Xbox Rumors and Speculation
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It really does make sense for those two to tie the knot, finally. I'm a huge Remedy fan and they offer exactly what MS needs in the SP cinematic experiences. Its a perfect match. QB and Alan Wake need sequels, GP needs the content. Make it happen MS.
Yeah, I agree, but with massively blown out budgets, and notoriously long cycles. Or maybe they felt long because they announced early?
I feel like some of MS's new studios fill the void that Remedy left, and potentially on a much smaller budget, and hopefully with better controls.
One thing that makes me wary about Remedy's Control, is maintaining 6 Axis of directionality while still aiming. Still, the game looks amazing, production-wise.
Remedy's Sam is starting to get the douche-factor that Cliffy B exuded just before GoW1 came out. I kind of love it, but I hope it doesn't spiral into Cliffy B circa GoW 3 territory.
http://time.com/5468429/microsoft-a...ebook.com&utm_campaign=time&utm_medium=social
Microsoft’s big bet on cloud computing is paying off as the company has surpassed Apple as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.
Microsoft’s big bet on cloud computing is paying off as the company has surpassed Apple as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.
Xbox’s Phil Spencer Talks Importance of Failure and Adding PC DNA to Microsoft’s Studios
During Microsoft’s Extra Life Livestream Xbox division head Phil Spencer provided some interesting insight about the company’s gaming business.
Spencer was asked what is the hardest part of his job, and he mentioned that while “hard” is not the right word for it, in a creative industry like gaming at times he wants to try things that aren’t going to work to push the boundaries.
“If we stay in the safe zone where you’re 70-80% sure that’s gonna work, I don’t think we’re actually doing our job to kind of push the state of the art forward.”
He explained that he trying to motivate the team to understand that failure is as important as success is a challenge.
“Everybody wants to be on the team that scores a hit […] but in reality, you want to do great work on things that don’t work as well because that’s how you learn.”
According to Spencer, there are teams that ship games or launch their live services. They get some negative feedback or no feedback because people aren’t using their product. It’s important to talk to the team and explain that the work they have done was valuable as they have learned a lot. There are many things that on the first attempt don’t hit their goals, but if the team stays at it they can be successful.
That is a challenge because a team might see the other team next to them “running victory laps” on a successful product, but it’s important that both teams learn, stay humble, and understand that both things that are successful and things that aren’t are “probably equally important in the long-term trajectory to try to make a platform that is the best place for gamers.”
Spencer also talked about Xbox’s acquisition (or more precisely the signing of the LOI for the acquisition) of inXile and Obsidian Games. He explained that one of the things he really loves about those studios is that the kind of games that they do are great for Microsoft’s lineup.
“When I look at those studios they have a history of building great RPGs. I love PC RPGs and I grew up playing games like Baldur’s Gate and MMOs like Ultima Online… The kind of asymmetric RPG history these studios have… I don’t know if that’s exactly what they’re gonna do going forward, they have creative freedom on what they’re gonna go do. But I will say the thing that’s exciting for me about those studios is what those studios are today and where they come from, not something about what we need to turn them into. I love what they are right now and when I think about where our platform and services are going, we know we need to have more PC DNA inside of our Studios teams, not solely for PC, but clearly, games that have come from PC.”
Spencer also feels that it’s good to have three Xbox studios in southern California. Like what Microsoft is building in the U.K., it’s cool to have centers where teams can get together. This is something Rare did with Playground Games and Ninja Theory after their acquisition. There is a lot of creative sharing between the teams, and it “can only lead to good things happening.”
Another element that Spencer mentioned as relevant is Microsoft’s ability to bring stability for those studios and increase the funding for their games. Both studios have the capability to do great games, but there is potential in them that the partnership with Xbox and Microsoft can help them realize. The goal is to make those studios the best at what they are, using the resources Microsoft has as a platform holder and a more diverse business as opposed to one studio running one franchise.
https://twinfinite.net/2018/12/phil-...ailure-pc-dna/
During Microsoft’s Extra Life Livestream Xbox division head Phil Spencer provided some interesting insight about the company’s gaming business.
