Hi-Fi Rush was a fantastic game, won major awards, showed off the promise of XBox Game Pass… and for their efforts their studio has been shut down. There have multiple instances of this in just the past few weeks; are publishers really going to just bet on their prime AAA titles (Call of Duty, Halo, GTA6, etc) and nothing else? And those games either take a lot of rotating studios and a long development cycle to release. What’s going to fill the gap?
The current tech meta seems to be coalescing around this notion of "even high-performance isn't enough to spare you from layoffs, be afraid!" It wasn't that high-performance always guaranteed your job would continue, but at least there'd be the idea that you'd get moved to a new team if you were a great performer.
To me, that just reinforces the notion that these layoffs are mostly about sending a message to workers and Wall St more than anything else.
Seems like studios are forgetting that you can't just drag some random person off the street and get them working on the next "Quadruple A" experience. Even a talented new grad would struggle with that scale. This is really going to come back to bite the industry long term.
Game development is in a really weird place. Insanely over-saturated but almost all AAA games are extremely derivative, stale, bland games with a coat of pretty graphics
Indie games are awesome right now, but they don't have the budgets to produce AAA games. So there is a huge gap. Innovative indie games with cool, new gameplay concepts, but always simple or retro graphics, and AAA games with shiny graphics on the other end but gameplay that hasn't changed in over a decade.
I'm just waiting for any AAA studio to provide something new with the AAA games. Maybe AI to improve NPCs in an open world game? Anything besides the same old gameplay with new skins on it.
It's just risk aversion. Companies want to turn video games into a factory line golden goose, but struggle to reconcile that each iteration through that factory line makes the final product relatively worse and worse, even if it continues to look better and better. Now even Call of Duty can't find a Call of Duty killer. But these same companies are terrified of trying anything new because new things do, on occasion flop. It would also entail scrapping the factory line, because creating a new game, instead of reskinning and old with a few new tweaks, is a way different beast.
That said, I don't really think the stereotypes of indie games are very valid anymore. Valheim looks great, has a massive open world, and is multiplayer. [1] It also started entirely as a result of one guy's pet project, until he grabbed a coworker and then set off to make it what it became. The graphics are stylized, but I think in a broadly aesthetically appealing way, as opposed to e.g. pixel graphics which are very off-putting to many people, myself among them. Pixel graphics came from an era of CRTs with interlaced scanning, and various other visual artifacts, that naturally blurred, antialiased, and blended them. Sharp jaggy edges never really existed, and I fail to understand why that's a popular style now.
Some game concepts are fairly well developed. A shooter like Call Of Duty is such a concept, so making a competitor is far more difficult. Sure, you can make up with setting and presentation.
But otherwise very true, true innovation happens in the indie world and the maximal complexity of these type of games is steadily rising due to better tools and maybe soon AI support.
For me indie gaming is going through its own aggravating phase right now, but it seems most people aren't bothered by it. The quality of the games is better than ever, but every indie title now goes through Early Access, sometimes for several years. By the time the game is released the hype cycle has already finished.
For people like me who play games just a couple of hours a week, I have no interest in playing an unfinished game. I have a library of games bigger than I could ever play and I will always skip the EA stuff.
>every indie title now goes through Early Access, sometimes for several years.
That mostly shows the realities of indie development. These games have less staff and need less sales to succeed, but they take much longer as indies lack the time (some do development on the side to a full time gig), manpower, or (sometimes) talent to get things done quickly.
>I have a library of games bigger than I could ever play
Well that proves the point. we also get more indies than ever. I don't think EA would give us more finished games. We'd just get less released games full stop. Even if you never play them I'm not sure if I'd call that a good thing.
Insanely over-saturated but almost all AAA games are extremely derivative, stale, bland games with a coat of pretty graphics...
People have been saying this for decades at this point. I'm not seeing it.
Innovation is largely overrated. It can be a good thing, but the vast majority of games, whether AAA or indie, can't be truly innovative. And innovative doesn't translate directly to a game being enjoyable. Conversely, a game being "derivative" doesn't automatically make the game not fun to play.
Agreed. In video games, "innovation" quickly becomes "niche". Microsoft actually has a wider variety of games and genres represented on the Xbox, many highly praised, but frequently gets lambasted for having no games because the the overwhelming majority of players aren't actually interested in them. Sony on the other hand is dominating, and yet its biggest titles are all somewhat similar to each other and none of them really do anything new or interesting, they simply have a lot of polish.
If past history is any indication, TES6 will be to Skyrim fans what Skyrim was to Oblivion fans which was what Oblivion was to Morrowind fans. Daggerfall fans are split about Morrowind though and i'm not sure there are any Arena fans.
AAA basically just means nice graphics at this point. You can't dump more money into a piece of art to make it better, that's why all the innovation comes from indie games. Look at Balatro, a guy made a poker roguelike and became a millionaire overnight. I think if big game studios, rather than dumping their copious amounts of money into single, giant-scope games, dealt it out amongst a variety of smaller teams for smaller-scoped projects, they'd be way better off.
Everyone keeps suggesting AI NPCs. I'm sure someone's gonna take a crack at it and it'll go about as well the Humane AI pin or the Rabbit R1 before everyone realized how horrible of an idea it is. If anything it'll make for a silly novelty like the VR games where you clumsily try to perform basic tasks with VR motion controls. But in this case you argue with an in-game LLM and see how quickly you can make it get defensive or start gaslighting you with made up facts about household cleaners you can combine to make a delicious cocktail.
Thing is 2M doesn't quite get you as far as you think. You get 10 devs (let's say, 4 programmers, 4 artists, 2 designers), pay them 100k each (which is lowballing it in med/high COL areas), and work 2 years. That's 2.4m just from labor, before advertising and other duties like community outreach. Sell for $30 (which is basically the top end of an "indie) and you need 80k copies to break even, more after platform cuts.
That's definitely a scale a AAA studio can afford, but far from what we associate "indie" with in our heads.That's where the exploitation begins.
The original games in the 90's? Yeah, probably. But cost of living was very different (so even if they made > 100k after adjusting for inflation, it went a lot farther), and the standards of games were much lower.
You can definitely make Doom 1993 with 1-3 people today (and without crunch). Making Doom 2016 levels of fidelity (even if we ignore the excellent optimization) would still be a very lofty task for 10 people. We still don't really have that many "full stack game devs" that can work at that scope and fidelity to bring the team size down.
