As schedules become more inflexible, many incomplete or untested products are released to the consumer. Nate Hales looks at who loses.
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
Spiders: "We're going to cut straight to the chase so you're not left wondering: After a long period without clear answers, we have received confirmation that Spiders is being liquidated.
What does it mean? This means the company as a whole no longer exists. We'll cease our functions immediately. The planned DLC will release via Nacon, and then-- well, that's it.
We're sorry that it's come to this and would like to thank each and every one of you for your support over the years.
If you have any questions or run into issues with your games, please contact Nacon directly as we'll no longer be able to reply."
Great article. I would change it completely to a statement, that statement being "deadlines ruin games". Knights of the Old Republic 2 lost 6+ months so Lucas Arts could make a Christmas release, still unfinished. Skyrim/FO3 known for being incredibly buggy at release. Unreal Tournament 3 ignored the demo/beta feed back and released a month later, failed. BRINK came out early due to the massive amounts of hype. ETC.
I think games need a time frame for completion, but not one set in stone. Rushed games can be hits, but that sour taste is hard to get out of your mind if it comes out buggy or unfinished. The opposite approach would be Duke Nukem: Forever. Taking your time and coming out polished, like Starcraft 2 is a better approach.
Deadlines for releasing games yearly is ruining gaming.
Yes because Julian Eggebrecht from Factor 5 more or less said that he had a harsh deadline in dealing with Lair and that game was pretty polished, but it also had a few things they could have improved upon; so putting more polish on that game would have made it a big success.
The problem is, without deadlines nothing would get released.
We may be talking about 'games' but these are products with hundreds or thousands of interdependent elements. The only way for a developer to be given the freedom to launch when ready is to have significant financial backing that allows this
Games are not art in the sense that an artist can take as much time as they want to produce something (although if the artist is on a commission there could be a deadline).
The simple fact is that there are peak times of the year where sales are maximised (holiday season etc), and budgets will be allocated to projects based on predicted sales. If a game doesn't hit the deadline then sales are lost and it can be the difference between a dev going under or not (the counter argument is that if you release something so buggy and undercooked it could do just as much damage - but with Skyrim etc we've seen that doesn't matter for some popular devs)
I really dislike Day 1 patches, and I do believe that the damage caused by launching early can be severe. But anyone who has been involved in massive projects knows that you just can't get everything right every time. Compromises have to be made; and as games get bigger and more complex this gets harder.
One of the things I find amazing (because of my current profession) is when I hear of some teams like Naughty Dog who have no hierarchy in their development. I really envy a company who can work like that and still hit deadlines and still release quality titles. I assume they have some Project management in there somehow, but I rarely see those roles listed in the credits.