Spencer was asked what is the hardest part of his job, and he mentioned that while “hard” is not the right word for it, in a creative industry like gaming at times he wants to try things that aren’t going to work to push the boundaries.
“If we stay in the safe zone where you’re 70-80% sure that’s gonna work, I don’t think we’re actually doing our job to kind of push the state of the art forward.”
He explained that he trying to motivate the team to understand that failure is as important as success is a challenge.
“Everybody wants to be on the team that scores a hit […] but in reality, you want to do great work on things that don’t work as well because that’s how you learn.”
According to Spencer, there are teams that ship games or launch their live services. They get some negative feedback or no feedback because people aren’t using their product. It’s important to talk to the team and explain that the work they have done was valuable as they have learned a lot. There are many things that on the first attempt don’t hit their goals, but if the team stays at it they can be successful.
That is a challenge because a team might see the other team next to them “running victory laps” on a successful product, but it’s important that both teams learn, stay humble, and understand that both things that are successful and things that aren’t are “probably equally important in the long-term trajectory to try to make a platform that is the best place for gamers.”
Spencer also talked about Xbox’s acquisition (or more precisely the signing of the LOI for the acquisition) of inXile and Obsidian Games. He explained that one of the things he really loves about those studios is that the kind of games that they do are great for Microsoft’s lineup.
“When I look at those studios they have a history of building great RPGs. I love PC RPGs and I grew up playing games like Baldur’s Gate and MMOs like Ultima Online… The kind of asymmetric RPG history these studios have… I don’t know if that’s exactly what they’re gonna do going forward, they have creative freedom on what they’re gonna go do. But I will say the thing that’s exciting for me about those studios is what those studios are today and where they come from, not something about what we need to turn them into. I love what they are right now and when I think about where our platform and services are going, we know we need to have more PC DNA inside of our Studios teams, not solely for PC, but clearly, games that have come from PC.”
Spencer also feels that it’s good to have three Xbox studios in southern California. Like what Microsoft is building in the U.K., it’s cool to have centers where teams can get together. This is something Rare did with Playground Games and Ninja Theory after their acquisition. There is a lot of creative sharing between the teams, and it “can only lead to good things happening.”
Another element that Spencer mentioned as relevant is Microsoft’s ability to bring stability for those studios and increase the funding for their games. Both studios have the capability to do great games, but there is potential in them that the partnership with Xbox and Microsoft can help them realize. The goal is to make those studios the best at what they are, using the resources Microsoft has as a platform holder and a more diverse business as opposed to one studio running one franchise.
https://twinfinite.net/2018/12/phil-...ailure-pc-dna/
During Microsoft’s Extra Life Livestream Xbox division head Phil Spencer talked about events like XO18 and other events like E3.
“I’d say we’re learning. I saw some of the feedback on “Hey, it would have been great if you guys had a new game to announce.” It’s always great to announce new games and I agree with that. I am very committed to XO and getting that back as part of one of our connections to our fans and our community. Like anything, you do something, and you learn, and you grow from it. The thing I’d say is we’re committed to that.
We didn’t announce anything about next year, but I can say we’re really happy with XO this year and how it went, and we want to do it again.”
Spencer then went on to talk about E3 and why Xbox is sticking with it:
“I think about the same thing at E3. It’s interesting for us because E3 is such an interesting one [event]. When I think about it, when I was young E3 was about retailers coming and trying to figure out how many cartridges they were going to buy for the holidays. This is back when things would sell out. They would go to E3 trying to figure out what the hit games were, and we were all there trying to show our games so that they would up their purchase quantities and we would know how many cartridges or disks, whatever it was [to make].
Then all of a sudden retailers wanted the press there because they wanted to see what the press was writing about because they kind of trusted the press, which makes sense, on what games were going to be hot. So E3 went from a retail show to a press and retail show.
Now I’d say most of our efforts and the reason why we like E3 the way we do… We could do this on our own or direct… We just think it’s an awesome and frankly convenient way for the fans to experience video games. I think we do it because it’s a U.S. celebration in L.A. It’s easy for people in the U.S. to come to one place and just share their love of video games.
