bludgeonParagon

I don't exaggerate when I say that this decision has shaken my faith in Xbox more than anything else they've done in the history of the console - more than RROD, more than the always online controversy (which I never thought was that massive a deal, to be honest), certainly more than the dumb exclusivity/third party discourse that was shitting up social media these last couple of months. I always thought that Phil Spencer et al. had a good eye for balancing business and building a creative portfolio and that he would be a great fit after the restructuring of the leadership, but ever since they changed the hierarchy to him answering directly to Satya Nadella it feels like his spine just up and fucking vanished.

Going out there and publicly committing support to teams like Tango and Arkane and then spinning on a dime is entirely out of character even compared to the executive that helped conceive of Game Pass in the first place that it makes me wonder who exactly is actually pulling the leash. It doesn't matter how Matt Booty spins it, it completely undermines any faith in Game Pass as a vehicle for first party content. This isn't even a "good guy Phil Spencer" angle - it is impossible to believe that Spencer and the others are too stupid to know how badly this reflects on other studios in the portfolio when even the critical darlings like Hi Fi Rush don't stand a fucking chance. There has to be external shareholder or accountant impetus that drives them to this level of desperation that they would gut teams like this just for the bottom line. Game Pass felt like a legitimately smart avenue for long term business growth, already profitable (despite what people who are misreading the reports keep insisting), but someone up there who wants more infinite money more faster and are unhappy with the rate of growth has gotten cold feet and are tightening the noose.

I desperately hope that Giant Bomb gets to have Phil on the couch this year to answer for his decisions, because even as a cold unfeeling corporation this shortsighted bullshit flies in the face of the demonstrated business acumen of years prior. It just reeks to me of a book-keeper with absolutely zero knowledge of how that particular sector of the industry works, looking at the numbers and going "hey this part of the balance sheet needs to be slashed". It wouldn't surprise me, but what does surprise me is that someone of the station and experience of Spencer/Booty not attempting some kind of pushback against what clearly runs counter to their objectives for diversity in content growth just months prior. Some kind of tectonic shift in strategy must be going on and it has to have run deeper than just the whole "multiplatform" thing.

Absolutely unconscionable

It's not particularly hard to find accounts from developers online who have received death threats and mail in their home addresses over the mildest changes to the videogames they developed.

If you can't find any possible correlation between that and the personal information of Insomniac employees that was directly embedded in the hacked data that was released, then I think we're at an impasse and don't have a whole lot more to discuss.

@bigsocrates: The crux of my original post was mostly that calls to never report on leaks were misguided and silly, but also that exercising restraint on the ways the leaks were covered in consideration of the victims is not the anathema to "real" journalism that journalists were claiming it was.

A number of orgs like Gamespot decided against covering the leaks in detail, and some of the responses from fellow journalists were downright questioning the professionalism of those who took that stance.

I don't think being mindful of the health and safety of one's subject is necessarily disparate from good journalism, especially when bad journalism has the power to do immeasurable harm. And after all, it's just as much about what [i]isn't[/i] being said as what is being said.

@thepanzini: not particularly the central point of the topic, but this is par for the course with all exposes, Kotaku or Bloomberg or otherwise. However, it does give voice to concerns about the state of game development that have been broadly echoed across the entire industry for an extremely long time.

I want to clarify and get a little specific here, because to split hairs here I'm not entirely referring to just plot spoilers:

In the days that the Insomniac hack occurred, a lot of straight-up previsualization gameplay footage was released. We're talking white-box levels with untextured models testing movement and combat, stuff that clearly makes up the meat and potatoes of the videogame part of the game. Publications like Kotaku and IGN laid the existence of these and other details out, with headlines for individual games that were clearly designed for clicks by people who wanted to see it, even if the footage itself wasn't necessarily included.

Amongst this signal-boosting, bad-faith actors online whipped up a frenzy on social media by finding and posting said test footage, and the devs from the team voiced their pain and frustration at having that work so badly misrepresented. Pretending like there is no correlation at all between the two is being willingly ignorant in pursuit of some absolute moral high ground, and telling victims "don't be mad at us we just reported the facts" to minimize their feelings on it is missing the forest for the trees when it comes to the way in which that sensitive information was handled.

