We’ve almost reached the end of the 1st half of 2024, and Xbox has had more studio closures than first party game releases in the year so far.
At this rate in a couple years there’ll be nothing left of all those studios they bought recently.
That’s by design. Force your opposition to sell, bankrupt them and write off the loses. Shrink the industry and force players to sign up for your subscription services.
I’m not a fan, but it’s hard to see this wasn’t their plan from the get go
The industry historically hasn’t shrunk when studios close like this. There just ends up being more bespoke studios all over the world with former developers from those studios.
It seems weird for a platform holder to do this.
They also now own all of the IP those studios created.
Sure, but what good is an IP if you can’t generate new products to attract and keep users?
What really gets me, and this touches on your comment, is that the execs said that they need to have the teams make what they specialize in. And then they turn around and force all the studios to make games that not at all anything they’ve ever made before.
They don’t care about being a platform holder
I guess you can do that when you own Windows.
The sad part is this might actually end up being a net positive in the long run. Their two biggest acquisitions were Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard, one company that has started their decline and another that is deep into it.
Microsoft pissing away $100B to buy these companies only to turn around and kill them 5-10 years later will end up breaking up the gaming conglomerates that have killed the western games industry. The only sad part is all the people that will lose their jobs and all the classic IP that will be squandered.
In a way, in Activision/Blizzard’s case, it seems more like it slightly postponed their death.
Tango Gameworks, however, was murdered.
Enhance, embrace, extinguish. That’s the Microsoft way, their success has always and will always be built off the backs of others they’ve fucked over.
kinda hard to make video games if you keep laying off the people who make video games…
my heart goes out to those in the industry going through all this crap, man
In just four months, they have lost Toys for Bob (developer of Spyro Reignited and Crash 4), Arkane Austin (Prey 2017), and Tango (Evil Within, Hi-Fi Rush). I wish I had the money to casually buy some great dev studios, including the makers of a GOTY contender, and casually kill them off a few years later.
I know they are in panic mode right now, but I honestly don’t know what their plan is at this point. I doubt even they know. Watching the situation from the outside, it’s almost comical how MS has mismanaged everything for years. I live in Europe and I’ve never seen Xbox marketed anywhere. GamePass is supposedly their priority, and barely anyone I know who is interested in gaming knows that it even exists. The whole deal with the service was delivering first party games day one, yet failed to deliver anything worth buying four years into the new generation, while most of what they actually released was already in the works prior the acquisition. They bought dozens of studios, and mismanaged every single one of them. Fuck, they couldn’t even settle on the cover for their game cases for half a year after their new box released.
The only good thing out of this debacle is that people have finally realized how utterly incompetent Phil Spencer is. I remember the days when fanboys were parroting his lies and kept talking about how “Phil is a gamer just like us”, just because he showed on the stage in a shitty t-shirt. Too bad it took xbox fucking dying for them to realize, but I guess it’s better later than never.
Hey, quite a few people bought Game Pass for a month to try out Cities: Skylines 2, because it was quite a lot cheaper than the game itself (and considering the poor state the game was released in, probably not much more than a month of replay value anyway)
Its almost like none of you remember microsoft in the dot com era.
Did no one just intuitely understand this was going to be a consequence of aquiring blizzard-activision?
In other news trees of green
Trees of green what, is the real question.
You didnt just remind me i have some new edibles to try out at alll
Corporate Greed ruining everything and MS having no real direction.
Welcome to Capitalism
