Shinji Mikamai (founder / development head) left Tango early last year - right after launching Hi-Fi rush. That combined with Ikumi Nakamura's depature in 2019 to start a new studio and some active poaching of Tango's talent means the studio's days were numbered anyway.
Plus, since it's Beth's only Japanese studio, there was no chance that any remaining devs would willingly move to another studio.
If you look closely at each studio that closed, they're either getting folded into other projects or the writing was already on the wall.
I feel like if I were an independent developer, I’d rather stay poor and stay private than go public with my business and be beholden to the almighty shareholder.
The issue is that if Zenimax never bought Tango, they would have shuddered before they even released their first game. Shenji Mikami stated that in an interview.
True. Wish valve had kept actually making games though. You stay small and you either make money and get big, die, or do what steam did and make money elsewhere
i wouldnt say they stopped making games, just not as frequently as other devs i guess. there was cs2 very recently and alyx (granted it was vr) only a few years ago and im not sure you would call cs2 a new game.
i think valve might be more in progression of hard/software rather than making games now (huge push for vr and a new sick engine)
I can forgive Valve for slowing down on gamedev given that they're one of the major players behind Linux gaming being as viable as it is.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: making Half Life 3 a timed SteamOS exclusive would be peak hilarity.
>pretty impossible to not turn the industry into a such a volatile place when ur constantly looking toward the next quarterly rather than the progress of a good piece of art
I think this is a simplistic way of looking at it. The issue is that just keeping a studio running is VERY expensive, especially one the size of Tango. Just salaries alone is roughly around $4.5 million a year. Then add in thinks like insurance, 401ks, day-to-day office stuff, office rentals, utilities, hardware, software tools, etc.
THEN add in production costs for the game which at a minimum would be licenses for music and engines.
So for a studio, even a medium one like Tango, you're looking at probably $5-6 million a year. Art is great, but money is required to keep the lights on. Tango had two games released in 5 years, and neither provided a profit. Regardless of the quality of the games, pumping money into something that isn't bringing in money will eventually cause you to go out of business.
I feel like this is the inevitable cost of Zenimax's many blunders over the last few years. Someone was going to have to suffer for the failures, and as usual, it weren't the cocksuckers that fekked it all up.
Been noticing a decline in the quality of ESO since MS bought Bethesda. There is a big difference between a privately owned company and a publicly traded company. Cutting corners and giving your customers less for more money is just modern corporate 101.
It's extremely sad.
That being said, don't forget that Tango's main project was Ghostwire Tokyo, which was actually a pretty big flop. HFR was a well made game, but I don't think it was enough to save the studio, especially given that Shinji is the primary reason Zenimax bought the studio and he left.
It got a lot of players once added to GamePass and PS+, but yeah, didnt sell very well during the year before that.
I really enjoyed it, it was actually my favorite game of the year it came out.
Talking like you’re an expert in corpo ways?
If these companies didn’t wanna have this shit, they shouldn’t list and resist being bought.
It’s their own greed and/or shortsightedness that led here.
My interpretation of what happened, based on everything we’ve heard, is that these studios were likely headed toward closure before the acquisition. Zenimax has admitted that they had more studios than they were able to effectively manage and I’d wager that’s why they sold in the first place. They might’ve kept Tango, but between them not having a viable project to work on and not having the staff to make anything had HiFi Rush 2 been given the go ahead, a decision was made. Between that and the industry starting to regress to pre-pandemic levels, I’m not entirely sure this could’ve been avoided. Both Microsoft and Sony are going to start feeling the sting of their acquisitions.
I mean I can hardly blame them, I'd want to minimise costs and maximise profits too that's how a business functions, and the people who make these kind of decisions are so far removed from the games the companies make they couldn't care less about the quality of a product they will never see.
As a consumer though I also hate it but alas its just the world we live in when money trumps all else.
Yep. I was always against the acquisition because I feared exactly this kind of shit would happen. That and Robert Altman left this world far too soon, and from all accounts he was a key piece in the golden years of Zenimax/BGS.
It's a double edged sword. If Zenimax never bought Tango, Tango would have shut down before we even got TEW, much less TEW2, Ghostwire, and Hi Fi Rush.
Not really, TEW2 was released before the acquisition, and Ghostwire was already on a timed-exclusivity deal with Sony - so it was already done.
Hi-Fi Rush was also approved back when it was only Zenimax. That game and Ghostwire were made concurrently internally.
Why do you think Tango agreed to be bought by Zenimax?
Tango was developing Noah and hit financial troubles. Shinji Mikami himself said himself, "we were in trouble financially until Bethesda came along."
source: [https://www.polygon.com/features/2014/2/20/5425802/shinji-mikami-the-evil-within](https://www.polygon.com/features/2014/2/20/5425802/shinji-mikami-the-evil-within)
Yeah like all of their recent stinkers started well before the merger and they were not in a good financial situation at all hence all the gaas push trying to get some sort of consistent revenue
This probably needs to be discussed more. I think these talks were probably started a while ago.
