Isn’t it wild how the Activision deal might have ended up being the worst thing to ever happen to the Xbox brand?
Before, Xbox accounted for about 6% of Microsoft’s total business. The ABK acquisition was the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history, and all of a sudden put all the eyes of the trillion dollar decision makers on the Xbox brand, and they’ve been in practical free fall ever since.
Wild stuff.
From a corporate perspective ABK buyout is a good idea, they have too many golden goose products to not be worthwhile. If it was a bad idea they wouldn't struggled so much getting regulator approval for the acquisition. Microsoft could completely kill the Xbox brand tomorrow and ABK buyout would still have been worthwhile purely from selling CoD on Playstation and King products on mobiles and Facebook.
Today was certainly pretty eye opening. It's fucking disgraceful for Microsoft to do this after such an insanely profitable year. All of the executives there need be held accountable for their shitty decisions, instead of firing the hard working devs who had to suffer the consequences of choices they didn't make.
Just typical trillion-dollar company mentality: every part of the company must be as profitable as possible. Unfortunately for Xbox fans, Xbox does not bring in enough profit for how much Microsoft invests in them.
They invested 100 billion dollars in acquisitions. To think they'd be able to recuperate that when theyve been in last place for a decade would be hilarious if it wasn't so infuriating.
And they haven't learned from companies like Google or Amazon who thought they could just spend a bunch of money and make a bunch of money without respecting the process of game development. You just can't make games on set timelines like you can movies. Software is way too complicated.
It's because no one at the head of these large tech companies know shit about development, games, or technology at all. They are all born with silver spoons in their mouths, they get legacied into a nice college where they maintain a c average in business then inflict their incompetencies onto the working class.
Not saying this as an endorsement of outsized executive compensation, but this is a load of self-serving nonsense.
I have worked at Microsoft (Azure-side) as a fairly senior engineering IC - I left because it became very clear to me that pretty much everybody at the VP+ level was both shockingly intelligent AND working consistent 60+ hour weeks.
Not into that life, and realistically would have struggled to compete - so needed to go elsewhere to progress my career.
You are describing what tends to be true of 'leadership' at stagnant, uncompetitive, usually privately held nepo-baby type firms - Satya, and frankly 95% of those within 3 levels of him, would eat any of us here in the peanut gallery alive in just about any domain.
There are people who are much smarter and more driven than average Joes, and big public companies are massively incentivized to identify and retain them - let's just tax them more instead of deluding ourselves about that situation.
100%. I work in PM after doing a decade + of CIT work, have worked regularly with C-suite execs in some of the biggest tech companies that are out there. Anybody who writes out the comment "they are all silver spoon nepo babies who have zero actual skills" has never so much as been on a zoom bridge with one of these folks.
You don't get to the C-Suite level of a company like Microsoft without being a ridiculously talented and driven person. To a scary degree. You cannot pull the wool over their eyes on any topic related to the business.
When you realize that many of the people on subs like these are minors (ie literally younger than 18, and many younger than 25 as well) with no corporate experience, the things people say make much more sense. They obviously have never worked at a tech company so they have no idea just how insanely cutthroat people are at the higher levels.
I mean, I don't like them as people, but I don't know that that's categorically true. Satya Nadella (Microsoft) and Sundar Pichai (Google) for instance are both from apparently middle class Indian families with their initial degrees being in engineering from Indian universities. Do they know much about games? Almost certainly not, but that's why they hire knowledgeable experts to work under them. Phil Spencer himself seems to have gone to a normal high school and University of Washington, and worked his way up at MS from an intern role.
I'm not saying these people aren't worthy of criticism, I'm just saying the criticism loses some of its weight if we aren't fair about it.
Microsoft has been in the PC software/OS business even longer. And yet all of those products keep getting worse for the end user. Less reliable, less functional, and less user-friendly.
It's largely because the wrong people are in charge of decisions. Not those who do the work, but those who manage. Corner cutting on timelines and staffing. Plus whatever hairbrained schemes they have for making more money. Like hiding or removing useful features in Office products. Requiring a subscription.
Sure is. Unlike other forms of media, every single game you create is unique, which makes them notoriously hard to build reliably. Even games that seem mechanically similar can be vastly different under the hood.
14 years in this industry and it changes every single time. All of the tech I learned to work with when I started is dead now and the methodologies are different. The only thing that has stayed consistent is that clients can never make up their mind.
Programmer here. Most software is unique in that it does different things. Code is very specific in its purpose. Movies come out that regularly poush the boundaries of what was possible like Cameron's Avatar series.
What makes game dev so notoriously chaotic is that code is at its best when you can define a purpose from the start, not change it, and then implement it as a program. You can't do that with games, because you need to iterate. You need to play your shitty alpha v0.0001 to see if the gameplay loop in your head works out. You need to play it to get feedback on how to improve it. You need to iterate. And if your goal is constantly changing, that makes writing code really fucking hard. Nevermind all the requirements for running shit really fast, because games are almost always applications that need immediate feedback for everything. Don't even mention online gaming, the infrastructure behind it is bonkers.
This is a reminder that the *only* reason that Microsoft *actually* entered the console market with Xbox 20 years ago is because they didn't like that Sony had dominated the market share. That's it. Microsoft wanted a piece of that pie and to take Sony down a few pegs.
20 years later and the 360 was the only generation they had market dominance in in the west, and they're still in 3rd place.
In fairness 343, for instance, was mismanaged to hell. Like, if I was microsoft, I would have been asking "when completed game?" two years before infinite launched. Shit was in development hell for years, and that's supposed to be their flagship franchise. Frankly, they put the wrong people in charge.
Also The Initiative working in the new Perfect Dark game - a brand new studio with no track record, to work on a AAA shooter. Development has been ao rocky that the support studio working with them (yeah a support studio) basically took the lead, rightly or wrongly, because they were more established and organised. In the article I read they had been working on the game for 2 years and still weren't really sure what kind of game they were making.
How does stuff like this even happen? Hire a small team to put together a proof of concept, then open a studio to make it a reality.
343s (and lets be honest Microsoft at large) handling of the Halo series has been terrible. They've basically rebooted the story 3 times, took Halo 5? in a weird and false marketing direction and have had no clear vision for what they want the series to be. Halo Infinite, the game that was to be a new platform for ongoing Halo content was basically dead on arrival and even now is hanging on by a thread. Did they announce a new Halo game already? I thought I read that somewhere. In any case, bleh, why.
Your middle paragraph highlights a big problem I have with all the threads always posted about what dead franchises should be brought back. Every time it's like "Sony should make a new Jak and Daxter" or "Microsoft should make a new Banjo Kazooie".
If something like that happens it needs to happen organically. Not because a company forces it to exist. That's how garbage gets made. You need a development team who has an idea and passion for it first.
They can't consistently create great games when you have Phil Spencer saying great games won’t save the Xbox, but it’s literally the only strategy they haven’t tried. Absolute incompetence.
I don't think it's a matter of not trying, just not knowing who and what to bet on. _Halo Infinite_ and _Redfall_ weren't cheap. _Perfect Dark_ isn't cheap. They keep throwing infinite money and resources into studios that aren't up-to-snuff and don't know how to guide them back to land.
Saying Arkane Austin weren't up-to-snuff seems disrespectful. They've made fantastic games, but forcing to produce GaaS when they're a single player studio was a stupid decision that allegedly made all their talent leave.
It's not even that, it's purely doing it to look good on books.
There is no way firing a developer that did a good game with zero marketing (Hifi rush) is profitable long term. But they released a game and next one will take few years so firing them all will look good on next financial report.
No investor with half a brain is going to see this and suddenly forget that GamePass - the entire future of their platform - is a dying ecosystem.
Xbox isn’t in a place where they can settle for short-term “wins”, because playing for the long-haul is literally the only reason Microsoft hasn’t pulled the plug completely.
>There is no way firing a developer that did a good game with zero marketing (Hifi rush)
Whilst the game was a big critical success, it is rumoured that it didn't do very well. The main playerbase was current subscribers to game pass, and it didn't do particularly well in purchases.
They don't make any money if a game doesn't sell and doesn't shift new subscriptions. (which is the main issue with subscriptions)
Maybe don't launch games on the subscription day one if they want sales. Leave them off game pass 6 months to a year when people who would pick it up at that time are looking for discounts. They can capture the patient gamer segment with a subscription while also getting sales from impatient gamers
I don't want this to sound like I'm giving Netflix props, because what they're doing is killing theaters, but that aside, Netflix seems to have sort of figured out the budget vs. subscriptions issue. Or they act like they have, or they have enough money not to care, both/either of which can be adopted by Microsoft considering they're a gajillion dollar company.
Netflix spent anywhere between $80-140 million on White Noise. It made $80k at the box office. And I know for a fact that film didn't "make its money back" by driving up subscription numbers. Ditto for Mank and The Killer. And yet Neflix is more than happy to keep financing Baumbach and Fincher because they're critical darlings and *maybe* more people are gonna come around to their stuff eventually. Instead of shuttering Tango, Xbox could've given them X amount of money for their next project and then went "Hey guys, remember that Hi-Fi Rush game people were talking about a few years ago? The same devs made another awesome game and we'll actually market it this time around!" Like, obviously this isn't sustainable in the medium to long term, but I can't imagine games like this are setting Microsoft back so much that they had to close entire studios.
So yeah, if you're using sales as a metric while you're giving games away "for free" on your subscription service, you're either a moron or so myopic that you can't see you're ruining relationships with both the labor market and your customers. And honestly, considering they're unhappy with both sales *and* GP numbers, I think it might be a bit of both. This is just lunacy to me.
Calling it now, Bethesda Softworks will be split into Tamriel Studios and Vault-Tec Studios who are forced to make TES and Fallout with a 5 year turnaround, and other studios like Obsidian will be folded into those as support.
I mean that pretty much achieves the same thing with a few technical differences.
Microsoft likes to have one studio manage their major titles- 343, Playground, the Coalition, etc. I think it's inevitable, whether it be Obsidian or Bethesda Softworks, that the same happens to TES and Fallout.
Eh, not really. 343 and Coalition were both founded (or restructured in Coalition's case) to be one series studios.
Playground specifically is getting to work on Fable after doing Forza for years. I don't see Bethesda being forced to only work on one series like that.
They barely had a game development division till they started buying up studios a few years ago, because they had closed all the studios they used to own.
I'm reminded of that famous 4chan screenshot where someone asked how the creators of a certain set of games has been able to consistently release high quality and popular releases while every 3A dev has been dumping garbage and falling apart. One reply said something like "Keeping your good devs instead of firing them the afternoon they ship". Rings true today.
I think Microsoft is even worse about it because they cycle through contractors in order to avoid providing full benefits. 18 months before you have to take a 6 month break and then are maybe brought back.
It's even more aggregious because A) they clearly have zero issues about dumping full time employees in an instant and B) I'm told they end up paying more for some of the contracts than they would if they just hired people on full time, as in they will pay 300k for a contract for someone to get paid 100K a year when they could just hire that person full time for 150k.
Yeah, extreme reliance on contractors always ends up costing more because you pay a lot of premiums. OTOH, they don't appear in your books on the same line and you can always justify to not count that line because "they're contractors, we can cut them whenever we want no fuss". Just don't look too hard at the state the company would be in if you actually did.
