Not a great look for Microsoft
Microsoft needs to exit the gaming business. They’re a comedic disaster! Seriously…… has the Xbox ever been profitable, or are they still losing money on it?
Why is this kind of sentiment the norm? Someone makes a miss, they should exit out of the market entirely? It makes no sense. If they mess up, they need to re-evaluate their strategies and come back stronger. The people who win in the end are the consumers.
The competition Vs Playstation alone is worth staying in the game. Forcing playstation to develop consoles and actually fight for sales each generation. sure, they’re winning handily, but it only requires a sleeper hit to turn the tides. Starfield is already selling a bunch of Xbox consoles and gamepass subs.
I can imagine in the future, TESVI, Oblivion remake etc will continue to push sales. If Microsoft did get exclusivity for Baldurs Gate, we’d be looking at a very successful period for Microsoft. Once the stars align, they’ll make a killing.
I’ll die on this hill every time: the Xbox One (the original pitch, with Kinect and steaming, voice commands etc) was over a decade ahead of its time. If they’d pitched the same pitch in 2023 it would have made sense. I don’t think PlayStation should sit too comfortably!
It’s pretty sad that your argument is that Microsoft would be winning if they got exclusive rights to Baldur’s Gate and shut everyone else out.
When this happens- EVERYONE loses.
And for the record, my sentiment is the norm because it adheres to reality. Get your head out of your ass an pay attention to how Microsoft it fucking things up for everyone AND themselves.
Firstly, my entire argument does not hinge on that one point. I’m simply commenting on Microsoft misjudging that potential value of Baldurs Gate and not making it an exclusive. If they judged it better, they’d be in a much better position financially and competitively.
Second, Playstation absolutely relies on exclusivity in order to keep their console competitive. Whenever there’s discussion about making games exclusive to XBox, people throw a fit, but it somehow doesn’t apply to PlayStation?
Get your head out of your ass an pay attention to how Microsoft it fucking things up for everyone AND themselves.
Despite the fact that you’re a child and unable to converse without resorting to insults, I’ll bite. Microsoft is a business. They’re losing the console war every generation, and the reason is exclusive games. They’re doing something about it.
With titles like Bloodborne, Horizon, God of War, ratchet and clank, the last of us, Uncharted, shadow of the Colossus, Persona 5, Spiderman etc. Whether they’re timed exclusives or not, they are console sellers for PlayStation. I can’t think off the top of my head, any exclusives for Microsoft besides Gears of War back in the day that I cared about. They messed up Halo infinite, Forza is meh, and everything else is also old. They need exclusives to balance the board and to stay competitive.
Microsoft also offers all their ‘exclusives’ on PC and GamePass, so even though they’re exclusive, they’re still far more available than PlayStation games, which typically come out on PC a few days after, and sometimes as Terrible ports.
Am I having a complete reading comprehension failure? “Microsoft would be winning if they got exclusive rights to Baldur’s Gate” isn’t in the comment you replied to at all.
Honestly. This is a fine look for Microsoft. This is inside baseball executives trying to make sure the lineup on their game pass platform is appealing to people throughout the year. They’re going to make bad predictions, but they’re not doing it out of spite or evilness, they’re just trying to maintain engagement in their game pass.
You would see similar discussions behind any other subscription platform. Did they underestimate it sure, but their job is to predict, so they’re going to have to make good estimates and bad estimates.
That’s kinda like saying an engineer builds good bridges and bad bridges.
Ok, not that, but it’s still their job to get almost all predictions at least CLOSE to right, so this is the definition of failing to do their job.
Maybe, but most prediction based jobs have a middling success rate.Missing this big is always significant, but not catastrophic in this case.
I guarantee that at least some of them would have been fired if they made the same magnitude mistake in the opposite direction, though, and unless they have specific safeguards to avoid overestimate that aren’t in place for underestimates, they WILL.
When you constantly miss though…
Where’s the good estimates? That’s the concerns people are having.
As much as I hate to say if, trying to low ball Larian is probably a good business decision. They are studio with niche appeal (out at least they were, before bg3 released) and I have no trouble believing MS would have the upper hand in negotiations.
Making an agreement to release a game on game pass basically means betting against the developers on their own success. The game might be huge. It might be a flop. Whatever happens, the money from MS it’s going in the back.