> I think if big game studios, rather than dumping their copious amounts of money into single, giant-scope games, dealt it out amongst a variety of smaller teams for smaller-scoped projects, they'd be way better off.
This is what game publishers do, and many of them are struggling too. It’s harder than it seems to pick winning horses. (Though in this case, it may be partially because more and more skilled teams are opting to self-publish.)
> I think if big game studios, rather than dumping their copious amounts of money into single, giant-scope games, dealt it out amongst a variety of smaller teams for smaller-scoped projects, they'd be way better off.
Big publishers tried and did not succeed much. EA, Square Enix, T2 with Private Division and so on.
Some independant studio or publishers have their fans base : Amanita Design, Playdead, Zachtronics, Devolver Digital, Annapurna Interractive are for me the folk to watch.
Oh for sure. AAA games require too much effort and too much returns while indies can spend 1 year and 1 person and deliver hit being multiple time more profitable.
Conversely, the recently released surprise hit Helldivers 2 is a very prominent AA game has sold millions of copies and seems well poised to win a bunch of game of the year awards (recently concluded PSN account linking controversy notwithstanding).
Same here, third person coop extraction shooter? Bleh, not my cup of tea. Helldivers 2 though? 70+ hours and counting, it's just so much damn fun, with friend or with randoms. It really is the sum of it parts, and every match is different in its own ways. An amazing game, is what it is.
Helldivers II is one of the few games of its type that it feels good to mess around in.
Lately my friend group has been playing on mid level difficulty to grind out common and rare samples, and there's nothing funnier than cracking a joke about something and then that person hitting you with a 500 kg bomb and making your body ragdoll across the map. There's just something about messing around in it and being goofy that feels good that doesn't in, say, Vermintide or Darktide.
That's been reversed this time but it won't be next time. Next time sony does this the outcry won't be as bad. It's the ratcheting effect of corporate greed.
A regression to the mean where mean is just whatever makes most money. I can understand if they are at the risk of going bankrupt but this seems so premature
I can't remember a single AA game that was great. Actually, I can't remember a single AA game other than the ones I remember because of how bad they were.
I think AA in games has, for a long time, meant "We want to do a AAA but don't have the money or time" and this can only end in disaster.
I'm always skeptical of "I can't remember ____" as an assessment of any given historical record because, well, the average person just doesn't remember anything. Which is all well and good, you have no obligation to be ready for a pop-quiz, but snapshot moment of free-association is just not a reliable stand in for the actual record.
I actually couldn't think of any AA titles off the top of my head either, but after Googling and GPT'ing a bit I came up with: Hellblade, Plague Tale, Hades, Outer Wilds, Control, Metro, Outer Worlds, Shadow Warrior 2, etc. plus the numerous others listed by other commenters.
My point though is that it's fine not to remember, but that should never be our acid test for what does or doesn't exist in the historical record.
As an aside of this discussion: I do not get people who like Outer Worlds. I am a huge fan of New Vegas, I was so pumped for that game, and it was so, so bland. The combat damn near put me to sleep, the writing was atrociously heavy-handed and made me think the authors thought I was a complete fucking idiot (and I agree with them!), and the moment-to-moment gameplay was just thoroughly, thoroughly unsatisfying.
I know it has a loving if smaller community and man, I wanted to love it, but I just could not. I have hope for the sequel and will definitely play it if not day one, close to it, but yeah. Outer Worlds was one of my most disappointing games of all time.
just a note for inattentive readers: Outer Wilds from GP's comment is a very different game compared to Outer Worlds which the parent comment mentions.
(it doesn't help that they were both released in the same year, 2019)
Outer Wilds: action-adventure, open world mystery game with puzzles
Outer Worlds: action role-playing game, open world first-person-shooter (similar to the Fallout games)
I get them confused all the time and you'd be in for a ride if you got Outer Wilds while expecting Outer Worlds, but the (G)GP actually mentioned both of them.
I think many of my most favorite games have been AA games. Though "what counts as AA" is probably a big question.
Hi-Fi Rush, was a delightful game that earned every $ I spent, but didn't feel like a AAA title.
Hades is a delightful game that earned every penny but which wasn't a "AAA" title.
I wouldn't call either games "indie", as they both had dozens of people on the teams that made them. But I'd also guess that both games were still made by very different size teams (e.g. 2 dozen vs 5 dozen).
I get that "indie" is often viewed as the 3rd option alongside AAA and AA but I don't think that's the right definition.
For me AAA and AA is about scope of the project. The 3rd option is "small", not "indie".
Hades (I don't know Hi-Fi Rush) is by all means a small game, regardless of how many developers worked on it. Same for Minecraft, or many of the games that other commentors posted.
You want a good measure? Check the price. AAA are $60, AA are around $40 and small games are below.
PS: out of topic but I just saw that Hades 2 is out in early access.
Sadly, people use indie to mean small, rather than it's actual meaning of "independent of a publisher", and it's one of those things that I've nearly given up on fighting.
It's even more sad because the only reason that change happened was big publishers wanting in on the success of indie games as a label and concept, but by definition being excluded, so they pushed their own definition, and people gobbled up their corporate cooption.
> Sadly, people use indie to mean small, rather than it's actual meaning of "independent of a publisher"
That is way too imprecise a description for it to possibly be considered correct.
Indie is about financial and creative independence aka the publisher does not drive the game.
Many indies still go through publishers because they don't have the means or knowledge to handle distribution. This was even more so back when you had to distribute via physical media, but they start looking for publishers once the game is done or in good shape.
For instance back when they built Bastion SuperGiant had just 7 people and it was entirely self-funded. But they went to WB for publishing, mainly to ensure getting it on XBLA would not be too much of a hassle.
>That is way too imprecise a description for it to possibly be considered correct.
It's the most objective definition. We can easily see if a game studio a) has their own publishing wing (people forget this when saying stuff like "Valve is an indie!"... It's few but they have published others' works since 2004) and b) the game has an external publisher.
But as the GP said, this definition (just like in music) was perverted over the years into CDXS2the modern, colloquial definition that you mention. Much less precise because we do not in fact know how much the publisher drives any given indie, a term locked under contracts and NDAs we'll never see. We simply need to trust a publisher's branding.
But no one is particularly interested in changing the current defintion. Publishers want to have that branding, indies want to have that branding, gamers seem to intuit what kinds of games and styles that "feel indie". So I guess it'll go by the way of the definition of "literally".