My hope is that E3 continues to grow. I think it’s gonna change in some ways, but I look at all these events like XO, E3, the FanFest that we do at Gamescom… While we were doing the fanfest in Mexico City, I think we also had one in Milan going on at the same time. We can reach retailers, we can reach press in so many different ways…” [Editor’s note: Spencer was interrupted by the game he was playing while speaking, but he meant that these events are a great way to reach the fans]
Spencer also mentioned that creating new IP is one of the greatest things that can be done in the gaming industry, but it’s also important to keep exploring characters and stories from the past. One of the challenges is to find a balance between those two options because it’s not possible to constantly double the production capacity of the organization. Another interesting concept is that if teams don’t feel like doing something, they won’t do it no matter what Spencer says. Developers will naturally gravitate towards the things they want to work on.
We also hear that one of his heroes in the gaming industry is Civilization’s creator Sid Meyer. He is a big fan of turn-based strategy games. One of the defining moments of his career was when he joined the gaming division. He was told that there was a studio that would have probably been closed, and he was to try to make it work. After that, he started to work at Studio X on Fable, Rise of Nations, and more. That’s what started him on his road to Xbox.
As a funny note of color, Spencer mentioned that one of his early jobs as a programming intern at Microsoft was to clean a vice-president’s fish tank. He remembers that the first time code he wrote shipped in DOS Bookshelf, it blew his mind. It “really freaked him out” that 100,000 people were running his code.
If you want to read more, you can also enjoy what Spencer said about the importance of learning from failure and adding PC DNA to Xbox’s studios.
https://twinfinite.net/2018/12/xboxs...spencer-xo-e3/
“I’d say we’re learning. I saw some of the feedback on “Hey, it would have been great if you guys had a new game to announce.” It’s always great to announce new games and I agree with that. I am very committed to XO and getting that back as part of one of our connections to our fans and our community. Like anything, you do something, and you learn, and you grow from it. The thing I’d say is we’re committed to that.
We didn’t announce anything about next year, but I can say we’re really happy with XO this year and how it went, and we want to do it again.”
Spencer then went on to talk about E3 and why Xbox is sticking with it:
“I think about the same thing at E3. It’s interesting for us because E3 is such an interesting one [event]. When I think about it, when I was young E3 was about retailers coming and trying to figure out how many cartridges they were going to buy for the holidays. This is back when things would sell out. They would go to E3 trying to figure out what the hit games were, and we were all there trying to show our games so that they would up their purchase quantities and we would know how many cartridges or disks, whatever it was [to make].
Then all of a sudden retailers wanted the press there because they wanted to see what the press was writing about because they kind of trusted the press, which makes sense, on what games were going to be hot. So E3 went from a retail show to a press and retail show.
Now I’d say most of our efforts and the reason why we like E3 the way we do… We could do this on our own or direct… We just think it’s an awesome and frankly convenient way for the fans to experience video games. I think we do it because it’s a U.S. celebration in L.A. It’s easy for people in the U.S. to come to one place and just share their love of video games.
My hope is that E3 continues to grow. I think it’s gonna change in some ways, but I look at all these events like XO, E3, the FanFest that we do at Gamescom… While we were doing the fanfest in Mexico City, I think we also had one in Milan going on at the same time. We can reach retailers, we can reach press in so many different ways…” [Editor’s note: Spencer was interrupted by the game he was playing while speaking, but he meant that these events are a great way to reach the fans]
Spencer also mentioned that creating new IP is one of the greatest things that can be done in the gaming industry, but it’s also important to keep exploring characters and stories from the past. One of the challenges is to find a balance between those two options because it’s not possible to constantly double the production capacity of the organization. Another interesting concept is that if teams don’t feel like doing something, they won’t do it no matter what Spencer says. Developers will naturally gravitate towards the things they want to work on.
