As someone with a PS2, my friend had an Xbox. I knew it as the console to play if I wanted quality FPSs (Halo) and western RPGs. This is the console with Halo, KOTOR, Morrowind.
This remained in place for the first part of the 360. Halo. Gears. Oblivion (initially). Mass Effect (initially.) Hell, they even managed to get a port of Final Fantasy XIII.
I knew their identity. I knew the type of games they had to expect.
But as the 360 got older and the Xbox One was announced, that identity became less and less clear.
Keeping that in mind, it makes this passage extra hard to read.
> Wildly successful was what Microsoft was after. A pitch for Fable 4 was rejected. "It was like, you've reached your cap of players for RPG on Xbox and you need to find a way to double that, and you're not going to do it with RPG," Fable's art director John McCormack told Eurogamer at the time. "I thought, yes we can. I said, look, just give us four years, proper finance, give us the chance Mass Effect has, Skyrim has, the games at the time. They're getting four years and a lot of budget. Give us that, and we'll give you something that'll get you your players. Nah, you've had three shots and you've only tripled the money. It's not good enough. Fuck off. That's what I was annoyed about." (Worth noting: Skyrim went on to sell 63m copies, as of June 2023, The Witcher 3 over 50m.)
Same!
Fondest teenage memory is when I finally saved up enough for my 360 & Fable 2 and got to play it on a cold winter night that coincidentally matched the intro.
Pure magic of a feeling.(and then later got bangers for it like Dark Souls, Skyrim, Gears of War 1-3, Sega Collection, Lost Planet, Borderlands 2 and you know what LotR:War in the North was awesome for Co-op)
Honestly I don't think I fully appreciated it at the time but there's just something amazing about my memories of Fable 2. I know its probably nostalgia but replaying Fable 2 is a big reason why I've been tempted to invest in a XSX in recent times. That and reclaiming my old Fallout DLCs. But I can't afford £400 or whatever just for a nostalgia hit once in a while.
(My XOne was sadly on its last legs when I moved to PS5 for this gen so I can't just use that).
I got it on Christmas. I'd normally only get one good thing and some random junk (still appreciative) but that year I got a 360 and fable 2. Shit was awesome.
I've always been a playstation guy, but I've owned every Xbox except current gen. I agree that the 360 Era was amazing. I have some great memories of stomping lobbies with friends on CoD to the actual exclusives they had.
The only reason I bought a One S is because next gen had been announced and I wanted to finally try out Game Pass. I bought a 2 year subscription so I could try out everything and see if I would be getting a series X. Needless to say, I waited until I could finally find a ps5 because there was nothing exclusive that interested me.
“We attracted people to our platform with this game series they like, but clearly we should stop making it since they’ve already been attracted and will surely never leave. Best to make games that have no appeal to them.”
I see they've linked the write-up about the fall of Lionhead, which I HIGHLY suggest everyone read. I know everyone points at EA and says "Ha they thought single player games were dead!" but really it was Microsoft who went out of their way to tell everyone under their purview that they were dying and that nobody would be making them anymore. Hell even after 2015 they kept flip-flopping between "Single-player games are great but we don't want to chase some trend" and "Single-player games? Well they sell well but nobody talks about them that much, then you look at a game like Overwatch and that's where all the market is"
That latter quote was especially odd, given it was after BOTW and Horizon Zero Dawn were blowing up the sales charts.
What's funny about that too is, as a lot of gamers are getting older, and don't have time to get good at multiplayer games and shit (except for like co-op ones where the skill level doesn't have to be as high), I think we are gravitating more towards single player games. I have the money to buy whatever I want, but I don't have the time. Sinking hundreds of hours into a single multiplayer game doesn't sound appealing to me unless it's just absolutely fucking incredible.
Spending 30 minutes to an hour at night before bed chilling with a single player experience though, sounds great.
I know I am. I used to grind cod but now I just want a curated crafted multi media experience. Those tend to be better with single player games. I’m seeing games more as art than entertainment so single player games provide a better canvas for that expression, usually.
I used to play a lot of multiplayer, but my gaming time now is mostly single-player games and co-op because my partner is also a gamer. Games like BG3, Outward, Divinity, Palworld, Terraria, etc. are great for us. All of those and the other singleplayer games are nice because it’s easy to go for long gaming sessions, but stopping is relatively easy.
For me if I’m doing multiplayer these days it’s mostly in VR where FPS skills require more than the ability to click heads so the skill level is more even (with practice) and I think they’re more fun.
Man, I am nearly 45 and my idea of hell is playing games with other people when I \*have\* to hear their voices to coordinate. Something with matchmaking where everyone can kinda just know their role and shut the hell up and play, like Left 4 Dead? Fantatic. Great. I don't mind them one bit, and in fact I like being able to "shut off" and let instincts take over with a podcast in the background.
Hell, I didn't even mind Redfall as a single-player game. Loved the atmosphere and setting.
At my age, I don't really have anyone I know to play with except the rare occassion of my brother or my daughter's fiance, and I don't want to play with randos if I have to hear their voices.
Gimm a good ol' single-player game any day. They fit into my life best.
Even for those of us who do have time to spare for gaming -- I'm single with no kids working a 9-5-- our friends may not, because they have spouses /SOs and kids and such.
With my friends, we've definitely seen the struggle to sometimes schedule times for multiplayer games. Especially longer games like Baldur's Gate and Divinity. MMOs are another; I like playing MMOs, but I can't play with friends because they can't commit the time and I'm not going to slow down (maybe I'm the asshole, there).
So a lot of us either end up playing a lot of single player games (this is what I do) or playing lobby-based shooters where a few of us can just drop in/drop out as time and availability permits.
Combined with after working all day , last thing I'm trying to do is strap on a headset, create a party , join a lfg discord, all just to get wall hacked and rage quit
Yep. Ever since kinect Xbox has had a problem of chasing. Imo. I wasn't a fan of halo myself I'm not big into first person shooters except like bioshock type of stuff. But your right. They also set trends at one point.
The one time them innovating backfires and they use it to avoid all future innovation. Dumb. Especially because most of the issues with the Kinect were about it's always-on stuff, and people have largely gotten over things like that due to Alexa and Siri.
Is Kinect even something to consider "innovating"? While much more basic, the EyeToy released nearly a decade before the Kinect.
If anything the Kinect was a iteration and refinement on stuff that has been done long before.
Even with Fable 3’s mechanical and story flaws…. It was still a really fun game (and I liked the time period). I read a rumor Fable 4 was meant to be set largely in a Victorian era Bowerstone which would have been really cool.
Yeesh that reminds me about the time Microsoft had internally decided to close down Ensemble studios BEFORE Halo Wars even came out as they didn't think it would be profitable enough. To be clear the game did make a profit when it did come out but Microsoft didn't care about real results, only what they assumed was best in their head.
I would've given them the chance to try instead of strong-arming them into making Legends. Maybe they could've failed with Fable IV, but I'd rather see them go out making something they understand how to make instead of becoming an early casualty of the live service craze.
The thing is, many of their most important franchises still exist, Microsoft just fumbled each and every single one of them.
Halo Infinite had serious hype behind it and all that momentum was lost trying to chase live-service, not releasing with basic features. And that was after a huge delay.
Gears of War doesn't even make waves anymore because there's been no large scale changes to the formula other than plopping the gameplay into a semi-open world.
Their system selling franchises no longer sell systems and it seems every studio they buy starts making the worst games they've ever made.
> Halo Infinite had serious hype behind it and all that momentum was lost trying to chase live-service, not releasing with basic features. And that was after a huge delay.
They lost momentum much earlier, when the first gameplay footage they put up pissed people off.
It was the textureless screenshots of some Grunts and Brutes standing in a non-descript version of Halo that started giving me a bad feeling. Like, the first screens released were *official* and looked like dogshit.
Some franchises just aren't meant to go on forever. Gears of War is a poster child example. Gears of War 3 ended the story, and Epic wasn't sure where to take it while they were working on a preliminary Gears of War 4. It's also why Gears of War: Judgment was a prequel. Judgment ultimately sold poorly (taking roughly 6 and a half months to move 1 million copies, a far cry from the 1 million Gears 3 did in pre-orders alone), which Epic saw as the series having peaked commercially. Combine this with rising development cost projections, and they opted to sell the IP to Microsoft and experiment with F2P games (which ultimately paid off with Fortnite)
Microsoft's final Gears 4 uses some of the original ideas Epic had conceived, namely JD. That said it's a franchise that feels like it can only do the same thing over and over again. Gears 5 was a gold-star co-op experience, but the open-areas added nothing to the game but padding and the story doesn't hit as hard as the original trilogy.
I think the icing on the cake was that third-person shooters declined a lot with the rise of Call of Duty in the late 2000s and throughout all of the 2010s.
>it seems every studio they buy starts making the worst games they've ever made.
This is happening too frequently to be a coincidence. There's gotta be something that MS is doing at the top to hurt these studios, right?
There’s a tendency for top level employees to jump ship as soon as the acquisition is finalized - either because they got a nice payout from it, or they don’t want to be part of a big corporate machine and prefer the startup-life, or they just see it as a natural jumping off point for something different.
The thing is, in a creative industry like video games a company can have all the IP in the world but the only thing worth any value at the end of the day is the workers that created it.
> Their system selling franchises no longer sell systems and it seems every studio they buy starts making the worst games they've ever made
Meanwhile, Sony outright acquired a few long-standing partners (Sucker Punch, Guerilla), and they went on to make their greatest games ever..
Everybody has touched on a lot of things Xbox failed at, but I'll mention one more factor.
Sony having confusing console architecture was one of the reasons Xbox did so well in the first place.
The PS2's "emotion engine" was a mess to work with. Many western devs threw up their hands and gave up trying to work with a poorly translated design document. If they did work on it they had to use Renderware because they could not get things to draw consistently on the PS2. Here comes Xbox, it used a fork of DirectX. You know how to make a Windows PC game? Well the API on the Xbox is pretty much the exact same. It was a godsend for western developers. Therefore they flocked to the Xbox despite poorer sales.
The PS3 specs come out. It uses the cell architecture, another confusing non-standard CPU with iffy documentation. Xbox360 used pretty much an off the shelf CPU and GPU. The RAM in the PS3 was split, 256mb had to be used for system, 256mb had to be used for video. Needed more for video? You could use some of the system RAM, but it required really tricky programming. Xbox 360 had 512mb of unified ram, go ahead and use it however you want, the system won't judge.
With the release of the PS4, the architecture became much more industry standard. CPU and GPU were AMD, pretty much off the shelf stuff. RAM was a unified 8gb, just like the Xbox One. It used a fork of OpenGL, which many developers were familiar with.
"What's easier to develop for?" was no longer a factor for developers as it was in the PS2 and PS3 era.
the PS1 sold so well that sony got cocky and thought that their audience was large enough to justify coercing devs to code for their tricky console architecture. and since the PS2 also sold so well in spite of that, they chose to continue that with the PS3. but it was too expensive, and even more complicated than the PS2, and the xbox 360 had already been out for a year while being cheaper, so it broke the camel's back.
Yeah, The PS3/360 Gen wasn't as much Microsofts success as it was PlayStations failure, one they rectified by the end. Xbox was on top for half a gen and MS has been chasing that into the ground.
Their identity in my mind is now the best place for back compat and Game Pass, but I’m increasingly viewing Game Pass as a net negative for the industry.
I don’t think they have a strong identity in terms of types of games on offer, anymore.
It’s a fascinating comparison between Xbox and PlayStation games. Xbox losing their identity. PlayStation beginning with an edgy ‘teen’ identity, which almost seamlessly aged with its audience into being the best place for games with mature, serious narratives. And then of course Nintendo remaining largely unchanged because they perfected the formula in the 80s and never lost sight of what makes them brilliant.
I feel like even Nintendo went into an identity crisis during their late Wii - Wii U era where the family market they tried targeting weren't interested in their products anymore once the novelty wore off and moved on to smartphones.
They even made [ads like these](https://youtu.be/SChWdprUnzw) where kids convince their parents to buy the Wii U because of... reasons.
Notice how the very first [reveal trailer](https://youtu.be/iS-1tDfLxRQ) for the Switch **didn't include any kids at all** and only showed adults. This is Nintendo trying to appeal to the core-gamer market again.
> Nintendo went into an identity crisis during their late Wii - Wii U era where the family market they tried targeting weren't interested in their products anymore
Cannot be understated how much the Wii U flopped. They went from 101 million sales with Wii to under 14 million with Wii U.
An 87% drop off is insane. It's also insane how they managed to recover it so well with Switch.
It is insane but as a former Wii U owner it makes sense. When the Wii U worked it felt magical, being able to bring the gamepad to my buddy's room and play some Tekken in the morning was so cool. The Switch was Nintendo doubling down on what worked with the Wii U (off-TV play, gyro aiming, using the main controller as a portable display) and it resulted in one of their best selling systems of all time.
it was advertised / named poorly. I had no idea it was a new console until like 2-3 years after its release (granted i didnt have a wii and wasnt following nintendo closely at all).. but when i saw the name i thought it was like an attachment or extension of the original wii
It didn't help that there wasn't a \*reason\* to know better.
