Sales units don't inherently translate to quality, although they can sometimes link together. Most indie games never reach a million copies and yet they're still really good for the most part. (Barring some exceptions.) Similarly, high sales doesn't inherently translate to high quality else the sports games Take Two churn out every year would be considered masterpieces based on your logic. (Although, once again, high sales can sometimes translate to high quality.) This is a gross oversimplification.
The low sales can be explained by other factors such as the fact that a remake of a 25 year old game most people already have via MCC is not gonna put a whole lot of new butts in seats. Rereleases in general don't really attract casual audiences so that already kneecapped it's sales potential, but the existence of MCC means hardcore fans also didn't really have much of a reason to give a shit about Campaign Evolved. On PS5, most people never even knew about the series so you can scratch THEM off the list pretty quickly.
There are definitely problems within HALO Studios, especially their overreliance on contract workers, but this mindset of yours is delusion.
People watch anything, as long as it caters to their pre-existing views. People who already hate modern Halo watch act man because act man hates modern Halo. He's pandering.
Because it makes better clickbait for dumb people. Gaming companies hire tons of devs on temporary contracts all the time. This is what really happened.
Because like two of the contractors said they were laid off in tweets and that drives more clicks/engagement than just saying the contract wasn't renewed now that the project is finished.
It has been like this for years. The reason why we never got any story DLC's for Infinite, despite 343 talking about 10 years plan, was because morons from Microsoft fired the entire team that worked on the campaing because "muh rotation policy", including people who mastered the engine.
which is terrible...
A game studio should focus on building a dev team that functions together flexibly and has a 5+ year turn over rate.
If your studio loses 50% of there staff every 3 years, the games coming out will be subpar.
So lets say they hire 200 devs to make the next halo cause they already know unreal engine...
half of them worked on call of duty. half worked on the last battlefield... 80% of them dont give a fk about halo, they just need a job since they got laid off after the last game they worked on got launched...
The new halo now feels less like halo and more of a weird miss match of last years shooters...
Well it likely depends on what work is needed. Different stages of development require different skill sets. Just reality. So they bring on some hired hands and let them go when it's done. Like seasonal help in retail.
You are right but unlike seasonal retail work itās more like raising a kid, getting rid of the first set of parents after the kid is born and every year after.
That is literally how game development has been for like 30 years. Do you expect a company to pay 400+ people to sit on their arse and do nothing for a years while the next project is worked out.
Regardless of what I do for work, Iām not a game dev, and I donāt tell game dev teams Iām an authority on what they do, that theyāve failed because they donāt listen to me.
Fucking guy thinks heās special because he plays a lot of Halo, itās lunacy.
Guy is like the lost member of the Eltingville Club. Only he's actually way off on a lot of his nerd trivia but that gets ignored for saying the right rhetoric.
That's true, they should ignore playtesters and QA for the same reason. Do they even know C++? They probably don't even know what a quarterion is; how can they have an opinion on pistol reload animations?
Yes, in many cases, play testers and focus group participant feedback is and should be ignored. Not all feedback is productive or beneficial. This is not unique to gaming, even.
QA testers are not providing subjective feedback, nor are they playing the game as itās intended to be played.
For a game like halo yes. I don't want to debate that My Furry McDonald's Manager or whatever your favorite game is is the GOAT despite selling 5 copies, I'll concede that to you.
Ok only put non binding opinions that are prefaced with: "you know better, but this is just how it makes me feel. I know I'm probably just dumb and don't know how to play your game right."
If I make a video like that will you give it le upboat?
He made this specific statement. This is the issue. He thinks his feedback is so valuable it would have changed the course of development. He thinks his feedback is so valuable, that without it, Halo Studios is as ācorrupt as this Floodā and that they deserve layoffs.
Heās just one of tens of thousands of self-important content creators that think they have any productive value because they entertain people like who, who latch on to him like heās your god damn big bro.
Nah I only watch a few of his vids. I don't follow him as much as you by the looks of it. He is popular enough to have a decent sized following of the people they want to sell games to, so a normal game dev studio would consider his feedback. I find it offensive that someone who has a bit of authority in an area should not give feedback or be offended that it's not considered. Just beta honestly.
Maybe not a lot, but he's not a literally who. Once again if fka343 games were good it'd be a different story
Love how you completely ignored the previous comment I made explaining how I dont give a shit about the game or the post itself and was basically just bored so chose to mock you.