Kotaku today released an article about Spiderman 2's budgetary concerns, Insomniac's staffing issues and the overall problems with AAA development. If they had lead with this kind of analytical content instead of low-effort clickbait, I wouldn't have found their response to this nearly as disrespectful.
I am not saying that journalists should not cover this kind of content at all - in fact I'm very sure what I said supports the opposite. I am not calling for the suppression of journalism and free speech or whatever - as I stated in my original post, critically disseminating important information that meaningfully shapes the landscape of the industry actually fulfils the social responsibility of journalism. But what some of these publications did on day one of the incident was absolutely not that, and I think the journalists still being hyper-defensive about this issue today are doing their colleagues with a different stance a disservice.

The question is, what constitutes mere "inconvenience" and what constitutes "real and serious harm"? Is that for the journalist to decide, or for the artists caught in the crossfire? It is one thing to uncover and critically examine the business decisions of multi-billion dollar organizations. Does it really serve the industry to specifically signal boost barely-placeholder art to get as many eyes from the public on it as possible, knowing how vulnerable their creators are to misrepresentation, death threats and other forms of abuse?

I think truth for the sake of truth is a noble ideal, but deliberately ignoring the human impact that good journalism has on society voids its purpose. If all that was needed were reported facts, we could leave games journalism entirely in the hands of machines.

The answer to this is that yeah, if you're an individual in a specific situation that for whatever reason owns every single current generation console and aren't interested in playing games on the Xbox, then... yeah, spending money on Xbox Game Pass is not really a wise financial decision, for you?

These games provide value to the subscription because... they're provided as part of the subscription. If they weren't considered value for the subscription, reviewers et al. wouldn't be pointing out that they were on Game Pass ad nauseum when they list the platforms they're available on.

Not that it means too much because actually laying out stuff like playtime and so forth is obnoxiously difficult on the PC app but based off my achievements unlocked in 2023, from Game Pass I installed:

State of Decay 2 (played through to credits)
Soul Hackers 2
Crossfire X (played the story mode through to credits)
The Last Case of Benedict Fox
Planet of Lana (played through to credits)
Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty (couldn't beat the final boss)
Eastern Exorcist
Redfall (lol)
Venba (played through to credits)
Midnight Fight Express
Exoprimal (played through to credits)
Sea of Stars
Lies of P
Party Animals
Quake II (played through a few campaigns to credits)
Starfield (one playthrough to New Game+)
Hi Fi Rush (couple of playthroughs, this is my brainrot)
Wild Hearts

This excludes multiplayer heavy installs like Halo Infinite, Gears 5 and Forza Horizon 5 (the last of which I kind of have an obscene number of hours played out of habit).

Now it's pretty obvious that I'm an Xbox power user, and I don't own a Playstation 5 (I do have a Switch). But if I did own a Playstation 5 and a Game Pass sub at the same time and wanted to play Dead Space remake, Like a Dragon, Monster Hunter, Persona etc. etc. why would I not just download it to the Xbox? (Or my PC, for that matter? I don't think my Game Pass list here actually includes console exclusive Game Pass options)

Also, I'm probably in the minority on this but I think there is more than one way to consume a subscription-based service, and treating it as a tasting platter by drastically lowering the barrier to entry to titles that players might not have tried otherwise is no less a valid approach. I can pretty confidently say that I would not have bothered playing half of those titles listed if I had to go through the process of spending 30-100AUD to purchase them individually, and my broader gaming experience is all the better for having done so. You can split hairs about the monetary value of that practice however you like and argue that the industry should never have done away with demo culture, but that's really kind of a different set of goalposts and we've already spent enough time trying to vaguely declare personal experiences as some sort of universally-agreed median.

Appreciate you stopping by!