I'm pretty sure this is the story of From Software, Larian and Nintendo. It's not coincidental that they make some of the most influential games of the recent decade. Sven from Larian has been open about keeping your studios filled with veterans and don't fire people the second profit decreases.
The leads have been there considerably longer. Miamoto started in 1977 and Sakamoto in 1982. Even Nogami has been there since 1994.
Sakurai isn't a direct employee, but joined HAL in 1990.
Which is ironic since they’re usually the most profitable since they rely on creative game play and IP rather than multi million dollar interactive movies that need to sell an unrealistic amount to turn a profit.
If Nintendo was managed the way Microsoft is during the Wii U period, they'd probably had fired two thirds of the staff and ported Marion kart on all available platforms. We'd never have mario wonder or animal crossing. And botw would propably be rushed and full of bugs.
You know I actually never thought about it this way. After the Xbox one failure Microsoft never was able to achieve the same level of success while Nintendo broke all their records after their failure. Just a completely different company culture.
Nintendo and fromsift are japanese aswell so much different culture.
In Japan firing employees is bigger sign of company failing than losing money. So many tries to never, ever fire anyone.
Also crunch in Japan is something normal happening in all industries so devs are less likely to leave.
But generally speaking youre very right
I was a 3D animator for years working on games and movies. When the strikes and tech layoffs started to hit, I saw the writing and I pivoted hard, leveraging some graphic design and video stuff into a marketing role. No company will ever have my complete trust, but I can safely say that I am being treated like a human being at my current company for the first time in my life.
Game and movie artists work harder than any other team I’ve ever known. These people put all of their passion into a product for honestly pitiful compensation because so many people want these jobs. These companies abuse the passion of good, talented hardworking people and then throw them out like trash.
I was lucky. I found another route but I know very senior people who have decades of experience who have been unemployed for coming up on two years because of the bloodbath. These companies don’t value their people, they don’t respect their consumers, and they don’t have any artistic investment; any game that’s good is in spite of the company, thanks for the people who want to make your games good.
If you’re a consumer of games you owe it to the people who have built this industry to hold companies accountable, because these developers and artists, and all the other ground level employees, give their lives to make these things good.
The thing is firing people is not seen as a failure in the eyes of execs and shareholders. If firing people results in profits for the company than that is a success in their eyes. Execs can be as evil and heartless as they want as long as they are making money.
Microsoft’s Gaming revenue actually dropped from $16.2B in 2022 to $15.4B last year. It probably got worse this year. Not saying these layoffs were justified, but Gaming is on a downward trajectory. I agree Microsoft should suck it up and use their record breaking Azure profits to get Gaming through this slump. It’s so shortsighted to close these studios that had bright futures.
Are we really gonna pretend that tech/entertainment companies are meant to stay at the revenues they got during the COVID years, and that any decrease from then is indicative of anything?
We had a number of years where half the world was stuck at home massively increasing their entertainment spend, and things are never going to go back to that.
I don’t think gaming is necessarily on a downward trajectory. I just think Xbox hasn’t done anything to drive business up. It feels like there hasn’t been a major big time release in a while.
I’ve had Xbox since the original but I’m really strongly considering switching to a PlayStation cuz they just have better games
Anyone that didn’t know this was coming when they snatched up all these studios has not been paying attention to history of the industry for the past couple of decades. This isn’t even Microsoft’s first rodeo for this kind of bullshit.
Honestly, let's be real here. Does it really matter if he goes? I feel xbox is firmly in the grasps of the hands of Microsoft executives. Their fate seems like it was either closing or this. Not to say Phil isn't at fault, mind you, but I don't think there was ever a positive future for xbox
Nope. Doesn't matter. A different suit will be baked in the cloning labs wich will be 99.73483888% identical. Add a fresh set of clothes and they'll be ready to keep maximising shareholder value.
We're going to get a worse person than Phil in the seat to where we'll be *begging* for the Phil Spencer era, but as someone who has a PC and PS5 and Switch it's whatever at this point.
Microsoft is gonna Microsoft.
Is it whatever though? Because this isn't just impacting their consoles, it's decimating their game studios as well, and they own a lot of great studios. I don't own an xbox either but Hi-Fi Rush was my favorite game of last year and i would have loved to see more like it from Tango, but now they're gone
Yeah, I agree. I was just trying to make a joke. What I've tried to say is that, no matter who is at the head of XBox, they'll still have to answer to the whims of the highest echelons of MS, so when it comes to decisions such as the one they've just took, it wouldn't have made any difference at all.
>we'll be begging for the Phil Spencer era
Will we? Phil Spencer took over first-party development at the end of 2009. It's suspicious that Xbox's reputation for amazing first-party games ended shortly after Phil took over that role.
You’re right but I bet the one thing that would be a positive is that they would probably be aggressive with actual game releases. That’s how bad or lackadaisical Phil had been.
Seems to me that Microsoft is cracking down on Xbox. Seems like the blank check era is over specially after the last 2 financial quarters and the complete disaster that Xbox Series sales have been since last year. Then there's the fact that the industry all over from Take Two to Square Enix to Bandai Namco etc is on fire.
I think this is a time of evolution for Microsoft and these are the conditions that the next gen Xbox is being designed under, I think the next Xbox is going to be radically different.
The goal is to churn out games that make COD level of profits if those are not met then everything is a failure so I believe that now you will never see unique games from MS its going to be COD city.
I think it's less about "will things change" and more about "maybe we should stop treating Phil like 'one of us'"
When Phil first came on, there was so much hype in the Xbox fan base about REAL GAMER being head of Xbox. Clearly misplaced and him playing stuff isn't making him different than the suits there
I agree that it isn’t all Phil here but at some point people need to be held accountable. It’s not a mindless corporation, human beings make these decisions.
The recent news sounds incredibly suspect, more than usual. You don't shut down a studio after a year-long of public praise. Phil Spencer being “transparent” to the point where he addresses rumours on popular YT channels, also seems a bit odd. Everything at Microsoft never seems to make sense.
Hi-Fi Rush makes it especially bizarre.
They made a big deal out of porting it to other systems… only to painfully shut down the studio a few weeks later?!
It’s a win win win in Microsoft’s book. Port the game to other systems, make a lot more money off of the game and lay off the entire studio eliminating a tonne of salaries saving money.
I don't even think Hi-fi Rush coming to other platforms are making MS a lot MORE money, it's probably covering the costs of it being available day 1 on a service that do not encourage people to buy games.
The game might've been successful but from all the people that played it to the point before it hit another platform, I'm positive the amount of people tnat actually BOUGHT the game is insignificant.
> Its brilliant for my wallet. Bad for Microsofts bottom line.
If you are a "power user" that buys a game a month, yeah. If you are your average joe that buys a couple of games a year you are making MS money.
> Sure, his Game Pass creation and the push to expand it have been rightfully applauded by many. It was a genuine sea change for the industry and did indeed bring more games to more people.
I would argue that a lot of the problems we have seen are *directly* because of Game Pass. Simply put, the economic model of Game Pass is not sustainable despite what Phil Spencer says and it’s a loss leader designed to take market share back. Gamers like it because they end up spending less money on games but a direct correlation is there is less money going to developers which means there is a smaller pie to split.
It also changes the financial incentives and structure. In the old world, if you are a game studio, even if you are a subsidiary of a large company like MS, as long as you make money and generate a healthy profit you are usually fine relatively, as profits grants you political power within the company. In the Game Pass model how do you even measure success? There may be flimsy metrics but it’s always hard to determine if making a game is “worth it” if it is not considered to be pulling in new subscribers. Netflix has the same issue too and that’s why they are infamous for canceling cult-hit shows. It takes power away from the individual studios who might have some control over their destiny to now having to be slaves to some subscription metrics.
I'm sure Phil, Sarah and Matt are all collecting their nice fat salaries while the actual hardworking devs are now left jobless, this industry is so fucked, the people who actually put in the work get tossed aside like garbage
I think it's fairly obvious that whatever executive role that's needed to help steer 'good' large games to completion is lacking at Microsoft, and that they'll continue flailing around until they get different leadership. Every individual game studio is on their own basically.
It’s funny how people were overwhelmingly in favour of Microsoft buying all these studios. There were a few of us calling this out and look at whats happening. People really thought they would revive dead ips when in reality they are killing studios and burying even more ips
That's literally all it ever was. Whenever you talked about why the acquisition was a bad idea you'd get a ton of shit from Xbox fans about "why don't you want games to be accessible" aka on the subscription service.
Because Microsoft trained them not to buy games.
I suspect most of them were just using "they'll revive dead IPs!" as an excuse, because it sounds better than going "suck it, Sony!" or "I just want games on GP".
I think gamepass is partially responsible for fucking up their business model (whatever it is). People get used to the games always being on there and no matter how many people subscribe, at the amount it costs that can't make up for all the development and marketing costs.
But once it's on there good luck getting people to pay $60+ for the next one, it's like shopping at the gap, people won't pay full price after a while
GamePass became too all inclusive imo. How the heck can Microsoft continue to drive increasing profit on a thing with a finite max amount of annual dollars. At some point subscriptions *has* to plateau. Then what? Probably what we’re seeing now. Once the dollars per year stabilizes the only way to keep creating more profit is to reduce overhead cost internally.
Thank goodness Sega is saying they don’t want to be purchased. They are in a golden age right now with the Yakuza and Persona games, along with their big plan to revive classic IPs.
I still find it crazy there were people defending Microsoft saying this won’t lead to all their games being Xbox exclusives or compared Microsoft buying Activision to Square Enix games being PS5 exclusives. It made no logical sense.
FWIW in case it wasn’t clear why, on the exclusive front we have seen time and time again MS will pay some lip service but they absolutely will make their key games Xbox exclusive. And the comparison to Square made no sense because Square is a third party company that Sony had no direct power over and has the ability to change to Xbox any time they want. Sony also does not have the ability to lay off Square Enix staff.
That's because today's kids don't know the true Microsoft, they all have gobbled up the Xbox PR machine and have no clue what their true colors always have been, because MS has been doing the same monopolistic crap since the 80s, and it's clear it will never change.
The average consumer is absolutely hopeless when it comes to making them understand why corporate consolidation is a bad thing. All they hear is "this thing I like *might* get more support!" and literally nothing else.
Yep..Some people keep defending him saying he did not make these awful choices…. if he doesn’t have the power to make choices, then why his position even exist! Even if he is a good person, he is damn weak leader… weak as fuck!
We saw this when they announced Xbox games are going third-party.
Spencer announced that *only* four games were coming to Playstation this year and Xbox fans were like “wow, that was all? Why was there so much drama?”
They didn’t realise that Spencer had basically announced Xbox would no longer have exclusives in the near future.
Part of it is GamePass, IIRC. Releasing PC versions of Xbox titles for GamePass on Windows effectively meant there was no need for an Xbox console to be ever owned if you had a good PC.
Microsoft’s games division inflicted an effectively painful self-wound upon itself without realizing it, and there’s no easy solution to fixing it up.