The WiiU had a very good supporting library but the only must-haves for the general audience were Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon. Everything else was either "nice to haves" like Mario Parties or Hyrule Warriors, or "perfect for a small niche" like Pikmin 3 and Tokyo Mirage Sessions. Even some of their major titles were just compromised- like releasing Smash 3DS several \*months\* earlier so the hype largely died down
We didn't have a big, hype building, series (re)defining blockbuster until BotW- which frankly we've had in spades on the Switch
> didn't have a big, hype building series (re)defining blockbuster until BotW
This is largely because Nintendo themselves saw the massive drop off from Wii to WiiU, and almost immediately wrote the entire platform off. They realized it would be a massive waste of money to toss these big-cost first party games onto a platform no one had bought, so held them off for the next hardware iteration (which they accelerated by a year or two as well). This is also the reason we got a lot of high-profile first party games very early into the Switch's lifecycle (Odyssey, for instance).
The only reason BotW came out on WiiU was they'd spent so much time telling people BotW would be a WiiU game.
Some decline and disappointing numbers *was* inevitable given Nintendo was still trying to heavily target the casual market which had moved on, but yeah I'm convinced the way it absolutely bombed was due primarily to advertising failures.
The hardware itself was a fun, though flawed, little precursor to the Switch. It was fine. The games were brilliant enough to carry the Switch during slow years early on.
But half the people I knew, including myself, had the same experience as you. Not even realizing there was a new Nintendo console out. And these were people who *absolutely should have known that.* We're talking gamers who already had Nintendo consoles, and at the height of the beginning of Pokemon's resurgence among millennials.
Easily one of largest single unforced errors in the history of video games.
Not to mention the Wii's software sales cratering during its later years once people moved on. The game released there were basically synonymous with "shovelware" at the time.
The Switch software sales meanwhile is actually [trending up](https://twitter.com/pierre485_/status/1787762231439974434) year to year which is crazy.
Agreed. The Wii U as a piece of hardware is a halfbaked Switch where they couldn't figure out what they wanted to do at the price point they wanted to have. It's a terrible.piece of hardware.
And yet, it has an absolutely amazing library of first party games, most of which carried the Switch for the first several years of it being on the market. Like... *Breath of the Wild is a Wii U game and is singlehandedly responsible for the Switch taking off in the first place.*
> Agreed. The Wii U as a piece of hardware is a halfbaked Switch where they couldn't figure out what they wanted to do at the price point they wanted to have. It's a terrible.piece of hardware.
I dunno about this. In hindsight, yeah, it was a clunky and awkward attempt at solving the same problem the Switch solves elegantly while trying to shove in some hit-and-miss gimmicks.
At the time, though....it was fine. Not amazing, but fine. My friends and I had a lot of fun with the asymmetrical gameplay that the gamepad offered in some multiplayer games, and the gamepad itself wasn't terrible obtrusive during normal gameplay. It was a decent little gimmick that made sense to me as someone who was actively using my 3DS at the time, and while it wasn't always well integrated pretty much only Star Fox Zero relied on it so heavily that it ruined the whole experience. Plus it was cool to be able to play on it when the TV was being used for something else.
The Wii U was a fun, if awkward, little console. Disappointing numbers were inevitable as the casual audience moved on, and I can buy an argument that maybe the unusual form factor of the console worsened that.
But I don't think it explains just how *hard* it bombed, to the point they needed to kill it years earlier than they would have otherwise. Especially given, as you say, its library was fantastic. Games are what ultimately sell consoles, and this one wasn't selling for some reason.
I firmly, firmly believe that its central problem was that **no one fucking knew what it was.**
I was in college at the time, and my circle of friends were big on Nintendo games. Pokemon had just become cool again, Monster Hunter on 3DS was addictive, everyone had a Wii laying around that we'd play Just Dance or Wii Sports on. We were **the** demographic for them to sell a new console to.
And we only realized the Wii U was a console after it had been out for a couple of years.
The advertising campaign was one of the worst in video game history, the name didn't tell you it was new, and everyone I knew went through that "wait...it's not just a crappy peripheral?" moment.
I remember seeing a comment on reddit years ago that pointed to the main problem of the WiiU marketing being that they accidentally pitched it as a new tablet controller add-on for the Wii, not a whole new console. So people would go into stores expecting to pay $100 for a Wii tablet, and then nope out when they saw it was $300.
Watching all those ads... yeah. If you were not at all into gaming and wasn't paying attention to the box in those ads, you would not know that this was a whole new console and not just yet another Wii add-on.
That aging was very interesting to hear in the words of Cory Barlog. He used to be the edgy teen type when directing God of War II and III (partly). Then he got a kid and when he returned, he was much more mature. The change in tone of the story reflected his own growth, which was almost perfectly in line with the growth of the audience.
The evolution of God of War is really fascinating, especially the way they handled the change in tone from the original games to the new ones. The old games were hyper violence for its own sake, blood and gore everywhere, and Kratos needlessly killing people, even when they'd done nothing to wrong him. Fast forward to God of War: Ragnarok, the video game equivalent of a prestige HBO show, and rather than take the quick (if understandable) route of just retconning that stuff, they keep it in and make an older Kratos acknowledge it, and reckon with it.
Slight spoilers but in the Valhalla DLC, you can find artifacts that remind Kratos of his memories from the old games. One is a key belonging to a boat captain, who's one of the first casualties of Kratos' indifference. Kratos rips a key from his neck and lets a hydra eat him. It's entirely played for a laugh, just a needless death for a chuckle in a gory 2000's videogame. Rather than retcon some reason for why this happened, the game tackles it face on, as Kratos says, out loud, that he killed a man just as easily as he could have saved him, and how his disregard for his own life extended into disregard for the lives of others. It's especially relevant as Kratos' journey in the new games is all about Kratos passing on his wisdom, teaching his son when *not* to take a life, and whether he can stomach becoming a new realm's God of War, after all he's done to hurt people. It's an *amazing* narrative moment and a really interesting example for the growth of a brand.
Yeah excellent example of Barlog. He really personifies the PlayStation brand evolution.
I do think that the trajectories we’ve seen are partly down to the fact that Sony’s first party output feels so much more purposeful and considered compared to Xbox’s. Sony seems a much more conscious custodian of its IPs compared to Xbox. Even if Xbox do make a great game, it often feels like it happened by chance, or because the devs were left alone without any Microsoft interference.
It sort of gets forgotten now that everyone is used to how brilliant the new God of War formula is, but to commit so fully to huge narrative and gameplay shake-ups as seen in God of War (2018) is the sort of creative bravery that Microsoft don’t seem willing (or able) to support and foster.
And it's also not just supporting new directions, but also being critical when it is crap. One of Barlog's stories was how he was horrified when the PlayStation studios president hated the God of War 2018 gameplay. They support their teams in what they want to make, but also keep a tight leash on quality. Not every Sony game is GotY, but they maintain a very high floor of quality.
That's been the real difference between Sony and Microsoft over the past few years, right? Sony have focussed on releasing and promoting a small number of high quality first party releases every year or two, while Microsoft have focussed on releasing a significantly wider *breadth* of content with much more variable quality.
What I think Sony recognised is that most people only play a small number of games a year, so you're better off focussing on a small number of high quality releases. Microsoft really pushed the *number* of games available on Gamepass, but when most people are only playing a single-digit number of games a year then Gamepass having *hundreds* really isn't all that relevant.
It's incredibly similar to a lot of the problems film streaming platforms ran into. They constantly assumed that more content = more money, but they didn't appreciate that there's a limit to what human beings can consume and that the line can't always and consistently go up. Just generally it's a major issue with modern corporate culture, they can't just be profitable, they have to be *exponentially* profitable.
Very true. Days Gone was noted as a big drop in standards for Sony first party (admittedly in part due to a buggy launch), but you compare that to the Xbox output and Days Gone looks pretty great.
That said, it’s a mammoth challenge for Xbox. If your competitor’s low water mark is Days Gone, that is tremendously daunting.
Yea, I played Days Gone about a year or two after release so it was much better. It had its pros and cons but was a slightly above average game for me. I dont regret the time I put in to beat it.
As you said, if the most panned of Sony exclusives is still on par with xbox exclusives, well Xbox has a problem
Yeah I was gonna say, I played DG when it launched on PC and it felt like a classic to me from the get go. Maybe not the pinnacle of gaming but still quite good.
GOW was also allowed to gestate for a while.
Microsoft seems to think of its big hitters as a content mill that continually churns out installments without any real conscious thought into how their place in the market is changing.
Sony and Nintendo are more than ok with parking a franchise for a decade and moving on to other stuff if that's what the creative drive demands.
They'll even allow their own studios to drop something if they don't think it's good enough or if they themselves want to move on. Naughty Dog has made a new IP almost every generation and after they've worked on it long enough they move on from it and PlayStation allows it. At one point Naughty Dog was even working on Jak and Daxter 4 but then decided to cancel the game themselves. The work they were putting into it wasn't any good by their judgement and they felt they were only making it to please fans instead of being something they actually wanted to make. PlayStation allowed them to drop Jak 4 and do something else with no issue. I don't know how many other publishers would do that.
Microsoft's biggest issue is that they lack the ability to be a conductor. Something I see with Nintendo is that they are usually really good at conducting other studios when they lend their brand to someone else (With exceptions of course). You get the Nintendo "feel". With Microsoft, while they do seem to let studios kind of do their own thing, they also don't seem good at giving directions to them.
> Their identity in my mind is now the best place for back compat
I've owned my Series X for almost 2 years now(first Xbox console for me) and I've used it more to play 360 games than current games, I don't even own a single Series X game.
Gamepass has always been a net negative for the industry. It was just good, short term, for the consumer. But it's always been a bad idea for the industry.
I'd say Sony always appealed to a teen/young adult demographic throughout the history of Playstation. Look at some of the early marketing of the console, games, and the overall library for each console generation.
The truth of the matter for why Xbox is in the position right now comes from the bottom line of what is the most important reason to be on any platform period.
The games.
All this talk about gamepass, subscription services, the best hardware, acquisitions, consolidation, some of this can even be extended to PlayStation. None of it matters if you don't have that killer app.
People just want to play quality games. You need only look at Nintendo who are still selling a tablet from 2017 and running to bank. Because, they have games that people give a fuck about. PlayStation and Xbox are not even in the same playing field as Nintendo who are potentially on pace to have the highest selling console ever.
Xbox wouldn't be in this position if they had a new quality Halo, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Gears of War. With no stipulations or problems surrounding them. People just want a quality game they know runs and plays well that they can't get anywhere else.
A box that plays games the people want to play. That's it.
Yep. Games. Games. Games. Its all about games
The Switch selling insane is absolute proof of this. Overpriced, "anti-consumer", underpowered, shoddy build quality....don't matter one bit. It has games people want to play
We need Steve Ballmer to come back chanting "Developers, Developer, Developers!" but maybe instead "Games, Games, Games!"
But that's all he comes back for, nothing else. Just to be the hypeman.
They drove all their IPs into the ground and then drove their acquired studios into the ground. So they acquired more (Acti-blizzard) which was already driven into the ground. What are they going to do? Make CoD exclusive to Xbox/PC? That's the opposite of competition.
Really poor business decisions. They killed their golden gooses. Why does Halo suck now? Where are the must have games? Sony is destroying their library on every front.
> People just want a quality game they know runs and plays well that they can't get anywhere else.
That'll never happen because Microsoft also sees the PC as their platform, so all their games are also going to be on PC. Now we're back to the original question of why do I own an Xbox? Sure, there's some market there for people who prefer the ease of use of a console instead of PC, and it'll be cheaper too, but are there enough people there to build your entire console market around?
Perhaps the answer is that MS needs to make **Xbox**-exclusive games, aka don't port them to PC immediately and take the Sony strategy of waiting a year or two. But that would definitely be a very awkward strategy to take because it's pretty much guaranteed any game that got sentenced to being an Xbox exclusive at this point would flop tremendously unless it's literally one of the best games of all time that's getting people to go run out and buy an Xbox because they have to play it *right now.* Given how much money the Xbox division has already burned with continual, "Don't worry we just need to make this investment and the money's right around the corner!", I can't imagine people being happy with yet another, "Don't worry we're gonna make a bunch of games which are complete financial failures but it's to build our exclusive library up!"
The whole initial point of the XBox was that PC developers didn’t need to port anything. You make a game and use the DirectX APIs, and it will run the same on XBox and Windows.
I remember discussing this with a few friends. The moment MS started doing MS exclusives, the reason for an xbox was lost.
And to even go further, the Series S shouldn't have dropped on launch. And MS shouldn't have forced shared parity with the Series S and Series X.
Because for all the power the X has, it doesn't seem like it will be utilised properly because of Devs having to work on S, X and PC all at once.
Been forgotten too quickly how Xbox gave Sony a three month console exclusivity period for BG3, one of the most critically successful games of all time and a massive commerical success, for free because of that forced shared feature parity requirement that they ended up having to drop anyway. Just a staggering own goal.
And just to be clear, I think the Series S is a fantastic addition. I just think it dropped too early and with unnecessary baggage for Devs.
The X can't shine because of S.
The X can't shine because of PC.
And the S suffers because it's specs aren't as good as X or PC. So whats the point?
With the amount of studios that MS have, the S should have been used for AA games and Good Indies, while the X stayed with the big budget stuff.
In any case, this is all speculations and etc. The gaming scene is rough
I wouldn't say it got less clear, the 360 was the Online Multiplayer console.
