Opinion: Phil Spencer, long cast as Xbox’s saviour, may be remembered as the man who killed it
Opinion: Phil Spencer, long cast as Xbox’s saviour, may be remembered as the man who killed it
HIT POINTS: Now that all his big bets have failed, Spencer is turning to corrective measures…
There's a common thread between a lot of the missteps listed here and Embeacer group's recent troubles. The idea that you could fund 230 Spiderman 2's for the same price as buying 1 Activision-Blizzard-King really drove the point home to me.
The problem (in my obviously uneducated opinion) is that when you spend so much money in acquisition, especially of established companies, you're neither funding nor rewarding innovation. You spend $70B on ABK and some randos in suits get a huge payout that they invest in oil or crypto or whatever. Spend $70B on talent and early career devs and you could unleash a tidal wave of creativity and experimentation.
True. These mega-deals are rarely about games, it's more in the realm of finance. In fact it doesn't really matter if it's games, films, cars, saucepans, it's all about the financial side. And as a consequence in order to make good on that investment these companies end up producing the blandest, widest-appealing pap, the complete opposite of innovation. However, the breathless way these stories are reported by a media, both specialist and mainstream, which is more concerned with business "success", means we're told it's a very good thing, when it clearly isn't.
Sony is also encountering similar issues in terms of the cost of games being unsustainable and Moore's Law kicking in. The difference is that they're making games that move consoles and Microsoft just aren't.
At this point, I don't know what strategy Microsoft has at this point. If you say "Xbox everywhere", what does Xbox even mean any more for the enthusiast? I don't think Xbox is done, but if they were looking to be HBO before, they are now going for the Netflix approach - high quantity content, mediocre product - and possibly alienate the existing audience they have.
I say this as an Xbox Series S owner, I'm happy with my purchase, but as a consumer I don't think I'll be upgrading my console to anything Microsoft ship any time soon.
I don't own either current gen consoles. But I do have a rather up to date PC. I don't have any current gen consoles when I owned some before (360, PS4) because I don't like how they handle those consoles. I don't run windows anymore because I disagree that MY PC that I built is somehow Microsoft's property if I use their software. I used to be a Halo fan but ever since Halo 4 the series has been rather... Mediocre and I just don't have time for sub par experiences. In fact I have not touched any AAA titles in so long because they have all been overly save and boring.
I don't hate every big company making games,in fact I miss the old Ubisoft from the early 2000s or valve or blizzard (save of a few things) or...
Either way, the market isn't infinite and at some point keeping the existing player base is probably a good idea. So is not pissing of customers with practices that are predatory. Ultimately wild uncontrolled growth is also known as cancer.
Do yourself a favor and never get curious about halo 5.
Gears on the other hand has still been rocking along and staying interesting IMO.
The only xbox exclusive(s) that I can think of that I have enjoyed and come back to in the past decade are the forza horizon games. I've had more enjoyment from backwards compatibility and 3rd party titles on my Xbox.
Halo should have been good. But something happened to both bungie and 343 during that split. Bungie had some kind of magic with their specific group from halo CE to reach. They knew what they were making, and they knew exactly how to bring their vision to life.
After the split, it felt like both company's were limping their releases to the finish line.
To be fair, I think a good portion of the issues are that Microsoft seems to be treating everything like a financial decision and not a creative one. I know this might not be the most popular opinion, but shit I would be happy if they scaled back their games a bit and just made something solid for once on a cheaper budget. I think we've seen that people don't need these massive projects to have fun. If you look at what some of the most popular games have been the past while, a lot are indie games.
I think the saddest part is that the xbox ecosystem during the xbox 360 was so good when it came to community features. Party chat was a game changer, and it made the system feel like a hub to gather friends. A lot of the games available were perfect for groups. Now because the games have been suffering, a lot of my friends have moved to various platforms. It's become less social and a lot less fun. Of course this is anecdotal and less of a tangible issue for Microsoft. But it's these long term issues that have cause a cascading effect of corroding their brand.
I just remembered that Redfall also flopped last year, and that was supposed to be one of their two big titles, along with Starfield, which got overshadowed, to say the least.
Wikipedia tells me the CoD release in 2023 was "the lowest-rated mainline Call of Duty installment on Metacritic", although it seemed to have still printed them money with essentially no work invested, so I guess that's good?
Diablo IV, I think, did reasonably well in its niche. I remember it being a bit overshadowed by Zelda.
Not sure, if I'm forgetting any other major Microsoft/Bethesda/Arcane/Obsidian/Activision/Blizzard/King games, but yeah, that doesn't look too great...
Redfall also flopped last year
Feels like an understatement - this was the game that killed Arkane, because a majority of the team decided they'd rather fuck off than work on whale chasing live-service nonsense. And like, good on them, but it means no more Dishonored, no sequels to Prey, no chance of Arx Fatalis II, and it fucking sucks to see enshittification strangling good talent. I hope they'll find success outside of MS' looming shadow.
Much as I am loath to admit it, Diablo IV did amazing beyond its niche. Anecdotally I saw soooo many people who’d never played Diablo or any game like it get onboard.
Staying power remains to be seen of course.
But how? Buying out Bethesda and turning them into an exclusive-only producing shitshow was probably the most business savvy move of the century!
Lol
I don't think it's a death, it's more of a transition. Firstly, a lot of XBox games have been coming to PC, intentionally, because Microsoft basically own the market*. They've also created XCloud + Game pass, possibly the most convenient way to play games, and you don't need an XBox.
The real people who've turned on the device itself has been devs. Some of the stuff they've been saying at GDC have been at the same level as the stuff they say about Linux as a target. Like your game shouldn't be that dependent on platform, it hurts things like archival.
You have to ask yourself why. Devs are professionals by definition, for them the context is ease of developing along with potential to make a return on investment. Xbox (console) is now a problem on both those metrics. Simple as that, no fanboying or villifying required.
Its just not a big enough market and a good portion of the market is GP'ified and doesn't spend outside of it. Couple that with dual SKU targets with real challenges working around the S memory constraints and here we are.
But I agree that its a transition. Away from the current hardware model.