Why don't they just get out of the industry, they clearly don't want to be in it anymore. It's just been stupid decision, after stupid decision, they basically have a license to print money and instead of creating the games that people want, and then selling them for people to play on their confusingly named consoles, they instead muck around with it by raise prices, closed studios and discontinuing IPs.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2026
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Sadly the only people they want to make happy are their shareholders while they rape the industry.
Holy moly.
That is basically the worst case scenario, no?
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The absolute last thing Obsidian needs is Bethesda presiding over them. Bethesda (the publisher) is pure toxicity, and don’t they hate Obsidian?
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They should have given Obsidian TES/Fallout, and folded Bethesda into Obsidian as a studio to farm work out to. BGS has some great level design teams, but the decision makers need to go.
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The absolute last thing Halo campaigns need is to be more like Call of Duty.
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They should have cut 343, and split the IP amongst specialized studios. Like an Arkane “special ops” stealth game, another Halo Wars, and/or a strictly multiplayer Activision game.
This is beyond even my worst expectations. It’s what I would have done if I was a corporate spy inside Microsoft, assigned to sabotage them.
Its not even close to the worst thing. The worst thing was letting 343 "Halo Studios" keep Halo.
At worst, we just get another bad Halo game. But with entirely different people working on it, at least there is a chance it could be better. Under 343 "Halo Studios" it had no chances of being good.
Activision is a publisher, they don't only make Call of Duty. They have a large variety of games they publish, including Blizzard's Overwatch, which while one can argue doesn't fit the Halo gameplay, proves that Activision has the capacity to publish FPS games that feel almost nothing like Call of Duty.
It's worse then that because studios aren't names they are the people that make the games. All these studios are effectively dead The only good that may come of this are the devs that start their own indio studio and make the games they want. Not an easy path mind you.
Worst case but certainly expected. Microsoft paid a ransom for Bethesda and the Bethesda brand and their IP. Nothing was ever going to be rolled into a “lesser” brand like Obsidian. It’s naive to think otherwise, this is capitalism to a fucking T, decisions made by penny pinching sleezebags who assign value to names.
Is the Bethesda brand even valuable anymore? I feel like it might have been relevant 10 years ago but it's kind of fallen by the wayside in recent years, mostly by their own hand.
Maybe. TES/Fallout still seem to have critical mass on YouTube and such, and people did buy Starfield.
I'm with you though. I am a shameless Oblivion shill, Starfield was theoretically my perfect game; yet I can't find a reason why I should devote any attention to BGS these days...
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Nah, they'll still somehow limp their way into the next generation because Sony is trying to one up MSFT in bad decisions.
If they just sat back and did nothing, then it'd would definitely be over lol.
Sony will announce the anti-piracy barbed rectal probe to fuck you in real time.
The next generation is the problem. With the component pricing being stupid up they're having to put off releasing the new consoles. They're raising the prices on existing hardware just to match the component crunch, so they're not getting the mid-late generation bump of people buying the hardware once it's come down in price, and the people willing to buy new hardware an a high price already bought this generation's comsole.
Xbox bled money buying studios for gamepass, then failed to get casual people subscribed to gamepass, but the hardware people who bought new $70 games a couple times a month started spending way less money on Xbox due to Gamepass because of all the day 1 releases. And the Series S held back everything by being wildly underpowered.
Meanwhile Sony burned billions betting on live service failures back to back to back (Microsoft did this too, but to a lesser degree).
And now their "new console generation" parachute/reset is fucked due to hardware costs. They know they can't make an even halfway decent "next-gen" console under $1000, so now they've burned mountains of money and don't really have a plan going forward. And now they're amputating limbs to create the illusion of cost-cutting.
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Fucking hysterical how everyone was celebrating Asha Sharma and Xbox a month or two ago, even though SHE LITERALLY SAID 1,600 CUTS ARE ON THE WAY.
This is because their AI bet fucking failed, and so did gamepass.
Yet the only ones hurt are Devs, the gamers, and potentially IPs people adore.
What a shit timeline this is.
There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the game pass idea. But that there was never anything good in it, and they kept raising the price. Sometimes they had so much filler content in there that if you discounted the games you didn't want and only looked at the games you did want, it would have actually been cheaper to just buy the game directly. Which is in what people did.
Nah gamepass is fundamentally flawed and it capped out well below their projections for a very simple reason they didn't consider.
Games are long, you can't binge 3 games a day. You might finish one a month, hell most people will finish one game every 2 months.
A subscription service for things where one of said things can take 20-100 hours doesn't make any sense.
That's letting alone the cannibalization of their own sales, a total lack of ownership for anyone exclusively on gamepass so they're never really committed, and you have a recipe for complete and utter mediocrity.
I am surprised they actually didn't see it. When gamepass was introduced, it seemed like insanity - how is $10 subscription with access to $60 titles is going to pay off, this makes no sense. Well... It didn't.
Yep.
It's also about control. Maybe it didn't start that way, but Xbox absolutely wanted to get people into their ecosystem with gamepass and the deals, and then keep them there.
I'm so tired of these shitty underhanded practices.
I just want to buy a PC/console/handheld and then be able to go and purchase a game that I OWN. Whether physical or digital, the fact that ownership is even a question when we have hundreds of ways to verify digital ownership, is insane.
These companies built a shitty world and they're finally paying a slight bit for it.
What exactly is their plan? Just collect IPs so they aren't being released on other platforms?
It is a very old strategy for monopolies to buy up competition when there are no anti monopoly protections so they can kill the competition, it's how Microsoft was founded.
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"I wonder what will happen if we put all of our eggs in the same basket?" - Famous basket-dropper.
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Activision in charge of Halo? That's a deathblow if ever I heard one.
Post bungie halo has been like watching a train wreck in slow motion, the series has survived the last 16 years on reputation alone.
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These fuckers won't rest until there's nothing good left to play and all that's left are multiplayer only games that cost $100 up front and still need several microtransactions a day forever in order to be in any way playable 😮💨🤬
You’re missing one major step. It’ll be 100 up front plus a monthly fee to your cloud gaming access to be able to play the game until they decide you don’t get the license to play it anymore and they take it away. You will own nothing and like it.
well, R.I.P. Elder Scrolls 6.
Wow. This is what happens when you put someone without game industry experience in charge of your game division. Incredibly stupid decisions all around.
I still think they should sell Rareware to Nintendo. The fact that so many of those excellent oldschool games are stuck in IP limbo is a tragedy. Can't play them unless you emulate them, or are lucky enough to find original hardware.
Well, some good news: Agent 64 came out earlier this year.
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A good time to mention that Xbox (and boycotting Game Pass especially) is one of a dozen or so priority targets chosen by the Palestinian BDS Movement beecause they're vulnerable and Microsoft's cloud computing services are so vital for "Israel's" military and prison system
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