- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
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I love how corporations work.
"Hey, we completely fucked this up. We mishandled it, made decisions our customers hate, and now we’re scrapping it because we might lose money.
“Could we fix it? Sure. But that would mean changing the business model that made us money 20 years ago, and that’s terrifying. There’s a risk we might lose money.”
“And sure, the board won’t lose a dime personally. But the stockholders, basically meerkats who scatter at the first loud noise might panic. And we can’t have that. We might lose money.”
Xbox as a 3rd party publisher can succeed. As a console vendor, it’s too late to stop the multiplatform strategy this gen. They’re not Nintendo. At least on the Wii U, Nintendo was still releasing great games and the 3DS sold like 80 million units and Nintendo were also releasing great games there and all those studios would converge on the Switch. They can’t be serious launching a console without a great launch year lineup of exclusives marketed well to convince people that they won’t cut tail and run if a new console doesn’t take off.
The advice for the new Xbox CEO that I believe in is to rip the bandage off and embrace 3rd party publishing. Timings for a new console seem awful. Fable is supposed to release this year. Forza Horizon Japan this year. Obsidian has already released their two big games last year. Perfect Dark cancelled. Forza Motorsport studio seemingly on life support rather than working on a new entry. New Gears of War should release soon. Elder Scrolls VII I’m not betting on that before the 2030s. Also these unreleased announced games are marketed as multiplatform already. Is it going to be another attempt at a Halo as the launch title after a string of crowd goes mild Halo releases. The hasty media work being done now with the new CEO is going to be thrown back in her face within a few years as some sort of hypocrite critique rather than someone speaking before they built up their Xbox strategy and was pretty much kind of winging it on short notice
Sorry to burst your bubble but the new head of Xbox has literally 0 experience with video games.
The woman that everyone was sure was Phil’s second in command, being set up to be his replacement?
Yeah she just got told she was being overtopped, and she then seemingly just retired, she just ‘resigned’, not even a new position in MSFT or at another high falutin’ gaming company or anything.
The new head of.Xbox is mainly a data scientist and project manager, managed instacart and other online etailer type apps.
Her speciality is using data to precisely squeeze as much money as possible out of a given service.
Which is what she will be doing.
good
Indeed. Death to consoles. A piece of hardware/software creating a gated community where you’re charged twice to use the entrance and then gaslit into thinking that it’s a necessary fee.
You have a point with that, but as long as consoles are easy to use they have their audience. I have both pc and ps5. I do mostly prefer my pc, but i honestly cant deny that ps has its merits. The time i have owned the one console i have needed to upgrade my pc twice.
As long as there is no convinient way for less computer savy people to play casually, consoles will be a thing.
And before you start to crusifix me, remember most people playing games do it casually and like it or not, those people are the majority and the audience that bring biggest part of the money in to the industry.
Look some people may say Xbox has confusing naming scheme, but it’s very simple, number just goes up:
First one is Xbox one. Noone in Microsoft is dumb enough to call “one” console that isn’t first of the series. Then Xbox X (because X is Roman 10) then the Xbox 360.
Very easy
Xbox S One S Xbox:
Sexbox.
…Did I get it right?
Announcing the Xbox One 2 SL XLS SE Pro, which is the basic version, and the Pro version, the Xbox Two 1 SE SL XS SLB Enterprise, both of which are vibe-coded Windows apps that stream Gamepass games without installing anything but take up 100GB of hard drive and still run your GPU at 100% somehow. The latter costs twice as much and you get a different Minecraft cape with it. They update on a completely separate schedule to the rest of Windows, but if you run either one and the updates aren’t in sync it deletes your Documents folder.
I think they are sunsetting whole company.
You mean Microsoft? I hope but I doubt it, they have a lot of companies locked in their products
Wtf I just came up with the same comment without reading yours first.
So yeah, I agree. They must have done the calculation that it’s easiest to just not exist and lay everyone off.
That’s what their actions felt like for decades yet somehow they’ve always kept chugging along.
I can only hope.
What can I say but… at least their hardware was on average a little more functional than Sony’s.
When you set an impossible goal (30% yoy profit margin for the gaming division), you know that you are killing off that division, just, slowly.
Satya just really wants an AI girlfriend that is also in everyone’s homes simultaneously, that he can use to spy on everyone for the NSA.
Not that it directly matters, but I did literally work for MSFT during the 360 3RR / Windows 8 era.
I kinda know at least a little about the uh, corporate culture.
My feeling on Xbox since Xbox One days has been pretty much “this is an awesome platform, you’re sitting on a gold mine Microsoft, what the fuck are you doing?”
The last bit of brilliance they did utilise properly was GamePass, and of course they cocked that up by getting greedy.
Last few years have been extremely rough. The only lucky thing about this is that instead of full Xbox exclusivity Microsoft was pushing Xbox/Windows cross functionality. …Yeah, I’ve been pivoting to PC, but Steam/GOG instead.