I made that section mostly in jest! But to be clear, the only section I'm predicting it might actually win something in now is Best Action (I was expecting Alan Wake and Resident Evil 4 to take up Best Action, not Best Action-Adventure, so the current lineup there is much more undecided). I was expecting Hi-Fi Rush to at least net nominations, just not a whole lot of wins.
The other categories are thoroughly populated with extremely well-beloved releases so I'm kind of expecting a rehash of the same thing that happened with Ori and the Will of the Wisps, which got its dues in the nominations list but lost out to games like Ghost of Tsushima and Final Fantasy VII Remake. The bigger properties tend to win out in the end.

I very much left out a very small number of issues I had with Hi-Fi Rush, one of which was I do think people may fall on either side of the fence with the way the visual composition might be too much on an individual's mental stack. That's a valid criticism, and there is basically one encounter in the game that I definitely considered a bridge too far (with the stage hazards, fire attacks etc.)

I think the reason why I was personally okay with it is that the vast majority of the attacks land on the exact same beat, so in a lot of scenarios where there is an overwhelming force, there are basically two principles (ignoring the wave-clear type specials) that let you reset and refocus on your place in the combat encounter:
Being in the air allows you to avoid a massive portion of incoming heat from enemies. There are only a small handful of enemy attacks that actually hit the player in an airborne state, and the game will actually give you a pretty good amount of hang time with attack animations - enough that you can mash your way through juggling an enemy while trying to consider what else to prioritize.
You can just mash the parry button to the beat and end up blocking almost all non-environmental damage from enemies without really tracking where it's coming from (and build upgrades in a way that make parrying a real tide-turner for survivability).

I wouldn't say these are perfect solutions, but they're design elements that help place Hi-Fi Rush a cut above some other character action games that can sometimes really dogpile enemies on you (or even worse, stunlock you into oblivion) without a northstar to pull you through that mental stack.

As for the platforming, I certainly adored navigating Hi-Fi Rush's environments but I think the jumping is probably the one part of the movement that I think could have used tuning because the X/Y-axis travel distance feels deliberately short and extremely fast in a way that makes every jump to a floating platform kind of a shaky proposition without very considered spacing. Those kinds of jump physics serve the combat well, but had me misjudging distance and falling into bottomless pits more often I'd like

It's definitely worth pondering as to exactly how sustainable a prop it is for Xbox's growth, but even the most cursory of searches on the most limited of platforms shows that Game Pass regularly adds latest-and/or-greatest titles on the regular, and isn't just a repository for the old games.

They may not be headliners designed for players to jump the fence or whatever, but suggesting that they don't count as much as value if they're available for purchase multiplatform is kind of nonsense. Other companies wouldn't be trying to restructure their own subscription services similarly if they didn't consider this kind of thing competitive.

The idea that BioWare from "the good old days" no longer exists or that the people who made BioWare good were all gone was mostly a myth perpetuated by people that have been trying to eulogize them for the last 10+ years, with an axe to grind against BioWare not making the cRPGs they preferred in perpetuity. The people that helped make Baldurs Gate and Dragon Age Origins were there and have always been there, up until EA started firing them en masse yesterday

In reality there are a bunch of veterans who will still be there, like Mike Gamble and Patrick/Karin Weekes. It's just that EA decided to make their lives a whole lot harder because around 6 months ago they completely restructured their accounting books and decided to gut a studio by firing the people who looked the most expensive and expendable. I'm willing to bet that the team were fighting tooth and nail to hold this off for as long as possible

At the end of the day any developer and their identity is more than any one individual in the team, and I think there's still a good chance they'll find their feet and come out the other end doing great things, but to say this fucking sucks ass would be a profound understatement

Axing an entire chunk of the small handful of personalities that even remain on the personality-based content creation website, in order to try and balance the cash flow, is the dumbest fucking blood-from-a-stone I've seen in a good while.

I know these decisions aren't made on vibes like the ones I operate on but I followed the new lineup of GB members with genuine, legitimate excitement at the new energy that was being brought in, and having a whole portion of that energy just uncermoniously axed like that is just plain rotten.

I guess I'll keep my sub for now but boy did I have a long and hard think about it this morning.