Post

I'm convinced that the plan is to slim down the Xbox division and sell it off to Musk. I mean who else has the money and thinks the letter X is really cool for some reason. 🤷‍♂️

What does it matter? Consumers dont care about engines. They buy nonfunctional UE5 slop and then give a bad review hours of gameplay later. A win in thr publishers eyes

That first sentence describes today’s prevailing business philosophy, seen as virtue among corporate boards across America. “Regard for the future” is as maligned as overhead expense.

Perfect Dark game on an ID tech engine also has my imagination going hard

It's funny because an engineer who can keep a GPU busy can easily save a few companies a billion dollars at this exact moment in history, including Microsoft, but those companies are just as shortsighted as game publishers

honestly everyone should start deleting unreal cause of this, what the fuck man.

the plan is to cut everything down and out while they shift everything to AI. it's an all-or-nothing gamble, and the odds are so good! unfortunately (for them), it's not a gamble they can win.

Its worse than flailing randomly. I genuinely believe this is management by AI Chat Bot.

It's like if capcom forcing to switch from RE engine for Unreal Engine for RE10

Not only is id Tech like one of the best engines in the gaming industry, but it is synonymous with the FPS genre as a whole. Some of the most popular games in the world are built off id Tech. Gutting id is something only a greedy, soulless executive would think of doing and oh hey look at that. Argh

It doesn't matter if they sell the whole Xbox division. Can't imagine who would buy it that wouldn't also be terrible.

At this point this feels like wanton vandalism.

Hasn’t tech suffered enough!

Feels like DOGE level shit. Promptfondling their way down the toilet.

The cuts - and moves like this - feel like a set up for those left behind. When they aren’t able to produce S-tier games with a skeleton crew and a lack of resources, they’ll all be axed too.

The waste cannot be overstated.

sure its fine to be frustrated idtech is on its way out but im so sick and tired of the ue5 slander. ue5 is actually great and way better in most regards to its predecessor not even by a little either

And when every game is Unreal, No game will be.

nothing but old IPs they probably havent even entertained the idea of selling that engine/team off

The cut out the first half of the sentence "Writing on the wall is getting relegated to support studio size and moving to Unreal,”

imagine if they had the foresight to build the halo remake in it

can’t wait for “Needless Cuts Part 2 Boogaloo: Who Do We Sacrafice To The Altar Of AI” in six months. I Feel really bad for everyone over there.

Gutting.

who needs the talent of experienced software engineers when you have an ideas man with unlimited claude tokens?

Games are content and engines are delivery platforms and nothing but, get with the program old man

Has anyone confirmed this? It feels wilfully stupid if so.

id Tech 7 (doom eternal) removed megatextures.

How does anyone purchase id Software and not understand that their technical expertise is *the reason* to own id Software. Like buying the most advanced waffle iron on the market and tossing frozen Eggos in there

Ah yes. If only there was some kind of example of what happened to that. 🤡 The craziest part to me is that Asha is from MS’s AI side, who famously got played by OpenAI. One of the many reasons that owning your own core tech is worth it. Nothing to stop Epic changing the terms in 10 years.

Controlled demolition is exactly right. Satya Nadella never understood or cared about Xbox. He tolerated it because he was sold on its growth potential. But after the senior Xbox leadership left, no one is left to "sell" Xbox to Nadella. He can't wait to get rid of that noise.

I mean Doom was inarguably AAA - in this picture Microsoft isn't dropping "AAA" they're dropping "games in general" outside of anything they think has a prayer of being a monoculture event.

We’re not hating rampant capitalism enough yet.

There's plenty of real things to be mad about. Let's not spread imaginary FUD on top of everything else too.

Surely someone is embezzling money with this? By buying id, they own all id assets. Including the engine. That they don't have to keep paying to license. And so they...pivot to keep paying for Unreal, which is objectively a worse engine. Fire&invetigate the dumbshit who made this decision please.

And Carmack is too busy with his genAI startup anyway.

Never officially diagnosed (iirc) clinical sociopath who grew up in a time and place where that kind of neurodivergence doesn't get noticed and treated, he's just "that kind of guy" Putting down a cat because it's inconvenient to your work is... It should have been THE red flag.

Thank you Capt. Obvious. I was talking dreams. :)

Epic could do something hilarious right now and hire all those people to make unreal engine not be a pile of flaming shit.

What's the level of concern beyond flashing red lights and sirens? Because we're there, or even beyond it.

Ah but now they can join the extended Fortnite metaverse

Slash, burn, pillage, and then flee with a golden parachute. Corporate raiders.

Dark ages and its dlc run buttery smooth at 280hz all ultra uncapped, meanwhile half the games that ship on unreal can barely hit 60 without stuttering like a mess no matter what I do (mafia the old country never felt stable no matter what I did)

I wonder what the actual Xbox plan is. If there is no internal goal for this mess, where MS is just trying to make an exit, the last while makes no sense. Exiting games and only caring about AI and cloud I could understand. But not the devaluing all their customer facing stuff.

I've come to a grim acceptance (especially wrt Zenimax) that any forward-thinking strategy Xbox devises will always be obliterated by the next wave of layoffs. Tango felt like the same - they had a highly qualified team seeded from decades of Japanese gamedev and it was unceremoniously destroyed

Asha Sharma and Matt Booty are incompetent. Management are actively killing Xbox and Bethesda, which is a damn shame.

It's so fucking dumb it feels like it should be illegal

I wouldn't be surprised if any of those former Id Devs decided to open a studio called "Super-ego" or something.

Ripping the copper out the walls for shareholder profits

Ok Im ready to scream

Not even shortsighted. This is not sighted at all.

Don Mattrick’s dream of real money auction houses for in-game cosmetics can finally be realized!