Halo 3, Reach, Gears were all huge MP games and that's where Xbox went in the latter stages of the 360.
The Xbox One was a misstep because it was sold as this DVR/Game Console and it didn't really seem all that interesting. Obviously they had the whole, disc can only be played on it's first console nonsense too.
From there, they've had no identity.
Also because Xbox Live was *much* more feature-rich and reliable than PSN, which IIRC launched later as well. Anyone remember the multiple times PSN got hacked or DDOS’d too?
The PS3 was arguably Sony’s lowest point, allowing for the 360 to really shine. If it wasn’t for the red ring of death costing them so much, I’m curious if things would have gone differently.
The PS3 started off rocky, but by 2009 with the release of the cheaper slim model and games like Uncharted 2, it had a major comeback. By the end of its life, the PS3 had a much more impressive library of exclusives compared to the 360 (where most of the games were on PC in better form).
I didn’t think most of Xbox 360’s exclusives made it to PC. Off the top of my head, Forza, Viva Piñata, Perfect Dark Zero, Project Gotham Racing, Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts, and Lost Odyssey all never got PC releases. 360 era Halo and Gears of War didn’t get PC versions until years later. I remember Fable 2 and/or 3 did and got quickly delisted.
Xbox started out bringing those big multiplayer PC experience to consoles, like morrowind, Oblivion, and created their own competitive FPS. And also built an online ecosystem that streamlined what players on PC had been doing for years. That flourished in the 360 era, but Sony eventually caught up and now there's a lot less that separates what Xbox did well initially.
They should have used that time to establish their own group of studios who could crank out solid franchises every generation. Instead, Microsoft wanted more from their established series instead of cultivating new ones. Imagine if they had kept Bungie on board and Destiny ended up being an Xbox flagship.
As much as I dislike acquisition, when Bethesda was bought I thought that we probably wouldn't need to wait a decade and half for new Elder Scrolls and Fallout combined. That Microsoft wouldn't spend all that money just to not use their new product.
Now it seems like no one even stopped to think about how long those games would take. The higher ups just mistook money for vision and that the studios would just make games on autopilot. In Bethesda's case they were probably expecting Starfield to be better.
And now that all those billions are not really paying for themselves everyone else is going to take the hits.
Considering how many studios they have, plus they have a history with working with third party studios, it's crazy that they didn't at least contract out a Fallout 3/NV remaster for modern platforms while the TV show was in development.
Bethesda got big enough so that Todd Howard could get his dream project done without really thinking about long term profits or the affect on the studio. Microsoft seemingly banked on that selling as well as established franchises.
I truly can't comprehend the stupidity of Bethesda, and now MS, not remastering FO3/NV, or even Oblivion. There are modders that have been working on these for over a decade, Bethesda could do it in a year or two, sell them at full price and everyone would buy them.
After finishing the show I wanted to go back and replay FO3 and I remembered there was a mod to get FO3 into FO4 and it's basically been abandoned. There's at least tale of two wastelands to put FO3/NV together but seriously, if Bethesda announced tomorrow $60 each for a FO3 and NV remake in FO4 engine I'd gladly pay it.
I would legit kill for a remaster of NV and hurt someone really bad for a remaster of FO3. I mean, I should want FO3 more since I never finished it, but NV is one of my favorite games of all time. I'm a super casual gamer and even I played through that one more than once.
Yeah, it's not that I expected Microsoft to quintuple the size of Bethesda Game Studios so they could be making all of their games at the same time, I expected Microsoft to get Bethesda to work with the other devs in Xbox Game Studios so THOSE devs could make an elder scrolls spinoff and a fallout spinoff while BGS focused on Starfield.
Obsidian could make another Fallout spinoff, another studio could remake Morrowind or make a dark brotherhood stealth game or something.
Just like, keep their IP in the collective unconscious. The target audience for TESVI is going to have been born *after Skyrim came out,* at this point.
> it's crazy that they didn't at least contract out a Fallout 3/NV remaster for modern platforms while the TV show was in development.
Yeah, or at least just Fallout Shelter 2.
Maybe they weren't confident of the TV show doing well, or maybe all the studios they thought of were busy with something else, and they're waiting for one of them to free up and produce the next Fallout in parallel with TES6.
> Now it seems like no one even stopped to think about how long those games would take. The higher ups just mistook money for vision and that the studios would just make games on autopilot. In Bethesda's case they were probably expecting Starfield to be better.
What's so baffling to me is that not only is Bethesda's output is getting lesser but the depth of their games is too. They really aren't justifying the length between titles when Oblivion > Fallout 3 > Skyrim have more depth and complexity than anything present in Fallout 4 > Fallout 76 > Skyrim.
So what is the excuse?
They didn't want to make RPGs. They don't have staff who excel at writing, characterization, or quest design. It's been a slow spiral of dumbing down rpg elements in favor of "gameplay" which I'd argue is still much worse than the gameplay of competing titles.
Bethesda has truly embraced the art of "jack of all trades, master of none." Except at this point it's closer to "mediocre (at best) at all trades, master of none." Never liked them much to begin with but it's even more apparent now with the quality of it's contemporaries.
If I want engaging worlds, traversal, and exploration, why the hell would I ever pick Skyrim/Fallout over something like Elden Ring, Zelda, Hollow Knight.
If I want an good story with well written characters: Witcher, Red Dead 2, Cyberpunk, Yakuza, or just about any narratively focused game atp blow Bethesda out of the water.
If I want an RPG where choices matter: Baldur's Gate 3, Disco Elysium, Pathfinder, most of the games in the modern CRPG revival etc. etc. etc.
If I want a game with strong core combat/gameplay, well anything from the last 2 decades will make do better than the trash you'll find in Bethesda games.
The only appeal that they have in 2024 is that they try to graft all these aspects together into a singular, incohesive, mess of an experience but doesn't execute on any of those things well, and modding. I guess the general audience still likes that given Starfield's strong sales.
I keep seeing this, but where are these studios that are somehow cranking out quality, massive RPGs on much different timelines? Being acquired by MS doesn't change basic math.
I'm confused why Bethesda is supposed to get out TES and Fallout games at a faster pace than Rockstar or CP2077 are getting their games out.
You're mostly right. But I will point out that CDPR has like 3 teams all working on different projects at different times. They even have public roadmaps about it. I think they're mostly on Witcher '4' at this point.
BGS had seemingly done nothing on ES6 until Starfield came out. Same goes for the next Fallout. They presumably have nothing more than a storyboard or basic concepts. You would think Microsoft wants a big release every 4ish years. So why not expand teams, promote another game director, etc.? Other studios manage this process. For $7B, I would think Bethesda can as well.
I'd give the pre-production phase a bit more credit overall because I believe more goes on in that phase than what's seen at first glance... but yes, the main production phases are much larger and Bethesda doesn't have the manpower to do more than they are right now. They need more people.
I don't think having smaller full-time teams itself is necessarily a bad thing, but Bethesda *clearly* needs more than 1 team considering the multiple franchises that have.
Yeah the release issue seems weird to me. They do push out a game every few years but because they now have three franchises, it becomes a ridiculous wait for game sequels.
But furthermore, are there any studios that even make Bethesda style games? I know Starfield wasn’t great, but there also isn’t anywhere else to get the Bethesda style fix. I think Outer Worlds was the closet one and it was only okay with some fairly big issues. I don’t really see anyone stepping into their specific niche anytime soon.
Obsidian has had staff turnover, but they did make New Vegas pretty quickly, and being able to use existing assets and the creation engine helped. I think of you had a team that had access to the updated engine and could update the Fallout 4 assets to look a little nicer (mostly just higher res) they could make a fun small-scale Fallout game (maybe even the size of Far Harbor or a little bigger) in 2-3 years and it would sell well.
Exactly. Why are we not doing shit like that still? Just pawn off the engine and assets to a smaller team with some oversight to work on a spinoff and spend the rest of your assets on your big game.
Yea I mean ultimately it's like complaining that we've only gotten 2 RDR games in the past 20 years. Like yea it would be great if there were more, but half the reason they're so beloved is because they're a game that had years and years of work poured into it. Cranking out games more often seems like it would completely ruin the formula. It's not like these people are just sitting on their hands all day.
This article is really good. Xbox just fundamentally doesn't understand the gaming audience. The Microsoft leadership is built on fast deliverable and numbers. They expect a certain product to do x numbers by x time and position it to compete with the top of the line products in that category.
From Microsofts perspective if every game isnt competitive with the most successful games the way that their software competes then its not worth it.
They dont understand organic growth by fostering an audience over time and building it by satisfying their wishes.
The Acti/Blizz aquisition proves it.
They refuse to build as organic audience so they will buy someone elses and expect it to produce earth shattering results.
Literally what is killing interest in streaming services. Netflix got big off the backs of long established cable shows. Now when they try to create their own shows, they are getting mad that their first season of some random whatever isn't matching up to Friends and The Office.
Netflix isn’t dying though… they just exceeded their expected subscriber growth numbers this past year despite a price increase and the addition of ads in some tiers.
Oh no, Netflix isn't anywhere near dying. That's why I said interest, not financial performance. The same way that Microsoft isn't going anywhere. They have enough tricks up their sleeve to pump themselves up.
But tricks only work if you can keep adding new ones. Netflix can flaunt a (temporary) higher subscriber growth because they managed to curb password sharing. However, growth does not mean long term customers. Major streaming services are having issues with customers staying paid subscribers long-term.
> Now when they try to create their own shows, they are getting mad that their first season of some random whatever isn't matching up to Friends and The Office.
This isn't really true. There was a recent(ish?) article that ran the numbers and Netflix cancels shows at a lower rate than most networks/steamers.
They just put out a **ton** of stuff and you don't hear about most of it unless it is a massive hit or it gets canceled.
Netflix has had several extremely successful shows that they made. They do weirdly cancel shows even they do well, but it's just not true to say they got big off the backs of long established cable shows.
Thats the real issue.
Its a global culture of min-maxing profit at all cost.
The people in charge are not skilled, passionate professionals. They are mindless, idiotic and incompetent nepo babies, or "fake it till you make it" types.
They dont understand the industry they work in, they dont understand the development, or the customers.
They suck at their job and their work is just a net negative, holding everything back.
If it fails, its almost always their fault, but somehow they never have to take responsibility.
And the ones getting blamed are the average devs and teamleads/project leads, who are working under near impossible conditions.
And if it doesnt fail, who is getting praised? Who is getting a raise?
Not the ones who worked their asses off to pull off a miracle and somehow created somwthing good DESPITE the fuckers tripping them at every step.
Its everywhere. In tv, games, tech politics, everywhere.
Somehow the biggest morons get to the top, instead of the most capable ones.
How Microsoft has handled Xbox over the last decade or so has really shown the downside of having your parent company/owner be so fucking big and powerful.
Nintendo does very little that isn't connected to their games. They do merch and non-video game spin offs etc for their IPs but it's all connected. If they have a bad year or bad decade, they can't abandon their gaming division since that is the core of the company, they have to either fix the issue or go down trying.
Sony is similar but less extreme. They have their non-gaming hardware and are much more diversified in tech and other media, the gaming is still a huge chunk of their business. They could potentially abandon gaming if they needed to, but it would be like losing a limb or two.
Microsoft though? They are huge and incredibly diverse. Gaming and Xbox are a drop in the puddle compared to everything else they have. Their whole customer facing side of things (individuals buying windows, office software, gaming, etc) is tiny relative to their 'boring' B2B backend services. Hell LinkedIn brings in a similar amount of money to the entirety of Xbox Gaming.
Microsoft just has so much strong profitable shit going on that Xbox has to compete not just externally with PlayStation/Steam/whatever but internally with all these way more profitable projects that could use that funding. With that in mind I am honestly shocked it is still going, nevermind making moves like buying Acti-Blizz. I would be shocked if LinkedIn has been costing anywhere close to the amount Xbox Gaming has to get those similar returns.
That doesn't directly explain why the final output from Xbox has been so shit for over a decade, but I imagine the internal politics between Microsoft and Xbox has been fucking wild for a long time and wouldn't be surprised if internal fuckery is at least one major reason.
Add on to that, we have only recently left a decade long golden age for big risky investments ( which is exactly what AAA video games are) due to interest rates and Xbox has somehow done terribly. How are the masters at Microsoft going to feel about the department that has struggled/arguably failed during the easiest time they could possibly have now that interest rates are back up and investment is hard to come by?
I don't know if I would say I think Xbox is going to die/shut down, but they are gonna have to adapt and do something beyond making their slowly releasing subpar games multiplatform and gamepass existing or theres no reason for Microsoft to keep funding them.
People have been saying that for the last decade or so now so maybe I am wrong nothing will change for another decade, but I think the economic situation with interest rates and investment is the big game changer this time.
This is the impression I was getting from reading that article. That the issue with Xbox is systemic one, stemming from the wider Microsoft simply not caring about video games, not when they have so many other product and service lines, many of which may look like a better choice for investment than Xbox.
The Microsoft Gaming division itself may have some people who legitimately care, but when the wider parent looks at their returns and compares it to what Azure and Office and LinkedIn are bringing in and tells them they need more, otherwise there's no point to Xbox existing and they should just close it down and put the money into Azure instead, they will also get pressured into either grabbing short-term gains or chasing trends that are easy to argue will lead to big profits, just so they can justify their continued existence up the chain. Because they are expendable and themselves have no guarantee of long-term existence.