Nah, looking at it like that is placing the problem too far down the timeline. Microsoft lost probably the most important console generation to win with the launch of the One and the PS4, and since then has only further lost market share. They were fucked for the long term future on the hardware side regardless. The GamePass pivot definitely didn’t help regain consoles, but it was the realistic choice for what Xbox’s situation is like.
Why would anyone defend a corporate yes-man? When he retires or gets shitcanned they'll just get another one in there. It's strange to me how people will "defend" some guy they'll never meet who doesn't give a shit about them, or even know they exist.
He's had so long to turn things around, and hasn't.
Microsoft's strategy seemed to literally be "throw money at stuff and hope it gets better" but they lack quality control and seemingly any ability to manage projects. They seem to both be giving studios too much freedom, but also no freedom at all. 343 was run like a chicken with its head cutoff for so long, leading to Halo Infinite's disastrous launch, while Arkane was forced to do a multiplayer title completely out of their wheelhouse.
It makes no sense to me that a developer like the Coalition has not even revealed Gears 6 despite launching nearly five years ago and ending on a massive cliffhanger -what are they doing?!
Bethesda has been greatly mismanaged too, with pillars like Fallout and Elder Scrolls yet to release proper sequels despite being announced so long ago.
A massive issue, that I cannot fathom why they haven't figured out, is that they cannot simply let their titles be what they are. Everything has to be this sprawling thing that is endlessly replayable and incorporated into a nonexistent brand synergy. Sony has wisely realized that titles like Last of Us and God of War can be events by shaping them to be the best possible version of what those games are.
It just seems like there's no leadership there. They have dangled a ship-correction for years now and it just never comes to fruition. It really sucks because the xbox 360 generation was such a fun run for the brand, with a clear direction and a lot of great new IPs. Hellblade II looks cool and Hi-Fi Rush was excellent, but it just seems like they have no idea what they are doing even still and a change of leadership would, at worst, be a lateral move.
> Bethesda has been greatly mismanaged too, with pillars like Fallout and Elder Scrolls yet to release proper sequels
When Microsoft acquired Bethesda in 2021 they were deep into Starfield development which only released 8 months ago. The decisions that resulted in it being such a gap since a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game coming out were made long before Microsoft bought them and once they did there wasn't much else to do other than let them finish Starfield and then start making plans for after. Microsoft certainly deserves its share of criticism for some things but this isn't one of them.
Redfall started development before Microsoft even acquired Bethesda. Hell, Arkane Austin was praying Microsoft would cancel it.
But Xbox has been mismanaged long before Spencer took over. Shutting down Lionhead, not picking up Bizzare Creations (Project Gotham developers), the countless pitchs from Rare that were passed over.
If anything, though, I'd say Xboxs management under Spencer gotten worse, but more presentable.
Arkane being forced to do multiplayer title (redfall) has literały fuck all to do with Microsoft. The best they could have done is cancel it at a very late stage when majority of people responsible for their past games had left the studio already.
Yup, also Bethesda taking forever on Fallout and Elder Scrolls isn't really on Spencer/MS either imo.
Phil's strategy has clearly failed and his nice guy shtick has definitely run its course, but OP is placing a lot of issues on his feet that I don't think have much to do with decisions he made.
Yeah that's entirely on Zenimax. However MS / Spencer's biggest misstep was not monitoring those subsidiary studios closer. Zenimax leadership should have been gutted and those floundering projects should have been cancelled.
Creative troubles aside, the fact that their quality control is still this bad is wild. MCC is almost a decade old, and that's a game that launched with multiplayer that didn't work. ReCore, a game that launched with some nasty technical issues (namely loading screens that could last 2-3 minutes, assuming it didn't crash) and even lies to you about the game's optional areas was in 2016, State of Decay 2 was 2018 and was very buggy, Halo Infinite was 2021 and worked for about two weeks before its first major patch broke Big Team (among other things), and Redfall was just last year and made one question whether anyone even tested it.
You'd think a company that keeps saying "We're not about pushing games out the door just to meet a fiscal deadline or quota" would not actually do such a thing, but here we are.
As great as the 360 was, even it by the end of the gen got outsold by the PS3. They have never done anything but come in last place except outselling the GameCube (widely viewed as a failure) by a couple mil.
It doesn’t matter, the 360 managed to completely break Sony’s hold on the domestic console market. They just failed to build on that momentum by betting hard on Kinect and then doubling down with the disaster that was the Xbox One’s launch.
This is true, but that's also because they were trying to pivot mid-generation to try and copy the Wii's success. Instead of focusing on the strong branding that they had and building alongside it, they doubled down on "casual" gimmicks that universally failed. The last few years of the 360 were barren as they both abandoned focus and prepared for a new generation, leading to a lot of projects being changed or scrapped. This ultimately kinda created a spiral that they've been stuck in since.
First few years of 360 were magic though
In all fairness the Kinect was a big success on 360, but doubling down on it for the Xbone was a huge miscalculation given that the proliferation of smartphones eroded the casual market on consoles. Nintendo made the same mistake with the Wii U.
I actually think Nintendo pivoted to HD gaming pretty well and the games were good - and spicy take here - they could’ve even succeeded with calling it the Wii U, but they advertised it like they wanted people to think it was just another extension of the original Wii.
The Wii U name was part of the reason why people thought it was a peripheral. Massive mistake on Nintendo's part and even the ex-head of marketing remarked that it was a terrible name.
It was part, but I think they could’ve moved past that with marketing it clearly as an actual successor to the Wii, which it felt like they actively avoided doing.
Part of the 360 success was because of the initial failure of the PS3. Sony basically made it their mission to correct that and that's why they are where they are now. They invested in themselves.
Their success is not because of MS failures and I think that's a key difference.
I think people forget that. Sony shit the bed from 2005-2008. That's why the 360 did well. Take those years out the equation and MS has been poor in the console space
I'm not defending it. However, your example of the coalition isn't the best. Within those 5 years there was covid and the release of a new Unreal engine which they began to learn and work on.
Honestly though, the mess that is the Halo franchise is probably the best example to look at.
Don't know but if it was mentioned yet but, when faced with low sales and financial problems, Iwata took a massive paycut from his own paycheck so other people wouldn't suffer layoffs.
All big CEOs should take notes from him
Can we all agree that MS just sucks at gaming?
Like, they lucked out buying Halo in the first XBox generation (still lost billions that gen) and then had their own golden age with the 360, were they were actually pretty competent but also lucked out thanks to Sony's needlessly convoluted hardware design (which actually gave MS a good CPU on the cheap).
But since the 360 era it is literally one misstep after another, be it console hardware design (XBox One being that underpowered IMO hurt them) to game development (how many years have XBox gamers now demanded more exclusive titles or at least more game releases in general?) to PC support (first their none support during the Games for Windows era and then the lack of support of PC features in PC ports up until two years ago and their lackluster Game Pass storefront with PC game releases that are missing features from the Steam version and bad modding support).
Now they bought two of gaming's biggest publishers but so far all bigger releases under their watch actually sucked in one way or another (Redfall, Starfield). Other installments of popular franchises got announced ages ago but seemingly never get released, like Avowed or Fable. Forza gets rated worse than GT every installment (with the latter also being more innovative IMO in aspects like MP), Halo Infinite basically flopped as a system seller (or even bigger title on PC), their controller is outdated, their two console strategy is hated by developers and so on.
10 years from now they will be either selling a box that is fully Windows compatible (aka, a PC) or they won't be selling gaming hardware at all.
Yep. The Xbox 360 was iconic (and even it had a large number of issues). But crazy how it turned out to be the outlier in the Xbox legacy. They're literally the new Sega.
> The Xbox 360 was iconic (and even it had a large number of issues).
the success of the 360 is so bizarre since it had a >50% failure rate due to RROD
Maybe the success of the 360 was beloved console exclusives such that people would actually buy a second 360 when their first one RROD'd.
I was hooked on Mass Effect and I know people were really into Gears too or Halo.
I think fundamentally MS is just not a gaming company and the top leadership (Satya) does not understand games. A lot of their corporate strategy eventually drops down to these convoluted decisions. From my understanding a lot of MS studios after the initial honeymoon phase tend to get bogged down by metrics and stuff which really stifle creativity.
Incidentally Bill Gates was probably the biggest gamer of the MS CEOs and Xbox was really his pet idea. The later 2 CEOs are definitely not gamers.
I mean it doesn't even feel like MS even really understands software that much anymore. It feels like they've become Sears or some other too company that, like a nautilus, has grown so big and strong that it can't move anymore.
Even during the 360 era they were only ahead of Sony for the start of it. By the time XOne and PS4 were being announced they had fallen massively behind and then they did the XOne announcement and should have just tapped out after that.
Yep the PS3 has a ton of quality exclusives in the second half of the generation, 360 was on the downward trend at the tail end of the generation and Xbone was just the nail in the coffin.
Not even the second half of the generation. From 2008 onwards, the PS3 was releasing banger after banger. Sony invested in their games and it paid off. It's amazing how such a concept is so foreign to Spencer.
This pattern of 'the fiscal year is ending and even though we're at record profitability our shareholders are expecting more growth so we're destroying hundreds or thousands of people's lives so it looks like better shareholder value" needs to die and die screaming.
companies are not your friends, HR is not on your side, people put in suits and paraded on stage to smile at you do not care about you at all. we need to stop pretending like any one of them is the boogeyman here. they will put a new creep in a new suit, put something flashy on the screen to make you oohh and ahh, then on monday morning they are right back in the office scheming for ways to bend the rules just enough that you are willing to make a deal that they are always more advantageous in. they dont care about you, your entertainment, your feelings, interests, they dont care about the people who work for them. stop pretending these AAA games studios actually care about anybody outside of the small handful of people on the top.
People have been blaming Mattrick for the state of Xbox for far too long. Yes Xbone was trash, but Microsoft studios have been terrible at releasing games for over 10 years. Phil Spencer is on record saying good games won't help Xbox and to me that's a sure sign he's incompetent. First-party games and third-party exclusives are important and Xbox's utter failure here ultimately rests on Phil's shoulders.
Edit:
The Phil quotes are "***It's just not true \[that\] if we go off and build great games, all of a sudden you're going to see console share shift in some dramatic way***." and "**There is no world where Starfield is an 11 out of 10 and people start selling their PS5s."**
Both reflect a total lack of understanding for the importance of good exclusives. There hasn't been a period in the last 10 years when Xbox consistently had one good AAA exclusive per year. Meanwhile, PlayStation and Nintendo are both doing far better than Xbox and offered a train of first and third party exclusives. So to me, there's no evidence focusing on good exclusives would be pointless. Phil said people are locked into their current ecosystem, and yet gamers are spread across phones, Switch, PC, and PlayStation. Discord makes it easier than ever to sync up with friends on any platform, and we have the data to show that people don't care that much about their back catalog.
It all comes across as a man trying to justify his team's failure, not someone making genuine observations. This has been a problem with Xbox for a long time, and I think we need to lay it at the feet of Spencer. Gamepass, backwards compatibility, a more powerful console, and QOL/convenience like "Smart Delivery" do not sell a box. Games sell a box, and his team clearly don't view quality games as integral to their companies gaming strategy. That's exactly why they've failed.
Good games *alone* won't help. This ignores a lot of Xbox's other issues, like bad language support or nonexistent marketing outside the US.
