Resetting XBOX - Compulsion Games and Double Fine to go indie again, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs "to join new ownership"

I really want id to be independent. But that's never going to happen.

Some of the news is sad to see but I agree with you that something needed/needs to be done with Xbox.

What the fuck does 14 layers of management accomplish even

Those middle managers won't middle manage themselves.

This might be the first time in a long while studios didn't just straight up closed by M$ but instead gone indie or sold off.

I heard they want to spin off XBOX though

Each layer siphon some of the money that's supposed to pass down to the dev.

She also mentioned that the big studio they currently owned will have their own cut too.

14 layers is insane, but 3 to 5 is on the real low side for a $300B corp with lots of massive studios too. The vision presented is gonna be real awkward for companies working on more than 1 game at a time, or with huge 200+ employee teams. Activision-Blizzard-King in particular, World of Warcraft has a handful of sub-teams that have to coordinate stuff and Call of Duty runs on coordinated yearly releases.

I can easily imagine 7 layers for WoW or 8 layers for CoD. That's not bloat, just the inevitable end-result of Satya Nadella being ultimately responsible for approving the salary of whoever's writing the latest Call of Duty, the main project of a wholly owned subsidiary (the four studios making CoD on rotation) of an acquired company (Activision) of Microsoft's side project gaming division (XBOX).

It is remarkable that Microsoft owned Undead Labs for 9 years with 0 game releases and sold them off the year before their game comes out

I suppose letting these studios return to being independent is technically an improvement over Microsoft just shutting them down.

I sure hope all your consumption is completely legal then.

Nepotism?

What an idiotic comment. Nobody is asking for you to boycott everything you don’t like, but we all have to draw our lines at some point, and looks like OP has done just that. You don’t have to like their line, but you also should not discourage others when they are trying to do something that’s more right than not.

They were merrily bleeding me every month until they bumped the price to £22/mo for my kids to basically play Minecraft and Lego star wars. Byeeee.