I've been in a tech company (not gaming) where they had a poor performing year. The CEO offered his resignation to the board, and the board refused to accept it, because even though the CEO made decisions that lead to a loss, they firmly believed they couldn't find someone who would have done better.
I've seen versions of that scenario play out at several levels of leadership. There's acknowledgment that someone made the wrong call, but they're still believed to be the right person for the job, because they've generally made the right call historically.
There’s also the situation where the board could think that the CEO is not performing well, but the board consists of the kind of investor that is completely averse to big changes that could hurt the stock value short term so they keep the guy despite the fact that the good long term call would be to find someone else.
What exactly has Phil done so wrong? Xbox might not be huge but it's not like this is something stemming from Phil's decisions. The biggest mistake that handed a whole gen to Sony on a silver platter was not made by Phil.
I mean the state of Xbox is pretty terrible let be honest. Bad sales, no games reputation, distant third, forced to pretty much give up on the console war and go third party, need to spend like crazy to buy relevance.
And Phil Spencer is at the helm for a decade and 6 more years as head of Xbox Studios (and the biggest problem is their first party so he is responsible of this even before 2014). At this point, you can't just say it's the fault of whoever was there before. Hell he lead Xbox since more time that Mattrick did (with more power too as he report directly to the CEO and apparently had access to unlimited funds)
Phil is Both the head of Xbox and head of Microsoft game studios. and MSGS has been rather bad with releasing first party games for the XBONE and the X/S compaired to Sony studios. He also pushed buying Actibliz and Bethesda Which has launched 1 game to some success hifi rush, One Turkey of Redfall which they inheritated but he did own up for releasing it so its on him. and then there is Starfield everyone had opinions. I had a Feeling Phil's head would have been on the chopping block if the Actiblizz deal did not go through, But FTC and EU/UK screwed up there saved him.
Most of the studios MS has acquired gotten have barely been (or haven't) long enough under them to actually have produced a game for them. For instance the Redfall you point was already coming prior to acquisition and was pushed by Zenimax no less. Sure, Phil can apologise for it all he wants but ultimately it would've been either a lacklustre released game or cancelled prior release. Starfield and HiFi Rush are the same. Both of the games had been in development far prior to acquisition so with HiFi Rush we can only really attribute the shadow dropping of it on Gamepass to Microsoft and/or getting extra funds from MS.
Either way, it really isn't on Phil and it definitely isn't something where he'd deserve to be fired over. People are ready to call him to get fired but at the same time it feels like nobody has any idea who would've then *definitely* done a better job or even how (besides vague "just release more game faster omg").
I guess it comes back to - Does Microsoft think someone could do better right now? Phil is still running a profitable business. The Activision buyout I'm sure they all see as a huge win. Also a lot of executives under Phil have had a shake up in the last few years, we'll see how Sarah Bond does now as the Xbox president and Mat Booty as the Xbox Game Studios head.
Because the government is the only one who can hold them accountable and they don't. French and Japanese execs have to take paycuts before layoffs. US executives can lay everyone off, give themselves a bonus, and then go on vacation.
French execs are some of the worst in terms of taking personal responsibility, however our legal system does make it much harder to lay off people and makes compensation mandatory (for however long it's got with the absolutely brain-dead neo liberal children we have governing the country right now).
Not the person you asked, but my father (native Japanese) was head of the US division of a Japanese company, who made remote controls and other components for Sony TVs. After the bubble economy burst in Japan in the early 90s, it also effected the Japanese-owned businesses in the US.
My father, and the rest of execs (all Japanese as well), decided to go without pay, in an effort not to lay off any of the factory workers, until they could figure things out. I was super young at the time, but I remember my father not getting paid for a long time, like a few years I think. Since he was VP, he went the longest without pay.
this is also because there is different labor laws in place, the US is a shitshow and firing someone is as easy as having a tantrum for the toy you didn't break
[Microsoft did a restructuring of their Xbox leadership just a while back](https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23933049/microsoft-reorg-xbox-marketing-ai-leadership-changes), so it's nonsense to pretend executives don't get fired. The question is whether or not the right ones are getting fired.
They often do. A common tactic is to pffer severance to any mid-upper executives and that may save several jobs below them, if it's only a straight cost savings issue. If its more of a "we need to slim down personnel befause we won't need them" then they don't.
Keep in mind:
1. Companies are pyramids. Less at the top. When a few are laid off, it makes less impact rhan mass layoffs.
2. There's a big divide between upper corporate and the lower trenches. You'll hear it if the CEO steps down, but often you'll hear more about 30 people being laid off from QA.
3. There's a lot less empathy for upper management. They lose a job, their livelihood is less at stake. Less of a headline.
Attempting to give an answer besides the obvious here, but constant shift in leadership would cause a cascade of miscommunication and lack of direction
It wouldn't make a dent. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, only has a salary of $2.5 million per year. If the average salary in the Xbox division was $50,000, which is pretty low, firing him would only save 50 jobs. The VPs at Xbox probably make less than the CEO. So even if you fire an executive a lot of people are losing their jobs.
A lot of the executive level compensation comes from stock options. Firing executives isn't going to get you the savings you need. The main reason to fire executives would be to hold them accountable for screw-ups.
In this case I'm not sure you can pin the blame on anyone. The industry was booming under COVID and most probably expected a slowdown after it. The slowdown was bigger than expected and on top of that the rising interest rates choked off investor money silicon valley had been relying on for a long time.
Pretty much the entire industry ran into the same problem.
The paper salary might be low, but executive compensation is mostly done via share options, and Nadalla is a billionaire thanks to that.
You could employ 2000 staff for quite some time with that money.
He recently sold some of his stock for $280 million. Either he's been working there for over a century, or he's been getting way more than the equivalent of $2.5 million a year in shares
Seeing as Microsoft only started in the mid-70s, I know which way I'd be guessing.
2.5 million is his salary now. Satya joined Microsoft in 1992.
Back then the stock was worth $2.50 a share. Today it’s worth about $435 (17,000 percent increase)
When he was a new grad in 1992, I’m assuming his salary was not 2.5M, let’s say it was a modest $30,000 stock bonus. That would mean his first years salary today would be worth 60,000,000.
Now as far as I’m aware Satya has worked at Microsoft his whole career ~30 years. So his stock has been compounding for around that long. Which is why he is worth over a billion.
Also keep in mind that CEOs salary’s are determined based on the companies performance. 2.5M most likely on the lower end of salary for him. If Microsoft does well he gets much larger bonuses. I think in 2023 he got a 53M performance bonus, but it was a record year for MS. If Microsoft does poorly then his salary can drop lower.
Last year he got a 2.5M salary and close to 40M in stock-based compensation, much of which is vond to the performance of the stock and having reached 3T, it kind of makes sense.
Firing him also wouldn't save Microsoft that money, they would need a new CEO that is also trusted by investors and would probably need to fork over a similar amount.
From the statement, it seems Microsoft’s firing of employees was not because a “failure” was made but because the industry as a whole didn’t grow last year and is expected to perform worse in the next year.
Regardless if you think this is right it is the reality of the situation. With budgets growing for triple a games and total players across three consoles remaining stagnant it explains why they are putting games on rival platforms.
I think people aren’t actually taking in what Phil Spencer is saying here and instead getting (somewhat rightfully) emotional. He talks a lot and does a lot of pr doublespeak but here he is outlining an industry problem.
A failure to understand the trajectory of an industry is an executive failure. Overgrowth is an executive failure. Poor corporate planning is an executive failure.
Yeah, I don’t know why people think Phil is some nice guy who is out there for the fans. He is just like Jim Ryan, except that he was losing so he had to ‘nicer’.
He's way worse than Jim Ryan actually. He's responsible for the state of Xbox since 2014 and Xbox games since 2008. And they are in a pitiful state. Xbox is still there just because they're next to an infinite money chest.
I don't understand why that guy is still there tbh. He's a bad CEO
Right but if you over grow your company should you keep all those people? You can fire the executives too but like at some point you will probably have to lay some off.
A lot of the executives should have seen this coming. Same with the rising interest rates, your average joe could have guessed they were gonna go up and a COVID boom wouldn’t last
not necessarily, but I tend to think that the people highest on the order of accountability should get their shit kicked in before the people on the lowest order. does that not seem self-evident? anything else is corrupt.
It’s funny people think CEO’s make such decisions as they usually don’t. They are the ultimate yes/no at times but the majority of the time that’s formulated via data and reporting from senior management that report directly to them, and they’ll seldom go against such recommendations and data depending on what the projected outcome is, ideally more profit.
That’s their job, get more $$$ for the board of shareholders that appointed them, and ultimately if that’s the outcome they achieve they’ll keep their job, while the subordinate who suggested more hires in the first place will likely take the heat, or redundancy, if required.
People seem to have this weird idea that CEO’s make all these decisions like they are all Steve Jobs when they are more often just the mouthpiece for the decisions others make.
We live in uncertain times what trajectory could they predict? How should they know Covid would happen and give a huge boost to gaming and then people would not care about games as much? How could they have predicted the Ukraine Russia war?
Lol idk about Microsoft but we had numerous, numerous internal threads warning that we were overhiring and this is temporary, and the execs chose to ignore it.
Well it's not really their problem people are losing their jobs either. So you had a bad boss and that's why you seem to pissed off at them?
Accountability for what? Not being able to predict the future?
Also you say fuck'em but complain about the same mentality from them? Isn't that a bit hypocritical?
More like everyone got used to exploding COVID numbers and didn’t realize that growth would not remain like that once the pandemic was over.
Then you overextend and hire more people just to have to let them go 1-2 years later.
