be EA at the end of this decade and it's probably true. 💀

The Console space is stagnant, and the PC space is thriving.  A/AA mid-tier games are seeing great sales on PC while those games seem to just barely do anything on current consoles.  The thing is the young people just are not interested in those expensive consoles with their expensive games and they are losing out to mobile.  There is going to be a reshuffle as the older gamers die out and the new gamers dictate what is successful and what is not.  Either you see the shift and make the changes ahead of time or you try to ride the wave and hope its only a short adventure and everything goes back to normal.  I personally believe there is going to be a huge shift in gaming period.  In my mind this move really doesn't mean anything from MS outside of that they know they need to make changes but we have not seen the full picture yet so not sure how things are going to turn out.