Świetne wypowiedzi z NeoGaf

Cześć wszystkim. Wczytałem się dzisiaj w bardzo obszerny wątek na NeoGaf odnośnie skasowania Scalebound, ale w postach znalazłem wiele bardzo ciekawych opinii o całej branży teraz, jak i kiedyś. Szkoda żeby inni na tym nie skorzystali, więc postanowiłem przekopiować co ciekawsze wpisy. Zapraszam do lektury! UWAGA, MASA CZYTANIA! [średni angielski wymagany]

Branżę śledzę dość skrupulatnie, i cytowane treści nie były dla mnie czymś odkrywczym, ale podzielenie się moimi przemyśleniami na blogu trwałoby masę czasu, więc rzucę gotowce :)

Jeśli się Wam spodoba takie dzielenie się informacjami, może przetłumaczę dla szerszego grona - to i tak lepsze niż pisanie wszystkiego samemu :)

EDIT: jak zobaczyłem ile tego wyszło, to nie wiem czy podjąbym się takiego zadania ;p no ale się zobaczy

Oczywiście do wszystkich wypowiedzi dorzucam linka, może ktoś będzie chciał dokładniej prześledzić dalsze posty.

1.Jak Sony uratowało swoją dupę za czasów PS3

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=228118795&postcount=553

the 360 had a lot of success in the first part of last gen because they were buying exclusives, meanwhile Sony was struggling because they suddenly lost all the exclusive games they didn't have to work for during the PS1 and PS2 era. they were the market leader, so all the titles naturally came on sony's consoles. 

things changed when hirai substituted kutaragi at the helm of the brand... he completely restructured sony's first party production, not without its fair share of game canceling action... but he got the job done, he made Sony an efficient and diversified gaming machine... something that Microsoft has not being able to do.

oraz świetna odpowiedź do tej jakże trafnej wypowiedzi:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=228119396&postcount=582

But that's the point. When hard times hit, Sony lost almost all 3rd party exclusives, but they still had their IPs, relationships and Studios created and bought from the PS1/2 era to fall back: Warhawk, Naughty Dog, Gran Turismo, Sucker Punch, Wipeout, Guerrilla, Evolution, etc. (and almost all bought studios created a new IP on the PS3: Uncharted, Infamous, Motorstorm)

That's what MS should have invested at the height of the success of the 360.

Czemu to takie ważne? Bardzo dobrze przedstawia obecną sytuację XO vs PS4 - MS ze względu na małą ilość studiów 1st party (a te co posiada skupiają się nad GoW/Forza/Halo) 

2.Czy Sony mogło mieć z górki dzięki innym departamentom?

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=228118114&postcount=518

Originally Posted by specdot 

At this point everyone should be asking themselves this question. Microsoft isn't like Nintendo or Sony. They don't have that culture of gaming background as the other two do. Everything they do, at least to me, seems like it has to be green lit by people who have nothing to do with their gaming division.

Originally Posted by Jaguar Victory 

It's not like Sony had a gaming background until the PlayStation. Sony was an electronics company. They are no different than MS. The only difference is MS doesn't rely on gaming as much as Sony does today. This personification of companies is odd kind of.

I think Sony having Sony Pictures and Sony Music Entertainment has helped them a lot with dealing with creative types, fostering studios and creative talent. Saying they are no different is a little off I think. Look at Bungie and Microsoft. Literally couldn't get along so they had to part ways. I don't think that kind of dysfunction would happen under Sony. Especially with their top studio. I think it just comes down to management and overall disbelief in gaming within the high offices at Microsoft.

Edit: Man I just find it so weird how Bungie and Microsoft couldn't get along creatively but they both have kind of arrived at the same conclusion of long running service type games with expansions and micro transactions. Kind of nuts.

3..Czy Xbox może stać się czymś na wzór Steam Machine? Wierzcie lub nie, ale nie jest to nieprawdopodobne. Fajny komentarz odnośnie tego zagadnienia:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=228118300&postcount=534

Maybe a winning strategy for Microsoft would be to relabel Xbox as a as a gaming hub brand. 