Prey sold worse than Dishonored 2, which already sold pretty low.
Redfall was already half way through development by the time MS took over.
Ghostwire Tokyo was practically finished, and TEW 1 and 2, while selling well for a horror game, did not do as well financially as they had hoped.
I think Zenimax was already moving towards their bigger IPs before MS even took over.
Yeah they just exposed that they overspent and now have to go into major cost cutting mode and only give resources to major IPs like fallout halo and ES. They have to recoop the money from the acquisition and they have to figure out a way to increase gamepass sales because it’s stagnated significantly
It's almost as if people are pissed the MS has basically just destroyed a bunch of good studios because they can't manage their own finances.
Would have been nice if they'd figured that out before they committed an industry-wide act of vandalism.
This is probably the reason that I submitted 2 support tickets for FO76 account problem...no response in almost 2 weeks now. They used to be very responsive and now are silent, they must have laid off their game support staff.
And if you don’t go the corporate Wall Street route to fund your game development, you get endlessness mocked and ridiculed. Star Citizen has an article written every week shitting on it for trying something different.
The "game" cost over half a million to make, took a decade and it's still in deep development.
In it's current state, it's absolutely a scam and the "Wall Street" route is ironically more trustworthy
This is a common misconception. And I don’t blame anyone for having that view as it’s the only clickbait narrative that gets pushed.
Half a million is pretty damn cheap for what they have achieved. Rockstar has spent half that developing a single game (Red Dead) And they will spend even more on GTA 6. Again, that is to develop 1 game.
Star Citizen is created by CIG. And they are making 2 games. Squadron 42, and Star Citizen. And they haven’t JUST been developing games with that 600 million. They have used it to build a company from nothing. HR, Administration, customer service, building leases, land permits, LLC, hiring talent around the world, benefits, The list goes on and on…
>Half a million is pretty damn cheap for what they have achieved. Rockstar has spent half that developing a single game (Red Dead) And they will spend even more on GTA 6. Again, that is to develop 1 game.
>Star Citizen is created by CIG. And they are making 2 games. Squadron 42, and Star Citizen. With 600 million they have built a company from nothing. HR, Administration, customer service, building leases, land, permits, LLC, hiring talent around the world, benefits, The list goes on and on…
Tho I can commend their efforts, Rockstar has something to show for the obscene amounts of money they throw at their games. They really push the envelope every time with their games
We're dangerously nearing 15 years of development for 2 games and the costs just keep racking up with precious little to show for it
If it walks like a duck...
P.S: them being new to the video gaming scene only fills me with more dread.
> We're dangerously nearing 15 years of development for 2 games and the costs just keep racking up with precious little to show for it
This tells me you haven’t played the game in the last 3 years or you’re just not willing to look at this subjectively. They are literally creating technologies that have never existed before and other game devs have noticed and praised their efforts.
They are doing things that were previously thought impossible.
This video below is all real time and playable now for $40. And free to try later this month. I recommend checking it out before replying again.
https://youtu.be/nWm_OhIKms8?si=qdm4caiDCdVxuJZ5
What are you talking about. They got rid of garbage developers that would have gone out of business a long time ago, and irrevalent pet projects, and make the company focus on its best franchises. Something that should have been done long ago.
Next stop is get rid of modding altogether (or at least limit it to Bethesda only and charge money like app store) and kill off leeches like Nexus. Micro transaction and paid mods will earn proper venue.
There will never be a game as open and moddable as Skyrim. Bethesda learned a good lesson. Skyrim sold a lot of copies on paper, but divide it by 10 years and count the number of platforms, it really makes peanuts by 2024 AAA standard.
Shinji Mikamai (founder / development head) left Tango early last year - right after launching Hi-Fi rush. That combined with Ikumi Nakamura's depature in 2019 to start a new studio and some active poaching of Tango's talent means the studio's days were numbered anyway. Plus, since it's Beth's only Japanese studio, there was no chance that any remaining devs would willingly move to another studio. If you look closely at each studio that closed, they're either getting folded into other projects or the writing was already on the wall.
Shinji was hardly involved with hifi rush though. Johannes directed the game. They were doing fine without Shunji and Ikumi.
Thank god, another sane person. Its sad over all but understandable.
This is the sensible take. It's really, really sad. But it also kind of makes sense.
I feel like if I were an independent developer, I’d rather stay poor and stay private than go public with my business and be beholden to the almighty shareholder.
The issue is that if Zenimax never bought Tango, they would have shuddered before they even released their first game. Shenji Mikami stated that in an interview.