Enshittifying
The Xbone is what made me go PC full time.
Been a Xbox gamer since the original Xbox with Halo CE. LAN parties galore. Halo 2 and the beginning of Xbox Live was amazing. Bought a X360 at launch, got Gears and Crackdown for the Halo 3 multiplayer beta. Halo 3 was peak.
And then Xbone announced. Always online. Kinect required. “Sports” “Live TV”. Yeah, not falling for that. “Can’t just flip a switch”.
Yeah I cancelled my Xbox Live sub and built a PC. 2500K with a 550ti. Haven’t looked back since. All of my friends in our group did the same, but some bought a PS4 as well for the SP games.
Microsoft just doesn’t care. They have enough money to not care. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time for Xbox and I’d be genuinely surprised if they release another console and I’d be even more surprised if anyone actually buys it. It’s a dead ecosystem.
It’s been a sad thing to watch. I was the biggest Xbox fan in my circles in the 360 & One days. But by the time Series X came out, I was so disappointed in their games that I still don’t own it. Microsoft bought so many companies that I thought would bring games. Yet, most of them aren’t producing anything.
I think MS has been surprised and confused by the success of Xbox ever since the very first one came out. It kinda stuck, and the upper management probably never really had a good idea what to do with it, as it just never really worked with them being oriented on business offerings. Remember Ballmer going wild during Xbox One reveal? Yeah. I think during this gen and previous more and more of the business people came into Xbox, and thus the meandering of the brand. They have no clue what gamers want, they’re penny pinchers and pencil pushers.
Nintendo isn’t doing much better. I was a Nintendo stan for most my youth but now they’re the leaders in stagnant games and dark patterns. You just can’t trust corporations not to backstab you anymore. Indie and opensource only for me here on.
I guess they’re going to go all-in on AI despite only 3.3% of MS365 subscribers paying for Copilot. Stonks?
The sunk cost fallacy is a bitch
Didnt stop them from killing windows phone
They’re going to go all-in on paid streaming gaming services, like every major company for the next thousand years.
You will own nothing and be happy.
May as well. Not like anyone still uses it. They’ve done a bang on job of running everyone off
Not surprising aren’t they sundowning their whole company?
Its got to be deliberate. They’ve had so many chances and fucked it, and they’ve had so many successes that they’ve just cancelled or discontinued for seemingly no reason.
Its got to be deliberate.
It is, they want to do what every gaming company wants to do, have a huge and popular streaming platform with games hosted on their servers so that people don’t own games or hardware, they just pay an ever-increasing monthly subscription fee. (plus many, many extra surcharges, in-game upgrades and cosmetics and virtual collectables, etc.)
“You will own nothing and be happy” is going to be the motto of every electronic media company for the next several decades. Hope you didn’t like peer-to-peer gaming and having good ping in competitive gaming.
Tax write-offs like Batgirl?
I love how nobody here is getting me actual picture. They’re not going to sell Xbox to people anymore. What’s going to happen is they’re going to turn to a subscriber model where you have to log into a data center that they control and use your browser to play video games. Paying a monthly subscription for the privilege of playing their exclusive games. In fact I will bet money that the first product that will be introduced with this feature is going to be the highly anticipated upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6.
Mark my words. Either at the time of release or shortly thereafter they’re going to introduce the ability to subscribe to play GTA 6 in your browser on a remote gaming system. And then they’re going to phase out physical Xbox systems over the next couple of years.
To play games coded by a shitty AI, full of bugs and as many microtransactions as possible …
Is the game buggy? Worry not! Microsoft™ Copilot 365™ powered by Azure™ will analyze your gameplay in realtime, detect when a bug occurs, and redirect you to an AI generated troubleshooting page.
And how well do you think that’s going to work? Sounds like a shitty service maybe five people will subscribe to, and then it dies a year later.
We’ve had subscription services like this already. I don’t hear much of them anymore… Or at all… So I presume they’re all dead.
I saw a thread the other day, something like “What low-level conspiracies do you genuinely believe”; to which someone replied that they believe that OpenAI is being speedrun to bankruptcy in order for Microsoft to buy their data centres for pennies on the dollar.
And yeah, it all kinda seems that could be a credible outcome, at which point MS will have a huge amount of equipment all ready to serve game streaming to people who can no longer afford to buy a home computer to do the same.
Is it going to happen? shrug
Could it? Absolutely.
Doesn’t remote gaming require everyone to have an unmetered and fast internet connection? There’s still a lot of places where not everyone is that lucky.
That’s not Microsoft’s problem.
(I agree with you)
The PS5 version of GTA6 is going to sell pretty well then
It won’t be GTA6. It will be an exclusive title like a rebooted Halo or Gears of War. They can’t risk losing the money on GTA when people just go to PS5 and buy the game outright there.
