Shahid Ahmad responds to Thomas Mahler's rant.
Moon Studios creative director Thomas Mahler is impressed with what the 20-year-old created in Dreams.
These are the type of guys MS should be trying to acquire. Buy em offer them a bigger budget over time and grow them into a AAA developer. I know MS doesn't have the best track record in regards to doing that, but that should be the approach they should be looking at. Hire people with experience in growing talent instead of buying up the industry.
“These are the type of guys MS should be trying to acquire.“
I don’t know about that.
“Moon Studios, the developer behind the Ori games, has been labelled an "oppressive" place to work by current and former employees. The workplace reportedly fosters an environment of bullying, racism, and sexism, and screenshots shared in the report show the co-founders using ableist slurs and racist jokes.“
Google says an example of an Ableist Slur is: "viewing a person with a disability as inspirational for doing typical things, such as having a career."
I'm sorry, but if I see an armless person doing a job that requires heavy lifting, I'm damn well going to be inspired! What's wrong with being inspired by a person's strength and resilience? smh
Doesn't Activision have their own scandal going on? Ain't stopping MS from buying them. I was speaking generally anyway.
Thomas Mahler, the founder of moon studios, has criticized Microsoft for not acting on their vision and creating "artificial barriers."
Lol the nerve on this guy Ms is way to nice with their games i mean for god sake you can play ori on everything except playstation.
He should be telling Sony and Nintendo this smh
'He also criticizes the exclusive culture in the industry, pointing out PlayStation and Nintendo as being “scared of change” and that they still believe in “walled gardens”'
It's right in there if you bothered to actually read it. From the sounds of it, he's against exclusives in general but has personal experience with Microsoft which is why he brings them up specifically.
Thing is, while true, Sony/Nintendo aren't the ones downplaying exclusives and trying to come off as this "come on everyone, lets hold hands, we shouldn't have any barriers in gaming" company during onslaughts of interviews only to then contradict themselves later. Phil talks so much it ends up biting him on the ass later.
For example
July 2020
https://www.nme.com/news/ga...
September 2020 - 2 months later
https://www.eurogamer.net/a...
for all those Multiplatfomists-no barriers supporters ..i want to ask
Is Microsoft pays any money to Sony from Windows sales??? ...then why the fk Sony to give their exclusive products to MS or any other platform holder???....
people (developers or not) who cry for all games to become multiplatform are detached from reality or have other more suspicious purposes
If he anyone wants to look at the full thread for more context (he makes his first comment about this on this page): https://www.resetera.com/th...
-Yeah he's actually criticizing all 3 but specifically Microsoft because thats who he worked with, but I honestly its sounds like something from a 13yr rant rather than someone who understands business:
“Make their games and port them to ALL platforms, not leave anyone behind. The 13 year old kid whose parents were able to only afford to buy one system for their child now won’t grow up playing Halo because Microsoft believes that it makes the most financial sense to leave PlayStation players out. How does that benefit anyone but Microsoft?”
-So he doesn't believe in platforms? Platforms and exclusives are a neccessary tool to generate profits that the devs themselves are concerned with because unlike manufacturers they are ONLY concerned with making 1 game at a time to make a profit.
-If he's so concerned about the 13yr old who's parents can only afford 1 console, then why not fund & dev his games for anyone to playe for FREE....surely there are parents who cant afford to buy their kids games tooso why stop at the console... why is it all on the console manufacturers, why isnt he making free games?
-That all said, actually Microsoft has done alot to make games more affordable an accessible so I dont get his criticism at all.
Incorrect... he calls out Microsoft because he mistakenly imagines the conversations Phil has made on exclusivity in the past suggests they are open to put games on other platforms. When what they have always stressed is they are open to put games on their supported eco-systems. This allows options for their games to reach much larger base and does not include the option to pay Nintendo and PlayStation to put all their games on their platforms.
His suggestion is that Xbox become a 3rd party developer for other systems. Which is simply ridiculous. He does not call out all platforms and then emphasize his experience with MS. He calls out MS and offhandedly mentions Sony and Nintendo in afterthought.
