3207

The original source of the $600M figure was describing a total investment by Amazon in Tomb Raider projects, not just the fee they are paying Embracer. It includes the budget for the new game, movie and TV show.

3208

Kind of wide ranging article looking at EA originals and how it has changed in the last 3 years.

3209

Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two has confirmed a “cost reduction program” to cut $50m of annual spending after a string of high-profile launches failed to find an audience.

Speaking to investors, Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick said recent releases such as the excellent but overlooked Marvel’s Midnight Suns, plus PGA Tour 2K23 and New Tales of the Borderlands, had all been received well but sold poorly.

“We’re seeing softness in the overall market,” Zelnick subsequently told GamesIndustry.biz. "Our titles are performing, we’ve gotten great review scores, we’ve gotten terrific critical acclaim. And one after another, we’ve been delivering hits into the current market.

“However, we are seeing softness in terms of consumer demand, particularly for console products and recurrent consumer spending related to console products.”

Take-Two’s upcoming cost-cutting drive will impact “personnel, processes, infrastructure, and other areas, particularly in our publishing and corporate functions,” Zelnick continued. It comes on top of an already-announced $100m round of cost synergies expected from its recent acquistion of Zynga.

Will Take-Two be the next company to announce mass layoffs, akin to Microsoft and Google? For now, Zelnick seemed to suggest nothing quite of that scale.

“We don’t expect any kind of broad-based reduction in force,” Zelnick said of possible layoffs. “We are going department by department and trying to drive efficiency.”

3210

Despite the license, maybe its time to acknowledge that to the greater public tactical strategy games are a niche?

3211

It seems like the XCOM games did well for them, though.

3212

Yeah, they expected it to do as well as the XCOM games. I saw another interview where he blames the poor release window, and there might be something to that. They missed Black Friday, and released in December. That’s usually a poor release window.

3213

Right, but I think the difference was the internal expectations were set correctly. Heck, one of the marketing bits for XCOM was Jake haranguing people at a GameStop about how niche the game is. I suspect the projections for Midnight Suns were higher.

3214

I think most people who love XCOM are probably not that much into Marvel stuff, and people who are into Marvel stuff are not generally into games like XCOM.
It was a stupid idea to combine the two.

New Tales from Borderlands - without the original characters and creators behind this, my enthusiasm is pretty much at zero.

3215

raises hand

3216

And people who were into XCOM who checked this out probably saw that it actually didn’t seem like it was going to be like XCOM at all. I think the broader population is probably a little exhausted of Marvel stuff at this point too, I know I am. Haven’t seen a bunch of the films from the last couple of years and the only Marvel game I’ve played outside of a brief try of Snap was Guardians of the Galaxy. I’ll probably buy Midnight Suns some day when it’s deeply discounted. I’m sure I’d buy XCOM 3 at full price on day one unless they went a really unfortunate direction with the game.

3217

Why in the world would you think that? Unless, Marvel is for the geek poseurs while XCom is for true geek connoisseurs?

I could get behind that. Anything to poke at the geek poseurs.

3218

Oh yay, gatekeeping!

I, for one, like both Marvel and Xcom so there

3219

I’m posing as somebody who is posing as a geek poseur. Does that make me a geek poseur or geek connoisseur or none of the above?

3220

Yes exactly, nailed it

(I think if people who love XCOM, of whom there are a lot, also loved Marvel stuff, they would be buying Midnight Suns in droves, because it would be dream come true. But the game sold poorly, apparently, so the crossover/overlap does not seem to be too significant).

3221

To pose as a poser is to be a connoisseur of posers or posing, yes?

3222

As states in the article - the game may have a longer than intended tail. Think they shot themselves in the foot by releasing interesting characters as dlc at later times. I went from a day 1 purchase to an “I’ll pick it up and all the dlc at the same time during a future sale” purchase.

3223

Still not sure about that logic, but it does raise an interesting question. Who is more likely to have throbbing forehead veins, Xcom fans or Marvel fans? And if they overlap, would that nullify or emphasize the throb?

Edit: in all seriousness, Xcom is a well known name for any Xcom fans. Midnight Suns means nothing to your average Marvel fan, so I think it more likely that the game didn’t sell because it was not marketed correctly.

3224

Same here. I like tactics games, and I like Marvel, and I like card-based mechanics. I’m squarely in the target audience for the game, and I fully expect to buy it and enjoy a few dozen hours playing through it at some point.

But critically, I don’t expect to play through the entire story mode multiple times, simply because I almost never do that even for games I love.

And given that, the choice is between having that playthrough now vs. having it in a year with the full planned roster and any balance/QoL improvements that get made in the meantime. And that’s an easy choice.

If the DLC followed some other model (or wasn’t planned at all), I would have bought the game by now; but this model instead encourages patience.

3225

Same here. Haven’t bought yet, fully intend to. But came out at a time when I knew I wouldn’t play for months at best.

3226

Yup. No point buying it at new release prices when I have no time to play it. I’ll definitely pick it up eventually.