Something Weird Is Going On With 'Hellblade 2'...

so it's been a pretty rough week or so for Xbox and you know what they could really use is like Adia just something to have a win If Only They had some big game or something that they could latch on to and show everybody yes you're frustrated with what we're doing but we have something awesome and here you go if only there was something like that well you see there might actually be something like that but the team that handles the marketing over at Xbox seems to be dedicated to preventing anybody from ever hearing about it I'm of course talking about hellblade which is a game that's slated to come out on the 21st of this month it's supposed to be out in less than two weeks and basically nobody has heard a damn thing about this game and the only thing that Xbox has done is send out the occasional tweet or retweet something else that somebody posted and that's about it there's been no marketing campaign for this game and it is shocking this trailer that's on screen right now is from the game awards 2019 this was the the Showcase to demonstrate how powerful the Xbox series X and S were going to be look at what the next generation of gaming is going to be like yes it's in engine but still this is what the future of gaming looks like and that was at this point 5 years ago the game had all already been in development for 2 years before that all told it's been in the works for roughly 7 years is expected to be between 7 and 8 hours long when all is said and done and despite reportedly costing hundreds of millions of dollars especially when you factoring the acquisition cost of buying out the studio this game is getting no love when you look at everything no part of this makes sense either they have internal metrics and they expect this thing to flop and so they're not going to waste anyy money on it or they are throwing this game out to the Sharks and listen I'm saying this is somebody that really liked the first game I loved the original hellblade I did a critique of it it's one of like the first bigger videos I ever did on this channel I love the original game and I love Ninja Theory as a studio but this small series of tweets is basically all we've seen for this game in the last month and prior to that there was like a preview event that IGN for example got to go to and in that video they describe it as a beautiful nightmare they describe how it's very very visually stunning it is Cutting Edge when it comes to Graphics as you would expect and that's reaffirmed by how they've presented this game pretty much all of the preview events all of the little like developer directs that they've done everything focuses on the Fidelity the motion capture the performances all of that stuff which I'm sure is phenomenal but as we all know there's a little bit more to making a super high quality well-received video game there's all those pieces that have to fit together and then gameplay and it all has to be fluid and immersive blah blah blah there's a lot that goes into it but with all that said there's just something weird going on with Seno Wasaga hellblade 2 there's just something off everyone started Ming on Xbox when they posted on the 8th this is shortly after the news of all of the layoffs and everything happening they posted a picture of Sena with the title of the game and a date not even a link to their website to pre-order it or to pre-download it nothing like that they just posted a picture and everybody started joking a marketing wow biggest promotion this game will ever get can't believe they also closed their marketing department like there's it it's just it boggles the mind the day after they did post a more flushed out little advertisement they posted this a little video trailer and a little wish list splash screen and the link to it which again is at least something I would argue this is the bare minimum but I guess for hellblade it's it's the star treatment and what's really shocking is that like Xbox has done marketing before like they gave redfall the star AAA treatment that game was everywhere before it came out same with Starfield Starfield was everywhere just blown up with all sorts of advertising both online and then also in retail settings with like big posters at GameStop and Best Buy in places like that and hellblade has just got en nothing an hour ago I put up this poll uh because I just wanted to know how many of you guys had actually seen any marketing for this game outside of Xbox streams and stuff like that and I was planning on leaving this up for a full day but I got impatient and wanted to talk about this uh this game and and all of this crap so I just decided to make the video check on the the community tab I guess when this video goes up see what the vote count is up at that point but um I mean this is pretty pretty telling 92% of people out of right now just 4,300 votes but I have a community that's pretty in tune with gaming and if 4,300 people are saying that 92% of them have not seen any marketing for this game that's pretty shocking especially because this is supposed to be Xbox's big game for the first half of this year there's another thing that's a little bit weird with hellblade as well which is that the studio co-founder and like one of the directors for the original hellblade that I think was responsible for making it really really stand out and just be cutting edge especially for the time that was a guy by the name of tamim antoniadis antoniadis I'm not sure but this guy head honcho at Ninja Theory found her very very Hands-On within the the development of the first game and naturally when there's preview events for games like hellblade a lot of media that goes to those events are looking for the game's directors and stuff to interview them because it's usually in those interviews that you'll find out some of the most telling things about a game like when I went to that Avatar frontiers of Pandora preview event I got to interview the gaml director for that entire project and I asked him what the most important gameplay system was what was the system he thought players were sleeping on that was going to tie the whole game together and he said the Cooking System The Cooking System it was it was quite telling once I played the game I was like okay yeah I'm not sure if this is is going to come together if the Cooking System is the key to all of this