I can understand why they are hyping their studio, simply to attract needed talent. But even though I could honestly careless about whatever Maverick or Mike Brown does, I would say I would much rather hear about what they invision on creating. Maybe in future pod casts…
Today, on How To Say We’re Getting Funded Entirely By Kickstarter Without Saying We’re Getting Funded Entirely By Kickstarter…
This is going to crash and burn so hard.
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I didn’t watch the full pod cast but I’m assuming they want to create a game on game pass funded by Microsoft? Is that correct and did they confirm whether anything is final yet?
They are supposedly VC-funded. I just hope the deposit was not made into SVB! 
Very well said. Maybe it is why so many of the developers left. They weren’t given enough power to do anything with this game. I never thought that Microsoft could be the downfall of this series, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.
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I’m skeptical, especially in light of recent high-profile failures. It’s a little too easy to just put the blame on Microsoft and move on. Thing is, a lot of what plagues Forza now has been festering for some time, and Mike Brown had plenty of opportunities to do his part to fix or alleviate some of those things. Instead, he led things to where they are now and then pulled the eject lever when consequences started becoming a thing. He doesn’t get a pass just because he’s on the outside now.
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Well Mike Brown said that he is a open world guy, not a car guy so…Good luck to them, but a franchise needs at least a few car guys to make a game about cars. What’s the point in making an environment nice and dandy when the core game content “cars and racing” is just bare bones.
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I’m no game developer but as far as I understand it takes on average 5 to 8 years to develop a game. That potentially brings us to 2028-2031 to see what Brown and his inspired minions create. During which time we will see FH6 and FH7, aswell as FM8 and FM9.
Developers leave studios all the time. Can’t blame them when you can get outside funding to start up a studio and hopefully create a big hit and then later sell your studio for hundreds of millions of dollars.
That’s what happened with one of the co-founders of Playground games, Gavin Raeburn, and now years later he’s started a new studio with probably the same goal in mind. He worked at Codemasters for 24 years before becoming owner, CEO and studio director of Playground.
A lot of money being thrown around in the videogame industry.
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The notion that money is not a motivator is nonsense. The example of 1000% more is not realistic. The bottom line is that people are motivated by their salary for numerous reasons, not the least of which is it giving them the ability to live in relative comfort. It also is the most concrete form of a company showing it’s appreciation for individual effort and the value they place on their employees by conveying the leaderships desire to keep them as employees.
It has always been relevant, but today more so as real salaries haven’t increased in decades. When an employee sees the S-levels making millions off their hard work, that is demotivational. That promotes a “do as little as possible to keep the job” mentality and does not encourage an employee to look for ways to improve product quality and sales since the resultant revenue increase would only line the pockets of those same few people who, in reality, do very little of what actually generates revenue.
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lol no
I say this every time a subject like this is brought up, but that’s entirely not true because FH2 exists. I would almost say FH2 is a worse game than even FH5. So much of it relies on recycled gameplay to pad the playtime, the way they implemented multiplayer free roam and online racing is actually just worse than the modern methods, and while people bring up how “good” cars sounded in that game I think it’s worse than FH1 in that aspect too. In particular the gunshot backfires just don’t sound right if you play with headphones. People never think about all the improvements to customization that have happened over the years either, those early games are really barebones. I wish this game was more easily accessible so more people could go back and play it. It does have the best map by far though and that’s the one thing I’ll never take away from that game. The map is good enough to carry the rest of it on its shoulders with pride.
I think the issue here is that MS saw FH4’s success and then went “do that again” and so they did it again. Forgetting that the game already existed so making us buy it again doesn’t really do anything for us. There has been some recent admitting of fault from MS after Halo’s failure, so maybe things will be different next time. Might even have something to do with FM’s delay, but no way to know that until it comes out I guess.
I think Mike and Co were made scapegoats in all this mass resignations drama. He left because he knew something was wrong. He has claimed that the new opportunity was too hard to pass and they took it. Maybe they managed to secure enough funding for 4 years from unknown “Shark” who is willing to risk few millions on Mike and his core team which has a decent track record.
Now when it comes to Forza Horizon 6, I think it might be set in China purely speculating on the basis of Chinese cars added to the game . The locale doesn’t count, it’s the overall game atmosphere and the event progression that counts for next game. The current format of speedtraps, zones, trailblazers, road racing, dirt racing, cross country, etc needs a serious revamp because it’s been the same since Forza Horizon 1.
Hope the new team at Playground Games works to make sure FH6 is not much of the same and we don’t get that feeling either.
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It’s hard to judge Mike Brown without knowing what he was actually responsible for and in control of.
Did Mike Brown come up with seasons in FH4? If so credit to him, brilliant idea and execution.
Did Mike Brown envision the bland boring map in FH5? If so good riddance.
Did Mike Brown remove ranked racing? Well in this case we know the answer and for that single reason good riddance, at least from me.
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Didn’t Mike leave to start his own studio? If so he would have known and been planning that a long way in advance. I.e. during development of FH5.
Imagine working on a project that isn’t your admitted passion knowing you are going to leave but still making the big promises to a loyal fanbase. To me that’s how it looks and feels, whether I am right or wrong.
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Heck, while there may be a lot of fingerpointing at Microsoft (and deservedly so), it’s possible they may have done every player a favor by keeping Mike Brown on a creative leash. We won’t know for sure until a new creative director is appointed, which I’m actually surprised hasn’t happened yet since I’m sure Horizon 6 is well into development by this point. In which case, I won’t be shocked if many of Horizon 5’s mistakes are repeated as a result.
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I do wonder how things will pan out and what will become of FH6.
We know Mike Brown and some other muppets have moved on and that there may be fresh new talent injected into these key roles such as Creative Director. I’m assuming their replacements will want to prove themselves and steer the boat in the right direction. Or maybe they completely capsize it.
We also know PGG has hit rock bottom with the FH5 map. So surely onwards and upwards there?
Moreover, surely PGG are aware that players are sick of this blantent copy pasta nature that is FH5 and that they will be hard pressed to continue in that manner.
We also have all these new hubs such as the suggestion and bug hubs, which are largely useless ATM but may prove useful in the future especially for FH6.
What else? FM8 will be released this year which has been “redeveloped from the ground up”. So presumably FH6 will benefit from any new improvements there to physics, graphics, environments etc.
Hardware? The latest generation of Nvidia cards support dlss3 which for supported games can improve performance by up to 4 times. So presumably FH6 performance on the latest generation of consoles and PC at that time will perform extremely well. Or at least one would hope.
So is FH6 destined to be better or worse then FH5? I’m hoping better…
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My worry is FM8 is still using the old car models from 10+ year old games and polishing them up again. To me that’s already not “the ground up”. 
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All 8 of them
For reference, that’s less than the total amount of BMWs and Audis added over the same timeframe
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You’re making a conclusion from an assumption founded on no facts. Why bother lol…
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