Honestly, I could maybe get behind AAA narrative-focused games being the hot new trend to chase, but Actiblizz just cancelled a massive internal project late last year and laid off all the devs working on it. I think it was also some trend chasing bullshit, some survival craft-em-up style live service nonsense, so why the hell didn’t they just scrap the project and shuffle the existing devs around. What was the point of shuttering that team just to make a new one?
Were the closed studios about to unionize or something?
for microsoft, 2 of the dev atudios shut down were mobile, one of them merging into besthesda. the other two, Arkane Austin, released a really terrible game last year, the other which caused the uproar, Tango Gameworks, created a popular game. Though personally I think that closed down because the original director who created the company left, and it would be hard for microsoft to merge the team elsewhere due to being japanese based, so they shut down the studio, despite recent sucess. Microsoft probably has little experience hiring a new game director for japan.
I don’t know the details of gaming studio or Microsoft operations, so thanks for this.
There is one point where I have to disagree, though; MS has plenty of experience hiring for any position anywhere on the planet. It doesn’t seem plausible that lack of familiarity with the talent market is the likely reason.