and sure enough it didn't really uh come together in a beautiful pad or anything it just kind of was there anyway that's beside the point the reason I bring it up is because usually at these preview events you can interview the people that are most directly responsible for building these games out and the creative directors and Studio Founders and stuff are usually there as well and you can talk to them however when Forbes IGN and all those guys went to this preview event for hellblade they noticed a suspicious absence they noticed that tamim was not there and there were positive reactions people really liked the game people thought it was really shocking and stunning I mean like May cannot come soon enough I remember I can't remember the last time a game preview left me so excited to Dive Into The Full Experience like very glowing previews but it was odd because tamim was just not there and when they asked the rest of the Ninja Theory staff where he was they just said oh he left the company a little while ago uh which happens normally it's like a red flag when an executive or game director leaves in the middle of production normally that would be really concerning but in tamim's case I think there's a couple of extenda circumstances for one as I said he was one of the co-founders of the studio and Microsoft is reported to have spent $117 million acquiring the studio and that was revealed in 2018 and what we know is that tamim worked on the early like pre-production phase and stuff for hellblade 2 and left shortly after which would time out pretty well to like working on it for the first year from 2017 to 2018 after the studio is bought and then he took his tens of millions or whatever his cut was and went off and started Living a party lifestyle and I actually looked up his Instagram page uh which is public you can actually find it yourself too and he actually just like is posting pictures of him on like pirate ship and partying with like a bunch of girls more power to you dude I mean I it seems like he is living the dream he built a game Studio made a ton of money selling it to Microsoft and then he left and now it's just on boats partying with with girls in their 20s so Props props dude you did it you won life so some people have said like oh he left because he knew the game was going to be bad I I don't think that's what that is I'm going to be honest I think he just got a big payday and went off to party I don't know maybe he'll see this video and comment below and be like no the game's going to suck or he's going to be like hell yeah yeah I did I'm going living my best life I don't know my feeling is that he's probably just off partying cuz he got a big payday when they sold the studio that being said that's just one little weird thing in this broader Bush of weird things about hellblade 2 so frankly putting all of it together the departure of one of the head honchos at the studio Xbox's seeming mevolent towards this game the non-existent marketing camp campaign and the extremely protracted development cycle all Stacks up to me to say that something is just frankly off here I've been trying to figure it out because on the one hand I think hellblade 2 looks tremendous I think graphically looks stunning the puzzles look super super cool the combat while I'm sure very repetitive just like the first game seems to have undergone some changes and shifts to make it a little bit more streamlined and less frustrating and I I think they certainly have tackled this game with a much bigger budget and a much bigger scope and all of that's great but there's just something odd about it and it all reminds me of a saying which was never a tribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence and in light of a lot of Xbox's recent decisions I'm starting to think that incompetence and stupidity might just be more likely so when I look at something like their complete lack of marketing for health H Blade 2 I could interpret that as oh it's cuz they know that the game's going to be terrible it's because they know something that we don't their internal reviews show that this is going to be a disaster and they don't want to put money into something that's going to be a failure we could say that attributing it to like a malice or some sort of big master plan or conspiracy or it could simply be that they just don't really know what they're doing and are trying to cut costs any way they can including with marketing for the biggest game they've released this year and this rule of thumb applies to many many different things it doesn't have to just be like Xbox's incompetence when it comes to marketing hellblade 2 it can also come out with Studios releasing buggy broken versions of games like something like a cdpr like was it this big evil masterminded plan to sell people a broken game or did the executives just honestly have no idea how broken it was because everybody around them were yes men who didn't want to give them bad news and didn't want to upset the big boss man so they all just kept their m shut and then there was a disaster as a result in my opinion it's more likely that it's the ladder that sometimes there's just miscommunication or dysfunction that leads to cascading effects that are much more damning and damaging to the broader Enterprise and in the case of hellblade 2 I am worried that an otherwise great game could potentially suffer under the weight of something Beyond its control because at this point all of the preview events that have happened that is to say the one preview event that has happened the feedback from that event was extremely positive people thought the game looked and played tremendously well they were super excited to see how they would actually flashh this out into a final product and Ninja Theory has some amazing worldclass talent there is no debate about that these guys really really know what they're doing and they've been given pretty much as long as they want to to make this game almost all of the red flags for this game are coming directly from Xbox and their marketing approach for this game or seemingly lack thereof and this is the part that I think is really really crucial and if there's anyone out there that works at Xbox who ever sees this video please listen to me Baby Darling listen there's an old saying in politics specifically goes back to a political strategist from the 80s and the the saying