We also hear that one of his heroes in the gaming industry is Civilization’s creator Sid Meyer. He is a big fan of turn-based strategy games. One of the defining moments of his career was when he joined the gaming division. He was told that there was a studio that would have probably been closed, and he was to try to make it work. After that, he started to work at Studio X on Fable, Rise of Nations, and more. That’s what started him on his road to Xbox.
As a funny note of color, Spencer mentioned that one of his early jobs as a programming intern at Microsoft was to clean a vice-president’s fish tank. He remembers that the first time code he wrote shipped in DOS Bookshelf, it blew his mind. It “really freaked him out” that 100,000 people were running his code.
If you want to read more, you can also enjoy what Spencer said about the importance of learning from failure and adding PC DNA to Xbox’s studios.
https://twinfinite.net/2018/12/xboxs...spencer-xo-e3/
https://gamingbolt.com/playground-g...orld-rpg-influenced-microsoft-acquisition#nnn
Speaking to Edge in their Christmas issue (Issue 326), Fulton said that the unannounced open world RPG Playground’s second team is working on, which has been heavily rumoured to be Fable 4, was a major factor in the deal between them and Microsoft.
“It definitely influenced our decision, and Xbox’s decision, to take this step together,” Fulton said. “It wouldn’t take a genius to work out that they were both with Xbox. The amount of content we’re going to be bringing to the family was a crucial factor, there.”
Fulton also went on to talk about the benefits Playground Games has been able to leverage now that they’re part of Microsoft’s first party lineup, which mostly boils down to them being able to freely collaborate and communicate with fellow Microsoft studios like The Coalition, 343 Industries, and Ninja Theory.
“We could talk to other studios, but it had to be filtered, you had to go through certain channels,” he said. “If we wanted to find out about new technology or initiatives that were coming through, there was a time and a place for that to happen, and it was usually just behind the curve. Now that we’re a first party studio, I can pick up the phone and dial out to 343 Studios, The Coalition, Ninja Theory – we can start talking about technology, tools, all of those conversations are easy to have.
“And hopefully, we can get involved with future planning for consoles and other initiatives. Even though not a great deal of time has passed since the acquisition – just before E3, end of May – there are already things we’ve had disclosed to us that we didn’t know.”
Speaking to Edge in their Christmas issue (Issue 326), Fulton said that the unannounced open world RPG Playground’s second team is working on, which has been heavily rumoured to be Fable 4, was a major factor in the deal between them and Microsoft.
“It definitely influenced our decision, and Xbox’s decision, to take this step together,” Fulton said. “It wouldn’t take a genius to work out that they were both with Xbox. The amount of content we’re going to be bringing to the family was a crucial factor, there.”
Fulton also went on to talk about the benefits Playground Games has been able to leverage now that they’re part of Microsoft’s first party lineup, which mostly boils down to them being able to freely collaborate and communicate with fellow Microsoft studios like The Coalition, 343 Industries, and Ninja Theory.
“We could talk to other studios, but it had to be filtered, you had to go through certain channels,” he said. “If we wanted to find out about new technology or initiatives that were coming through, there was a time and a place for that to happen, and it was usually just behind the curve. Now that we’re a first party studio, I can pick up the phone and dial out to 343 Studios, The Coalition, Ninja Theory – we can start talking about technology, tools, all of those conversations are easy to have.
“And hopefully, we can get involved with future planning for consoles and other initiatives. Even though not a great deal of time has passed since the acquisition – just before E3, end of May – there are already things we’ve had disclosed to us that we didn’t know.”
Zero chance of Insomniac. If Sony got a whiff of MS buying them they would be straight in and would most likely be the preferred buyer due to their relationship with them and ND. Also Insomnaic's best assets are owned by Sony: Spider-man, Ratchet, Resistance etc which means they don't have a lot value. They have to yet to show they can build a successful new I.P outside of Sony too.
It's my understanding that Sunset Overdrive is successful, and the Spider-Man assets are from Sunset Overdrive.
Of all the third party devs that have worked closely with Sony, as a second party as well, I’m suprised they haven’t/hadn’t bought Insomniac, especially during the ps1/2 era.
If MS gets them then I wish them the best.
