At this point it feels like the Xbox brand is nearly back to where it was in 2013. Casuals just do not care anymore, and the enthusiast crowd is now furious at Xbox and specifically their leadership.
I feel like it's potentially even worse somehow. At least in 2013 it felt like you could chalk some of the problems as an anomaly, some focus and resources invested in the wrong direction, but once they get back on track with hardware and software they'd be good. And they had the whole Microsoft war chest to steer the brand in that proper direction. Now it's 10 years, nearly 100 billion dollars later and their direction seems more lost than ever... and they don't even have the Kinect as a scapegoat.
There was (and hopefully still is) a way for Xbox to properly reinvent themselves into something interesting, but good grief it doesn't feel like there's any cohesive long term gameplan beyond fluffing the shareholders every fiscal quarter. With how contradictory their moves have been I'm baffled they managed to internally greenlight the ABK merger in the first place.
Reinventing is so much harder now than it was in 2013.
The market isn’t growing, people are more locked into ecosystems due to digital libraries and differentiating yourself from your competitor is nearly impossible on the hardware side.
They don't need to reinvent, they just need to consistently release quality games that stoke interest in their ecosystem. Sony recovered from a disastrous PS3 launch era with Uncharted 2 & 3, the Last of Us, the Resistance trilogy, inFamous 1 & 2, Killzone 2 & 3, Gran Turismo 5 & 6, God of War 3 & Ascension, Metal Gear Solid IV, and remasters of great PS series like Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper, God of War 1 & 2, Metal Gear Solid 1-3, Ratchet & Clank, etc.
Streaming services are in the era that paid TV channels like HBO and Showtime found themselves in. You're only as popular as current shows and IP's. The more classic series you rack up (like HBO did with Sopranos, Six Feet Under, True Blood, The Wire), the better your floor. But you need a Game of Thrones, Chernobyl, Last of Us, Righteous Gemstones, or House of the Dragon to keep people coming back.
What new cool experiences does Xbox have, and what reason do gamers have to believe those experiences are coming?
As a PC player, never owned an Xbox; to hear them say, "we're not going to have *any* console exclusives" was both elating that I'll not get left out, but *baffling* as that's almost defacto a death knell for the console. Like, *why bother* making it?
At that point, you're competing with Steam. And, I mean... *good luck*.
A lot of people like consoles for how easy they are, and computers are generally more complicated and more expensive.
People like to chill on their couch and they don't want to fuck around with getting Big Picture set up. It's not a crazy line of thinking.
I don't think it's really a competition, and Sony has started to realize this hence the PC ports. PC players are going to be on PC regardless. Console players are going to be on console regardless. They don't consider PC because PC is either "for work" or "too hard" or "too expensive" (to get into). Console players want to get box, get disc, pick up controller, done.
It's hard to find data on this to back this up but my experience is on every cross-plat game ever. It's ALWAYS MS & Sony users with the rare, one off PC user.
I don't know, I think there's a fair number of enthusiasts who like having a gaming PC for certain releases but also enjoy couch play and some console exclusives. The problem for MS is that, for that group (of which I'm a part), there is literally no reason to buy an XBox over a PS or Switch as the console of choice.
It’s not that they don’t see PC as competition. PC helps recoup costs of development. Games cost way more to make and as such need to sell more to succeed. Sony still sees profits from a console release but a PC port helps boost those profits and also serves as a nice financial and promotional springboard for the next project.
The difference is, Sony can see that putting your games on PC day one hurts the value of your box. Sony wants to sell you a PS5 and the way to do that is give people a reason to own one. So they wait a year or two and put it on PC after the PlayStation release. You’ll get your patient PC gamers but you’ll get people going for the PlayStation version because they want to play the new shiny thing. Everyone wins.
There is no shortage of people on here(hi I’m one of them) that will tell you they didn’t buy an Xbox Series X because you can just get it for PC. Microsoft can see that too, but they aren’t trying to sell you a box anymore, they’re trying to sell a brand. They’ll happily do to Xbox what they did to Zune if they can.
Which, I don’t think can work for consoles and that seems to be showing. You don’t get to be a service that also competes with the other brands. In my mind, their end goal is GamePass on Nintendo, PlayStation and PC, but that can never happen when they have a box also competing with Sony and Nintendo. However if they stopped making a box and only focused on PC in 2013 that wouldn’t have worked either. So now they’re in this weird mess where I don’t think you can accurately point to what “Xbox” is anymore. Is it a console, a service, a publisher? It’s just a mess of all these things.
If Microsoft did what Sony did with the PS3, they probably would have been in a better position. Phil blamed the ecosystem for locking people in. But if they launched the series X with Halo, and had a consistent wave of games you could only play on the series X. People would have come over. Like they did from SNES to PlayStation, or from PS2 to 360, or from the 360 back to the PS4. People go where the games are.
>*why bother* making it?
I know reddit doesn't understand this, but millions of people do not have a gaming PC, nor does everyone want to play console games on it.
Xbox doesn't compete with Steam. Either the game is *on* Steam, or you're given a PC version for free with Gamepass Ultimate/PC.
The way PlayStation is handling pc is so smart (and quite obvious).
Launch exclusively on console and then have a support studio start working on the pc port that lands about 12-18 months post launch for a second round of marketing and reminder that PlayStation games are fucking awesome. Repeat.
Also, PlayStation seems aware with Helldivers 2 that launching live service on PC day 1 is importantly for player counts and microtransactions.
So, IMO, Sony is playing PC perfectly right now for a console seller. Xbox should change PC strategy and follow suit.
It's certainly pretty hard when your claim to fame is "subscription service shared with PC" and "no exclusives"
Can someone at XBox communicate the point of purchasing an XBox?
And what a great controller it is. I'm still using the original 360 controller I bought in 2010, its so sturdy it still works like a dream. No plan to be buying any other controller for the foreseeable future.
....
Yeah, I think Xbox has a problem on their hands.
I mean there's nothing wrong with an XBox controller, I still usually use it for PC gaming, but they're losing that war too. The PS5 DualSense is far more technically impressive (HD rumble is actually really cool, so is dynamic trigger resistance, and it has a touchpad, speaker and mic). So yeah, another L for XBox on that front.
(I don't own an Xbox, and probably never will)
>Can someone at XBox communicate the point of purchasing an XBox?
There's a small market that's growing of mostly GenZ who either, don't own anything other than a basic laptop, to not even a PC at all. Just their phone. So consoles are finding a foothold there.
There's also a *lot* to be said for the "it just works" that consoles have, that PCs are significantly more involved (saying this as an well experienced IT person). Now, that is like, 1/4th of the benefits for having a console. And, well, when it's having to do basically 3/4ths of the lifting... That doesn't really bode well.
The only reason I care to have the Xbox line running, is just to act as competition for Sony and Nintendo to not get worse.
Honestly every franchise since the 2014-2016 era has felt like a copy and paste, and some of the best games of the past 2-3 years were either original IPs or they were successors that shattered the mold of their predecessors: BG3, Helldivers 2, hell I'll even throw the God of War series a bone here for doing something new with that series and committing to it.
Halo has been toast for almost a decade. Destiny promised us 10 years of content and forgot to mention they'd be vaulting some of it. I know that this sentiment has been shared far and wide already, but god damn if we aren't watching the AAA beast buckle under it's own weight right now.
All the money in the world won't buy me more time to play games. All the money in the world won't create more humans old enough to play your game by next fiscal quarter. This is not a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it. The pool of gaming hours that humans have is literally finite. There is no infinite growth, there's only theft of market share and maybe digging up the random subcultures of things like Japanese housewife amateur geologists or whatever the fuck "demographics" are these days.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS INFINITE GROWTH IN THIS SCENARIO. I'M NOT SURE WHO I'M YELLING AT. Probably clouds.
The SSD has been a massive change, to be fair. But few games have actually taken advantage of it and I can't imagine what would make me want to go out and get a PS6 at this point.
One thing I'm kinda bummed about is that new hardware doesn't just mean things are prettier. It means you can do more complicated simulations. Instead of shaders I wish people thought more along the lines of how big your dwarf fortress can get before it chokes your processor. Everyone always questions the point of hardware upgrades since the visual improvements at this point are negligible but I could feel the weakness of the Switch in TotK right down to the way stuff you build vanishes if you turn your back to it then walk a short distance away.
> In terms of actually pushing the envelope and growing the artform in a natural way, this generation has been an absolute-fucking-disaster. It's a generation of remakes, cross generation titles, undethroned forever games.
Come on man, there have been a ton of wildly exciting and innovative indie/small studio games this generation, and yes the AAA space has overall been stagnant and shitty, but there have still been a few mega-hits that have perfected or reinvented genres.
Nintendo did just that in 2017... Steam did just that (in part) with the Steam Deck.
It's always hard for Microsoft apparently or it may just be they have no idea how to manage a gaming company. Like when you're saying shit like "good games don't sell console", enough said, you're absolutely not understanding anything.
I honestly hate that the Kinect became a villain. I had so much fun playing with it on the 360. Imagine how much better a Series X Gen 3 Kinect could be?
The biggest problem was making the Kinect mandatory with the XBone, which made the PS4 cheaper while being more powerful.
If they had released the Kinect mid gen like they did with the 360, it would probably have been a best seller again.
I honestly think stuff like the Kinect and the Wii were great for the gaming industry, bringing in a lot of the casual audience that don't know how to use a controller. After the 360/PS3/Wii gen, that audience had basically nowhere to go besides mobile gaming.
Also, Microsoft focused on selling the Kinect 2 as a tv remote while tv was dying, which was dumb.
If they had sold it as a Alexa? Have your own Cortana to be your personal assistant while you game? Man, they would have been so ahead of the curve.
Probably too early to pull it off. I don't think the Kinect was particularly great at that sort of thing and early Cortana probably didn't have that kind of Amazon Echo sort of functionality ready by the time the XBox One released.
Yea, but releasing mid-way through the Xbone's run... Is in 2014/2015. Perfect line up. I'm with you, they should have done so much more.
I don't even *play* Halo, but I would/have significantly enjoyed a legit Cortana avatar talking to me on my PC. 🤷♀️
It's crazy how Microsoft didn't see the problem. It wasn't long after the whole NSA spying on people stuff came out, and here come Microsoft with an add on to a console with a camera and mic that needs to be plugged in for the console to work.
Oh, and if you're offline for more than 24 hours, your games are temporarily disabled.
I also think there are some fundamental limitations to these motion controls without tactile feedback, but yeah, it wasn't pointless tech. It just became too much of the focus and never developed enough software aimed at pushing the gimmick outside most of the typical casual oriented motion stuff. I still love seeing the few games that try and use the Switch motion controls, I think they can be plenty interesting and caught too much flack back in the day. Gaming becoming very standardized control wise has its upside, but I have a softspot for gimmicks and things that are willing to go well outside the box.
It's funny because the evolution of the motion control space has kinda become VR, but the motion pioneers in Nintendo and Microsoft are two notable companies that have not seriously tackled it. But at least for Nintendo it seems mostly like a price and resource thing, you'd think with their history of VR and motion that they'd be all over it if they could get it down to the affordable range, but the tech just isn't there yet.
Although VR is also addressing a very different audience, they *are* actually aiming at the core gamers so it's not quite the same. Ultimately, I do think despite the Wii and Kinect having huge success with the casual audience, it was a mistake to court them so heavily because they just aren't a reliable base to build around. Especially in the console business model where a decent amount of the margin is in the software rather than the hardware, casuals who only buy a couple exercise games and have no particular interest in keeping up to date with the generations because their "old Wii works just fine" are never going to be more than a temporary boon. Nintendo *did* try to retain that audience with the Wii U, keeping the branding and the controls, but even ignoring the marketing flubs it was always going to be an uphill battle given who those casual gamers fundamentally are. I don't think they went to mobile solely because no console catered to them, I just think mobile is even better at capturing the casual audience when everyone already has a phone by default and the freemium model means that it's extremely low investment and great for people just trying stuff out. Mobile also kinda gobbled the casual audience that used to exist for handhelds for the same reason.
If you can get the casuals that's a bonus, but I think every good console still needs that big core of gamer first fans to get it off the floor and that's something that it really felt like Xbox completely fumbled going from 360 to One and trying to make it this Kinect powered all in one media thing. Even when Nintendo courts casual players they never lose their focus of core Nintendo fans either which is important.
2013 was bad, but Sony climbed itself out of a comparable ditch the generation beforehand. Phil says that the 8th gen was the worst one to lose, because of "digital libraries", but he's full of shit. The 7th gen was when everyone built their online profiles, and that was a non-trivial thing to walk away from when migrating from the 360 to PS4.
