Microsoft Buying Obsidian?

I can’t count how many "new Microsoft"s we had in the last few decades, and none of them I would consider good gamingwise. But who knows… maybe nth time is the charm, right?

I’m worried with a dash of cautious optimism. The PoE games are my current fave series of RPGs so I really want to see that universe continue to evolve with the same style in place. Enjoyed the NV, AP, SW games, too.

On the other side, InXile games were a mixed bag. Wasteland 2 totally worked for me, but Torment was just ok and I’ve still not been able to drag myself into BT4.

What Microsoft money could mean is that there are fewer games with longer development cycles but more polished or more games with shorter cycles and pushed out because of deadlines. Totally not sure how it’ll play out. It’ll keep them going at least.

Just hope they don’t do a Bioware.

Sega owns Alpha Protocol.

Fuck.

Expect the latter. Lionhead and Rare are the best analogs to these studios.

It’s almost guaranteed. Hopefully we’ll get a couple more good games before the suits come in and make Pillars into a third person console game.

I guess I’m in the minority here, but I don’t care. While I enjoyed both POE’s they were hardly favourites, largely because I’m not a fan of RTWP. InXile, well there was lots of boasting but all of their games were very underwhelming. I think I liked Wasteland 2 the best, but Torment was at best ok and Bards Tale IV isn’t what I expected. It was a puzzle game, not really an RPG but there were RPG elements. There were some deal breaking elements like the savepoint system and having to tab out for the code for some of the puzzles was really annoying. I guess you really are only as good as your catalogue. I don’t think Microsoft is going to do these companies any favours and I don’t expect they will make any RPGS that are actually better than what these companies launched.

I’d be more worried if it was EA or Activation. I’m not super concerned yet, really. In fact, this could be a good thing for both companies, potentially. They may be able to take on additional staff to work on multiple projects, and we may get a PoE 3 after all, now. Who can say?

I’m with Scott on this one. Also, MS is big enough that they can afford a few underperforming games if it means that their Xbox brand gets strengthened (due to exclusivity or whatever). They also have enough weight to throw some marketing money behind these titles, which I think was part of the reason why they didn’t sell particularly well in the past.

Honestly, for the quality of their future games this is likely the best possible outcome - EA/Actiblizzard would have probably meddled too much, and smaller publishers like Paradox often give the impression that they’re in a permanent last stand mode where a single big commercial failure could undermine the whole thing.

So did MS buy them wholesale with leon’s and tim’s take2 game included, or is that game still take2’s?

Getting inXile makes perfect sense, after BT4 bombing they were likely to go out of business, so they were cheap. But now they can keep the lights on and maybe even make a more ambitious and better marketed game(s).

With Obsidian, Deadfire bombed too so they were likely also in similar situation. I tend to trust Avellone about the problems with the owners, hopefully they won’t mess up a possible good thing.
I do hate that their games will be Store exclusives unreservedly. It will have to get lot of improvements to be worth using.

Anyway, best case scenario would be if both companies could (perhaps with help from other MS studios if needed) make New Vegas-like AAA singleplayer storydriven new IP RPGs with no microtransactions. We’ll see if MS has enough sense to greenlight something like that.

Well, it’s a game changer, pardon the pun, and no doubt about it. I think about all the hours I’ve spent on games from these two studios (and if I can go back to Interplay through Brian Fargo, that number leaps even higher) and I hope MS does right by them. On the one hand, I like that this should allow the creative people to focus solely on making the kind of games these guys are known and loved for. I think Phil Spencer has been doing some pretty great things in his time in charge of Xbox*, and I’m hopeful this keeps things moving upward.

But I can understand that if you’re not a fan of MS or Xbox then this feels like a net loss. This is two fewer independent studios out there doing their thing. I guess it’s a fact of life that survivability for these kinds of studios is trending downward, and these deals are happening more and more frequently, especially with MS chumming the water. I guess we’ll have to see how things shake out.

*though of course if he gets fired or bails, all bets are off and I could totally see MS doing an Ensemble on these guys.

Sorry, but that sounds like a dream scenario.

Apart that what you wrote doesn’t make a lot of sense: if they make games for niche audiences, how that would give them a solid advantage? It’s only an advantage if you are in that niche, and most of the market, by definition, it won’t.
In the real world, the market pruned that kind of “single A” game over the last decade, in a method similar to natural selection, leaving mostly only indie games and AAA games for a reason: they aren’t economically feasible. From time to time a game appears on that category which is successful, like State of Decay, but most of the time they are duds.

I agree, but I don’t think the PC guys here have any idea who even Phil Spencer is. All they know is that MS shut down Lionhead so they must be bad.

You guys are a little too optimistic. I give it 2 to 1 odds that InXile is gone in two years and Obsidian in three.

That’s really the biggest bummer for me. I play both Obsidian and InXile games on PC and that’s not going away, but the Windows store has an unfortunate habit of breaking in confusing and intractable ways for anything larger than a 30MB app.

You have the cause and effect wrong here - the issue wasn’t that these games aren’t inherently economically feasible, but rather that most of the mid-sized developers that made this sort of game during the PS2 era got blindsided by the costs of HD development with the Xbox 360 and PS3 and were effectively forced to either close down entirely or (usually only if they were Japanese) scale down for handheld dev, followed by mobile dev. In theory, the hardware, dev environments, and marketplace are finally back in position so that mid-sized games can thrive on traditional hardware again, and if Microsoft can bank on that with studios known for quality work, more power to them.

I think it’s great news for both developers, and shows Spencer is thinking in broad strokes with these acquisitions.

Nobody has perfectly average tastes, everyone is a member of some niches. Driving games are a niche; but I suspect people in that niche must be a noticeable proportion of the Xbox audience just because Microsoft gives them their annual Forza while Sony has nothing. Trying to replicate that model with other genres seems reasonable (and that’s why you’d buy multiple studios targeting the same niche).

That seems to be the approach that Netflix has been taking, not worrying about whether any individual show is going to appeal to tens of millions of people, but about whether it’ll tip a million people into keeping on subscribing for another few months.

Exactly. This news isn’t inherently distressing because it’s a big corporation swallowing up smaller developers (though that’s tended not to go well in the long run). I’d have been okay with seeing them be bought by any of a number of larger businesses as long as those businesses didn’t interfere too much in what they were making and how. (And usually they’re eager to assure everyone, at least to begin with, that that won’t happen.) It’s not distressing because Microsoft has shut down some of their purchases over the long run - that’s not super promising but I don’t recall anything that went “purchase > shutdown” or even “purchase > game > shutdown” - I think there’s usually been some time and leeway there. And of course there’s different management now than in the past. It’s not even distressing because they used to force their internal studios to do console-only exclusives. That’s a thing they’ve clearly stopped (for the time being).

But they very definitely have been forcing all their releases for some time now to be Microsoft Store only, which I wouldn’t be happy with even if it reliably worked. But the Microsoft Store is actually broken as shit. So that basically means I will probably never get to play another inXile or Obsidian game, and that sucks ass.

I don’t think it’s a lock that any new inXile or Obsidian releases will be exclusive to Windows store. It’s looking like Sunset Overdrive will be getting a PC release soon and there’s an entry in the SteamDB for it.

I hope you’re right, but as far as I can recall the only Microsoft-published game to come to Steam since they started locking things to the Microsoft Store was Quantum Break, and that was a third (or at least, second) party game.