I don’t think they were lowballing; I think they genuinely complete underestimated Baldur’s Gate 3. Their internal documents comparing games coming out classified it as a “second-run Stasis PC RPG.”
I can’t really parse the “second run”. Was it supposed to be Stadia exclusive for a while and is the list never updated? Do they mean the early access release?
Either way, Microsoft never really “got” gaming in any meaningful sense. That’s why buying Nintendo and/or valve would have made sense, those two really understand their respective markets.
Even looking past the “unprecedented “ success of BG3, they were ridiculously underestimating it…
Goes to show how out of touch they are with what people want. They’re so focused on their known market that they completely ignore everyone else.
You do have to look at it in some context tho.
As seen in many of the documentation, these documents were from 2020 and even earlier.
At that point, BG was set to be a decent game, but still being done by a small studio and far from finished. For a normal company, the development and production time for the game was stretched so long it was doubtful that it would see completion and if it did, it would probably be rushed.
Instead Larian got enough backing to finish it.
Besides, traditionally, that style of RPG is a niche market that does have a rather well defined target audience, but not an especially WIDE audience.
The fact it broke out of its niche and got such wide appeal is in fact not something you would’ve guessed.
But even with the needed context, the wording they used was rather harsh, to say the least.
And all of this is because Microsoft execs, or almost any exec, cannot even judge the market they are in properly. They only understand once the money starts coming in, after the selling data is compiled, and then claim it was impossible to predict. They have 0 foresight and imagination. They just cannot fathom a new game can be successful if someone involved hasn’t already succeeded to the same level. They don’t understand progress and cannot see signs of a good product if you don’t tell them how much it sold.
Look at the product, not just the previous financial success. Look at the following (YES kickstarter success IS A GREAT SIGN IT WILL SELL). Look at the actual fucking game they are making since you had three years to check it out before. But they don’t because they don’t get it, they don’t understand their own market. They, like always, based their entire opinion on past financial success and some arbitrary “niche market” they invented anyway. The market is much, MUCH wider that this. Every single gamer in the world plays a wide variety of genres, that is not what makes a game succeed of fail. The quality of them is.
Nobody who looked into BG3 before had doubts about this game’s quality. Hell a lot of us are not here because of DnD but because Larian already made extraordinary games in that genre.
They are just proving they don’t understand what makes games sell at all then. Anybody who had experienced the early access (they had like 3 years to do so) knew this was a special game. Anybody who tried the DOS series also knew and are probably here because of those anyway. The success of this game was obvious way before it came out. This is just another proof that the people running the business have no idea of what they are doing. They just cannot judge of stuff before they have numbers and it’s why we should get rid of these leeches. So again, the only surprised people are the idiots that don’t understand shit about modern games.
These documents are from 2019 dude, so it’s not like could have tried the early access.
They’re not thinking about these things as games, generally, but specifically how they’ll be perceived by the Xbox audience. It looks to me like they discounted BG3, at least in part, because it couldn’t split-screen on series S. They’re thinking about games you play on the couch, in a group, maybe during a party - not games you play solo for hours or days on end.
That may end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. BG3 isn’t out on Xbox (officially) yet. We don’t know what their advertising will look like, and it well turn out that everyone who wants to play it will already have gone the PC route.
because it couldn’t split-screen on series S
Makes me wonder if they actually took the backlash on Halo Infinite to heart.
They’re not thinking about these things as games, generally, but specifically how they’ll be perceived by the Xbox audience. It looks to me like they discounted BG3, at least in part, because it couldn’t split-screen on series S. They’re thinking about games you play on the couch, in a group, maybe during a party - not games you play solo for hours or days on end.
And that’s what I mean. They are wrong on all counts because they don’t understand what makes a game successful. They only consider the monetary success of their own. They also think “xbox” audience is somehow different and want something else than other platform users. Sure couch is cool but let’s not pretend that this is really how people are gaming nowadays. People like all games when they are well made, complete from the start and just fucking work. Throw a bit of good writing in there and you have a GOTY contender. BG3 is just far above that only and that’s why I’m saying if anyone an MS looked into BG3 and Larian and chose not to sign, they are incompetent idiots.