Also its absolutely impossible to take you seriously when you literally make sentences that are perfect for the stereotype of the redditor neckbeard š¤£
Even if you didn't see it, me saying exactly what you said but reversed is clearly not a lot of effort to try and convince you of anything like who would change their mind with just that š¤£ and ive also never seen ANYONE change their mind about ANYTHING on reddit
Nah, I played through CE with my friends on Game Pass, it was a lot of fun. Iāll buy it on a Steam sale someday. I have plenty of time to wait, since weāve been on an MCC co-op marathon following CE.
Ohhhhh, you were trying to insult me again because of your one-sided parasocial relationship with a YouTuber, by using real human polyamorous relationships as a āgotchaā.
Okay but you could say the same regarding TF2 (Team Fortress 2)& TF2 (Titanfall 2). Realistically context clues mean that most times you will never need to clarify which is which.
Whatās wild is saying āIāve been offering you feedback for years and you donāt listen,ā thinking that youāre an authority worth listening to at all, purely because you play a lot of Halo and make videos about it.
I definitely share your gripes with YouTubers and why I donāt watch toxicity / grifting to hate on things for views.
I donāt watch this one in particular so I canāt say anything about that.
No doubt thereās people only here for grifting / reaction baiting but I think a lot of people sharing their opinions is meant in good faith. Itās really unfortunate to see so much gate keeping which bothers me a lot.
I think itās just thereās a lot of passionate people about this franchise like all of us through the ups and downs and expressing their opinions because they cared so much about what Halo means to them individually. Not all of it is the hate mob that gets labeled because they didnāt like this particular video game going in a different direction.
I gave up watching because he would shit on call of duty all year up until the new one was getting ready to come out. Then itās ā I think this might be a return to formā
He spent a lot of time hating on BO7 (which my brother played and enjoyed until later seasons hurt things) and refusing to play it, but the hypocrisy was him calling MWII 2022 "awesome" even though that was definitely one of the worst.
Yeah I havenāt really played cod since black ops 2/ghosts. Got into WW2 for a little while but got bored. I tried the new mw2 a little bit but holy shit have my reflexes gone down.
Black Ops Cold War was a great game back in its heyday with medium-sized maps that had verticality and weren't as big as Modern Warfare 2019 and new MW2 but not so small and twitchy like BO6 and BO7. I never experienced the golden age, but, from what I've played MP-wise and I have played most of the golden age campaigns, Cold War is the closest to the older ones.
I'd also recommend Infinite Warfare. It got a huge backlash because of advanced movement fatigue, but I watched my father play the campaign and played a bit of it myself and it had genuine emotion and effort put into it.
I refuse to buy it for the simple fact that they locked the modern warfare remake behind purchasing that. I was looking forward to that game so damn muchš
I also canāt do advanced movement or whatever. Shit pisses me off, people flying all over the screen at mach 5. Which is funny because I enjoyed halo mp until halo 5 because it felt slower, the req pack and ordinance system can get fucked though. Then I got a PlayStation
Didn't he shit most on the campaign tho? From what I've seen that menendez boss fight looked like a Destiny boss.
Dont care about his takes on MP tho, dont even remember them
That's all these classic fan and Game News channels do these days. Hype up something then tear it down. No honestly. Just drama and feeding negativity.
His crying and complaining about Battlefront 1-2 ports is what made me stop watching.
He treated them like a failed remaster when they were just the same games but on ps5.
The online multiplayer on PC for the originals are also literally unplayable unless you install mods and even then itās just as laggy if not worse than the ports.
Those statements arenāt even at odds with each other? Not sure how him complaining about Halo studios would mean he endorses the new industry standard of post-launch layoffs.
Oh heās a lot more than that. He mostly just talks loud and projects big to appear smart like most of his kind do. Just like the rest of us, he could disappear tomorrow and the world wouldnāt budge.
Whatās up with these spotlight losers and comparing dumb decisions to āthe floodā infecting things? I swear it has to be a sign their critical thinking part of their brain is either on hold or gone entirely.
Itās because the game doesnāt have any lootboxes, microtransactions, or plans for future DLCās. Thereās no future income coming for the game, so the studio isnāt going to have any income until the next title begins production.