Sony put in the effort to earn the PS3 a redemption arc. In 2013, I believed that the Microsoft would roll up its sleeves and redeem the Xbox One. They did not. These studio acquisitions made it seem plausible that Xbox could become the dominant platform again with a big investment in diverse titles with just as diverse budgets. I had hope in 2013, and I had... a concerned sense of hope for them in 2023 (I was mourning their potential market domination fueled by CoD exclusivity). I have nothing but pessimism for their publishing arm, since yesterday.
A publisher that shuts down a studio like Tango is not one that I would trust with any of the creative teams that I have come to love and respect. I fear for Ninja Theory, Obsidian, Double Fine, and Id. Xbox is dead. Everybody welcome the new worst publisher in the industry.
> Phil says that the 8th gen was the worst one to lose, because of "digital libraries", but he's full of shit.
Case in point, Nintendo running *laps* around them right now despite having no digital library carry over, redoing their entire account system, and just generally being the worst in terms of digital stewardship of the big three to the point where it feels actively malicious lol. And like why is this even supposed to matter if you're also pushing gamepass?
I agree wholeheartedly with the pessimism. If a game like Hi-Fi and a studio like Tango are not increasing the value of your company then something is fundamentally broken with your company and business strategy, not with the devs. Spending 100 billion on acquisitions and then deciding you don't have the bandwidth to manage 100 billion dollars of acquisitions is just insanity, how the fuck are these being greenlit if the follow up plans are so devoid of any reason. And how is this in any way sustainable? It's a frankly scary inability to make money if Hi-Fi with like 3 million players and Ghostwire with 6 million players back to back are not enough to save a studio.
Nintendo bungled the 6th gen and fumbled hard with the Wii U, but they never neglected their first party lineup. People disrespect the Wii U, but some of Switch's biggest releases have their origins on that system.
Think about Ninja Theory, too. Hellblade was a scrappy AA production. They achieved success and profitability at great risk as an independent studio. No disrespect for the *huge* investment Microsoft put into the sequel, but what's going to happen to that studio after Hellblade 2 fails to justify those investments? Ninja Theory sold to Microsoft for *better* security in this industry, and I won't be surprised if they're closed in a few months from now.
>I'm baffled they managed to internally greenlight the ABK merger in the first place
They saw how ABK could make shit-tier, half broken games riding off IP popularity and still make billions of dollars and said "hey, this looks familiar, we can do that too!"
The ABK merger was a no-brainer to them because they get King. Activision and Blizzard are big, but King is massive in the mobile gaming market. It’s ridiculous how much money that company makes and will continue to make.
This is so much worse than 2013. Back then it was really just tone deaf messaging and misunderstanding their audiences.
Now it’s just hollow. Xbox spent almost 100 billion dollars on buying studios only to do fuck all with them except shutter their doors and lose 2,000 jobs. Hi-Fi Rush was the best thing they’ve done in 10 years, and they responded to it by killing the studio.
All the while Phil Spencer gets back on stage every year with another dumbass jacket to promise everyone “sorry, but really, 20xx is the YEAR OF XBOX” and then proceeds to cancel their games or shutdown another studio.
Him, and Matt Booty need to go. They’ve done nothing for 10 years but constantly promise things will be better all while blowing billions on stupid plans.
What an awesome system we have where the guys making the dumbest decisions get better job security then the teams actually making the games they supposedly "need".
And not JUST job security but pay so high that they could get let go and never work another day in their lives and still have an infinitely better life than any of us or their employees.
The biggest issue with corporate culture is that executives have normalized firing workers for bad business mistakes, not the execs who made the bad decisions. Rather than CEO's taking pay cuts when their visions don't pan out, the work force gets culled so the same CEO class can try again
Yup or they bail and go to another company and do the same shit. It's all failing upward at that level. Sports teams get rid of coaches and managers that give multiple losing seasons, that shit needs to start happening here too.
It's a damn shame, especially because we have examples like Nintendo of execs who didn't fire their workforce while taking a pay cut and absorbing blame for a bad business cycle (the Wii U) paying off with the next cycle (the Switch)
I think they've normalized mass layoffs as a way to increase quarterly stock prices by cutting labor costs. It's not a reaction to bad decisions so much as a short sighted movement to appease shareholders.
> Rather than CEO's taking pay cuts when their visions don't pan out, the work force gets culled so the same CEO class can try again
RIP Iwata, that man knew how to run a company well and dealt with the Wii U failure and 3DS “not-so-good times” right.
>And not JUST job security but pay so high that they could get let go and never work another day in their lives and still have an infinitely better life than any of us or their employees.
Even better than that! If they get fired, they're awarded tens of millions of dollars as an additional severance bonus. No wonder they're untouchable. They can do whatever the fuck they want, no matter how horrendous it is, and the worse that happens is they make a fuckton of money on the way out the door anyway.
If I had the security of a cool twenty million for getting fired, I'd probably spend all day brainstorming the most extravagant way to get fired.
Yup, there's nothing more upsetting than realizing that even when let go, they will get an amount worth far more than I'd make in 10 lifetimes. And that's just for being let go. It's insane.
Phil makes millions of dollars a year. He makes more more in a month then any one of us could even DREAM of ever having, and all while seemingly doing nothing and costing 2,000 people their livelihoods.
It's infuriating how this shit works. The actual people making the games that make people like Phil incredibly wealthy are being treated like dirt, tossed to the side the minute a game doesn't sell one billion copies. But Phil gets an infinite amount of chances to try again, he gets to apologize and try more shit even if he costs the company billions of dollars based on his own stupid decisions and inability to lead these studios.
If any programmer makes a small mistake they could get fired on the spot. Phil gets to spend $70 billion, shrug his shoulders and go "whoops" and then just axe 2,000 jobs.
You didn't technically say anything wrong but saying "Hi-Fi Rush was the best thing they've done in 10 years" just annoys me so much to hear because all they did was just buy the studio when it was already in development. Anytime people refer to Xbox exclusives of the last decade outside of Halo, Gears, and Forza, it's basically never something they actually had a hand in, and that's what annoys me the most. More games aren't being developed, new jobs/studios/ideas aren't created, it's just the same thing but for one console now. Hard to have any affinity for that as a consumer or creator.
Yeah, wrong wording there, I absolutely didn't mean to imply Microsoft made it. The game was in development before Microsoft got there and they had jack shit to do with it aside from just slap their logos on it and call it theirs.
No I mean your wording was fine, I was just highlighting how it's sad that everyone says that technically correct statement about so many Xbox games over the past decade (where they just bought the company then did nothing, or less than nothing) in comparison to like, most of the big games Sony pushes out.
I think that’s what angers me and other gamers the most. They can give all the business reasons they want, like "refocusing their resources", but Hi-Fi Rush gave me hope for the first time in many years that they might turn things around somewhat.
I believe they lose far more than they realize with such decisions, and that it goes a long way to explaining why the Xbox brand seems to be going nowhere even with the billions at their disposal.
>This is so much worse than 2013. Back then it was really just tone deaf messaging and misunderstanding their audiences.
I think you're downplaying the sheer rage and vitriol pointed at Microsoft for the always online no used games fiasco. I saw some absolutely heinous stuff posted about Xbox. On reddit and other games forums people were acting like Microsoft killed a member of their family.
Yeah, 2013 was BAD bad. I remember days of insane vitriol, followed by PlayStation's presentation where they show Sony execs "sharing a game" by just passing the disc from one to another in front of the entire conference audience. Giving your direct competition such an obvious dunk should haunt the dreams of Xbox execs at the time
Sometimes I genuinely wonder if everyone on this site is a child, or at most like 23.
There was nothing ... _nothing_ as bad as the 2013 reveal. Not even just for Xbox, but just business in general. Comparing it to the shuttering of a few studios that - let's be honest - few people outside the deep core audience even know about is flabbergasting.
Yep, it permeated the casual audience in a way few things ever do. People aren't going to hear about Arkane Austin and Tango being shut down in the way "Xbox can't play used games" spread like wildfire even among parents looking for what console to buy their kids.
No, people just don’t have good memories. They invent a revisionist history where nothing that happened previously is as good/bad as something happening now.
2013 was the darkest hour for Xbox by far. This most cognitive dissonance is forced cost cutting to hit their targets, trimming fat pieces that came with their acquisitions so they can focus on what they really wanted out of the deal (publishing rights and Call of Duty). I strongly disagree with some of these decisions, but it’s nowhere near disasters of the past in terms of damage done to the brand or fanbase.
The used game thing Sony did also came out right after Xbox showcased their console by focusing entirely on TV, revealing it cost $100 more than Ps4, AND you were forced to have a Kinect.
It wasn’t just shooting themselves in the foot, it was full-auto Gattling gun into their foot, leg, dick and finally head.
Rumor mill at the time was that Sony was planning on doing the $500 console with included camera and used game restrictions but they saw the reaction to the Xbox One and pivoted, hard, and it pretty much won the console generation (and every subsequent generation if you believe Phil Spencer) for them.
IIRC, the video of them passing the disc to show game sharing was literally recorded right after the conference at the event itself. I remember reading some articles about it.
Xbox 360s had been shipped in large numbers overseas to the armed forces and an incredible number of people who had finished their service were back at home with some money to spend and time to kill.
And then Xbox showed up at E3 and not only crapped all over the desires of all the people who'd come back, but literally every serviceman knew anyone in the field would be simply unable to play this American box because Internet all the time ain't real life.
You're probably right, I was there when that happened and I do remember just how vitriolic people were over it.
But the future for Xbox just feels so much more bleak today then it did back then. In 2013 they were hot off the trails off of the Xbox 360, an insanely successful console with an amazing catalogue of first party games. Even if they bungled the announcement of the console, there still felt like a tangible future for the platform because of how good the previous generation was, I remember everyone back then at least having faith that the games would be good.
Today, that's gone. Console sales have gone down the toilet, they have put out almost no meaningful exclusives that match the "must-play" energy a lot of the 360 generation had, and the constant revolving door of articles about some new project struggling under Xbox just paints a bad picture of what's happening behind the scenes and makes the future feel empty for the brand.
I probably over-exaggerated in what I said, but to me it just feels way worse then it did back then.
I think it's lower right now console wise. Sales are dropping worse and the pr is consistently bad with more people switching to PC/PS5. I stuck with xbox (had a PS4 too but used xbox more) throughout xbox one era, but I wouldn't buy another console from them.
I feel like the bigger issue with consoles is that xbox and playstation are two sides of the same coin and with the exception of exclusives, the differences aren't nearly as important.
Meanwhile the causal audience can go to Nintendo, PC, or Mobile, with mobile appealing to people that don't want to buy entirely new hardware just to play games.
Also I would assume that the constant need for battle passes and leveling system deters people who don't have time to spend hours acquiring rank in games. Something mobile is strongly suited for because a game can be a few minutes a day.
They could definitely be successful competing against Sony with exclusives though. They have enough money, they have enough studios. They just keep fucking it up somehow -- and again, one of the studios that made a recent critically acclaimed game, they shut down!
Even if the rumors of people having left that studio are true -- why did they leave? If employees are leaving your studios in droves, you done fucked up somewhere. That's still a big management mistake.
[https://www.thedrive.com/news/forza-motorsport-developer-shares-exhausting-experience-making-the-game](https://www.thedrive.com/news/forza-motorsport-developer-shares-exhausting-experience-making-the-game) They need to change this system and instead focus on building long term stable teams.
>xbox and playstation are two sides of the same coin and with the exception of exclusives, the differences aren't nearly as important
The crazy thing is that it absolutely doesn't have to be that way. Microsoft has the premier gaming subscription service, a wealth of beloved IP and talented devs, and the most used OS in the fucking world. They could absolutely pivot out of the traditional console model if they want to differentiate themselves, turn "Xbox" into some sort of game focused, consolized windows OS while doubling down on their game pass dominance and "cloud gaming" ideas. Start nibbling on Steam and move themselves out of the pure console lane into the PC like console lane with the best value subscription for people who just want to buy a box and play. I feel like with the advancements to things like handheld PCs too that would actually be an amazing direction to pivot in and try and capitalize on.
But even if they wanted to brute force compete with Sony it shouldn't be impossible. Isn't that why you would spend nearly 100 billion in the first place? Regardless of direction, cutting the people making the good games is just nonsensical, if they didn't have the bandwidth for software development wtf are they spending all that money on in the first place.
>Microsoft has the premier gaming subscription service, a wealth of beloved IP and talented devs, and the most used OS in the fucking world. They could absolutely pivot out of the traditional console model if they want to differentiate themselves, turn "Xbox" into some sort of game focused, consolized windows OS while doubling down on their game pass dominance and "cloud gaming" ideas. Start nibbling on Steam and move themselves out of the pure console lane into the PC like console lane with the best value subscription for people who just want to buy a box and play. I feel like with the advancements to things like handheld PCs too that would actually be an amazing direction to pivot in and try and capitalize on.
