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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.