It’s painful to watch this because the recipe for success at Microsoft is so obvious. They’ve just been fumbling the ball for so many years that it’s catching up to them.
And the thing is they’re not unprofitable. Gutting their studios and technology development isn’t going to help growth, it’s going to contract the business.
Why villainize her specifically? Seems like the whole division has been in limbo for a decade. Maybe there are good reasons, I am uninformed on the matter, but hesitant whenever a woman gets run over in tech fora.
That's my question reworded: she wound up being in charge of this particular sinking ship at this particular point in time. Did she hole it below the waterline personally or no?
Does it matter? The one person who takes responsibility for what occurs in a huge organization like Xbox is the person driving the ship. What's done is done. She is responsibile for the layoffs, whether they were made necessary by her or not. She is responsible for choosing to fire the idTech Director of Engine Tech. She owns all of it, because that is literally her job as CEO. Boo hoo her predecessor made terrible decisions too.
She's a corporate executive. Maybe she's not willing to crash the business and take a golden parachute, but if so she's one of a vanishingly small crowd. I would personally bet that she's willing to slash and burn just like other corpos are.
> The glass cliff is a phenomenon described by psychologists Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam, in which women are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest.
In my experience, once organizations have enough history and size, they can't just pivot. Whatever happens within MS the organization makes it impossible for them to become anything other than what they've always been.
Their MO will always be EEE and they'll always (attempt to) abuse their monopoly power, while giving corpos and consumers just a glimmer of hope to keep them strung along...
Also any company they acquire will be gutted until it looks like the rest of the org.
Minecraft didn't get shut down yet, only enshittified. I believe it's still very profitable due to the enshittification? I heard they sell skyblock maps for $8
I don’t fully agree with this because the original experience (Java version, private servers, 100% free content) is still extremely popular and the same as it always was.
I think it would be enshittification if Microsoft said “sorry, you now have to rent servers through us and all content comes from our content shop,” but that’s not the case.
Merely offering a product that has a bad value is not enshittification.
Is it enshittification if you heavily advertise the enshittified product and attract all the new users there? Like IRC and Discord, can we say Discord enshittified chat even though IRC is still around?
Growth over a long period of time involves two things: consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks.
We do not have a market designed to reward these things, at least not for the likes of Microsoft. For them, it's far easier to simply cut people while collecting on their previous labor. Once the product of that previous labor is no longer as valuable, it can then simply be spun off or shut down permanently.
I actually think this is the wrong diagnosis of this situation. The studios in Microsoft gaming appear to have been given a lot of room to take risks under previous leadership, build passion projects, etc. while letting big franchises sit on the side. Those things ended up being anywhere from abject failures to small successes - where some players and critics loved them - but most don't seem to be commercial successes.
In the meantime we haven't seen a new Quake, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Perfect Dark, Fable, Banjo, Conker, or the myriad of other mainstream IP they owned in decades. Most of these franchises have lost a ton of value after sitting on the shelf for so long without releases.
The thing is, every time you take a swing on one of those big IPs, you take a risk.
Sure, you can do well: Skyrim was a big step up from Oblivion, for example. But you can also screw things up (see: Halo), or fall into the trap that Valve has fallen into with Half-Life 3 where the expectations of the public can never be truly met.
I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.
> The thing is, every time you take a swing on one of those big IPs, you take a risk.
I think the entire content production industry, no matter the medium, is aware of the risk/reward of rerunning existing IP vs creating new IP. There's a reason we get retreads of retreads elsewhere, existing IP is lower risk, higher reward, pretty much always.
Halo is a good example - they fumbled with Infinite. It just wasn't very good. Yet the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a ton of attention from the fanbase and broader gaming community. If the next Halo is good, that fanbase will come back around.
> I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.
This is what they now want from Mojang and Minecraft. Asha even called it out in her letter.
> Yet the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a ton of attention from the fanbase and broader gaming community. If the next Halo is good, that fanbase will come back around.
The fanbase already has the Master Chief Collection. The remake seems doomed to fumble worse than MCC's notorious launch issues and it should be obvious to anyone looking at the project on paper. MCC was a team with ownership trying to learn the ins and outs of decades of work on the Slipspace engine to recreate each step of the Halo journey in an upgraded/consolidated form of its own engine. The new remake is a mostly outsourced team that basically owns nothing trying to recreate Halo mechanics in UE5 with the help of LLMs and other AI upscalers. That's nothing like what the real fans should want for the franchise. It reeks of corporate mismanagement misunderstanding what IP is for. It also reeks as a slap in the face for the hard work on the MCC (and yeah 5 and Infinite, fumbles and all).