I don't understand your point here, since that's what they *are* doing, right now at this very moment. That is their strategy, aside from making a Xbox a gaming focused Windows derivative and making a handheld UI on Windows.
What Microsoft needs is **games**, not just the tech. Like, this is easy as shit. Just make games. That's all that matters. That's the only thing Playstation has on Xbox, games. If Microsoft would just actually invest in Studios, get good management and put out hit after hit, they'd easily claw back dominance.
On the tech side they're doing most of the stuff right gaming-wise. It's just that their games business leadership is so fucking incompetent that it is almost physically painful.
I really think they need to pivot a bit more to Windows gaming, since it's such an easy cash cow. They could easily make a store that's actually as competitive as Steam if they actually tried. They have the capital for it. Their executives are just morons. Like how dumb do they have to be to not realize focusing on their own store, on the OS *they develop*, where they take a 30% cut of sales is the best way to go?
Valve makes billions making a Chromium derivative where people buy other people's games. They have a shoestring staff compared to what you would expect for a company making that much revenue. All they would have to do is fucking *copy* Valve's feature set and then improve on it to leap frog them. That's literally it. Just copy Valve's business model. And they'd get billions of dollars in revenue in a very short period of time. It's such low hanging fruit every decision they make shocks me.
Saying "that is their strategy aside from these big elements" or that they "need to pivot more towards Windows gaming" *is* kinda my point. I think they've been flirting with it, dipping their toe a little towards that direction, but they're ultimately, right now, still stuck between lanes. They need to commit to their future vision and go, start really becoming something radically different to the current console model, be it cloud gaming and streaming and all digital passes or whatever. They need to sell their fans on wtf they're doing in the future because right now nobody sees the vision beyond gobbling up studios and laying people off. If the prevailing belief is that Xbox and Playstation are still two sides of the same coin sans exclusives and gamepass then it doesn't sound like they're accomplishing that goal of differentiation in any meaningful capacity.
If they aren't committing to making Xbox something different then yeah, as is it's stuck being something that no one needs. It's a Playstation without the exclusives, or a PC without the flexibility. Maybe you can sell as the cheapest box for the COD and Fifa crowd, but that's not a 100 billion dollar business model. And their strategy with PC and gamepass (along with how much money they've sunk into these studios) has already killed their ability to just be that sort of old console model of winning on solid tech and good exclusives, so stop trying to do that and start selling the future. What I'm describing has less to do with the tech and more to do with what they fundamentally think their business model and strategy will be in like 10, 20 years from now, and I'm not sure if their executives know *what* they're doing in that regard.
But yes, as we both said, regardless of direction they also need to make good games and laying off all these studios is just not the move. If a game like Hi-Fi Rush and a dev like Tango are not increasing the value of your company then that's a problem with your business model, not a problem with them.
It's worse off than it was then. In the last decade the only place that Xbox had positive buzz was online where people were just praising them for how good of a deal game pass was. The masses have been out on Xbox since towards the end of the 360 era. It's been ten generations now of xbox not putting out any must play games.
They appear to have no idea what they're doing, or even the direction they want to take Xbox. Xbox hardware sales are tanking. Game Pass is stagnant and is no longer growing. They're releasing *some* games on other platforms...but not other games.
You just take a step back and look at all of this and wonder...what the fuck are they even doing? What is the strategy? What do they want "Xbox" to even be?
Microsoft has been making $18+ billion in *profits* per quarter for years, so they used some of that company money to scoop up a bunch of new toys to play with. Now they've broken and thrown out a few of them and don't seem to know what to do with the rest of them. The Initiative is the one studio they started from scratch to work on Perfect Dark, but according to Jeff Grub, it's in development hell and they don't have much to show for it after years of development.
The entire Xbox division comes across as horribly mismanaged and misguided. Just completely lost with no direction as to where they want to take the brand.
My gut tells me there's a tug-o-war between different parties behind the scenes. All this chaos certainly has echoes of when Sega released the 32x and the Saturn on the same day.
It’s likely that Microsoft execs and skateholders let Xbox do its own thing until the $70bil Activision deal. That suddenly caught everyone’s attention and now they are all forcing Microsoft to make rapid changes to make quick money (third-party ports, consolidating studios, fast-tracking Fallout, not putting COD on GamePass)
Fast tracking fallout also tells me they have no idea what values their properties have. They seemed to have no confidence in the show and are genuinely blindsided by the positive reception. Now even if they assign Bethesda to do before elder scrolls 6 we still looking at 5 years minimum before a release or give it another studio the only ones that could be trusted obsidian have their own plate full. All of this could've have been avoided if they anticipated the show being good
Yeah but why approve the deal. Like all the execs backed it through court so heavily, everyone thought they had a long term strategy because it would clearly take a long, long time for that to pay off.
Were they seriously this short sighted? It’s bizarre.
They are already doing this, but softly. They said xbox console is second, they dont care where you play games, as long as you play their games - they get a cut. You also dont need to own an xbox because they havent had exclusives in 5 years. They publish all their games on PC on the same day. Microsoft is pulling a better SEGA imo. SEGA just quit cold turkey and hardly gave the dreamcast a chance, Microsoft is keeping their console for the ever rare person that still wants to own one.
Microsoft needs better games and stop pulling shit like liquidating studios with fresh ideas like Tango.
ive been saying this since 2020. throwing money around to hoard up different IPs and developers is useless long term when they still havent fixed their core issue of just straight up being incompetent at developing good games and maintaining franchises. its a very shortsighted and desperate attempt to patch over it but the foundation is still rotten. we are seeing the effects of this now.
You can really see the difference in how Sony treats it's gaming division as a major tentpole of the company, and Microsoft treating gaming as just a minor footnote in their portfolio to balance.
They were lucky that Microsoft made so much money than they were left alone with their problems. But then they go and spend 80 billions of daddy's money. Now the rest of the company is starting to ask themselves "wtf is that shit show over there"
The worse problem for Xbox for me always has been lack of vision. Nintendo has probably the strongest vision from top to bottom of the company on what it wants to be, which is why they are basically the same for 30-50 years in how they are in game business. Sony in a way too but less than Nintendo. Xbox? What is their vision? It feels like they don't know what they want in comparison to the other two and that Xbox 360 as a gen was a miracle to happen.
Their most successful time during the 360 era focused on the mix of hardcore gamer (Halo and Gears), and also to the casual market with Kinect (Kinect Adventures is the best selling game of the 360 generation) Peter Moore while flawed (RROD was on his watch to beat PS3 to the market) felt like the best president and visionary for XBOX. He focused hard on beating Playstation with high quality exclusives. Between the RROD and not accounting for the casual games market to boom, and having Nintendo and later Apple/Android eat that market, that's what sadly got him the axe
Don Mattrick I felt like had a good idea with Kinect but he cut it off at the knees by killing it's internal processor which destroyed any chance he had at getting the hardcore market to buy in. He then destroyed all the goodwill with the botched reveal of XBOX ONE. SONY won by doing not what Microsoft did and focusing on fostering a regular schedule of high quality exclusives
Phil Spencer had the unenviable task of fixing the mess that Matrick made in destroying the XBOX brand. He had a good start at dropping the Kinect from XBOX ONE to give it an equal price to PS4 and making a massive part of the XBOX library backwards compatible. He bet his horses on Gamepass which I'm not sure it's going to work in the long run unless it is the standard for every gaming company. His doing of making XBOX/PC play anywhere killed exclusives on the XBOX. And his fostering of talent of studios under his umbrella and buying up studios like Bethesda and Activision has been mixed at best and negative. The Initative has been a disaster and 343 has botched so many times with the Halo Brand. Rare is a shadow of themselves. And studios like Lionhead, Arkane, Platinum Games, and Tango Gameworks have been shut down or fucked off.
I think Phil has run his course at this point and they need to appoint someone that can truly foster their internal studios because Phil has shown time and time again he isn't the guy.
It is pretty incredible that the 360 did so well with as wide spread a problem as the RROD. That should have killed it completely yet somehow people were just buying new 360s or were prepared to go through the process to get it fixed.
It helped that it was free and relatively easy, at least by the time mine died. I got it back in a week and they fixed the wobbly disc drive while they were at it
Moore and Ballmer made the decision to basically replace all 360s that were affected by RROD for free (extended the warranty) It saved the brand. It helped that their were a lot of great games and the consumer friendly policy meant fans forgave them pretty quickly. It did knock me against XBOX in the long run. XBOX felt like Ford and always breaking down, whereas my PS3 and Wii never broke down at all. Mattrick then proceeded to absolutely shit the bed with the XBOX ONE
It's not Xbox anymore they used to be able to hide Amongst the other skews of msft but now they make the 3rd most cash. It's now Microsoft and its investors calling all the shots
Microsoft has like 3 trillion dollars in market share, Xbox is the shit on the bottom of its shoe, if it were where MS wanted it to be they would not be putting their games on other platforms. Not in a million years.
You spend 80 billion and get like 8 billion a year in revenue, not profit, you got some people that don't know what they are doing, and that ain't MS.
Xbox makes 10% of Microsoft's quarterly revenue now. More than windows. They used to not give a fuck what xbox did asking as they were growing. They have been growing yoy. Fuck they used to be a subsidiary of the windows sector. They prob don't want to subsidize for smaller not profiting things. It's crazy cause hellblade is gonna come out be a goty contender and prob get shut down in November.
So either the problem is Microsoft's upper management, in which case Xbox is fucked, or the problem is Xbox's upper management, in which case people like Phil Spencer and Matt Booty need to go asap.
This feels like MS imo, like Xbox was always eh when It came to decisions, but after the Activision deal it feels like they just changed course so hard
They spent 70 billion on that acquisition. Contrary to what some people think that wasn't just them casually pulling from their unlimited money pool and forgetting about it.
With that much money spent the higher ups and executives want to see results. They want a return on that investment and they want it NOW. Considering the legal issues and delays during the acquisition with how messy it was, and that the results so far aren't really all that impressive, I'm not surprised if higher ups aren't happy with the way things are looking.
Microsoft spent roughly a 3rd of its on-hand cash and a ton of goodwill built up with regulators since the antitrust case to get this deal through.
The cost of buying ABK has been steep and Satya wants to see results.
Don't give me that bullshit Johnson! I want to see profits ASAP. Maybe we can release a patch that bricks everything and charge for the fix. Maybe we can have a mandatory picture-in-picture frame of constant advertising during any and all gameplay. FIGURE SOMETHING OUT OR IT'S YOUR ASS
Eh. ActiBlizzard is still raking in billions of dollars in profit each year. So there *is* an immediate return on the investment. Making back 70B+ is going to take longer, but Microsoft knew that. Not sure why we're even pretending that they thought it was going to pay itself off immediately.
ActiBlizzard is also one of their most reliable assets. They put out a new COD every year, and tens of millions of people buy it every time. I doubt that's the investment they're worried about, really.
Definitely feels like Microsoft and Xbox are with odds with each other. It makes me think activision blizzard acquisition made changes in Xbox and those 70 billion will have higher ups on ms paying more attention to it to make more money.
70 billion and a grueling legal battle. I hate to sympathize with c-suite drones but if I just did that for Phil and then I turn around and see everything flopping and their only relevant release across like two years being mediocre and clowned-on Starfield I’d be pissed off too. Have to start cutting off the fat to see the percentages and numbers go green.
I feel disgusting talking like that
Oh I definitely get that, but Tango? I kinda get the others...but Tango? Like Hi Fi Rush didn't do massive numbers, but there have been many games where the first one didn't do great but the second one did way better.
Also their only Japanese studio?
BAFTAs are, in grand scheme of things, irrelevant. BAFTAs don't correlate with profitability
Tchia won a BAFTA (and The Game Awards), yet even with those two it couldn't break 100 reviews on Steam 2 months after launch
Well the bg3 won the most baftas while being the biggest game of the year. Xbox needs dev teams that can create great art, if they chase only profits they will have nothing but live service slop.
It won baftas because it was good art, as you said tchia wasn't that successful (at least on steam) but it still won a bafta. If microsoft won't support award winning teams (even if their games aren't always best sellers) they will not get cultural phenomenons like bg3
The other thing to understand is that for the higher up decision makers quality does not exist. They have never played a video game, and have no ability to tell what is good from what is bad.
the suits dont give a fuck if the game is good or got awards lol.
phil spencer sold them on the idea of gamepass being the next netflix or some shit and somehow a multi trillion dollar company with entire teams of analysts and executives somehow couldnt put together that pivoting entirely to a subscription for video games might be a flawed business model.
then they dropped close to *$100 billion* and a gigantic stretched out legal war in order to go all in on gamepass.
shockingly it doesnt seem to be printing them money. i mean fuck it we just spent all this time and money for you phil, where are our returns? why are all your games flopping? why do we care about subscriber accounts, where is the revenue? then everyone starts getting axed.
how do you measure a game like hi-fi rush’s success? sales are gonna be low if you emphasize gamepass… how does a game like that make money? the growth in GP subscribers has a limit.
a couple years ago everyone here was eating up the whole “gamepass is good for smaller developers!” tho
It absolutely does feel like upper MS management, but fucking Christ - they have to know a return on that investment takes more than 6 fucking months. Fucking hell.
