Xbox is canceling Contraband, announced in 2021 from Avalanche Studios (Just Cause), after four years of radio silence, sources tell Bloomberg News. This news arrives weeks after a mass layoff in which Xbox canceled several other big titles. - Jason Schreier
Is Microsoft’s new strategy just to cancel every other game so everyone has nothing left to buy but Call of Duty?
Bold of you to assume they have a strategy at all.
They have a concept of a strategy.
Imagine if E3 was still around.
“At the Xbox showcase this year at E3, we at Microsoft Game Studios can’t wait to share the amazing range of games we’ve canceled.”
If E3 was still a thing I imagine the execs would have felt inclined to keep a few projects going, just to avoid the public humiliation.
Microsoft seriously bought all the IPs to make sure none of them got used
That’s straight up the behavior of a company that wants to create a monopoly. Buy up the smaller companies so the competitors can’t buy them up and then just shut those companies down so their products can’t compete with the existing money makers. The money they put into those studios for game development is just a charade to please the authorities. Cause if they would shut those companies down immediately after purchasing that would be undeniably anti-competitive behavior and illegal even in the US.
They bought Rare simply becaues they thought it’d take Donkey Kong from Nintendo
Which is exactly what I expected them to do. I laughed at Blizzard fans being hopeful about the acquisition because things didn’t go well at the time. It was always just another step towards closure.
Blizzard fans have a habit of believing Blizzard is still this small indie company with humble games like Starcraft, Lost Vikings, and Diablo, and that it’s just mean ol Activision making them do things like…
sigh
Have two to three whole expansions of Sylvanas Windrunner being not only the Warchief of the Horde, but for all intents and purposes being basically the main fucking character, complete with a writer who brought her previously killed off-boyfriend Nathanos, only as a self-insert.
Like I love Sylvanas, she was my favorite character, but Jesus fucking Christ that was cringe. Not only was it completely out of character for the Horde to give her leadership (Protip: The Forsaken aren’t trusted by anyone because they’re scary fucking zombies who do scary zombie shit, the Horde just figures they’re less dangerous as allies than enemies), but she continously forced the Horde to do horrible shit.
Now if the point was that Sylvanas was evil and the Horde’s mistrust of her was valid, I guess that’d work, but the way it was executed was more like “Look how cool Sylvanas is for doing all this edgy shit.”
I don’t know who the Warchief is now, I honestly don’t think they have any fucking Horde characters left to be Warchief given how often Horde leaders get killed off. Jesus Christ WoW’s story just completely shit itself after Legion.
I got off-topic, my point was Microsoft was never going to save Blizzard from Activision, because Activision isn’t holding Blizzard at gunpoint and forcing them to kill off Heroes Of The Storm, Steal female employees’ breast milk, or making Overwatch 2, Blizzard’s just not a cool company.
“XBOX - Proudly in the worlds most drawn out nosedive since 2010.”
So uhh, what’s still on the table from Microsoft? Fable? Seems like they cancelled every other game.
Fallout, Fable, and COD.
I’m still really looking forward to clockwork revolution. Hopefully that actually gets released but at this point it seems like almost everything Microsoft touches is doomed.
And these fuckers were trying to “celebrate” the Rare anniversary on social media recently like they didn’t just cancel Perfect Dark and have done nothing with any of the other properties in years.
C’mon, they haven’t done nothing. They asked Nintendo to put Banjo and Kazooie in Smash!
So, how does this work? Were people actually developing a game that will never be seen? Or did they likely stop working on this years ago and just forgot to tell the world?
The announcement on Avalanche’s website says "Active development has now stopped […] ", so, the former.
At the time it was announced, money was cheap to borrow, so a trailer like this came out when it was way too soon to let customers know about it but exactly the right time to entice new employees to work on your new project, so they were staffing up to make that game. They probably were working on it for the past four years; Avalanche hasn’t had a release since it was announced.
Well since there has been absolutely nothing revealed since, I can only guess and speculate. But I would say the most likely scenario is it was in active development hell.
Like, developers were working on it, but there were probably major problems that were holding them up. Perhaps they restarted development due to some factor. If the game was originally going to be a PvEvP looter shooter, for example, that plan may have changed after seeing the severe negative public reception to that genre (except for streamers). It may have been planned as a live service game but then Concord happened and developers decided to change everything because they were worried the same could happen to their game. Maybe some of the developers wanted a “realistic” depiction of the 1970s and other developers wanted a “sanitized” depiction and there was infighting preventing the game from progressing.
My point is, there are a lot of way that there could have been active development with no actual progress. But since nothing has been shown since the announcement trailer ( a render, not gameplay), I can say with some level of confidence that it likely had no meaningful progress in terms of gameplay development. Otherwise, we would have seen it. 4 years is a long time to spend with no updates just to be cancelled. If there was progress, the game should have been finished by 4 years.
Why would we have seen it? You normally don’t see anything until they’re gearing up for launch.
I think it’s more likely MS looked at their portfolio, looked at how much this was costing, and decided it didn’t fit what they were looking for for how much it was costing.
This is not to say it’s a good call, just that MS executives are pretty shit at game development analysis.
4 years of development and they didnt have anything to show except for a CG render? That is absolutely troubled development.
