The layoffs at one of your studios most able to ship games is a bonkers, stupid decision; but pivoting Obsidian to making a new Fallout game is a good business decision if you don’t care about what your creatives feel led to create.
New Vegas Fans: “We want Obsidian to make Fallout again”
Monkeys paw curls
I feel obligated to point out that this won’t be the same Obsidian who made New Vegas. Same company, but (mostly) not the same devs or the same leadership.
Though I’m a little hopeful that Josh Sawyer manages to make something neat.
And people will talk themselves out of enjoying a game for that, too.
It’s gotta really suck to be some employee at a cool studio… And then microfuckingsoft buys it. I’d be wicked pissed at whoever made that decision.
I don’t know why you’d want to work at Bethesda these days, but Id Soft does not deserve to be in that spot.
Stoked Obsidian gets to do a proper title though. I hope they can use a different engine this time.
Eh, it’s the circle of
lifegame development.Small studio makes great games, gets bought by big studio, big studio’s management flood small studio’s staff, the games developed suffer, big studio makes cuts firing almost everyone who was worth a damn, small studio shambles on in name only for a while longer before being mercifully put down. Meanwhile some of the fired devs band together creating a new small studio which makes great games, attracting the attention of a big studio…
True true
I don’t know why anyone would work at one of these studios. Obviously people are staying because the jobs are still lucrative but who is it that’s walking into these super unstable jobs under a company that’s been doing nothing but layoffs and shutdowns for the last few years?
Anecdotally, I was illegally fired by Microsoft in December 2024 because I helped form a massive union earlier that year. I want my job back because I want a union contract.
I have friends at Zenimax that stayed because they have a union contract. There are currently 14 unions at Microsoft actively negotiating for their first contract. The thousands of people who are protected by a union stay because they have a union.
I’ve been laid off from Microsoft before (you just collect unemployment until they hire back in three months. No union) but I have a feeling these are more permanent layoffs.
Being a part of a union is absolutely a good reason to stay. If it guarantees you a paycheck.
Sometimes, people leave a company and move to another one, only for that first company to buy the company they moved to…
Knew someone this happened to.
Someone with that skill set who wants to keep making games, looking for any port in a storm.
Yup.
With the crazy number of layoffs from the AI frenzy… for those people, some money is better than no money. Even if the job won’t be there in 6 months.
I mean, if it’s with the intention of making enough money, experience and connections to go indie, I can respect aspiring developers who are doing the best with the hand they’re given.
The entire games industry, and software development in general, is unstable right now. The few companies that are still stable aren’t hiring. If you have a job, you try to keep it. Because trying to get a new job will be an absolute nightmare. I’m in that situation myself right now.
It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t sort of situation.
The games industry has a lot of shitty business practices in general. Job security is almost nonexistent unless you manage to get a key position at a successful studio. Otherwise, you’re more likely to be hired for one project and then let go just before release, so you don’t get to collect the sales bonus. Some contracted employees are even omitted from the credits, so you don’t even get much of a portfolio boost out of it.
Larger companies like Microsoft are shitty in their own ways, but they don’t tend to do the hire-fire cycle of game dev as much as other studios may. So it was seen as stable work for a lot of these studios that were acquired. Especially for the former Activision studios that were falling apart at the seams while being rocked by a sequential train of scandals.
And by all accounts it truly was good times for a lot of developers at Xbox, where they were given resources to develop whatever they wanted with relatively little corporate oversight. But then these teams that were previously given carte blanche on their projects suddenly had the rug pulled out from under them by new management. They suddenly care about results, and that’s apparently now the developers’ fault for just doing what they were told was okay before.
Damn, Obsidian makes good RPGs but they’re not so great at making the kind of open world sandbox RPG that Fallout has been since the 3D era, so idk if they’ll do better than last time where they gave us a great RPG hidden deep under the baggy clothes of an absolutely awful open world. I like FNV for what it is, but they’re really not the right studio for modern 3d Fallout. I hope they let Obsidian make the more classic RPG style of Fallout that they clearly wanted to make with FNV, but I highly doubt that would happen.
Smart money is that it’s built on the bones of The Outer Worlds 2, which was great. Failing that, a far dumber but still possible decision would be to build it on the bones of Fallout 76 or Starfield.
Build it on the bones of The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard!
Battlespire, or bust
Honestly I am surprised they didn’t do this years ago. It makes sense to let the studio that made the best Fallout game continue making Fallout games while the other studio works on the long-neglected Elder Scrolls 6. Otherwise we’d just be looking at decade-long droughts between Elder Scrolls and Fallout games at the pace BGS develops.
Especially since Bethesda’s Fallouts suck because of the thing that makes TES great - what they do is power fantasy. That’s great for Nirn, since you almost always turn out to be some sort of demigod anyway. But a post-apocalyptic RPG? You’re meant to be scraping by in dirt. Sure, let the player become a wasteland badass, but not godlike. That sucks.
I guess we’ve eventually come full circle?
