In just four months, they have lost Toys for Bob (developer of Spyro Reignited and Crash 4), Arkane Austin (Prey 2017), and Tango (Evil Within, Hi-Fi Rush). I wish I had the money to casually buy some great dev studios, including the makers of a GOTY contender, and casually kill them off a few years later.
I know they are in panic mode right now, but I honestly don’t know what their plan is at this point. I doubt even they know. Watching the situation from the outside, it’s almost comical how MS has mismanaged everything for years. I live in Europe and I’ve never seen Xbox marketed anywhere. GamePass is supposedly their priority, and barely anyone I know who is interested in gaming knows that it even exists. The whole deal with the service was delivering first party games day one, yet failed to deliver anything worth buying four years into the new generation, while most of what they actually released was already in the works prior the acquisition. They bought dozens of studios, and mismanaged every single one of them. Fuck, they couldn’t even settle on the cover for their game cases for half a year after their new box released.
The only good thing out of this debacle is that people have finally realized how utterly incompetent Phil Spencer is. I remember the days when fanboys were parroting his lies and kept talking about how “Phil is a gamer just like us”, just because he showed on the stage in a shitty t-shirt. Too bad it took xbox fucking dying for them to realize, but I guess it’s better later than never.
Hey, quite a few people bought Game Pass for a month to try out Cities: Skylines 2, because it was quite a lot cheaper than the game itself (and considering the poor state the game was released in, probably not much more than a month of replay value anyway)
One could argue to get exclusivity of said IPs for their subscription service. They haven’t pulled the trigger yet, it’s possible they have aborted the plan entirely. I wonder if they even know what they’re doing.
I really hope this bites them if the industry goes less IP-centric. We’ve gotten a slow build of “From the developers of…” fan hype, and I don’t think a big “2” matters as much as it used to.
Elden Ring, Overwatch, Cyberpunk, Genshin Impact, were all technically “new franchises” but built insane followings off either good marketing or high knowledge of their studio. So now all MS can do is copy the death path of their parrot studios like 343 Industries and The Coalition, which were built to try to tentpole their old franchises made by better studios.
Microsoft has always been more than happy to make the market smaller by buying the competition and discontinuing their products shortly after. For some reason people didn’t think Xbox would do the same?
…wikipedia.org/…/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguishin 1998, Bill Gates stated: “One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people’s browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities. Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destory [sic] Windows.”
Not just Gates, but all higher ups at Microsoft think this way. It’s kind of naive to think Xbox would be different IMHO.
That’s by design. Force your opposition to sell, bankrupt them and write off the loses. Shrink the industry and force players to sign up for your subscription services.
I’m not a fan, but it’s hard to see this wasn’t their plan from the get go
What really gets me, and this touches on your comment, is that the execs said that they need to have the teams make what they specialize in. And then they turn around and force all the studios to make games that not at all anything they’ve ever made before.
The industry historically hasn’t shrunk when studios close like this. There just ends up being more bespoke studios all over the world with former developers from those studios.
The sad part is this might actually end up being a net positive in the long run. Their two biggest acquisitions were Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard, one company that has started their decline and another that is deep into it.
Microsoft pissing away $100B to buy these companies only to turn around and kill them 5-10 years later will end up breaking up the gaming conglomerates that have killed the western games industry. The only sad part is all the people that will lose their jobs and all the classic IP that will be squandered.
I never finished the first Elex (the combat was way too unforgiving imo; it took me like 5 minutes just to kill one of those river raptor looking things) but I loved the trailer for Elex 2. I thought it went really hard.
yeah, for me the games after Risen 1 were pretty meh for me. But the Gothic series was part of my childhood, with Gothic 1 being my first ever RPG. (probably one of the best games to start with)
Earlier, multiple sources had indicated that Xbox is looking to foray into third party development, with ports of several first party titles rumored to arrive on PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2
So I guess they know more about the next Switch console than the rest of us.
Saw the headline, wondered what had happened, and then saw that they were owned by Embracer. It's a shame to see them go. Gothic has been on my list of series to try for a while now and the Elex games looked interesting.
I would love to play some Gears of War on my PlayStation, but only if you could buy the physical game and not play through a subscription service like GamePass.
I am very pessimistic about that ever happening but i would love to be wrong. I dont think they have much incentive to make all those physical copies unfortunately
It would still be money into their account even if a subscription model might be better for them. But since, I wouldn’t be subscribing to anything related to Microsoft they would gain less money from me that way…
They tried for like a decade before finally giving up. Microsoft has learned a lot of lessons while trying to work on their gaming arm, and some of them have actually stuck. I would expect titles to be sold on Steam until Phil Spencer retires.
Their games were rough around the edges but sure as hell showed a lot of passion. The lore and attention to detail that went into their worlds were unparalleled, especially in the open world genre where lots of content is just generic copy-pasted fetch quests or mindlessly following the Ubisoft formula.
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