At completexbox we are very much community driven, and welcome guest articles, opinion pieces and reviews. This piece is written by the very talented Mo Mahoney. Mo tries to get his head around the recent Studio Closures affecting the Xbox brand.
Mo Mahoney Writes
A fascination with messaging has always stuck out to me. Marketing teams spend countless dollars trying to navigate a way to make a character, the mascot so that higher ups are ill afforded the negativity for a brand. As we become shareholders in a brand via our purchasing power, the strength of the connection is different for all.
Falling in love with a football club, sports team, or video game publisher can come with many ups and downs along on the way.
A songwriter once wrote that classy girls don’t kiss in bars like this (The Lumineers), and it was one of those lines that always got caught in my head for hours after I heard the song play. The many layers to the line always stuck with me as I would ponder all the micro and macro-moments in a life that would help someone to deduce such a pivotal piece of experience.
This week with the studio closures at Microsoft of Tango gameworks and Arkane Austin I kept getting stuck in a similar loop of trying to comprehend what got the team at Xbox to make this decision.
What got us to this point?
Personally I want to be angry, as those studios mentioned above produced games that I thoroughly enjoyed. Beating Prey and Hi-Fi Rush are two vivid and awesome parts of my gaming journey.
Prey was a game I picked up at launch and put down after a few sessions due to some bugs. A year later, when I had heard that many of those hiccups had been fixed, I jumped back into my old save and was able to grind through what became a very interesting story and fun completion in one of the most beautiful space landscapes I have ever seen in a game.
Day one Hi-Fi Rush was a game that I knew I wanted to beat. I have always enjoyed a good parry in games and despite its cartoon wrapping, there was some Dark Soulsian timing mechanics behind the rhythmic button mechanics.
This game seemed to be made for me as it was something I could play with my toddler around that I was ok with her watching, as I adjusted to being a father with young impressionable eyes around (her asking for the wolf game after coming down stairs while I was trying out Wild Hearts and realized that the 10 seconds it took me to pause and switch to a movie for her made an impression weeks later).
Running around with 808 in tow and gaining teammates on the grand adventure to stop Kale Vandelay and his evil plan turned a shadow drop into one of my favorite games. So for the studio that created it and built it to be closed down after leadership had gone out and placed the game on other platforms hit me hard.
Trying to figure out why this stuck with me so badly, why I had to find a way to write about it, and more so how to try to better comprehend the logic behind a decision that seemed to be so senseless. As I attempted to look at the plan, the decision making behind closing the studios that had created some good games and some not great games, I wanted to see the why.
As Xbox leadership has so far remained silent on all fronts concerning the closures which has let internet speculation and exasperation to run wild. Higher ups have been beat up by fans and media alike.
Podcast Unlocked even went as far as to call Xbox leadership hypocrites and languish about how teams at Ninja Theory may be closed as well due to marketing concerns. (Podcast Unlocked – Trying to Make Sense of the Xbox Studio Closures)
As I continued to try to navigate many of the negative aspects throughout media, that I too had some agreement with concerning the closures in wanting to understand why. In order to understant, better gauge what was being said and find my way to facts instead of fiction, I was drawn to sales charts. What i discovered painted a picture that pointed more to an industry issue, instead of a Microsoft one. I composed a tweet that I never published that read:
Company A- 2 million units sold, 73 rating on Metacritic, out for 12 months.
Company B- 775k units sold, 87 on Metacritic, out for 16 months.
Company B- 498k units sold, 75 on Metacritic, out for 2 years plus.
This data gave me some insight into the closing of Tango, by comparing it to the 15th best sold game of the past year, versus Tango’s last two. Discovering that games like Ghostwire: Tokyo sold near half a million units (GameSensor, 2022) and that inconclusive numbers of units sold for Hi-Fi Rush due to it being on GamePass with ranges from the low 300k to player base installs across multiple sites.
What caught my eye is that Dead Island 2 sold nearly 2 million units and was out of the top ten for games sold in 2023 (Chalk, 2023). Using stats for Evil Within 2 would bring a combination of the last three Tango gameworks games to be able to finally surpass the total sold units for Dead Island 2, whose Embracer group also went through closures in the last month. Perspective is always difficult because macro versus micro, and where our point of view lies.
Is the glass half full verse glass half empty, verses there is no glass because everything is on fire which is pivotal to understand what creates our own lenses.
I believe in data and the data tells me that even though Tango gameworks created a game that I absolutely love and will be in my personal top 20 list for years to come, once leadership left, their games have not sold well, which could be the reason Microsoft has chosen to invest more in other companies.
“Perspective is always difficult because of the macro verse micro and where our point of view lies”
As I sat with this, staring at the keyboard trying to make heads or tails of this situation what kept pulling at me was the feeling of being captain less. As a gamer, I have all four ecosystems but spend the most of my time on my Xbox and over the last few years we have heard many a tail of how the Xbox brand has failed, has fallen down, and/or lost their way.
Can this be attributed to bias from the market leader, maybe, possibly, I don’t know. The best way I can describe it is that many of us have been on this ship and even when we felt the waters rushing onboard, we knew where we were headed, our original Xbox ones in tow, bailing the water out.
This new generation had some of the water still on deck, but the vision was there, and the purchasing power was used to demonstrate how full the sails could be.
ABK deal and Leadership questioned
Since the fight to close the Activision deal however, the ship seems aimless, and without a foreseeable course from those of us not in the control room. Are we lacking leadership? Rudderless? Or is the ocean overtaking the course, we on the outside don’t know.
My hope is that transparency comes soon from those in charge and we are able to watch the vision be one that helps all gamers, like we believed when we kept swimming through all the course corrections and long windless months. Though I am not like many who are slandering those at the top because I do not quite see the whole picture, I do have hope that the tag lines said on stages of the past will come to fruition and this amazing hobby we enjoy will be able to continue to create amazing stories and worlds for us to all enjoy.
References used in the article
Chalk, Andy. “Dead Island 2 Breaks 2 Million Sales, Is Now ‘the Biggest Launch’ in Deep Silver’s History.” Pcgamer, PC Gamer, 24 May 2023, www.pcgamer.com/dead-island-2-breaks-2-million-sales-is-now-the-biggest-launch-in-deep-silvers-history/.
GameSensor. “Almost $5 Million and about 100 Thousand Copies Sold in the First Month of Release – Ghostwire: Tokyo Launched on Steam | GameSensor.” GameSensor, 2022, gamesensor.info/news/ghostwire_tokyo_sales.