"Independent of a publisher" is less precise than, "independent ideas and creative freedom"?
Mine is literally a binary, factual assessment, that is easily verifiable: did they use a publisher?
Yours is a standard that the public has no way to verify, and is regularly is lied about by devs and publishers. Every publisher says they let their studios have full creative control. No one says, "yeah, we interfere in design decisions all the time".
> Many indies still go through publishers because they don't have the means or knowledge to handle distribution.
No, indies didn't go through publishers, small studios do.
What you are describing is just indie studios signing on with publishers, becoming dependent* on them for some aspect of distribution. Literally ditching their indie status.
Why do you think *any* size developer that uses a publisher does so? To gain the advantages of their greater resources.
As another commenter pointed out, this term doesn't originate in video games, it comes from musicians who do not sign on with a record label.
indie is literally a shortening of independent though, the term i believe originated from musicians who would release their music without a label to publish them
Isn’t AAA vs AA about the funding of the project, and AA vs indie is about the publisher?
I don’t care for scope as part of this because scope is so heavily influenced by the type of game. Eg Call of Duty is the poster child for AAA games and has a pretty unimpressive scope compared to virtually any RPG. Even indie RPGs tend to have a broader scope; CoD has basically nothing outside of combat mechanics.
Then there’s weird questions about what counts as scope too. Tabletop Simulator has a much broader scope than MTG Arena, but Arena is far closer to AAA or AA.
I specifically said scope of the "project" instead of the "game".
You're right that CoD is simple, but it's still a massive project where most areas (graphics, networking, game engine, etc.) are infinitely more developed than a game like Stardew Valley which is a much broader experience _as a player_.
Star Citizen must be AAAA then with all that feature creep!
Jokes aside, it still feels very subjective to me. Eg I wouldn’t point to CoD as a shining example for any of that. Their in-game launcher sucks, the voice chat is 2003 cell phone quality, the graphics are nice but not groundbreaking, and the stability of the game/servers is worse than most of the indie games I play even after installing mods.
CS:GO has better voice, better stability, and now you can shoot holes through the smoke from grenades. Servers are also 128Hz, where CoD just went from 20Hz to 60Hz (just in time to be out of date again).
COD is the poster child of scope creep to me. It has half-assed support for just about everything under the sun. I wouldn’t really call any part of it “developed”, though.
Dave the diver is definitely not an "AA" game. It's so indie looking it was nominated for multiple indie awards (even if it's not an actual indie game). DRG is not AA either, according to its homepage GhostShip has 32 people 4 years after launching it. Same for Spiritfairer, it was built by a team of 16.
Wasn’t the case earlier in development since they didn’t have big financial backing, Ghost Ship only grew after DRG had sales
> Deep Rock Galactic aired a trailer at E3 2017, then the game had a huge bump after its Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview launch in February 2018. Its Early Access didn't skyrocket the game "insanely high" like titles such as Valheim, but Pedersen said it was solid enough to know they had a success. At that time there were only 12 employees, and everyone was contracted "because we didn't know if we'd have money the next month."
Well yes that's what I said, I didn't find what numbers they had at the time but I indicated that they had 32 people (which generally falls short of AA in the first place) 4 years after launching a successful game, so they'd most likely have had even less before then.
I personally would consider 10-40 person teams to potentially qualify as AA. Often we also outsource code/art so the team size can sometimes be misleading.
I suppose I would go by the budget. Maybe 5-10million+ IMO. It also kind of depends how they spend the money.
EDIT : After some further reflection, From personal experience I'd consider a AA game one where everyone on the dev team knows each other fairly well. AAA games get so large that you don't end up knowing everyone super well by the end of the project.
> I suppose I would go by the budget. Maybe 5-10million+ IMO.
Which is not really useful, because we usually don't have budgets.
Team size x development time might be an approximation for it, but if you assume an average salary of 80k and a development time of 30 months, by your reckoning AA is a team of 50... which is basically the low end of what's normally considered an AA team size.
> From personal experience I'd consider a AA game one where everyone on the dev team knows each other fairly well. AAA games get so large
Team Meat is just two people, four if you include the producer and the composer, I would very much assume they knew each other fairly well, but there's no meaningful interpretation of AA where Super Meat Boy is an AA game.
> Which is not really useful, because we usually don't have budgets.
The majority of the AAA/AA projects I've worked on have budgets. I'm struggling to think of a project that didn't have a budget.
> Team Meat is just two people, four if you include the producer and the composer, I would very much assume they knew each other fairly well, but there's no meaningful interpretation of AA where Super Meat Boy is an AA game.
Of course you would expect a small indie team of 2-4 to know each other. I'm saying that once you hit AAA size teams that no longer becomes feasible.
> The majority of the AAA/AA projects I've worked on have budgets. I'm struggling to think of a project that didn't have a budget.
We don't have budgets, as in the people not involved in the project don't have any access to the projects so have no way to "rate" on that metric.
> Of course you would expect a small indie team of 2-4 to know each other. I'm saying that once you hit AAA size teams that no longer becomes feasible.
How is that relevant? This here discussion is about the lower limit of AA, not the higher one.
Housemarque hadn't released any AAA games before launching Returnal on PS5, which is, in my opinion, still one of the best games on this platform. Smaller studios can innovate on gameplay and stories before creating a hit.
Another example is FromSoftware. They kept iterating on their games going from KingFields to Demon Souls, Dark Souls, etc...You can't have Elden Ring without all this earned experience.
FromSoft is putting out some really interesting experimental bangers too. If you haven't tried the new Armored Core, I highly recommend it -- it's a great bridge from a beloved-but-niche genre (mech games) toward the mainstream. It's small, focused to a point, tells the story it wants to tell and gets out of your way. I'm still thinking about it 9 months later...
Sounds like this sort of risky niche title would earn a studio closure if it came from Microsoft's corner.
Elden ring was the shitty mainstream version of dark souls. The open world was just a big forgettable grind of annoying mini dungeons that you probably had to look up and then didn’t enjoy, collectible items that you were never going to use 95% of the time, shitty quests that were difficult to engage in without external guides, and powerful buffs that were very useful but guarded by enemies that don’t scale; leading most players to follow the main quest to the first boss and then just run around the entire map exploring for the warp points/permanent buffs ignoring every enemy possible and then basically forgetting it was an open world game and just hitting the highlights.
The memorable parts of the game are the bosses which are generally cool but very gimmicky, and the legacy dungeons. Which is… the dark souls bits. The open world was stinky garbage that made the game much worse.
