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Basically: The thing everyone worried about and quite frankly knew would happen when Microsoft started buying every studios they could get their hands on... happened.
Embrace. Expand. Extinguish. It never went away. Careless incompetence. The shareholders way.
Shareholders: "Wow, Microsoft is really expanding by buying up those studios, promising great output for them in the future!". Line goes up.
Microsoft then does nothing except investing all of their money into AI.
Shareholders: "Wow, Microsoft is really streamlining their organisation by dumping all of those useless dead weight studios. Excellent management". Line goes up.
I absolutely hate how on the nose this is. sigh
TIL that this is a valid use of "on the nose" (definition 1). I was genuinely confused, I'm only familar with definition 2 there, "unimaginative; overliteral; lacking nuance; unsophisticated".
TIL about the second definition
We are the lucky ten thousand.
Yeah. I would look at Microsoft's aquisition of studios as those studios exiting the space in the long term. Gaming is thriving but it's not the big studios, it's the myriad of indies and smaller games that are where the innovation and interest is. The monolithic AAA gaming space is in a crisis of it's own making - driven by shareholder demands and the view of games as nothing more than franchises to milk every year.
Also, AAA is struggling with games being too large. Every game is so expensive and has so many years of development that it's hard for a studio to survive a flop without a major publisher. But the major publishers are pushing for studios to pursue games that have a really high flop rate (live-service, competitive shooters/etc). Additionally because every game has so much money invested in it, the studios are scared to try anything too different or unique, resulting in the games having a bland "design-by-committee" and not offering anything meaningfully different from what's already out there. Features are intentionally held back so that the game will have content to drip-feed the players later, resulting in lacking content at launch.
I really think the AAA industry needs to downside, split up many AAA studios into multiple AA projects.
What I'm worried about is some of those greedy fuckhead parasites would start courting big indie studios and AA games and ruining a part of that scene
Im not even sure the extinguish part is intentional here. I think they are just genuinely this incompetent, but Greys Law applies here imo.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
What we gotta do is start going after the people selling the studios and companies and pillars of society. Make selling off unprofitable or even downright dangerous again and we'll see companies that compete to grow instead of compete to sell inferiority while intentionally poisoning competence.
Yep. They don't understand games so they buy studios that DO understand games, and then turn them into divisions of Microsoft instead of game studios and are surprised that they no longer can make games.
Embrace. Expand. Extinguish.
That implies careful planning.
In this case, MS thought just mindlessly throwing money around will somehow bring in massive profits.
They also don't understand software.
Or user privacy.
Or valuing their own workers.
Or how to respectfully be a part of the F/OSS ecosystem.
Or humanity's desire to not live in a pollution stream from their AI processing centers (they're not really "data centers").
Or that we all wish LinkedIn would self-destruct under the weight of its own bullshit, and magically blink itself out of existence.
You have to remember that the only person who ever really wanted Microsoft to get into console gaming was Bill Gates and this was largely an extension of his own love of video games and obsession with getting MS into the living room. Other efforts included things like WebTV, MSNBC, and a device that led to the creation of TiVo. Ballmer cared about Bill’s legacy but once the two of them were gone nobody was left who gave a rat’s ass about Xbox.
They had vision and knew how to build a brand. The current CEO's idea of branding is to name their products after a tool that absolutely no one will be using.
I get what you’re saying, but it’s probably worth pointing out that the Xbox was built on the ashes of the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast ran Windows CE, a precursor of sorts to Windows Mobile. Microsoft was perfectly happy using an already wounded Sega, who had mismanaged their last two console generations and lost a lot of users to the then fairly new PlayStation line, as the test bed for the software platforms that would eventually power the Xbox, though under a slightly different hardware platform. This is why, among other things, the Duke controller looks very much like a Dreamcast controller.
Like a lot of things that Gates did, he was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Probably true, although Ballmer didn't screw it up and Nadella did screw it up for one simple reason. He's a 1 Cloud Pony. He came from the cloud and that's all he really knows, and his narrow Senior VP perspective helped him extract earnings from cloud but nothing else at Microsoft.
Yeah, this isn't news and the studio owners who can cash big checks to sell don't care.
I have talked to a mobile game Dev, a very drunker heart to heart. He had an India mobile game (like alto). He made about 120k in 5 years between two versions of the game. And then some tenent adjacent studio offered him 650k for the IP.
In his words "All I could think was that in 650k, my house would be paid. My education loan would be paid and I would still have enough money to ensure my kid goes to college and not worry about an education loan. I knew selling game would mean enshittification of my baby. But then i looked at my actual baby and I knew I had to betray the digital one"
That's the first time I saw it from the dev point of view. He wanted to keep the project, but between choosing fans of his games that can't keep a subreddit alive and doing right by no name, no face fan base vs 650k hard cash from a shitty studio that would concretely secure his family's future. I am not sure if I would hold out.
I know it's not the same with the studio Microsoft bought..... But I can't help but wonder people who sellout might not be such horrible pieces of shit that we imagine them to be.
Microsoft has a lot more problems than that, but I suppose that's the only one Steve Jobs would care about.
Steve engineers developed the iPod Touch in secret because they thought he would look at the ugly prototype and can the whole project Jobs
Remember when Microsoft bought Rare and did basically nothing with them for two decades?
Not nothing. They remade a bunch of games worse than the originals.
(Some people did enjoy Viva Pinata, but I didn't play that.)
MS shot itself in the foot: MS gutted the team, then the game didn't come out right and this resulted in bad sales.
Here are the Steam sales numbers:
FYI Doom The Dark Ages was available day 1 on game pass and they were boasting on social media that they had over 3 million players on the first week if I remember right.
It's Microsoft's fault the game didn't sell. Most people (me included) opted to subscribe to game pass for a month instead.
Wait, there's a new doom game? (Not joking)
Been out for almost a year and just received a new DLC a few weeks ago.
Why did Microsoft buy all these studios if the plan was to never actually have them make anything?
I've been asking that since they bought Rare and proceeded to do nothing with them.
Because it's run by fucking idiots with MBAs who have no connection whatsoever to the company's profits and losses.
Not a single fucking CEO understands art and games. They only thing they understand is profit$. That's all that matters to them.
Of something can't generate a profit, it's essentially useless. Art? If you can sell it at a profit it's good. Or doesn't matter if nobody will ever see it. Oxygen producing trees, sea weed, algae? Not worth a damn until it's cut down, collected, and sold. Food, water, shelter and basic human needs? Gotta make a profit. Don't matter if we can produce tons and people are going hungry, homeless and thirsty, if we can't generate a profit.
Capitalism is a fucking cancer. And these guys are the rogue cells that make it grow.
They are blinded by their own goals, and forget how things are interconnected. Or maybe its just arrogance.
I've seen it on the smaller business side too. They want immediate profit, so cut key staff when the work slows a bit, rather than carry the veterans till the next projects. Then complain that things aren't getting done and the costs to outsource the missing skill set is high.
While the lower levels are like : this is exactly as we predicted it would go.
anyone who is hopeful about xbox's new leadership probably isn't terribly aware of microsoft's past. they've done this dance a million times. "we're improving!" -> people believe it yet again -> surprise, they found a way to suck even more now.
In the future they will have difficulty recruiting talent for projects and as a result will have to pay people way more like Meta because of the stigma.
All developers should refuse to develop for Microsoft. Starve them out
Microsoft are the EA of yEAsterday
They also don't understand their customers.
But they do understand what they care about. Short term "Shareholder value"