Are there any examples of games which have had 4 straight years of radios silence that have not had major development problems? I mean, Metroid Prime 4 had major issues and was restarted twice. Halo Infinite had major problems and that took 6 years. Scalebound was in development for 4 years before it was cancelled, and it obviously had very troubled development. At least Scalebound had some gameplay to show after it was in development for 2 years (it was cancelled 2 years later), Contraband didn’t even have that for all 4 years. That would indicate to me that the gameplay was not in a state that could be shown to the public. The developers could have been actively working on the game, but no meaningful progress was being made.
This was probably the right call from Microsoft. Though depending on the problems being had, they probably should have cancelled it sooner. It sucks for me to say that because I was interested in this game, but thats the reality of game development. Sometimes an impassable roadblock comes up and its not feasible to continue to fund the sinkhole for 10 years, sometimes its better to pack up and go around.
4 years of development and they didnt have anything to show except for a CG render?
Anything to show you. They aren’t beholden to you. The CG render was to get applications for jobs, not to sell the game. That happens when it’s almost done.
Are there any examples of games which have had 4 straight years of radios silence that have not had major development problems?
The vast majority! Game dev cycles are often 8+ years now, and you don’t hear anything from them until about a year before launch. You think about the canceled ones, but most of them that launch you just don’t consider, which is good. No news is good news, as the saying goes.
This is why selling out to Microsoft is culture death.
EEE
Microsoft is getting out of the games business.
And apparently Everwild was officially dropped last month too.
Can’t say I’m surprised… after 6 years there was no gameplay footage and the impression was “Well, it’s pretty but what is the actual game?”
And, much like it is always shown, that is a problem of management at the publisher level. Visceral Games is generally one of the most well documented but every major studio with a similar “uh derr, how they not have game after five years. They deserve to die” story is a similar tale:
The studio heads and the publisher could never agree. Often there are mandates for specific technology (Visceral was forced to use Frostbite which even the Battlefield devs hate) and publisher level management can never be bothered to actually look at anything other than a full pitch level vertical slice… which they then say is not good enough or “Continue but make massive non-specific changes”.
The end result is that game dev, which already takes years, gets stretched out because so much work gets thrown out and completely redone whenever the managers actually communicate. And then the studio is gutted, jackasses online talk about how it was obviously the answer, and said managers get to move on to hopefully work with devs who can deliver products in spite of them.
So… maybe don’t just parrot the bullshit for the companies mismanaging the industry and destroying the livelihoods of the people who actually make the games we claim to like?
It shouldn’t take 6 years to demo a basic gameplay loop. If you don’t have a demonstrable gameplay loop after 6 years, yes, that’s a management problem, but it’s also a dev problem.
All we got to saw of Everwild was pretty, but it was never clear what the game actually was and the developer wasn’t clear either.
It doesn’t take “6 years to demo a basic gameplay loop”. They are pushing vertical slices, proofs of concepts, etc internally near constantly. The issue is when you get told “no, not like that. We want it to be more… you know?” and so much of that work gets scrapped. ESPECIALLY as time moves on and those vertical slices are also being done alongside levels, weapons, cutscenes, etc all while never knowing what the gameplay even will be.
Is there an issue at multiple levels of management? Yeah. But when you have a single “boss” you tend to actually have something. It might not be great but you have a vision you can work towards and release. Rather than five new visions every time you get a new contact at HQ.
But hey, keep on leaping to defend the mega corporations.
Another “great” example is the bad CGI in most modern Marvel-Disney movies. And that is because the VFX studios don’t even get the actual full scene until VERY late in the cycle. And they might not even get the final costumes until literally days before it is due (because “leaks”). When you are completely redoing the entire scene because now Cap shoulder tackles the helicopter instead of dodges around it AND don’t even know what colors he is wearing it is REALLY hard to get the lighting and dust to look right. And your team is completely over-stretched because you are not just doing one scene: You are doing five. Even though you agreed to four.
And you can bet countless clowns are out there talking about how the VFX studios suck and blah blah blah/
I’m not defending anyone, I’m attacking shitty game development.
When the first teaser came out, people went “Well, that’s pretty, but what’s the game?”
Then, reportedly, the whole thing was rebooted in 2021 and we still weren’t able to see what the game mechanic was.
I get it, it LOOKED great, but as a potential player I need to know what the actual fuck I’m doing. What’s the goal? What am I supposed to do? What are the tools I have to do that?
Everwild Devs: 🤷♂️
If the suits were screwing around and changing things, we STILL should have seen what the actual game was before and after the changes. We never did. Never will.
That’s not a corporate problem, it’s a development problem.
Compare that to a teaser for a game that actually released:
You DO realize that you aren’t their bosses, right? That was Microsoft. Microsoft almost assuredly saw a LOT of internal content. It just didn’t get packaged up into sizzle reels to be shown at the keighleys for 50k for a few seconds in between kojima appearances.
At the end of the day, game development is a business. You only see what is deemed worth publishing. Take Night Dive for example. They have a ridiculously solid portfolio and, outside of System Shock (which was kickstarted?), don’t talk about ANYTHING until it is ready to release. Does that mean they are in a constant state of doing nothing and deserving to get fired up until that brief window where we all see Hexen and Heretic being pulled from store shelves a few hours before a (funny enough) Microsoft press conference?
… Actually I could very much see Microsoft take that route if they owned Night Dive. “They haven’t uploaded anything to youtube. Let’s fire their asses. Oh, shit. Danny O’Dwyer just skeeted that he is driving up to Washington again. Okay, give them a week and we’ll probably get a few million bucks out of them”
No, I have just been working in software development for 13 years.
If I spent six years on a project and could not demonstrate core functionality after all that time, I’d be fired too.