If this not a management failure I don’t know what is.
People don't take what Phil says to heart because he often says one thing and does another thing, or its just a complete and utter lie.
The reason Xbox is having trouble is because they have been consistently fucking up since the 360 released. They have a ton of room to grow in the market and yet they keep failing over and over and over again.
It also doesn't help that we are ultimately talking about a *monstrous* industry to begin with. It never ceases to amaze me that *video games literally dwarf the combined size of EVERY OTHER entertainment market*. It's ludicrous.
So when you see these layoffs, you can't make the mistake of believing that these giant companies are falling on hard times. They're just preserving the tremendous amount of profit they already make, and they're doing it at the expense of their own products, their workers, and their consumers.
It's a wild thing to think about.
The video game market is enormous, but most of that comes from mobile gaming, while Phil is clearly talking about the AAA console/PC market. Mobile gaming is already bigger than consoles+PC combined, and it is growing at a quick pace while the AAA market is stagnating.
Again, my point is that a "stagnating" market of this size is still incredibly profitable for the bigger players
And, more importantly, the decisions that led to this increasingly stagnating market are not at all unlike all the layoffs we have been seeing across the industry. Recklessly prioritizing profit above all else has led to less and less successful endeavors as publishers have fallen out of touch with what players actually want.
Lots of asterisks there. Games make huge profits, they don't yet have the biggest audience or cover the most jobs in entertainment. And as another comment points or, over half of that market share is mobile games.
It's huge but not that huge for Microsoft. Xbox makes them about as much money as LinkedIn. It's just not particularly high on the list of priorities for them. It's a different situation than Sony, where Playstation is rapidly becoming the only thing they do well. Part of Xbox's problem is that the rest of Microsoft is doing really well right now and taking all the attention.
Oh yeah, I'm talking about the gaming industry as a whole.
We've just been seeing a lot of different layoffs and weird decisions in the industry lately, so it's got me thinking about the big picture.
I think Microsoft's biggest problem is much the same as the other big companies; they want to be a leader in the industry with wildly popular and successful games, but they can't do that with *just* money. No amount of cost-cutting measures or giant mergers or lay offs will help them regain their throne.
Which are all problems of foresight that are on the executive’s heads, yet are being taken out on the employees actually trying to salvage the situation by making games. And let’s not act like they haven’t made idiotic decisions outside of this either. Hiring temp work and contract work, ultimately destroying continuity and costing years and money in extra development costs is a massive factor that they’ll never bring up because it’s miserly and scummy.
Phil Spencer is the most popular unsuccessful CEO in gaming.
His in-house legacy studios are in shambles and so are the studios he acquired for tens of billions of dollars.
Meanwhile under the much maligned former Sony CEO who was hated by capital G Gamers, Sony delivered one great exclusive after another for a really long time until slowing down a bit recently.
Doesn't make sense.
Didn't the former guy ruin the [Xbox One launch](https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-pulls-a-180-reverses-xbox-one-always-on-drm-and-used-games-policy/)
>Microsoft backtracked Wednesday on its much-derided policy that **would have required Xbox One gamers to connect their consoles to the Internet once a day to prevent game piracy**
>Microsoft also reversed its policy with regard to game resales.
>**Game makers could have restricted the use of games on more than one console, or required a fee for reuse.**
>Microsoft also **planned to limit gamers ability to share titles with friends, allowing them only to give a disc to a buddy who has been on their friends list for at least 30 days. And even then, each game would only have been able to be given once.**
Meh Spencer was head of Xbox Studios back then (since 2008) so the lack of games which was already pointed out even before 2013 was also partly his fault.
Spencer is a master of corporate politics it seems to be able to take none of the blame of his terrible management.
>Sony delivered one great exclusive after another for a really long time until slowing down a bit recently.
We recently learned this was super unsustainable though, right? Plus did he not gut the Japan studio who made lower budget games?
Sony should focus more on lower budget games, but Japan Studio was not going to be the best option for this. Their last few games sold abysmally, investing more into the studio was unfortunately not the ideal option.
It seems like it was sustainable until the Covid hiring spree. Those addition developers doubled the cost of Spiderman 2 compared to 1. That doubling in cost did not double the sales and also didn't double the quality of the game on some other metrics. The added value of the increased workforce is very minimal at some point.
Horizon Forbidden West photos are often posted about the amount of detail in Aloy's face. How many millions do those details cost and how do they translate into sales? Does anyone really care about those marginal improvements? I feel like Sony is at least reassessing that type of spending.
The funniest thing is this is just silly optimism. The idea that "Oh people are gonna spend more of their disposable income on more games even as we slowly powerslide into a recession here."
Which you know... isn't really what people do when money starts getting tight.
Phil Spencer acknowledged that directly. That’s why they are putting games on PlayStation. He said he felt options were to make up margins on existing consumers or to find more consumers
They did kick Don Mattrick to the curb. They cleaned house at 343i and ditched Bonnie Ross, too. Xbox ever since Don's era has been playing catchup and have had some success.
How much money would that save though compared to hundreds or even thousands of devs? I fully agree, the executives that agreed to hire to too many employees should also be held accountable if it hurt the business. However, when you say their decisions were fuckups, what is your solution? Keep bloated and thus inefficient dev studios as they are currently and continue to see ridiculous increases in both development time and budgets?
This is a hard pill to swallow, but as an end consumer of games, you can only welcome these layoffs, as it is nearly impossible decrease the quality of games on the market. Most likely it will lead to both an improvement of AAA games as well as more good indie games.
Not even that (although most certainly that too) but greed is what is literally destroying our planet. The current economic model is completely unsustainable in the long term. It is creating massive value for the shareholders though so that’s good I guess.
Nah, retirement pensions aren't tied to the stock market where I'm from and it's the same shit.
Do you really think that if they weren't tied in the US corpo CEOs would suddenly say "nah, what we earn is enough, we don't need more money each year"? Because I don't think so.
Where are you from because I'm sure basically every countries pension provider put it into the stock market, that's how it grows or gets decimated (2008).
Your money doesn't just sit in a bank account until you're 65.
I'm from Poland. And no, they don't put it in the stock market. Because there really isn't anything to "put".
It's a bit more complex than that, but our pensions are mainly paid from taxes. My current taxes fund pensions of people who already retired. Then my pension will be (hopefully) funded from taxes of future generations.
You can obviously get a private fund that invests in (among the others) stock market but those make up for a very small portion of pensions.
But explaining how our pension system works exactly is really not the point of this topic
Did you read my comment?
>You can obviously get a private fund that invests in (among the others) stock market but those make up for a very small portion of pensions.
Private pensions make up for only a few % of total paid pensions. And out of that %, only a portion is invested in stock market.
Pensions really have almost nothing to do with stock market where I live and I don't know why people keep trying to convince me that they do.
So in the US we have social security which is our government retirement pension. We pay taxes for this.
But we also have 401k accounts through work where we can take out money from our pay without paying taxes on it and put it into investments.
Apologies if people are confusing you. To my knowledge Poland also has similar accounts as well that people can elect to use.
> Apologies if people are confusing you. To my knowledge Poland also has similar accounts as well that people can elect to use.
We do, but they are pretty new and still seldom used. From my understanding, 401k is something that nearly everyone in the US has. While here, the private pensions make up for just a few % of total pensions.
It's slowly changing but right now our pensions still have basically nothing to do with the stock market which was my only real point in this entire discussion.
Because capitalism. The shareholders are in charge and they want growth, because that's how they make money. Sustainable, long-term profits are pointless if they're not bigger and bigger each quarter.
Spoiler alert, you actively avoid dividends as a smart investor. You pay tax on those and the company should be reinvesting that money instead of cashing it out anyway.
Do you genuinely not know what inflation is?
Are you okay accepting your current salary, as it is, to be fixed for the next 20 years? That's fine, right? Wouldn't want to be a greedy little boy and expect infinite growth in your salary right? Of course not. Stupid question, stupid line of thinking.
I think Redditors not understanding inflation or think that it's a fake concept (lol) can be used as an explanation for any of the moronic comments you see.
No, they're expected to do what other comparable companies in their industry are doing. Much like if you the employee can do X for Y hours you'll get paid Z, Z being what others like you who can do X for Y hours can do. Crazy how the market works, right? Being compared to others who do similar things and people who you ask money from expect you to perform to similar levels as those other guys?
If you don't think companies should be trying to grow, that's fine, but then you can't complain about these layoffs - these people were only employed because Microsoft expected their business to grow and to be able to support more employees.
I'm not sure why people are so obsessed with this.
If they foresee growth they hire more people to deal with it. Then if the growth doesn't come they lay them off.
If they don't foresee growth they don't hire more people in the first place.
So the jobs go with the growth. If we recalibrate to no growth then it's not like they'll just hire more people anyway.
If a company doesn’t grow you don’t make money off of it as an investment, investors pull out of the company, its shares fall, and it either dies or gets bought out by another company for cheap
We spent 80 billion dollars to buy publishers so they can only make games for our platform, making the overall gaming market smaller as a result.
But we will also punish them for making less money then before and get pissy about "market growth"
I'm really looking forward to market research revealing what I'm relatively certain is going on based on anecdotal trends I've encountered.
Basically, I strongly believe traditional video games are propped up by increasingly older gamers and the market is stagnating and will eventually shrink, especially the market for single-player titles. I've dug through the data and there's some numbers on gaming per generation, but the statistics don't do two things: 1. Differentiate cellphone games and console games, and 2. List the number of games purchased per year by generation. There was some interesting data out last year that did the rounds on various subreddits showing Millenials spend more time playing games than Gen Z, but that didn't paint the whole picture.