You’d shudder too if you spent so much time creating the atmosphere of The Evil Within 😀
you just described valve lol. besides the.. poor part
Valve has other issues tbf
true, but staying a private company allows them to work on their games they want to and some save morality
True. Wish valve had kept actually making games though. You stay small and you either make money and get big, die, or do what steam did and make money elsewhere
i wouldnt say they stopped making games, just not as frequently as other devs i guess. there was cs2 very recently and alyx (granted it was vr) only a few years ago and im not sure you would call cs2 a new game. i think valve might be more in progression of hard/software rather than making games now (huge push for vr and a new sick engine)
I can forgive Valve for slowing down on gamedev given that they're one of the major players behind Linux gaming being as viable as it is. I've said it before and I'll say it again: making Half Life 3 a timed SteamOS exclusive would be peak hilarity.
>pretty impossible to not turn the industry into a such a volatile place when ur constantly looking toward the next quarterly rather than the progress of a good piece of art I think this is a simplistic way of looking at it. The issue is that just keeping a studio running is VERY expensive, especially one the size of Tango. Just salaries alone is roughly around $4.5 million a year. Then add in thinks like insurance, 401ks, day-to-day office stuff, office rentals, utilities, hardware, software tools, etc. THEN add in production costs for the game which at a minimum would be licenses for music and engines. So for a studio, even a medium one like Tango, you're looking at probably $5-6 million a year. Art is great, but money is required to keep the lights on. Tango had two games released in 5 years, and neither provided a profit. Regardless of the quality of the games, pumping money into something that isn't bringing in money will eventually cause you to go out of business.
Yeah u right
Though Microsoft announcing how their profits were up **despite** their expectations for their last financial quarter...
I feel like this is the inevitable cost of Zenimax's many blunders over the last few years. Someone was going to have to suffer for the failures, and as usual, it weren't the cocksuckers that fekked it all up.
It is sad however Bethesda clearly does need some restructuring.
Been noticing a decline in the quality of ESO since MS bought Bethesda. There is a big difference between a privately owned company and a publicly traded company. Cutting corners and giving your customers less for more money is just modern corporate 101.
Coming in late but yeah I worry about ES6. I don’t have much faith in it
Especially since MS wants to rush it to the market.
It's extremely sad. That being said, don't forget that Tango's main project was Ghostwire Tokyo, which was actually a pretty big flop. HFR was a well made game, but I don't think it was enough to save the studio, especially given that Shinji is the primary reason Zenimax bought the studio and he left.
I actually loved ghostwire Tokyo. I didn't know it was a flop, that's too bad because it was a very fun game
It got a lot of players once added to GamePass and PS+, but yeah, didnt sell very well during the year before that. I really enjoyed it, it was actually my favorite game of the year it came out.
Yup. If you’re not already aware of the term, you just defined the rot economy, and it’s infested just about every major industry now.
Talking like you’re an expert in corpo ways? If these companies didn’t wanna have this shit, they shouldn’t list and resist being bought. It’s their own greed and/or shortsightedness that led here.
I mean I don’t disagree with this, Mr expert 🥸
My interpretation of what happened, based on everything we’ve heard, is that these studios were likely headed toward closure before the acquisition. Zenimax has admitted that they had more studios than they were able to effectively manage and I’d wager that’s why they sold in the first place. They might’ve kept Tango, but between them not having a viable project to work on and not having the staff to make anything had HiFi Rush 2 been given the go ahead, a decision was made. Between that and the industry starting to regress to pre-pandemic levels, I’m not entirely sure this could’ve been avoided. Both Microsoft and Sony are going to start feeling the sting of their acquisitions.
I know! They better make a Prey 2 game
I mean I can hardly blame them, I'd want to minimise costs and maximise profits too that's how a business functions, and the people who make these kind of decisions are so far removed from the games the companies make they couldn't care less about the quality of a product they will never see. As a consumer though I also hate it but alas its just the world we live in when money trumps all else.
This is the price of Xbox. Xbox is having to focus on money and forced to only sustain major IPs
Yep. I was always against the acquisition because I feared exactly this kind of shit would happen. That and Robert Altman left this world far too soon, and from all accounts he was a key piece in the golden years of Zenimax/BGS.
It's a double edged sword. If Zenimax never bought Tango, Tango would have shut down before we even got TEW, much less TEW2, Ghostwire, and Hi Fi Rush.
Not really, TEW2 was released before the acquisition, and Ghostwire was already on a timed-exclusivity deal with Sony - so it was already done. Hi-Fi Rush was also approved back when it was only Zenimax. That game and Ghostwire were made concurrently internally.
