I’m pretty sure they hired Asha Sharma just to gut the entire Xbox department and force its closure. It’s losing them money, but they want to continue to pretend that they care about gaming.
They’ll hype up the PR, pretend that they are restructuring, and then announce some “sad news” that they had to completely shudder the Xbox brand after a few years of pretending.
The thing is that Microsoft isn’t doing great in the Windows department, either. They are pissing off so many people that they’re losing grip of their near monopoly. And Copilot is almost as bad as Llama in terms of LLMs.
What the fuck do they have left? Office?
Copilot isn’t an LLM. It’s just an application layer that utilizes other 3rd party LLMs like gpt. I think it’s shit because it’s usually a few versions behind and they put guard rails and external data filtering on their application layer.
So it’s basically duck.ai from duckduckgo but no privacy
Office and Azure mainly. But Azure is getting spanked by AWS.
I hate Amazon too btw. Just adding more information.
I really don’t understand Azure. Their whole marketing, at least a year ago, was that it’s cheaper than AWS. But it literally isn’t?
I did the comparison and AWS was consistently cheaper in every scenario that I tried. I may be wrong, because the pricing with these services is so purposefully made difficult to understand that both companies have released calculators just so you can make an approximation.
So far the only thing Azure has going for it are the managed Microsoft services, like Azure AD. And even those are kinda bad, when you consider after a certain company size it’s cheaper to have a sysadmin manage a local server with an AD (or whatever other service).
I also hate both Azure and AWS and don’t use them. Fuck both companies. But yeah, I don’t understand the Azure business model when there is AWS.
My guess is that they offer some dumb discount package to businesses via their use of AD and Windows, which only lasts a year.
Otherwise I have no idea why everyone’s c suite falling for the azure sales rep spiel is the exact same story of losing money after hopping off AWS every time I hear about it.
And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history.
Is it me or is the gaming industry being gutted on purpose to make room for AI slop games?
That’s part of it, but it’s also because the industry saw a massive spike in profits during COVID when everyone was stuck at home, and shortsighted executives made hires and investments as if that money train was going to continue forever. Once things went back to normal they immediately started canceling projects and firing talent.
Microsoft is also going through leadership changes, and it’s unfortunately common for incoming executives to can projects started by their predecessor since they won’t get the credit for them.
Of course it’s the employees who pay for their idiocy and not the ones who actually fucked up.
Edit: I remember reading a thread several years ago about just how dysfunctional Microsoft’s gaming wing is and how Phil Spencer almost singlehandedly kept clueless higher ups from destroying the brand with their dumb, out-of-touch ideas. With his retirement, I have a feeling Xbox will enshittify at speeds we’ve never seen before.
I think its 70/30 split with what you said being the 70. However woth Sharma’s background shes probably seen how much AI can save in replacing certain roles.
This is what I see too. Like so many industries short term profit chasers never thought that things might slow down after everyone went back outside.
They could have saved that profit and invested instead into long term longevity, but no, had to plan like it’ll be there forever. I swear to god it only takes a 5th grade completion certificate to be an executive.
When COVID relief was handed out (and after Trump neutered investigations into relief fraud), a bunch of corporations immediately used the extra cash to fund stock buybacks instead of using it to shore up their finances - literally putting shareholder profits ahead of the health of their company.
See to me they should be suing those previous executives and clawing back bonuses since they purposefully screwed over the long term health of the company. Of course though I have apparently crazy ideas.
I wouldn’t rate Phil Spencer too highly either, though. He was the face behind these massive buyouts in the first place. He set the strategy for Xbox’s very lackluster console offering this generation. And he went all in on “You’ll own nothing and like it” with GamePass.
The studios that Xbox spent so much money on don’t appear to have really paid for themselves yet. With games being made at a glacial pace, you have not only the large sum of cash spent on the buyouts to worry about, but years of additional salaries, infrastructure, and services to pay before profit starts coming in. GamePass also appears to have been a major investment that hasn’t quite paid off, what with them now denying new contracts to third party studios while they reevaluate its business model.
Now imagine how bad the other MS execs must be for Spencer to be considered the ‘good one’.
His main value was acting as an insulating layer between Xbox and headquarters.
There’s just a general downturn in the economy. People don’t buy video games when they’re struggling to pay for groceries.
That and MS probably wants to throw more into the AI money pit.
There’s a trend on more spending on cheap entertainment during recessions and times of finacial hardship
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry
Since 2000, the video game industry was considered recession-proof, having thrived compared to other industries during the 2008 Great Recession, and as one of the more profitable industries during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Video games are seen as a low-cost vice and entertainment for consumers when approaching recession.[74][75] However, in 2022, atop pandemic economic fallout including chip shortages, supply chain disruption, and consumers preferring outdoor activities, the industry started to indicate recession with global revenues falling for the first time in twenty years.[76]
It seems that they went a bit too far recently for price gouging, but you can do research on similar pre video game “amusments” like films and such and find similar patterns
Yeah, interestingly enough we are so reliant on cheap entertainment for presumably mental health reasons that we tend to make other cuts instead. That’s why for example the Men’s Underwear Index is actually a pretty good indicator of recession.
There’s a much much bigger indy market now. I’m sure people will still be playing games, just not AAA games they can’t afford on hardware they definitely can’t afford.
It’s a good time to have a few 1-5 year old PCs and some spare parts laying around to play games up to current Gen and future Indy games.
Batten down the hatches me matey. We will need to weather these seas with narry a port in the storm for the next few years.
The PC of Theseus will survive.
Re: edit - correct!
Xbox thinks their biggest competition is Fanduel, Kalshi, and TikTok…
What a stupid idea on their part, if accurate.
If you make AI slop, you have to compete with everyone else who is making AI slop. And pretty much everyone else is making AI slop with less overhead than Microsoft will EVER get down to. Shit, the new XBOX CEO probably makes more than most AI-centric devs/teams.
The advantage of being big is that you can gain access to resources and sources that aren’t available to competitors who are small. That’s real voice talent, amazing designers, capital to develop and maintain your own game systems (e.g. engines). So if you’re going to do small-company stuff while being big, you’ll always lose to the small companies (business-wise). Guess the new CEO either doesn’t realize this or doesn’t want to believe it.
Ok, but let me tell you about the regulatory moat we are digging with lobbyist money… It’s gonna be huge!
Raise the floor, drown the little guy!
(The large firms will just shed the unprofitable parts and sell the shovels of compute to whomever will use them untill they can size and enshitify the product of their labor)
Reading the names of all those studios that Microsoft gobbled up, I just think how it never should have been permitted to consolidate so much of the industry in the first place.
I mean many of those companies got bought, it’s not like Microslop took them over by force, those companies willingly gave up their IPs for cash money.
At least those studios aren’t resolved and closed! Unlike a certain other company… like Sony does.
Well, at least that’s better than shutting down the studios…
Though is funny if you think about the Activision/Blizzard/King acquisition lol
Executives have less than average IQ but decide our lives for us
It’s like they are trying to fix a train heading for a derailment, by speeding up.
I want XBOX to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day
So more slop?
XBOX, the everything app!
Would love it if they just let these studios spin themselves off and not be bought up.
But that’s not going to happen.
I imagine a lot of talented and creative people work at these studios and have great ideas that non-gamer owners won’t greenlight and are holding them back, but they know what actual gamers want.