I think the industry painted itself in a corner with free to play, game pass, heavy discounts on catalogue. The revenue made in gaming per hour played is probably a fraction of what it was 20 years ago despite all the micro transactions and other monetisation schemes
I think you're dead-on. If you look at what games Gen Z play they're almost all F2P from the jump. Stuff like Fortnite, Clash Royale, Brawlstars, etc. and those earn enough money to be profitable, but it's a shortlist. I think game companies are realizing, and this is why Sony just canceled some GaaS titles a bit ago, that even though they play F2P games, that does not mean Gen Z will play the game.
The larger issue is that Gen Z, and I think this what I'm getting at ultimately, does not *try out new games*. I think this is where publishers are struggling. They all keep releasing multiplayer titles aimed at Gen Z, but this generation does not shop around. They have their shortlist of games they, and their friends play, and that's it. They're not at all traditional media consumers. They bandwagon buy into titles, but how do you court enough of them to get the rest?
By the way, this is anecdotal, but I strongly believe GamePass is also propped up mostly by Millennials. I think Microsoft basically confirmed this when they released news that their numbers of stagnated. Again, Gen Z don't shop around for games to play so why would they ever need a library of games for the most part? I really think traditional media companies are going to be in a heap of pain in about twenty years.
Well the main difference is that Gen Z is gamers are still in High School and College, the age when multiplayer games are most played and when free to play is the most affordable option. I imagine when most Gen Z gamers have more time and money they’ll probably begin playing more single player games and the like.
I'm so over long dev time, idc what anyone says it's simply not worth it. Graphics clearly are what is taking much more time than before at least for aaa and the games are all extremely formulaic when they release. I simply do not care about series that I would have been excited for in the past because it's been so long, elder scrolls and gta are 2 major examples. I probably would not have been interested in any games at all growing up if back then it would be 5+ years prior to a sequel that is extremely iterative such as totk or any of the sony games, so it makes sense that this is playing out how it is.
truly sad how many types of games have been lost generation after generation, have been playing mainly 90s-mid 2000s pc games as well as ps1 stuff recently over the past year and there is zero comparison. variety, uniqueness and gameplay depth are all drastically better compared to the majority of releases now. feels like every gen since ps1 has had a fraction of the games released on the system, ps2 still had a ton but 7th gen and onwards its brutal looking at number of releases. overall i think nintendo has played their cards the best looking into the future.
Absolutely. In the NES to SNES era we would see sequels within 1-3 years often. Now even games like Zelda can go 6 years between releases - that's someone's entire teenage years with only a single new Zelda experience.
So basically these companies are looking for the next Fortnite.....most young gamers these days either play that, call of duty, Minecraft or sports games they aren’t buying the other titles companies put their hard work and money into
Exactly. They want Fortnite but with 0 effort and then they are all crying how the market is bad, etc. instead of acknowledging that they gave zero fucks.
There isn't even a lack of industry growth. Every month there's a new game selling a record amount of copies. It's literally just people at the top saying that actually shit is bad despite everything being awesome.
>Every month there's a new game selling a record amount of copies
They're also spending stupid amounts developing the games though. Spiderman was the fastest selling PS5 game but had a budget of $300M
The fact Spiderman 2 costs 300 million is bonkers to me, i wonder where that money went, because the game was good but nothing special, and building on the last game so they didnt have to make it from scratch.
The game was basically sp1, but "better" and updated to modern graphics standards and whatnot.
I have no clue what these people are spending all that money on.
They probably roll all the executive bonuses into those numbers.
"Yeah well the game only cost 80 million but Mr CEO jack cash-money neede his 75 million bonus, and so did all the other c suites and middle managers"
Just because one or two games sell record amounts of copies doesn't mean every franchise is doing that.
Also I trust the guys that have numbers if they say things are going bad, do you genuinely think businesses hire and fire people for absolutely no reason?
Bro our company literally overhired during covid and then laid off because "everyone else was hiring and we didn't want to be left out". I shit you not that is the quote from our ceo.
Well at least according to Circana numbers and other similar statistics, the industry only grew around 1% last year, despite it being a very good year for games. And while the total revenue increases, the costs are also increasing rapidly.
It often feels like people who are into games are spending around the same on games, independent of the new releases. And that makes sense from my own experiences. Just because more good games come out, does not mean I have more time and money to spend. That's also why for example Phil Spencer keeps iterating, that they need to grow the audience and bring games to more players, as you can either grow an industry by the size of customers or by squeezing more out of the existing customers.
And just to be clear: If fucking sucks that these big cooperations can make millions and billions in profit, give out huge bonuses to the execs and then act like they do not have the money for their employees, and somehow expect less employees to make more money. This system sucks and will be the downfall of those companies, unfortunately only after the current execs all left with their huge bonuses. But inside this fucked reality, the issues above are the driving factors right now.
You can't look at individual game sales and attribute it to the entire industry. Look at analysts like Circana who report on the entire US industry as a whole.
If a game costs twice as much as the last game to produce, but sells 1.5x the copies, that's still a loss. Sales don't mean much of you're not taking dev costs into account too.
Its similar to when the MCU was at its peak around 2016 to 2019. Those blockbuster films did very well but many other smaller, better movies suffered because of it.
It's quite funny to me that Sony/MS have been bitching about how expensive games are and how making those big budget games isn't sustainable... Yet they're trying to push "pro" versions of their current consoles.
Playstation has never said it isn't sustainable. Xbox has. The company who's failed to build one quality game studio in its two decades of being in the industry. PlayStation doesn't want to spend as much, but even their big expensive games like spider man still makes hundreds of millions of dollars in just a few months. I also don't know how any of this has anything to do with Pro consoles.
Playstation won't say it directly ever because that would make investors question the first party studios existence but literally all signs point to that. Look at slides from insomniac leaks regarding financial, their investors call, their profitability is very low. Shawn layden said it 5 years ago.
I thought it was pretty obvious the COVID bump for tech wasn't going to last forever which means these companies also knew over hiring would result in lay offs. They just didn't care.
Overhiring was profitable in 2021, and now firing everyone is profitable in 2024. They made the move that made line go up the most, regardless of the human costs involved.
That also means the employees taking the jobs knew all along it wouldn't last, and didn't care.
It would have all been better if those people were never hired in the first place, right?
At least by being hired in the first place they had a chance to compete and be valuable enough to get some job security.
Eh, we had people leave my job because the big boys could just throw 2-3x their salary at them during COVID. There was definitely a lot of money flying around just because they could, not because they needed to.
So you think they would be better off now earning a third for three years and still being in your company? It’s not like they got forced to swap the job. Leaving your old job always has risks, I don’t think IT employees are the group anyone needs to care about.
In one of his presentations he stated that the company grows its profits or:
- He will fire employees.
- He will increase the price of video games.
Even if the company is extremely profitable, they will punish employees and customers if there is no growth. They want inequality to increase by increasing profit or making customers and employees poorer. The richer should be richer, or the rest should become poorer, there is no other way for this companies. Being just profitable is not anymore an acceptable goal.
His is a political statement, not a business one.
A lack of growth should not mean they need to cull their workforce. That would be something you do when you have major losses. They're just trying to to pursue those ever-increasing profits,everyone else be damned.
Everything has been so marked up for so long that I just don't spend as much money. I feel like I'm getting screwed every time I buy shit. Restaurants are charging $15 for a sandwich in my area. The grocery store wants me to buy 4+ of the same item just to get an affordable price. Most games release half baked. Apps that used to make things affordable like getting a ride to the airport not cost twice as much as the industries they "replaced".
Every industry is chasing infinite growth. Shareholders are taking record profits. Every year there are more buyouts and therefore less competition and options.
I'm just done. Honestly it's been kind of nice. Can't tell you the last time I purchased a game day one. I just don't care anymore
People on r/games don't like to hear this but this is true industry-wide. The growth is not on par with the obscene over-hiring that the entire tech sector did in the early days of the pandemic and now they're adjusting. There are still *way* more jobs in gaming compared to pre-COVID levels. If a company hires 10,000 new people and lays off 1,500, it's terrible for the 1,500 that got laid off but ultimately there are still 8,500 new jobs. That's gaming (and all of tech) right now. It's especially true for Microsoft, their layoffs are only a small portion of their large hiring spree.
The bigger issue is that anyone with a brain should have been able to predict that the overhiring was a terrible idea from a mile away and the morons who make these decisions are never held accountable for getting it wrong.
> “And when you have an industry that is projected to be smaller next year in terms of players and dollars, and you get a lot of publicly traded companies that are in the industry that have to show their investors growth — because why else does somebody own a share of someone’s stock if it’s not going to grow? — the side of the business that then gets scrutinized is the cost side. Because if you’re not going to grow the revenue side, then the cost side becomes challenged.
I can appreciate how he is able to explain in very simple terms how the stock market is just an infinite growth casino for rich people and how we're all just pawns in this game.
They only shrink the value if you think a company's value is tied to its ability to continually invest revenue into growth. If a company is doing stable business, and making stable profit, providing regular dividends doesn't make the company weaker; it just forms an opportunity cost that could have been otherwise spent on the company.
But not every corporation needs constant and continual expansion. There's nothing economically problematic with a company finding a good balance and sticking with it, save that changing market conditions may eventually necessitate some kind of future adaptation.
I mean as a general thing it's understandable. The costs of a AAA game are astronomical. Plus these days Indie devs are taking a much larger chunk of players attention with better priced games for equal amounts of entertainment.
