What is the point of Xbox?
What is the point of Xbox?
Xbox has repeated the same terrible mistakes for over a decade. The reason is simple: its priorities are back-to-front.
I thought, yes we can. I said, look, just give us four years, proper finance, give us the chance Mass Effect has, Skyrim has, the games at the time. They're getting four years and a lot of budget. Give us that, and we'll give you something that'll get you your players. Nah, you've had three shots and you've only tripled the money. It's not good enough. Fuck off. That's what I was annoyed about.
Fuck man, that's like, summing up my entire corporate career right there. I want to buy this man a beer, I feel this so hard.
Good quote. Here is more of it for context:
Fable was profitable - "highly profitable", Lionhead's Simon Carter told Eurogamer - but in a now too-familiar story, it and its genre was seen by Microsoft as just not profitable enough. "That category is not the biggest category on the planet," said Robbie Bach, who was the President of Entertainment & Devices Division at Microsoft before Don Mattrick assumed the role. "It's not soccer. It's not American Football. It's not a first-person shooter sized category. So at a commercial level, I would say it was successful, but not wildly so."
Wildly successful was what Microsoft was after. A pitch for Fable 4 was rejected. "It was like, you've reached your cap of players for RPG on Xbox and you need to find a way to double that, and you're not going to do it with RPG," Fable's art director John McCormack told Eurogamer at the time. "I thought, yes we can. I said, look, just give us four years, proper finance, give us the chance Mass Effect has, Skyrim has, the games at the time. They're getting four years and a lot of budget. Give us that, and we'll give you something that'll get you your players. Nah, you've had three shots and you've only tripled the money. It's not good enough. Fuck off. That's what I was annoyed about." (Worth noting: Skyrim went on to sell 63m copies, as of June 2023, The Witcher 3 over 50m.)
I'm just loving the amount of bad press Microsoft is deservedly getting.
I think the studio closures was just the last straw. Like they spent almost $100 billion and they’ve made NOTHING. Like not one goddamn thing.
Say what you will about Sony and Nintendo but they have output and they care about gaming because they have to, it’s the only way they make money.
Microsoft could shutter their gaming division tomorrow and they would save money, not lose it. Whatever exec championed the buyouts for Game Pass is clearly gone or asleep at the wheel. So the end result is they own WoW, Candy Crush and CoD that print money and a bunch of franchises that haven’t seen a good release in 10+ years.
The fact that they bought inExile, Obsidian and Bethesda and didn’t immediately start work on a Fallout 1/2 remake or an FNV sequel is evidence enough they they have no fucking clue what they’re doing. How does a company own so many studios and make no games!?
why don't they close down 343 next? they haven't launched a good game in over a decade by now. that should have been high on the list of closures.
To be honest, as a huge Halo fan, I was surprised when seeing those studios closed that 343 wasn't one of them. The studio is just cursed, even a leadership change isn't going to save them.
Either make Halo games from all the studios under Microsoft or start a new one with people who are actual fans of the franchise
Excellently written article that really sums up why I'm finally done with Xbox once my gamepass runs out. Been holding off buying a ps5 but they'll be gaining a new customer for my console gaming.
Lol it's funny cause after this week I've been thinking of dropping p PlayStation for Xbox. Ships passing each other in the night
Gpu off the trade on from game pass and extended with the reward points has been great value. But their current strategy and the games I can't play on it that are on ps5 is tempting me, also about to upgrade my gaming PC, so maybe steam etc e will satisfy that
It passes butter.
Destroying competition.
Buying the competition and then closing them is technically achieving it.
Except now that talent joins or forms more competition
I would call that killing competition because they dont actually achieve the stuff they did, they just destroy them
What's the point of consoles when PCs exist? I don't understand how we have spent the entire modern PC era still clinging to locked down, limited consoles. And PCs aren't expensive if you're not buying some laughable top of the line garbage that runs games at super-ultra-mega-hyper high settings at 50billion pixels @ 4,096Hz.
Yes they are. A PS5 costs £389.99.
What gaming PC can you build for that?
That sorta money doesn't even buy you a great GPU these days. Maybe a decent one. And then you only need a little more money for a CPU, RAM, Mainboard, storage and a power supply. And if you're feeling fancy, maybe a case as well.
I love how you specifically say "gaming PC" because I know you and every so-called "gamer" these days have to have some over the top, expensive, overheating, power-sucking pile of trash to run games at ridiculous resolutions/refresh rates with blinding, ugly graphics full of so many garbage lighting effects and muddy megatextures that the game is nearly unplayable.
If you can't run a game on a ~400 UKBucks machine, the game isn't worth playing.
I got a series s for £150 when my PC couldn't run Elden Ring properly. It seemed cost effective vs a PC upgrade for playing the latest games.
It's cheaper than a PC and has almost all the same games (with new releases)?
Yeah, but my PC will last much longer.