> Housemarque hadn't released any AAA games before launching Returnal on PS5, which is, in my opinion, still one of the best games on this platform. Smaller studios can innovate on gameplay and stories before creating a hit.
Yeah I never said the contrary. Actually you see this quite commonly with small unknown studios that release stuff like educative or mobile games and suddenly are handed a big project.
> Another example is FromSoftware.
Please, they've been releasing AAA since Demon Souls. They're definitely not AA games.
It depends what type of game you like. There are a million AA RPGs, Metroidvanias, etc. that are enjoyable. Both RoboCop: Rogue City and Terminator: Resistance are good, budget games. Looking through recent games: Dead Cells, Bloodstained, anything from Bitmap Bureau, a lot of Way Forward titles, Altus, etc.
The list of great non AAA games would be so long, here, as to be obnoxious. A lot of game greatness is found in the explicit avoidance of AAA conventions, like extended cut scenes. Many AAA games are masterpieces, and yet few to no no AAA games are 2D platformers for example. Which is one of the all time great formats for pure fun.
I've worked on some titles very similar to Yakuza and I keep espousing the way they develop their titles. I don't know for sure because I haven't worked at the studio but it really seems like they've streamlined their development to keep costs down and allow them to develop quickly via asset reuse and resisting major engine upgrades across titles in favor of a slower, more focused pace.
Often in my experience in the west we tend to re-author assets, do major engine upgrades or re-implement gameplay systems across sequels when we could have iterated on existing systems and use the time we saved to work on new stuff.
Standards change and game development standards have skyrocketed. the best AAA titles in 2005 would barely be AA in 2015, and by 2025 it gets to a point where a small (but very talented) team can achieve the same scope with better graphics. That's part of the reason I don't particularly like "AAA" as a nominer. It's a moving target with budget levels we usually have no clue of.
>I think AA in games has, for a long time, meant "We want to do a AAA but don't have the money or time" and this can only end in disaster.
I don't know, because we have even less idea what "AA" means. Would Demons' Souls 2009 be AA?
That the thing, a lot of the biggest AAA titles didn't knock it out of the park day one. Overwatch in 2016 may have been the last new IP that was AAA from the get go and truly nailed it in one. IDK why companies keep trying to do it that way.
Were you gaming back in the PlayStation 2 / original Xbox days? There were a TON of AA games in that era. Most of those studios have been bought up by the big studios that peddle AAA (and in some cases, claim to peddle AAAA) garbage.
Condition Zero and Source released in 2004. Global Offensive released in 2012, eight years later. Counterstrike 2 released in September 2023, eleven years later. Counterstrike isn't the game to point to for re-releasing the same thing over and over.
If you can't be bothered to understand the differences, then criticizing consumers for perceiving those differences and being willing to buy them is a real interesting spot to land on.
I don't play those games, either, but I at least understand the proposition that they present.
Willful ignorance from GP aside, their point is valid. The most played games to this day are decade+ old games that extended their lifetime with multiple re-releases or with an online component. If that's the will of the consumers, there's not much we can do.
Fortnite has had a single release and is a free to play game. Once again, if you're going to point out games that just come out with a new version to sell it again, you're failing to show accurate examples.
Bethesda is also notorious for taking forever to make Elder Scrolls games. Skyrim came out in 2011 and has not had a proper sequel since. First-person RPG also isn't exactly a glutted sub-genre. Neither of the examples fit the phenomenon they're talking about!
I wouldn't say notorious. It's only become that way with the latest games. Morrowind to Oblivion was ~5 years. Oblivion to Skyrim was ~5 years. Fallout New Vegas (Obsidian) to FO4 (BGS) was 5 years.
It's really only since then that game development times have skyrocketed as much as they have.
That's fair. The ancestral post's claim of "every six months" is still ludicrous, just not as cartoonishly so. It's not like Bethesda RPGs are licensed pro sports games or Assassin's Creed.
There is nothing more freeing than being "out of touch" with media.
I got rid of my TV in 2000, and my life improved dramatically.
I stopped playing AAA in 2009, and my life improved dramatically.
Indie games, specifically the Godot dev scene, is where the real innovation in gaming is happening. When AAA implodes, you'll learn what you were missing all along.
It just sounds like you mainly like 2d platformers and open source (which is fine). But Godot isn't nearly the best engine to use for 3D, and arguably may not even the best of the open soucre engines (for example O3DE may be better, although almost no one is using it right now). Most 3D indie devs are using Unity and many are switching to Unreal now just like AAA (for example Palwolrd). I think "out of touch" here means making false claims about something you (not you specifically but GP) don't even care to know about.
If you aren't interested enough to even know what you're talking about why do you make such specific claims about it? Fortnite is completly different from counterstrike. For example counterstrike is a team based game and Fortnite can be played single player. And counterstrike has not had a new release in which current players must buy the new game for 11 years much less every six months. Also, you are wrong when you say you are "not saying they're good or bad" when you said making the supposed re-releases of these games is like putting a "fresh coat of lipstick on the same pig."
It's pretty easy to convert your TV to a PC console. Just grab a HDMI/DisplayPort cable and some USB cables for controllers. Wire your TV up, start Steam Big Picture mode, done. You now have a console with a zillion awesome games in the exact same place you had the console connected.
Here's [1] the Steam page for split screen games. Currently there are 934. Can't go wrong with Earth Defense Force! And no you don't need a "gaming PC." That term doesn't even make any sense in modern times, because if you have a computer from within the past decade or so, you can run the overwhelming majority of games with no problem. And I mean that literally - for instance GTA V requires an AMD HD 4870 card. That card was released in 2008!
Not sure if you're being snark, like referring to your office at work, but we did this and it works pretty well. We ran the cables along the edges of wall/floor using little cable clamps. They're pretty much out of sight and it works great. Depending on your house you could also run them through the walls/attic/etc. There's a lot of ways to make it work without going bachelor pad.
Do you have a smart TV or can you fit a streaming device or mini PC into your setup? If so, Steam Remote Play might fit the bill: https://store.steampowered.com/remoteplay
Steam used to sell a device called Steam Link for this very purpose, but now they just release apps for common platforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Link
I've always been surprised by the lack of cable tracking options in home electronics stores. Some installations can be done with a drill and a box knife.
Microsoft has been consistently failing to support and engage game developers since early in the 360 cycle, then the doublespeak crook Spencer took over, and it got even worse.