@sonic nah man, people just want to be able to play games. Exclusives mean nothing to anybody besides die hards. Microsoft, Sony, tendo, or whoever should pay whoever publishes a game for access to the game. It’s not a hard concept, why bottleneck games anymore?
You claim people are detached from reality… but it’s like not a “reality” it’s a simple effect from how the industry was ran for decades. So it’s more of a artificial barrier than a reality. There’s no “suspicious” behavior. Video games are entertainment at the end of the day, some people can’t afford every system, it’s not always some tribalistic vendetta. You sound like you are out of touch of reality if anything.
Like for example if Sony pictures only released their spiderman movies to play on Sony tvs/PlayStations/Blu-rays, would that make any sense? No. We live in a new era, holding onto imaginary company laden battle lines is a bad look.
Let PlayStation play halo, let Xbox play Pokémon, let switch play uncharted. Saying no just shows how hard you grasp at the tailfeathers of yesteryear.
Agreed. Xbox has Game Pass on PC too, opening up a whole world of IPs for PC gamers. Can PlayStation offer the same?
Ugh whenever I think of Todd Howard I think of Fallout 76. Microsoft can keep that dirty ray tracing liar
Yes, they have been releasing exclusives on PC now….not to mention PS Now has a PC App and it has many older PS exclusives on the service that you can play.
While not perfect, they are showing effort into this now
Yep, they were very "nice" when they bought Zenimax and took long established multi-platform IP away from a player base that had been playing those series of games for decades. He's telling exactly who he needs to be telling.
Like when Sony "helped" Capcom and Stret Fighter 5 was born BUT NOT FOR OTHER CONSOLES LIKE MY SWITCH
Sure. Only 1 evil in the world
@Ursozord
Yea because buying a publisher and locking down their catalog is the as paying for the development of a game that wouldn't have been created otherwise.
"Their the same"
Lol
I have no sympathy for the crying about Microsoft buying studios, because if the shoe were on the other foot everybody knows sony fans would praise the move. Sonys 1st party talent mainly comes from buying up once independent studios, very few studios under either Sony or Microsoft were built from the ground up with talent put together by them. So sure many try to move the goal posts to act like sony is so different when it comes to acquisitions but at the end of the day they both are just doing what they can to increase their gaming portfolio & strengthen their brand...and hell Microsoft doesn't even tie you to a console at all, all 1st party is on pc, letting you play anywhere but ps, they are honestly much more consumer friendly than Sony.
@4Sh0w
I'm sure you don't have any sympathy. "crying"? LOL, that's hypocrisy at its finest. Name any major studio, in fact name any studio at all that Sony purchased that pulled long running multi-platform IP off of xbox and took it away from the xbox fanbase. I'll wait. No ones moving any goal posts except for maybe you, the reality is the situations are very different and you're trying to find an excuse to make Sony look like MS when it comes to acquisitions and that couldn't be further from the truth. But maybe it would be an easier pill to swallow for everyone if Spencer didn't go around claiming to not place barriers on people to gaming and then take beloved franchise away from people because for MS its easier to throw money around than it is to foster or create talented studios of their own. Yeah taking away peoples beloved franchises from where they prefer to play them is definitely the most consumer friendly thing anyone could do. You cant be serious with this s---. smdh
4show.
Sony buys the devs, MS buys the IP's . They are very different when it comes to acquisitions. Try to find me one IP other than Sunset Overdrive that Sony acquired as a result of buying a dev. They have actually had relationships with their dev's. What has MS ever created with Double Fine or Ninja Theory? They bought the IP's plain and simple. Sony already owned all the IP's from every dev before they acquired them. You can't buy loyalty. Just look at people jumping back into Insomniac after Sony bought them.
What it comes down to is consolidation, if Sony were to get a big publisher will you be all for it? What if they split them down the middle half the current 3rd party games are not available on the other platform?
Microsoft didn't "take them away" like a brutal divorce sometimes forces a child to be taken away by just one parent. Zenimax was happy to forgoe other consoles for the $$$$.
Really his beef is with all of the platform holders. He wants everything to be third party accessible
This comment right here is when you're loyal to Microsoft and lobe kissing their A$$
In a perfect world there would be no exclusives... unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world.
