I don’t normally go into the video game domain as part of my writings. That has to change today as we’re seeing a fundamental shift in the way entertainment companies are going to have to approach those properties going forward. We’re going to take a look today at two different properties under the direction of the same huge corporation, two different strategies, and two totally different results. This is reverberating around Hollywood; it is inescapably poignant for all those involved.
Halo: A Lesson in Total Failure
Microsoft spent half a billion dollars on Halo Infinite, a game that was supposed to kick off a decade of constant Halo content and a bulwark for driving nonstop Xbox Game Pass subscriptions. But that record-breaking amount of money didn’t buy Microsoft what they thought. Although the game came out strong (following a one-year delay and a crazy development cycle), players soon realized that this constant drip of content was more like an iceberg. Glacially slow releases of new material, combined with a bare-bones multiplayer experience, meant that once the glitz had worn off, there just wasn’t much left to do. Yes, the game definitely showed massive amounts of money had been spent, but it was so much on polish and so little on substance. As a result, a live service platform concept Microsoft had invested hundreds of millions of dollars into has already failed.
How badly has it gone? Worse than almost any sane person could have imagined:
In the last day, 9,000 peak players were on Halo: MCC while 7,800 were on Infinite. This disparity opened up officially for the first time on Tuesday, and it’s possible it could continue until season 2 launches, where I would then expect to see a surge for Infinite, even as the game has heavily struggled on Steam since launch, where it started with a quarter million players, and is now at a fraction of that.
A lot of credit has to be given to the Halo: MCC team for this latest update which includes Flood Firefight, a much-requested and instantly beloved new mode which has helped herd people back into the game. But even if MCC just got an update and Infinite is at the tail end of the season, if you’re Microsoft or 343, I don’t think that you want to see your anthology game that came out in 2014 outperforming your brand new series entry that came out six months ago in 2021.
— Paul Tassi, Forbes
To put that in perspective, let’s imagine that Bethesda were to release a brand-new sequel to Skyrim running on modern hardware. Let’s imagine its budget for production and marketing was the biggest in the history of gaming. Now imagine that six months later Skyrim has more players. That wouldn’t just be a failure… it would be such a catastrophic collapse in execution of a new game that people behind it should consider career changes. For Microsoft, they just blew half a billion dollars and the result is a product that probably harms Halo more than it does anything else. In other words, doing nothing would have been better and $500,000,000 less expensive.
But it gets worse…
They also handed the property over to Paramount+ where the new Halo TV Show is performing so badly that it’s hard to imagine anyone funding future seasons. It’s so bad that Paramount+ put the show’s first episode on YouTube and it appears it was downvoted so strongly (at a time when nobody downvotes because you need tech savvy to install a Chrome extension to even see them) that Paramount+ hid the thing off of YouTube!
I could go on and on about how badly Halo was bungled on Paramount+, but Ryan in the video covers it quite nicely. Suffice to say that when you gloat about throwing away your source material, the people who loved the source material (i.e. fans of the franchise) are going to gloat about throwing you away.
Sonic: A Lesson in Total Success
But it’s not all bad over at Paramount. In fact, they have a video game franchise that has and is making them fantastic wads of cash. Sonic the Hedgehog is fast becoming the coveted children’s cinematic universe where kiddos watch superheroes duke it out movie-after-movie before they grow up and move onto Marvel or DC… or who knows, maybe Sonic will grow up with them?
The sequel is outpacing the original Sonic the Hedgehog movie with analysts now thinking it could reach as high as $200 million domestic box office before it ends its run. You might scoff at that number after seeing Spider-man No Way Home stats, but remember: Sonic is the second movie in the franchise, Spider-man was the culmination of decades. Sonic is growing and making profits, something Disney’s Marvel films did not succeed in accomplishing during 2021. IF SEGA can pull off a tremendous feat and produce a great Sonic the Hedgehog game this winter (that one is certainly not a given), you could see the rise of a video game property that might even eclipse Nintendo’s Mario. Of course, Nintendo knows that and is preparing their own Mario movie for good measure.
The lessons to be learned here:
- Money doesn’t buy passionate artists who are true to the customer. Sometimes money just buys bloat.
- Honoring the source material and the franchise matters. It matters a lot.
- Creatives are great. Creatives without boundaries are awful. Creatives confined within parameters set by a visionary are sublime.
- A good story will make investors a massive amount of money compared to ideology. Avoid ideology like the plague in mass media productions.
It’s just unfortunate that Microsoft is learning this one the hard way. They may also take quite a few more blows to the chin as they acquire Activision-Blizzard — a company I am hearing has become a woke epicenter since getting rid of their corrupt overlords. As has been said before on this site though, any of these CEOs or Boards that think they’re too big to fail should take a hard look at SEARS. Bad decisions have bad consequences.
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