Microsoft has won a massive following with Surface products. It's the best hardware Microsoft has ever made. They now have a Surface Pro and a Surface Book and a Studio Surface. They could make Surface HTTPs for content creation and gaming.

And then push XBox as a brand that tries to smooth out PC gaming- Allowing Steam, Uplay, Gog and others to be better integrated into the OS. Work with the distribution platforms and see if they can find a financial angle as a middle man. Xbox has a lot of value. It makes sense as a gaming line of hardware and products, but if they adhere to PC gaming- Making 400-500 Dollars Gaming PCs, and doing the dell thing where they try to sell them as a console experience- A work-out-of-the-box type experience, then they'd not have to spend all this time and money fighting over exclusives and they could pay to their strengths.



Is the yield they get from Xbox Live really worth this? 

If I was Spencer I'd think that if you went out and said: Like with Steam Machines- Let's make a well designed affordable Gaming PC, and achieve this by making a massive supply order. Get developers to aim for "optimal" performance" on these Xbox Gaming PC SKUs, let them be upgradeable. 
Such a device could undermine the increasing chromebook market, get windows into a lot more peoples hands. 



Exclusive-games war is a losing proposition. It hasn't made financially sense for Microsoft since Minecraft and that was more than 2 billion in cost. Besides Halo and Gears of War the aquisitions for Microsoft has not had a good history. Meanwhile many of their excellent IPs are unused; MechWarrior to Top Spin, the list of fantastic IPs they own that they are just sitting on. 
They should sell all of that shit. Grow Xbox as a peripheral brand, affordable gaming PCs and make developers to specifically target performance for their Xbox Line.
We're already seeing this trend with Scorpio.
The strategy was always to trojan horse Windows into the living Room. Gotta pull out all whistle on the living room gaming PC. 400 dollars gaming PC could be quite powerful if it was someone like Microsoft who made it. At the volumes they buy parts at, they get massive discounts. 


The other thing is that Xbox Live Gold Subscription has to go.

A tutaj jeszcze więcej o spojrzeniu CEO MS na firmę - zdaje się uwiarygodniać powyższą tezę 

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=228125431&postcount=841

From the MS CEO:
 

I just think about three things. There are a few other efforts we do, and I’ve been very clear about those efforts and why they exist and why we are proud of them. But, there are three products in all of this. There is Windows, there is Office 365, and there is Azure. That’s it. Everything else to me is, of course, you can call them features, you can call them parts of that... - Link

Finally, we will build the best instantiation of this vision through our Windows device platform and our devices, which will serve to delight our customers, increase distribution of our services, drive gross margin, enable fundamentally new product categories, and generate opportunity for the Windows ecosystem more broadly. We will pursue our gaming ambition as part of this broader vision for Windows and increase its appeal to consumers. We will bring together Xbox Live and our first-party gaming efforts across PC, console, mobile and new categories like HoloLens into one integrated play. - Link

 4.Jak wygląda finansowanie gier - pisałem to przy okazji jakiegoś newsa, tutaj ładnie wytłumaczone ponownie

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=228119980&postcount=624

Originally Posted by Killroyskbg 

Dont understand why so many are defending spencer and blaming it on higher ups. He is the head of Xbox! It is his job to explain why canceling games and not investing in new IP´s is a bad decision to the higher-ups if that is what he actually believes.

Have you followed Star Citizen or its thread?


It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Most video games are a nightmare to make. Most large scale software projects involving hundreds of people are a nightmare to make. Almost no games end up being like the creator envisions them. There is never enough time or money. You promise more than you can chew to make publishers bite.
You go to publishers, and you make a pitch. As a lead you promise things you cannot realistically deliver. 