is perception is reality and the meaning of that saying at the time was that if voters think that a candidate eats puppies that's what you have to deal with right like it doesn't matter if that's true or not true you have to deal with that perception if everybody sees you as a crook you have to deal with the perception that you're a crook and handle that even if it's not true people think it's true and so you have to handle it that way and in the case of these games and within marketing and business the same rule generally applies if you have a game like hellblade that is in fact really really good it doesn't really matter if the perception is that Xbox themselves don't think it's good they think it's bad which is why they're not marketing it doesn't change the fact that the game is actually really good but you have to deal with the perception that not even Xbox believes in this game not even Xbox wants to spend money on this game marketing it so why should I spend money in time playing it you know you have to deal with the perception and the message that Xbox is sending to Gamers about hellblade 2 is that they don't think this game is worth spending money on marketing it and if they don't think it's worth spending money on it if a three trillion doll company in the form of Microsoft does not think it's worth marketing and spending money on it there why should Gamers feel like it's worth spending their own money on and I know it's like it's Game Pass whatever you're still paying for Game Pass it's not technically a free game you are paying for it and the real tragedy of this is that a game like Blade 2 could be tremendous it could end up being a 9 or a 10 out of 10 but it could still be a commercial flop simply because Xbox has no idea what they're doing right now it is extremely likely that Ninja Theory has been working for 7 years on a game which will not be for everybody but that will be incredibly impressive in many many ways and despite that fact and all of the crazy amount of effort that went into its production the game could still be considered a failure because Xbox their parent company was incompetent and this brings us back to the core problem within Xbox that they're dealing with and will continue to deal with if a studio like Tango Game Works they put out the best game according to critics that Xbox had last year and they were shut down a little over a year later because Xbox didn't think it hit their targets or was dissatisfied with it or just didn't like the studio who knows why they closed them they've offered many conflicting explanations uh of what they thought high-fi rush and the studio and all that stuff so who knows why it actually happened but the perception because again perception is the reality you have to deal with the perception is that if you are an Xbox Studio you can work your ass off and put out an amazing game and still lose your job still have your studio shut down simply because they need to trim the fat in the budget a little bit and that is no way to create a culture of creatives that feel comfortable and confident they can pour their heart and soul into a project that's how you create a soulless corporate machine that's just chasing revenues for quick and easy profits to boost bottom lines that might work for Microsoft when they're they're pumping out Call of Duties now that might work when they're trying to pump out you know the latest update to one note and Microsoft teams it does not work when you're trying to create pieces of art when you're trying to tell stories when you're trying to build universes for people to explore and fall in love with the characters that inhabit them it's no way to build video games and unfortunately it seems like Microsoft thinks that they can run their gaming divisions just like they run the windows 11 update team and that is one of the biggest blunders that they could possibly make and it could literally drive all of their creative production into the the garbage disposal because no one is going to feel confident working at Xbox now because even if hellblade is an amazing 9 out of 10 10 out of 10 game it could still end up with Ninja Theory being shut down simply because Microsoft didn't Market it enough and didn't support them in the way they needed to and then they decided it wasn't worth keeping open so they shut it down so naturally they're going to end up with talent that leaves they're going to end up with people not working those extra hours that they might have worked otherwise not pouring their heart and soul into it as much as they might have before because they don't know if it's actually going to pay off and that is just sucky and it's something that would be wholly avoidable if they were to look at this from outside the bubble that they are in sitting in the corporate headquarters evaluating budgets and spreadsheets I really really hope for the best with hellblade 2 but my fear is that even if it's a great game it could still be a failure and it could still lead to Major repercussions for Ninja Theory and that's a a tragedy that would be unspeakable I mean it would be such a waste and I hope to the gods of that realm that that doesn't happen but unfortunately it's now a possibility that everybody's dealing with I I think there's something off with hellblade 2 but I think it's more fair to say that there's something off with how Xbox is treating hellblade 2 and that could be because there's something wrong with the game that they see internally or it could be Xbox just doing something stupid because that seems to be a hobby at this point so I'm not sure but I think we can all agree that something is weird with Xbox's treatment of hellblade 2 and while I think the game looks really really solid and I think that it will probably please a lot of its its more di hard fans of the franchise I'm worried that's going to do it for me if you enjoyed the video make sure to like the video hit that like button takes a second really helps me out I would greatly appreciate it and with that I'm going to go eat some dinner because I am a hungy boy so thank you for watching I love you I cannot believe I just said that thank you for watching I love you all see you in the next video hugs and kisses byebye

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 100,822

Keywords: luke stephens

Id: dYjc8rhWVTQ

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2024