This whole shitting on AA was bound to happen with Xbox fanboys saying that “it is good that Microsoft is buying studios to give Sony a taste of their own medicine!”
Except MS is still not giving Xbox gamers a taste of Sony medicine, because Sony gets out there and gives games chances, funds loads of “trial” titles, supports developers and studios, etc.
I don’t like that Sony just does this better, as I am a PC gamer and Sonys PC game is awful.
The vast majority of games that get released each month are straight-up garbage. And for the minority that aren't, I'd hope that people in a YC-affiliated forum of all places would see that a product getting released does not equal financial viability.
I really don't understand why they would shutter Tango, a small / low cost house producing influential art that people actually want, while behemoths that burn cash and produce soulless products that no one wants survive.
Shut down Bethesda, they're the ones with awful gameplay and writing. Don't shut down the darlings.
“Influential art” vs “soulless products” tends to map pretty well to “niche products that return poorly compared to costs to produce while earning critical accolades” vs. “reliable cookie-cutter moneymakers”, and Microsoft isn't in the business to win critical awards for stockholders, but to make money for them.
I'm not arguing philanthropy. Bethesda makes a bad product that that costs a fortune to generate. It's shrunk the size of its market and its time is limited. Tango's business model is sustainable, Bethesda's is not.
ehh, the correlation is off. MS apparently lied that Hi-Fi Rush "succeeded on all metrics" and meanwhille, Redfall couldn't have been more cookie cutter if you try. It all feels like a crapshoot at this point.
I will remember this closure very well in a year or two when MS tries for the dozenth time to "expand our reach to the Asian market". Because they pulled out. Again.
what do you mean by "just"? millions if not billions of USD profit @ the 3 titles cited between the brackets? people play GTA V till these days, even Skyrim...
either the way, hope it paves the way for more small studios titles...
The economics of traditional AAA game development just don't make sense, and the market conditions right now are just acting as a forcing function to expedite their (current) collapse. You have insanely high development costs (50-100m on the low end to 200m+ on the high end) where the _only_ opportunity for return is to release a hit or polish the game to a hit (read, more $$$), but even being able to predict what will or won't be a hit is near impossible. So you have high burn on teams for long dev cycles (2-3 years+) that can't even really time the market because of their slow releases, with audience expectations for what a title means also insanely high, and also that their are both very good free options like Fortnite and large discounted backlogs of "really good games" that you're also fighting against. You also have weird calculus now where you're fighting against your own bets on live service games — spending 100m on expanding GTAV some more is likely a better return than working on GTA6. In the email announcing this from Microsoft's own words, you can see this:
"In 2024 alone we have Starfield Shattered Space, Fallout 76 Skyline Valley, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, and The Elder Scrolls Online’s Golden Road. "
3/4 of those titles are old games that are live services, where it's a better investment and dev cost to pump engaged players than build new audiences. It's VERY hard to beat a 5% (even more for an MS-sized deposit) return on a savings account, so closing studios that made Good Games isn't about the games at all, it's just looking at the balance sheet. Everyone always knew they were creating on borrowed time, and now that time is unfortunately up.
The solution of this is to not let private companies dictate cultural production for a nation, but the US is piss poor at arts funding and all our billionaires want to squirrel away wealth overseas rather than building libraries, museums, or cultural production funds.
>are publishers really going to just bet on their prime AAA titles (Call of Duty, Halo, GTA6, etc) and nothing else?
I guess so. I don't fully understand it either. An indie-ish scoped game won GOTY in 2022, Helldivers costs half as much as a AAA title and is probably selling better than any of the other dozen GaaS Sony was trying to break into, Take Two has (had) several breakout hits under their wing. But they seem so hellbent on being the Fortnite, instead of just "really damn good (and presumably making money)"
It's strange that we know super successful "indies" can sell millions and be just as acclaimed as any AAA title but those metrics don't matter to a company that should be trying to foster a full portfolio.
>What’s going to fill the gap?
GTA has shark cards and COD us a yearly releases rotating around 4 or more studios now. Those will be fine. Halo? No idea, I don't think the battle pass format can sustain these levels of budget. it juse seems to all be a mess.
I don't understand it either. Maybe there's more going on behind the scenes that we don't know about, but on the face of it seems like a really poor decision.
Large publishers keep reiterating the importance of successful IPs these days, and Hi-Fi Rush was like lightning in a bottle. Here Microsoft had a new IP with critical acclaim, suitable for a large audience, and ripe for a sequel. You'd think they would cling to it for dear life, especially given how their other IPs are doing (Halo, Redfall, Starfield...)
Closing the studio doesn't necessarily mean they're ditching the IP, but it doesn't bode well.
Yeah, I have a hard time understanding the push to consolidate everything into a small set of core titles.
Consider private label brands on Amazon, which at least maintain numerous distinct brand identites focusing on different categories.
Having a portfolio of actually distinct companies with unique personalities and signature approaches to design and gameplay is exactly what you want if you are trying to maintain a thriving ecosystem.
Money? When 90% of revenue comes from yearly sports, FPS, etc. refreshes, it’s easy for middle managers to get the idea that cutting the fat will increase margins. Unwittingly, they are missing the opportunity to find that new hit franchise that needs to be tested and refined outside of the mainstream.
> consolidate everything into a small set of core titles
This already happened in the early 2000s. If you were around back then, you might remember how everything was sequels and rehashes for a while. Diversity of ideas returned to the industry only after it became practicable to publish and monetize indie games (post-Braid).
Microsoft and Embracer recently bought the whole industry. Now they might be about to light a match and set fire to the whole thing. OK, but fortunately, all the talented passionate people with the ideas and drive to create new things still exist in the world. I believe many players will find their way back to them, no matter how sufficent "garbage" is for the majority of people. If milking the uncaring baseline consumer was all that mattered to videogame creatives, they'd all be making ad-driven smartphone shovelware.
They also developed The Evil Within games and Ghostwire: Tokyo, but their founder and CEO left the company last year to found a new studio. The writing was on the wall honestly.
Yeah, I'm hoping to find some type of image AI service that can produce passable art assets for 2D game development. Just good enough to do POC work. I have started a few gaming projects over the years and always ran into a brick wall needing assets.
What is extraordinary about the Microsoft games unit and Xbox is how immune their senior staff are to the repercussions of their bad decisions. They're certainly not taking responsibility for the failed gamepass experiment, trashing the Xbox brand, or the acquisitions they now regret since successfully closing Activision.