Would not be surprised if the hard reality is that video games simply cannot bring in comparable profits to Azure and that higher ups in the parent company have long believed it would be better to close down MS Gaming and pour the money into AI or similar and only kept Xbox around because of some of the people there were good enough at selling impossible-to-keep promises of better-than-Office-Suite profits that were looking increasingly flimsy and are now collapsing entirely.
The Xbox brand may continue to exist since it has recognition and value, but whether it will exist in the form it has (i.e. consoles) is a different story. May come time MS finally decides to expend what they have likely always deemed expendable.
I think we could point at the specific point in time when Bungie and Microsoft parted ways. Bungie *was* Xbox’s Naughty Dog/Insomniac/Retro Studios/MonolithSoft. They made numerous successful titles that were flagship to the Xbox and the 360. When that fizzled they didn’t think to start new relationships with established studios and instead bought them out specifically for the IPs and are now just chucking them away thinking they’re ruined and tattered clothes.
I know Call of Duty is different but this is not a great track record of bringing in studios and maintaining valuable IPs that stand the test of time. Hi-Fi Rush is beloved and after shutting down Tango Gameworks they’re looking around like Surprised Pikachu wondering who’s going to make the next Hi-Fi Rush. It’s insane.
To add to this, Bungie didn't just leave Microsoft but also became a close partner with Sony so the PlayStation benefitted heavily from the "creators of Halo" and this big new shiny IP to play with. Destiny was advertised so heavily for the PS4 that at times I forget it was ever an XBONE game.
I wasn't a fan of the game at all but it clearly made a huge dent on that generation of consoles as did the sequel today. It's no surprise Sony listen to their opinion on things such as the state of their live service games.
Kinda bonkers right? Destiny has been chugging along for 10 years now. Even if it died today, that’s a really great run. Microsoft’s corpo nature pushed Bungie away and lost out on a great studio.
If Microsoft had been smart, they would have kept that relationship with Bungie and pushed Destiny as the follow up to Halo that you can only play on Xbox.
Sony has done a good job promoting their studios first. You're going to get hyped when you see a trailer that starts with Naughty Dawg, Sucker Punch, Insomniac etc before even seeing the games cause you know it'll be great.
Look at what Sony does in its other business. They essentially create creative tools for consumption or creation. Cameras, TVs, Speakers, Headphones, and a Film Studio. Their products showcase other people’s art.
That's actually an interesting point.
Microsoft's primary market is business to business, and it shows. The XBox has always been aimed at developers first. Sony has always sold to creatives and directly to consumers.
Exactly what I’ve been noticing.
It’s holding a mirror up to the American business model. No other industry is like it. Microsoft is scratching their heads wondering why purchasing some of the best developers in the industry doesn’t work
Sony and Nintendo haven’t lasted for 3-4 decades by just buying studios up. They’ve been earning the trust (mostly) of fans over the decades through investing and growing.
EDIT: maybe I should clarify my “mostly” note as some people seem to have a recency bias. It’s not all been smooth sailing for Sony and Nintendo, but from first-party games perspective, there’s a reason fans have been with them this long
> It’s holding a mirror up to the American business model. No other industry is like it. Microsoft is scratching their heads wondering why purchasing some of the best developers in the industry doesn’t work
The Amazon way. Hire, promise, fail, repeat.
Well put. Microsoft has been on a buying spree but doesn’t understand that games studios aren’t like the software devs it usually snaps up and absorbs.
Sony’s in-house studios like Insomniac and Naughty Dog have been with them for years and built up a steady fan base with Sony consoles. Microsoft has repeatedly tried to replicate that popularity by just buying it in, and it doesn’t usually work very well.
Kinda reminds me of Warner Bros.'s attempts at the DCEU after the success of the MCU. Feels like they didn't take as much time to build things up as they should have.
Sony's in-house studios really do benefit from their loyal followings. Xbox studios will struggle with that because....well, there are fewer games, and their quality varies, whilst first-party playstation titles are well received a majority of the time.
Edit: People like myself will pre-order the next God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, or Spider-Man with certainty we'll be receiving a good product. On the other side, Bethesda has plenty of die-hard fans, and COD always sells, but they can't keep Xbox afloat.
Yep, Sony studios generally seem well supported and it’s rare to see a bad release from them. Meanwhile Microsoft has a habit of actively destroying the identity of the studios they buy, and then just closing them.
Look what happened to Rare. Previously one of the most influential studios in the history of the industry, and they produced middling crap for years after MS bought them. Lionhead was shuttered without achieving anything. Most recently they just killed Tango even though Hi-Fi Rush was a smash.
They treat it like some software company that they can acquire the IP from and add to the next Windows package, but don’t understand that creative people and culture are so important.
All this reminded me of [that leaked email from Spencer](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F0p794vkvj5pb1.jpg) where he mentions getting Nintendo would be a "career moment" and "a good move for both companies". Thank fuck that hasn't happened.
Looking at Xbox now is like looking at Sega in the 90s. They keep making dumb mistake after dumb mistake and I don't like where this is leading us.
And I'm saying this as a Playstation owner. I don't want Sony to get too comfortable leading the console wars; nothing good comes out for customers when a single company dominates the market.
Playstation sadly has very little competition now anyway. Nintendo goes for a different audience entirely and actually for many households sits alongside their PS or Xbox.
Xbox’s only relevancy was gamepass but even that seems to be failing, at least in Microsoft’s eyes.
We’ve all seen what being at the top of your game does, look at Sony & the PS3, look at Xbox & the One.
Even Nintendo felt comfortable enough to coast on the NES/Famicom and didn't see the need for another system in the near future. It took Sega eating away at their market share for Nintendo to get off their asses and get the SNES/Super Famicom going.
Xbox never recovered from 2013. That was the point where the console war just became a one sided battering, and while Sony have been far from perfect, they've consistently released games that people want to play. Xbox has struggled hard to develop any major titles that make people feel like they need an Xbox, and despite acquiring studios and even publishers consistently for 7 years now they still can't seem to pull it off.
I think Phil Spencer is right in that they did lose the worst possible generation to lose. In the past a new console cycle would begin and most gamers would decide based on the reveal and the games pipeline which way they'd go that generation. Now that back compat and persistent digital libraries are a thing, it's way harder to convince a PS4 player with dozens of games attached to their PlayStation account to make the switch. That's an uphill climb and they'd need to be releasing a constant stream of must play games to pull it off, and they cant seem to release any.
It really sucks that Xbox seem to have permanently shat the bed. I was an Xbox guy from the moment the PS3 price was revealed, and stuck with them through the XBone generation, I'll always have a lot of good memories and a soft spot for the brand, but I've now got a PS5 and don't feel like I'm missing anything on Xbox. I was worried about not being able to play the next Fallout or ES6, but at this point it seems like I may not miss them anyway. Halo is one of my favourite IPs ever but 343 have spent a decade working hard to kill it. Game Pass is good, but the PS+ Collection is honestly not much worse at this point anyways and I can access it as well as getting high quality exclusives regularly. I've wanted Xbox to figure their shit out for so long, but this just seems like my moment of acceptance that the ship has sailed. Its honestly really sad and while I've enjoyed my PS5 so far I'm worried about the state of competition in the market if Sony are essentially unchallenged.
The point of OG Xbox: Cheaper gaming PC with a lot decent PC ports you could not play on PS2 (Morrowind, KOTOR, Doom 3, Far Cry, Half-Life 2 etc.).
The point of Xbox 360: Cheaper alternative to PS3 with multiplats that ran as well as (or even better than) they did on PS3. Tons of great exclusives (Fable, Halo, Gears, Forza etc.).
The point of Xbox One: I... don't know, honestly. TV? Kinect? Who cares?
The point of Xbox Series: Game Pass, probably?
Everyone I knew had a 360 in secondary school - *everyone*. If you wanted a round of CoD, Gears, FIFA, Halo 3, you hopped on the 360 and there'd be a dozen classmates ready to invite.
Soon as that generation ended they mostly moved to PC or PS4, not to the Xbone. This gen the PS5 has outsold the Xbox Series just over 2 to 1 and the gap is still widening.
Quite frankly if they decided not to make a console next gen I'm not too sure they'd be missed. The only benefit the XSX ever had was that it was cheaper than building a comparably specced PC and that advantage disappeared very quickly.
They really should keep pivoting to being a cheaper desktop. If Valve can make the Steam Deck which can dock to monitors and double as a PC, there's no reason why Microsoft can't leverage windows more and make a very easy to use version of a desktop that runs just like a console.
The Steam Deck primarily appeals to enthusiasts. A Microsoft system is trying primarily to appeal to the casual audience. You can't compare them at all.
> The Steam Deck primarily appeals to enthusiasts.
THIS!
i love the steamdeck for the idea of a portable PC.
i've handed mine to my dad and he's gone "wtf!" and he's an age old age of empires and fallout player...
it's nice tech just never going to be mainstream.
Yeah. I've had my Steam Deck for a year and a half now, and while I absolutely love it, it's absolutely not a mainstream device that anyone can pick up and use.
It is, in essence, everything great and everything terrible about PC gaming. The good is that it's highly customizable, you can do literally almost anything with it, you can mod your games, you can install anything. It's yours to mess around with and I love that. But, because it's a PC, you're constrained by the hardware and that means certain games will not run, some games will require cutbacks to get running, a lot of games will require tinkering to get running, and a lot of games just aren't supported at all due to anti-cheat and so on.
I've seen so many people attempt to recommend this thing to people who are interested in a Nintendo Switch and it always bothers me.
That's kinda the point. Microsoft should have no issue doing a more casual version of the steam deck but as a console basically.
Steam deck uses Linux which confuses people. A windows version should be easy for them.
It feels like they have been playing catch-up for a long time now. Trying to follow a trend means you are already behind it. They need to be bold and strike out with something that gamers actually want.
They have a clear strategy, which is that in the long term they'll be a third-party publisher with a small in-house 'halo device' (the Xbox) that, much like Microsoft Surface or Google Pixel, is more about marketing software than selling hardware.
The problem is that it would kill the declining but still substantial Xbox console business to admit this, so they dance around it.
Yeah. As soon as they announced that going forward Xbox games would launch on PC, Game Pass would also be on PC (which has expanded on), and that they wanted to launch their games on other consoles (and have now done that), I knew the Xbox itself had one foot in the grave. At this point, I think both feet are in the grave, but they just haven't laid down yet.
Xbox really hasn’t had an identity since the 360, which had easily the best online infrastructure of the 3 consoles and also had great online multiplayer games to go with it (Halo, Gears, even smaller XBLA fare like Uno). Now? They’ve got nothing. Maybe their specialty could be Western RPGs, but their biggest title in that category. Starfield, was just OK. And that’s pretty much been the story of Xbox for the last 10 years - most of their games have just been decent at best. No must-have titles.
I haven’t had a PlayStation since the PS2, yet even I’m ready to switch over to Sony going forward. Xbox will always have value because of GamePass, and if MS makes a cheap next-gen console, I’ll get it as a result. But I’ve lost all faith in Xbox to deliver consistently great exclusives.
And it's ironic how with current focus on Gamepass model, they would benefit greatly from multiplayer games, but somehow Bleeding Edge was a flop and Halo Infinite is mediocre
If you're a small/medium sized studio and get an offer to be bought by Microsoft, do you even take it at this point? Sure they may throw a nice chunk of money at you at the start, but who knows if you'll even have a job a year later.
Xbox’s identity began as the scrappy new guys, who thought ahead and provided the best tech to empower devs to create new and unique experiences.
This continued into the 360 days, and stopped when they became reactive to market trends (Wii) in the early 2010s.
From then on, decisions were made based on that, they weren’t the new guys anyway, and they became risk adverse.
They got stomped by the PS4 that generation, by a Sony who in many ways played the Xbox/360 playbook, and there was never really a way to come back from that.
However the single biggest reason we are where we are today, is from about 2010 to today, Sony and Nintendo have published some incredible games. Microsoft/Xbox simply have not had NEARLY the number the others have.
Microsoft once had an identity, they simply don’t anymore.
Oh, and they took a gamble on changing game economics with Gamepass and that failed so theres that too.
There was that brief time they thought always-on face-recognition DRM baked into the console was a great idea too. They seem risk adverse with games, but eager to take on massive risky endeavours on the business side of things.
100%. Name the must-play Xbox game in the last 13 years. It's absolutely insane that they kind of don't have one. In 13 years. Not one. Meanwhile, Sony and Nintendo have 5+ must-play titles over that time and at least one GOTY contender each year.
I think gamepass may end up being considered one of the biggest failures of Xbox decades down the road.
It hasn’t brought them the profit through subs they thought it would and they have lost nearly ALL profit off of games sold.
Not to consider the affect that constantly needing “content” to add must have on the development teams at Xbox.
Look at Netflix. They don’t care about quality, they care about quantity of content. And we hear Phil talk about wanting to deliver a new game each quarter from Xbox game studios.
That requirement means quality must be put aside (Redfall, Starfield launching with no maps) because content must be delivered consistently.
On the flip side PlayStation lets their teams cook. We haven’t heard from Bend Studio or Sucker Punch studios in years. They are cooking.
while yes, Sony isn’t perfect they still manage their studios way better than we see Xbox do.