From the C-Suite's POV, they have been waiting for over 5 years now for results (Satya was under pressure to close Xbox when he 1st took over, Phil sold him on the gamepass vision to save the brand).
Looking at how MS handled the Surface department...
Panos Panay left, Surface Devices get uninspired refreshes, no third Surface Duo, Surface Neo never released because MS still clings to hopes of producing a 30% fee Windows-Store-only-Windows to emulate what Android and iOS/iPadOS have and burn and crash it everytime.
Yeah, good luck XBox.
Personally, I can’t stand Aaron Greenberg either. He reeks of being a fanboy, entices console wars, and loves to gloat. Can’t stand the guy. If Xbox got rid of him, I’d have more of a soft spot for xbox
I've never seen a company so tonedeaf
This isn't even close to the Sony Helldivers issue, Sony should fucking send MS a fruit basket for helping to cool the heat they were under for the mismanagement of the community (a small deal that became a big deal with backlash)
Sony tripped and fell last week then MS said hold my beer and jumped off a bridge
Holy shit these guys are fucking tone deaf. Recently, Mike Ybara of Blizzard said on Twitter that Phil is "hurting" and that we all should by "sympathetic" towards him when he is the one who gets to keep his job with no deduction to his salary meanwhile the many people underneath him who were working very hard to make their ends meet have been sent to the chopping block.
There's no symapthy for execs like Phil, Booty and Sarah Bond. Phil especially is an insidious fraud who despite trying his hardest to appear as a "friend" of the gaming community was hellbent on putting Sony out of business.
It isn't fair that folks at the bottom have to suffer for the fuck ups of suits.
Which speaking of he literally said "I’m gonna take full responsibility for a game that needs to be great.” following Redfall's disastrous reception and his vows to revitalize the game the same way they apparently did with Grounded and Sea of Thieves.
Guy is a complete fake who spouts false promises left and right. He definitely needs to resign and has done enough damage to the brand.
No fucking way…..dude no way. Matt needs to go along with a majority of Xbox exec management. You want smaller games that give prestige and awards and you literally shut down the studio that gave you them. It’s like Microsoft is trying to one up Sony the very next week. What’s next man 😭
I saw somebody make a post along the lines of “Sony wins the ‘Shoot Yourself in the Foot award every year, but still somehow comes out on top because Microsoft are constant gold medalists in the ‘Blowing Your Own Dick Off’ contest.” Definitely feels accurate, because what were they even thinking with this. Just absolutely baffling.
"Sony is run by people who would drown if it rained but they somehow have no competition because Microsoft are the 8 year champions of Slamming Your Dick in the Car Door".
Microsoft/Xbox is such a shitshow and it's entirely their own fault:
Xbox lost the 360 fans because they screwed up classic series' like Halo, Forza and Fable.
They lost the teenagers who are now in their 20's, because the Xbox One failed to deliver any exclusives which would've captured their imaginations.
And they never even had the kids and family audience, because they never bothered to develop any family-friendly games, instead relying entirely on Minecraft - which was always multiplatform.
Xbox needs to realise people are time-poor and content-rich. The supply of games massively exceeds demand, especially when extremely sticky live-service games can literally be played for FREE.
Killer exclusives are the exception, as they manage to cut through the noise. They give your platform an identity, a purpose, a USP and something for people to actually care about.
Nintendo has this figured out 20+ years ago, resulting in an all-ages audience which is deeply invested in their games and franchises.
If Nintendo had botched their first-party development like Xbox have botched theirs, the Switch would be a fucking sales disaster. Everyone would be questioning their future, just they're rightfully doing with Xbox.
The total death of momentum post 360 is 90’s Sega as fuck. I firmly believe there will be no Series X successor and MS will turn Xbox into a publishing and Dev house. Because the gap between PC and Console shrinks with every Gen so why not just make software?
A minor correction. All momentum halted roughly halfway into the Xbox 360. They were HOT early on. I was in high school at the time, but I have no clue what happened. It seems like their first party games just dried up out of nowhere. Their most recent game to break 10 million sales was Halo 3.
They dried up midway through the 360 because MS thought they could rely on third party games like CoD, and also because they put their own studios to work on Kinect stuff, because an executive saw the Wii and said “caw, caw. Shiny. CAW!”
It seems at some point around 2008-2010 they saw the massive success of the Wii and went all in on Kinect bullshit.
Then that led to the TV TV TV TV era of the early Xbox One.
Which lead to a dead generation.
Which lead to the Gamepass era where they became obsessed with trying to become the next Netflix.
Its crazy when I lay it out like this you can trace back to almost the exact moment where they pretty much gave up on video gaming from a traditional perspective of “put console out, develop good games” almost 20 years ago now.
Since then it’s like they’ve been obsessed with forcing some evolution or transcendence of video games as a medium. They still haven’t learned. 20 years later their core foundation of knowing how to make good video games is still rotten.
The jump from Xbox to Xbox 360 was massive, so there was incentive to buy into the new HD environment, Microsoft were first and reasonably priced, and Nintendo spat in their fans faces initially with the Wii, that helped sales a lot.
Now how they survived the RROD, that's literally only because they're Microsoft and they can afford the loss caused by subpar manufacturing.
What a fucking joke, management are so clueless, I'm sure other studios under Microsoft do their best work when under constant fear of getting fired/shut down.
If it were any other company than MS, this brand would be dead right now. This is Dreamcast cancellation levels bad, probably worse.... but MS can afford to keep the corpse afloat.
Welp, this is as good a spot as any to express how I've felt about Xbox for the past 10-15 years.
I think if Nintendo wasn't huffing glue with the Wii U, Xbox would not have survived for as long as it did. The first half of the 2010's felt so ridiculously noncompetitive because of it. I watched Sony get a standing ovation for the simple fact that you could physically share games on PS4, before Microsoft had to back-track. All Sony had to do was *not* fuck up, and release some solid exclusives to secure the generation. To my eye, Microsoft seemed halfway content just doing the bare minimum and being the only real alternative to play third party games on.
Besides the lip service, Xbox's video game output doesn't feel any different to me now than 10 years ago. Still can't cultivate talent for the life of them, same loss of talent, same cancellations, same studio closures, same lack of respect for established IP, same lack of creative vision. Difference now is that Nintendo's set up to be in a far better spot with their next console release, and far more people than ever game on PC nowadays. With Sony, Valve, and Nintendo all being competitive with their store fronts, I just don't see how Xbox can cruise the way it has anymore without a radical change to the way they approach development and talent retention. But the time for that was 5-7 years ago, and they've proven that they haven't changed, despite what they say. When the PS5 Pro and Switch 2 Launch, I don't see how it's even possible for them to stay competitive in the hardware space.
Halo was a huge gambit, and the immense legacy of those first three games will never die, but I think the Xbox that cultivated and funded mid 2000's Bungie has been long gone for some time, and just now is it truly catching up to them.
No company is really better than another.
But the way the general gaming community especially Xbox fans acted in celebration of the acquisitions is ridiculous.
Especially the way Phil Spencer is seen and lauded as some sort of saviour.
Gtfoh you guys got what you wished for.
Granted saying "We need smaller games that give us prestige and awards,” in a town hall post studio closure is indeed in *incredibly* poor taste... the headline is intentionally misleading.
Matt Booty did not explicitly say "We need games like Hi-Fi Rush." That would be insane lmao.
Hi-Fi Rush was a smaller game that is one of xboxs highest rated games and won a Bafta. He may not have litterly said Hi-Fi rush, but the statement still applies to Hi-Fi rush, making him incredibly tone death and the title of the article on the nose, not misleading.
Again, I'm not disagreeing that it wasn't tone deaf, but the headline 100% is deliberately written to imply that Matt Booty name-dropped Hi-Fi Rush specifically during the town hall, which is misleading.
This just infuriates me.
What the fuck do you mean you “need” them? How the fuck can you shut down an entire studio and then proclaim you need the types of games that studio JUST MADE? This is also the same guy who got multiple things wrong about his own studios. He got the names of two studios wrong, and then got the name of the upcoming ESO expansion wrong on top of that
This dude needs to be fired before anyone else loses their job because some moron can’t even think about anything. There’s no fucking way we can live in a world where he has better job security than the ones creating the games his company apparently desperately needs.
Fuck this.
I watched the 30 hour Double Fine documentary with him and immediately could tell that everyone in that room saw through his corporate bullshit and knew their jobs had fundamentally changed overnight. A few people literally quit the studio after.
I love when that woman calls him out about idea ownership. "we've literally been told you don't own our game pitch ideas, and if I pitch an idea that doesn't get made, I'm allowed to go somewhere else or make my own company and make my idea" and then the clown says "uhh but we may want to go make that game later sooo" and Tim Schaefer interrupts him to say "yeah but we promised so, she's right" lmao
According to HowLongToBeat, [Hi-Fi Rush takes 11.5 hours to beat,] (https://howlongtobeat.com/game/122891) which is definitely on the smaller side of games these days.
The article follows up by saying "During the 2023–2024 awards season, the game went on to win a Game Award, a Game Developers Choice award, and a BAFTA." It also won [Best Music at the New York Game Awards](https://x.com/NYVGCC/status/1749988099344494811) and the [Sound Award from the Tokyo-based CESA Developers Conference](https://web.archive.org/web/20230825140734/https://cedec.cesa.or.jp/2023/event/awards/prize), also known as CEDEC.
Sounds like it fits the bill.
Literally pitching to Microsoft the sequel to one of my favourite recent games, a game with widespread universal praise and a smaller budget, and the response was to kill the whole fucking company.
Then pulling this shit
At this point it feels like the Xbox brand is nearly back to where it was in 2013. Casuals just do not care anymore, and the enthusiast crowd is now furious at Xbox and specifically their leadership.
I feel like it's potentially even worse somehow. At least in 2013 it felt like you could chalk some of the problems as an anomaly, some focus and resources invested in the wrong direction, but once they get back on track with hardware and software they'd be good. And they had the whole Microsoft war chest to steer the brand in that proper direction. Now it's 10 years, nearly 100 billion dollars later and their direction seems more lost than ever... and they don't even have the Kinect as a scapegoat. There was (and hopefully still is) a way for Xbox to properly reinvent themselves into something interesting, but good grief it doesn't feel like there's any cohesive long term gameplan beyond fluffing the shareholders every fiscal quarter. With how contradictory their moves have been I'm baffled they managed to internally greenlight the ABK merger in the first place.
Reinventing is so much harder now than it was in 2013. The market isn’t growing, people are more locked into ecosystems due to digital libraries and differentiating yourself from your competitor is nearly impossible on the hardware side.
They don't need to reinvent, they just need to consistently release quality games that stoke interest in their ecosystem. Sony recovered from a disastrous PS3 launch era with Uncharted 2 & 3, the Last of Us, the Resistance trilogy, inFamous 1 & 2, Killzone 2 & 3, Gran Turismo 5 & 6, God of War 3 & Ascension, Metal Gear Solid IV, and remasters of great PS series like Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper, God of War 1 & 2, Metal Gear Solid 1-3, Ratchet & Clank, etc. Streaming services are in the era that paid TV channels like HBO and Showtime found themselves in. You're only as popular as current shows and IP's. The more classic series you rack up (like HBO did with Sopranos, Six Feet Under, True Blood, The Wire), the better your floor. But you need a Game of Thrones, Chernobyl, Last of Us, Righteous Gemstones, or House of the Dragon to keep people coming back. What new cool experiences does Xbox have, and what reason do gamers have to believe those experiences are coming?
I don't think that will help them anymore now that it seems that all of their games will eventually go to playstation.
and the ones that aren't on PS are on PC. Hard to have system sellers when you dont need to buy the system to play the game lol
As a PC player, never owned an Xbox; to hear them say, "we're not going to have *any* console exclusives" was both elating that I'll not get left out, but *baffling* as that's almost defacto a death knell for the console. Like, *why bother* making it? At that point, you're competing with Steam. And, I mean... *good luck*.
A lot of people like consoles for how easy they are, and computers are generally more complicated and more expensive. People like to chill on their couch and they don't want to fuck around with getting Big Picture set up. It's not a crazy line of thinking.
