When I was younger, I loved Chewits. Each parcel of chewy sugar threatened to tear out a tooth, but their punch of strawberry, blackcurrent, and orange flavour was hard to resist. Left to my own devices, I would take packs of Chewits, unwrap all the sweets, and press them together in the palm of my hand until they formed a single Chewit boulder. The different colours and flavours became indistinguishable but the sheer size and density of the thing was attractive to my inner glutton. The first time I did this, I put the whole thing into my mouth and when I tried to bite down on the sweet mass my jaw became almost glued together by the sugary morass. Panicking, I tried to swallow it down and almost choked, as the formless Chewitts filled my oesophagus. Before I turned completely blue, I was able to cough it back up.
I want to say I only did this once, but it took a good three or four times before I realised squashing things together, while it seems could only multiply each Chewits' amazingness, can actually make a formless mass that will choke you.
So, onto Xbox's plans to consolidate their studios.
There will be sensible business-minded people stroking their beards at Xbox's announcement, pointing out that studios like Bethesda and Obsidian share many synergies. After all, Obsidian have worked on Bethesda's most famous properties, and the Fallout: New Vegas developers are already hard at work on a new Fallout game. Rare's most successful game, Sea of Thieves is a live service game, and Activision Blizzard have been operating online live service games through World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Diablo for decades. And, well, Activision have perfected producing Call of Duty games on time every year without fail – something that can't be said of 343 Industries Halo efforts.
And, while they may have a point, there are two things I say to them: first, are Xbox competent enough to make that work? And, two, even if they did, doesn't that make for an immensely boring future?
To the first point, Xbox have done little to suggest they actually know what to do with the studios they own. With Rare's Everwild, The Initiative's Perfect Dark, and Undead Lab's State of Decay 3, we saw studios spend years in pre-production before their games were cancelled or abandoned. Or, as in the case of Mojang and Activision Blizzard, effectively carry on with business as usual, none of which is embellished by their new owners. Or worse still, a developer manages to get a great game out, it's recognised as being exactly the sort of thing Xbox wish it did more, and then they close the studio down anyway.
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma herself spelled out how bad at the game business they are back in July when she wrote that "in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested." They are not a company that have proven they know what they're doing. How about another one, last year they renamed 343 Industries Halo Studios and this year they are moving the series to Activision and 268 members of the team.
I really don't want to dwell on the business decisions, though. Playing fantasy football with game studios may be a fun mental exercise – what would a Gears of War from Obsidian look like, or a Halo by Rare, or a Minesweeper by Treyarch – but when those conversations are spurred by studio closures and layoffs, it very quickly diminishes the human cost of the corporation's shrugging.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/xboxs-consolidation-plans-might-mean-you-get-a-new-halo-sooner-but-history-shows-production-line-development-makes-for-boring-games