If they bite (Microsoft) you get millions and you begin working on the game. Then eventually, you've not hit your milestones and now you're behind schedule. You go to microsoft and the investors and tell them "we're out of money- Please give us more". The publishers become annoyed because the agreement was they'd finish by this date and with this amount of money. Developers explain to the publisher that things went wrong (it always goes wrong) - Systems needs to be remade, focus groups gave them insights into things that werent working, major problems with tech and engine forces them to seek other solutions.

As a publisher or investor you're in a pickle. If you pull the plug now, your money is lost. the game is dead, and you will never recoup your investment. Or. Or you can give the developers more money. Okay- 5 more million for you guys- six more months. 
And then six months later, you come back and they're not done. Ahh, things where not working in the internal alpha. They could release it, but it would mean they expect much lower sales prejections and perhaps a meta critic score of 55-65. 

What do you do? Now you got a sort of working game product you can release. Do you keep going at it? The developers show the latest builds, they show their new targets and how they plan to spend the remaining money. Okay, - You give the developers 5 more months and more money. You come back 5 months later, and it's still not done. 
At this point this is where many publishers say "enough" and either force them release it (a half finished or finished buggy game) or shut it down.
Game development is a fight to hit milestones. When you operate a studio and you have a staff of 300-500 people working internally, with marketing, branding and all the various staff members, you're easily spending 100K a month just to keep the studio operational. That's not even in full development cycle. You're burning through massive amounts of money and you take major risks. 

On the other line you have the gamers. Sick and tired of publishers always betting on the safe games. Another World War 2 shooter? uck. Another Military Shooter? Yuck. Another Hero shooter? Fuck. 
It's not that publishers like EA or Microsoft or Ubisoft are out to fuck anybody over. It's that they are trying to make back their money.
I respect Spencer for betting on Phantom Dust. That was a bold and insightful game that deserved another chance. And going by this games development studio, and the fact it was transfered to another team makes me think that Spencer had a personal interest in seeing it realized. I don't think Scalebound was different. Or ReCore. How cool would it have been had ReCore been a modern Ico? It could have been. That game has so much promise, but that's another situation where the game just wouldn't finish. Microsoft had to say "enough" and force them to release it.




Why is this? 

It's because games are not coming together until near the end. You cannot tell if it's a fun game you got until all the gameplay systems are in place. And because they need to be a part of a whole, you're designing and building in the blind for years. So you have to go deep into the rabbit hole and hope for the best. 
Software development is beaucratic. You got so many people that the leads don't even have an idea what is really going on elsewhere. If you're a lead on programming, or animation or sound or illustration, you're just ahead of your team. You don't know how the other pieces of the puzzle is coming together. Sometimes you have a strong team and a strong game, but one team is fucked. Either by poor management or because it suffers on the burdens of other teams. Maybe the programming team is understaffed or the choice of engine was problematic in the beginning. Now because a early lead developer picked a terrible engine to work in, you're spending 50% of your staff on programmers because the engine choice was fucked. Now you don't got enough budget for other teams- Now what the fuck do you do?
Are you supposed to go to Microsoft and EA with that fucking story? Yeah, me as the lead dev and the lead programmer made a mistake, and now we need a lot more money for the next 3 years to finish this game. 

Decisions like that in the beginning is why, many large famous developers move to indie games. It's less stressful, it's smaller manageable budgets, you can have your finger in every area of development, you can control it, lesser people means less risk and less timewaste by the sheer amount of people, meetings and builds that have to be moved. You cannot throw more staff and money after this and expect games to become good. It just doesn't work that way.
So what did Spencer do wrong here? I don't understand how he is at fault. It's a stroke of bad luck that these projects have folded. It has left wide gaps in the Xbox strategy for 2017. But it could not have been forseen.

Sony during the PS3 days is a good example of how they had a massive slate of games that ended up being terrible terrible. Games like Lair and Haze ended up being unfinished messes. They weren't coming together- But that was also not the fault of Sony. Choosing which projects to back is a 20/20 hindsight.

 Ale gry eksluzywne nie koniecznie muszą dużo zarabiać - mają być urozmaiceniem w bibliotece!