If MS gets them then I wish them the best.
MS isn't going to buy Insomniac. I don't know where that idea came from. Oh, that's right, it was Showers, in this thread. That wshowers, always causing trouble...
But he was just thinking out loud, just spit-balling. He wasn't saying it actually would happen or that there was any evidence it might happen.
It wouldn't make sense, for multiple reasons. I won't repeat all that, but anyone interested can read back.
But he was just thinking out loud, just spit-balling. He wasn't saying it actually would happen or that there was any evidence it might happen.
It wouldn't make sense, for multiple reasons. I won't repeat all that, but anyone interested can read back.
Klobrille did say in an earlier Tweet that, "MS are definitely still acquiring studios - big and small. Some may be a surprise to many."
Insomianc is still a possibility until the opposite is shown. All bets are off on this one. No one is safe unless they've already been acquired.
Xbox gamers are saying what they want to see.. not what is most likely. That is why developers like Insomniac and Remedy hit so many of the top 5 acquisition wants. It would be one hell of an upset though, if they get Insomniac.
They probably tried. Insomniac likely just wants to be independent.
But outside of just some crazy offer if Sony isn't buying them they probably aren't getting bought. That is where Insomniac is the perfect fit. Not Microsoft.
Couldnt agree more. I'm not saying that MS will for sure get Insomniac. I'm saying that it is entirely possible for the simple reason that they are independent and not owned by anyone at the moment. Everybody has a price. Everybody - even Insomniac.
Well, anything is possible. Maybe MS will buy EA, too. Oh yeah, we already went down that road 6 months ago. That didn't work out so well. Don't stop believin, though.
Maybe they'll buy CDPR or Take Two or Ubisoft. Hey, maybe they'll buy Sony. I mean, it's possible until it doesn't happen, right?
Major acquisition. The gaming press goes wild. Omg, now I work for Phil!
Wanting something to happen and believing something will happen are two completely different things, but whatever...
Bad form, Andy. Truly bad form. Hell, I didn't even say I believed it would happen. Just that it could. s***, I don't even think that it will happen. But, it could. And its true. If it doesn't, its not really a big deal. They've already picked up a few heavy hitters. I'm sure there'll be more.
If not careful Andy, they may get a studio you wouldn't believe they could in a million years. I'd laugh my ass off, too.
Not at you, of course. But the irony.
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I dono how I’d feel if UVGF were to be bought out. Wasn’t it one time associated with MS/Xbox directly? I don’t think we need another igning exodus, you folk are my grizzled old folk who bicker like those in nursing homes.
Sorry, I'm just poking fun. It's hard to resist sometimes. I'll try to be better, but no guarantees.
I know people are just expressing their wishes. That's fine. However, several reasons have been presented for why an Insomniac buyout is highly unlikely to happen, and no one has bothered to engage those ideas. Wishing is fine, but it's good to apply some thought to the subject, too.
But hey, if people want to have wishes and fantasies, that's okay. I'm just saying, it ain't gonna happen.
I should probably delete my post history before the buyout. I can't have Phil finding out what I've been saying.
No, I don't think there was ever an official connection between Team Xbox (or MSXbox, as it was known before that) to Microsoft or Xbox. It sounded like there was, but there wasn't (at least I don't think there was). It's a little confusing, because I believe MS now has a group they call "Team Xbox," which always reminds me of TXB.
I know they've said they're interested in talent rather than IPs, but I'd like to see them snatch up at least one big IP. I don't think they've acquired a big IP yet, unless you count Forza or Fable, which were already theirs, really. The biggest IP out of the bunch they've got so far has been what? Something from Obsidian? Nothing really stands out there. Hitman, I guess, if the IO deal goes through. That doesn't do much for me, personally. I'd like to see them grab up a nice, big, juicy IP.
I dunno. Klobrille said that they are definitely talking to more studios, big and small, and that a few may surprise some folks. I'm guessing we'll find out during E3 next year.
Personally, I'm thinking during E3 next year, MS is going to knock it out of the park with a few major announcements, what with Sony not showing up. Hell, why not?