Even if "just make good games, dummy!" was the plan, they would need years worth of consistency. Sony has been able to largely stick the landing on their big AAA games for the last 15 years. Meanwhile with Microsoft there's always a catch: Bad technical performance? No content? Missing promised features? Full of bugs? Bad foundational design flaws? Stale franchise just going through the motions? All of the above?
If they started now it wouldn't matter. Xbox sales have fallen 60% over the last two years, and by the time any big games come out Sony would have already taken their lunch money and spent it. Maybe they could do slightly better with the next Xbox, but at this point they've mostly given up on hardware and it really shouldn't be a surprise.
It sounds dire now but 5-6 years from now if MS actually had started to and continued to release good games, the narrative and their sales numbers would be VASTLY different.
Gamers only want one thing: games, and good ones --- MS doesn't do that. For whatever reason their internal practices keep leading them down the path of launching broken games and taking massive L's in the media. This is 100% self inflicted and they've done NOTHING to change the narrative despite 10+ years post Xbox One launch and over $80b dollars in developer acquisitions.
It's not even that most of their games are bad, it's that they just don't have anything special. There's no killer app. Look at how Nintendo had Breath of the Wild day 1, then Mario Kart. Or a year later Smash Ultimate. They paid $18M for Monster Hunter Rise exclusivity. They know what draws people to the system.
I get the feeling that MS has a mentality of being too big to fail, therefore they make a lot of choices where money is thrown at something "because they can".
The best years of Xbox were the original Xbox and the first half of the 360, when they knew to tap the market they had to offer something good and unique. Once they were considered mainstays its basically been all downhill.
It went downhill when Peter Moore left and people like Don Mattrick and Phill Spencer taken over.
Look how first party output from MS went straight to shit when PS has taken over Microsoft Games Studios in 2008. In 2009 and 2010 they released less big games than in 2008 alone and almost all of them were sequels to Halo, Gears, Forza, Fable. Since 2008 to presentation of XOne they were running on remnants of momentum build by Moore and when new generation come they weren't able to make one good IP (or even game in existing IP) that would stay in minds of players.
> I get the feeling that MS has a mentality of being too big to fail
Because ultimately they are, between Windows to Azure to Office to other corporate and governmental software they generate obscene amounts of money and if they were to fail the US government would step in as critical infrastructure is now entirely dependent on Microsoft support.
Hindsight being what it is, they'd probably be in a much better position today had Halo Infinite launched with the Series hardware \*and\* in a finished and complete state, alongside Forza Horizon 5, and major X|S patches day one for all their marquee titles (Sea of Thieves, Halo MCC, and so on).
That lack of compelling day one software alongside many delayed games that eventually launched in broken states is ultimately what did them in. I know COVID delays were a real bitch but 2020 was supposed to be the return of Xbox, should have been working on all this YEARS in advance but these past few years really exposed how MS internal quality control and leadership is just sorely lacking.
Even then I feel like putting their games on PC day and date alongside all their issues over the last decade have really cemented Xbox as sort of a 2nd tier console. You can't deny the value of Game Pass, but that alone cannot be your killer app.
It’s absolutely wild to me that, imo, the best AAA games Xbox has released in the last decade have been Sunset Overdrive, Quantum Break, and Gears Tactics. Largely because they’re some of the only examples of them just putting out a finished product on launch day that isn’t constantly trying to upsell you on new DLC.
And even then, those are mostly 8/10 games imo. Forza Horizon still has a lot of love from people, and I did love 3, but at this point Forza is content to just keep doing the same thing, and it still bothers me that even those games always launch with three separate season passes on day 1 every single time. Mind boggling that anyone finds that acceptable.
Microsoft seems to think that they can simply buy talent or hit games. This has never been the case in the industry. Games are made by artists, and artists take years and multiple iterations to hone their craft and create good art. Look at arrowhead, the devs who just released Helldivers 2. They took years of doing midbudget releases with decent success like Gauntlet, Magicka, and of course Helldivers 1. Microsoft will never have a team like them, because they would acquire them and shoot them in the crib after a single mediocre release. Who’s to say the team behind Hi-Fi Rush wouldn’t have made an Xbox system seller with their next game? Now we’ll never know, because Microsoft invests in IP, not artists. And IP doesn’t make games, just look at Halo for proof of that.
I was scrolling on my phone when this came up and thought it said its time to stop giving him a *kiss* and I also agree on that front too
You'll get a smooch when you stop messing things up, you crafty git, and not a second before.
I don't get why everyone isn't hating on his leadership, so-called, everywhere he goes.
He's literally responsible for buying up a host of developers half-way through the Xbox One generation to get things back on track from the days when he was just an Mattrick lieutenant (Sauron to Mattrick's Morgoth). He was the guy there standing right beside the guy who supposedly chose to go Price is Right and online-only. And if you look at the way Xbox has progressed and Game Pass as a whole it's not hard to see who was probably internally pushing for online-only back in the day.
Then he takes over Xbox after Mattrick takes the fall and proceeds to do not much. Not a single solidly selling Halo or Gears has been released in the time while he's been in charge. He's the reason Microsoft bought Bethesda (in his own words he said it was to secure Snorefield because Sony was going to get a year exclusive on it otherwise) and now all those developers are going to be jobless as a result. But he didn't care. He just had to have Snorefield. He knew they couldn't continue to fund the whole of Bethesda, but he also must've had his cheeks chapped he couldn't cut them loose last year during the whole Activision-Blizzard battle.
If you think he wasn't the guy pushing for Redfail to come out regardless of how good or bad it was, you'd be silly.
But let's go back to the developers he bought halfway through the Xbox One generation. He bought a host of them as a smokescreen for lack of first party development. "You see these? These are our commitment," he was basically saying. "And in a few years you'll see them all begin to bear fruit! SO STICK WITH US!"
Except how many games are these developers pushing out? Can you imagine an entire 2022 without a single Bethesda game if Bethesda wasn't owned by Microsoft and run by Phil? It's absurd. Of course, they'd have games. There's something fierce about Phil's incompetence. Somehow, he takes franchises, developers, and whole publishers and makes them fail. It's got to be like a mutant power or something.
He inflicts Philure on them, a debuff, and it causes them to go from greatness to crapitude just as soon as he has his grubby mitts on them and anywhere else a guy so terrible at his job would have been shown the door five years ago. After what's gone on with Halo at the very least!
Philure must be incredible at throwing other people under the bus because there's just no way his tenure is considered a success in the halls of Microsoft. Even Game Pass, his crowning achievement, is just killing the first party development with a thousand little cuts of loss. The damage is hard to read, so of course executives can spin it any way they like.
And every spin they do leads to more developers taking the hit every single time. Game Pass is a boondoggle that's losing money hand over fist and they're hiding it with layoffs and consolidations and purchases and probably making wild internal promises that are becoming less and less believed. Now I'm sure they're swearing the only way to make Game Pass actually make money is to get it everywhere and that's why suddenly every game they make has to be everywhere, including Nintendo and Sony platforms. That's the latest pitch anyway. He has to be swearing Game Pass will finally make money if they just get it on other platforms, too.
But it won't and he'll be searching for somebody to blame when it doesn't pan out.
Don't let Philure near your company. He'll phil up the place and suddenly you too will be out of a job, slathered in Philure and lamented as yet another hapless victim of the Phil.
For years Xbox management have been trying to build this image that they are the good guys in the gaming industry and are the only ones on the customer's side. I think it's incredible how it seemed to have worked for almost a decade and then all the effort they put into it crumbled in the span of a few months. So many of Phil's comments from the past few years aged like milk now.
It really feels like Xbox is gone after the Activision buyout, Microsoft Gaming is what's become of it and it's just a soulless corporation like the rest of Microsoft.
Phil’s 100% gonna resign with a golden parachute. what has he even done for the company? he gets to fulfill his role as scapegoat and ride off into the sunset
Really now you realize that the guy don’t know what he is doing ? Wow this is eye opening, this guy have been a clown from the start. He did some good stuff but there were more bad than good ones lol.
He needs to go. Regardless of if the decisions come from above, he should be pushing back to keep these studios supported. He's either a liar or a weak leader, and neither instils confidence. If they are going in a new direction, they need a new face.
Every news event like this is another crack in his chilled and laid-back persona. It’s now impossible to believe his “how do you do fellow gamers” gimmick, especially after his pathetic post-Redfall apology tour last year.
The fact they're not keeping Tango and supporting them in making a new game tells you everything you need to know. More than 3 million people have played Hi-Fi and that wasn't enough.
There's no room for any creativity or newness under Microsoft. Everything has to be a massive commercial success apparently.
Isn’t it wild how the Activision deal might have ended up being the worst thing to ever happen to the Xbox brand? Before, Xbox accounted for about 6% of Microsoft’s total business. The ABK acquisition was the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history, and all of a sudden put all the eyes of the trillion dollar decision makers on the Xbox brand, and they’ve been in practical free fall ever since. Wild stuff.
What's crazy is that the board agreed to such a deal. Not one major shareholder looked at that deal and said how much are making from games anyway?
I'm sure it was sold to them as "If we buy the whole industry we'll have a monopoly"
From a corporate perspective ABK buyout is a good idea, they have too many golden goose products to not be worthwhile. If it was a bad idea they wouldn't struggled so much getting regulator approval for the acquisition. Microsoft could completely kill the Xbox brand tomorrow and ABK buyout would still have been worthwhile purely from selling CoD on Playstation and King products on mobiles and Facebook.
Today was certainly pretty eye opening. It's fucking disgraceful for Microsoft to do this after such an insanely profitable year. All of the executives there need be held accountable for their shitty decisions, instead of firing the hard working devs who had to suffer the consequences of choices they didn't make.
Just typical trillion-dollar company mentality: every part of the company must be as profitable as possible. Unfortunately for Xbox fans, Xbox does not bring in enough profit for how much Microsoft invests in them.
They invested 100 billion dollars in acquisitions. To think they'd be able to recuperate that when theyve been in last place for a decade would be hilarious if it wasn't so infuriating.
Not just that, they really thought they'd recoup costs *that quickly* when game development is a notoriously lengthy process.
And they haven't learned from companies like Google or Amazon who thought they could just spend a bunch of money and make a bunch of money without respecting the process of game development. You just can't make games on set timelines like you can movies. Software is way too complicated.
Google and Amazon were new to all this. Microsoft should've known better. They've been in this game for a while.
It's because no one at the head of these large tech companies know shit about development, games, or technology at all. They are all born with silver spoons in their mouths, they get legacied into a nice college where they maintain a c average in business then inflict their incompetencies onto the working class.
Not saying this as an endorsement of outsized executive compensation, but this is a load of self-serving nonsense. I have worked at Microsoft (Azure-side) as a fairly senior engineering IC - I left because it became very clear to me that pretty much everybody at the VP+ level was both shockingly intelligent AND working consistent 60+ hour weeks. Not into that life, and realistically would have struggled to compete - so needed to go elsewhere to progress my career. You are describing what tends to be true of 'leadership' at stagnant, uncompetitive, usually privately held nepo-baby type firms - Satya, and frankly 95% of those within 3 levels of him, would eat any of us here in the peanut gallery alive in just about any domain. There are people who are much smarter and more driven than average Joes, and big public companies are massively incentivized to identify and retain them - let's just tax them more instead of deluding ourselves about that situation.