If the Ori dev wanted their game on every platform, they shouldn't make a deal with Microsoft... or Sony... or Nintendo.
Replies(1)
It's called exclusives. Every platform is creating ''Artificial Barriers''
The dude opened his mouth and now everyone knows who to be worried about.
He knows that. But, Microsoft is at the same time saying they want to get rid of those barriers. His literal complaint is the difference between what they say and what they do.
But what about the point he's trying to make? He's basically saying that exclusives shouldn't be a thing, which is, well, something I don't agree with.
***He's basically saying that exclusives shouldn't be a thing, which is, well, something I don't agree with.***
That's not his point. His point is clearly quoted about how Microsoft talks about removing artificial barriers while doing the exact same thing as Sony/Nintendo.
Regardless of how you feel about exclusives, good or bad, Microsoft is the one saying something completely different than what they are doing regarding exclusives.
And I agree, exclusives should be a thing, to an extent. It creates a healthy, competitive environment for the industry. But it 100% needs to be watched to ensure that anti-competition elements don't creep in to give any single company dominant control of the market via IP purchases.
You're essentially complaining about the opinion of the developer and not saying "Microsoft should stop saying they don't believe in exclusives when they clearly do." If you're going to go after the developer, you should also go after Microsoft for their own words.
Chris I disagree he is totally saying exclusives shouldn't be a thing...at least *starting with Microsoft when he says this:
“Make their games and port them to ALL platforms, not leave anyone behind."
You say:
"That's not his point. His point is clearly quoted about how Microsoft talks about removing artificial barriers while doing the exact same thing as Sony/Nintendo."
-Gotta disagree with you here, sounds like you guys are purposely taking the comments made about being able to play on many different devices out of context. Microsoft has removed artificial barriers by putting all their 1st party games on pc, thus no longer making console needed to play but I dont think anybody in their right mind thought that "removing artificial barriers" ever meant removing *ALL* artificial barriers, nor did Microsoft say that as a factual matter. Gamepass also reduces barriers giving gamers access to more games cheaper, cloud, etc to some limited extent. Frankly this dev is surely talking big about somebody elses wallet....ironically only after his game has done well on xbox & pc= that barrier he's really talking about is just more $$$ in his pocket from ps. Its a cheap shot in fact to all 3, because he gets to play the nice guy while making more money, meanwhile who cares about the platform owners investment. If hes such a no barriers guy then dont take the funding or ask sony to fund it for all platforms & see how that goes??? This is a clear case of how some will take a good thing, deed/genorosity and then say well they could do more here, more there, etc. Microsoft is not doing exactly like Sony/Nintendo, until they both make all their 1st party games available on pc day one thats a HUMONGOUS DIFFERENCE...and if we want it to go further with NO BARRIERS then sure that means ALL GAMES playable everywhere but I think we can all agree this would breed complacency and quality of games would suffer in the longrun because theres less incentive, less competition without competing brands.
***Gotta disagree with you here, sounds like you guys are purposely taking the comments made about being able to play on many different devices out of context.***
Direct quote from his post:
"Microsoft is in this weird ‘between a Rock and a hard place’ position where they’re saying that this is the vision they want to see happening in the future, no artificial walls, no boundaries, but then they’re not necessarily acting accordingly”
Well said. There has to be exclusives that are optimized for a particular platform to show off its capabilities. Not our fault a certain company doesn't place an emphasis on this and ends up coming third every generation. If they just commit to this they wouldn't have to hide actual sales figures, promote the crap out of a service that's going to hobble them eventually or claim to promote cross platform play. But hey if some people like to believe the same lie Gen after Gen....
I get the point that the Moon Studios founder is trying to make but I really think that it's all about money in the end. No business in the world runs on Good Samaritan points. I personally like the "exclusive culture." Makes console wars more exciting. And no, don't give me that "gaming is for all" bs. You pick sides in this mf or you play PUBG on your phone.
