When a nintendo executive I generally trust that theirs truth somewhere past the branding. With Phil Spencer talks I’m just assuming the opposite of everything he says. It’s a different thing, he really goes for the lies, to you, to the ftc, everyone
The writing is on the wall here, and it’s plain to see. Also, you really can’t trust anything that comes out of Phil Spencer’s mouth.
If the goal is indeed for Xbox games to be on all platforms, then the Xbox platform is the only place they don’t make money. Super low third-party sales, zero first-party sales. Only gamepass subscription money, which can’t pay for all of their company buyouts, never mind paying off the 65 billion actiblizz purchase.
If gamepass is everywhere, then Xbox has no value to Microsoft, it only harms them.
It also exists to weaken any argument they might have to get governments to forcibly allow Microsoft stores on other platforms like the eu apple ruling.
Honestly, at this point, they should really just save whatever for a sequel. It’s been two years. As a reminder (though there are extenuating circumstances here), Dark Souls 2 was 2014, and Dark Souls 3 was 2016.
I guess the new reality is that it takes six years to make a game and three years between expansions. I think I’d just prefer smaller games and smaller dev cycles.
Private servers don’t really happen much or at all anymore, “here’s a .exe you can run” idea doesn’t scale on modern online infrastructure well
Emulation is typically a very difficult thing to do, often requiring cracking the original game to get it to work with non official servers and also mapping and building out all the online subsystems. It’s rare.
This is a fairly lofty and unrealistic goal. Unfortunately, the right for companies to keep their source code private isn’t going to go away anytime soon and if they were legally compelled to release binaries, the setup for a modern cloud based online experience is not for the faint of heart.
A more realistic goal would be to say that all products should be usable offline (with exceptions for impossibilities like an instant messenger or something)
If the online servers don’t exist anymore, there should be a path to functionality without them. For everything, given the rise of iot especially. If there’s a path to functionality without the online service there’s a path to preserving the game
Update: The LinkedIn profile in question removed the references to the “30 million” milestone. Microsoft reiterated to us in a statement that 25 million remains the last official milestone.
literally from your article.
from another ign article
“We’re seeing slowing adoption of Xbox Game Pass even though Microsoft will claim otherwise thanks to the repositioning of Xbox Live Gold as Xbox Game Pass Core,” McWhirter says. “Our forecast estimates total Xbox Game Pass subscriptions (excluding Core/Live Gold) to be at 33.3 million at the end of 2023, which represents subscriber growth of just 13% - down from 15% in 2022. Piscatella notes too on X/Twitter that subscription services specifically aren’t growing as fast as they used to.
I want to be extremely clear about this, game sales functionally do not exist. We are not going to be discussing the validity of if xbox gamers purchasing Xbox games. We know they are not.
New titles are not resulting in more console sales and subscribers, as those have flatlined.
They have indeed shifted to this model to make less money so that they can be the one making money in a decade. It’s extremely short-sighted to claim otherwise.
they don’t have the income from retail games any-more, if you’re an Xbox player, you almost certainly have gamepass. which means you aren’t paying for a single game they produce. A decade ago a new Halo would come out and that would be 100 million in revenue day one. Now it’s nothing.
They have to pay for the entire cost of development of multiple game studios. I’ll highlight the ones for relevance, these are studios they have to pay salaries for hundreds of people for every month, as well as all the other costs of development, and then get no payday. Gamepass has to (but doesn’t) pay for all of these: Bethesda Game Studios, ZeniMax Online Studios, id Software, Arkane Studios, Machine Games, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog Games, Roundhouse Studios, Blizzard, Treyarch, Infinity Ward, High Moon Studios, Toys for Bob, Raven Software, Sledgehammer Games, Beenox, Radical Entertainment, Rare, 343 Industries, The Coalition, Mojang. Ninja Theory, Playground Games, Undead Labs, Compulsion Games, Obsidian Entertainment, InXile Entertainment, Double Fine
Then they have to licence all the other games on gamepass, all the third party stuff on there currently that microsoft does not own. Again, this means that they don’t make any money from game sales of those products, and also have to pay for them. Gamepass subscriptions currently probably covers this cost just about
Currently Gamepass can only exist thanks to microsoft azure and office 365. those to microsoft services pay for gamepass game development. This is why no other company does this, only microsoft can front the money from their other businesses.
The worrying aspect is that they seem to be trying to make non gamepass users pay for the development of gamepass games.
Gamepass is a massive drain on Microsoft, and numbers appear to have flatlined and not enough to pay for all the games made by Bethesda, Id, obsidian, Activision, blizzard and so much more.
So now I think they want to get non gamepass users to pay for the development and have gamepass users get the same deal they always did. Which is imo setting the industry up for some very turbulent times in the future as the cost of gamepass is buried under this, and the Xbox platform is further weakened as it gets deeper into the “no one buys games” pit.
The past few years have had at least four reaident evil games in development at the same time.
Re3make, 4make, village, that weird multiplayer one all going at the same time. It’s really not as unusual as you are making it seem. People like resident evil more than ever right now.
I imagine the situation is similar to this, but maybe mobile or switch games involved.
The tech industry is not doing much better. But in general, if you can find a job in tech vs. games, you’ll make more money, have more stability, and be treated better.
Dragon Quest XI - I am a huge fan of the 8-bit and 16-bit DQ games. But I just couldn’t get into DQ11.The atrocious music probably didn’t help.
the (full price ofc) re-releases help with the music a lot. I got the game on release because its dragon quest of course I did, and put it down 12 hours or so in because I could not stand it anymore - mostly because of the blaring midi music.
picked up the re-release with orchestral music some years later and had a much better time with it. It’s nowhere near the best of the series, But it’s better than a fair few of them.
there is. this is at a large scale however. and involved cancelling projects. normally this happens because of redundancies in rolls (like QA for example, microsoft already has QA, marketing, stuff like that)