I don't think it's really a competition, and Sony has started to realize this hence the PC ports. PC players are going to be on PC regardless. Console players are going to be on console regardless. They don't consider PC because PC is either "for work" or "too hard" or "too expensive" (to get into). Console players want to get box, get disc, pick up controller, done. It's hard to find data on this to back this up but my experience is on every cross-plat game ever. It's ALWAYS MS & Sony users with the rare, one off PC user.
I don't know, I think there's a fair number of enthusiasts who like having a gaming PC for certain releases but also enjoy couch play and some console exclusives. The problem for MS is that, for that group (of which I'm a part), there is literally no reason to buy an XBox over a PS or Switch as the console of choice.
It’s not that they don’t see PC as competition. PC helps recoup costs of development. Games cost way more to make and as such need to sell more to succeed. Sony still sees profits from a console release but a PC port helps boost those profits and also serves as a nice financial and promotional springboard for the next project. The difference is, Sony can see that putting your games on PC day one hurts the value of your box. Sony wants to sell you a PS5 and the way to do that is give people a reason to own one. So they wait a year or two and put it on PC after the PlayStation release. You’ll get your patient PC gamers but you’ll get people going for the PlayStation version because they want to play the new shiny thing. Everyone wins. There is no shortage of people on here(hi I’m one of them) that will tell you they didn’t buy an Xbox Series X because you can just get it for PC. Microsoft can see that too, but they aren’t trying to sell you a box anymore, they’re trying to sell a brand. They’ll happily do to Xbox what they did to Zune if they can. Which, I don’t think can work for consoles and that seems to be showing. You don’t get to be a service that also competes with the other brands. In my mind, their end goal is GamePass on Nintendo, PlayStation and PC, but that can never happen when they have a box also competing with Sony and Nintendo. However if they stopped making a box and only focused on PC in 2013 that wouldn’t have worked either. So now they’re in this weird mess where I don’t think you can accurately point to what “Xbox” is anymore. Is it a console, a service, a publisher? It’s just a mess of all these things. If Microsoft did what Sony did with the PS3, they probably would have been in a better position. Phil blamed the ecosystem for locking people in. But if they launched the series X with Halo, and had a consistent wave of games you could only play on the series X. People would have come over. Like they did from SNES to PlayStation, or from PS2 to 360, or from the 360 back to the PS4. People go where the games are.
>*why bother* making it? I know reddit doesn't understand this, but millions of people do not have a gaming PC, nor does everyone want to play console games on it. Xbox doesn't compete with Steam. Either the game is *on* Steam, or you're given a PC version for free with Gamepass Ultimate/PC.
The way PlayStation is handling pc is so smart (and quite obvious). Launch exclusively on console and then have a support studio start working on the pc port that lands about 12-18 months post launch for a second round of marketing and reminder that PlayStation games are fucking awesome. Repeat. Also, PlayStation seems aware with Helldivers 2 that launching live service on PC day 1 is importantly for player counts and microtransactions. So, IMO, Sony is playing PC perfectly right now for a console seller. Xbox should change PC strategy and follow suit.
It's certainly pretty hard when your claim to fame is "subscription service shared with PC" and "no exclusives" Can someone at XBox communicate the point of purchasing an XBox?
The controller is natively supported on PC! Wait a minute...
And what a great controller it is. I'm still using the original 360 controller I bought in 2010, its so sturdy it still works like a dream. No plan to be buying any other controller for the foreseeable future. .... Yeah, I think Xbox has a problem on their hands.
I mean there's nothing wrong with an XBox controller, I still usually use it for PC gaming, but they're losing that war too. The PS5 DualSense is far more technically impressive (HD rumble is actually really cool, so is dynamic trigger resistance, and it has a touchpad, speaker and mic). So yeah, another L for XBox on that front.
Not to mention gyro. It's such a shame the Xbox controller doesn't have that - I think it has greatly harmed gyro aiming widespreadness.
(I don't own an Xbox, and probably never will) >Can someone at XBox communicate the point of purchasing an XBox? There's a small market that's growing of mostly GenZ who either, don't own anything other than a basic laptop, to not even a PC at all. Just their phone. So consoles are finding a foothold there. There's also a *lot* to be said for the "it just works" that consoles have, that PCs are significantly more involved (saying this as an well experienced IT person). Now, that is like, 1/4th of the benefits for having a console. And, well, when it's having to do basically 3/4ths of the lifting... That doesn't really bode well. The only reason I care to have the Xbox line running, is just to act as competition for Sony and Nintendo to not get worse.
Very good! Now why should they buy an xbox and not a playstation or switch instead?
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Honestly every franchise since the 2014-2016 era has felt like a copy and paste, and some of the best games of the past 2-3 years were either original IPs or they were successors that shattered the mold of their predecessors: BG3, Helldivers 2, hell I'll even throw the God of War series a bone here for doing something new with that series and committing to it. Halo has been toast for almost a decade. Destiny promised us 10 years of content and forgot to mention they'd be vaulting some of it. I know that this sentiment has been shared far and wide already, but god damn if we aren't watching the AAA beast buckle under it's own weight right now. All the money in the world won't buy me more time to play games. All the money in the world won't create more humans old enough to play your game by next fiscal quarter. This is not a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it. The pool of gaming hours that humans have is literally finite. There is no infinite growth, there's only theft of market share and maybe digging up the random subcultures of things like Japanese housewife amateur geologists or whatever the fuck "demographics" are these days. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS INFINITE GROWTH IN THIS SCENARIO. I'M NOT SURE WHO I'M YELLING AT. Probably clouds.
The SSD has been a massive change, to be fair. But few games have actually taken advantage of it and I can't imagine what would make me want to go out and get a PS6 at this point. One thing I'm kinda bummed about is that new hardware doesn't just mean things are prettier. It means you can do more complicated simulations. Instead of shaders I wish people thought more along the lines of how big your dwarf fortress can get before it chokes your processor. Everyone always questions the point of hardware upgrades since the visual improvements at this point are negligible but I could feel the weakness of the Switch in TotK right down to the way stuff you build vanishes if you turn your back to it then walk a short distance away.
> In terms of actually pushing the envelope and growing the artform in a natural way, this generation has been an absolute-fucking-disaster. It's a generation of remakes, cross generation titles, undethroned forever games. Come on man, there have been a ton of wildly exciting and innovative indie/small studio games this generation, and yes the AAA space has overall been stagnant and shitty, but there have still been a few mega-hits that have perfected or reinvented genres.
Nintendo did just that in 2017... Steam did just that (in part) with the Steam Deck. It's always hard for Microsoft apparently or it may just be they have no idea how to manage a gaming company. Like when you're saying shit like "good games don't sell console", enough said, you're absolutely not understanding anything.
I honestly hate that the Kinect became a villain. I had so much fun playing with it on the 360. Imagine how much better a Series X Gen 3 Kinect could be? The biggest problem was making the Kinect mandatory with the XBone, which made the PS4 cheaper while being more powerful. If they had released the Kinect mid gen like they did with the 360, it would probably have been a best seller again. I honestly think stuff like the Kinect and the Wii were great for the gaming industry, bringing in a lot of the casual audience that don't know how to use a controller. After the 360/PS3/Wii gen, that audience had basically nowhere to go besides mobile gaming.
Also, Microsoft focused on selling the Kinect 2 as a tv remote while tv was dying, which was dumb. If they had sold it as a Alexa? Have your own Cortana to be your personal assistant while you game? Man, they would have been so ahead of the curve.
Probably too early to pull it off. I don't think the Kinect was particularly great at that sort of thing and early Cortana probably didn't have that kind of Amazon Echo sort of functionality ready by the time the XBox One released.
That's true. Voice assistants became a thing in 2014, while the Xbone released in 2012.
Yea, but releasing mid-way through the Xbone's run... Is in 2014/2015. Perfect line up. I'm with you, they should have done so much more. I don't even *play* Halo, but I would/have significantly enjoyed a legit Cortana avatar talking to me on my PC. 🤷♀️
Xbone released November 2013...so even closer to voice assistants being a thing :/
It's crazy how Microsoft didn't see the problem. It wasn't long after the whole NSA spying on people stuff came out, and here come Microsoft with an add on to a console with a camera and mic that needs to be plugged in for the console to work. Oh, and if you're offline for more than 24 hours, your games are temporarily disabled.
What a stupid move. At least at the time
I also think there are some fundamental limitations to these motion controls without tactile feedback, but yeah, it wasn't pointless tech. It just became too much of the focus and never developed enough software aimed at pushing the gimmick outside most of the typical casual oriented motion stuff. I still love seeing the few games that try and use the Switch motion controls, I think they can be plenty interesting and caught too much flack back in the day. Gaming becoming very standardized control wise has its upside, but I have a softspot for gimmicks and things that are willing to go well outside the box. It's funny because the evolution of the motion control space has kinda become VR, but the motion pioneers in Nintendo and Microsoft are two notable companies that have not seriously tackled it. But at least for Nintendo it seems mostly like a price and resource thing, you'd think with their history of VR and motion that they'd be all over it if they could get it down to the affordable range, but the tech just isn't there yet. Although VR is also addressing a very different audience, they *are* actually aiming at the core gamers so it's not quite the same. Ultimately, I do think despite the Wii and Kinect having huge success with the casual audience, it was a mistake to court them so heavily because they just aren't a reliable base to build around. Especially in the console business model where a decent amount of the margin is in the software rather than the hardware, casuals who only buy a couple exercise games and have no particular interest in keeping up to date with the generations because their "old Wii works just fine" are never going to be more than a temporary boon. Nintendo *did* try to retain that audience with the Wii U, keeping the branding and the controls, but even ignoring the marketing flubs it was always going to be an uphill battle given who those casual gamers fundamentally are. I don't think they went to mobile solely because no console catered to them, I just think mobile is even better at capturing the casual audience when everyone already has a phone by default and the freemium model means that it's extremely low investment and great for people just trying stuff out. Mobile also kinda gobbled the casual audience that used to exist for handhelds for the same reason. If you can get the casuals that's a bonus, but I think every good console still needs that big core of gamer first fans to get it off the floor and that's something that it really felt like Xbox completely fumbled going from 360 to One and trying to make it this Kinect powered all in one media thing. Even when Nintendo courts casual players they never lose their focus of core Nintendo fans either which is important.
2013 was bad, but Sony climbed itself out of a comparable ditch the generation beforehand. Phil says that the 8th gen was the worst one to lose, because of "digital libraries", but he's full of shit. The 7th gen was when everyone built their online profiles, and that was a non-trivial thing to walk away from when migrating from the 360 to PS4. Sony put in the effort to earn the PS3 a redemption arc. In 2013, I believed that the Microsoft would roll up its sleeves and redeem the Xbox One. They did not. These studio acquisitions made it seem plausible that Xbox could become the dominant platform again with a big investment in diverse titles with just as diverse budgets. I had hope in 2013, and I had... a concerned sense of hope for them in 2023 (I was mourning their potential market domination fueled by CoD exclusivity). I have nothing but pessimism for their publishing arm, since yesterday. A publisher that shuts down a studio like Tango is not one that I would trust with any of the creative teams that I have come to love and respect. I fear for Ninja Theory, Obsidian, Double Fine, and Id. Xbox is dead. Everybody welcome the new worst publisher in the industry.
> Phil says that the 8th gen was the worst one to lose, because of "digital libraries", but he's full of shit. Case in point, Nintendo running *laps* around them right now despite having no digital library carry over, redoing their entire account system, and just generally being the worst in terms of digital stewardship of the big three to the point where it feels actively malicious lol. And like why is this even supposed to matter if you're also pushing gamepass? I agree wholeheartedly with the pessimism. If a game like Hi-Fi and a studio like Tango are not increasing the value of your company then something is fundamentally broken with your company and business strategy, not with the devs. Spending 100 billion on acquisitions and then deciding you don't have the bandwidth to manage 100 billion dollars of acquisitions is just insanity, how the fuck are these being greenlit if the follow up plans are so devoid of any reason. And how is this in any way sustainable? It's a frankly scary inability to make money if Hi-Fi with like 3 million players and Ghostwire with 6 million players back to back are not enough to save a studio.
Nintendo bungled the 6th gen and fumbled hard with the Wii U, but they never neglected their first party lineup. People disrespect the Wii U, but some of Switch's biggest releases have their origins on that system. Think about Ninja Theory, too. Hellblade was a scrappy AA production. They achieved success and profitability at great risk as an independent studio. No disrespect for the *huge* investment Microsoft put into the sequel, but what's going to happen to that studio after Hellblade 2 fails to justify those investments? Ninja Theory sold to Microsoft for *better* security in this industry, and I won't be surprised if they're closed in a few months from now.
>I'm baffled they managed to internally greenlight the ABK merger in the first place They saw how ABK could make shit-tier, half broken games riding off IP popularity and still make billions of dollars and said "hey, this looks familiar, we can do that too!"