I said GTA 6 will be the introduction. Not the closer.
As any drug dealer can tell you, you have to give them a taste in order to get them addicted then you can start to really charge them for the good stuff.
The Elder Scrolls 6, only available on Xbox® Game Pass© Ultimate Plus™ Cloud Gaming™®©
This has been tried before and never worked well. What makes you think its going to work any better now?
I even have a free controller google gave me when they tried it.
The only thing that makes me think it might work this time is that for some reason Microsoft has this magical ability to take a bad idea, make the shittiest possible iteration of it and have it mysteriously become the most widely-adopted standard against all logic.
Oh man, those stadia controllers. Not the stupidest $99 I’ve ever spent, but still pretty dumb.
It doesn’t need to work well.
It needs to sound like it will make more money for MSFT’s board.
You’re approaching this from the angle of ‘is this a sensible and sustsinable long term business strategy.’
Nobody cares!
They care about LINE GO UP BIG FAST NOW!
Microsoft Board: But Google lost so much money on Stadia!
Voice on speaker: but Google didnt have me, Bing.AI!
Microsoft Board: DONE. MAKE US RICH!
Stadia was still a system you buy. What I’m talking about here is having a browser based gaming system where any computer could be used to play games, for subscription price of course.
There are in fact currently places on the web that offer such services for Minecraft.
And I’ll bet you anything they’ll make the subscription price really low at first. Borrowing from the Netflix model… Then, once consoles and PCs have been outmoded and no one owns anything, they jack the price up.
Attitudes like that are not how we got a trillion dollars in spare data center infrastructure to find a use for!
Those consumers will be happy owning nothing THIS time!!
The old “we don’t want to put any effort into creating anything good, we just want to milk this for cash until we can’t anymore.”
My cloud computing teacher says the future of personal computing is just monitors connected to the cloud. Why couldn’t I have been born in the 70s?
When computers were just a teletype attached to a mainframe?
Sure, but realize that the current level of personal computing is a smartphone, we’re not that far off from your home “PC” just being a display, KB, mouse, and maybe an interface for some external storage and peripherals. I wouldn’t be shocked if that happenes some time in the next 10 years.
That being said, I think there will still be a significant group of people who will own their own hardware.
Ain’t that quiet.
I went to walmart to look for a new xbox controller for my xbox one x and they had maybe 12 games for the Xbox series X and NONE of them were anything i would ever want to purchase. Also the series X is a trash piece of equipment that has constant overheating issues, you cannot replace the hard drive if it dies, and it looks absolutely horrible design wise. They also had zero consoles in stock, while Best buy had about 12 open box Series X that people had returned for one reason or another at the outlet store.
So looks like even retailers are giving up on it.
The xbox one x was the last good console xbox made and even it has a ton of heat related issues with the HDMI circuit.
Xbox just cannot make a high quality gaming system, they just can’t. It’s been 2 decades and they still can’t get 90% of their consoles to last more than a year or 2.
xbox one x was the last good console xbox made
Was it good? The Xbox 360 outsold it (by a lot), but even that was mostly luck because Sony notoriously fucked up the PS3 launch (and in the end, PS3 sold more anyways lmao). It also had the red ring of death issue.
The Xbox One was when they started the hardcore ramp up of enshittification which never ended even after continually losing in every way to the competition.
The OG Xbox worked well, and at least managed to outsell the GameCube (though not by a lot).
Yeah, it’s the first 4k console that xbox produced and has a slim profile, looks good, has a great selection of games and backwards compatible games. I own 5 xbox 360’s, it’s my favorite xbox console, but not the LAST good console they made. It was their best console in my opinion. The original xbox had its own hard drive problems and the original controller that came with it is absolutely terrible, so they had to remake the S version that we actually could fit in our hands.
I had to go back and read your post twice because I was getting Xbox One X and Xbox Series X confused with eachother. I even know there is a difference, but holy god are those names bad. It’s still confusing even when you know to look for it. I have no clue who decided that was a good idea. Then again, I look at their recent naming schemes and I guess I should just be happy they didn’t fuck up the Xbox branding even harder.
Some products from just this one article. (Note: Microsoft 365 Copilot App, and probably others, aren’t even in the article.) Can you tell me the difference?
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat
- Microsoft 365 Copilot
- Microsoft Copilot
- Microsoft Security Copilot
- GitHub Copilot
- Microsoft Copilot Studio
I explained the different xbox versions to my coworker and he almost had an aneurysm.
Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox 360 Slim, Xbox 360 Slim E, Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X.
Dumbest names ever and 70% of the listings for these consoles, the owners don’t even know what they are selling. They call a series X a xbox One, and vise versa. Just too damn confusing for people.
Don’t forget how there are like at least 4 simultaneous versions of Teams, at any given point in time.