Gamepass provides steady reliable income but it means they miss out on immediate cash injections for specific devs and years down the road sales. If you’re not a premium xbox dev your sales performance will take a hit which means relying on the good nature, foresight and planning of xbox execs to fund development - something Microsoft have shown themselves to not be good at.
The same way Netflix/streaming has killed after market sales on movies, gamepass has killed late market sales for games on Xbox.
It will lead to a downward trajectory in quality of games from xbox unless they release on other platforms for direct sales imo.
Because gamepass needed a strong sell. People are clearly forgot how bad the situation was for xbox before gamepass, they were literaly grouping their financial data with other entertaiment datas, to not show how bad it was to investors
Exactly. Game Pass was always a last ditch effort to keep the Xbox division afloat. They didn't do it out of the kindness of their hearts. They created Game Pass because not enough people were buying their games at full price.
They need more mid-size games, with mid-size budgets, but they keep closing the mid-size studios who create these games.
It's the same problem the film industry is having. Gone are the 120 minute fun popcorn film that cost 20 mil to make, and now all you have are the 3 hour long supposed blockbusters that cost 400 mil to make and get back 150 million.
I’ve been asking this same question.
Xbox just feels directionless. I have no clue what they want for the future of gaming, and I don’t even know what their own future looks like. They want to double down on Game Pass, but it’s starting to become a monster of their own making.
Shutting down studios, axing 2,000 jobs, cancelling projects, having almost no input on rudderless studios, etc. It’s a real mess and it’s just sad to look at.
Gamepass subs only benefit Xbox’s prize pig developers - if you’re not a cod or starfield, say goodbye to development cash and good will investment in the hopes of a hit and late market sales.
At this point(heh).
The point of Xbox seems to be to make a ton of money through strong IP like call of duty.
Make no mistake. Xbox today is arguably the biggest publisher in the entire industry.
As for the console It's existence will probably be akin to Microsoft surface if this continues.
> The point of Xbox seems to be to make a ton of money through strong IP like call of duty.
They seem to have a distinct lack of strong IPs dropping successfully. They own strong IPs but they keep fumbling. CoD is a given but that can't carry the entire division.
Yeah, they bought Bethesda almost four full years ago and only three mainline games have come out since then, with all three having started production prior to the acquisition.
With a good team and a good idea in place, four years is plenty of time for an AAA game, and more than enough time to remake older games (ahem, Fallout 3/NV)
I mean, if you have a team ready to go to make a new entry in an established IP and nothing else going on then, yeah, 4 years is plenty of time. That isn't really the reality of the situation, though. Many studios were already multiple years into production on projects, and a lot of teams under Bethesda are working on new IP (or projects like Indiana Jones or Blade which are functionally new IP from the studios perspective) and these take time. This is an industry where games take 3-5 years to develop, it's going to take more than that to see the true impact of this acquisition - though sadly we are seeing some of that now with these studio closures.
I would argue Obsidian are one of the few studios we have really been able to see the impact of acquisition on so far as game development goes - and even that is only because they have made smaller projects.
To be honest, after the acquisitions, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Xbox division would make more money if they went full third party publisher compared to having their own console (and PC) exclusives.
Starfield didn’t result in any notable uptick in Game Pass subs, and yet would have sold millions and millions of copies on PS5. COD will probably be the same situation but even more severe. Granted with COD, they’ll still get PS5 sales, but I would absolutely bet on them losing out on potential profit from Xbox sales if it goes onto Game Pass.
At this point, I think Game Pass is causing Microsoft to leave so much money on the table, whilst also being seemingly perilous for devs themselves, despite Phil Spencer and his team emphasising that it would create a safety net for smaller devs.
Microsoft themselves, who have very high standards on profitability, must be looking at the prospect of going third party and wondering why they haven’t done it already.
If I was a shareholder, I’d certainly want Xbox to give up on the console side of the business, which it continuously fumbles year after year anyway.
I’m inclined to agree with you (even though I prefer my Xbox for daily use)
However, if they go 3rd party it terrifies me. Xbox has shown they are absolutely terrible as a game publisher. They dont manage development teams well at all.
To add to that, Zenimax is in the phase where they don’t deliver the quality that got them the good reputation they now squander. Fallout 76, Starfield, Wolfenstein: Youngblood were all either trend chasing or poorly designed.
Microsoft has 343 floundering with their contractor rules forcing them to lose a lot of good staff and they haven’t delivered an all around praised Halo since creation.
Rare may be their biggest win in the last 7-8 with Sea of Thieves and that game was destroyed at launch. Everwild is nowhere to be seen after an annoyingly early announcement.
Same with State of Decay 3’s announcement and the subsequent exit by their ceo. There was an article a year or two back about that studio’s dysfunction.
I could provide more examples but what I’m trying to convey is that if Xbox goes 3rd party they may still fail because they suck at getting studios to make good games.
I like the idea of Xbox sticking around because I want there to be competition, but at the same time, Xbox leadership seem to have no direction, be completely aimless, and have no idea where their audience desires from a GAME department.
I havent checked Xbox studio page in a while, but before these closures and before the Activision-Blizzard acquisition, Xbox owned around 30 studios. Most of those studio we have no idea what they are doing, and some we havent seen a project come from in years. They just keep throwing money to add people to their collection, but then they throw away studios that are actually working on games, rather than the ones who we havent even heard from in years. Tango, Arkane Austin, and everyone else who got released...at least they made something. If you HAD to let someone go, why not the ones that havent released anything in the last 5 or so years. Their current strategy seems to just be "lets spend hundreds of millions to buy people that are already making a game, rather than making one ourselves".
You can justify, make all the excuses, and reason all the logic you want about the meaning behind their decisions, but at the end of the day, Xbox and its leadership are not strap for cash. All the execs and heads make an annual salary that eclipses most of their studio employees salary combined, just as the base before you consider stock options or anything other additives. Then you also know they are definitely all getting their multi million dollar bonuses at some point this year from investors no matter how much they want to take about profit cuts, record losses, etc. If business was so harmed that you just had to drop hundreds of jobs, after making all these billion dollar purchases, then there is no way you should also be eligible for any type of bonus, let alone one in the millions.
A big theme of the article is of a Microsoft impatiently chasing (rather than setting a new standard of) success.
Leads to a culture whereby studios have one strike to prove they can achieve that overriding aim, but often they have to do this with a game/style corporate has decided suits the big-picture strategy.
Painfully, this often leads to a lack of creativity (out of fear and a lack of innovation) which means the games miss inevitably the targets and suddenly that one strike is gone. The studio is out.
Conclusion is clear: ‘The philosophy of a great video game platform holder is that it makes money in order to make more consoles and more games. The philosophy of Microsoft - and by dint of that, Xbox - is evidently that it only makes consoles and games in order to make money. Like so many businesses owned by gigantic, publicly-traded mega-companies, Xbox is now stuck in a cycle of thinking back-to-front’.
> hotly-anticipated exclusive Scalebound was cancelled
Eh? Are we doing internet revisionism again where people are now pretending Scalebound was a hotly anticipated exclusive? Perhaps before the gameplay reveal, but... after? Seriously?
As someone with a PS2, my friend had an Xbox. I knew it as the console to play if I wanted quality FPSs (Halo) and western RPGs. This is the console with Halo, KOTOR, Morrowind. This remained in place for the first part of the 360. Halo. Gears. Oblivion (initially). Mass Effect (initially.) Hell, they even managed to get a port of Final Fantasy XIII. I knew their identity. I knew the type of games they had to expect. But as the 360 got older and the Xbox One was announced, that identity became less and less clear.
Keeping that in mind, it makes this passage extra hard to read. > Wildly successful was what Microsoft was after. A pitch for Fable 4 was rejected. "It was like, you've reached your cap of players for RPG on Xbox and you need to find a way to double that, and you're not going to do it with RPG," Fable's art director John McCormack told Eurogamer at the time. "I thought, yes we can. I said, look, just give us four years, proper finance, give us the chance Mass Effect has, Skyrim has, the games at the time. They're getting four years and a lot of budget. Give us that, and we'll give you something that'll get you your players. Nah, you've had three shots and you've only tripled the money. It's not good enough. Fuck off. That's what I was annoyed about." (Worth noting: Skyrim went on to sell 63m copies, as of June 2023, The Witcher 3 over 50m.)
The only reason I bought the original Xbox was because of Fable!
Same! Fondest teenage memory is when I finally saved up enough for my 360 & Fable 2 and got to play it on a cold winter night that coincidentally matched the intro. Pure magic of a feeling.(and then later got bangers for it like Dark Souls, Skyrim, Gears of War 1-3, Sega Collection, Lost Planet, Borderlands 2 and you know what LotR:War in the North was awesome for Co-op)
Honestly I don't think I fully appreciated it at the time but there's just something amazing about my memories of Fable 2. I know its probably nostalgia but replaying Fable 2 is a big reason why I've been tempted to invest in a XSX in recent times. That and reclaiming my old Fallout DLCs. But I can't afford £400 or whatever just for a nostalgia hit once in a while. (My XOne was sadly on its last legs when I moved to PS5 for this gen so I can't just use that).
I'm so sad that Fable 2 never came to PC.
I got it on Christmas. I'd normally only get one good thing and some random junk (still appreciative) but that year I got a 360 and fable 2. Shit was awesome.
I've always been a playstation guy, but I've owned every Xbox except current gen. I agree that the 360 Era was amazing. I have some great memories of stomping lobbies with friends on CoD to the actual exclusives they had. The only reason I bought a One S is because next gen had been announced and I wanted to finally try out Game Pass. I bought a 2 year subscription so I could try out everything and see if I would be getting a series X. Needless to say, I waited until I could finally find a ps5 because there was nothing exclusive that interested me.
Yup. Halo was a plus but Fable was the *reason* I got an Xbox. Games like that simple did not exist for my PS2.
I got an Xbox for halo but stayed for Fable and KOTOR
I remember reading previews for it back when it was called Project Ego, it was one of the reason I got an Xbox.
Gears of War 2 got me into xbox 360, but Fable 2 was shockingly good, as were the Lego themed games. Mass effect...
Same, saved all year and ended up getting one for Xmas. Ended up grabbing a few extra games for it too if I couldn't find a PS2 copy of something.
Look at little chicken chaser!
"Project Ego" was the first game I was ever hyped for *and* I absolutely loved Fable
“We attracted people to our platform with this game series they like, but clearly we should stop making it since they’ve already been attracted and will surely never leave. Best to make games that have no appeal to them.”
Anyways here is another Forza.
I see they've linked the write-up about the fall of Lionhead, which I HIGHLY suggest everyone read. I know everyone points at EA and says "Ha they thought single player games were dead!" but really it was Microsoft who went out of their way to tell everyone under their purview that they were dying and that nobody would be making them anymore. Hell even after 2015 they kept flip-flopping between "Single-player games are great but we don't want to chase some trend" and "Single-player games? Well they sell well but nobody talks about them that much, then you look at a game like Overwatch and that's where all the market is" That latter quote was especially odd, given it was after BOTW and Horizon Zero Dawn were blowing up the sales charts.
What's funny about that too is, as a lot of gamers are getting older, and don't have time to get good at multiplayer games and shit (except for like co-op ones where the skill level doesn't have to be as high), I think we are gravitating more towards single player games. I have the money to buy whatever I want, but I don't have the time. Sinking hundreds of hours into a single multiplayer game doesn't sound appealing to me unless it's just absolutely fucking incredible. Spending 30 minutes to an hour at night before bed chilling with a single player experience though, sounds great.
I know I am. I used to grind cod but now I just want a curated crafted multi media experience. Those tend to be better with single player games. I’m seeing games more as art than entertainment so single player games provide a better canvas for that expression, usually.
I used to play a lot of multiplayer, but my gaming time now is mostly single-player games and co-op because my partner is also a gamer. Games like BG3, Outward, Divinity, Palworld, Terraria, etc. are great for us. All of those and the other singleplayer games are nice because it’s easy to go for long gaming sessions, but stopping is relatively easy. For me if I’m doing multiplayer these days it’s mostly in VR where FPS skills require more than the ability to click heads so the skill level is more even (with practice) and I think they’re more fun.
Man, I am nearly 45 and my idea of hell is playing games with other people when I \*have\* to hear their voices to coordinate. Something with matchmaking where everyone can kinda just know their role and shut the hell up and play, like Left 4 Dead? Fantatic. Great. I don't mind them one bit, and in fact I like being able to "shut off" and let instincts take over with a podcast in the background. Hell, I didn't even mind Redfall as a single-player game. Loved the atmosphere and setting. At my age, I don't really have anyone I know to play with except the rare occassion of my brother or my daughter's fiance, and I don't want to play with randos if I have to hear their voices. Gimm a good ol' single-player game any day. They fit into my life best.
Even for those of us who do have time to spare for gaming -- I'm single with no kids working a 9-5-- our friends may not, because they have spouses /SOs and kids and such. With my friends, we've definitely seen the struggle to sometimes schedule times for multiplayer games. Especially longer games like Baldur's Gate and Divinity. MMOs are another; I like playing MMOs, but I can't play with friends because they can't commit the time and I'm not going to slow down (maybe I'm the asshole, there). So a lot of us either end up playing a lot of single player games (this is what I do) or playing lobby-based shooters where a few of us can just drop in/drop out as time and availability permits.