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=228121002&postcount=679

I know about SC yes and I believe both them and Xbox suffer from bad leadership.

Off course some games are not going to be loved and bought by everyone and they really dont need to be. Probably The last guardian will not be a financial successes and missed so many milestones it was delayed over a generation. Dreams nobody really seems to understand just what it actually is yet. There is this quote from Yoshida I believe about how only one in many games actually generates profit so why do Sony continue to give so much creative freedom and support to "unsafe" games. Because even if the game itself is not a success it ads to the library and might attract owners that would not buy your system and pay for your other services, games etc. otherwise.

Phil is basically starving Xbox of content by canceling games (especially this late) in development and attracting new buyers with Halo X, Forza X to me does not sound like a good strategy.

5.Tutaj zajedzie trochę szufladkowaniem,  ale musicie przyznać, coś w tym jest. Tak jak w przypadku Fable - miala to być gra F2P, a Phantom Dust również miało być grą MP. 

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=228119099&postcount=566

Scorpio will have niche success, and Halo, Halo Wars, Forza, etc to drive sales with the XBox population. That is enough for 95% of the fanbase from what I have seen. GAF is great, but not representative of gaming trends as a whole.

Remember, most XBox buyers love CoD.

But that's the thing they are not driving sales currently. Halo 5 under performed, so did Gears 4 by a larger margin and I want to say Forza has slowly been shrinking now growing.

Games like Uncharted and niche games like Bloodborne have shown first party and exclusive third party can sell consoles.

W tym punkcie chciałbym również dodać coś jeszcze 

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=228119431&postcount=584 

Originally Posted by CCIE 

I agree games like Uncharted drive console sales. But as some have said earlier, those kind of games take time. Time that MS isn't really willing to put in when their studios can continue to pump out Halo clones and Forza in short order.

Ms is not like Sony, and never will be. They are more of a multiplayer kind of company looking for the next big thing.

The biggest problem is that gaming is no where near as important to MS as it is to Sony. MS could (and has) loose billions on the Xbox brand, maybe even can it altogether, and it could be a drop in the bucket compared to their other divisions. Meanwhile the PS brand is the only part of Sony thats doing well, and has been for some time.

6.Jeden z moich ulubionych wpisów

 http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=228119227&postcount=572

I like Phil overall but I feel like this continues to happen. Our very own MH Williams put up an article going over all the things announced in 2014 that have all but been axed: http://www.usgamer.net/articles/revisiting-xbox-e3-2014-remembering-the-dead

I almost forgot how much. 

Every time this happens, fans start questioning him and the platform's direction, Phil gives the standard reply "we're committed to games and first party", and then you get the "Ok, phew, thanks Phil!" though that seems to be waning now. 

Thing is, you need to allow your teams to branch out and take risks creatively. That's how you grow a brand and ecosystem and new fan bases. This has nothing to do with console war bs, but Sony does this and it's evident. One of their flagship studios known for first person shooters was allowed to take 5 years to build a post apocalyptic open world RPG with a female lead and robot dinosaurs. Another studio (Sony Santa Monica), even though its initial new IP failed, was allowed to radically revamp one of their biggest and most beloved franchises (God of War). Both huge risks. Sucker Punch is on a new IP. Bend is on a new IP, etc. Naughty Dog took time to develop a new IP that's arguably their biggest yet. That's how these become successful franchises. 

Besides Rare, which is basically their new IP testbed though relegated to service driven games, Turn 10 works on Forza, Black Tusk was transformed into a Gears factory, 343 is relegated to Halo...it's just tired at this point. To me anyway, even though I still enjoy those series a lot. I want Xbox around forever. I was there day one with my OG Xbox and fell mad in love with Halo, but damn...give us new and exciting things man. I mean nurturing internal first party talent, not signing more deals that don't go anywhere.

7.Sporo na temat działania MS, dosyć ciekawa wypowiedź 

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=228136781&postcount=1073

Originally Posted by 555-Goodbye 

What about 360? Did they drop that immediately after Xbox One launched? Oh, no they didn't. 