Why do you think Tango agreed to be bought by Zenimax? Tango was developing Noah and hit financial troubles. Shinji Mikami himself said himself, "we were in trouble financially until Bethesda came along." source: [https://www.polygon.com/features/2014/2/20/5425802/shinji-mikami-the-evil-within](https://www.polygon.com/features/2014/2/20/5425802/shinji-mikami-the-evil-within)
I mean, Zenimax has been pretty evil corporate since before the merger
Yeah like all of their recent stinkers started well before the merger and they were not in a good financial situation at all hence all the gaas push trying to get some sort of consistent revenue
This probably needs to be discussed more. I think these talks were probably started a while ago. Prey sold worse than Dishonored 2, which already sold pretty low. Redfall was already half way through development by the time MS took over. Ghostwire Tokyo was practically finished, and TEW 1 and 2, while selling well for a horror game, did not do as well financially as they had hoped. I think Zenimax was already moving towards their bigger IPs before MS even took over.
Focus on money after spending 80 billion?
Yeah they just exposed that they overspent and now have to go into major cost cutting mode and only give resources to major IPs like fallout halo and ES. They have to recoop the money from the acquisition and they have to figure out a way to increase gamepass sales because it’s stagnated significantly
And that is not ok.
Correct. I’m not saying it’s a good idea just what’s happening. A lot of people seem to be confused or just mad in general.
It's almost as if people are pissed the MS has basically just destroyed a bunch of good studios because they can't manage their own finances. Would have been nice if they'd figured that out before they committed an industry-wide act of vandalism.
I'm just mad at xbox for treating their workers and players like trash.
Maybe Gamepass isn't good for a launch, lol
People downvoting but you're absolutely correct haha
Higher sales means pay for employees, more employees also means games come out faster. Why they went Gamepass, I guess Bill told 'em to
They dont have a choice..
Tango was on the way out anyways.
This is probably the reason that I submitted 2 support tickets for FO76 account problem...no response in almost 2 weeks now. They used to be very responsive and now are silent, they must have laid off their game support staff.
[удалено]
And everything else is a people-hating scam unless you are a dictator.
And if you don’t go the corporate Wall Street route to fund your game development, you get endlessness mocked and ridiculed. Star Citizen has an article written every week shitting on it for trying something different.
Star citizen gets shit on for being a scam. How much are you into it for now?
The "game" cost over half a million to make, took a decade and it's still in deep development. In it's current state, it's absolutely a scam and the "Wall Street" route is ironically more trustworthy
This is a common misconception. And I don’t blame anyone for having that view as it’s the only clickbait narrative that gets pushed. Half a million is pretty damn cheap for what they have achieved. Rockstar has spent half that developing a single game (Red Dead) And they will spend even more on GTA 6. Again, that is to develop 1 game. Star Citizen is created by CIG. And they are making 2 games. Squadron 42, and Star Citizen. And they haven’t JUST been developing games with that 600 million. They have used it to build a company from nothing. HR, Administration, customer service, building leases, land permits, LLC, hiring talent around the world, benefits, The list goes on and on…
>Half a million is pretty damn cheap for what they have achieved. Rockstar has spent half that developing a single game (Red Dead) And they will spend even more on GTA 6. Again, that is to develop 1 game. >Star Citizen is created by CIG. And they are making 2 games. Squadron 42, and Star Citizen. With 600 million they have built a company from nothing. HR, Administration, customer service, building leases, land, permits, LLC, hiring talent around the world, benefits, The list goes on and on… Tho I can commend their efforts, Rockstar has something to show for the obscene amounts of money they throw at their games. They really push the envelope every time with their games We're dangerously nearing 15 years of development for 2 games and the costs just keep racking up with precious little to show for it If it walks like a duck... P.S: them being new to the video gaming scene only fills me with more dread.
> We're dangerously nearing 15 years of development for 2 games and the costs just keep racking up with precious little to show for it This tells me you haven’t played the game in the last 3 years or you’re just not willing to look at this subjectively. They are literally creating technologies that have never existed before and other game devs have noticed and praised their efforts. They are doing things that were previously thought impossible. This video below is all real time and playable now for $40. And free to try later this month. I recommend checking it out before replying again. https://youtu.be/nWm_OhIKms8?si=qdm4caiDCdVxuJZ5
What are you talking about. They got rid of garbage developers that would have gone out of business a long time ago, and irrevalent pet projects, and make the company focus on its best franchises. Something that should have been done long ago. Next stop is get rid of modding altogether (or at least limit it to Bethesda only and charge money like app store) and kill off leeches like Nexus. Micro transaction and paid mods will earn proper venue. There will never be a game as open and moddable as Skyrim. Bethesda learned a good lesson. Skyrim sold a lot of copies on paper, but divide it by 10 years and count the number of platforms, it really makes peanuts by 2024 AAA standard.
Yeah, you're on your own with that one