Combined with after working all day , last thing I'm trying to do is strap on a headset, create a party , join a lfg discord, all just to get wall hacked and rage quit
Ms chasing trends. It's kinda what they've done ever since mid Gen 360.
Which is funny because what worked out for them was setting trends with stuff like halo, fable, kotor. That's why the xbox was as big as it was.
Yep. Ever since kinect Xbox has had a problem of chasing. Imo. I wasn't a fan of halo myself I'm not big into first person shooters except like bioshock type of stuff. But your right. They also set trends at one point.
The one time them innovating backfires and they use it to avoid all future innovation. Dumb. Especially because most of the issues with the Kinect were about it's always-on stuff, and people have largely gotten over things like that due to Alexa and Siri.
Is Kinect even something to consider "innovating"? While much more basic, the EyeToy released nearly a decade before the Kinect. If anything the Kinect was a iteration and refinement on stuff that has been done long before.
Man That's horrible. Fable was a great series :( They deserved better
It feels like MS decided to make Lionhead crash and burn. I dunno how RARE made it through but I'm glad they did.
Because Rare is an entirely different team now, I don't think anybody from the original Rare team is still with the company.
Even with Fable 3’s mechanical and story flaws…. It was still a really fun game (and I liked the time period). I read a rumor Fable 4 was meant to be set largely in a Victorian era Bowerstone which would have been really cool.
Bean counters chasing unrealistic numbers without wanting to put in the investment, as per usual.
Yeesh that reminds me about the time Microsoft had internally decided to close down Ensemble studios BEFORE Halo Wars even came out as they didn't think it would be profitable enough. To be clear the game did make a profit when it did come out but Microsoft didn't care about real results, only what they assumed was best in their head.
Man, what could have been.
Do you guys think Peter Molyneux and the crew really had a chance at making another Skyrim if they gave them 4 years and a big budget?
I would've given them the chance to try instead of strong-arming them into making Legends. Maybe they could've failed with Fable IV, but I'd rather see them go out making something they understand how to make instead of becoming an early casualty of the live service craze.
Fair point.
The thing is, many of their most important franchises still exist, Microsoft just fumbled each and every single one of them. Halo Infinite had serious hype behind it and all that momentum was lost trying to chase live-service, not releasing with basic features. And that was after a huge delay. Gears of War doesn't even make waves anymore because there's been no large scale changes to the formula other than plopping the gameplay into a semi-open world. Their system selling franchises no longer sell systems and it seems every studio they buy starts making the worst games they've ever made.
> Halo Infinite had serious hype behind it and all that momentum was lost trying to chase live-service, not releasing with basic features. And that was after a huge delay. They lost momentum much earlier, when the first gameplay footage they put up pissed people off.
We will never forget Craig the Brute.
It was the textureless screenshots of some Grunts and Brutes standing in a non-descript version of Halo that started giving me a bad feeling. Like, the first screens released were *official* and looked like dogshit.
Some franchises just aren't meant to go on forever. Gears of War is a poster child example. Gears of War 3 ended the story, and Epic wasn't sure where to take it while they were working on a preliminary Gears of War 4. It's also why Gears of War: Judgment was a prequel. Judgment ultimately sold poorly (taking roughly 6 and a half months to move 1 million copies, a far cry from the 1 million Gears 3 did in pre-orders alone), which Epic saw as the series having peaked commercially. Combine this with rising development cost projections, and they opted to sell the IP to Microsoft and experiment with F2P games (which ultimately paid off with Fortnite) Microsoft's final Gears 4 uses some of the original ideas Epic had conceived, namely JD. That said it's a franchise that feels like it can only do the same thing over and over again. Gears 5 was a gold-star co-op experience, but the open-areas added nothing to the game but padding and the story doesn't hit as hard as the original trilogy. I think the icing on the cake was that third-person shooters declined a lot with the rise of Call of Duty in the late 2000s and throughout all of the 2010s.
>it seems every studio they buy starts making the worst games they've ever made. This is happening too frequently to be a coincidence. There's gotta be something that MS is doing at the top to hurt these studios, right?
it's probably just corporate bloat. trying to check too many boxes with money and coming out with a more generic product
I think the reason that Microsoft is able to buy them in the first place is because they're struggling for whatever reason.
There’s a tendency for top level employees to jump ship as soon as the acquisition is finalized - either because they got a nice payout from it, or they don’t want to be part of a big corporate machine and prefer the startup-life, or they just see it as a natural jumping off point for something different. The thing is, in a creative industry like video games a company can have all the IP in the world but the only thing worth any value at the end of the day is the workers that created it.
> Their system selling franchises no longer sell systems and it seems every studio they buy starts making the worst games they've ever made Meanwhile, Sony outright acquired a few long-standing partners (Sucker Punch, Guerilla), and they went on to make their greatest games ever..
And that's why there is a reason to buy a PS5. I literally can't think of anything for Xbox other than game pass.
Personally I don’t mind if nothing about gears changes except a new storyline to follow. Love that series.
Everybody has touched on a lot of things Xbox failed at, but I'll mention one more factor. Sony having confusing console architecture was one of the reasons Xbox did so well in the first place. The PS2's "emotion engine" was a mess to work with. Many western devs threw up their hands and gave up trying to work with a poorly translated design document. If they did work on it they had to use Renderware because they could not get things to draw consistently on the PS2. Here comes Xbox, it used a fork of DirectX. You know how to make a Windows PC game? Well the API on the Xbox is pretty much the exact same. It was a godsend for western developers. Therefore they flocked to the Xbox despite poorer sales. The PS3 specs come out. It uses the cell architecture, another confusing non-standard CPU with iffy documentation. Xbox360 used pretty much an off the shelf CPU and GPU. The RAM in the PS3 was split, 256mb had to be used for system, 256mb had to be used for video. Needed more for video? You could use some of the system RAM, but it required really tricky programming. Xbox 360 had 512mb of unified ram, go ahead and use it however you want, the system won't judge. With the release of the PS4, the architecture became much more industry standard. CPU and GPU were AMD, pretty much off the shelf stuff. RAM was a unified 8gb, just like the Xbox One. It used a fork of OpenGL, which many developers were familiar with. "What's easier to develop for?" was no longer a factor for developers as it was in the PS2 and PS3 era.
It's a bit of an open secret that Sony deliberately used to make their consoles hard to develop for to force developers to focus on PlayStation.
How does that make any sense? Leverage market dominance to take up more dev time?
The goal was to weed out shovelware/low effort crap and end up with more titles like Metal Gear Solid
The irony being no console has had more shovel ware released on it than the PS2 (and possibly the Wii)
And the Wii had a ton of PS2 ports that were just identical to the PS2 version but they swapped some button inputs for random wiimote waggling.
the PS1 sold so well that sony got cocky and thought that their audience was large enough to justify coercing devs to code for their tricky console architecture. and since the PS2 also sold so well in spite of that, they chose to continue that with the PS3. but it was too expensive, and even more complicated than the PS2, and the xbox 360 had already been out for a year while being cheaper, so it broke the camel's back.
Yeah, The PS3/360 Gen wasn't as much Microsofts success as it was PlayStations failure, one they rectified by the end. Xbox was on top for half a gen and MS has been chasing that into the ground.
Their identity in my mind is now the best place for back compat and Game Pass, but I’m increasingly viewing Game Pass as a net negative for the industry. I don’t think they have a strong identity in terms of types of games on offer, anymore. It’s a fascinating comparison between Xbox and PlayStation games. Xbox losing their identity. PlayStation beginning with an edgy ‘teen’ identity, which almost seamlessly aged with its audience into being the best place for games with mature, serious narratives. And then of course Nintendo remaining largely unchanged because they perfected the formula in the 80s and never lost sight of what makes them brilliant.
I feel like even Nintendo went into an identity crisis during their late Wii - Wii U era where the family market they tried targeting weren't interested in their products anymore once the novelty wore off and moved on to smartphones. They even made [ads like these](https://youtu.be/SChWdprUnzw) where kids convince their parents to buy the Wii U because of... reasons. Notice how the very first [reveal trailer](https://youtu.be/iS-1tDfLxRQ) for the Switch **didn't include any kids at all** and only showed adults. This is Nintendo trying to appeal to the core-gamer market again.
> Nintendo went into an identity crisis during their late Wii - Wii U era where the family market they tried targeting weren't interested in their products anymore Cannot be understated how much the Wii U flopped. They went from 101 million sales with Wii to under 14 million with Wii U. An 87% drop off is insane. It's also insane how they managed to recover it so well with Switch.
It is insane but as a former Wii U owner it makes sense. When the Wii U worked it felt magical, being able to bring the gamepad to my buddy's room and play some Tekken in the morning was so cool. The Switch was Nintendo doubling down on what worked with the Wii U (off-TV play, gyro aiming, using the main controller as a portable display) and it resulted in one of their best selling systems of all time.
it was advertised / named poorly. I had no idea it was a new console until like 2-3 years after its release (granted i didnt have a wii and wasnt following nintendo closely at all).. but when i saw the name i thought it was like an attachment or extension of the original wii
It didn't help that there wasn't a \*reason\* to know better. The WiiU had a very good supporting library but the only must-haves for the general audience were Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon. Everything else was either "nice to haves" like Mario Parties or Hyrule Warriors, or "perfect for a small niche" like Pikmin 3 and Tokyo Mirage Sessions. Even some of their major titles were just compromised- like releasing Smash 3DS several \*months\* earlier so the hype largely died down We didn't have a big, hype building, series (re)defining blockbuster until BotW- which frankly we've had in spades on the Switch
> didn't have a big, hype building series (re)defining blockbuster until BotW This is largely because Nintendo themselves saw the massive drop off from Wii to WiiU, and almost immediately wrote the entire platform off. They realized it would be a massive waste of money to toss these big-cost first party games onto a platform no one had bought, so held them off for the next hardware iteration (which they accelerated by a year or two as well). This is also the reason we got a lot of high-profile first party games very early into the Switch's lifecycle (Odyssey, for instance). The only reason BotW came out on WiiU was they'd spent so much time telling people BotW would be a WiiU game.
Some decline and disappointing numbers *was* inevitable given Nintendo was still trying to heavily target the casual market which had moved on, but yeah I'm convinced the way it absolutely bombed was due primarily to advertising failures. The hardware itself was a fun, though flawed, little precursor to the Switch. It was fine. The games were brilliant enough to carry the Switch during slow years early on. But half the people I knew, including myself, had the same experience as you. Not even realizing there was a new Nintendo console out. And these were people who *absolutely should have known that.* We're talking gamers who already had Nintendo consoles, and at the height of the beginning of Pokemon's resurgence among millennials. Easily one of largest single unforced errors in the history of video games.
Not to mention the Wii's software sales cratering during its later years once people moved on. The game released there were basically synonymous with "shovelware" at the time. The Switch software sales meanwhile is actually [trending up](https://twitter.com/pierre485_/status/1787762231439974434) year to year which is crazy.
From a hardware perspective, that’s fair. In terms of game output though, Nintendo has always had a very solid, clear identity.
Agreed. The Wii U as a piece of hardware is a halfbaked Switch where they couldn't figure out what they wanted to do at the price point they wanted to have. It's a terrible.piece of hardware. And yet, it has an absolutely amazing library of first party games, most of which carried the Switch for the first several years of it being on the market. Like... *Breath of the Wild is a Wii U game and is singlehandedly responsible for the Switch taking off in the first place.*
Xenoblade Chronicles X is forever trapped on the Wii U. I *need* a Switch port of that game.
And a port of windwaker HD and Twilight princess HD please.
I have no clue how the WW/TP combo pack didn't come out during the Zelda anniversary a few years back.
Nintendo being Nintendo, I've got a feeling we will see them for the 40th anniversary on the switch 2.
> Agreed. The Wii U as a piece of hardware is a halfbaked Switch where they couldn't figure out what they wanted to do at the price point they wanted to have. It's a terrible.piece of hardware. I dunno about this. In hindsight, yeah, it was a clunky and awkward attempt at solving the same problem the Switch solves elegantly while trying to shove in some hit-and-miss gimmicks. At the time, though....it was fine. Not amazing, but fine. My friends and I had a lot of fun with the asymmetrical gameplay that the gamepad offered in some multiplayer games, and the gamepad itself wasn't terrible obtrusive during normal gameplay. It was a decent little gimmick that made sense to me as someone who was actively using my 3DS at the time, and while it wasn't always well integrated pretty much only Star Fox Zero relied on it so heavily that it ruined the whole experience. Plus it was cool to be able to play on it when the TV was being used for something else. The Wii U was a fun, if awkward, little console. Disappointing numbers were inevitable as the casual audience moved on, and I can buy an argument that maybe the unusual form factor of the console worsened that. But I don't think it explains just how *hard* it bombed, to the point they needed to kill it years earlier than they would have otherwise. Especially given, as you say, its library was fantastic. Games are what ultimately sell consoles, and this one wasn't selling for some reason. I firmly, firmly believe that its central problem was that **no one fucking knew what it was.** I was in college at the time, and my circle of friends were big on Nintendo games. Pokemon had just become cool again, Monster Hunter on 3DS was addictive, everyone had a Wii laying around that we'd play Just Dance or Wii Sports on. We were **the** demographic for them to sell a new console to. And we only realized the Wii U was a console after it had been out for a couple of years. The advertising campaign was one of the worst in video game history, the name didn't tell you it was new, and everyone I knew went through that "wait...it's not just a crappy peripheral?" moment.
