Episode 89: Summer Catch Up and Updates

First, we have Microsoft's.

We know that they've made some pretty poor decisions over the last few years.

They were under different leadership than they are now.

But of course, one thing you can count on like the rising sun with Microsoft is layoffs.

So right after we recorded our top 10 Capcom games episode, Microsoft at the beginning of July announced their annual layoffs.

So they chopped out 3,200 people.

And what makes that worse is that there's 1,600 people who are losing their job pretty much within the next, I'd say a couple of months now.

And then by sometime next year, another 1600 are losing their jobs and they don't know who's being cut yet.

I can only imagine the anxiety and how terrifying it is to be working at one of the companies or one of the developers that Microsoft owns and knowing that you might be on the chopping block at some point.

I mean, imagine the dedication it takes because we're still getting some good games and whatever they're making, they're focused on.

But at the same time, like if you were at your regular job and you knew your head was on a chopping block, you just didn't know when.

Yeah.

that'd be like a giant middle finger to the corporation like you know what i don't care i'm gonna check out now because yeah you've already checked that's the

challenge but it's like also the challenge too is that the gaming industry is in such a bad spot right now with even stuff beyond microsoft of developers shutting down like the creators of moss who they made this really cool vr game on ps4 and they just released um a non-vr version on switch 2 and everything else called moss something chronicles they shut down because you know it's just that's just the state of the gaming industry there's a lot of companies that are using shut down so the challenge is that you may have a job at microsoft at one of the developers now but then it's like it's hard to get a job anywhere right now and no game

is safe like what were what were some of the ones that came out recently that critical acclaim sold tons of copies and then you still hear about the labs

here's the one that really really irritated the hell out of me was they gutted id id software the most iconic legendary developer and i'd say They're up there with the Nintendos and some of the other developers we could probably make examples of, but they did so much for gaming when they started in the early 90s with John Carmack and John Romero and the whole team they did there, right? So they apparently gutted more than half the team there.

Their team now is apparently smaller than what they started Doom 2016 with.

And all three Doom games critically acclaimed, sold pretty well.

And also their intake engine is one of the best in the business right now.

It's so scalable.

It looks amazing.

And they weren't even safe.

So they got half the team there.

They were about to shut down Compulsion Games, who did South of Midnight, which is a game I eventually played and really enjoyed.

It's a different artistic kind of platformer game.