ProtoByte
Member
If it was even a possibility. Who would want to salvage this or be allowed to do it?
As much as the likes of Spencer and Booty deserve flak for their years long incompetency, the truth is that if it wasn't them playing kick the can down the road, it would be someone else doing the same thing or no one at all.
Don't forget, they have a boss too. Nadella has kept that leadership infrastructure in place because Spencer continuously made promises to somehow shape the games market into something of a scale and nature that folds into the Windows frame of business. Desperation lead them too close to the sun, buying too much, too quickly - when they've actively damaged the little that they owned prior - and now they've gone from being something Microsoft could do without to something Microsoft needs to recoup their investments on. Yeah yeah, "trillion dollar corporation" (in non-liquid valuation only, but whatever). They didn't get there by being loose with their resources and time.
It's very different at each of the major publishers, but you can extend this logic to almost all executive decision making.
Not to say that there shouldn't be any sympathy on behalf of a studio that gets shut down like Tango, but iirc, Shinji Makami left because he thought Tango would be safe with Microsoft? I could've told him that they were not safe simply because Microsoft had money - money that Tango in particular wasn't making for Bethesda in the first place, and definitely nothing that would've impressed Microsoft; that the only thing that could've hoped to protect them is their pedigree by virtue of having his name attached to it.
Any of these other studios or studio heads feeling the pressure after having sold themselves to likes of Microsoft or Embracer or Sony (looking at you Bungie) or any given publishers should not be surprised, imo. They themselves should understand the industry and their buyer well enough to forecast what their standing is going to be. Embracer was never going to work out, because trying to become a major publisher by swallowing up dozens of mid rate eurojank sweatshops would've been a laughable strategy in the 2000s, let alone now.
As much as the likes of Spencer and Booty deserve flak for their years long incompetency, the truth is that if it wasn't them playing kick the can down the road, it would be someone else doing the same thing or no one at all.
Don't forget, they have a boss too. Nadella has kept that leadership infrastructure in place because Spencer continuously made promises to somehow shape the games market into something of a scale and nature that folds into the Windows frame of business. Desperation lead them too close to the sun, buying too much, too quickly - when they've actively damaged the little that they owned prior - and now they've gone from being something Microsoft could do without to something Microsoft needs to recoup their investments on. Yeah yeah, "trillion dollar corporation" (in non-liquid valuation only, but whatever). They didn't get there by being loose with their resources and time.
It's very different at each of the major publishers, but you can extend this logic to almost all executive decision making.
Not to say that there shouldn't be any sympathy on behalf of a studio that gets shut down like Tango, but iirc, Shinji Makami left because he thought Tango would be safe with Microsoft? I could've told him that they were not safe simply because Microsoft had money - money that Tango in particular wasn't making for Bethesda in the first place, and definitely nothing that would've impressed Microsoft; that the only thing that could've hoped to protect them is their pedigree by virtue of having his name attached to it.
Any of these other studios or studio heads feeling the pressure after having sold themselves to likes of Microsoft or Embracer or Sony (looking at you Bungie) or any given publishers should not be surprised, imo. They themselves should understand the industry and their buyer well enough to forecast what their standing is going to be. Embracer was never going to work out, because trying to become a major publisher by swallowing up dozens of mid rate eurojank sweatshops would've been a laughable strategy in the 2000s, let alone now.
