Microsoft shuts down another Studio… Ninja Theory

I hate this; however, lest we forget, this studio made Hellblade and Bleeding Edge during their time with Microsoft. Hellblade is a glorified indy game and Bleeding Edge was a massive flop.

They also shut down several other studios and several major executives are departing.

I only feel bad for the studios if they were just following orders and still get shut down.

But the opposite is usually true.

A studio like Compulsion Games spends 7 years and probably tens of millions of dollars to develop an 8 hour long DEI indie type game that sold an estimated 65,000 copies and then want sympathy when they are shut down?

Microsoft was basically just massively subsidizing their pretend game studio business that is hopelessly unprofitable.

MS isn't stupid or evil for shutting them down, they are stupid for ever buying them and funding them in the first place.

MS has just officially lost patience pissing away money. Their CEO said recently the entire Xbox ecosphere operates at a 3% profit margin, which is actually less than inflation right now. Someone pointed out you could buy treasury notes and get a guaranteed 4%.

So yeah they either have to cut costs and get that margin back up or just abandon the whole venture.

There were rumors of MS even spinning xbox off into its own separate company, in fact that could still happen after they shore it up after all these cuts.

Wasn't that game a trauma dump of the writer, or some shite? Think I remember something about that

These games were all a result of businesses trying to capitalize on peak woke of 2020. All these studios starting pumping out these trash games, thinking they would snatch up this new crowd

By the time many of these projects released, woke was not only over. . .but reviled

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Not sure. They originally intended the protagonist to be a white woman, but late in development they hired a DEI consultant and then spent the rest of their budget implementing all the consultant's recommendations. This included making the lead character black.

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Yes the infamous Sweet Baby Inc cabal. They did the exact same thing to Alan Wake 2. Imagine hiring an outside "consulting" company when you know their advice will be to make everyone black, female, gay, and ugly.

Regardless, this a huge reason why these studios die. At no point in time did anyone ask "Is this good for business?" "Will this sell more copies?" stuff even a child running a lemonade stand at age 8 would think to ask.

If you wanna approach your game as a purely artistic venture to make a point about society or politics or whatever, you need to do it on your own dime and your own time.

There's a statement from the studio head at one point who said part of their mission is to make games for under-served communities.

Those communities are "underserved" because they are so irrelevantly tiny and there's no fricking money in serving them.

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Enslaved: Odyssey to the West was a great game with an amazing soundtrack.

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I'm a little bummed about Ninja Theory, but apparently they've only released Hellblade 2 over the course of the last 6 years. Not sure how anyone not named "Rockstar Games" justifies that level of production. At some point these people have to realize they must generate revenue to justify existing as an entity.

You cannot buy your way into success. You have to cultivate it.

Massive publishers/corporations buying talent and then squandering it is a tale as old as time.

When you’re naive, you think “okay, maybe an infusion of cash and corporate backing will help a smaller studio put out their projects with a grander scale.”

When you become older and wiser, you begin to realize that the conditions that made a smaller studio great are usually destroyed/altered once they are absorbed by a larger entity.

I wish that the naive scenario was the norm, but reality begs to differ.

That said, ninja theory wasn’t a studio that I followed with any real interest. I hate to see anyone lose their jobs, but their products didn’t register with me.

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If something happens to Double Fine, that would be a tragedy. They are fantastic.

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That one makes the least sense to me, but they've only released "Keeper" and "Kiln" in the last five years. Kiln is absolute garbage. Keeper was fun but I lost interest after a day.

Hellblade 2 was fricking dogshit, this should come as a surprise to no one

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When you become older and wiser, you begin to realize that the conditions that made a smaller studio great are usually destroyed/altered once they are absorbed by a larger entity.

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In general, micromanagement by fricking stupid corporate suits kills these studios.

It happened to the various brands under Sierra when it was bought out, it has happened repeatedly under EA, etc.


They change how these studios run in some way, such as making a studio that focuses on high end racing games start to make graphic adventures, then wonder why shite doesn’t work anymore.

I have yet to see any of these acquired studios produce a product that exceeded their output pre acquisition in terms of quality or volume.

At best, they coast. In that vein, I can look at studios such as id software or activision/blizzard.

In many cases, they stagnate or produce things outside of their core competencies. Rare being a good example.

Whatever Microsoft is doing, it’s functioning about as well as what EA did with their acquired talent.

The point is this: publishers are struggling to buy their way into more market share. The best growth is organic and seemingly Microsoft struggles with that, especially from the one era onward.