What's the best thing to do here? Judge them on ten years ago with a different head or three years ago with the current leadership team?

Right, they'd dropped it almost a full year before the XBO came out. Gears: Judgement in March 2013, Halo 4/Forza Horizon in fall of 2012. Other than catching a surprise quality game in State of Decay as a mid-2013 XBLA they put out basically nothing worthwhile on the X360 for basically a year.

And that's giving them credit for the Halo/Forza/Gears trio just being represented. Alan Wake in March of 2010 and Crackdown 2 in June of th same year were the last times MS funded a major AAA release that wasn't Halo, Gears, Forza, or Fables, and that assumes you consider Alan Wake a major AAA title. Other than that they milk the shit out of a core group of IPs and sign some indie game already well on it's way to completion up as an XBLA pseudo-exclusive every now and then.

This is MS' routine with every console generation by the way. They roll out some new IPs to start each generation, if something isn't an immediate success they pack it up and go back to the core IPs, pulling basically all support once the next platform is on the horizon. Did it with the OG Xbox, did it with the X360. Starting to do it now on a mid-generation transition from XBO to Scorpio so they can pimp what for most Xbox owners will amount to bullshit video just so they can reclaim hardware "superiority".
 

Originally Posted by Collingwood 

I think a lot of it is timing.

Microsoft needs to stop releasing their 1st party games and 3rd party new IPs in the fall bloodbath.

Sony has already learned not to do this.

I've been saying this for several years now. MS simply doesn't understand the role of first party studios and it shows.
 

Originally Posted by Bitch Pudding 

Speaking of 2014, this sudden change of mood in the entire debate is odd, isn't it? 

Just two months ago, when MS won the fourth consecutive month in the US, Phil was praised for turning the tides.

While continuing to get destroyed outside the US and with Sony having a huge holiday season in the U.S. themselves. Still losing ground.
 

Now he cancelled one game, and Phil is suddenly a failed prophet, and the entire division is doomed. Hell, you can even say right here on NeoGAF that the XBOX lineup is garbage. What would have resulted in a proper console/list war including bans on both sides six month ago seems to be widely accepted now and not even the die-hards can be bothered to defend it.

Kind of hit on it yourself there. Even the die-hards can't be bothered to defend it. Why? Because it pretty well is garbage if you aren't someone with a serious Halo/Gears/Forza itch to scratch. But Gears is day and date on PC and both it and Halo are no longer the undisputed #1 games at the top of their respective genres.

Their exclusive offerings are weak and unoriginal. People are beginning to accept that MS is either unwilling or unable to change that fact, Scalebound being the wish upon a star for something better.

Made even worse by Nier: Automata coming as a PS4/PC game with no XBO version in sight, also made by Platinum, with a recent PS4 demo that is exceptionally good for such a small snapshot of a game.
 

So, why not calm down a little and wait and see which aces the XBOX division has up their sleeves for 2017? Maybe it's worth the wait? We can still administer the last rites to Phil and his division if they screw up the Scorpio presentation.

Because we know what they have for 2017. Halo Wars 2, State of Decay 2, Sea of Thieves, and Crackdown 3. All will likely be on PC as well. None are the kind of big new IP or reinvention of an IP you would like to see a first party studio bringing to the table.

Maybe they show something new for future years but at this point how can anyone really trust that? Scalebound was revealed at E3 2014 and is now dead in early 2017. They also showed Phantom Dust and Crackdown 3 at that same E3, both theoretically coming in 2017 as well, so a >3 year lead time on reveal to release. That with almost no real substance shown for either game recently, so who even knows what state they're in? They didn't even mention Phantom Dust in their PR release when cancelling Scalebound for example.

I'd say MS has dropped the ball, but this is the game they've always been playing. Their first party strategy is clearly to milk the big IPs and do just enough otherwise to not look too shameless in doing so.