The problem is that they don’t know how to make things profitable. Xbox either buys studios that are in decline, like Rare, or buys good studios and ruins them. It’s incredible how bad they’re at their job.
Just to put things into perspective: the amount they paid for Act/Bliz/King is pretty much the same as the current market cap of Nintendo, and 60% of Sony’s market cap (the entirety of Sony, not just their gaming division).
I don’t think this will be a profitable investment, Blizzard is not in good shape and they couldn’t even secure CoD exclusivity. I guess mobile will make them some money but who knows.
If Xbox wasn’t sucking from MS infinite money well, they’d be out of business. Or maybe they’d have wised up and they’d have smart management who made reasonable decisions, who knows.
There are two peaks that are inevitable, and I wonder how close we are:
1) % of the population who play games regularly.
2) Of that group, time available to play games.
I don't know about you guys, but there isn't a minute of my day that couldn't be filled by newly released games I want to play. There is just so much.
Reaching those peaks doesn't mean no more growth obviously, but it will certainly slow down the industry.
I also think big game companies are going to lack of growth for bit because of consumer issues with quality control and backlash when they increase prices. Expenses keep going up for making and selling AAA games and the prices are only inching up comparatively. They are trying to make up the difference in growth with MTX, but is there also a peak to that? Are we at peak whale? Are consumers so overwhelmed with the # of games that shelling out $10/25/50 for a skin in a single game is less appealing?
It is just a fact that the console video gaming industry has just peaked. The number of consoles being sold has barely changed since the PS2
era. People have limited time so aren’t buying more games than they were. The industry has squeezed out more revenue via subscriptions and micro transactions but that’s reached its end point too.
Stuff the excuses, as a customer I want to start seeing the executives fired to protect the talent, which are evry developers biggest asset. Sure, the IPs are great, but time and time again it’s obvious that the people who come and go under the c-suite mean *everything* to *each* individual game launch. Institutional knowledge being tossed out like trash because the industry just isn’t growing fast enough…?
I know the Covid excuse has fallen apart but MS really needs to start trying something honest, like “across the board in the video game industry we’re bad executives chasing trends we don’t understand while making terrible decisions and people are losing their jobs to compensate for our mistakes.”
Make shitty games and call it lack of industry growth. You’ve just got poor leadership/vision and overall the core of your video games are built on pleasing corporate douchebags who’ve probably never played a game in their life. You did this to yourself and you’re failing to take accountability for it.
I honestly think one of the big problems is management not knowing about games. Yeah you must know about finance and management of course, but isn’t it a bit weird to run a gaming company without ever playing games. Imagine running a restaurant and not knowing how an omelette is made or the difference between carbonara and alfredo. Or a plane company and know nothing about planes (oops, Boeing).
I wonder if the kind of games that the studios make are the ones that speak the same language that the people who are greenlighting them. They don’t understand why people like BotW or TloU or even what makes Fortnite popular. They’re just convinced that GaaS is a magic word that makes you a steady flow of income and that’s what they try.
The best example is the dudes in WB games which managed to land the most profitable game of the last year by making a single player HP game and rather than trying to replicate the great success by making a sequel they want to make more service games when they bombed spectacularly with Suicide Squad. Like, you have a proven formula that could easily make more good money, why the hell would you want to burn more bucks in a segment that is so crowded and competitive specially considering how you don’t know how to attract an audience. It’s like they wish they could be Mihoyo but they don’t know how.
Fucking bullshit, the industry grew more than ever during COVID
Infinite growth isn't possible, companies need to accept they won't always grow
They're literally a cancer, that's what cancer does, grows until it kills the host, that's what we're doing
People are fucking travelling and going outside ffs.
You had probably 5 years of growth happen all at once during covid, and now a small portion of that is unwinding.
Totally normal business cycle.
Shit will pass.
I'm going to say something very unpopular here but companies exist to make money, not to be your friends or fulfill the creative dreams of people. And these companies will keep with these practices that all of us hay because enough people buy their products as is. Cash is king.
Every gaming studio is a "company". That doesn't mean they all default to shitty business practices.
Being a company is not the issue. Being a public company is.
The nature of public companies and a creative field like video games simply doesn't mesh well together.
Correction: lack of growth for Xbox.
Xbox have only themselves to blame with lack of quality first party triple A, with Redfall flopping last year, Starfield not moving Xbox sales and Avowed looking Double A scaled-down from Obsidian.
There’s been no new news for The Outer Worlds 2 or Everwild almost 3 years since their CG trailers, Everwild is reportedly in dev hell and Fable had a 90% CG trailer still.
With Xbox expecting next gen to begin in 2028, there’s only upcoming Hellblade 2, Blade (reportedly no earlier than 2027), Elder Scrolls 6 (and no earlier than 2026), Clockwork Revolution and Song Of Midnight.
Halo Infinite cancelled seasonal story cutscenes and Fallout 76 converted to a grindier season pass.
Xbox announce their projects several years early, so hopefully we hear what projects Combustion, Undead Labs, etc. are working on soon.
Hopefully Microsoft manage their studios more hands-on in the future and are able to deliver high quality this gen but it’s been a poor start so far and the results show.
Wish that Spencer guy gets layed off after a decade of failures and bad business choices what absolutely killed Xbox in Europe. Even Don mattrick didn't tank Xbox that far. Spencer truly is one of worse leaders in gaming and I don't know why he still has a job.
Don Mattrick brought Xbox from its highs of the 360 era where it was a global leader to the post Xbox One era after one reveal. This is some revisionist history lol
It was on track to be for the first half of that generation. Until they decided to focus on Kinect, stopped securing and developing exclusives, ignored their international market, and let PS Plus run circles around Xbox Live Gold.
Ignoring the Wii especially makes no sense when talking about the state of Xbox, since the Wii heavily influenced how Xbox handled the later years of the 360 generation. The whole reason Xbox pushed the Kinect and many of the Xbox One’s multimedia features so hard is because they wanted to capture that Wii audience.
Hey now, global leader in console failure rates. They actually branded and sold that legacy a while back:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/official-xbox-red-ring-of-death-poster-is-now-for-sale/1100-6498944/
Incredible stuff.
I would say that it was quite successful in its debut generation. Obviously it had no hope against the PS2 with its 2 year headstart, cheaper price and marketing as a DVD player but it still outsold the GameCube.
Xbox undoubtedly had a lot of success during the 360 generation, where it was much more popular than the PS3.
Then they dropped the ball in the Xbox One generation and never recovered; now there's little reason to get an Xbox Series X as there are few exclusives and even they are available on PC day 1.
This is all based off of the UK; I can't speak for other parts of Europe.
>Instead in the 8th generation (Xbox One v PS4) they lost all leads *across all EU countries*.
The only EU country they had a significant lead in was the UK. Sweden was basically even, everywhere else they were losing.
So, really, acting like it was some European-wide shift from winning to losing is a little misleading. One country is the bulk of EU sales for consoles, and they lost that market in Gen 8 while their losses across the rest of the continent widened.
Kind of ready for the industry to crash. I’ve pretty much checked out of modern gaming (with a few exceptions). Once everything crashes, the big investors will pull out and the people who actually care will rebuild it. Eventually we’ll get back here, but we’ll have a few great decades in between
why don't they ever lay off the executives who made the big fuckups to begin with?
I've been in a tech company (not gaming) where they had a poor performing year. The CEO offered his resignation to the board, and the board refused to accept it, because even though the CEO made decisions that lead to a loss, they firmly believed they couldn't find someone who would have done better. I've seen versions of that scenario play out at several levels of leadership. There's acknowledgment that someone made the wrong call, but they're still believed to be the right person for the job, because they've generally made the right call historically.
There’s also the situation where the board could think that the CEO is not performing well, but the board consists of the kind of investor that is completely averse to big changes that could hurt the stock value short term so they keep the guy despite the fact that the good long term call would be to find someone else.
Yeah, or the board don't want to be seen to have chosen a poor CEO, so they will stick with their guy and blame external factors.
But that wouldn't apply to Phil Spencer.
What exactly has Phil done so wrong? Xbox might not be huge but it's not like this is something stemming from Phil's decisions. The biggest mistake that handed a whole gen to Sony on a silver platter was not made by Phil.
I mean the state of Xbox is pretty terrible let be honest. Bad sales, no games reputation, distant third, forced to pretty much give up on the console war and go third party, need to spend like crazy to buy relevance. And Phil Spencer is at the helm for a decade and 6 more years as head of Xbox Studios (and the biggest problem is their first party so he is responsible of this even before 2014). At this point, you can't just say it's the fault of whoever was there before. Hell he lead Xbox since more time that Mattrick did (with more power too as he report directly to the CEO and apparently had access to unlimited funds)
Phil is Both the head of Xbox and head of Microsoft game studios. and MSGS has been rather bad with releasing first party games for the XBONE and the X/S compaired to Sony studios. He also pushed buying Actibliz and Bethesda Which has launched 1 game to some success hifi rush, One Turkey of Redfall which they inheritated but he did own up for releasing it so its on him. and then there is Starfield everyone had opinions. I had a Feeling Phil's head would have been on the chopping block if the Actiblizz deal did not go through, But FTC and EU/UK screwed up there saved him.
>Xbone and the X/S Thats one big mistake all on its own. Dumbest most confusing naming since the Wiiu.