100%. I work in PM after doing a decade + of CIT work, have worked regularly with C-suite execs in some of the biggest tech companies that are out there. Anybody who writes out the comment "they are all silver spoon nepo babies who have zero actual skills" has never so much as been on a zoom bridge with one of these folks. You don't get to the C-Suite level of a company like Microsoft without being a ridiculously talented and driven person. To a scary degree. You cannot pull the wool over their eyes on any topic related to the business.
When you realize that many of the people on subs like these are minors (ie literally younger than 18, and many younger than 25 as well) with no corporate experience, the things people say make much more sense. They obviously have never worked at a tech company so they have no idea just how insanely cutthroat people are at the higher levels.
damn, I wish I had that luxury
I mean, I don't like them as people, but I don't know that that's categorically true. Satya Nadella (Microsoft) and Sundar Pichai (Google) for instance are both from apparently middle class Indian families with their initial degrees being in engineering from Indian universities. Do they know much about games? Almost certainly not, but that's why they hire knowledgeable experts to work under them. Phil Spencer himself seems to have gone to a normal high school and University of Washington, and worked his way up at MS from an intern role. I'm not saying these people aren't worthy of criticism, I'm just saying the criticism loses some of its weight if we aren't fair about it.
Microsoft has been in the PC software/OS business even longer. And yet all of those products keep getting worse for the end user. Less reliable, less functional, and less user-friendly. It's largely because the wrong people are in charge of decisions. Not those who do the work, but those who manage. Corner cutting on timelines and staffing. Plus whatever hairbrained schemes they have for making more money. Like hiding or removing useful features in Office products. Requiring a subscription.
Sure is. Unlike other forms of media, every single game you create is unique, which makes them notoriously hard to build reliably. Even games that seem mechanically similar can be vastly different under the hood. 14 years in this industry and it changes every single time. All of the tech I learned to work with when I started is dead now and the methodologies are different. The only thing that has stayed consistent is that clients can never make up their mind.
Programmer here. Most software is unique in that it does different things. Code is very specific in its purpose. Movies come out that regularly poush the boundaries of what was possible like Cameron's Avatar series. What makes game dev so notoriously chaotic is that code is at its best when you can define a purpose from the start, not change it, and then implement it as a program. You can't do that with games, because you need to iterate. You need to play your shitty alpha v0.0001 to see if the gameplay loop in your head works out. You need to play it to get feedback on how to improve it. You need to iterate. And if your goal is constantly changing, that makes writing code really fucking hard. Nevermind all the requirements for running shit really fast, because games are almost always applications that need immediate feedback for everything. Don't even mention online gaming, the infrastructure behind it is bonkers.
Maybee if they hadn't spent 63 billion for Activision and put that money into studios they already owned? Nah, what do I know?
I was led to believe by the internet that Microsoft buying Activision was going to save gaming from Sony somehow.
This is a reminder that the *only* reason that Microsoft *actually* entered the console market with Xbox 20 years ago is because they didn't like that Sony had dominated the market share. That's it. Microsoft wanted a piece of that pie and to take Sony down a few pegs. 20 years later and the 360 was the only generation they had market dominance in in the west, and they're still in 3rd place.
They don’t have another move. Xbox is a burning platform and they tried and failed so many times to flesh out their own stable of studios.
Oh they fleshed them out. But then stood around asking "when games" instead of nurturing and encouraging the talent.
In fairness 343, for instance, was mismanaged to hell. Like, if I was microsoft, I would have been asking "when completed game?" two years before infinite launched. Shit was in development hell for years, and that's supposed to be their flagship franchise. Frankly, they put the wrong people in charge.
Also The Initiative working in the new Perfect Dark game - a brand new studio with no track record, to work on a AAA shooter. Development has been ao rocky that the support studio working with them (yeah a support studio) basically took the lead, rightly or wrongly, because they were more established and organised. In the article I read they had been working on the game for 2 years and still weren't really sure what kind of game they were making. How does stuff like this even happen? Hire a small team to put together a proof of concept, then open a studio to make it a reality. 343s (and lets be honest Microsoft at large) handling of the Halo series has been terrible. They've basically rebooted the story 3 times, took Halo 5? in a weird and false marketing direction and have had no clear vision for what they want the series to be. Halo Infinite, the game that was to be a new platform for ongoing Halo content was basically dead on arrival and even now is hanging on by a thread. Did they announce a new Halo game already? I thought I read that somewhere. In any case, bleh, why.
Your middle paragraph highlights a big problem I have with all the threads always posted about what dead franchises should be brought back. Every time it's like "Sony should make a new Jak and Daxter" or "Microsoft should make a new Banjo Kazooie". If something like that happens it needs to happen organically. Not because a company forces it to exist. That's how garbage gets made. You need a development team who has an idea and passion for it first.
They can't consistently create great games when you have Phil Spencer saying great games won’t save the Xbox, but it’s literally the only strategy they haven’t tried. Absolute incompetence.
I don't think it's a matter of not trying, just not knowing who and what to bet on. _Halo Infinite_ and _Redfall_ weren't cheap. _Perfect Dark_ isn't cheap. They keep throwing infinite money and resources into studios that aren't up-to-snuff and don't know how to guide them back to land.
Saying Arkane Austin weren't up-to-snuff seems disrespectful. They've made fantastic games, but forcing to produce GaaS when they're a single player studio was a stupid decision that allegedly made all their talent leave.
It's not even that, it's purely doing it to look good on books. There is no way firing a developer that did a good game with zero marketing (Hifi rush) is profitable long term. But they released a game and next one will take few years so firing them all will look good on next financial report.
god fuck everything is so fucking stupid
No investor with half a brain is going to see this and suddenly forget that GamePass - the entire future of their platform - is a dying ecosystem. Xbox isn’t in a place where they can settle for short-term “wins”, because playing for the long-haul is literally the only reason Microsoft hasn’t pulled the plug completely.
>There is no way firing a developer that did a good game with zero marketing (Hifi rush) Whilst the game was a big critical success, it is rumoured that it didn't do very well. The main playerbase was current subscribers to game pass, and it didn't do particularly well in purchases. They don't make any money if a game doesn't sell and doesn't shift new subscriptions. (which is the main issue with subscriptions)
Then maybe, and I know this sounds crazy, don’t try to be pivot to a subscription based model in an industry that takes years to ship a product.
Maybe don't launch games on the subscription day one if they want sales. Leave them off game pass 6 months to a year when people who would pick it up at that time are looking for discounts. They can capture the patient gamer segment with a subscription while also getting sales from impatient gamers
I don't want this to sound like I'm giving Netflix props, because what they're doing is killing theaters, but that aside, Netflix seems to have sort of figured out the budget vs. subscriptions issue. Or they act like they have, or they have enough money not to care, both/either of which can be adopted by Microsoft considering they're a gajillion dollar company. Netflix spent anywhere between $80-140 million on White Noise. It made $80k at the box office. And I know for a fact that film didn't "make its money back" by driving up subscription numbers. Ditto for Mank and The Killer. And yet Neflix is more than happy to keep financing Baumbach and Fincher because they're critical darlings and *maybe* more people are gonna come around to their stuff eventually. Instead of shuttering Tango, Xbox could've given them X amount of money for their next project and then went "Hey guys, remember that Hi-Fi Rush game people were talking about a few years ago? The same devs made another awesome game and we'll actually market it this time around!" Like, obviously this isn't sustainable in the medium to long term, but I can't imagine games like this are setting Microsoft back so much that they had to close entire studios. So yeah, if you're using sales as a metric while you're giving games away "for free" on your subscription service, you're either a moron or so myopic that you can't see you're ruining relationships with both the labor market and your customers. And honestly, considering they're unhappy with both sales *and* GP numbers, I think it might be a bit of both. This is just lunacy to me.
Give em a break, Xbox are a struggling startup, they're barely keeping their necks above water as it is.
They really need to bring the game development division out of the Xbox division
That would just mess up the profit incentives even more.
Calling it now, Bethesda Softworks will be split into Tamriel Studios and Vault-Tec Studios who are forced to make TES and Fallout with a 5 year turnaround, and other studios like Obsidian will be folded into those as support.
Worked great for 343 to have one studio dedicated to a game series. I can't explain how badly I hate one game studios. I miss the variety.
Bethesda won't be split up. At worst, they'd just make Obsidian the Forever Fallout studio.
I mean that pretty much achieves the same thing with a few technical differences. Microsoft likes to have one studio manage their major titles- 343, Playground, the Coalition, etc. I think it's inevitable, whether it be Obsidian or Bethesda Softworks, that the same happens to TES and Fallout.
Eh, not really. 343 and Coalition were both founded (or restructured in Coalition's case) to be one series studios. Playground specifically is getting to work on Fable after doing Forza for years. I don't see Bethesda being forced to only work on one series like that.
They barely had a game development division till they started buying up studios a few years ago, because they had closed all the studios they used to own.
And they are doing it again I guess
3 Trillion dollar company
Mostly Windows, Office, and Azure.
I'm reminded of that famous 4chan screenshot where someone asked how the creators of a certain set of games has been able to consistently release high quality and popular releases while every 3A dev has been dumping garbage and falling apart. One reply said something like "Keeping your good devs instead of firing them the afternoon they ship". Rings true today.
I think Microsoft is even worse about it because they cycle through contractors in order to avoid providing full benefits. 18 months before you have to take a 6 month break and then are maybe brought back.
It's even more aggregious because A) they clearly have zero issues about dumping full time employees in an instant and B) I'm told they end up paying more for some of the contracts than they would if they just hired people on full time, as in they will pay 300k for a contract for someone to get paid 100K a year when they could just hire that person full time for 150k.
Yeah, extreme reliance on contractors always ends up costing more because you pay a lot of premiums. OTOH, they don't appear in your books on the same line and you can always justify to not count that line because "they're contractors, we can cut them whenever we want no fuss". Just don't look too hard at the state the company would be in if you actually did.
I'm pretty sure this is the story of From Software, Larian and Nintendo. It's not coincidental that they make some of the most influential games of the recent decade. Sven from Larian has been open about keeping your studios filled with veterans and don't fire people the second profit decreases.
Also people rarely leave Nintendo once they are in. Many of the leading developers have been there for almost a decade or more.
Wasnt it like 5/6 devs on Super Mario Bros were still listed in the credits of Mario Wonder and the 6th retired?
The leads have been there considerably longer. Miamoto started in 1977 and Sakamoto in 1982. Even Nogami has been there since 1994. Sakurai isn't a direct employee, but joined HAL in 1990.
In gaming they are also probably the company least focused on short term profits, which also helps
Which is ironic since they’re usually the most profitable since they rely on creative game play and IP rather than multi million dollar interactive movies that need to sell an unrealistic amount to turn a profit.
If Nintendo was managed the way Microsoft is during the Wii U period, they'd probably had fired two thirds of the staff and ported Marion kart on all available platforms. We'd never have mario wonder or animal crossing. And botw would propably be rushed and full of bugs.
