There have been a lot of good responses to the studio closures and good articles written, but this is not one of them.
Hi-Fi Rush was not a small project, and putting it in the same bucket as Balatro and Manor Lords is outright bizarre. It’s far closer to AAA budget scale than it would be solo/small indie projects.
It’s not AAA by any stretch. It was sold at a fraction of the usual price point, it’s advertising was non-existant, and it makes no effort to do the usual AAA things: live-service, online multiplayer, “you can play it forever”, etc. are are not present.
But putting it side-by-side with Manor Lords and Balatro, the latter of which was a single-person dev, also doesn’t suit it. It has a real studio, a dev team with experience, and at least enough of a budget to license real music from popular (or at least, once popular) artists. I’d perhaps agree with your statement that it’s closer to AAA than to a “small dev” game, but it is true that it’s a “smaller game that [gives Microsoft] prestiege and awards”.
This is a great article highlighting the pig-headed double speak going on at Microsoft’s gaming divisions. On the one hand, they’re cutting studios and supposidly refocusing on their core offerings, while simultaneously describing the experiences they want to offer as exactly the studios they just cut. The absolute worst part is I can’t help but suspect that they’re going to take the IP, push it on a different dev team that they control and give it the Fable treatment: “this IP was so well received; make a sequel that checks all these boxes that our market research data tells us popular, profitable games have” while conviniently ignoring the passion and vision that the original devs poured into the original title.
I see the contradiction. And I’m not saying the game was AAA-sized, although live service, multiplayer, or ongoing support are not requirements for the term. It’s a budget classification. Hi-Fi Rush had 1,400 people in its credits.
My comparison to Balatro was more in the line of “Cleopatra lived closer to present day than the era the Great Pyramid was built.” We’re talking about massive gaps in scale, and gaming communities tend to have trouble reconciling that. Balatro is not Hades, Hades is not Hi-Fi Rush, Hi-Fi Rush is not Starfield.
There have been a lot of good responses to the studio closures and good articles written, but this is not one of them.
Hi-Fi Rush was not a small project, and putting it in the same bucket as Balatro and Manor Lords is outright bizarre. It’s far closer to AAA budget scale than it would be solo/small indie projects.
It’s weird because you’re both right and wrong.
It’s not AAA by any stretch. It was sold at a fraction of the usual price point, it’s advertising was non-existant, and it makes no effort to do the usual AAA things: live-service, online multiplayer, “you can play it forever”, etc. are are not present.
But putting it side-by-side with Manor Lords and Balatro, the latter of which was a single-person dev, also doesn’t suit it. It has a real studio, a dev team with experience, and at least enough of a budget to license real music from popular (or at least, once popular) artists. I’d perhaps agree with your statement that it’s closer to AAA than to a “small dev” game, but it is true that it’s a “smaller game that [gives Microsoft] prestiege and awards”.
This is a great article highlighting the pig-headed double speak going on at Microsoft’s gaming divisions. On the one hand, they’re cutting studios and supposidly refocusing on their core offerings, while simultaneously describing the experiences they want to offer as exactly the studios they just cut. The absolute worst part is I can’t help but suspect that they’re going to take the IP, push it on a different dev team that they control and give it the Fable treatment: “this IP was so well received; make a sequel that checks all these boxes that our market research data tells us popular, profitable games have” while conviniently ignoring the passion and vision that the original devs poured into the original title.
I see the contradiction. And I’m not saying the game was AAA-sized, although live service, multiplayer, or ongoing support are not requirements for the term. It’s a budget classification. Hi-Fi Rush had 1,400 people in its credits.
My comparison to Balatro was more in the line of “Cleopatra lived closer to present day than the era the Great Pyramid was built.” We’re talking about massive gaps in scale, and gaming communities tend to have trouble reconciling that. Balatro is not Hades, Hades is not Hi-Fi Rush, Hi-Fi Rush is not Starfield.