GamesIndustry.biz: Microsoft's mystifying mismanagement
GamesIndustry.biz: Microsoft's mystifying mismanagement
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If you're a developer working for Xbox, what can you do to secure your job?
The whole piece is worth a read but to me this paragraph sums it all up:
"Who even knows what would please these people? They say they're focusing their resources on bigger games, then they say they need smaller games. They say they love your games, then they shut your studio down. They make more money than they've ever made before, then they cut costs repeatedly, drastically, and cruelly. They buy more studios than they can manage, so the answer is not to use that aforementioned money to hire more (or perhaps better) managers, but to have fewer studios so management's job can be easier."
I hesitate to attribute it to accidental mismanagement. Surely Microsoft has enough experience by now to be pretty good at acquiring firms they think of as competition only to find some excuse to shut them down.
That could work if these firms were somehow competitors, but these aren't Sony-aligned studios they're buying, these are studios that were releasing games on Xbox.
This is definitely a case of, "what makes stock line go up? New games, Big names, More stuff!" Then later, "uh oh, did that and stock price not going up. Layoffs mean less cost, now stock line go up again!"
Microsoft has so many spinning plates up in the air right now and they have no idea how to handle them all. Eventually they're all going to come crashing down and smash on the floor and it's not going to be pretty.
Why are people so confused? Microsoft wanted monopoly by acquiring a bunch of companies, to consolidate their intellectual property and shaft it's employees, the people who created the software in the first place.
Classic Microsoft.
Unfortunately, a lot of people blindly believe in systems and authorities. It doesn't matter how many times they're shown that companies give zero fucks and will light everything on fire at a whim, they think they're rational actors who will do what's responsible for their product, their customers, and their employees.
Clearly, that assumption isn't remotely true, but they'd rather roll their eyes at anyone who doesn't take it on faith than risk having their world view altered.