Obsidian's modest ambition with Avowed is just what Game Pass, Xbox, and the wider industry needs - but will Microsoft let them stick to it?
Obsidian's modest ambition with Avowed is just what Game Pass, Xbox, and the wider industry needs - but will Microsoft let them stick to it?
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Obsidian's modest ambition with Avowed is just what Game Pass, Xbox, and the wider industry needs - but will Microsoft let them stick to it?
Lol, no, the answer is they will make cuts to Obsidian.
I'd normally say this is crazy talk given that Avowed is almost certainly profitable, but they did decide they wanted nothing to do with Tango Gameworks after making Hi-Fi Rush, so it wouldn't be beyond them to do something this stupid. To Obsidian's credit, they've got a bunch of irons in the fire at any given time, basically everything they make reviews well, and they don't overscope their projects to the point that they need to sell 3 million copies to break even, so even if they're small potatoes on a spreadsheet, they still ought to always look good on a spreadsheet. I hear Obsidian ranks highly in "best places to work" polls too.
The problem is that even when a studio publishes a successful game which brings in sales over many months, you can still generally reduce short-term costs by firing those devs. And investors love short-term profits.
I have nothing to corroborate this other than my intuition, but I’d bet the outcry against Microsoft in the wake of them shuttering Tango will make them far more hesitant to do something similar in the future. They have done a lot of work to move away from the GFWL era and have clawed just a little bit of goodwill back which does a lot to sell games, and the Tango closure was clearly an own goal that really hurt their image.