Agree 100% but I think this is about how contradictory MS is being as opposed to being exclusive. What's likely going on is, they probably wanted to port ori to Playstation after switch and MS probably wasn't okay with that as the switch porting really seemed to be MS trying to bully Sony which didn't work. Ultimately when they couldn't do it anymore, they stopped porting. Just sounds like they don't want to work exclusively with MS anymore is all tbh. As a dev, it would make sense to want to be multiplat even if I don't think Ori would get the attention it gets now as a multiplat. The trade off is limited audience but alot more exposure because of exclusivity. Sounds like a fair trade to me
PN: Thomas Mahler, the director behind Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps, has taken to gaming forum ResetEra to vent. He is tired of “snake oil salesmen” getting hyped up by the games press and consumers, only to fail in delivering their promises.
no matter if Cyberpunk or No Man s Sky had their problems ...the amount of work to build these games are in a completely different (superior) league than to build a simplistic platformer with LED lights that jump here and there .....he is not showing a good profile making these comments
agree about Molyneaux though ...he was lame all the time
You guys CAN NOT keep using this awful excuse... ESPECIALLY for Cyberpunk not soo much for No Mans Sky tbh
No Man's Sky had their development completely fucked by a flood and Sony sort of shrugged and told them to release it anyway then abandoned them when the game got blowback. Completely different situation from the shitshow that was the Cyberpunk launch in which Sony did the right thing and told them to take their ball and go home. No Man's Sky is now the game they promised years ago. They have their redemption and they earned it. I have a hard time seeing how CDPR can actually achieve what they promised from what they released. Like the way they sold the story turned out to be completely different than what the game became. I don't think we'll ever see their original vision or scale.
@RememberThe357. Your comment is spiteful as it takes a couple of facts and deliberately twists them with fiction to suit an immature narrative.
You say "No Man's Sky had their development completely fucked by a flood and Sony sort of shrugged and told them to release it anyway". In reality, what happened was when Hello Games experienced a flood on the 24th December 2013 just days after demoing it for the first time at the VGX awards. No Man's Sky was released on the 9th of August 2016.
https://www.polygon.com/201...
It was after the awards that Sony secured a timed console exclusive, and Sony did not pressure Hello Games to release the game early. In fact, Shuhei Yoshida in an interview with Eurogamer said Hello Games oversold the capabilities of the game. He said: "I had the opportunity to play the game right before launch - and I restarted playing the game on launch day with the Day One patch - so I could see the struggle for the developers to get the game out in the state that they wanted. I understand some of the criticisms especially Sean Murray is getting, because he sounded like he was promising more features in the game from day one."
https://www.eurogamer.net/a...
@RememberThe357
Flood or not, they still released a shitty unfinished game which was a fragment of what they promised compared to all the PR interviews and gameplay videos.
They might have supported it and changed it over the years, good for them but I mean did they really have that much of a choice? If they moved on they'd never be trusted again. Besides I still don't think the game it is now is on the same level as what they originally promised and hyped up, it's better but it's still not there and I don't think it ever will be.
Indie Studio or an AAA one, gamers should never forget.
I really don't know why people give Hello Games a free pass because they've kept supporting it, I mean Fallout 76 is still getting supported but I'm not giving them a free pass, I still remember how they launched it.
Oh damn you right they did really pull a CDPR back in the day. Guess they got me with the PR on both sides of that shit show. But that doesn't change the fact that they turned the game around and today it's incredible.
And Plumbus, Sony doesn't need you to cape for them Capitain. I'm not spiteful, just ignorant lol
I agree with the sentiment here squire, but I do think you are grossly underselling how expertly crafted the Ori games are.
That is true but a consumer has a right to get what they pay for. Those who bought Ori got just that and nothing less.
The only thing I'll contest in this article is that they downplay what Hello Games has done in NMS and they act as if they still haven't delivered on "promises" when in reality they've gone way beyond that in the last few years.
They deserved shit for their release and expectations, but they stuck it out until it not only met what players expected but have done way more than that since then.
The question here is if CDPR will do the same or not. There's no excusing their release, but how they recover from it says a whole lot about them.
I still don't understand how people were so taken by surprise at NMS. You could watch long gameplay sessions well before release and see what the game was. Granted, it wasn't what we all had hoped for from the initial trailers, but it wasn't like you couldn't see exactly what the game was before it launched.
Very true. I watched gameplay trailers & made up my mind that NMS was not the game for me.