Failing upwards has never been so conspicuously obvious as it is in modern corporate America thanks to the pervasive use of social media.
For the Xbox brand they have failed to release quality versions of every major Xbox franchise bar Forza Horizon (Halo Infinite, for example), and this mismanagement has been ongoing for so long the sales figures of the Series consoles are dire. (And the Series X is not bad by any stretch). Now they are having to release their games on their major competitor, the PS5, making the point of buying into the Xbox ecosystem . . . what exactly?
And to emphasise here Sony are not exactly doing stupidly well with PS5 software and support, they just aren't actively screwing it up completely.
Give them some credit - Forza Horizon 5 was extremely buggy on release and for months after! Many non-race goals/activities, a significant part of gameplay were totally broken. I don't know if it ever got better? It could have been a quality game but I gave up.
You're spot on. It's just funny to me that the lone quality release was also botched imo.
They’ve already expressly said they’re shifting from a hardware-focused business to a software-focused one. Did you miss that and think they’re just bad at business?
Hardware has always been a loss leader used to sell games, nothing more. If they can sell the games just as well on their “competitiors platforms” then why bother spending time and exorbitant amounts of money building your own hardware?
Exiting the hardware space looks like a loss only if you don’t understand the dynamics of the game industry.
I've actually worked at a high enough level in the games industry to know about the non-public dynamics, and that includes working with some of the people involved in this story.
> Hardware has always been a loss leader used to sell games, nothing more. If they can sell the games just as well on their “competitiors platforms” then why bother spending time and exorbitant amounts of money building your own hardware?
By this logic Sony and Nintendo are completely wasting their time making hardware, yet they persist in doing so. Does this make them bad at business?
It just means they get enough out of other sales (including an increase from hardware) that they have decided hardware is still worth it. Microsoft has decided otherwise. They’re both perfectly fine decisions.
> I've actually worked at a high enough level in the games industry to know about the non-public dynamics, and that includes working with some of the people involved in this story.
Then you should very well know how hardware has always been a loss leader intended to drive people to exclusives and first party services. It shouldn’t be a surprise that once a company finds just as successful ways of driving the same engagement, they no longer need hardware.
I highly doubt they have recouped the R&D costs of making the console and platform at $40-80 per unit. So, yes, at a loss. Looking at the BOM and calling it a day is the shallowest way to evaluate if something is sold at a gain or loss.
> To drive people to play the exclusives?
Nintendo? The major game studio that famously only releases their first party titles on their own platform? Yeah I'm pretty sure that's the reason their entire hardware lineup exists and has ever existed.
> TBH I won't engage further in this line.
Not that you've been engaging in anything but dismissals without substance in this entire post.
Both Sony and Nintendo have expanded outside their traditional exclusive hardware. I don't think the parent is saying that doing hardware is useless, but rather that the writing is on the wall to some extent for pure console exclusivity.
It ain't the PS3 era where consoles are some radically different hardware stack. The latest gen, except for nintendo, are basically just x86-64 gaming PCs.
The hardware might be a loss leader, but the manufacturer controls access to the hardware, so every game developer for the hardware is giving them a portion of the sale price. They were Steam before Steam existed. Sony didn't make most of their money on first party games, but on third party fees. The first party games, along with the loss leaders, were there to bootstrap getting consumers to buy the console.
The reason to abandon hardware is when you aren't going to get many third party sales regardless, because you are getting destroyed: In large part because your first party games and the console experience aren't attracting enough players. Microsoft hasn't whiffed with every game they released in the last 5 years, but their batting average has been very low.
If your games aren't selling, it makes sense to abandon hardware, but it's even more important to downsize your studios that are releasing underperforming games.
That's not true. Hardware gives them the ability to create a monopoly on game publishing/distribution, which is why console games have always been so expensive. The platform holder can charge high fees to developers and demand high prices from consumers. That's nothing unique to the game industry.
Microsoft has said they're trying to focus more on software, but that focus is on gamepass not games themselves. They want that monopolized platform without the burden of having to sell Xboxes (which consumers have rejected time and time again), which obviously would be very lucrative for them. It's why they've been throwing so much money at devs to entice them to put their games on gamepass, and why they spent such a ludicrous amount of money on Activision despite the Xbox business being such a dud. They believe games are destined to become like video streaming industry, and want to be the Netflix for games.
Now I'm talking out of my ass here, but I think there might be some kind of internal metric at Microsoft that rewards execs that chase monopolization. It's either that, or they're really so incompetent over there that nobody has noticed how bad Xbox leadership is at their jobs. The peak of Xbox success was the 360, and I think that was mostly because Sony got the pricing completely wrong for the PS3 at launch (and even then, lifetime sales of PS3 surpassed the 360)
Gears 5 came out around 5 years ago. Considering the series has consistently rated very well, I doubt they killed it. They're probably just doing the modern AAA thing of spending a decade and a half working on a bloated game with unlimited budget. I bet we'll see one of those logo drops for Gears 6 soon (next showcase is in June), the game will release in a buggy/broken state with a flawless in-game store, the studio will get shut down, and then they'll announce the new Elder Scrolls game while everyone is pissed.
Microsoft didn't kill Gears of War out of ineptitude or malice. It's just that consumers don't want to play cover shooters anymore. There's no market for the game's core identity. People's tastes have swung hard in the opposite direction, they want movement shooters.
Hardware is not always a loss leader, with Nintendo hardware (generally, Wii U was an exception) being the largest example. Estimates were about $250[1] for production for a $300 unit at launch if I remember right, so maybe $10 profit.
Selling on someone else's hardware means they take your 30% or so storefront fee. For example selling your studio's Elder Scrolls title on Steam or PlayStation nets you $42 instead of $60.
>Did you miss that and think they’re just bad at business?
A software shop closing up its software devs to focus more on a few golden geese doesn't inspire confidence for me. But it's not like shareholders actually look that intimately into the industry.
if you only offer software and can't get a 30% cut on all software you sell on a hardware platform, I'd hope you make up for that with more and better games. So this seems backwards to that strategy as a long term move (I know, a relic of the past).
I think it is popular but not growing as fast as Microsoft would have hoped. When I talk to some of my friends about it they don't seem to realize how deep the catalog is and just buy games that they could have played on GamePass, but most of those games are third party games that happen to be on GamePass.
