Xbox Is Not Your Friend
Xbox Is Not Your Friend
After laying off almost 2,000 people, Xbox finds itself in a position at odds with the community-first image it has cultivated for itself.
After laying off almost 2,000 people, Xbox finds itself in a position at odds with the community-first image it has cultivated for itself.
It should be no surprise. Xbox, and Microsoft as a whole, are businesses whose only goal is profit at any cost. It’s capitalism at any stage. And as long as there are people willing to spend money on their services (myself included), they will continue doing what they do.
Still, it bears reiterating lest some start believing in the marketing they spin. No company or division of a company can be a friend to anyone. Even PC darling Valve isn't ! (and I say that having spent thousands of euros on Valve's products and services)
And even bearing that in mind, Microsoft has time and again openly shown anti consumer behavior, so they shouldn't be awarded even the slightest amount of trust. Allowing them to continue existing in their current form is already too much.
Nobody is surprised, though the workers may be shocked.
Yeah no shit. I don't even need to click this link to agree.
MS is a $3tn company and has one of the worst track records on earth for anti-competitive practices.
Shit, in the Xbox FTC leaks, Phil Spencer was openly saying he didn't just want Bethesda and Activision, his dream is to do hostile takeovers of Nintendo and Valve.
And yet I still see people online acting like they're on our side. Utterly laughable.
Why would you ever think any company is "on your side"? They're on their own side. If they make products you like and operate in a way you like, I recommend supporting them, but that still doesn't mean they're "on your side."
Promote products, not companies. A company can change overnight, whereas a product that you own won't.
Why would you ever think any company is “on your side”?
ABK employees, apparently. See this from almost exactly one year ago: https://www.kotaku.com.au/2022/01/activision-blizzard-employees-react-to-xbox-acquisition/
He won't buy Nintendo nor Valve anytime soon. Valve is pushing Linux distro for a reason.
Valve is a private company. How do you do a hostile takeover of a private company? what a clown.
Phil : Sell us Valve Now!
Gabe : No
Phil : ...
To paint picture Gabe is sitting on a hord of gold like a dragon and says No very quietly.
How do you do a hostile takeover of a private company?
The Mafia does that all the time. Not sure Microsoft would risk that, but there's an option.
Also, if Gabe doesn't have 51% of the shares, Microsoft could buy those shares from the other shareholders just like with a publicly traded company, it's just more difficult because there isn't an open market for it. If Microsoft gets a 51% stake, they legally own the company at that point.
I've never encountered the ridiculous idea that Xbox was "community-first." 100% of everybody has always known that Xbox and Microsoft are rapacious and exploitative hawkers. Nothing has been shattered here, except the financial stability of thousands of tech workers. Which is a normal part of the alienation of capitalist society.
"made redundant" is such a terrible euphemism. They were fired. Say it like it is.
Well there is a distinction between the two though right? When you get fired, that's it. You just stop working there. Being made redundant you also get given X amount of extra pay depending on their policies and the laws of where they are to make up for the time that they may be unemployed between jobs.
I'd go even further: "They were fired so rich executives and shareholders could become more rich."
"Those freeloaders were eating from my profit pie!"
It's a crock of shit platitude too if you look at the statements from workers that are affected
Companies are not your friends.
except mabye privacy ones
Are you sure?
No console is your friend. Only PC can be friend.
Yeah! With my Micorsoft Wintendo
Only PC can be friend.
Not if it's running Windows.
Btw, they're using "Xbox" synonymous with the Microsoft video games division because that's how Microsoft is using the term as well. If you think using the same term for two completely different things is dumb, please remember that's the same company that thought that naming the third Xbox console generation "Xbox One" is an amazing idea and then releasing "Xbox Series S" and "Xbox Series X" after "Xbox One S" and "Xbox One X" were already around.
Windows isn't a operating system, its a virus that wants to make you believe its a OS.
Meh, I saved literally thousands of dollars a year playing the shit that doesn't need eye candy on Xbox/PS5. The OS is far less of a pain to maintain as well.
Fuck valve and them destroying discs.
On the flipside, I've saved even more on PC. I regularly buy games for <$5, and those typically go for $20+ on any console. I also get a bunch of free, high-quality games from EGS, GOG, and some other stores. The games I want to play all work well, are incredibly cheap (especially w/ bundles on Fanatical or Humble Bundle), and still work when I upgrade my hardware. I regularly play games from the 90s, try that on your console.
The main downside is no physical media, but I'm way too lazy to actually sell my old games, and for the cost I pay, I'm really not worried about it. My OS is incredibly easy to maintain, I literally run updates and that's it. Oh, and I use Linux, so I don't even need to pay for the OS either.
Consoles absolutely have their place (I have a Switch as well), but for budget gaming, you really can't beat PC.
the tone around the (Microsoft-Actiblizzard) merger was largely dominated by vocally supportive Xbox players and commentators
Excuse me, what? I guess my social bubble is thick as fuck, because I didn't see a single person supporting that megacorp scale merger.
These two concurrent pushes (of marketing good vibes image) resulted in a landscape that was, at best, reluctant to discuss the potential harm of its acquisitions and, at worst, actively rejected it because Xbox’s “good guy” image and messaging had so thoroughly seeped into the foundations of shared community spaces and broader gaming consciousness
Feels like a load of bullshit, then again I don't even know where the cool kids hang out, so it could be me.
The superficial artifice of Xbox’s brand permeates every corner of video game marketing. It’s an endless parade of phrases that don’t quite mean anything and campaigns designed to romanticise and humanise the company’s seemingly bottomless appetite for growth at all costs.
I guess this is why I didn't buy into the previous paragraphs, I just assumed people were "too smart" to fall for so much corporate bullshit.
Microsoft closed the day with a $3 trillion valuation for the first time in the company’s history.
3 trillion with roughly 20k employees now. I wonder how much of that value is assigned to its workforce, like "of the 3 trillion our company's worth, our workers are worth 100 billion" or something.
The support I saw around the merger was from blizzard fans who were excited that maybe Microsoft would mismanage blizzard slightly less than Activision did
Basically this.
I don't like mergers but holy fuck Activision/Blizzard had to go. That that POS Kotick got away with a golden parachute while pulling every dirty trick that unluckier cronies have pulled once and gotten cancelled, is a travesty.
Getting acquired is just about the only way something that big "dies". Activision swore many times they'd change, but it was never gonna happen. Too many wore rose tinted glasses and forgave them because of what Blizzard once was, dismissing what it had become.
Microsoft has been good to its subsidiary studios in recent years, but eventually it too will have to be dealt with in some form. My preferred method would be hitting it with the "monopoly-break-up-stick" again.
20k is just the gaming division. From what I can tell by looking online they have over 200k employees
There was definitely a lot of support for this merger - people see it as ABK's "redemption arc", and there was a lot of excitement around ABK games coming to GamePass / other platforms like Steam because of this.
Ultimately this is how people think: What is in the merger for them? And they don't think macro, but just simple things like "now I can finally get this game on [platform]"
Xbox hasn't been Xbox since 2011.
is not a friend.