Because the gameplay trailers were fake and contained fleets and space wars and battles between factions. that to my knowledge are still to this day not in the game. Certainly weren’t in it for the first year of release. It was so fake that they got taken to court in the UK by the Advertising Standards Agency which was unprecedented for a game.
Still confuses me why we still get people with this “I watched the gameplay sessions I knew what I was getting”.
No one knew what we were getting because we got something very different. Fact. Whether you like it or not.
Yes, some of those things were scaled down (fleets are in the game, just smaller than in old trailers).
But I'll return to my point that it was fair to be disappointed the game was scaled down (as so many games are), but you should have been disappointed when they showed the game in the months before release and it was not what the trailers from 2013-14 looked like.
Put differently, if I tell you that I'm going to sell you a Porsche for $10,000 dollars, and I send you a picture of a Porsche, you have a right to be excited, and then when I show up on the day of the purchase with a used Toyota Camry instead, you have a right to be mad that I didn't bring a Porsche. But what is silly is to then give me your $10,000 in exchange for the used Camry, drive it for a week, then complain all over the internet that I tricked you into buying a Camry instead of a Porsche.
Like I said fleets were not in the game at all at launch. No small fleets. No fleets at all. The same as the flourishing varied wildlife or vegetation. The same as the dynamic wind and storms environmental simulations. The same as the spaceships. The same as the multiplayer.
Your analogy makes absolutely no sense and is not relevant in anyway to the situation.
See, your comment is getting into the arbitrary. "Flourishing wildlife and vegetation" is a subjective term, so this is just an instance where people like you decided what they expected the game to be, then said "the liezzz" when it was different than what you concocted in your head.
The game absolutely had wind and storms at launch, so you are outing yourself a little bit on that one.
Also it had spaceships, so I'm going to assume that's another case of "in my imagined version there was more variety, the liezzzzz!"
Also, they took great pains years before the game launched, even in the period where they were arguably misrepresenting features compared to the final version (again, you could have seen that these features were scaled back in the gameplay shown leading up to launch), to explain that the "multiplayer" portion of the game was passive multiplayer like Journey, not co op like Destiny (source: https://www.gameinformer.co...
The whole "multiplayer" thing is the perfect example of people creating features in their heads rather than paying attention to what they were directly told about the game.
And my analogy is perfect. You got mad because the thing you bought was the thing you were shown right before purchase, rather than what you were shown years before.
No you’re just making shit up. Is there still the wildlife and vegetation that was shown in the initial gameplay trailers? Still to this day, no there is not!
Yes of course the game launched with wind and storms I didn’t state they didn’t. I said they were no longer the environments simulations that were shown in the gameplay demos. Much like watch dogs.
Again, of course it had spaceships. It’s a spaceship game. It didn’t have the ships advertised or anything on the same technical level.
They explicitly stated in interviews that full multiplayer would feature and that “it would be technically possible to meet your friend online but due to its massive procedural worlds it would be almost impossible. You would never find the same world” this was then later PROVEN false and he had to apologise. That is why multiplayer suddenly had to be addressed as it was also printed on the game case.
You can’t just twist facts because it upsets your ideals!
They got taken to court for false advertising and forced to fix their game! What’s wrong with you people. It’s fact. Why are you wasting your time and everyone else’s pretending that never happened?
He is 100% right, but sorry, ori ran also like shit in the beginning. Sometimes like 5fps in some scenes.
He had an interview with Digital Foundry for Will of the Wisps where he expressed his and the team's disappointment with how it launched.
It's a vastly different reaction to, for example, the CEO of CDPR liking then unliking Tweets slamming Sony for pulling the game after they themselves directed users to Sony for wanting refunds on their deliberately-unfinished product...
And forgot to talk to Sony about said refunds. . . What a moron.
The fact that management at CDPR is still intact is reflective of how seriously they took this fk up. They got their money and they're gonna move on.
The game had awful sound glitches for me that made it unplayable for 2 months after launch.
Is it wrong of me to say that his games are associated with a company that is known for being one of the best snake oil salesmen in the industry?
No, that's fair. MS has made a lot of money by doing just that. And they enabled Molyneux all those years.
But Ori wasn't one of those products, so aside from taking an easy shot at MS, it really doesn't change things.