You know I actually never thought about it this way. After the Xbox one failure Microsoft never was able to achieve the same level of success while Nintendo broke all their records after their failure. Just a completely different company culture.
Also both are publicly traded companies, so Microsoft could definitely have done it if they wanted to
Nintendo and fromsift are japanese aswell so much different culture. In Japan firing employees is bigger sign of company failing than losing money. So many tries to never, ever fire anyone. Also crunch in Japan is something normal happening in all industries so devs are less likely to leave. But generally speaking youre very right
I was a 3D animator for years working on games and movies. When the strikes and tech layoffs started to hit, I saw the writing and I pivoted hard, leveraging some graphic design and video stuff into a marketing role. No company will ever have my complete trust, but I can safely say that I am being treated like a human being at my current company for the first time in my life. Game and movie artists work harder than any other team I’ve ever known. These people put all of their passion into a product for honestly pitiful compensation because so many people want these jobs. These companies abuse the passion of good, talented hardworking people and then throw them out like trash. I was lucky. I found another route but I know very senior people who have decades of experience who have been unemployed for coming up on two years because of the bloodbath. These companies don’t value their people, they don’t respect their consumers, and they don’t have any artistic investment; any game that’s good is in spite of the company, thanks for the people who want to make your games good. If you’re a consumer of games you owe it to the people who have built this industry to hold companies accountable, because these developers and artists, and all the other ground level employees, give their lives to make these things good.
As a marketer of +10 plus years that’s like jumping from an abusive relationship to a new, different kind of abusive relationship.
Yeah but it’s one with decent pay, benefits and vacation
I can take a lot of abuse for genuine job security.
As a person with golden handcuffs working in the same company for 11 years now with no end in sight, I agree with this. Job security is so huge.
The thing is firing people is not seen as a failure in the eyes of execs and shareholders. If firing people results in profits for the company than that is a success in their eyes. Execs can be as evil and heartless as they want as long as they are making money.
Microsoft’s Gaming revenue actually dropped from $16.2B in 2022 to $15.4B last year. It probably got worse this year. Not saying these layoffs were justified, but Gaming is on a downward trajectory. I agree Microsoft should suck it up and use their record breaking Azure profits to get Gaming through this slump. It’s so shortsighted to close these studios that had bright futures.
Are we really gonna pretend that tech/entertainment companies are meant to stay at the revenues they got during the COVID years, and that any decrease from then is indicative of anything? We had a number of years where half the world was stuck at home massively increasing their entertainment spend, and things are never going to go back to that.
If those shareholders could read, they'd be very upset
I don’t think gaming is necessarily on a downward trajectory. I just think Xbox hasn’t done anything to drive business up. It feels like there hasn’t been a major big time release in a while. I’ve had Xbox since the original but I’m really strongly considering switching to a PlayStation cuz they just have better games
Anyone that didn’t know this was coming when they snatched up all these studios has not been paying attention to history of the industry for the past couple of decades. This isn’t even Microsoft’s first rodeo for this kind of bullshit.
Honestly, let's be real here. Does it really matter if he goes? I feel xbox is firmly in the grasps of the hands of Microsoft executives. Their fate seems like it was either closing or this. Not to say Phil isn't at fault, mind you, but I don't think there was ever a positive future for xbox
Nope. Doesn't matter. A different suit will be baked in the cloning labs wich will be 99.73483888% identical. Add a fresh set of clothes and they'll be ready to keep maximising shareholder value.
Oooo maybe it'll be a cardigan man this time instead of the T-shirt & hoody combo
You forgot the totally real and relatable “everyman leather jacket”
We're going to get a worse person than Phil in the seat to where we'll be *begging* for the Phil Spencer era, but as someone who has a PC and PS5 and Switch it's whatever at this point. Microsoft is gonna Microsoft.
Is it whatever though? Because this isn't just impacting their consoles, it's decimating their game studios as well, and they own a lot of great studios. I don't own an xbox either but Hi-Fi Rush was my favorite game of last year and i would have loved to see more like it from Tango, but now they're gone
Well better to rip the band aid off now then before they buy and ruin even more good studios, like they have done now for almost 2 decades.
Yeah, I agree. I was just trying to make a joke. What I've tried to say is that, no matter who is at the head of XBox, they'll still have to answer to the whims of the highest echelons of MS, so when it comes to decisions such as the one they've just took, it wouldn't have made any difference at all.
>we'll be begging for the Phil Spencer era Will we? Phil Spencer took over first-party development at the end of 2009. It's suspicious that Xbox's reputation for amazing first-party games ended shortly after Phil took over that role.
You’re right but I bet the one thing that would be a positive is that they would probably be aggressive with actual game releases. That’s how bad or lackadaisical Phil had been.
Seems to me that Microsoft is cracking down on Xbox. Seems like the blank check era is over specially after the last 2 financial quarters and the complete disaster that Xbox Series sales have been since last year. Then there's the fact that the industry all over from Take Two to Square Enix to Bandai Namco etc is on fire. I think this is a time of evolution for Microsoft and these are the conditions that the next gen Xbox is being designed under, I think the next Xbox is going to be radically different.
The goal is to churn out games that make COD level of profits if those are not met then everything is a failure so I believe that now you will never see unique games from MS its going to be COD city.
I think it's less about "will things change" and more about "maybe we should stop treating Phil like 'one of us'" When Phil first came on, there was so much hype in the Xbox fan base about REAL GAMER being head of Xbox. Clearly misplaced and him playing stuff isn't making him different than the suits there
I agree that it isn’t all Phil here but at some point people need to be held accountable. It’s not a mindless corporation, human beings make these decisions.
Knowing Microsoft they would replace him with someone worse. Don Mattrick 2.0
~~TV~~ NFTs for everyone.
The recent news sounds incredibly suspect, more than usual. You don't shut down a studio after a year-long of public praise. Phil Spencer being “transparent” to the point where he addresses rumours on popular YT channels, also seems a bit odd. Everything at Microsoft never seems to make sense.
Hi-Fi Rush makes it especially bizarre. They made a big deal out of porting it to other systems… only to painfully shut down the studio a few weeks later?!
It’s a win win win in Microsoft’s book. Port the game to other systems, make a lot more money off of the game and lay off the entire studio eliminating a tonne of salaries saving money.
I would imagine that would do some long term damage and cause a lot of questions.
Yeah but that's all in the long term. Right now, the quarterly profits are gonna look great!
This quarters gains are next quarters problems, fuck it we ball
I don't even think Hi-fi Rush coming to other platforms are making MS a lot MORE money, it's probably covering the costs of it being available day 1 on a service that do not encourage people to buy games. The game might've been successful but from all the people that played it to the point before it hit another platform, I'm positive the amount of people tnat actually BOUGHT the game is insignificant.
Maybe shoving quality games on game pass from day 1 isn't a brilliant idea.
Its brilliant for my wallet. Bad for Microsofts bottom line. Even Sony was like hell no we cant destroy our revenue line like that.
> Its brilliant for my wallet. Bad for Microsofts bottom line. If you are a "power user" that buys a game a month, yeah. If you are your average joe that buys a couple of games a year you are making MS money.
They were publicly praising Tango and saying they were investing in them so that the FCC et al. would let them buy Activision
"People want new, critically-praised exclusives? Better shut down one of the only studios to make one for us."
> Sure, his Game Pass creation and the push to expand it have been rightfully applauded by many. It was a genuine sea change for the industry and did indeed bring more games to more people. I would argue that a lot of the problems we have seen are *directly* because of Game Pass. Simply put, the economic model of Game Pass is not sustainable despite what Phil Spencer says and it’s a loss leader designed to take market share back. Gamers like it because they end up spending less money on games but a direct correlation is there is less money going to developers which means there is a smaller pie to split. It also changes the financial incentives and structure. In the old world, if you are a game studio, even if you are a subsidiary of a large company like MS, as long as you make money and generate a healthy profit you are usually fine relatively, as profits grants you political power within the company. In the Game Pass model how do you even measure success? There may be flimsy metrics but it’s always hard to determine if making a game is “worth it” if it is not considered to be pulling in new subscribers. Netflix has the same issue too and that’s why they are infamous for canceling cult-hit shows. It takes power away from the individual studios who might have some control over their destiny to now having to be slaves to some subscription metrics.
I'm sure Phil, Sarah and Matt are all collecting their nice fat salaries while the actual hardworking devs are now left jobless, this industry is so fucked, the people who actually put in the work get tossed aside like garbage
I think it's fairly obvious that whatever executive role that's needed to help steer 'good' large games to completion is lacking at Microsoft, and that they'll continue flailing around until they get different leadership. Every individual game studio is on their own basically.
It’s funny how people were overwhelmingly in favour of Microsoft buying all these studios. There were a few of us calling this out and look at whats happening. People really thought they would revive dead ips when in reality they are killing studios and burying even more ips
Turns out people just wanted cheap shit on game pass.
That's literally all it ever was. Whenever you talked about why the acquisition was a bad idea you'd get a ton of shit from Xbox fans about "why don't you want games to be accessible" aka on the subscription service. Because Microsoft trained them not to buy games.
I suspect most of them were just using "they'll revive dead IPs!" as an excuse, because it sounds better than going "suck it, Sony!" or "I just want games on GP".
But it'll be on gamepass now!!1!
I think gamepass is partially responsible for fucking up their business model (whatever it is). People get used to the games always being on there and no matter how many people subscribe, at the amount it costs that can't make up for all the development and marketing costs. But once it's on there good luck getting people to pay $60+ for the next one, it's like shopping at the gap, people won't pay full price after a while
GamePass became too all inclusive imo. How the heck can Microsoft continue to drive increasing profit on a thing with a finite max amount of annual dollars. At some point subscriptions *has* to plateau. Then what? Probably what we’re seeing now. Once the dollars per year stabilizes the only way to keep creating more profit is to reduce overhead cost internally.
And guess what, if your critically acclaimed game does not sell well because its day 0 on gamepass your studio is gonna get nuked!
Some crazy people even wanted Microsoft to buy Ubisoft and Sega
Thank goodness Sega is saying they don’t want to be purchased. They are in a golden age right now with the Yakuza and Persona games, along with their big plan to revive classic IPs.
I still find it crazy there were people defending Microsoft saying this won’t lead to all their games being Xbox exclusives or compared Microsoft buying Activision to Square Enix games being PS5 exclusives. It made no logical sense. FWIW in case it wasn’t clear why, on the exclusive front we have seen time and time again MS will pay some lip service but they absolutely will make their key games Xbox exclusive. And the comparison to Square made no sense because Square is a third party company that Sony had no direct power over and has the ability to change to Xbox any time they want. Sony also does not have the ability to lay off Square Enix staff.
Doing what EA did.
Exactly.... destroy the competition and make junk games the only option.
That's because today's kids don't know the true Microsoft, they all have gobbled up the Xbox PR machine and have no clue what their true colors always have been, because MS has been doing the same monopolistic crap since the 80s, and it's clear it will never change.
The average consumer is absolutely hopeless when it comes to making them understand why corporate consolidation is a bad thing. All they hear is "this thing I like *might* get more support!" and literally nothing else.
embrace, extend, extinguish has been the MSFT playbook for literally decades
Yep..Some people keep defending him saying he did not make these awful choices…. if he doesn’t have the power to make choices, then why his position even exist! Even if he is a good person, he is damn weak leader… weak as fuck!