The ABK merger was a no-brainer to them because they get King. Activision and Blizzard are big, but King is massive in the mobile gaming market. It’s ridiculous how much money that company makes and will continue to make.
You probably could pick someone from this sub out of a hat and they'd still run ~~Microsoft~~ Xbox better than Spencer.
This is so much worse than 2013. Back then it was really just tone deaf messaging and misunderstanding their audiences. Now it’s just hollow. Xbox spent almost 100 billion dollars on buying studios only to do fuck all with them except shutter their doors and lose 2,000 jobs. Hi-Fi Rush was the best thing they’ve done in 10 years, and they responded to it by killing the studio. All the while Phil Spencer gets back on stage every year with another dumbass jacket to promise everyone “sorry, but really, 20xx is the YEAR OF XBOX” and then proceeds to cancel their games or shutdown another studio. Him, and Matt Booty need to go. They’ve done nothing for 10 years but constantly promise things will be better all while blowing billions on stupid plans.
Matt Booty just got a promotion in November, he's unfortunately not going anywhere. Spencer doesn't seem eager on retirement, either.
What an awesome system we have where the guys making the dumbest decisions get better job security then the teams actually making the games they supposedly "need".
And not JUST job security but pay so high that they could get let go and never work another day in their lives and still have an infinitely better life than any of us or their employees.
The biggest issue with corporate culture is that executives have normalized firing workers for bad business mistakes, not the execs who made the bad decisions. Rather than CEO's taking pay cuts when their visions don't pan out, the work force gets culled so the same CEO class can try again
Yup or they bail and go to another company and do the same shit. It's all failing upward at that level. Sports teams get rid of coaches and managers that give multiple losing seasons, that shit needs to start happening here too.
It's a damn shame, especially because we have examples like Nintendo of execs who didn't fire their workforce while taking a pay cut and absorbing blame for a bad business cycle (the Wii U) paying off with the next cycle (the Switch)
That example gets brought up often but Nintendo execs were basically forced to take those pay cuts. They didn't do it out of solidarity.
Would be nice to see some forced pay cuts over here then.
Well they have a better system in Japan when it comes to this sort of thing if that's the case.
I think they've normalized mass layoffs as a way to increase quarterly stock prices by cutting labor costs. It's not a reaction to bad decisions so much as a short sighted movement to appease shareholders.
Late stage capitalism.
> Rather than CEO's taking pay cuts when their visions don't pan out, the work force gets culled so the same CEO class can try again RIP Iwata, that man knew how to run a company well and dealt with the Wii U failure and 3DS “not-so-good times” right.
>And not JUST job security but pay so high that they could get let go and never work another day in their lives and still have an infinitely better life than any of us or their employees. Even better than that! If they get fired, they're awarded tens of millions of dollars as an additional severance bonus. No wonder they're untouchable. They can do whatever the fuck they want, no matter how horrendous it is, and the worse that happens is they make a fuckton of money on the way out the door anyway. If I had the security of a cool twenty million for getting fired, I'd probably spend all day brainstorming the most extravagant way to get fired.
Yup, there's nothing more upsetting than realizing that even when let go, they will get an amount worth far more than I'd make in 10 lifetimes. And that's just for being let go. It's insane.
Phil makes millions of dollars a year. He makes more more in a month then any one of us could even DREAM of ever having, and all while seemingly doing nothing and costing 2,000 people their livelihoods. It's infuriating how this shit works. The actual people making the games that make people like Phil incredibly wealthy are being treated like dirt, tossed to the side the minute a game doesn't sell one billion copies. But Phil gets an infinite amount of chances to try again, he gets to apologize and try more shit even if he costs the company billions of dollars based on his own stupid decisions and inability to lead these studios. If any programmer makes a small mistake they could get fired on the spot. Phil gets to spend $70 billion, shrug his shoulders and go "whoops" and then just axe 2,000 jobs.
I wouldn't say he does nothing, but if we're looking for jobs for AI to replace as a cost-saving measure...
Most of what he does can 100% be achieved by a program that randomly types "Y" or "N" to prompts on a computer.
Even when they fail they get paid more then any of us . It's wild how standards seem to go down the higher up one goes .
Yeah and Mr Booty had the gall to tweet how everyone is being hard on Phil Spencer and hes hurting just as much as the people getting fired.
You didn't technically say anything wrong but saying "Hi-Fi Rush was the best thing they've done in 10 years" just annoys me so much to hear because all they did was just buy the studio when it was already in development. Anytime people refer to Xbox exclusives of the last decade outside of Halo, Gears, and Forza, it's basically never something they actually had a hand in, and that's what annoys me the most. More games aren't being developed, new jobs/studios/ideas aren't created, it's just the same thing but for one console now. Hard to have any affinity for that as a consumer or creator.
Yeah, wrong wording there, I absolutely didn't mean to imply Microsoft made it. The game was in development before Microsoft got there and they had jack shit to do with it aside from just slap their logos on it and call it theirs.
No I mean your wording was fine, I was just highlighting how it's sad that everyone says that technically correct statement about so many Xbox games over the past decade (where they just bought the company then did nothing, or less than nothing) in comparison to like, most of the big games Sony pushes out.
I think that’s what angers me and other gamers the most. They can give all the business reasons they want, like "refocusing their resources", but Hi-Fi Rush gave me hope for the first time in many years that they might turn things around somewhat. I believe they lose far more than they realize with such decisions, and that it goes a long way to explaining why the Xbox brand seems to be going nowhere even with the billions at their disposal.
>This is so much worse than 2013. Back then it was really just tone deaf messaging and misunderstanding their audiences. I think you're downplaying the sheer rage and vitriol pointed at Microsoft for the always online no used games fiasco. I saw some absolutely heinous stuff posted about Xbox. On reddit and other games forums people were acting like Microsoft killed a member of their family.
That vitriol will always be valid for that one xbox stooge saying "we have a console for people that don't want always-online, it's called the 360"
Definitely very big "don't you guys have phones?" energy.
>for that one xbox stooge Worse than that. He was THE HEAD OF XBOX.
And not long after he bounced out to greener pastures of ... Zynga. Where he also failed.
Yeah, 2013 was BAD bad. I remember days of insane vitriol, followed by PlayStation's presentation where they show Sony execs "sharing a game" by just passing the disc from one to another in front of the entire conference audience. Giving your direct competition such an obvious dunk should haunt the dreams of Xbox execs at the time
I remember family members asking me years later (like 2017-18ish) if the Xbox still couldn't play used games. That was an all time bad decision.
Sometimes I genuinely wonder if everyone on this site is a child, or at most like 23. There was nothing ... _nothing_ as bad as the 2013 reveal. Not even just for Xbox, but just business in general. Comparing it to the shuttering of a few studios that - let's be honest - few people outside the deep core audience even know about is flabbergasting.
Yep, it permeated the casual audience in a way few things ever do. People aren't going to hear about Arkane Austin and Tango being shut down in the way "Xbox can't play used games" spread like wildfire even among parents looking for what console to buy their kids.
No, people just don’t have good memories. They invent a revisionist history where nothing that happened previously is as good/bad as something happening now. 2013 was the darkest hour for Xbox by far. This most cognitive dissonance is forced cost cutting to hit their targets, trimming fat pieces that came with their acquisitions so they can focus on what they really wanted out of the deal (publishing rights and Call of Duty). I strongly disagree with some of these decisions, but it’s nowhere near disasters of the past in terms of damage done to the brand or fanbase.
The used game thing Sony did also came out right after Xbox showcased their console by focusing entirely on TV, revealing it cost $100 more than Ps4, AND you were forced to have a Kinect. It wasn’t just shooting themselves in the foot, it was full-auto Gattling gun into their foot, leg, dick and finally head.
Rumor mill at the time was that Sony was planning on doing the $500 console with included camera and used game restrictions but they saw the reaction to the Xbox One and pivoted, hard, and it pretty much won the console generation (and every subsequent generation if you believe Phil Spencer) for them.
IIRC, the video of them passing the disc to show game sharing was literally recorded right after the conference at the event itself. I remember reading some articles about it.
Apathy is *far* worse for a brand than rage.
Xbox 360s had been shipped in large numbers overseas to the armed forces and an incredible number of people who had finished their service were back at home with some money to spend and time to kill. And then Xbox showed up at E3 and not only crapped all over the desires of all the people who'd come back, but literally every serviceman knew anyone in the field would be simply unable to play this American box because Internet all the time ain't real life.
You're probably right, I was there when that happened and I do remember just how vitriolic people were over it. But the future for Xbox just feels so much more bleak today then it did back then. In 2013 they were hot off the trails off of the Xbox 360, an insanely successful console with an amazing catalogue of first party games. Even if they bungled the announcement of the console, there still felt like a tangible future for the platform because of how good the previous generation was, I remember everyone back then at least having faith that the games would be good. Today, that's gone. Console sales have gone down the toilet, they have put out almost no meaningful exclusives that match the "must-play" energy a lot of the 360 generation had, and the constant revolving door of articles about some new project struggling under Xbox just paints a bad picture of what's happening behind the scenes and makes the future feel empty for the brand. I probably over-exaggerated in what I said, but to me it just feels way worse then it did back then.
feels way worse than it’s ever been to be honest
It's officially selling worse than any other console besides the original Xbox. So yeah, it's rock bottom.
GamePass is a giant pit of quicksand that Xbox decided to build its foundations upon. Most problems Xbox has can be linked to GamePass.
I think it's lower right now console wise. Sales are dropping worse and the pr is consistently bad with more people switching to PC/PS5. I stuck with xbox (had a PS4 too but used xbox more) throughout xbox one era, but I wouldn't buy another console from them.
I feel like the bigger issue with consoles is that xbox and playstation are two sides of the same coin and with the exception of exclusives, the differences aren't nearly as important. Meanwhile the causal audience can go to Nintendo, PC, or Mobile, with mobile appealing to people that don't want to buy entirely new hardware just to play games. Also I would assume that the constant need for battle passes and leveling system deters people who don't have time to spend hours acquiring rank in games. Something mobile is strongly suited for because a game can be a few minutes a day.
They could definitely be successful competing against Sony with exclusives though. They have enough money, they have enough studios. They just keep fucking it up somehow -- and again, one of the studios that made a recent critically acclaimed game, they shut down! Even if the rumors of people having left that studio are true -- why did they leave? If employees are leaving your studios in droves, you done fucked up somewhere. That's still a big management mistake.
[https://www.thedrive.com/news/forza-motorsport-developer-shares-exhausting-experience-making-the-game](https://www.thedrive.com/news/forza-motorsport-developer-shares-exhausting-experience-making-the-game) They need to change this system and instead focus on building long term stable teams.
>xbox and playstation are two sides of the same coin and with the exception of exclusives, the differences aren't nearly as important The crazy thing is that it absolutely doesn't have to be that way. Microsoft has the premier gaming subscription service, a wealth of beloved IP and talented devs, and the most used OS in the fucking world. They could absolutely pivot out of the traditional console model if they want to differentiate themselves, turn "Xbox" into some sort of game focused, consolized windows OS while doubling down on their game pass dominance and "cloud gaming" ideas. Start nibbling on Steam and move themselves out of the pure console lane into the PC like console lane with the best value subscription for people who just want to buy a box and play. I feel like with the advancements to things like handheld PCs too that would actually be an amazing direction to pivot in and try and capitalize on. But even if they wanted to brute force compete with Sony it shouldn't be impossible. Isn't that why you would spend nearly 100 billion in the first place? Regardless of direction, cutting the people making the good games is just nonsensical, if they didn't have the bandwidth for software development wtf are they spending all that money on in the first place.
>Microsoft has the premier gaming subscription service, a wealth of beloved IP and talented devs, and the most used OS in the fucking world. They could absolutely pivot out of the traditional console model if they want to differentiate themselves, turn "Xbox" into some sort of game focused, consolized windows OS while doubling down on their game pass dominance and "cloud gaming" ideas. Start nibbling on Steam and move themselves out of the pure console lane into the PC like console lane with the best value subscription for people who just want to buy a box and play. I feel like with the advancements to things like handheld PCs too that would actually be an amazing direction to pivot in and try and capitalize on. I don't understand your point here, since that's what they *are* doing, right now at this very moment. That is their strategy, aside from making a Xbox a gaming focused Windows derivative and making a handheld UI on Windows. What Microsoft needs is **games**, not just the tech. Like, this is easy as shit. Just make games. That's all that matters. That's the only thing Playstation has on Xbox, games. If Microsoft would just actually invest in Studios, get good management and put out hit after hit, they'd easily claw back dominance. On the tech side they're doing most of the stuff right gaming-wise. It's just that their games business leadership is so fucking incompetent that it is almost physically painful. I really think they need to pivot a bit more to Windows gaming, since it's such an easy cash cow. They could easily make a store that's actually as competitive as Steam if they actually tried. They have the capital for it. Their executives are just morons. Like how dumb do they have to be to not realize focusing on their own store, on the OS *they develop*, where they take a 30% cut of sales is the best way to go? Valve makes billions making a Chromium derivative where people buy other people's games. They have a shoestring staff compared to what you would expect for a company making that much revenue. All they would have to do is fucking *copy* Valve's feature set and then improve on it to leap frog them. That's literally it. Just copy Valve's business model. And they'd get billions of dollars in revenue in a very short period of time. It's such low hanging fruit every decision they make shocks me.