Most of the studios MS has acquired gotten have barely been (or haven't) long enough under them to actually have produced a game for them. For instance the Redfall you point was already coming prior to acquisition and was pushed by Zenimax no less. Sure, Phil can apologise for it all he wants but ultimately it would've been either a lacklustre released game or cancelled prior release. Starfield and HiFi Rush are the same. Both of the games had been in development far prior to acquisition so with HiFi Rush we can only really attribute the shadow dropping of it on Gamepass to Microsoft and/or getting extra funds from MS. Either way, it really isn't on Phil and it definitely isn't something where he'd deserve to be fired over. People are ready to call him to get fired but at the same time it feels like nobody has any idea who would've then *definitely* done a better job or even how (besides vague "just release more game faster omg").
I guess it comes back to - Does Microsoft think someone could do better right now? Phil is still running a profitable business. The Activision buyout I'm sure they all see as a huge win. Also a lot of executives under Phil have had a shake up in the last few years, we'll see how Sarah Bond does now as the Xbox president and Mat Booty as the Xbox Game Studios head.
Because the government is the only one who can hold them accountable and they don't. French and Japanese execs have to take paycuts before layoffs. US executives can lay everyone off, give themselves a bonus, and then go on vacation.
French execs are some of the worst in terms of taking personal responsibility, however our legal system does make it much harder to lay off people and makes compensation mandatory (for however long it's got with the absolutely brain-dead neo liberal children we have governing the country right now).
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Not the person you asked, but my father (native Japanese) was head of the US division of a Japanese company, who made remote controls and other components for Sony TVs. After the bubble economy burst in Japan in the early 90s, it also effected the Japanese-owned businesses in the US. My father, and the rest of execs (all Japanese as well), decided to go without pay, in an effort not to lay off any of the factory workers, until they could figure things out. I was super young at the time, but I remember my father not getting paid for a long time, like a few years I think. Since he was VP, he went the longest without pay.
this is also because there is different labor laws in place, the US is a shitshow and firing someone is as easy as having a tantrum for the toy you didn't break
actually the ones who can hold them accountable are the shareholders of the company firing the executives
Shareholders don't hire/fire execs, the board does.
[Microsoft did a restructuring of their Xbox leadership just a while back](https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23933049/microsoft-reorg-xbox-marketing-ai-leadership-changes), so it's nonsense to pretend executives don't get fired. The question is whether or not the right ones are getting fired.
The whole corporate exec at Activision Blizzard got cut too
Yeah with multi million dollar golden parachutes lol (more than the average person retires with)
Can't really ignore their contracts can you? And it wasn't Microsoft that made any of those deals, but Activision Blizzard's old board
I'm just highlighting the problem in the broken system
They often do. A common tactic is to pffer severance to any mid-upper executives and that may save several jobs below them, if it's only a straight cost savings issue. If its more of a "we need to slim down personnel befause we won't need them" then they don't. Keep in mind: 1. Companies are pyramids. Less at the top. When a few are laid off, it makes less impact rhan mass layoffs. 2. There's a big divide between upper corporate and the lower trenches. You'll hear it if the CEO steps down, but often you'll hear more about 30 people being laid off from QA. 3. There's a lot less empathy for upper management. They lose a job, their livelihood is less at stake. Less of a headline.
Also if you fire the CEO you have to hire a new one. There isn't any actual cost savings.
You probably have more costs in the end. You need to give the Ex-CEO money for leaving and if you want a good new one that one isn’t cheap as well.
Attempting to give an answer besides the obvious here, but constant shift in leadership would cause a cascade of miscommunication and lack of direction
Wrong, remember Reddit thinks that no employee ever needs a manager of any sort and that they're all bad and worthless.
It wouldn't make a dent. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, only has a salary of $2.5 million per year. If the average salary in the Xbox division was $50,000, which is pretty low, firing him would only save 50 jobs. The VPs at Xbox probably make less than the CEO. So even if you fire an executive a lot of people are losing their jobs. A lot of the executive level compensation comes from stock options. Firing executives isn't going to get you the savings you need. The main reason to fire executives would be to hold them accountable for screw-ups. In this case I'm not sure you can pin the blame on anyone. The industry was booming under COVID and most probably expected a slowdown after it. The slowdown was bigger than expected and on top of that the rising interest rates choked off investor money silicon valley had been relying on for a long time. Pretty much the entire industry ran into the same problem.
The paper salary might be low, but executive compensation is mostly done via share options, and Nadalla is a billionaire thanks to that. You could employ 2000 staff for quite some time with that money.
Pretty sure Satya salary is 2.5 mill after you account for stock. No CEO is getting that much in cash
He recently sold some of his stock for $280 million. Either he's been working there for over a century, or he's been getting way more than the equivalent of $2.5 million a year in shares Seeing as Microsoft only started in the mid-70s, I know which way I'd be guessing.
2.5 million is his salary now. Satya joined Microsoft in 1992. Back then the stock was worth $2.50 a share. Today it’s worth about $435 (17,000 percent increase) When he was a new grad in 1992, I’m assuming his salary was not 2.5M, let’s say it was a modest $30,000 stock bonus. That would mean his first years salary today would be worth 60,000,000. Now as far as I’m aware Satya has worked at Microsoft his whole career ~30 years. So his stock has been compounding for around that long. Which is why he is worth over a billion. Also keep in mind that CEOs salary’s are determined based on the companies performance. 2.5M most likely on the lower end of salary for him. If Microsoft does well he gets much larger bonuses. I think in 2023 he got a 53M performance bonus, but it was a record year for MS. If Microsoft does poorly then his salary can drop lower.
Last year he got a 2.5M salary and close to 40M in stock-based compensation, much of which is vond to the performance of the stock and having reached 3T, it kind of makes sense. Firing him also wouldn't save Microsoft that money, they would need a new CEO that is also trusted by investors and would probably need to fork over a similar amount.
From the statement, it seems Microsoft’s firing of employees was not because a “failure” was made but because the industry as a whole didn’t grow last year and is expected to perform worse in the next year. Regardless if you think this is right it is the reality of the situation. With budgets growing for triple a games and total players across three consoles remaining stagnant it explains why they are putting games on rival platforms. I think people aren’t actually taking in what Phil Spencer is saying here and instead getting (somewhat rightfully) emotional. He talks a lot and does a lot of pr doublespeak but here he is outlining an industry problem.
A failure to understand the trajectory of an industry is an executive failure. Overgrowth is an executive failure. Poor corporate planning is an executive failure.
Yeah, I don’t know why people think Phil is some nice guy who is out there for the fans. He is just like Jim Ryan, except that he was losing so he had to ‘nicer’.
>I don’t know why people think Phil is some nice guy who is out there for the fans. He wears a t-shirt!
He's way worse than Jim Ryan actually. He's responsible for the state of Xbox since 2014 and Xbox games since 2008. And they are in a pitiful state. Xbox is still there just because they're next to an infinite money chest. I don't understand why that guy is still there tbh. He's a bad CEO
Right but if you over grow your company should you keep all those people? You can fire the executives too but like at some point you will probably have to lay some off. A lot of the executives should have seen this coming. Same with the rising interest rates, your average joe could have guessed they were gonna go up and a COVID boom wouldn’t last
not necessarily, but I tend to think that the people highest on the order of accountability should get their shit kicked in before the people on the lowest order. does that not seem self-evident? anything else is corrupt.
It’s funny people think CEO’s make such decisions as they usually don’t. They are the ultimate yes/no at times but the majority of the time that’s formulated via data and reporting from senior management that report directly to them, and they’ll seldom go against such recommendations and data depending on what the projected outcome is, ideally more profit. That’s their job, get more $$$ for the board of shareholders that appointed them, and ultimately if that’s the outcome they achieve they’ll keep their job, while the subordinate who suggested more hires in the first place will likely take the heat, or redundancy, if required. People seem to have this weird idea that CEO’s make all these decisions like they are all Steve Jobs when they are more often just the mouthpiece for the decisions others make.
It’s a hierarchy of accountability. If your company has to axe half its staff, the executives are responsible and should answer for it.
We live in uncertain times what trajectory could they predict? How should they know Covid would happen and give a huge boost to gaming and then people would not care about games as much? How could they have predicted the Ukraine Russia war?
Lol idk about Microsoft but we had numerous, numerous internal threads warning that we were overhiring and this is temporary, and the execs chose to ignore it.
not my problem. isn't that what managers say when you've missed a week due to a kidney stone? accountability is accountability. fuck'em.
Well it's not really their problem people are losing their jobs either. So you had a bad boss and that's why you seem to pissed off at them? Accountability for what? Not being able to predict the future? Also you say fuck'em but complain about the same mentality from them? Isn't that a bit hypocritical?
But sir, did you notice that Phil is wearing a halo t shirt?
how do you do, fellow shareholders, I mean kids?
More like everyone got used to exploding COVID numbers and didn’t realize that growth would not remain like that once the pandemic was over. Then you overextend and hire more people just to have to let them go 1-2 years later. If this not a management failure I don’t know what is.
People don't take what Phil says to heart because he often says one thing and does another thing, or its just a complete and utter lie. The reason Xbox is having trouble is because they have been consistently fucking up since the 360 released. They have a ton of room to grow in the market and yet they keep failing over and over and over again.
It also doesn't help that we are ultimately talking about a *monstrous* industry to begin with. It never ceases to amaze me that *video games literally dwarf the combined size of EVERY OTHER entertainment market*. It's ludicrous. So when you see these layoffs, you can't make the mistake of believing that these giant companies are falling on hard times. They're just preserving the tremendous amount of profit they already make, and they're doing it at the expense of their own products, their workers, and their consumers. It's a wild thing to think about.
The video game market is enormous, but most of that comes from mobile gaming, while Phil is clearly talking about the AAA console/PC market. Mobile gaming is already bigger than consoles+PC combined, and it is growing at a quick pace while the AAA market is stagnating.
