Perfect Dark Cancelled, The Initiative Shut Down

Haint said:
Santa Monica California, it's like a top 5 most expensive city in the US. Every developer at this studio made more than $200K a year (many significantly more).
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Which is hilarious because the quality of life is absolute shit out there. It was good at one point but the best days are behind it. Traffic, congestion, pollution, fires in North Santa Monica, homeless, filthy beaches etc.
 
politics shitshow GIF
 
Don't care for The Initiative but disappointed with the game being cancelled outright as it looked so promising and the kind of game I love to get into
 
Perfect Dark was the game that showed the most ambition out of their lineup. Gross display of mismanagement across the board, as if it weren't clear before this.
 
FeastYoEyes said:
Perfect Dark was the game that showed the most ambition out of their lineup. Gross display of mismanagement across the board, as if it weren't clear before this.
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I thought it looked great except it looked very scripted to me. I questioned how the actual game could really play with some of the stuff they were presenting as being gameplay.

All we needed was a AAA game that captured the feel of GoldenEye/Perfect Dark with maybe some Deus Ex mixed in. It really wasn't that hard of an assignment.
 
HJuggernaut said:
HAHAHAHHAAH I fucking knew it they wouldn't be able to pull it off. Besides nobody was interested in a new Perfect Dark. MS' biggest problem is that they greenlit games nobody cares about.
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Well microsoft is fucked but I wanted a new perfect dark. Whether they could deliver that is another matter.
 
i knew this going to happen.

pretty obvious actually

1) no update on the game itself since the announcement
2) majority of the devs are coming from "popular game studios", clashing of ideas from these devs is going to happen
3) perfect dark? who cares?
 
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Imagine taking 7 years to realise a studio you setup and allocated budget for simply isn't going to work out, closing the studio at a loss of tens, if not hundreds of millions, shafting over a second-party development partner in the process, and the whole management team just keeping their jobs like nothing happened, when hundreds of other people under them get hit by the collateral damage, It's wild

The same team, who didn't realise their system's big launch title wasn't actually ready until a couple of months before launch, they couldn't even scrub it off the box art in time.

I couldn't even think of two bigger hypothetical fuck-ups when leading a gaming division, it's baffling nobody is held accountable at the higher tiers of Microsoft when at the 2nd and 3rd tiers your constantly fighting each other just to stay in a job.
 
lh032 said:
3) perfect dark? who cares?
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I think PD was an IP in a unique spot. It was part of the hype and success that made MS interested in buying Rare. It was the spiritual successor to Goldeneye, a shooter phenomenon for consoles in the 90s. Everyone felt Rare or at least their IP was being underutilized by MS and Rare. Xbox needed more IP identity. It made sense to do something with PD and not just give up on it after Zero was disappointing. The problem is they took a long time to decide to do something with the IP and then they spent forever on a game that went nowhere (they also decided to be unnecessarily ambitious). After all these years you can look back now and say "All this for Perfect Dark? a series that had one really good entry on the N64 25 years ago and a disappointing follow-up on the 360?" but there's more context to it.
 
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Hilarious how MS management currently burns money. So many years of development and they just throw it away

Not releasing anything = no money to at least get some costs back
 
Meh useless studio imo. Not sure Perfect Dark was a good decision either. Decent game back in the day (it was fine), but idk.
 
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Gambit2483 said:
That's because it was being outsourced to Namco Bandai....and you pick literally the one game out of almost every single other game they ship. Nintendo is, in fact, known for holding onto completed games for months, if not years before announcing/releasing them. Heck, just look at MK World and DK Bananza, both announced mere months before their release.

Edit: And here I was hoping you'd have something intelligent to rebut with 😂
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You acted like Nintendo never does it. I refuted it. The end.
 
Shame, one of their games I was actually looking forward to. Nothing shown at Summer Game Fest was a pretty big clue the project was in trouble. You don't go from the gameplay trailer they showed to nothing if the project is on track.
 
As suspected the trailer they showed was not from the actual game, clever slice for marketting. I feel bad for all the layoffs and the usual suspects surviving at the cost of others. If MS pockets weren't so deep, they would be bankrupt finanicially, already bankrupt creatively.

When do they realize it's poor management and actually do something about it.
 
Pasta la Vista said:
For airport and hotel workers, maybe some others but no, the min wage across the board is not going to $30. Should though, rent prices and everything is out of control here.
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A better thing to do is pass sound money legislation here, like Florida and Arkansas just did. Make constitutional money legal tender again.
 
As I'm pretty sure I said at the time they set up The Initiative, trying to create a cherry-picked "all star" dev team is a recipe for disaster.

You end up with too many chefs in the kitchen and not enough cooks, and when you add on top a whole other level of corporate expectation that comes from hiring a bunch of high price individuals... its most likely going to end up in gridlock.
 
semiconscious said:
this's aged beautifully:

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"being in LA".... can we start building studios that are... I don't know... NOT in the richest part of the country???

I don't know, I'm not a business man, but I can't help but feel like if you're gonna build a new studio, you should start it by saying "must be willing to live in Arkansas" or something... Set up the studio in a place that's more affordable to live so that you don't have to pay people so fucking much money just so they can meet the minimum cost of living. Seems stupid to me to set up a studio in a part in the country where you have to pay everyone 6 figures, even the janitors probably, just so they can afford their rent/mortgage.
 
Cancellation of Perfect Dark sucks since it was shaping up nicely. But The Initiative was doomed from the start, these things never work out when you dont have that energy or spirit in making something you really care for. A great idea you have together with someone and you work it out. I wonder what the reason is, since it looked good so far.
 
Power Pro said:
"being in LA".... can we start building studios that are... I don't know... NOT in the richest part of the country???

I don't know, I'm not a business man, but I can't help but feel like if you're gonna build a new studio, you should start it by saying "must be willing to live in Arkansas" or something... Set up the studio in a place that's more affordable to live so that you don't have to pay people so fucking much money just so they can meet the minimum cost of living. Seems stupid to me to set up a studio in a part in the country where you have to pay everyone 6 figures, even the janitors probably, just so they can afford their rent/mortgage.
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You still have to attract talent to your studio. An actually realistic place to put a big studio would be somewhere like Atlanta, Orlando, Raleigh, Austin, or Dallas.
 
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Soooooo 7 years Phil put this initiative together millions of dollars later and NOTHING not even a concord to show for it l?
 
Some fucking yuppie at Microsoft will explain this all away in some convoluted, esoteric, complex sounding jargon that involves the idiosyncrasies of business that consumers just don't understand - that only a Harvard MBA could.


Now hear this.... fuck....that...shit.


Phil Spencer (and to a greater extent Microsoft's Xbox team) just sucks at his job. It really is as simple as that. I didn't know you could fail so fucking far up a ladder.
 
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Main character aside, the gameplay we saw looked good. Too bad. Hopefully development will be picked up by someone else.
 
What a shit show. Pay a dev studio for 7 fucking years with no return. To cancel the game at this point means it was either complete shit or nowhere close to being complete. To cut their losses and not even release it as gamepass fodder is saying alot.
 
Fess said:
They already did that, Crystal Dynamics has been on this for several years. And yes they should give the IP to them or at least contract them to finalize it. It looked almost finished!
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No, I mean sell it to the publisher who's willing to continue development and support it financially.

I mean, JFC, games like meh at best and completely forgettable South of Midnight gets released, but a lot more promising and interesting games get cancelled and the studio is no more.
 
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