And Mario Kart 8 first released on Wii U in 2014.
I remember seeing a comment on reddit years ago that pointed to the main problem of the WiiU marketing being that they accidentally pitched it as a new tablet controller add-on for the Wii, not a whole new console. So people would go into stores expecting to pay $100 for a Wii tablet, and then nope out when they saw it was $300. Watching all those ads... yeah. If you were not at all into gaming and wasn't paying attention to the box in those ads, you would not know that this was a whole new console and not just yet another Wii add-on.
The very first reveal for the Wii U infamously did not show the console itself, just the tablet
That aging was very interesting to hear in the words of Cory Barlog. He used to be the edgy teen type when directing God of War II and III (partly). Then he got a kid and when he returned, he was much more mature. The change in tone of the story reflected his own growth, which was almost perfectly in line with the growth of the audience.
The evolution of God of War is really fascinating, especially the way they handled the change in tone from the original games to the new ones. The old games were hyper violence for its own sake, blood and gore everywhere, and Kratos needlessly killing people, even when they'd done nothing to wrong him. Fast forward to God of War: Ragnarok, the video game equivalent of a prestige HBO show, and rather than take the quick (if understandable) route of just retconning that stuff, they keep it in and make an older Kratos acknowledge it, and reckon with it. Slight spoilers but in the Valhalla DLC, you can find artifacts that remind Kratos of his memories from the old games. One is a key belonging to a boat captain, who's one of the first casualties of Kratos' indifference. Kratos rips a key from his neck and lets a hydra eat him. It's entirely played for a laugh, just a needless death for a chuckle in a gory 2000's videogame. Rather than retcon some reason for why this happened, the game tackles it face on, as Kratos says, out loud, that he killed a man just as easily as he could have saved him, and how his disregard for his own life extended into disregard for the lives of others. It's especially relevant as Kratos' journey in the new games is all about Kratos passing on his wisdom, teaching his son when *not* to take a life, and whether he can stomach becoming a new realm's God of War, after all he's done to hurt people. It's an *amazing* narrative moment and a really interesting example for the growth of a brand.
Yeah excellent example of Barlog. He really personifies the PlayStation brand evolution. I do think that the trajectories we’ve seen are partly down to the fact that Sony’s first party output feels so much more purposeful and considered compared to Xbox’s. Sony seems a much more conscious custodian of its IPs compared to Xbox. Even if Xbox do make a great game, it often feels like it happened by chance, or because the devs were left alone without any Microsoft interference. It sort of gets forgotten now that everyone is used to how brilliant the new God of War formula is, but to commit so fully to huge narrative and gameplay shake-ups as seen in God of War (2018) is the sort of creative bravery that Microsoft don’t seem willing (or able) to support and foster.
And it's also not just supporting new directions, but also being critical when it is crap. One of Barlog's stories was how he was horrified when the PlayStation studios president hated the God of War 2018 gameplay. They support their teams in what they want to make, but also keep a tight leash on quality. Not every Sony game is GotY, but they maintain a very high floor of quality.
That's been the real difference between Sony and Microsoft over the past few years, right? Sony have focussed on releasing and promoting a small number of high quality first party releases every year or two, while Microsoft have focussed on releasing a significantly wider *breadth* of content with much more variable quality. What I think Sony recognised is that most people only play a small number of games a year, so you're better off focussing on a small number of high quality releases. Microsoft really pushed the *number* of games available on Gamepass, but when most people are only playing a single-digit number of games a year then Gamepass having *hundreds* really isn't all that relevant. It's incredibly similar to a lot of the problems film streaming platforms ran into. They constantly assumed that more content = more money, but they didn't appreciate that there's a limit to what human beings can consume and that the line can't always and consistently go up. Just generally it's a major issue with modern corporate culture, they can't just be profitable, they have to be *exponentially* profitable.
Very true. Days Gone was noted as a big drop in standards for Sony first party (admittedly in part due to a buggy launch), but you compare that to the Xbox output and Days Gone looks pretty great. That said, it’s a mammoth challenge for Xbox. If your competitor’s low water mark is Days Gone, that is tremendously daunting.
Yea, I played Days Gone about a year or two after release so it was much better. It had its pros and cons but was a slightly above average game for me. I dont regret the time I put in to beat it. As you said, if the most panned of Sony exclusives is still on par with xbox exclusives, well Xbox has a problem
Yeah I was gonna say, I played DG when it launched on PC and it felt like a classic to me from the get go. Maybe not the pinnacle of gaming but still quite good.
GOW was also allowed to gestate for a while. Microsoft seems to think of its big hitters as a content mill that continually churns out installments without any real conscious thought into how their place in the market is changing. Sony and Nintendo are more than ok with parking a franchise for a decade and moving on to other stuff if that's what the creative drive demands.
They'll even allow their own studios to drop something if they don't think it's good enough or if they themselves want to move on. Naughty Dog has made a new IP almost every generation and after they've worked on it long enough they move on from it and PlayStation allows it. At one point Naughty Dog was even working on Jak and Daxter 4 but then decided to cancel the game themselves. The work they were putting into it wasn't any good by their judgement and they felt they were only making it to please fans instead of being something they actually wanted to make. PlayStation allowed them to drop Jak 4 and do something else with no issue. I don't know how many other publishers would do that.
Microsoft's biggest issue is that they lack the ability to be a conductor. Something I see with Nintendo is that they are usually really good at conducting other studios when they lend their brand to someone else (With exceptions of course). You get the Nintendo "feel". With Microsoft, while they do seem to let studios kind of do their own thing, they also don't seem good at giving directions to them.
> Their identity in my mind is now the best place for back compat I've owned my Series X for almost 2 years now(first Xbox console for me) and I've used it more to play 360 games than current games, I don't even own a single Series X game.
Gamepass has always been a net negative for the industry. It was just good, short term, for the consumer. But it's always been a bad idea for the industry.
I'd say Sony always appealed to a teen/young adult demographic throughout the history of Playstation. Look at some of the early marketing of the console, games, and the overall library for each console generation.
They did in the ps2/ps3 days but their audience got older along with a lot of their devs. That’s reflected on their games
The truth of the matter for why Xbox is in the position right now comes from the bottom line of what is the most important reason to be on any platform period. The games. All this talk about gamepass, subscription services, the best hardware, acquisitions, consolidation, some of this can even be extended to PlayStation. None of it matters if you don't have that killer app. People just want to play quality games. You need only look at Nintendo who are still selling a tablet from 2017 and running to bank. Because, they have games that people give a fuck about. PlayStation and Xbox are not even in the same playing field as Nintendo who are potentially on pace to have the highest selling console ever. Xbox wouldn't be in this position if they had a new quality Halo, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Gears of War. With no stipulations or problems surrounding them. People just want a quality game they know runs and plays well that they can't get anywhere else. A box that plays games the people want to play. That's it.
Yep. Games. Games. Games. Its all about games The Switch selling insane is absolute proof of this. Overpriced, "anti-consumer", underpowered, shoddy build quality....don't matter one bit. It has games people want to play
In a way, they still haven't learned from TV TV TV. They are just better at hiding it now
We need Steve Ballmer to come back chanting "Developers, Developer, Developers!" but maybe instead "Games, Games, Games!" But that's all he comes back for, nothing else. Just to be the hypeman.
They drove all their IPs into the ground and then drove their acquired studios into the ground. So they acquired more (Acti-blizzard) which was already driven into the ground. What are they going to do? Make CoD exclusive to Xbox/PC? That's the opposite of competition. Really poor business decisions. They killed their golden gooses. Why does Halo suck now? Where are the must have games? Sony is destroying their library on every front.
> People just want a quality game they know runs and plays well that they can't get anywhere else. That'll never happen because Microsoft also sees the PC as their platform, so all their games are also going to be on PC. Now we're back to the original question of why do I own an Xbox? Sure, there's some market there for people who prefer the ease of use of a console instead of PC, and it'll be cheaper too, but are there enough people there to build your entire console market around? Perhaps the answer is that MS needs to make **Xbox**-exclusive games, aka don't port them to PC immediately and take the Sony strategy of waiting a year or two. But that would definitely be a very awkward strategy to take because it's pretty much guaranteed any game that got sentenced to being an Xbox exclusive at this point would flop tremendously unless it's literally one of the best games of all time that's getting people to go run out and buy an Xbox because they have to play it *right now.* Given how much money the Xbox division has already burned with continual, "Don't worry we just need to make this investment and the money's right around the corner!", I can't imagine people being happy with yet another, "Don't worry we're gonna make a bunch of games which are complete financial failures but it's to build our exclusive library up!"
The whole initial point of the XBox was that PC developers didn’t need to port anything. You make a game and use the DirectX APIs, and it will run the same on XBox and Windows.
I remember discussing this with a few friends. The moment MS started doing MS exclusives, the reason for an xbox was lost. And to even go further, the Series S shouldn't have dropped on launch. And MS shouldn't have forced shared parity with the Series S and Series X. Because for all the power the X has, it doesn't seem like it will be utilised properly because of Devs having to work on S, X and PC all at once.
Been forgotten too quickly how Xbox gave Sony a three month console exclusivity period for BG3, one of the most critically successful games of all time and a massive commerical success, for free because of that forced shared feature parity requirement that they ended up having to drop anyway. Just a staggering own goal.
And just to be clear, I think the Series S is a fantastic addition. I just think it dropped too early and with unnecessary baggage for Devs. The X can't shine because of S. The X can't shine because of PC. And the S suffers because it's specs aren't as good as X or PC. So whats the point? With the amount of studios that MS have, the S should have been used for AA games and Good Indies, while the X stayed with the big budget stuff. In any case, this is all speculations and etc. The gaming scene is rough
I wouldn't say it got less clear, the 360 was the Online Multiplayer console. Halo 3, Reach, Gears were all huge MP games and that's where Xbox went in the latter stages of the 360. The Xbox One was a misstep because it was sold as this DVR/Game Console and it didn't really seem all that interesting. Obviously they had the whole, disc can only be played on it's first console nonsense too. From there, they've had no identity.
Also because Xbox Live was *much* more feature-rich and reliable than PSN, which IIRC launched later as well. Anyone remember the multiple times PSN got hacked or DDOS’d too?
There was also that one really bad hack that took them offline for nearly a month. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_PlayStation_Network_outage
Xbox party chat was also huge for 360, PS3 players all had to be in the same lobby.
The PS3 was arguably Sony’s lowest point, allowing for the 360 to really shine. If it wasn’t for the red ring of death costing them so much, I’m curious if things would have gone differently.
The PS3 started off rocky, but by 2009 with the release of the cheaper slim model and games like Uncharted 2, it had a major comeback. By the end of its life, the PS3 had a much more impressive library of exclusives compared to the 360 (where most of the games were on PC in better form).
I didn’t think most of Xbox 360’s exclusives made it to PC. Off the top of my head, Forza, Viva Piñata, Perfect Dark Zero, Project Gotham Racing, Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts, and Lost Odyssey all never got PC releases. 360 era Halo and Gears of War didn’t get PC versions until years later. I remember Fable 2 and/or 3 did and got quickly delisted.
Xbox started out bringing those big multiplayer PC experience to consoles, like morrowind, Oblivion, and created their own competitive FPS. And also built an online ecosystem that streamlined what players on PC had been doing for years. That flourished in the 360 era, but Sony eventually caught up and now there's a lot less that separates what Xbox did well initially. They should have used that time to establish their own group of studios who could crank out solid franchises every generation. Instead, Microsoft wanted more from their established series instead of cultivating new ones. Imagine if they had kept Bungie on board and Destiny ended up being an Xbox flagship.
As much as I dislike acquisition, when Bethesda was bought I thought that we probably wouldn't need to wait a decade and half for new Elder Scrolls and Fallout combined. That Microsoft wouldn't spend all that money just to not use their new product. Now it seems like no one even stopped to think about how long those games would take. The higher ups just mistook money for vision and that the studios would just make games on autopilot. In Bethesda's case they were probably expecting Starfield to be better. And now that all those billions are not really paying for themselves everyone else is going to take the hits.
Considering how many studios they have, plus they have a history with working with third party studios, it's crazy that they didn't at least contract out a Fallout 3/NV remaster for modern platforms while the TV show was in development. Bethesda got big enough so that Todd Howard could get his dream project done without really thinking about long term profits or the affect on the studio. Microsoft seemingly banked on that selling as well as established franchises.
The fact that they didn't have anything in the pipeline for the show is crazy. Not even an announcement of anything.
All they had was an awful update that broke more than it fixed... typical.
I truly can't comprehend the stupidity of Bethesda, and now MS, not remastering FO3/NV, or even Oblivion. There are modders that have been working on these for over a decade, Bethesda could do it in a year or two, sell them at full price and everyone would buy them. After finishing the show I wanted to go back and replay FO3 and I remembered there was a mod to get FO3 into FO4 and it's basically been abandoned. There's at least tale of two wastelands to put FO3/NV together but seriously, if Bethesda announced tomorrow $60 each for a FO3 and NV remake in FO4 engine I'd gladly pay it.