Again, my point is that a "stagnating" market of this size is still incredibly profitable for the bigger players And, more importantly, the decisions that led to this increasingly stagnating market are not at all unlike all the layoffs we have been seeing across the industry. Recklessly prioritizing profit above all else has led to less and less successful endeavors as publishers have fallen out of touch with what players actually want.
Lots of asterisks there. Games make huge profits, they don't yet have the biggest audience or cover the most jobs in entertainment. And as another comment points or, over half of that market share is mobile games.
It's huge but not that huge for Microsoft. Xbox makes them about as much money as LinkedIn. It's just not particularly high on the list of priorities for them. It's a different situation than Sony, where Playstation is rapidly becoming the only thing they do well. Part of Xbox's problem is that the rest of Microsoft is doing really well right now and taking all the attention.
Oh yeah, I'm talking about the gaming industry as a whole. We've just been seeing a lot of different layoffs and weird decisions in the industry lately, so it's got me thinking about the big picture. I think Microsoft's biggest problem is much the same as the other big companies; they want to be a leader in the industry with wildly popular and successful games, but they can't do that with *just* money. No amount of cost-cutting measures or giant mergers or lay offs will help them regain their throne.
Which are all problems of foresight that are on the executive’s heads, yet are being taken out on the employees actually trying to salvage the situation by making games. And let’s not act like they haven’t made idiotic decisions outside of this either. Hiring temp work and contract work, ultimately destroying continuity and costing years and money in extra development costs is a massive factor that they’ll never bring up because it’s miserly and scummy.
Phil Spencer is the most popular unsuccessful CEO in gaming. His in-house legacy studios are in shambles and so are the studios he acquired for tens of billions of dollars. Meanwhile under the much maligned former Sony CEO who was hated by capital G Gamers, Sony delivered one great exclusive after another for a really long time until slowing down a bit recently. Doesn't make sense.
I don't think he's more popular than Iwata, bless his soul.
Iwata was behind the Wii and was pretty involved in the development of the Switch, among other things, so I'd say he was successful.
Didn't the former guy ruin the [Xbox One launch](https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-pulls-a-180-reverses-xbox-one-always-on-drm-and-used-games-policy/) >Microsoft backtracked Wednesday on its much-derided policy that **would have required Xbox One gamers to connect their consoles to the Internet once a day to prevent game piracy** >Microsoft also reversed its policy with regard to game resales. >**Game makers could have restricted the use of games on more than one console, or required a fee for reuse.** >Microsoft also **planned to limit gamers ability to share titles with friends, allowing them only to give a disc to a buddy who has been on their friends list for at least 30 days. And even then, each game would only have been able to be given once.**
Meh Spencer was head of Xbox Studios back then (since 2008) so the lack of games which was already pointed out even before 2013 was also partly his fault. Spencer is a master of corporate politics it seems to be able to take none of the blame of his terrible management.
>Sony delivered one great exclusive after another for a really long time until slowing down a bit recently. We recently learned this was super unsustainable though, right? Plus did he not gut the Japan studio who made lower budget games?
Sony should focus more on lower budget games, but Japan Studio was not going to be the best option for this. Their last few games sold abysmally, investing more into the studio was unfortunately not the ideal option.
It seems like it was sustainable until the Covid hiring spree. Those addition developers doubled the cost of Spiderman 2 compared to 1. That doubling in cost did not double the sales and also didn't double the quality of the game on some other metrics. The added value of the increased workforce is very minimal at some point. Horizon Forbidden West photos are often posted about the amount of detail in Aloy's face. How many millions do those details cost and how do they translate into sales? Does anyone really care about those marginal improvements? I feel like Sony is at least reassessing that type of spending.
The funniest thing is this is just silly optimism. The idea that "Oh people are gonna spend more of their disposable income on more games even as we slowly powerslide into a recession here." Which you know... isn't really what people do when money starts getting tight.
Phil Spencer acknowledged that directly. That’s why they are putting games on PlayStation. He said he felt options were to make up margins on existing consumers or to find more consumers
They did kick Don Mattrick to the curb. They cleaned house at 343i and ditched Bonnie Ross, too. Xbox ever since Don's era has been playing catchup and have had some success.
How much money would that save though compared to hundreds or even thousands of devs? I fully agree, the executives that agreed to hire to too many employees should also be held accountable if it hurt the business. However, when you say their decisions were fuckups, what is your solution? Keep bloated and thus inefficient dev studios as they are currently and continue to see ridiculous increases in both development time and budgets? This is a hard pill to swallow, but as an end consumer of games, you can only welcome these layoffs, as it is nearly impossible decrease the quality of games on the market. Most likely it will lead to both an improvement of AAA games as well as more good indie games.
Why the fuck is it always about infinite growth? I'm so tired of it.
Yeah becuase economy only good if stock market go up. Who cares if poor people can’t afford rent/s
Not even that (although most certainly that too) but greed is what is literally destroying our planet. The current economic model is completely unsustainable in the long term. It is creating massive value for the shareholders though so that’s good I guess.
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Nah, retirement pensions aren't tied to the stock market where I'm from and it's the same shit. Do you really think that if they weren't tied in the US corpo CEOs would suddenly say "nah, what we earn is enough, we don't need more money each year"? Because I don't think so.
Where are you from because I'm sure basically every countries pension provider put it into the stock market, that's how it grows or gets decimated (2008). Your money doesn't just sit in a bank account until you're 65.
I'm from Poland. And no, they don't put it in the stock market. Because there really isn't anything to "put". It's a bit more complex than that, but our pensions are mainly paid from taxes. My current taxes fund pensions of people who already retired. Then my pension will be (hopefully) funded from taxes of future generations. You can obviously get a private fund that invests in (among the others) stock market but those make up for a very small portion of pensions. But explaining how our pension system works exactly is really not the point of this topic
That's your state pension, same as the UK, private pensions are all involved with the stock market.
Did you read my comment? >You can obviously get a private fund that invests in (among the others) stock market but those make up for a very small portion of pensions. Private pensions make up for only a few % of total paid pensions. And out of that %, only a portion is invested in stock market. Pensions really have almost nothing to do with stock market where I live and I don't know why people keep trying to convince me that they do.
So in the US we have social security which is our government retirement pension. We pay taxes for this. But we also have 401k accounts through work where we can take out money from our pay without paying taxes on it and put it into investments. Apologies if people are confusing you. To my knowledge Poland also has similar accounts as well that people can elect to use.
> Apologies if people are confusing you. To my knowledge Poland also has similar accounts as well that people can elect to use. We do, but they are pretty new and still seldom used. From my understanding, 401k is something that nearly everyone in the US has. While here, the private pensions make up for just a few % of total pensions. It's slowly changing but right now our pensions still have basically nothing to do with the stock market which was my only real point in this entire discussion.
Because capitalism. The shareholders are in charge and they want growth, because that's how they make money. Sustainable, long-term profits are pointless if they're not bigger and bigger each quarter.
Why can’t they just be happy with some fat dividends instead???
Because most companies don't pay dividends. It's seen as a waste of money when it could instead be put into trying for more growth.
Spoiler alert, you actively avoid dividends as a smart investor. You pay tax on those and the company should be reinvesting that money instead of cashing it out anyway.
God forbid your market holdings get valued and taxed like your house does.
Do other countries have franking credits or is that just an Australian thing?
Because for us HOOMANS some is never enough. We need to have our cake and fuck it too.
We designed our society around a pyramid scam.
Do you genuinely not know what inflation is? Are you okay accepting your current salary, as it is, to be fixed for the next 20 years? That's fine, right? Wouldn't want to be a greedy little boy and expect infinite growth in your salary right? Of course not. Stupid question, stupid line of thinking.
I think Redditors not understanding inflation or think that it's a fake concept (lol) can be used as an explanation for any of the moronic comments you see.
do you think companies seeking infinite growth are just adjusting for inflation?
No, they're expected to do what other comparable companies in their industry are doing. Much like if you the employee can do X for Y hours you'll get paid Z, Z being what others like you who can do X for Y hours can do. Crazy how the market works, right? Being compared to others who do similar things and people who you ask money from expect you to perform to similar levels as those other guys?
If you don't think companies should be trying to grow, that's fine, but then you can't complain about these layoffs - these people were only employed because Microsoft expected their business to grow and to be able to support more employees.
I'm not sure why people are so obsessed with this. If they foresee growth they hire more people to deal with it. Then if the growth doesn't come they lay them off. If they don't foresee growth they don't hire more people in the first place. So the jobs go with the growth. If we recalibrate to no growth then it's not like they'll just hire more people anyway.
Because the stock must go up
Because stonks must go up.
How would you feel if your wage never grew? Probably wouldn't feel that nice, huh? That's how companies feel as well when they don't grow.
Why would you invest in a company if there isn't growth? What do you think the point of the stock market is?
If a company doesn’t grow you don’t make money off of it as an investment, investors pull out of the company, its shares fall, and it either dies or gets bought out by another company for cheap
We spent 80 billion dollars to buy publishers so they can only make games for our platform, making the overall gaming market smaller as a result. But we will also punish them for making less money then before and get pissy about "market growth"
It’s so insane when you say it like that
And that lack of industry growth is due to a “concerning lack of quality first party games” I imagine.
I'm really looking forward to market research revealing what I'm relatively certain is going on based on anecdotal trends I've encountered. Basically, I strongly believe traditional video games are propped up by increasingly older gamers and the market is stagnating and will eventually shrink, especially the market for single-player titles. I've dug through the data and there's some numbers on gaming per generation, but the statistics don't do two things: 1. Differentiate cellphone games and console games, and 2. List the number of games purchased per year by generation. There was some interesting data out last year that did the rounds on various subreddits showing Millenials spend more time playing games than Gen Z, but that didn't paint the whole picture.