> I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree.
Sure, who doesn't want that? You don't get there by gutting the veterans who can rapidly iterate and know the technology and gaming landscape well. In my eye these kinds of layoffs are simply their giving up.
Note that this is different in gaming than film because of technical progression. But also Nintendo are very good at "same charm, familiar characters and plot, different feel".
Nintendo does it the right way. I'm not at all afraid to say I want more Mario, Samus, Fox McCloud, Fire Emblem avatars and the like.
But they don't simply do roster updates, they bring those characters and worlds into new experiences, and they're willing to sit on good games rather than push out yearly new releases with almost nothing different compared to the previous iteration.
And the stability these franchises gives them, allows them to continue to make new IPs that may themselves grow into future tentpoles. So it's not just that they squander those successes, they are often trying to innovate into new things.
It's like phones with smaller screens: they always sell poorly in comparison when available and then it's all you hear about online when it's not.
The usual tricks of "noise signals how many are really upset in absolute terms, not the relative popularity", "people will still make noise about what they don't like regardless if that's more popular overall", and "people who hate one attribute of the product can often still like it enough to buy overall".
> consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks.
Agreed. If you are looking at a chart of performance and it's flat or slightly increasing year over year for a few years, you're not doing great. You need to see some dips which means you tried and failed. Without those, you won't ever see the big jumps.
Timely releases of existing IP. Halo, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, etc, all spend way too long in the oven considering how much studio talent Microsoft has. For example, instead of making Avowed and Outer Worlds, Microsoft should have had Obsidian make the next Elder Scrolls and Fallout games while Bethesda worked on Starfield.
The fact that Microsoft has a studio making Fallout knockoffs while they own the Fallout IP is insane.
Put more effort into having pot sweeteners that get you off competing platforms and onto theirs. As it stands there’s no reason not to buy Microsoft’s games on PlayStation, PC, or Switch where Sony presumably captures 30% of the sale price.
The Xbox Ally hardware is way too late and way too niche. It should have had the operational friendliness of the Nintendo Switch, come out 5 years ago, and been first party hardware instead of a co-branded item.
No, but it doesn't mean the opposite will either. Some solutions are orthogonal and in reality commenters online have no idea what to do in these sorts of business situations and therefore resort to making pithy statements.
I know these other commenters gave you a non-answer but my reply to you further up the thread is hopefully more of a tangible example of the strategy Xbox should be taking.
Some of that is potentially 5-10 years too late, but even with the pessimism around new consoles I think Microsoft could still reset their fortunes with new console hardware and new exclusive games as the anchor.
The next Xbox shouldn't just be a box that's equivalent to a PC or a PS6, it should have something unique, the kind of uniqueness that Nintendo has delivered with every new console. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but when it works, it works.
The next Xbox should launch out of the gate with 1-2 must-have games, completely exclusive. Can't get them on PC, can't get them on PlayStation or Switch, if it’s on GamePass it’s only on Xbox console.
This is more easily justified if the Xbox hardware is truly unique. "Sorry, we can't put this experience on PC or PlayStation, because only Xbox can do XYZ"
We should put you at the head of a company as clearly you know so much about it. It's not as if these other people haven't tried the same thing and turns out they make no money instead. These "pretty simple" solutions sound good, don't work, as they say.
margins can't be compared to interest rates, because it's comparing revenues against costs. Comparing that with interest rates yields nonsensical results. If you want a proper comparison, you'd need return on capital, which requires you to figure out how much capital is in the gaming division.
If you input $1000 into process A which returns $20, and inputing $1000 into process B returns $30, you'd be insane to invest in process A and not process B, right?
That example only says 3% margin is better than 2% margin, not whether the hypothetical process yields better results than a bond paying 4% (or whatever). If the said process takes exactly 1 year to complete, and requires all the inputs to be provided upfront, then its margins can be directly compared to bond yields, but businesses are rarely that simple.
>If the said process takes exactly 1 year to complete, and requires all the inputs to be provided upfront, then its margins can be directly compared to bond yields, but businesses are rarely that simple.
Something tells me the xbox division isn't some sort of machine that takes in $x in costs at the start of the year and spits out $1.03x in revenue at end. Capital costs could be higher (eg. game takes 4 years to develop before you can sell it), or lower (eg. you pay foxconn $400 to make an xbox then immediately turn around and sell it to best buy for $450).
And the thing is they’re not unprofitable. Gutting their studios and technology development isn’t going to help growth, it’s going to contract the business.