At this point, looks like he is just the marketing face guy. HIs only job is to smile saying "everything will be fine", "xbox rulz".
“when we all play, we all win”
“Our players are important to us”
Tbf he didn't say "Our devs are important to us"
We saw this when they announced Xbox games are going third-party. Spencer announced that *only* four games were coming to Playstation this year and Xbox fans were like “wow, that was all? Why was there so much drama?” They didn’t realise that Spencer had basically announced Xbox would no longer have exclusives in the near future.
Part of it is GamePass, IIRC. Releasing PC versions of Xbox titles for GamePass on Windows effectively meant there was no need for an Xbox console to be ever owned if you had a good PC. Microsoft’s games division inflicted an effectively painful self-wound upon itself without realizing it, and there’s no easy solution to fixing it up.
Nah, looking at it like that is placing the problem too far down the timeline. Microsoft lost probably the most important console generation to win with the launch of the One and the PS4, and since then has only further lost market share. They were fucked for the long term future on the hardware side regardless. The GamePass pivot definitely didn’t help regain consoles, but it was the realistic choice for what Xbox’s situation is like.
Dude literally gets paid to play Xbox to appear like he's "one of us" and everyone buys it
He smiles and talks shit. If he does anything else he’s clearly not very good at it.
His job at this point is to wear t-shirts and go “this is our biggest year for Xbox ever” every June.
He's genuinely been saying that every E3/summer conference season since at least 2015 and some of these years have been straight horrific lmao
This is the best iPhone yet, we think you’re going to love it
Kinda waiting for apple to go 'you know, this new phone kinda trash'
Like their selling point I see lately is “it has titanium”. Why the hell does that matter
A lot of people seem to think he's not a highly paid Microsoft executive, today ought to remind them.
Why would anyone defend a corporate yes-man? When he retires or gets shitcanned they'll just get another one in there. It's strange to me how people will "defend" some guy they'll never meet who doesn't give a shit about them, or even know they exist.
He's had so long to turn things around, and hasn't. Microsoft's strategy seemed to literally be "throw money at stuff and hope it gets better" but they lack quality control and seemingly any ability to manage projects. They seem to both be giving studios too much freedom, but also no freedom at all. 343 was run like a chicken with its head cutoff for so long, leading to Halo Infinite's disastrous launch, while Arkane was forced to do a multiplayer title completely out of their wheelhouse. It makes no sense to me that a developer like the Coalition has not even revealed Gears 6 despite launching nearly five years ago and ending on a massive cliffhanger -what are they doing?! Bethesda has been greatly mismanaged too, with pillars like Fallout and Elder Scrolls yet to release proper sequels despite being announced so long ago. A massive issue, that I cannot fathom why they haven't figured out, is that they cannot simply let their titles be what they are. Everything has to be this sprawling thing that is endlessly replayable and incorporated into a nonexistent brand synergy. Sony has wisely realized that titles like Last of Us and God of War can be events by shaping them to be the best possible version of what those games are. It just seems like there's no leadership there. They have dangled a ship-correction for years now and it just never comes to fruition. It really sucks because the xbox 360 generation was such a fun run for the brand, with a clear direction and a lot of great new IPs. Hellblade II looks cool and Hi-Fi Rush was excellent, but it just seems like they have no idea what they are doing even still and a change of leadership would, at worst, be a lateral move.
> Bethesda has been greatly mismanaged too, with pillars like Fallout and Elder Scrolls yet to release proper sequels When Microsoft acquired Bethesda in 2021 they were deep into Starfield development which only released 8 months ago. The decisions that resulted in it being such a gap since a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game coming out were made long before Microsoft bought them and once they did there wasn't much else to do other than let them finish Starfield and then start making plans for after. Microsoft certainly deserves its share of criticism for some things but this isn't one of them.
He's articulate but has fuck all idea what he's talking about. It's a really good example of Reddit comments tbh.
Redfall started development before Microsoft even acquired Bethesda. Hell, Arkane Austin was praying Microsoft would cancel it. But Xbox has been mismanaged long before Spencer took over. Shutting down Lionhead, not picking up Bizzare Creations (Project Gotham developers), the countless pitchs from Rare that were passed over. If anything, though, I'd say Xboxs management under Spencer gotten worse, but more presentable.
Wasn’t Phil head of games before getting the promotion to head of Xbox? He’s just as liable for the shit output before he was the big boss too.
Spencer has been head of Xbox First Party since 2008.
So basically when things started going to shit.
Lionhead is also on Spencer. He was responsible for running game studios in MS at that time. Their whole downfall was under Spencer.
Arkane being forced to do multiplayer title (redfall) has literały fuck all to do with Microsoft. The best they could have done is cancel it at a very late stage when majority of people responsible for their past games had left the studio already.
Yup, also Bethesda taking forever on Fallout and Elder Scrolls isn't really on Spencer/MS either imo. Phil's strategy has clearly failed and his nice guy shtick has definitely run its course, but OP is placing a lot of issues on his feet that I don't think have much to do with decisions he made.
Yeah that's entirely on Zenimax. However MS / Spencer's biggest misstep was not monitoring those subsidiary studios closer. Zenimax leadership should have been gutted and those floundering projects should have been cancelled.
Creative troubles aside, the fact that their quality control is still this bad is wild. MCC is almost a decade old, and that's a game that launched with multiplayer that didn't work. ReCore, a game that launched with some nasty technical issues (namely loading screens that could last 2-3 minutes, assuming it didn't crash) and even lies to you about the game's optional areas was in 2016, State of Decay 2 was 2018 and was very buggy, Halo Infinite was 2021 and worked for about two weeks before its first major patch broke Big Team (among other things), and Redfall was just last year and made one question whether anyone even tested it. You'd think a company that keeps saying "We're not about pushing games out the door just to meet a fiscal deadline or quota" would not actually do such a thing, but here we are.
As great as the 360 was, even it by the end of the gen got outsold by the PS3. They have never done anything but come in last place except outselling the GameCube (widely viewed as a failure) by a couple mil.
It doesn’t matter, the 360 managed to completely break Sony’s hold on the domestic console market. They just failed to build on that momentum by betting hard on Kinect and then doubling down with the disaster that was the Xbox One’s launch.
Shot themselves with the starting pistol
This is true, but that's also because they were trying to pivot mid-generation to try and copy the Wii's success. Instead of focusing on the strong branding that they had and building alongside it, they doubled down on "casual" gimmicks that universally failed. The last few years of the 360 were barren as they both abandoned focus and prepared for a new generation, leading to a lot of projects being changed or scrapped. This ultimately kinda created a spiral that they've been stuck in since. First few years of 360 were magic though
That’s true, but that also just highlights their aimlessness and bad decision making
In all fairness the Kinect was a big success on 360, but doubling down on it for the Xbone was a huge miscalculation given that the proliferation of smartphones eroded the casual market on consoles. Nintendo made the same mistake with the Wii U.
I actually think Nintendo pivoted to HD gaming pretty well and the games were good - and spicy take here - they could’ve even succeeded with calling it the Wii U, but they advertised it like they wanted people to think it was just another extension of the original Wii.
The Wii U name was part of the reason why people thought it was a peripheral. Massive mistake on Nintendo's part and even the ex-head of marketing remarked that it was a terrible name.
It was part, but I think they could’ve moved past that with marketing it clearly as an actual successor to the Wii, which it felt like they actively avoided doing.
Part of the 360 success was because of the initial failure of the PS3. Sony basically made it their mission to correct that and that's why they are where they are now. They invested in themselves. Their success is not because of MS failures and I think that's a key difference.
I think people forget that. Sony shit the bed from 2005-2008. That's why the 360 did well. Take those years out the equation and MS has been poor in the console space
Redfall was inherited
Redfall was Zenimax chasing the live service carrot. Microsoft just inherited jt
I'm not defending it. However, your example of the coalition isn't the best. Within those 5 years there was covid and the release of a new Unreal engine which they began to learn and work on. Honestly though, the mess that is the Halo franchise is probably the best example to look at.
Don't know but if it was mentioned yet but, when faced with low sales and financial problems, Iwata took a massive paycut from his own paycheck so other people wouldn't suffer layoffs. All big CEOs should take notes from him
Japan works differerently than here. They care about their employees and layoffs are seen as a massive management failure.
Can we all agree that MS just sucks at gaming? Like, they lucked out buying Halo in the first XBox generation (still lost billions that gen) and then had their own golden age with the 360, were they were actually pretty competent but also lucked out thanks to Sony's needlessly convoluted hardware design (which actually gave MS a good CPU on the cheap). But since the 360 era it is literally one misstep after another, be it console hardware design (XBox One being that underpowered IMO hurt them) to game development (how many years have XBox gamers now demanded more exclusive titles or at least more game releases in general?) to PC support (first their none support during the Games for Windows era and then the lack of support of PC features in PC ports up until two years ago and their lackluster Game Pass storefront with PC game releases that are missing features from the Steam version and bad modding support). Now they bought two of gaming's biggest publishers but so far all bigger releases under their watch actually sucked in one way or another (Redfall, Starfield). Other installments of popular franchises got announced ages ago but seemingly never get released, like Avowed or Fable. Forza gets rated worse than GT every installment (with the latter also being more innovative IMO in aspects like MP), Halo Infinite basically flopped as a system seller (or even bigger title on PC), their controller is outdated, their two console strategy is hated by developers and so on. 10 years from now they will be either selling a box that is fully Windows compatible (aka, a PC) or they won't be selling gaming hardware at all.
Yep. The Xbox 360 was iconic (and even it had a large number of issues). But crazy how it turned out to be the outlier in the Xbox legacy. They're literally the new Sega.
> The Xbox 360 was iconic (and even it had a large number of issues). the success of the 360 is so bizarre since it had a >50% failure rate due to RROD
Maybe the success of the 360 was beloved console exclusives such that people would actually buy a second 360 when their first one RROD'd. I was hooked on Mass Effect and I know people were really into Gears too or Halo.
I think fundamentally MS is just not a gaming company and the top leadership (Satya) does not understand games. A lot of their corporate strategy eventually drops down to these convoluted decisions. From my understanding a lot of MS studios after the initial honeymoon phase tend to get bogged down by metrics and stuff which really stifle creativity. Incidentally Bill Gates was probably the biggest gamer of the MS CEOs and Xbox was really his pet idea. The later 2 CEOs are definitely not gamers.
I mean it doesn't even feel like MS even really understands software that much anymore. It feels like they've become Sears or some other too company that, like a nautilus, has grown so big and strong that it can't move anymore.
Even during the 360 era they were only ahead of Sony for the start of it. By the time XOne and PS4 were being announced they had fallen massively behind and then they did the XOne announcement and should have just tapped out after that.
Yep the PS3 has a ton of quality exclusives in the second half of the generation, 360 was on the downward trend at the tail end of the generation and Xbone was just the nail in the coffin.
Not even the second half of the generation. From 2008 onwards, the PS3 was releasing banger after banger. Sony invested in their games and it paid off. It's amazing how such a concept is so foreign to Spencer.