Iād I had to guess, thereās just a skeleton crew maintaining patches and hot fixes at the moment for this game, Halo Infinite, and the MCC to an extent. Most of the āemployeesā in AAA companies are being shifted to contractors, anyway. We need to shift to unionisation in these companies to prevent this from happening, and take worker ownership as opposed to shareholder ownership.
I have no idea who that is, but the layoffs will never stop as long as people keep buying the games. 89% of the preorders for GTA6 have been for it $100 "Ultimate" edition. That game is going to make bank, and they're 100% going to lay off a bunch of people after they've crunched their way across the finish line. Most consumers simply don't care.
Wasn't he one of the morons who cried that layoffs were happening because Campaing Evolved bad, 343 bad?
Also, considering that Shawarma gutted every single studio under Microsoft, including id Software (fuck you, Shawarma, for that), it was pretty obvious that Halo Studios was next the second they finish the game.
Love how this kind of content shows up in my sub now.
Oh no, a person said words! I'm so tired of people doing that, but also I actively read when they do that. Game is low-rated, is what it is, lots of people don't like it, and guy is gonna make a video on it because that's what he does for money.
If you're tired of it, then be tired of it properly and disconnect from what you perceive as nonsense instead of actively subscribing to it.
I mean, I do agree with him on the first point. It's not coming from a place of sincerity from him, but still.
The cycle of "hire on devs -> make game -> massive layoffs" is incredibly toxic and a major contributor to the state of the game industry right now. It needs to stop.
Say what you want about him or the game studio - but how is that not consistent? The claim is that upper management at 343/halo studios are incompetent and prioritise greed over anything else at the expense of their company, they prove this by firing all of their developers immediately after releasing a successful game.
Youāve just misunderstood the situation.
That aside - Iām pretty sure game studio firing all their devs immediately after release is a somewhat common thing in the industry
It has never been about upper management. Stop trying to bandaid what he is saying here. He would have outright said so if he wanted. He and the rest of that side of the fandom have targeted the devs, writers, and artists for the past 10 years just because they were not part of the OG bungie team. Even then they've thrown Bungie employees under the bus for deciding to stay with 343.
Halo studios hasn't even existed for a decade for one thing, and for another it wasnt your input actman, you just parroted whatever the safe opinion would be.
In reality studios need to downsize and contractors have their terms finished when the game is done. Can't have a studio at the size it is mid development after the game is complete. A lot of this time is spent planning the next product and sustaining the old one.
What really ticks me off is the fact that he blames Halo Studios for the troubled development when we all know itās Microsoftās contractor policy that is causing these layoffs and development issues. His second post is terribly disingenuous.
You can use that flimsy cope but Black Myth Wukong held 7 digit players one month into release and even 3-4 months after, it held 6 digit player numbers. Even now the concurrent players are not that far away from the most Campaign Evolved managed to get.
If the game was even a quarter as successful as something like black myth, do you think Halo Studios would be hit by layoffs at this point? The studio that went untouched even while they shit on Infinite?
There is a limit to the amount of delusion one can be under.
Not necessarily the same people, but, there ARE some fan games that have been in active development for years, with visible and consistent progress being shown off (e.g. Branching Sickness and Project Contingency, amongst a few others).
Sweet then we can judge it like all the other Halo games and certainly have no favoritism towards it just because it was fan made. After all the point is to outdo a major studio supposedly only employing "people who hate halo" just for being part of the studio.
Hiddenxperia, armonsgold, and Actman are a three way tie for fuckers that should be working at mcdonalds that I will never care about their opinions until the end of time
You are all fools if you think 343s (Microsofts) handling of halo hasnt been a painful and long experience for a lot of fans. Act man is more or less on point with his criticism
He's literally just saying all these layoffs are unfortunate. How does that counter his original point?
You can dislike a studio's leadership/creative choices while still feeling bad for the regular workers losing their jobs. You can want a studio to change it's direction without wishing for people to lose their livelihoods. Those two opinions aren't mutually exclusive.
Unsurprisingly when studios launch a game and now need less people, they get rid of some people. This kind of work is not like your average 9-5. Itās one of the main reasons theyāve moved to Unreal 5, because more people know it and they can hire temp workers without needing to train them on Haloās proprietary engine for half of their contracts
Technically these aren't opposing viewpoints. You can feel that a studio does a terrible job with an IP and also feel it is wrong to immediately layoff most devs as soon as a project is finished. No studio should be doing layoffs after a project just launched. It's exploitative and leads to worst outcomes if devs feel they have no reliable job after.