I'd be pissed too if I was him.
Weren't we all pissed off at these games? They're almost black holes of revenue for the rest of the industry. Someone who actually kept their word and worked for it lost sales to broken games that over promised.
@remember
Yep, I thought it was pretty universal.
I get the general comment that MS is guilty of a lot of overhyped nonsense over the years. And no one can ever say that they weren't called out on it (especially on resetera of all places).
But both Ori titles were amazing.
Just like any line of work you may be in, imagine if someone else in your field gets tons of hype and attention over your own great efforts, and it turns out that they screw up and drastically underdeliver.
I know I have colleagues like that. I'd love to vent about them.
You aren't lying so no, it isn't wrong of you to say it. I wonder what this man has to say about crackdown 3 and the power of the cloud btw.
No Man's Sky wasn't a surprise to anyone who was actually paying attention and was a really small team. Guy is an ass for calling them out.
Yep. It's baffling. You could watch long gameplay videos of the game several months before it actually launched. Also, for all the flack Sean Murray gets, he specifically explained in 2014 that NMS wasn't going to be a multiplayer game like Destiny that you could play with your friends (source: https://www.gameinformer.co...
All the youtubers and their parrots freaked out at his "liez" because he said the game has multiplayer, but he had taken pains for years to explain that the multiplayer features were passive like Journey, not active co-op like Destiny. Honestly the snake oil salesmen for NMS were youtubers who apparently watched a trailer, decided what they wanted the game to be and hyped it up as if it was going to be that game, ignored all the information that explained how it was really a fairly simple indie game, then freaked out at release when the game turned out to be what it had been in all the previews rather than what they had imagined in their heads.
Yeah no. There are plenty of videos with him blatantly lying, plenty. He knew exactly what he was doing.
@Aussiesummer
I mean, there are videos of him from a few years before the game talking about features that didn't end up in it, yes (many of the "lies" are more based on arbitrary expectations, but he did say there would be a planetary physics system that wasn't in the final game). But literally almost every big game cuts features (this doesn't make it okay, I'm just saying NMS wasn't out of the ordinary in this respect). Plus, my main point is that there were long gameplay videos and impression pieces of what was essentially the final game out in the months before launch. So even whatever disappointments were reasonable should have happened in the months before launch, not after.
They said the game would be one thing, and it released as another. they mislead their customers. It doesn't matter what size the team was, they could have been more honest about what features would and would not make it into the game well before release.
It's easy to look back and, with the benefit of hindsight, reinterpret what was stated, but when the overwhelming majority of customers were expecting a different product to what was delivered, there was clearly some misleading going on.
How is he an 'ass' for calling out his straight up lies? This is what he is talking about, gamers just don't seem to care when these devices lie and decieve. They make all the excuses under the sun.
Glad someone Finally someone set him straight..
“No I’m not harsh at all and you don’t have the full picture,”
Great way to sum this up in my opinion. We KNOW next to nothing about NX and speaking early on support is asinine. People say historically, Nintendo has tried hard to be self sufficient. That is true in more recent times, but Nintendo back in the day actually had great support all around. Final Fantasy VII was actually supposed to be multiplatform but the N64 created a limitation there. Companies had every intention of supporting Nintendo but it was GameCube going forward that changed the trend quite a bit. Interestingly enough, it's also the beginning of Iwata's leadership. He did great in making gamers out of non gamers. It just didn't play out well for Wii U.
Nintendo is under new management now, however due to unfortunate circumstances. Now, it looks like Nintendo is working on a console that's power competitive (perhaps superior) to the point that it can at least run Unreal Engine 4.
It's a new day. With a new company head comes a new vision. Just ask Spencer. And shame on Mahler for assuming the worst.
This guy has gotten way too much attention.
“Former PlayStation guy supporting Nintendo against unprofessional rant gets tacit support from Microsoft guy.”
Haha. I love that line. Can't wait to see what Shahid is up to.
Good.. Those dev kits are to be kept secret from everyone.. Indie devs that dont have a good relationship with nintendo might leak info about it or something.. Maybe later they can get one but for now, wait it out.. Im sure nintendos trusted dev studios have them and are making some killer IPs