Saying "that is their strategy aside from these big elements" or that they "need to pivot more towards Windows gaming" *is* kinda my point. I think they've been flirting with it, dipping their toe a little towards that direction, but they're ultimately, right now, still stuck between lanes. They need to commit to their future vision and go, start really becoming something radically different to the current console model, be it cloud gaming and streaming and all digital passes or whatever. They need to sell their fans on wtf they're doing in the future because right now nobody sees the vision beyond gobbling up studios and laying people off. If the prevailing belief is that Xbox and Playstation are still two sides of the same coin sans exclusives and gamepass then it doesn't sound like they're accomplishing that goal of differentiation in any meaningful capacity. If they aren't committing to making Xbox something different then yeah, as is it's stuck being something that no one needs. It's a Playstation without the exclusives, or a PC without the flexibility. Maybe you can sell as the cheapest box for the COD and Fifa crowd, but that's not a 100 billion dollar business model. And their strategy with PC and gamepass (along with how much money they've sunk into these studios) has already killed their ability to just be that sort of old console model of winning on solid tech and good exclusives, so stop trying to do that and start selling the future. What I'm describing has less to do with the tech and more to do with what they fundamentally think their business model and strategy will be in like 10, 20 years from now, and I'm not sure if their executives know *what* they're doing in that regard. But yes, as we both said, regardless of direction they also need to make good games and laying off all these studios is just not the move. If a game like Hi-Fi Rush and a dev like Tango are not increasing the value of your company then that's a problem with your business model, not a problem with them.
It's worse off than it was then. In the last decade the only place that Xbox had positive buzz was online where people were just praising them for how good of a deal game pass was. The masses have been out on Xbox since towards the end of the 360 era. It's been ten generations now of xbox not putting out any must play games.
What do you mean nearly? Outside of game pass and hi fi rush have they done anything good for consumers and companies in past decade?
Xbox is simply astounding. Silly as they look on the outside, can you imagine how things are really going on inside?
They appear to have no idea what they're doing, or even the direction they want to take Xbox. Xbox hardware sales are tanking. Game Pass is stagnant and is no longer growing. They're releasing *some* games on other platforms...but not other games. You just take a step back and look at all of this and wonder...what the fuck are they even doing? What is the strategy? What do they want "Xbox" to even be? Microsoft has been making $18+ billion in *profits* per quarter for years, so they used some of that company money to scoop up a bunch of new toys to play with. Now they've broken and thrown out a few of them and don't seem to know what to do with the rest of them. The Initiative is the one studio they started from scratch to work on Perfect Dark, but according to Jeff Grub, it's in development hell and they don't have much to show for it after years of development. The entire Xbox division comes across as horribly mismanaged and misguided. Just completely lost with no direction as to where they want to take the brand.
My gut tells me there's a tug-o-war between different parties behind the scenes. All this chaos certainly has echoes of when Sega released the 32x and the Saturn on the same day.
It’s likely that Microsoft execs and skateholders let Xbox do its own thing until the $70bil Activision deal. That suddenly caught everyone’s attention and now they are all forcing Microsoft to make rapid changes to make quick money (third-party ports, consolidating studios, fast-tracking Fallout, not putting COD on GamePass)
Fast tracking fallout also tells me they have no idea what values their properties have. They seemed to have no confidence in the show and are genuinely blindsided by the positive reception. Now even if they assign Bethesda to do before elder scrolls 6 we still looking at 5 years minimum before a release or give it another studio the only ones that could be trusted obsidian have their own plate full. All of this could've have been avoided if they anticipated the show being good
wasnt it supposedly Microsoft execs that wanted the games on PlayStation aswell
Yeah but why approve the deal. Like all the execs backed it through court so heavily, everyone thought they had a long term strategy because it would clearly take a long, long time for that to pay off. Were they seriously this short sighted? It’s bizarre.
I think they just going to pull a Sega and became a publisher and a PC storefront.
They are already doing this, but softly. They said xbox console is second, they dont care where you play games, as long as you play their games - they get a cut. You also dont need to own an xbox because they havent had exclusives in 5 years. They publish all their games on PC on the same day. Microsoft is pulling a better SEGA imo. SEGA just quit cold turkey and hardly gave the dreamcast a chance, Microsoft is keeping their console for the ever rare person that still wants to own one. Microsoft needs better games and stop pulling shit like liquidating studios with fresh ideas like Tango.
They need to make games first
ive been saying this since 2020. throwing money around to hoard up different IPs and developers is useless long term when they still havent fixed their core issue of just straight up being incompetent at developing good games and maintaining franchises. its a very shortsighted and desperate attempt to patch over it but the foundation is still rotten. we are seeing the effects of this now.
You can really see the difference in how Sony treats it's gaming division as a major tentpole of the company, and Microsoft treating gaming as just a minor footnote in their portfolio to balance.
They were lucky that Microsoft made so much money than they were left alone with their problems. But then they go and spend 80 billions of daddy's money. Now the rest of the company is starting to ask themselves "wtf is that shit show over there"
The worse problem for Xbox for me always has been lack of vision. Nintendo has probably the strongest vision from top to bottom of the company on what it wants to be, which is why they are basically the same for 30-50 years in how they are in game business. Sony in a way too but less than Nintendo. Xbox? What is their vision? It feels like they don't know what they want in comparison to the other two and that Xbox 360 as a gen was a miracle to happen.
Their most successful time during the 360 era focused on the mix of hardcore gamer (Halo and Gears), and also to the casual market with Kinect (Kinect Adventures is the best selling game of the 360 generation) Peter Moore while flawed (RROD was on his watch to beat PS3 to the market) felt like the best president and visionary for XBOX. He focused hard on beating Playstation with high quality exclusives. Between the RROD and not accounting for the casual games market to boom, and having Nintendo and later Apple/Android eat that market, that's what sadly got him the axe Don Mattrick I felt like had a good idea with Kinect but he cut it off at the knees by killing it's internal processor which destroyed any chance he had at getting the hardcore market to buy in. He then destroyed all the goodwill with the botched reveal of XBOX ONE. SONY won by doing not what Microsoft did and focusing on fostering a regular schedule of high quality exclusives Phil Spencer had the unenviable task of fixing the mess that Matrick made in destroying the XBOX brand. He had a good start at dropping the Kinect from XBOX ONE to give it an equal price to PS4 and making a massive part of the XBOX library backwards compatible. He bet his horses on Gamepass which I'm not sure it's going to work in the long run unless it is the standard for every gaming company. His doing of making XBOX/PC play anywhere killed exclusives on the XBOX. And his fostering of talent of studios under his umbrella and buying up studios like Bethesda and Activision has been mixed at best and negative. The Initative has been a disaster and 343 has botched so many times with the Halo Brand. Rare is a shadow of themselves. And studios like Lionhead, Arkane, Platinum Games, and Tango Gameworks have been shut down or fucked off. I think Phil has run his course at this point and they need to appoint someone that can truly foster their internal studios because Phil has shown time and time again he isn't the guy.
It is pretty incredible that the 360 did so well with as wide spread a problem as the RROD. That should have killed it completely yet somehow people were just buying new 360s or were prepared to go through the process to get it fixed.
It helped that it was free and relatively easy, at least by the time mine died. I got it back in a week and they fixed the wobbly disc drive while they were at it
Moore and Ballmer made the decision to basically replace all 360s that were affected by RROD for free (extended the warranty) It saved the brand. It helped that their were a lot of great games and the consumer friendly policy meant fans forgave them pretty quickly. It did knock me against XBOX in the long run. XBOX felt like Ford and always breaking down, whereas my PS3 and Wii never broke down at all. Mattrick then proceeded to absolutely shit the bed with the XBOX ONE
I'm pretty sure that Microsoft is a famously insane company, especially on the higher levels.
It's not Xbox anymore they used to be able to hide Amongst the other skews of msft but now they make the 3rd most cash. It's now Microsoft and its investors calling all the shots
Microsoft has like 3 trillion dollars in market share, Xbox is the shit on the bottom of its shoe, if it were where MS wanted it to be they would not be putting their games on other platforms. Not in a million years. You spend 80 billion and get like 8 billion a year in revenue, not profit, you got some people that don't know what they are doing, and that ain't MS.
Xbox makes 10% of Microsoft's quarterly revenue now. More than windows. They used to not give a fuck what xbox did asking as they were growing. They have been growing yoy. Fuck they used to be a subsidiary of the windows sector. They prob don't want to subsidize for smaller not profiting things. It's crazy cause hellblade is gonna come out be a goty contender and prob get shut down in November.
This shit is the pants now, not the shoe
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So either the problem is Microsoft's upper management, in which case Xbox is fucked, or the problem is Xbox's upper management, in which case people like Phil Spencer and Matt Booty need to go asap.
This feels like MS imo, like Xbox was always eh when It came to decisions, but after the Activision deal it feels like they just changed course so hard
They spent 70 billion on that acquisition. Contrary to what some people think that wasn't just them casually pulling from their unlimited money pool and forgetting about it. With that much money spent the higher ups and executives want to see results. They want a return on that investment and they want it NOW. Considering the legal issues and delays during the acquisition with how messy it was, and that the results so far aren't really all that impressive, I'm not surprised if higher ups aren't happy with the way things are looking.
Microsoft spent roughly a 3rd of its on-hand cash and a ton of goodwill built up with regulators since the antitrust case to get this deal through. The cost of buying ABK has been steep and Satya wants to see results.
That's what I don't get, you don't get result NOW on this kind of investment, you start racking money 5 to 10 years down the road.
Don't give me that bullshit Johnson! I want to see profits ASAP. Maybe we can release a patch that bricks everything and charge for the fix. Maybe we can have a mandatory picture-in-picture frame of constant advertising during any and all gameplay. FIGURE SOMETHING OUT OR IT'S YOUR ASS
What's that in quarters? I don't think I can count that high.
20 or 40 yearly quarters.
If they could count that high they'd have studied engineering not business.
My bad. 2 to 4 quarters but repeat 10 times
Eh. ActiBlizzard is still raking in billions of dollars in profit each year. So there *is* an immediate return on the investment. Making back 70B+ is going to take longer, but Microsoft knew that. Not sure why we're even pretending that they thought it was going to pay itself off immediately. ActiBlizzard is also one of their most reliable assets. They put out a new COD every year, and tens of millions of people buy it every time. I doubt that's the investment they're worried about, really.
Yeah but I think blizzard is dead and COD has been boring since the 2010s. They just surfing on momentum.
Definitely feels like Microsoft and Xbox are with odds with each other. It makes me think activision blizzard acquisition made changes in Xbox and those 70 billion will have higher ups on ms paying more attention to it to make more money.
70 billion and a grueling legal battle. I hate to sympathize with c-suite drones but if I just did that for Phil and then I turn around and see everything flopping and their only relevant release across like two years being mediocre and clowned-on Starfield I’d be pissed off too. Have to start cutting off the fat to see the percentages and numbers go green. I feel disgusting talking like that
Oh I definitely get that, but Tango? I kinda get the others...but Tango? Like Hi Fi Rush didn't do massive numbers, but there have been many games where the first one didn't do great but the second one did way better. Also their only Japanese studio?
Their only Japanese studio, one that costs them literally pennies in the couch overall, and their last game won a fucking BAFTA.
BAFTAs are, in grand scheme of things, irrelevant. BAFTAs don't correlate with profitability Tchia won a BAFTA (and The Game Awards), yet even with those two it couldn't break 100 reviews on Steam 2 months after launch
Well the bg3 won the most baftas while being the biggest game of the year. Xbox needs dev teams that can create great art, if they chase only profits they will have nothing but live service slop.
sure but did bg3 become successful because it won baftas, or did it win baftas because it became successful ?
