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.
Everyone should be able to talk about their current employer as openly as Hays here
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”.
“Wow, I hate how on the nose this is”. Line goes up.
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
Embrace. Expand. Extinguish.
That implies careful planning.
In this case, MS thought just mindlessly throwing money around will somehow bring in massive profits.
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.
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.
Man those quotes from Chris Hays in the article hit hard.
I think I need to watch the video they are from tonight.
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.
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Meh.
Their understanding and objectives are simply different than game devs.
And game devs understanding and objectives are different than mine.
MS is a massive org with a research arm with more money than Croesus. God only knows what their C-level and upper management have gleaned from that arm.
At a minimum, we aren’t privy to their actual objectives, so statements like “they don’t get gaming” are meaningless - they get it as well as they need to for their objectives.
Not to defend them, just that we don’t really know what they intend, what they’re really trying to do.
But to call them ignorant would be naive.
But to call them ignorant would be naive.
I used to believe that sort of thing, in my callow youth. They’re rich and powerful, they must know what they’re doing. It’s hard to imagine how anyone paying attention to the news these past ten years could still believe it. There’s no mysterious logic behind their nonsensical decisions. There’s no more than luck involved in any success those decisions have brought them. When they behave like clueless twits it’s because they’re clueless twits.
anyone that’s been in a csuite meeting knows it’s all nepotism and good ol boys
no brains in the lot of them
just keep failing your way up until your so big the government has to bail you out
Yeah, I think all their talk about games not being where they want and bringing in a new head of Xbox and saying “they’ve tried everything” to make their games division successful how they want shows they have no idea and are just going shotgun style with changes and hoping something works.
Hell, the way they let Halo, Elder Scrolls, and Fallout be managed shows they don’t really know anything and just sit around waiting for magic to make them rich.
Not to defend them, just that we don’t really know what they intend, what they’re really trying to do.
They want profit. Maximum profit, preferably by the end of this quarter. Failing that, they want monopoly power. The fact that M$ is going all in on AI (it already spent over 150 fucking billion dollars on it as capital expenditure) with nothing to show but “trust me bro” revenue and empty promises should be all you need to know about how far up their own asses the higher ups are.
When they went on a studio acquisition spree, it was with the intent of gaining market share. This was back when cloud gaming was “the next big thing”, but that it has mostly disappeared from headlines should make it obvious that it was not “the next big thing”. Sure, only Google Stadia was shut down, but you don’t hear much about GeForce NOW, Amazon Luna or even Xbox Cloud. “Cloud gaming” was nowhere near as big as they hoped and is unlikely to be, even with the absurd prices of electronics thanks to the AI craze.
We are talking about the M$ which is actively sabotaging their own mainline programs for greater profit extraction. Win11 is a mess of unwanted ads, worse than Win10 ever was. They bundled copilot everywhere - teams, office, even fucking notepad - in order to artificially boost adoption numbers.
All of the decisions that put focus on profit extraction come from higher up. None of them come from Joe Software Engineer, who has to do what the boss says or pack his shit and look for a job elsewhere.
Their objective is the same as every other corporation:
Provide shareholder value that grows indefinitely.
They don’t care about games or art, they see them as a means to an end, the end being profit above all.