The Xbox brand issue at this point is a lack of quality first party games. They can never seem to nail a release. Even when a game is pretty good there is a caveat.
- Halo Infinite was pretty good, but buggy and they struggled to release new content.
- Starfield is Bethesda's most ambitious game yet with the best combat, graphics and polish from the studio to date, but the exploration loop that defines their games is broken by interplanetary travel. It is still pretty good, but just not what it should have been.
- Forza Motorsport launched buggy and while technically proficient is perhaps of the most joyless games I have ever played.
- Redfall was hyped as a first party release and is absolutely mid
I do think that both the Xbox and PlayStation brands have put themselves in strange positions strategically. People buy consoles to play certain games and if you know that you can play those games on PC (eventually) why would you ever buy a PlayStation or Xbox?
From what I understand gamepass has heavily undercut actual game sales (why buy a game for $70 when it'll probably be on gamepass at some point, and most games are a month of play or so).
With games costing $70 now, I'm thinking it several times now before shelling out the money, specially for those AAA-valued bad/low-quality games, Game Pass or not.
Argument is still valid, since I’ve not bought AAA games for more than two years now, only indies or AA, even if I already beat them with Game Pass.
I don’t think it failed yet, but I’m not renewing my subscription, gifted to me by a friend, for the following reasons:
1. Too many game choices without having to think about spending money for each one is very expensive when the currency is time.
2. Video games will never be Microsoft’s primary business, while video game players and makers are Valve’s. This is why Steam is so much better than Xbox/PC Game Pass.
Xbox was at their prime on the 360 era, they sold almost as many consoles as Sony did PS3. Ever since then they are selling half of PlayStation and their current consoles are tracking behind the previous generation in sales launch-aligned. Even with GamePass which is undeniably great value for gamers.
Seems they are now seriously considering becoming a third party publisher and release all their games or at least most on PlayStation and Switch, which honestly makes sense considering the amount of new development studios they acquired that used to release their games for every platform available, there are not enough Xbox consoles with paying customer to sustain all those studios I think.
I'm amazed that this is a question. Gamepass is essentially so low cost as to be an incredibly costly giveaway, only it has proven that this devalues everything that touches it.
For context, Hifi Rush had 3 million players on Gamepass last August, and today they shut the studio. So even when they get a break out hit they cannot justify keeping the studios around to try and do another; that's not a success.
Until I see actual numbers on Gamepass I won’t believe that it was a failure. It isn’t a direct comparison of “gamers are spending $10 instead of $70”. People who would not buy a game that just came out will willingly pay for Gamepass every month. Gamepass also exists on PC, so Xbox is dipping into a user base which otherwise might not buy many products from them.
Yes they almost definitely make less money from some people, but they might make that back and more from people who otherwise would not be buying their games. It’s hard to use your intuition here without some numbers
It's way too soon to call it a failure, but I'd be very surprised if GP isn't a loss leader strategy for Microsoft to capture the game subscription market.
The problem is that this is a very 2010's strategy and money is no longer free. So this approach is a lot riskier than it was than in the netflix days. I don't know if Microsoft, given this news, wants to keep playing the long game.
And yet here we are where a fantastically successful mid budget game published on to gamepass by a first party studio leading to huge excitement in gamepass is not enough to justify the continued existence of the studio which produced it.
It is current high value for consumers, but that’s all it is, and in cases where MA is just a third party vendor to the publishers, high value for consumers is bad for the publishers. If it is ever deemed a success, that value will diminish extremely fast.
But Hi-Fi Rush did well and invigorated the market. Starfield cost an order of magnitude more and only had the opposite effect. It's like shutting down your successful competitor for your screwup because you're their boss. Almost like the result of an anticompetitive practice.
With Tango/Hi-Fi Rush, MS decided to make it free with Game Pass at launch, which obviously hurt its sales.
If you sell chips but charge people $1 for two weeks for unlimited chips, then just $10/mo for unlimited chips, you might be disappointed with direct chip sales.
Most game studios don't give 2 shits about the games themselves, it's all about the MTX. They don't care if selling the game installer is a massive money loss, it's about bringing in the microtransactions and the massive piles of cash they create (generally at the expense of the users game experience).
Part of the reason the merger was allowed was because they promised it would not result in layoffs for either company. They have now done multiple rounds of layoffs. They lied.
The amount of layoffs the last two years is ridiculous.
My company just laid off 35 people (150ish employees) and gave them a whopping 2 weeks severance for each year that they worked there. Most of the people let go had only worked here for 1-2 years. Engineers and QA.
I was shocked when I heard that because I've always seen it as a great place to work and very forward thinking. That wasn't publicly disclosed, of course, I heard it from a manager coworker/friend.
This is quite a lot of studios to be dissolving and obviously a lot of good developers and artists. The silver lining, if any, is that usually some of those let off open up their own indie studios and release some absolute gems. So here's to hoping and good luck to them!
My guess is that because of the success of Fallout show Microsoft is trying to spin up resources to make another Fallout game as soon as possible while also keeping Elder Scrolls moving forward. Bethesda has always been a one game studio, but perhaps they will try to hire up to become a two game studio or they could go beef up Obsidian to pivot into a Fallout New Vegas to or other non-numbered Fallout game.
The casualties of this are two financially under performing studios.
If Microsoft plans to bring a lot of new people into a Bethesda game, I hope they invest in new engine tech and QA. Old Bethesda fans know what to expect by now, but newcomers with any modern game experience are going to be in for a rude surprise if the next Fallout game ships with typical Bethesda quality.
They've had this problem with their last several releases too, but I think the TV show will make it a lot worse.
It’s the same old shitty engine that needs to be sent to the recycle bin if they hope to have any chance of making a modern AAA game that doesn’t feel like it’s stuck in 2015.
Does a technical community like HN really not understand how legacy code works? The Creation engine in 2024 has about as much relation to Embryo as UE5 does to UE1. There will be some core math that hasn't changed in 30 years, but the engines are night and day.
I don't even know why this makes news anymore. It's so rare for a game studio to last a decade, most don't, and even successful ones will be shut down after launching a huge title in order to keep more profits for the publisher. Publishers are slave masters in the games industry.
Making a crass example, but schol shootings also make the news all the time and they are reported on in detail everytime. It being semi-common doesn't not make it depressing.
Looking Glass, Irrational Games, Ion Storm, Arkane. Wonder if immersive sims are fated to be an over-ambitious, under-sold, mass audience-unfriendly genre made by doomed studios.