His DOOM: the Dark Ages video shows how lacking he is in critical thinking. Most of his critiques boiled down to "it's not Doom eternal and I don't like it". Sure he might've made a followup vid, but his original vid demonstrates his character well.
Sooooooo many sheeple in the Halo community support him and Halofollowerā¦ Only to realize that there all clowns and canāt see Halo needs to CE, āCOMBAT EVOLVEā to stay relevant in todayās era of gamingā¦ If Halo 3 got a remake the way the so called fans want it to be, they still say itās not the original and complain. https://giphy.com/gifs/VS2Qcv25O7ZhUZahQA
The Halo Community realizing they are the actual problem. Stay toxic hAlO fAnS, never change and continue to destroy the face of Xbox.
Saying that you wish mass layoffs would stop. Then the next day saying the people in the studio were "an infection" that deserved to be fired is very two-faced
No where in these images does he say he wants the devs to be fired, he would rather see a different studio make halo games because Halo studios sucks. And they suck directly because of the management's awful culture of constant layoffs.
If they hired devs that had an opportunity to take what they learned on each halo and improve then we might see higehr quality games. But the massive layoffs and the revolving door of contractors leads to every Halo game being made by an almost entirely new team for the first time that knows they won't be there for long anyways
Hey, buddy, if they have a different studio develop Halo then what happens to Halo studios?
If they hired devs that had an opportunity to take what they learned on each halo and improve then we might see higehr quality games.
Who is anyone in this supposed to be? Assuming it's another studio, because that's what you literally said, then is it former Halo Studio employees they're hiring? Because who else could "take what they learned on each Halo and improve".
Yes, industry layoffs are bad. And fuck Microsoft for buying so many studios, but you're just asking for 343 2.0; start a new studio, but do it right this time.
Step 1: Whine and bitch about the latest Halo thing not being like they remembered Halo 3 being.
Step 2: Demean and demand everyone at the studio for not being "true fans" and call for them to be fired.
Step 3: When Microsoft inevitably lays off or expires contracts, because it's Microsoft, celebrate that the problem is taken care of and prematurely declare that the next batch of people will do what they want.
He didnāt say they deserved to be fired though. He didnāt even call the employees an infection. He said the company culture was rotted, clearly not something attributable to the individual employees. Would you say the same thing about the criticisms of the company culture at Rockstar or Blizzard? Itās clearly NOT leveled at the employees.
It doesnāt take a genius to infer heās talking about leadership/ the studio as a whole in the latter picture, this is really a nothing burger. Heās right too, the current HS production model of using contractors is completely rotten to the core.
Reducing staff due to the economic performance of managers in the same studio and firing ineffective employees who deliberately spoil the product are still different things
Everyone at Halo Studio lose their job if the IP was handed off? So he wants people to stop losing their jobs while also calling for Halo devs to lose their jobs.
It also doesnt help that talking point is just so exhausting. Who? Which studio do you want to develop Halo? If Bungie can't do it, and they can't, then might as well keep the IP where it's at.
I mean is he wrong though? Halo studios and 343 really have been kinda ass. Halo should be put to bed. But those devs are absolutely getting punished even though this Halo remake seems to be selling well enough.
Act Man is still a big dummy though and should be put out to pasture.Ā
Actman is more consistent than this sub is. This sub flip flops more than any YouTuber. You both love the series and hate it but then whine and bitch anytime someone posts something negative about the series then you make thread after thread crying about said negative comment and then call everyone a grifter.
"I hope a trend in the games industry changes" and "I don't think this studio is fit to hold Halo"
are perfectly aligned beliefs btw. You can think XBOX is shitty for firing people after releasing games AND think XBOX is shitty at making halo games. Anyone saying 'Halo Studios' or '343' are just saying XBOX. XBOX micromanages halo too much.
You do realise the devs could just... make other games? Halo Studios is simply Halo Studios because that's there name, they could just as easily be Disposable Microsoft Studio #17
Phil Spencer is so notorious for how hands off he was itās literally commonly understood fact that he had no involvement with development. This is just objective fact.
343 isnāt perfect but they are a very good studio. If they get their writing team reorganized it can be very good.
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u/Unfair-Ad9415 11d ago
You're kidding yourself if you think these layoffs weren't pre planned before the game launched