Actions speak louder then words. It's just going to be tough seeing what actions Obsidian/Microsoft choose.
I'm sure we'll get some dulcet sounding marketing coming out of this, but here's the facts we have so far.
- Scalebound was sold to Kamiya as his project, he could do whatever he wanted with it. Microsoft wanted his individuality. Within a few months however he had to take weekly/monthly meetings to listen to Microsoft shareholders demand he change the product to me more mainstream, more casual, more this or that. It eventually caused him to have a mental breakdown and he has gone fully **** Microsoft, never working with them again since then.
- Phantom Dust went from being a small remaster project, to suddenly a full price $60 RPG with a full campaign and more, without any changes to the budget. Why? Because Microsoft shareholders snuck past Phil yet again and demanded more, and more, and more from the company. They couldn't keep up, so Phil killed the studio.
- Microsoft forces everything onto their storefront. Reminder, this is their fourth attempt at a storefront. The last 3 times they gave up on PC gaming after attempting to be worse then everyone else, they also shut down access to all the games you previously bought. I have bought Gears of War 1 3 times, across 3 different Microsoft storefronts before I wised up and stopped giving Microsoft money.
Microsoft drains, guts, and then drops devs pretty ****ing quickly. Not as quick as EA, but they are next inline. It's gotten better since Phil took over, but "gotten better" just means slightly better then EA. And if Phil ever steps down, you can bet your bottom dollar the new head of Xbox will wonder why they have this "pointless" RPG studio.
If Microsoft and Obsidian want me to trust them that this is a good move, then they'd announce all their games will still come to all PC storefronts. But they won't, and instead we'll get the 2K RPG they are making ( cause 2K will publish that on everything ), and then all future games, including probably Pillars 3 will be locked down.
I get that Obsidian was hurting, what with Tyranny not hitting sales numbers, and Pillars 2 hurting as well, but yikes. This feels like taking a loan from the ferryman to hopefully stave off death for a few more years. Feels like we are trading one devil for another.
I'm not even worried about more casual/Alpha Protocol style RPGs. The writing has been on the wall for the CRPG Renaissance for awhile now. It was big enough for 1-2 games, but after that the interest dried out. Outside of a few hardcore fans, and people chasing nostalgia, there just isn't the money in it for big CRPGs anymore. That's fine. The idea of a Microsoft funded beefy RPG is appealing. It's just I wonder what the cost will be.
^^ Sonic, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of "3rd Party" and "1st Party" mean. More then half of those games were made through the Indie Fund Microsoft keeps up, which has notoriously bad return rates for indie devs, and has screwed over a lot of new devs. The other half were published after Microsoft ****canned almost every single 1st party studio they had, and they suddenly needed to make games again. I don't think any of those are actually 1st party, ie made by Microsoft inhouse.
You want to know what happened to the inhouse games? They got canned, told to remake their games for different audiences because shareholders refused to fund them, had huge firing sprees, and didn't actually get their games released. Microsoft is a fine publisher.....usually, sometimes they pull a Stormlands, but an AWFUL 1st party publisher. And that's the role they just took over for Obsidian. Total control.
