it’s crazy how bad at video games microsoft is. they change their direction every year, spend billion and billions every time they do it, and end up with nothing over and over. the xbox 360 was the most popular console in the west and had a clear identity (online dudebro games + dumping ground for every and any weird indie or abandoned japanese genre). how are you a company with infinite money, standing at the top, and end up with whatever the fuck the xbox division is now. and of course all the decision makers who have overseen that are still around and still making functionally infinite money, while the people tasked with actually making any sense of whatever the fuck they’re supposed to be doing are continually laid off.
presumably from here xbox will somehow be tasked with being a testbed dumping ground for AI slop
the future of Xbox is a pile of assets which are either dissolved or sold off as the sunk cost effect wears off at Microsoft and they remember they only know how to sell things to businesses, not consumers. I wouldn’t touch their shit because of the BDS boycott, but there’s no path forward for them anyway. they can’t claw console sales back from Sony and Nintendo. they extremely can’t claw PC game sales away from Valve. a “third thing,” being Game Pass, won’t provide the returns MS expect for all this ongoing investment, it will shed customers as they continue to increase its price, and the vision of xCloud Game Pass as an app on every mobile device and smart TV is a pipe dream - people don’t have home Internet good enough for streaming games without lag and even if they do the experience still often sucks. throwing the Xbox branding on any and every random third party device is suicidal. this exec team keep their jobs by lying to their bosses and they’re going to put even more of their actual workers out of a job.
Completely obvious but because the Wii made MORE money that means Microsoft lost and that’s how these ghouls think. Success isn’t real. So you get a bunch of managers at all levels going “why are we losing we gotta pivot.”
And now that AI works perfectly they don’t need those pesky workers.
before he realized how terrible it went over DOn Mattrick probably felt so fire saying,
" we have a product for people who aren’t able to stay connected; it’s called the Xbox 360"
like its just pithy enough that i gotta imagine for someone who doesnt ever interact with the sphere of real people he had to be feeling like wow…im so damn good at this.
i like that that interview even made Geoff Keighley, the most industry shill guy in existence, look like some kind of hard-hitting journalist for two seconds
also this Microsoft thing does feel like a similar thing to Embracer Group just buying up any little thing and then eventually being forced to puke it out, just on a bigger scale. similar sort of smugness and trash politics as well. also it is interesting how Phil Spencer has presented himself as like a “gamer first” kinda guy with his like strategic jean and tshirt combos. i never knew how much of an intentional put on that was on his part or if there’s some genuineness there and he’s just subject to the whims of higher ups anyway.
It is annoying that all the PS5 games I wanted to pick up this year so far (Indiana Jones, THPS 3 & 4) are released by Microsoft, who just seemed cursed and at least slightly evil.
…If I just buy them used from Gamestop they get nothing, right? >_>
Was going to write something to this effect but it’s better said here, I guess. Microsoft, like a lot of publishers with money to burn, seems to crave “IP,” but doesn’t give a shit about the people who helped shape the things people like about these things.
Xbox has been such a weird, rudderless thing for so long. I think the last time anything “original” to Xbox struck me as being appealing was…I don’t know. Stuff that came out mid-360? Some of the early weird Xbox One stuff that got rushed out so it would have anything at all to launch with?
Shoutout I guess to all the gamers who were drooling and hooting with every acquisition that it was gonna beef up their Game Pass library or whatever. Now the whole goddamn industry is gonna contract in a big way because Microsoft has bought up a significant chunk of it. Cool stuff.
At this rate Phil Spencer is gonna walk out at Gamescom wearing the shiniest “still hot from the mall printing kiosk” shirt with Pitfall Harry on it and behead Banjo and Kazooie on stage.
Microsoft took down that trailer from that smuggler game by the Just Cause team. I don’t think it had any gameplay, just a bunch of 70s iconography and, uh, Steely Dan.
If they canned Romero’s funding I guess they’d can this, too.
i’ve been thinking about why i’m so numb to the game layoff news specifically. part of it might just be the severity of other things going on in the world in comparison, but it definitely goes beyond that.
i think some of it is just that it feels like the result of a lot of things coming together - finance capital that has always had way more interest in profit seeking than art. games may have been very profitable but are still not a very deeply respected or valued medium certainly - and that extends to the workers. indie that promises a way out of this but is really just another additional market category with its own severe constraints and even higher rates of anxiety and failure. an industry that has consistently had no shame about fucking over even many of its biggest and most high profile names in the past, let alone anyone else, and just turning their work into hollow zombie IPs to trot out to gamers. a media ecosystem that pushes identification with brands and IPs over identification with individual devs and has done that successfully for a long time.
also like - a lot of the kinds of stuff i was interested in that might have had some potential to grow had already been pushed out of the space years ago, if it even had a chance to exist within the space at all in the first place. meanwhile marketplaces are filled with the kind of portfolio-core stuff that looks maybe respectable but has absolutely no soul or spark. the divisions between “indie” and bigger companies are increasingly meaningless in terms of what is actually put out there. even the kind of like quirky zoomer indie games that i see occasionally do well are like so few and far between and occupy such a small overall space in the scheme of things. and Steam stuff does well because of a smaller number of people who buy a shitload of games and the fact that it’s an almost global monopolized marketplace now. it’s not really clear how long that kind of status quo holds.
but yeah, i feel bad about people losing their jobs. but it was hard not to see this all coming - and i think i feel frustrated with all the people who pushed back against the idea that all of this was built on sand. the game industry’s growth in the past 20 years or so came at a time when a lot of other creative industries were shrinking and becoming more precarious. i think everyone should be economically stable and have access to good healthcare ofc but beyond that there’s no guarantee for anything, regardless of the skill level you have. games were never an exception to this rule, and they shouldn’t have ever been one.
so anyway, it might be worth it for people being laid off to look at ways to expand the space artistically outside of the usual marketing and product oriented mindset. and also to join up more with other creative industries that have been siloed off from each other and try and come up with a good positive vision of an alternative. even if it has to start really small. obviously unionization efforts are a much needed part of this too. because i just don’t think you can keep kicking the can down the road to new galaxy brained schemes to keep games profitable and keep people being employed. esp as like brutal austerity means people have less time and money to spend on games and other leisure activities in general.