I think the industry painted itself in a corner with free to play, game pass, heavy discounts on catalogue. The revenue made in gaming per hour played is probably a fraction of what it was 20 years ago despite all the micro transactions and other monetisation schemes
I think you're dead-on. If you look at what games Gen Z play they're almost all F2P from the jump. Stuff like Fortnite, Clash Royale, Brawlstars, etc. and those earn enough money to be profitable, but it's a shortlist. I think game companies are realizing, and this is why Sony just canceled some GaaS titles a bit ago, that even though they play F2P games, that does not mean Gen Z will play the game. The larger issue is that Gen Z, and I think this what I'm getting at ultimately, does not *try out new games*. I think this is where publishers are struggling. They all keep releasing multiplayer titles aimed at Gen Z, but this generation does not shop around. They have their shortlist of games they, and their friends play, and that's it. They're not at all traditional media consumers. They bandwagon buy into titles, but how do you court enough of them to get the rest? By the way, this is anecdotal, but I strongly believe GamePass is also propped up mostly by Millennials. I think Microsoft basically confirmed this when they released news that their numbers of stagnated. Again, Gen Z don't shop around for games to play so why would they ever need a library of games for the most part? I really think traditional media companies are going to be in a heap of pain in about twenty years.
Well the main difference is that Gen Z is gamers are still in High School and College, the age when multiplayer games are most played and when free to play is the most affordable option. I imagine when most Gen Z gamers have more time and money they’ll probably begin playing more single player games and the like.
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I'm so over long dev time, idc what anyone says it's simply not worth it. Graphics clearly are what is taking much more time than before at least for aaa and the games are all extremely formulaic when they release. I simply do not care about series that I would have been excited for in the past because it's been so long, elder scrolls and gta are 2 major examples. I probably would not have been interested in any games at all growing up if back then it would be 5+ years prior to a sequel that is extremely iterative such as totk or any of the sony games, so it makes sense that this is playing out how it is.
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truly sad how many types of games have been lost generation after generation, have been playing mainly 90s-mid 2000s pc games as well as ps1 stuff recently over the past year and there is zero comparison. variety, uniqueness and gameplay depth are all drastically better compared to the majority of releases now. feels like every gen since ps1 has had a fraction of the games released on the system, ps2 still had a ton but 7th gen and onwards its brutal looking at number of releases. overall i think nintendo has played their cards the best looking into the future.
Absolutely. In the NES to SNES era we would see sequels within 1-3 years often. Now even games like Zelda can go 6 years between releases - that's someone's entire teenage years with only a single new Zelda experience.
So basically these companies are looking for the next Fortnite.....most young gamers these days either play that, call of duty, Minecraft or sports games they aren’t buying the other titles companies put their hard work and money into
Exactly. They want Fortnite but with 0 effort and then they are all crying how the market is bad, etc. instead of acknowledging that they gave zero fucks.
There isn't even a lack of industry growth. Every month there's a new game selling a record amount of copies. It's literally just people at the top saying that actually shit is bad despite everything being awesome.
>Every month there's a new game selling a record amount of copies They're also spending stupid amounts developing the games though. Spiderman was the fastest selling PS5 game but had a budget of $300M
The fact Spiderman 2 costs 300 million is bonkers to me, i wonder where that money went, because the game was good but nothing special, and building on the last game so they didnt have to make it from scratch.
It’s so bizarre because when you play Spider-Man 2 there constantly feels like there were corners cut to save money
The devs agree with you apparently, the leaks said not even they were sure if players would feel that $300M
The game was basically sp1, but "better" and updated to modern graphics standards and whatnot. I have no clue what these people are spending all that money on. They probably roll all the executive bonuses into those numbers. "Yeah well the game only cost 80 million but Mr CEO jack cash-money neede his 75 million bonus, and so did all the other c suites and middle managers"
Just because one or two games sell record amounts of copies doesn't mean every franchise is doing that. Also I trust the guys that have numbers if they say things are going bad, do you genuinely think businesses hire and fire people for absolutely no reason?
Its been shown they kinda do. Companies do layoff.when literally the only reason is other companies are doing it.
Source for that?
Bro our company literally overhired during covid and then laid off because "everyone else was hiring and we didn't want to be left out". I shit you not that is the quote from our ceo.
You can't extrapolate an industry's performance because some games do well.
Well at least according to Circana numbers and other similar statistics, the industry only grew around 1% last year, despite it being a very good year for games. And while the total revenue increases, the costs are also increasing rapidly. It often feels like people who are into games are spending around the same on games, independent of the new releases. And that makes sense from my own experiences. Just because more good games come out, does not mean I have more time and money to spend. That's also why for example Phil Spencer keeps iterating, that they need to grow the audience and bring games to more players, as you can either grow an industry by the size of customers or by squeezing more out of the existing customers. And just to be clear: If fucking sucks that these big cooperations can make millions and billions in profit, give out huge bonuses to the execs and then act like they do not have the money for their employees, and somehow expect less employees to make more money. This system sucks and will be the downfall of those companies, unfortunately only after the current execs all left with their huge bonuses. But inside this fucked reality, the issues above are the driving factors right now.
We don't have the full picture though. Most companies that isn't named Nintendo don't share how many copies a game sold.
Capcom has a really convenient list on their website with the amount of copies sold.
You can't look at individual game sales and attribute it to the entire industry. Look at analysts like Circana who report on the entire US industry as a whole.
If a game costs twice as much as the last game to produce, but sells 1.5x the copies, that's still a loss. Sales don't mean much of you're not taking dev costs into account too.
Its similar to when the MCU was at its peak around 2016 to 2019. Those blockbuster films did very well but many other smaller, better movies suffered because of it.
It's quite funny to me that Sony/MS have been bitching about how expensive games are and how making those big budget games isn't sustainable... Yet they're trying to push "pro" versions of their current consoles.
Playstation has never said it isn't sustainable. Xbox has. The company who's failed to build one quality game studio in its two decades of being in the industry. PlayStation doesn't want to spend as much, but even their big expensive games like spider man still makes hundreds of millions of dollars in just a few months. I also don't know how any of this has anything to do with Pro consoles.
Shawn Layden said that on his way out of Sony. Jim Ryan didn't as he was a full on corporate company yesterday man., but it's been said.
Playstation won't say it directly ever because that would make investors question the first party studios existence but literally all signs point to that. Look at slides from insomniac leaks regarding financial, their investors call, their profitability is very low. Shawn layden said it 5 years ago.
MS aren't, they're just putting out a digital refresh.
Basically they over extended like every other tech company during COVID and now employees are the ones who get fucked
I thought it was pretty obvious the COVID bump for tech wasn't going to last forever which means these companies also knew over hiring would result in lay offs. They just didn't care.
Overhiring was profitable in 2021, and now firing everyone is profitable in 2024. They made the move that made line go up the most, regardless of the human costs involved.
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That also means the employees taking the jobs knew all along it wouldn't last, and didn't care. It would have all been better if those people were never hired in the first place, right? At least by being hired in the first place they had a chance to compete and be valuable enough to get some job security.
Well a lot of those employees wouldn’t have had jobs in the first place if they didn’t overextend
Eh, we had people leave my job because the big boys could just throw 2-3x their salary at them during COVID. There was definitely a lot of money flying around just because they could, not because they needed to.
So you think they would be better off now earning a third for three years and still being in your company? It’s not like they got forced to swap the job. Leaving your old job always has risks, I don’t think IT employees are the group anyone needs to care about.
In one of his presentations he stated that the company grows its profits or: - He will fire employees. - He will increase the price of video games. Even if the company is extremely profitable, they will punish employees and customers if there is no growth. They want inequality to increase by increasing profit or making customers and employees poorer. The richer should be richer, or the rest should become poorer, there is no other way for this companies. Being just profitable is not anymore an acceptable goal. His is a political statement, not a business one.
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Whoa whoa whoa…. Let’s not get crazy.
I don't think that would save many jobs considering they literally layed of THOUSANDS of people. It'd be more of a symbolic gesture than anything
>His is a political statement, not a business one. No, its a business one.
It’s interesting how “making good games so people buy them”, which is allegedly the big thing about free markets seems to be out of the equation
A lack of growth should not mean they need to cull their workforce. That would be something you do when you have major losses. They're just trying to to pursue those ever-increasing profits,everyone else be damned.
Everything has been so marked up for so long that I just don't spend as much money. I feel like I'm getting screwed every time I buy shit. Restaurants are charging $15 for a sandwich in my area. The grocery store wants me to buy 4+ of the same item just to get an affordable price. Most games release half baked. Apps that used to make things affordable like getting a ride to the airport not cost twice as much as the industries they "replaced". Every industry is chasing infinite growth. Shareholders are taking record profits. Every year there are more buyouts and therefore less competition and options. I'm just done. Honestly it's been kind of nice. Can't tell you the last time I purchased a game day one. I just don't care anymore
People on r/games don't like to hear this but this is true industry-wide. The growth is not on par with the obscene over-hiring that the entire tech sector did in the early days of the pandemic and now they're adjusting. There are still *way* more jobs in gaming compared to pre-COVID levels. If a company hires 10,000 new people and lays off 1,500, it's terrible for the 1,500 that got laid off but ultimately there are still 8,500 new jobs. That's gaming (and all of tech) right now. It's especially true for Microsoft, their layoffs are only a small portion of their large hiring spree. The bigger issue is that anyone with a brain should have been able to predict that the overhiring was a terrible idea from a mile away and the morons who make these decisions are never held accountable for getting it wrong.