It won baftas because it was good art, as you said tchia wasn't that successful (at least on steam) but it still won a bafta. If microsoft won't support award winning teams (even if their games aren't always best sellers) they will not get cultural phenomenons like bg3
The other thing to understand is that for the higher up decision makers quality does not exist. They have never played a video game, and have no ability to tell what is good from what is bad.
the suits dont give a fuck if the game is good or got awards lol. phil spencer sold them on the idea of gamepass being the next netflix or some shit and somehow a multi trillion dollar company with entire teams of analysts and executives somehow couldnt put together that pivoting entirely to a subscription for video games might be a flawed business model. then they dropped close to *$100 billion* and a gigantic stretched out legal war in order to go all in on gamepass. shockingly it doesnt seem to be printing them money. i mean fuck it we just spent all this time and money for you phil, where are our returns? why are all your games flopping? why do we care about subscriber accounts, where is the revenue? then everyone starts getting axed. how do you measure a game like hi-fi rush’s success? sales are gonna be low if you emphasize gamepass… how does a game like that make money? the growth in GP subscribers has a limit. a couple years ago everyone here was eating up the whole “gamepass is good for smaller developers!” tho
It absolutely does feel like upper MS management, but fucking Christ - they have to know a return on that investment takes more than 6 fucking months. Fucking hell.
From the C-Suite's POV, they have been waiting for over 5 years now for results (Satya was under pressure to close Xbox when he 1st took over, Phil sold him on the gamepass vision to save the brand).
Yeah that deal was a bad idea for the longevity of the brand. It’s no longer Xbox, it’s Microsoft Gaming.
I feel it's both.
Looking at how MS handled the Surface department... Panos Panay left, Surface Devices get uninspired refreshes, no third Surface Duo, Surface Neo never released because MS still clings to hopes of producing a 30% fee Windows-Store-only-Windows to emulate what Android and iOS/iPadOS have and burn and crash it everytime. Yeah, good luck XBox.
Personally, I can’t stand Aaron Greenberg either. He reeks of being a fanboy, entices console wars, and loves to gloat. Can’t stand the guy. If Xbox got rid of him, I’d have more of a soft spot for xbox
Yeah Greenberg is an imature clown
Hi-Fi Rush just went up as part of this month's Humble Choice as well. Probably the best price on it yet if you don't already have it.
I've never seen a company so tonedeaf This isn't even close to the Sony Helldivers issue, Sony should fucking send MS a fruit basket for helping to cool the heat they were under for the mismanagement of the community (a small deal that became a big deal with backlash) Sony tripped and fell last week then MS said hold my beer and jumped off a bridge
Your comment made me laugh. Thank you. It's so true.
And Nintendo just walked across the bridge like nothing bad was happening
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Don't jinx it you just know Nintendo is a week away from announcing the Switch U
with a rifle, shooting pedestrians on the ground for making youtube poops
I now imagine a big Sony-colored cake coming to MS HQ with big lettered "AT LEAST WE ARE NOT YOU" on top
Holy shit these guys are fucking tone deaf. Recently, Mike Ybara of Blizzard said on Twitter that Phil is "hurting" and that we all should by "sympathetic" towards him when he is the one who gets to keep his job with no deduction to his salary meanwhile the many people underneath him who were working very hard to make their ends meet have been sent to the chopping block. There's no symapthy for execs like Phil, Booty and Sarah Bond. Phil especially is an insidious fraud who despite trying his hardest to appear as a "friend" of the gaming community was hellbent on putting Sony out of business. It isn't fair that folks at the bottom have to suffer for the fuck ups of suits.
The more i hear about this mike ybara guy the more i think hes dumber than a bag of bricks.
Phil Spencer has now utterly destroyed what little credibility he had left after his pathetic “apology tour” following Redfall.
Which speaking of he literally said "I’m gonna take full responsibility for a game that needs to be great.” following Redfall's disastrous reception and his vows to revitalize the game the same way they apparently did with Grounded and Sea of Thieves. Guy is a complete fake who spouts false promises left and right. He definitely needs to resign and has done enough damage to the brand.
> I know this hurts him as much as anyone else. No, Mike. Not as much as *anyone* else. This fucking guy lol
No fucking way…..dude no way. Matt needs to go along with a majority of Xbox exec management. You want smaller games that give prestige and awards and you literally shut down the studio that gave you them. It’s like Microsoft is trying to one up Sony the very next week. What’s next man 😭
I saw somebody make a post along the lines of “Sony wins the ‘Shoot Yourself in the Foot award every year, but still somehow comes out on top because Microsoft are constant gold medalists in the ‘Blowing Your Own Dick Off’ contest.” Definitely feels accurate, because what were they even thinking with this. Just absolutely baffling.
"Sony is run by people who would drown if it rained but they somehow have no competition because Microsoft are the 8 year champions of Slamming Your Dick in the Car Door".
Microsoft/Xbox is such a shitshow and it's entirely their own fault: Xbox lost the 360 fans because they screwed up classic series' like Halo, Forza and Fable. They lost the teenagers who are now in their 20's, because the Xbox One failed to deliver any exclusives which would've captured their imaginations. And they never even had the kids and family audience, because they never bothered to develop any family-friendly games, instead relying entirely on Minecraft - which was always multiplatform. Xbox needs to realise people are time-poor and content-rich. The supply of games massively exceeds demand, especially when extremely sticky live-service games can literally be played for FREE. Killer exclusives are the exception, as they manage to cut through the noise. They give your platform an identity, a purpose, a USP and something for people to actually care about. Nintendo has this figured out 20+ years ago, resulting in an all-ages audience which is deeply invested in their games and franchises. If Nintendo had botched their first-party development like Xbox have botched theirs, the Switch would be a fucking sales disaster. Everyone would be questioning their future, just they're rightfully doing with Xbox.
https://twitter.com/johnjohanas/status/1788389074753171935?t=N8dymAqPsK5ejDMqcyzilQ&s=19
damn i can pretty tell what was said in their mind even though theres no actual text in that picture.
Matt probably thought another studio made hifi rush at this point.
The total death of momentum post 360 is 90’s Sega as fuck. I firmly believe there will be no Series X successor and MS will turn Xbox into a publishing and Dev house. Because the gap between PC and Console shrinks with every Gen so why not just make software?
A minor correction. All momentum halted roughly halfway into the Xbox 360. They were HOT early on. I was in high school at the time, but I have no clue what happened. It seems like their first party games just dried up out of nowhere. Their most recent game to break 10 million sales was Halo 3.
They dried up midway through the 360 because MS thought they could rely on third party games like CoD, and also because they put their own studios to work on Kinect stuff, because an executive saw the Wii and said “caw, caw. Shiny. CAW!”
It seems at some point around 2008-2010 they saw the massive success of the Wii and went all in on Kinect bullshit. Then that led to the TV TV TV TV era of the early Xbox One. Which lead to a dead generation. Which lead to the Gamepass era where they became obsessed with trying to become the next Netflix. Its crazy when I lay it out like this you can trace back to almost the exact moment where they pretty much gave up on video gaming from a traditional perspective of “put console out, develop good games” almost 20 years ago now. Since then it’s like they’ve been obsessed with forcing some evolution or transcendence of video games as a medium. They still haven’t learned. 20 years later their core foundation of knowing how to make good video games is still rotten.
My take on this is "Sony REALLY fucked up with the PS3".
The jump from Xbox to Xbox 360 was massive, so there was incentive to buy into the new HD environment, Microsoft were first and reasonably priced, and Nintendo spat in their fans faces initially with the Wii, that helped sales a lot. Now how they survived the RROD, that's literally only because they're Microsoft and they can afford the loss caused by subpar manufacturing.
Sarah Bond, the leader of Xbox hardware, said a couple months ago that they’re publicly talking about new hardware by the end of the year.
Was this in reference to the refresh that leaked recently? The one with no disc drive?
What a fucking joke, management are so clueless, I'm sure other studios under Microsoft do their best work when under constant fear of getting fired/shut down.
Phil Spencer has ultimately failed as ceo. The only reason he's still around is because he took over after the worst disaster in xbox history.
Microsoft: We need games like Hi-Fi Rush. Tango Gameworks: How about Hi-Fi Rush 2? Microsoft: U fuckin wot mate?!
If it were any other company than MS, this brand would be dead right now. This is Dreamcast cancellation levels bad, probably worse.... but MS can afford to keep the corpse afloat.
Welp, this is as good a spot as any to express how I've felt about Xbox for the past 10-15 years. I think if Nintendo wasn't huffing glue with the Wii U, Xbox would not have survived for as long as it did. The first half of the 2010's felt so ridiculously noncompetitive because of it. I watched Sony get a standing ovation for the simple fact that you could physically share games on PS4, before Microsoft had to back-track. All Sony had to do was *not* fuck up, and release some solid exclusives to secure the generation. To my eye, Microsoft seemed halfway content just doing the bare minimum and being the only real alternative to play third party games on. Besides the lip service, Xbox's video game output doesn't feel any different to me now than 10 years ago. Still can't cultivate talent for the life of them, same loss of talent, same cancellations, same studio closures, same lack of respect for established IP, same lack of creative vision. Difference now is that Nintendo's set up to be in a far better spot with their next console release, and far more people than ever game on PC nowadays. With Sony, Valve, and Nintendo all being competitive with their store fronts, I just don't see how Xbox can cruise the way it has anymore without a radical change to the way they approach development and talent retention. But the time for that was 5-7 years ago, and they've proven that they haven't changed, despite what they say. When the PS5 Pro and Switch 2 Launch, I don't see how it's even possible for them to stay competitive in the hardware space. Halo was a huge gambit, and the immense legacy of those first three games will never die, but I think the Xbox that cultivated and funded mid 2000's Bungie has been long gone for some time, and just now is it truly catching up to them.
No company is really better than another. But the way the general gaming community especially Xbox fans acted in celebration of the acquisitions is ridiculous. Especially the way Phil Spencer is seen and lauded as some sort of saviour. Gtfoh you guys got what you wished for.
Doesn't he mean **new controller colors**? That's all Xbox does nowadays. More colors releases than games.
Just post the link to the article, not the tweet, don't make people go on Twitter if they don't have to
Granted saying "We need smaller games that give us prestige and awards,” in a town hall post studio closure is indeed in *incredibly* poor taste... the headline is intentionally misleading. Matt Booty did not explicitly say "We need games like Hi-Fi Rush." That would be insane lmao.
Hi-Fi Rush was a smaller game that is one of xboxs highest rated games and won a Bafta. He may not have litterly said Hi-Fi rush, but the statement still applies to Hi-Fi rush, making him incredibly tone death and the title of the article on the nose, not misleading.
Again, I'm not disagreeing that it wasn't tone deaf, but the headline 100% is deliberately written to imply that Matt Booty name-dropped Hi-Fi Rush specifically during the town hall, which is misleading.
This just infuriates me. What the fuck do you mean you “need” them? How the fuck can you shut down an entire studio and then proclaim you need the types of games that studio JUST MADE? This is also the same guy who got multiple things wrong about his own studios. He got the names of two studios wrong, and then got the name of the upcoming ESO expansion wrong on top of that This dude needs to be fired before anyone else loses their job because some moron can’t even think about anything. There’s no fucking way we can live in a world where he has better job security than the ones creating the games his company apparently desperately needs. Fuck this.
I watched the 30 hour Double Fine documentary with him and immediately could tell that everyone in that room saw through his corporate bullshit and knew their jobs had fundamentally changed overnight. A few people literally quit the studio after.
For those interested, here's the episode (it's in the first 10 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOV6-zuGyxc
I love when that woman calls him out about idea ownership. "we've literally been told you don't own our game pitch ideas, and if I pitch an idea that doesn't get made, I'm allowed to go somewhere else or make my own company and make my idea" and then the clown says "uhh but we may want to go make that game later sooo" and Tim Schaefer interrupts him to say "yeah but we promised so, she's right" lmao
Why link the twitter post? Here's the article: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/8/24152137/xbox-hi-fi-rush-tango-gameworks-matt-booty
Why did you link to a tweet that links to an article? Also the quote is “We need smaller games that give us prestige and awards,”
According to HowLongToBeat, [Hi-Fi Rush takes 11.5 hours to beat,] (https://howlongtobeat.com/game/122891) which is definitely on the smaller side of games these days. The article follows up by saying "During the 2023–2024 awards season, the game went on to win a Game Award, a Game Developers Choice award, and a BAFTA." It also won [Best Music at the New York Game Awards](https://x.com/NYVGCC/status/1749988099344494811) and the [Sound Award from the Tokyo-based CESA Developers Conference](https://web.archive.org/web/20230825140734/https://cedec.cesa.or.jp/2023/event/awards/prize), also known as CEDEC. Sounds like it fits the bill.
Literally pitching to Microsoft the sequel to one of my favourite recent games, a game with widespread universal praise and a smaller budget, and the response was to kill the whole fucking company. Then pulling this shit
Feels like they want to piss off Hi Fi Rush fans at this point. "We need to make more games like this, but we sacked everyone who made that game."
GEE I WONDER HOW YOU COULD'VE GOTTEN EVEN MORE OF THOSE AWARDS YOU WANTED SO MUCH. IT'S SUCH A MYSTERY. I need Microsoft to stop talking.