81% of Nintendo's software revenue came from first-party in the last fiscal year

Crazy stat and also Nintendo has the best profit margin of the 3 but rely 81% on their own 1st party (and a profitable hardware Tbf)

Meanwhile Sony's profit margins are razor thin and Xbox's ain't much better and that do they decide? DOUBLE DOWN ON $100m+ BLOCKBUSTERS!

Makes sense. Arkane Austin had 2 games in a row underperform, while it sucks that they were closed without getting a chance at another game, while they were also trying to fix Redfall, it's understandable in this gaming economy. 

Tango closing though makes alot less sense, pretty much no sense honestly. Ghostwire Tokyo may not have been a huge seller, but it did very well on subscription services, hitting 4m lifetime players within a month or so of releasing on both PS+ and Gamepass, and 6m about 5 months after releasing on both, with probably at least 1.5m of those 6m+ being sales. Then there is HiFi Rush, a game with a low developmeng budget that was shadow dropped onto Gamepass, so barely any marketing budget either. It hit 2m players within 2 months of release and 3m after 8 months, with probably at least 400k of those being sales.

Both were lower budget games, HiFi the lower of two, but even Ghostwire would have only had a AA budget with only around 70 devs on it's team I believe, and a smaller marketing budget than any AAA gets. If those 2 games are considered flops, the whole damn market is probably doomed, development costs have clearly reached an unsustainable rate if those 2 games of all games are considered flops, with their lower budgets and moderately good sales.

The financial wigs at Microsoft caught up to them and capitalism him them like a ton of bricks because no matter how much money a company makes, it's never good enough. Game Pass is profitable but not enough, why have Hi-Fi Rush when we can have COD Spinoff #25? It'll sell more than Hi-Fi Rush and push Game Pass more!

It's definitely premature in terms of their move to multiplatform, it feels like porting HFR to PlayStation just became totally fucking pointless now.

Just saw ABK's profit margins and now they want to turn XGS/Zenimax into ABK basically is how I see it.

Halo/Forza/Gears/Fable for XGS.
Elder Scrolls/Fallout/Doom for Zenimax.
COD for Activision (Lol).
Diablo, Overwatch, WoW for Blizzard.

Then their profit margins will be higher but at the cost of creativity...We'll see...Maybe I'm dooming and need to sleep on this or need another break.

Forza Horizon* Not Forza Motorsport.

Gears might not even survive this, Sea of Thieves could probably be put in its spot instead, Lol.

Heck, Halo might not even survive this and Fable is an uncertainty in todays world since it hasn't had an entry for years.

Forza Horizon and Sea of Thieves are basically the only guarantees from XGS.

Did Bethesda ever have layoffs before MS?

Jeez, Altman (RIP) sold his company thinking it would be safe under Microsoft and they do this.

Age of Empires too probably it would seem. 

This....

And also, what are the Microsoft execs expectation for this game? The game has been in development for years, changed engines and is a Day 1 Gamepass game. If the suits expect a big return from this Ninja Theory might be the next studio to go.... And what are Double Fine thinking right about now? 

Exactly, it's flawed thinking. If you look at the movie industry it's the same. A risk adverse culture where IP, sequels and franchises are considered the safe bet. Have a look at the movies that lost the most money last year. Most of them are sequels and franchises! 

https://screenrant.com/biggest-box-office-bombs-movies-2023/

Terrible day at MS. Tango makes no sense. They could have atleast had them work on a mobile game on the side.

That can't happen unless the big titles go Multiplat and if Halo and Gears go to PlayStation Xbox is officially dead as a platform to me, I can see Forza (both Horizon and Motorsport), AOE and Flight Sim going to other consoles day and date though. Activision will be staying one trick pony forever now.