Immersive Sim + "I have to keep up with the latest AAA game standards for graphics" probably is doomed. We really need to give them permission to not have to be up to that graphics standard. Permission to not have to be fully voiced would be nice too.
Right now they're in an ugly place where they're still awfully large for an indie or AA studio, but an AAA studio still largely won't make anything that doesn't drive to the limit of modern graphics.
There is no doubt AI won't be used to fix the fully voiced issue. That is such a no-brainer.
As to graphics, my favorite games of the past 5 years were average graphics at best. (Subnautica, Outer Wilds, Hollow Knight, Hades... Red Dead 2 ok not that one)
I'm holding out on that one until I see it work. AI voices have certainly reached the point where I don't mind listening to them for a good period of time, and they can match the basic contours of someone's voice, but at the moment they are still missing precisely the fine details a game needs from a voice actor. And I don't know if this is just a matter of a few last tweaks or if it's a case of the last 10% taking 90% of the work. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that I'm waiting until I see it before I declare that it's here.
Personally I've nearly entirely bowed out of AAA gaming. The harder they push the graphics the more everything else ends up trashed. It isn't even a lack of effort per se. It's just that if literally everything has to have pristine animations and perfect voice acting and physics-based interactions with its environments, you get less than when all you needed was a 5 frame pixel animation and a funny sound effect for some particular interaction. AI can only cut into the problem there but not solve it until it is essentially not only human-capable, but human-capable in realtime, which is literally getting to holodeck levels of computation.
AI for voices is such a catch-22. On one hand, you don't want to open that box of pandora and/or alienate human VAs. OTOH, if the choice is between no VO, and AI VO, well, I'd be ok with AI VO, but it's a slippery slope for sure.
I almost wonder if one could make immersive sims for VR, though such an experiment would probably be incredibly intensive for a relatively minuscule playerbase.
Similar to how the adventure gennre killed the point and click, I argue that sandbox killed the immersive sim. The ultimate choice is to do whatever you want, with no pesky story and narrative to get in your way.
Immersive sims meanwhile, seem to be expected to be a smaller scoped (often single player) game, bringing about choice in repeating the same playthrough in its world. Not giving the player a huge toolbox and letting them go wild.
I feel like AAA gaming has just gotten too big, the time between releases is way too long compared to back in the 2000s and try to hard to big massive open world or movie quality cinematic experience. I feel similar about Sony.
Nintendo on the other hand seems have a good balance of putting out quality games of various ambition with a good frequency
>Nintendo on the other hand seems have a good balance of putting out quality games of various ambition with a good frequency
And you see how vehemently the gaming community reacts everytime a Switch exclusive game has some slight frame dip despite running on 2016 hardware. Part of that demand does in fact come from the consumers who don't understand how much work goes into those fancy graphics. And what it sacrifices.
Just yesterday there was a poll going around on Twitter of which of the big 3 gaming companies, Nintendo, Sony, and MS is the "least bad" or something like that, and I saw a lot of people saying Microsoft. I figured they'd do something stupid soon to remind everyone how Microsoft operates, but didn't think it would be so soon!
I can't believe these studio acquisitions still aren't being blocked. At what point will they finally acknowledge the blatant anti-competition Microsoft regularly demonstrates by buying any studio that gets too big, letting them rot, and then killing them off?
You gotta think like a gamer. Microsoft will make Call of Duty free on gamepass. Meanwhile, Nintendo graphics suck and they hate mods. and Sony is too greedy in buying exclusives and keeping them off PC. MS wins by default with this mindset. Their backwards compatibility and PC support is indeed the best out of the 3, but that only helps out PC players (who seem to dominate a lot of this discussion).
Seeing the reactions on Reddit or Twitter really show how either young or ignorant the average video game commenter is on how the industry works. just instant gratification at any cost, and if it's denied it's war. Just look at how ballistic they went for needing an extra account for Helldivers, then read up on the news for these layoffs for a game they loved and see the slight murmur in comparison.
HN has some of that too, but there's at least some professionals here that will sympathize with the developers.
Gamepass is pretty generous. Gamers see MS buy a studio and add their catalog to gamepass. PC gamers appreciate that Xbox games are also usually on PC.
Nintendo sends a ton of C&D letters to smaller developers, and are pretty anti-emulation. Games never go on sale. Remakes are expensive ($60 for Super Mario RPG for example).
Sony just had the whole "You need a PSN account to play a PC game" thing. But also, you can't create a PSN account in some countries, so sorry you can't play the PC game you bought anymore. They ended up walking it back though. You also need to pay to play online, which is a thing on xbox as well. But I think that's usually drowned out by the "PC Gamers" who don't need to pay for something like that.
Every once in a while they'll do a generous move to essentially buy the good graces of gamers -- e.g. backwards compatibility, launching new releases day one on GamePass (I don't consider that a good thing but whatever), making some custom accessible controller for the disabled, etc.
But as with any shitty corporation like MS, it's not charity. It's an investment to distract everyone from the fact that they're a shitty corporation. And it works apparently!
But that clearly isn't equivalent to "they will not be missed", or "the gaming industry is better without them". Rockstar or Treyarch could disappear and I personally wouldn't care, but I also wouldn't pop into threads about them and pat myself on the back for not being bothered.
Arkane Austin only made Redfall since Prey, the rest were Arkane Lyon (which didn't close). Allegedly (based on some articles) Redfall started as a pure singleplayer game ala Prey 2017 (and their older titles) but Zenimax and Bethesda wanted to add multiplayer and Games-as-a-service elements because they thought it'd increase the company's value back when they were looking for buyers
Essentially the studio was forced to make a game very different from what they were known for (not just as Arkane but even people who worked there) and wanted to make for reasons outside the game's own merits, which in turn introduced a lot of production issues (they did not have the staff or know-how and had to expand in size) and predictably ended up a mess.
This seems bizarre to me. They're closing the one that made Prey 2017. Is it because labor is cheaper in France vs in Austin, USA? Or maybe because everybody who was involved with making Prey left during the shitshow that was Redfall? Or a combination maybe? I can't imagine giving Harvey Smith the axe, though I guess he'll be one of the handful who'll be shuffled off to work on something else inside Bethesda.
Not only it’s probably cheaper in France, but France has strong employee-protection laws, so closing a company there will probably be more costly on severances alone, assuming they can justify to the government why they are closing that company.