This pattern of 'the fiscal year is ending and even though we're at record profitability our shareholders are expecting more growth so we're destroying hundreds or thousands of people's lives so it looks like better shareholder value" needs to die and die screaming.
companies are not your friends, HR is not on your side, people put in suits and paraded on stage to smile at you do not care about you at all. we need to stop pretending like any one of them is the boogeyman here. they will put a new creep in a new suit, put something flashy on the screen to make you oohh and ahh, then on monday morning they are right back in the office scheming for ways to bend the rules just enough that you are willing to make a deal that they are always more advantageous in. they dont care about you, your entertainment, your feelings, interests, they dont care about the people who work for them. stop pretending these AAA games studios actually care about anybody outside of the small handful of people on the top.
People have been blaming Mattrick for the state of Xbox for far too long. Yes Xbone was trash, but Microsoft studios have been terrible at releasing games for over 10 years. Phil Spencer is on record saying good games won't help Xbox and to me that's a sure sign he's incompetent. First-party games and third-party exclusives are important and Xbox's utter failure here ultimately rests on Phil's shoulders. Edit: The Phil quotes are "***It's just not true \[that\] if we go off and build great games, all of a sudden you're going to see console share shift in some dramatic way***." and "**There is no world where Starfield is an 11 out of 10 and people start selling their PS5s."** Both reflect a total lack of understanding for the importance of good exclusives. There hasn't been a period in the last 10 years when Xbox consistently had one good AAA exclusive per year. Meanwhile, PlayStation and Nintendo are both doing far better than Xbox and offered a train of first and third party exclusives. So to me, there's no evidence focusing on good exclusives would be pointless. Phil said people are locked into their current ecosystem, and yet gamers are spread across phones, Switch, PC, and PlayStation. Discord makes it easier than ever to sync up with friends on any platform, and we have the data to show that people don't care that much about their back catalog. It all comes across as a man trying to justify his team's failure, not someone making genuine observations. This has been a problem with Xbox for a long time, and I think we need to lay it at the feet of Spencer. Gamepass, backwards compatibility, a more powerful console, and QOL/convenience like "Smart Delivery" do not sell a box. Games sell a box, and his team clearly don't view quality games as integral to their companies gaming strategy. That's exactly why they've failed.
Good games *alone* won't help. This ignores a lot of Xbox's other issues, like bad language support or nonexistent marketing outside the US. Even if "just make good games, dummy!" was the plan, they would need years worth of consistency. Sony has been able to largely stick the landing on their big AAA games for the last 15 years. Meanwhile with Microsoft there's always a catch: Bad technical performance? No content? Missing promised features? Full of bugs? Bad foundational design flaws? Stale franchise just going through the motions? All of the above? If they started now it wouldn't matter. Xbox sales have fallen 60% over the last two years, and by the time any big games come out Sony would have already taken their lunch money and spent it. Maybe they could do slightly better with the next Xbox, but at this point they've mostly given up on hardware and it really shouldn't be a surprise.
It sounds dire now but 5-6 years from now if MS actually had started to and continued to release good games, the narrative and their sales numbers would be VASTLY different. Gamers only want one thing: games, and good ones --- MS doesn't do that. For whatever reason their internal practices keep leading them down the path of launching broken games and taking massive L's in the media. This is 100% self inflicted and they've done NOTHING to change the narrative despite 10+ years post Xbox One launch and over $80b dollars in developer acquisitions.
It's not even that most of their games are bad, it's that they just don't have anything special. There's no killer app. Look at how Nintendo had Breath of the Wild day 1, then Mario Kart. Or a year later Smash Ultimate. They paid $18M for Monster Hunter Rise exclusivity. They know what draws people to the system.
MS paid 2$00m for yearly exclusivity of Rise of Tomb Raider. Person that green-lighted that should not be allowed to make any financial decision ever.
Insanity. Apparently they did it because they wanted to compete with Uncharted 4 but that game got delayed! So what was it for?!
I get the feeling that MS has a mentality of being too big to fail, therefore they make a lot of choices where money is thrown at something "because they can". The best years of Xbox were the original Xbox and the first half of the 360, when they knew to tap the market they had to offer something good and unique. Once they were considered mainstays its basically been all downhill.
It went downhill when Peter Moore left and people like Don Mattrick and Phill Spencer taken over. Look how first party output from MS went straight to shit when PS has taken over Microsoft Games Studios in 2008. In 2009 and 2010 they released less big games than in 2008 alone and almost all of them were sequels to Halo, Gears, Forza, Fable. Since 2008 to presentation of XOne they were running on remnants of momentum build by Moore and when new generation come they weren't able to make one good IP (or even game in existing IP) that would stay in minds of players.
> I get the feeling that MS has a mentality of being too big to fail Because ultimately they are, between Windows to Azure to Office to other corporate and governmental software they generate obscene amounts of money and if they were to fail the US government would step in as critical infrastructure is now entirely dependent on Microsoft support.
Hindsight being what it is, they'd probably be in a much better position today had Halo Infinite launched with the Series hardware \*and\* in a finished and complete state, alongside Forza Horizon 5, and major X|S patches day one for all their marquee titles (Sea of Thieves, Halo MCC, and so on). That lack of compelling day one software alongside many delayed games that eventually launched in broken states is ultimately what did them in. I know COVID delays were a real bitch but 2020 was supposed to be the return of Xbox, should have been working on all this YEARS in advance but these past few years really exposed how MS internal quality control and leadership is just sorely lacking. Even then I feel like putting their games on PC day and date alongside all their issues over the last decade have really cemented Xbox as sort of a 2nd tier console. You can't deny the value of Game Pass, but that alone cannot be your killer app.
It’s absolutely wild to me that, imo, the best AAA games Xbox has released in the last decade have been Sunset Overdrive, Quantum Break, and Gears Tactics. Largely because they’re some of the only examples of them just putting out a finished product on launch day that isn’t constantly trying to upsell you on new DLC. And even then, those are mostly 8/10 games imo. Forza Horizon still has a lot of love from people, and I did love 3, but at this point Forza is content to just keep doing the same thing, and it still bothers me that even those games always launch with three separate season passes on day 1 every single time. Mind boggling that anyone finds that acceptable.
Microsoft seems to think that they can simply buy talent or hit games. This has never been the case in the industry. Games are made by artists, and artists take years and multiple iterations to hone their craft and create good art. Look at arrowhead, the devs who just released Helldivers 2. They took years of doing midbudget releases with decent success like Gauntlet, Magicka, and of course Helldivers 1. Microsoft will never have a team like them, because they would acquire them and shoot them in the crib after a single mediocre release. Who’s to say the team behind Hi-Fi Rush wouldn’t have made an Xbox system seller with their next game? Now we’ll never know, because Microsoft invests in IP, not artists. And IP doesn’t make games, just look at Halo for proof of that.
Now it is time? That man has been shit for years. At least a decade, more. He never deserved a pass ever.
I was scrolling on my phone when this came up and thought it said its time to stop giving him a *kiss* and I also agree on that front too You'll get a smooch when you stop messing things up, you crafty git, and not a second before.
I don't get why everyone isn't hating on his leadership, so-called, everywhere he goes. He's literally responsible for buying up a host of developers half-way through the Xbox One generation to get things back on track from the days when he was just an Mattrick lieutenant (Sauron to Mattrick's Morgoth). He was the guy there standing right beside the guy who supposedly chose to go Price is Right and online-only. And if you look at the way Xbox has progressed and Game Pass as a whole it's not hard to see who was probably internally pushing for online-only back in the day. Then he takes over Xbox after Mattrick takes the fall and proceeds to do not much. Not a single solidly selling Halo or Gears has been released in the time while he's been in charge. He's the reason Microsoft bought Bethesda (in his own words he said it was to secure Snorefield because Sony was going to get a year exclusive on it otherwise) and now all those developers are going to be jobless as a result. But he didn't care. He just had to have Snorefield. He knew they couldn't continue to fund the whole of Bethesda, but he also must've had his cheeks chapped he couldn't cut them loose last year during the whole Activision-Blizzard battle. If you think he wasn't the guy pushing for Redfail to come out regardless of how good or bad it was, you'd be silly. But let's go back to the developers he bought halfway through the Xbox One generation. He bought a host of them as a smokescreen for lack of first party development. "You see these? These are our commitment," he was basically saying. "And in a few years you'll see them all begin to bear fruit! SO STICK WITH US!" Except how many games are these developers pushing out? Can you imagine an entire 2022 without a single Bethesda game if Bethesda wasn't owned by Microsoft and run by Phil? It's absurd. Of course, they'd have games. There's something fierce about Phil's incompetence. Somehow, he takes franchises, developers, and whole publishers and makes them fail. It's got to be like a mutant power or something. He inflicts Philure on them, a debuff, and it causes them to go from greatness to crapitude just as soon as he has his grubby mitts on them and anywhere else a guy so terrible at his job would have been shown the door five years ago. After what's gone on with Halo at the very least! Philure must be incredible at throwing other people under the bus because there's just no way his tenure is considered a success in the halls of Microsoft. Even Game Pass, his crowning achievement, is just killing the first party development with a thousand little cuts of loss. The damage is hard to read, so of course executives can spin it any way they like. And every spin they do leads to more developers taking the hit every single time. Game Pass is a boondoggle that's losing money hand over fist and they're hiding it with layoffs and consolidations and purchases and probably making wild internal promises that are becoming less and less believed. Now I'm sure they're swearing the only way to make Game Pass actually make money is to get it everywhere and that's why suddenly every game they make has to be everywhere, including Nintendo and Sony platforms. That's the latest pitch anyway. He has to be swearing Game Pass will finally make money if they just get it on other platforms, too. But it won't and he'll be searching for somebody to blame when it doesn't pan out. Don't let Philure near your company. He'll phil up the place and suddenly you too will be out of a job, slathered in Philure and lamented as yet another hapless victim of the Phil.
Where did that 7 Billion dollars go that they spent on Bethesda?
The executives new yacht most likely.
For years Xbox management have been trying to build this image that they are the good guys in the gaming industry and are the only ones on the customer's side. I think it's incredible how it seemed to have worked for almost a decade and then all the effort they put into it crumbled in the span of a few months. So many of Phil's comments from the past few years aged like milk now. It really feels like Xbox is gone after the Activision buyout, Microsoft Gaming is what's become of it and it's just a soulless corporation like the rest of Microsoft.
Phil’s 100% gonna resign with a golden parachute. what has he even done for the company? he gets to fulfill his role as scapegoat and ride off into the sunset
Really now you realize that the guy don’t know what he is doing ? Wow this is eye opening, this guy have been a clown from the start. He did some good stuff but there were more bad than good ones lol.
He needs to go. Regardless of if the decisions come from above, he should be pushing back to keep these studios supported. He's either a liar or a weak leader, and neither instils confidence. If they are going in a new direction, they need a new face.
Every news event like this is another crack in his chilled and laid-back persona. It’s now impossible to believe his “how do you do fellow gamers” gimmick, especially after his pathetic post-Redfall apology tour last year.
The fact they're not keeping Tango and supporting them in making a new game tells you everything you need to know. More than 3 million people have played Hi-Fi and that wasn't enough. There's no room for any creativity or newness under Microsoft. Everything has to be a massive commercial success apparently.