Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2025, including an update on its gaming business.
Cultured Vultures: You love the SNES, we love the SNES, so let’s look at the best SNES games ever together.
Former Santa Monica Studio writer Alanah Pearce has shared some insight on the game industry, and it's not great.
AAA has gone downhill as they focus on huge profits. Indie and other smaller games however have been amazing not chasing trends and the next big thing.
In all honesty, a significant majority of indies and smaller games fail. At best a you might hear about 10-20 indies that get attention or do well, but 100s more fail. AAA games can still be the bread and butter of the industry, but greedy executives would kill a good game if it doesn't make them a lot of money
Nail on the head. AAA has lost the magic and focused on profits and "player engagement". Gaming is an art form, and like always the CEO fat cats roll in to capitalize at the cost of innovation, passion, wild experimentation. We need a major realignment in the industry and it starts with gamers voting with their wallets.
I think that's already happening, we're seeing commercial successes in studios like Larion and whoever made Kingdom Come for example. Double Fine is another good example. Studios who are filled with and run by people who give a fuck that aren't hamstrung by money men. That's the answer and consumers are favouring it more than the soulless AAAs that have been put out. I don't doubt there is talent at Ubisoft for example but when they're told exactly what the end product needs to be by people who don't know what consumers actually want, it's always going to result in the same rehashed but slightly shinier slop.
Exactly. I do believe we are starting to see a shift in consumer habits. The market is saturated with GaaS and battlepasses, seasons, etc. We can't all play the same four games until the end of time. Fatigue is setting in and the industry needs to get back to making new experiences rather than chasing the latest "money maker".
I was wondering whether this is perception or actually happening but it feels to me, as a semi old gamer, there is more choice than ever and as such people are now much choosier about how they spend their time and money gaming. Certainly noticing this when it comes to GaaS as you mentioned, the question always has to be why would I play this instead of what I'm already playing. Anthem is going to have a real hard time prying away people, especially with a premium price tag that screams money men as a decision.
Nah. Devs need to pay the bills. Uninspired games fail, but artsy games usually fail even harder.
She didn't even call out Stanfield's PNG file planets when she flew through one. She just 'yelled' something stupid like 'flat earth'. She wasn't even taken aback in the slightest. I am not sure she isn't a part of the problem.
She's always been a narcissist bimbo, I'm even more surprised she's not in only fans yet.
I wasn't sure of the actual number of years just seemed like it wasn't that long ago when I heard that she got a job as a writer there, guess time flies. 4 years being "pretty good" or not is subjective depending on ones perspective. The question might be, was four years long enough to make a discernible writing contribution to a video game based on how long development cycles are these days?
She left SMS because she needed to go back to Australia to support a parent with cancer.
She quit SM studio to focus on her own stuff, There was a video where she explained all of it.
Greed , lack of innovation and agendas
Why do we rave about a good indie game but we avoid a AAA game.
NVIDIA’s RTX 50 “Blackwell” architecture has been a bit of a bore for us gamers. Apart from Multi Frame Generation, which has limited use-case scenarios, there isn’t much to be excited about. It is achieved using GPU-side Flip Metering. The optical field data is generated using AI models in the Tensor cores.
To put it simply... two steps forward, one step back.
Another win for Microsoft. The haters can use the dog door to leave.
Hardware revenue will probably sit somewhere between 800M - 1B for the quarter.
And content & services make up around 75 - 80% of total gaming revenue. Total gaming revenue is up 5%.
While positive numbers are positive, I don't find +5% year-on-year in total revenue a great, not even a good result considering what they've been throwing into the pot since their last Q3.
I don't think they are happy with only a +5% payoff since and compared to last year's Q3, which was abysmal, despite these numbers are indicating "Positive!" at 1st glance.
Especially since in terms of revenue, hardware doesn't contribute a lot to overall revenue anymore ("only" -6% down, because there's no hardware really being sold anymore).
Well what do you know. When you release good games, good consecutive 1st party you output you actually make money.
Minus hardware of course.
I'll give credit where it's due. MS is starting to capture that old 360 energy when it comes to games and releases. It took them 14 years of having a clue but they seem to be doing it now. All will be lost if they step on rakes like they're known to do. Who knows how long it'll last.