I remember the exact moment when death of XBOX console basically started. It was XBOX One announcement where Don Mattrick messed up the rollout so bad no one knew how their always online DRM system worked. Sony made this video in response. Also there is this disaster of an interview where he said gamers should buy XBOX 360 if you can’t be online 24/7. Microsoft basically took it for granted that gamers were in their pocket and they could focus on dominating the livingroom by adding tv related features that gamers didn’t care about. Also Kinect was initially mandatory which made the console $100 more than PS4. XBOX lost console marketshare and they never recovered since then.
I hate this Microsoft cycle so much: buy gaming studios, do fuck all with them, fire all staff, close studios, rinse, repeat. So much talent and so many great IPs down the drain because MS can’t decide what the fuck are they doing
They know exactly what they are doing, they are reducing competition.
That narrative doesn’t make much sense. There’s far too much competition in the industry, and you’re not reducing competition by shutting down the likes of Tango Gameworks.
It’s how these large corporations operate though. Ignore, buy, or bury, that’s how they all operate. They may have ‘plans’ to use the studio, but for them if all they get are the assets and a less of a threat from the old ip, then that’s enough. I don’t think it makes any sense either, but it also absolutely something microsoft has done for years in their larger business model.
From past articles on why this is happening though, it’s that they had a growth strategy for years, with Game Pass, with Xbox consoles, with studios. Then what changed was the general state of the economy and Nadella’s goals. Game Pass plateaued, the old console model is clearly headed toward obsolescence, and they bought the world’s largest publisher by market cap. Suddenly Nadella decided that you can’t spend what you were spending, and it’s time to take profits.
Well, perhaps I’m just wrong then. But for me, I see twenty tears of MS buying up studios, sitting on them, and closing them with some sort of excuse about changed plans. It’s always the same though, studio performs well, gets bought, makes no games or games out of their genre, and closes. Call it whatever you want, I call it business as usual.
There was also COVID screwing up sales projections for the last few years. People were stuck at home for months and ended up buying a ton of digital media such as games to stay sane. Executives are stupid and were somehow shocked when numbers dropped after quarantine ended and people went back to their regular lives. Since then, a bunch of projects or even entire studios have been axed due to “underperforming” because they couldn’t compete sales-wise with a period where the entire world was a captive audience.
It is not something people could really predict.
Games and media sales did indeed go down. But movie theatres (and a lot of live entertainment) never actually went back up. People didn’t “go back to their regular lives”. We got a new normal
Which is why trump et al are working so hard to trigger doom spending and likely another pandemic or three if rfk gets his way.
But the bigger factor is funding. Plenty of indie studios have talked about how hard it is to find funding. Because economic uncertainty means that even a 2-3 year investment is a LOT riskier than it used to be. And that is a death sentence for indie devs but also very alarming for the major publishers who have to answer to investors.
Fuck microsoft and all their bullshit. But this goes way beyond “they bought too many studios and mismanaged them”
Maybe they forgot they have to compete as well then, because it doesn’t look like they know how to do that
They had the Kinect which (ignoring all the negative press surrounding it) fucking slapped, and could easily have been integrated with a VR headset for full-body VR.
They have Blizzard which im pretty sure means they can put WoW on xbox but don’t even seem to have started.
They’re positioned to have the greatest console of all time and they’re just fucking around instead. It’s maddening.
This will free up a lot of capital for c-level bonuses
That’s a relief. I was starting to worry about them, with all these breakout indie game successes.
Maybe the indie developers will start buying the AAA CEOs a coffee once in awhile.
(This is intended as surrealist humor.)
Microsoft is exiting the console business
Yeah with their “everything is an Xbox” nonsense it’s pretty clear they want to focus on the platform, marketplace where you buy games. Playing them is kind of second. I’m sure they’ll still have something, but it’s going to be more geared towards cloud streaming, pc, handhelds, and “play where you want” so they can just do the digital side. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get partners like Asus to build boxes now.
So we’ve always have had 3 competitors. Who is going to replace them?
Xbox will still exist as a platform, just not the console. It’ll probably just be stuff like the Xbox ally x; Xbox partners with brands to sell hardware with cut down versions of windows that has access to 3rd party markets like steam and such, but a major emphasis on the Xbox/windows store.
Either way, I don’t think there has to be a third platform if Xbox went away. PC looked kinda shaky there for a moment in the '00s/'10s, but at this point it seems pretty well poised to become the dominant platform. Xbox and PlayStation already port games to steam and even GoG. Nintendo is the harder nut to crack, I’m not sure what’d it take for them to get out of the hardware business. I read somewhere they have enough cash on hand to operate at a loss for like a decade or something.
Likely no one. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next generation of consoles is the last one.
XBOX can’t be buried soon enough. It’s been dead in the casket for over a decade and it’s time to start throwing dirt on it.
I love the original and the 360. The people that had the passion and vision for what XBOX was and needed to be are long gone and this is what we’re left with. A bunch of suits making decisions who probably don’t even know how to play pong.
What exactly was the original vision?
“Everything is an Xbox” now. Even the PlayStation is living on borrowed time. The way Xbox is run right now may not be very good, but the vision for what Xbox was had to change. They were just an earlier casualty of the way things are changing than their competition.
Why? What about their strategy right now it because of the way things are changing?
None of it is. It is because of mismanagement that happened with Don Matrick and the OG Xbox one focusing on fucking cable hookups and banning their users from borrowing physical games.
That corporate garbage in Xbox NEVER fully disappeared and now they’re reaping what they sowed.
Also not releasing an exclusive game worth buying since before 2014 is a wild strategy.
Why? What about their strategy right now it because of the way things are changing?
Accepting other storefronts on their platform going forward, choosing to instead make their money via Game Pass and third party publishing. An Activision or Bethesda acquisition made great strategic sense when you needed to lock up exclusives for the way consoles used to work, but in the time it took for Activision to go through, they realized that strategy no longer makes sense. It’s a huge paradigm shift to decide to no longer take a cut of every “Xbox” game sold the way that Nintendo and Sony do, for now, but it’s in their best interest long term to be the first to do so.
I don’t see it that way at all. Xbox took their foot off the gas when Kinect came out and has been dying from 1000 cuts. What was working for Xbox - they stopped doing. This isn’t the future, this is them throwing anything they can at the wall and see what sticks.
Yeah, but that’s something you do when times are changing and you need to adapt. Sony investors are already asking if there will be a new PlayStation or if they’ll just go to PC. (There will be at least a traditional PS6, but Microsoft doesn’t have the same luxury.)
Makes sense after how successful the oblivion AI remaster sold.
Can you provide proof that AI was used? It’s not disclosed on the Steam page which Valve requires for all games.
Yeah. They used UE5. Which has insane AI tools. So, you know how you can walk around and see all the detail? Well if you think bathesda hand painted in new brush and details and redid ALL the character models etc etc you’re nuts. But what’s funny is, in the character models. You can literally see the AI used because nothing is significant. The motions are all exactly the same except the main character. The mouth movements are the exact same. Everything is exactly how it was but just overcoated with a new engine. And UE5 literally advertises their AI capabilities.