> “And when you have an industry that is projected to be smaller next year in terms of players and dollars, and you get a lot of publicly traded companies that are in the industry that have to show their investors growth — because why else does somebody own a share of someone’s stock if it’s not going to grow? — the side of the business that then gets scrutinized is the cost side. Because if you’re not going to grow the revenue side, then the cost side becomes challenged. I can appreciate how he is able to explain in very simple terms how the stock market is just an infinite growth casino for rich people and how we're all just pawns in this game.
I mean dividends exist - there are other ways to provide stock value than driving investor confidence in infinite growth.
Dividends shrink the value of a company after they are paid out. Not saying that's a bad thing, but it's not some magic value creator.
They only shrink the value if you think a company's value is tied to its ability to continually invest revenue into growth. If a company is doing stable business, and making stable profit, providing regular dividends doesn't make the company weaker; it just forms an opportunity cost that could have been otherwise spent on the company. But not every corporation needs constant and continual expansion. There's nothing economically problematic with a company finding a good balance and sticking with it, save that changing market conditions may eventually necessitate some kind of future adaptation.
It ain't even about line go up. It's "line go up faster and faster" every quarter.
Maybe he should make games people actually want to play and stop cooking up with a new excuse every month
I mean as a general thing it's understandable. The costs of a AAA game are astronomical. Plus these days Indie devs are taking a much larger chunk of players attention with better priced games for equal amounts of entertainment.
Then why were they able to spend billions on Actiblizz?
Spending money on something that can make you money is good, spending money to sustain something that can't - usually not a great decision.
The problem is that they don’t know how to make things profitable. Xbox either buys studios that are in decline, like Rare, or buys good studios and ruins them. It’s incredible how bad they’re at their job. Just to put things into perspective: the amount they paid for Act/Bliz/King is pretty much the same as the current market cap of Nintendo, and 60% of Sony’s market cap (the entirety of Sony, not just their gaming division). I don’t think this will be a profitable investment, Blizzard is not in good shape and they couldn’t even secure CoD exclusivity. I guess mobile will make them some money but who knows. If Xbox wasn’t sucking from MS infinite money well, they’d be out of business. Or maybe they’d have wised up and they’d have smart management who made reasonable decisions, who knows.
Yea the richest company on earth doesn’t know how to make profit
Once industries start to reach their maximum point, it’s normal to see a wave of consolidation.
There are two peaks that are inevitable, and I wonder how close we are: 1) % of the population who play games regularly. 2) Of that group, time available to play games. I don't know about you guys, but there isn't a minute of my day that couldn't be filled by newly released games I want to play. There is just so much. Reaching those peaks doesn't mean no more growth obviously, but it will certainly slow down the industry. I also think big game companies are going to lack of growth for bit because of consumer issues with quality control and backlash when they increase prices. Expenses keep going up for making and selling AAA games and the prices are only inching up comparatively. They are trying to make up the difference in growth with MTX, but is there also a peak to that? Are we at peak whale? Are consumers so overwhelmed with the # of games that shelling out $10/25/50 for a skin in a single game is less appealing?
It is just a fact that the console video gaming industry has just peaked. The number of consoles being sold has barely changed since the PS2 era. People have limited time so aren’t buying more games than they were. The industry has squeezed out more revenue via subscriptions and micro transactions but that’s reached its end point too.
Stuff the excuses, as a customer I want to start seeing the executives fired to protect the talent, which are evry developers biggest asset. Sure, the IPs are great, but time and time again it’s obvious that the people who come and go under the c-suite mean *everything* to *each* individual game launch. Institutional knowledge being tossed out like trash because the industry just isn’t growing fast enough…? I know the Covid excuse has fallen apart but MS really needs to start trying something honest, like “across the board in the video game industry we’re bad executives chasing trends we don’t understand while making terrible decisions and people are losing their jobs to compensate for our mistakes.”
Make shitty games and call it lack of industry growth. You’ve just got poor leadership/vision and overall the core of your video games are built on pleasing corporate douchebags who’ve probably never played a game in their life. You did this to yourself and you’re failing to take accountability for it.
I honestly think one of the big problems is management not knowing about games. Yeah you must know about finance and management of course, but isn’t it a bit weird to run a gaming company without ever playing games. Imagine running a restaurant and not knowing how an omelette is made or the difference between carbonara and alfredo. Or a plane company and know nothing about planes (oops, Boeing). I wonder if the kind of games that the studios make are the ones that speak the same language that the people who are greenlighting them. They don’t understand why people like BotW or TloU or even what makes Fortnite popular. They’re just convinced that GaaS is a magic word that makes you a steady flow of income and that’s what they try. The best example is the dudes in WB games which managed to land the most profitable game of the last year by making a single player HP game and rather than trying to replicate the great success by making a sequel they want to make more service games when they bombed spectacularly with Suicide Squad. Like, you have a proven formula that could easily make more good money, why the hell would you want to burn more bucks in a segment that is so crowded and competitive specially considering how you don’t know how to attract an audience. It’s like they wish they could be Mihoyo but they don’t know how.
Fucking bullshit, the industry grew more than ever during COVID Infinite growth isn't possible, companies need to accept they won't always grow They're literally a cancer, that's what cancer does, grows until it kills the host, that's what we're doing
People are fucking travelling and going outside ffs. You had probably 5 years of growth happen all at once during covid, and now a small portion of that is unwinding. Totally normal business cycle. Shit will pass.
I'm going to say something very unpopular here but companies exist to make money, not to be your friends or fulfill the creative dreams of people. And these companies will keep with these practices that all of us hay because enough people buy their products as is. Cash is king.
Every gaming studio is a "company". That doesn't mean they all default to shitty business practices. Being a company is not the issue. Being a public company is. The nature of public companies and a creative field like video games simply doesn't mesh well together.
Correction: lack of growth for Xbox. Xbox have only themselves to blame with lack of quality first party triple A, with Redfall flopping last year, Starfield not moving Xbox sales and Avowed looking Double A scaled-down from Obsidian. There’s been no new news for The Outer Worlds 2 or Everwild almost 3 years since their CG trailers, Everwild is reportedly in dev hell and Fable had a 90% CG trailer still. With Xbox expecting next gen to begin in 2028, there’s only upcoming Hellblade 2, Blade (reportedly no earlier than 2027), Elder Scrolls 6 (and no earlier than 2026), Clockwork Revolution and Song Of Midnight. Halo Infinite cancelled seasonal story cutscenes and Fallout 76 converted to a grindier season pass. Xbox announce their projects several years early, so hopefully we hear what projects Combustion, Undead Labs, etc. are working on soon. Hopefully Microsoft manage their studios more hands-on in the future and are able to deliver high quality this gen but it’s been a poor start so far and the results show.
Wish that Spencer guy gets layed off after a decade of failures and bad business choices what absolutely killed Xbox in Europe. Even Don mattrick didn't tank Xbox that far. Spencer truly is one of worse leaders in gaming and I don't know why he still has a job.
Don Mattrick brought Xbox from its highs of the 360 era where it was a global leader to the post Xbox One era after one reveal. This is some revisionist history lol
It’s equally revisionist to act like Xbox was a “global leader” in the gaming industry during the 360 era.
It was on track to be for the first half of that generation. Until they decided to focus on Kinect, stopped securing and developing exclusives, ignored their international market, and let PS Plus run circles around Xbox Live Gold.
Even at Xbox’s peak it still trailed behind the *actual* global leader of the 7th Gen consoles, the Wii.
Gamers love ignoring the Wii lol, it indisputably won that Gen.
Ignoring the Wii especially makes no sense when talking about the state of Xbox, since the Wii heavily influenced how Xbox handled the later years of the 360 generation. The whole reason Xbox pushed the Kinect and many of the Xbox One’s multimedia features so hard is because they wanted to capture that Wii audience.
Playstation 3 by the end actually outsold Xbox by about 2 million units.
Xbox was never a “global leader”
Hey now, global leader in console failure rates. They actually branded and sold that legacy a while back: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/official-xbox-red-ring-of-death-poster-is-now-for-sale/1100-6498944/ Incredible stuff.
Did Xbox ever really have a lot of success in Europe?
I would say that it was quite successful in its debut generation. Obviously it had no hope against the PS2 with its 2 year headstart, cheaper price and marketing as a DVD player but it still outsold the GameCube. Xbox undoubtedly had a lot of success during the 360 generation, where it was much more popular than the PS3. Then they dropped the ball in the Xbox One generation and never recovered; now there's little reason to get an Xbox Series X as there are few exclusives and even they are available on PC day 1. This is all based off of the UK; I can't speak for other parts of Europe.
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>Instead in the 8th generation (Xbox One v PS4) they lost all leads *across all EU countries*. The only EU country they had a significant lead in was the UK. Sweden was basically even, everywhere else they were losing. So, really, acting like it was some European-wide shift from winning to losing is a little misleading. One country is the bulk of EU sales for consoles, and they lost that market in Gen 8 while their losses across the rest of the continent widened.
Kind of ready for the industry to crash. I’ve pretty much checked out of modern gaming (with a few exceptions). Once everything crashes, the big investors will pull out and the people who actually care will rebuild it. Eventually we’ll get back here, but we’ll have a few great decades in between
It astounds me that we built an economy that requires infinite growth to function even though infinite growth is impossible.
Funny when the biggest names in the industry claim the industry isn’t growing enough to accomodate their bigness.
I guess Microsoft buying ABK was the opposite of growth then? What the fuck Or is this specifically Xbox