Hasbro Apologizes Saying Activision Did Not Lose Its Transformers Games - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 03 October 2023 / 10,567 Views
The team at Hasbro in a recent interview stated that Activision had lost the hard drives the seventh generation of Transformers games were on, however, this is not the case.
Hasbro is a newly released statement sent to VGChartz has apologized for the confusion and said Activision has not lost the code for the games.
"To clarify, comments that suggest Transformers games have been lost were made in error," reads the statement from Hasbro. "We apologize to Activision and regret any confusion; they've been great partners, and we look forward to future opportunities to work together."
Activision Blizzard CCO and EVP of Corporate Affairs Lulu Cheng Meservey via Twitter stated, "These headlines are wrong. We have the code, it's not lost and never was."
Transformers games on the Xbox 360 includes Transformers the Game, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Transformers: War for Cybertron, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark. Some of them can be played on the Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S via backwards compatibility using a physical copy.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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This doesn't seem like the kind of thing that could be easily misinterpreted. So I wonder where the confusion comes from.
I'm guessing that Hasbro had wanted Activision to put them on Xbox back compat several years ago when Xbox was doing back compat on their 360 library, but if you recall Activision at that time didn't like back conpat at all and allowed barely any of their games onto Xbox back compat, so maybe they told Hasbro that the code was lost to get Hasbro off their back. Then Hasbro believed that lie and made the statement last week about how they hoped Xbox would search Activision's servers post-acquistion and find the lost code so that the games could be made available on Xbox back compat and Gamepaas.
Sounds plausible.
Okay then.
I get it. When dealing with Activi$ion it would seem like if i's not CoD....older games would feel like they have been permanently lost.
"We apologize to Activision and regret any confusion; they've been great partners, and we look forward to future opportunities to work together."
That still doesn't answer if you've actually found them, have them and plan to actually do something with them.
Kind of a nothing burger statement to make.
Can you confirm which of those Xbox 360 Transformers games work via backwards compatibility as the list I can see on the xbox site doesn’t show any of them.
That is correct, none of them are on Xbox back compat as of now. Guessing that is why Hasbro thought the code was lost, either Activision told them several years back the code was lost because Activision wanted to save them for a possible remaster collection instead of having them on back compat, or Hasbro just assumed that Activision had lost the code when the Activision Transformers games were never added to back compat and Xbox said that all games that were able to be added to BC had been added.
So, this is one part of certain game development I've never truely understood and slight deviation from this. Now, Hasbro owns the licence, Activision the publisher get a developer (High Noon) to make a game under licence for Hasbro. It's High Noons work, Activision publish it but Hasbro own the IP. So, who's is the code?
Eitherway, as the licence owner, I'd ask for a copy of the source code as even if they aren't allowed to publish it as it's Activision or High Noon's code, it's still their product.
That's the problem most licensed games run into and why so many are not backwards compatible.
The games will be produced under a time-limited license. Once the license expires its pulled from sales. Forza games are a clearer example of this - its Microsoft's game and they own the code but once their license from car manufacturers expires they have to pull the game from sale.
MS had said they had reached the limit of what they could add to backward compatibility but as Hasbro has made it clear that they are willing maybe they could get a few more games added once the ABK merger closes.
Any game can theoretically be added to back-compat, but ones with licence issues would require that you have the disc. And Microsoft has on occasion added a game to back compat that you needed the disc for, such as that 50 Cent game.
Microsoft chooses to only do so if the rights-holders don't object, though.
Microsoft's statement about adding more games to the back-compat programme suggested to me that they had hit the limits of what they could do technically with their current approach, and also what rights-holders were allowing. So I am excited for Microsoft's purchase of Activision improving the rights-holder side of things. I'd love to play the Transformers (and the X-Men Legends) games again, even if I have to track down discs!