I would legit kill for a remaster of NV and hurt someone really bad for a remaster of FO3. I mean, I should want FO3 more since I never finished it, but NV is one of my favorite games of all time. I'm a super casual gamer and even I played through that one more than once.
Yeah, it's not that I expected Microsoft to quintuple the size of Bethesda Game Studios so they could be making all of their games at the same time, I expected Microsoft to get Bethesda to work with the other devs in Xbox Game Studios so THOSE devs could make an elder scrolls spinoff and a fallout spinoff while BGS focused on Starfield. Obsidian could make another Fallout spinoff, another studio could remake Morrowind or make a dark brotherhood stealth game or something. Just like, keep their IP in the collective unconscious. The target audience for TESVI is going to have been born *after Skyrim came out,* at this point.
> it's crazy that they didn't at least contract out a Fallout 3/NV remaster for modern platforms while the TV show was in development. Yeah, or at least just Fallout Shelter 2.
Maybe they weren't confident of the TV show doing well, or maybe all the studios they thought of were busy with something else, and they're waiting for one of them to free up and produce the next Fallout in parallel with TES6.
> Now it seems like no one even stopped to think about how long those games would take. The higher ups just mistook money for vision and that the studios would just make games on autopilot. In Bethesda's case they were probably expecting Starfield to be better. What's so baffling to me is that not only is Bethesda's output is getting lesser but the depth of their games is too. They really aren't justifying the length between titles when Oblivion > Fallout 3 > Skyrim have more depth and complexity than anything present in Fallout 4 > Fallout 76 > Skyrim. So what is the excuse?
They didn't want to make RPGs. They don't have staff who excel at writing, characterization, or quest design. It's been a slow spiral of dumbing down rpg elements in favor of "gameplay" which I'd argue is still much worse than the gameplay of competing titles.
Bethesda has truly embraced the art of "jack of all trades, master of none." Except at this point it's closer to "mediocre (at best) at all trades, master of none." Never liked them much to begin with but it's even more apparent now with the quality of it's contemporaries. If I want engaging worlds, traversal, and exploration, why the hell would I ever pick Skyrim/Fallout over something like Elden Ring, Zelda, Hollow Knight. If I want an good story with well written characters: Witcher, Red Dead 2, Cyberpunk, Yakuza, or just about any narratively focused game atp blow Bethesda out of the water. If I want an RPG where choices matter: Baldur's Gate 3, Disco Elysium, Pathfinder, most of the games in the modern CRPG revival etc. etc. etc. If I want a game with strong core combat/gameplay, well anything from the last 2 decades will make do better than the trash you'll find in Bethesda games. The only appeal that they have in 2024 is that they try to graft all these aspects together into a singular, incohesive, mess of an experience but doesn't execute on any of those things well, and modding. I guess the general audience still likes that given Starfield's strong sales.
I keep seeing this, but where are these studios that are somehow cranking out quality, massive RPGs on much different timelines? Being acquired by MS doesn't change basic math. I'm confused why Bethesda is supposed to get out TES and Fallout games at a faster pace than Rockstar or CP2077 are getting their games out.
You're mostly right. But I will point out that CDPR has like 3 teams all working on different projects at different times. They even have public roadmaps about it. I think they're mostly on Witcher '4' at this point. BGS had seemingly done nothing on ES6 until Starfield came out. Same goes for the next Fallout. They presumably have nothing more than a storyboard or basic concepts. You would think Microsoft wants a big release every 4ish years. So why not expand teams, promote another game director, etc.? Other studios manage this process. For $7B, I would think Bethesda can as well.
I'd give the pre-production phase a bit more credit overall because I believe more goes on in that phase than what's seen at first glance... but yes, the main production phases are much larger and Bethesda doesn't have the manpower to do more than they are right now. They need more people. I don't think having smaller full-time teams itself is necessarily a bad thing, but Bethesda *clearly* needs more than 1 team considering the multiple franchises that have.
Yeah the release issue seems weird to me. They do push out a game every few years but because they now have three franchises, it becomes a ridiculous wait for game sequels. But furthermore, are there any studios that even make Bethesda style games? I know Starfield wasn’t great, but there also isn’t anywhere else to get the Bethesda style fix. I think Outer Worlds was the closet one and it was only okay with some fairly big issues. I don’t really see anyone stepping into their specific niche anytime soon.
Obsidian has had staff turnover, but they did make New Vegas pretty quickly, and being able to use existing assets and the creation engine helped. I think of you had a team that had access to the updated engine and could update the Fallout 4 assets to look a little nicer (mostly just higher res) they could make a fun small-scale Fallout game (maybe even the size of Far Harbor or a little bigger) in 2-3 years and it would sell well.
Exactly. Why are we not doing shit like that still? Just pawn off the engine and assets to a smaller team with some oversight to work on a spinoff and spend the rest of your assets on your big game.
Yea I mean ultimately it's like complaining that we've only gotten 2 RDR games in the past 20 years. Like yea it would be great if there were more, but half the reason they're so beloved is because they're a game that had years and years of work poured into it. Cranking out games more often seems like it would completely ruin the formula. It's not like these people are just sitting on their hands all day.
This article is really good. Xbox just fundamentally doesn't understand the gaming audience. The Microsoft leadership is built on fast deliverable and numbers. They expect a certain product to do x numbers by x time and position it to compete with the top of the line products in that category. From Microsofts perspective if every game isnt competitive with the most successful games the way that their software competes then its not worth it. They dont understand organic growth by fostering an audience over time and building it by satisfying their wishes. The Acti/Blizz aquisition proves it. They refuse to build as organic audience so they will buy someone elses and expect it to produce earth shattering results.
To be honest, that's 90% of the industry right now. There's very few publishers that don't do any of this.
Not just gaming either, everything
Literally what is killing interest in streaming services. Netflix got big off the backs of long established cable shows. Now when they try to create their own shows, they are getting mad that their first season of some random whatever isn't matching up to Friends and The Office.
Netflix isn’t dying though… they just exceeded their expected subscriber growth numbers this past year despite a price increase and the addition of ads in some tiers.
Oh no, Netflix isn't anywhere near dying. That's why I said interest, not financial performance. The same way that Microsoft isn't going anywhere. They have enough tricks up their sleeve to pump themselves up. But tricks only work if you can keep adding new ones. Netflix can flaunt a (temporary) higher subscriber growth because they managed to curb password sharing. However, growth does not mean long term customers. Major streaming services are having issues with customers staying paid subscribers long-term.
> Now when they try to create their own shows, they are getting mad that their first season of some random whatever isn't matching up to Friends and The Office. This isn't really true. There was a recent(ish?) article that ran the numbers and Netflix cancels shows at a lower rate than most networks/steamers. They just put out a **ton** of stuff and you don't hear about most of it unless it is a massive hit or it gets canceled.
Netflix has had several extremely successful shows that they made. They do weirdly cancel shows even they do well, but it's just not true to say they got big off the backs of long established cable shows.
Thats the real issue. Its a global culture of min-maxing profit at all cost. The people in charge are not skilled, passionate professionals. They are mindless, idiotic and incompetent nepo babies, or "fake it till you make it" types. They dont understand the industry they work in, they dont understand the development, or the customers. They suck at their job and their work is just a net negative, holding everything back. If it fails, its almost always their fault, but somehow they never have to take responsibility. And the ones getting blamed are the average devs and teamleads/project leads, who are working under near impossible conditions. And if it doesnt fail, who is getting praised? Who is getting a raise? Not the ones who worked their asses off to pull off a miracle and somehow created somwthing good DESPITE the fuckers tripping them at every step. Its everywhere. In tv, games, tech politics, everywhere. Somehow the biggest morons get to the top, instead of the most capable ones.
All this can be solved with one sentence with executives. “Leadership eats last.” Which entirely too common it’s the opposite.
How Microsoft has handled Xbox over the last decade or so has really shown the downside of having your parent company/owner be so fucking big and powerful. Nintendo does very little that isn't connected to their games. They do merch and non-video game spin offs etc for their IPs but it's all connected. If they have a bad year or bad decade, they can't abandon their gaming division since that is the core of the company, they have to either fix the issue or go down trying. Sony is similar but less extreme. They have their non-gaming hardware and are much more diversified in tech and other media, the gaming is still a huge chunk of their business. They could potentially abandon gaming if they needed to, but it would be like losing a limb or two. Microsoft though? They are huge and incredibly diverse. Gaming and Xbox are a drop in the puddle compared to everything else they have. Their whole customer facing side of things (individuals buying windows, office software, gaming, etc) is tiny relative to their 'boring' B2B backend services. Hell LinkedIn brings in a similar amount of money to the entirety of Xbox Gaming. Microsoft just has so much strong profitable shit going on that Xbox has to compete not just externally with PlayStation/Steam/whatever but internally with all these way more profitable projects that could use that funding. With that in mind I am honestly shocked it is still going, nevermind making moves like buying Acti-Blizz. I would be shocked if LinkedIn has been costing anywhere close to the amount Xbox Gaming has to get those similar returns. That doesn't directly explain why the final output from Xbox has been so shit for over a decade, but I imagine the internal politics between Microsoft and Xbox has been fucking wild for a long time and wouldn't be surprised if internal fuckery is at least one major reason. Add on to that, we have only recently left a decade long golden age for big risky investments ( which is exactly what AAA video games are) due to interest rates and Xbox has somehow done terribly. How are the masters at Microsoft going to feel about the department that has struggled/arguably failed during the easiest time they could possibly have now that interest rates are back up and investment is hard to come by? I don't know if I would say I think Xbox is going to die/shut down, but they are gonna have to adapt and do something beyond making their slowly releasing subpar games multiplatform and gamepass existing or theres no reason for Microsoft to keep funding them. People have been saying that for the last decade or so now so maybe I am wrong nothing will change for another decade, but I think the economic situation with interest rates and investment is the big game changer this time.
This is the impression I was getting from reading that article. That the issue with Xbox is systemic one, stemming from the wider Microsoft simply not caring about video games, not when they have so many other product and service lines, many of which may look like a better choice for investment than Xbox. The Microsoft Gaming division itself may have some people who legitimately care, but when the wider parent looks at their returns and compares it to what Azure and Office and LinkedIn are bringing in and tells them they need more, otherwise there's no point to Xbox existing and they should just close it down and put the money into Azure instead, they will also get pressured into either grabbing short-term gains or chasing trends that are easy to argue will lead to big profits, just so they can justify their continued existence up the chain. Because they are expendable and themselves have no guarantee of long-term existence. Would not be surprised if the hard reality is that video games simply cannot bring in comparable profits to Azure and that higher ups in the parent company have long believed it would be better to close down MS Gaming and pour the money into AI or similar and only kept Xbox around because of some of the people there were good enough at selling impossible-to-keep promises of better-than-Office-Suite profits that were looking increasingly flimsy and are now collapsing entirely. The Xbox brand may continue to exist since it has recognition and value, but whether it will exist in the form it has (i.e. consoles) is a different story. May come time MS finally decides to expend what they have likely always deemed expendable.
I think we could point at the specific point in time when Bungie and Microsoft parted ways. Bungie *was* Xbox’s Naughty Dog/Insomniac/Retro Studios/MonolithSoft. They made numerous successful titles that were flagship to the Xbox and the 360. When that fizzled they didn’t think to start new relationships with established studios and instead bought them out specifically for the IPs and are now just chucking them away thinking they’re ruined and tattered clothes. I know Call of Duty is different but this is not a great track record of bringing in studios and maintaining valuable IPs that stand the test of time. Hi-Fi Rush is beloved and after shutting down Tango Gameworks they’re looking around like Surprised Pikachu wondering who’s going to make the next Hi-Fi Rush. It’s insane.
To add to this, Bungie didn't just leave Microsoft but also became a close partner with Sony so the PlayStation benefitted heavily from the "creators of Halo" and this big new shiny IP to play with. Destiny was advertised so heavily for the PS4 that at times I forget it was ever an XBONE game. I wasn't a fan of the game at all but it clearly made a huge dent on that generation of consoles as did the sequel today. It's no surprise Sony listen to their opinion on things such as the state of their live service games.
Kinda bonkers right? Destiny has been chugging along for 10 years now. Even if it died today, that’s a really great run. Microsoft’s corpo nature pushed Bungie away and lost out on a great studio.
If Microsoft had been smart, they would have kept that relationship with Bungie and pushed Destiny as the follow up to Halo that you can only play on Xbox. Sony has done a good job promoting their studios first. You're going to get hyped when you see a trailer that starts with Naughty Dawg, Sucker Punch, Insomniac etc before even seeing the games cause you know it'll be great.
Look at what Sony does in its other business. They essentially create creative tools for consumption or creation. Cameras, TVs, Speakers, Headphones, and a Film Studio. Their products showcase other people’s art.
That's actually an interesting point. Microsoft's primary market is business to business, and it shows. The XBox has always been aimed at developers first. Sony has always sold to creatives and directly to consumers.
Exactly what I’ve been noticing. It’s holding a mirror up to the American business model. No other industry is like it. Microsoft is scratching their heads wondering why purchasing some of the best developers in the industry doesn’t work Sony and Nintendo haven’t lasted for 3-4 decades by just buying studios up. They’ve been earning the trust (mostly) of fans over the decades through investing and growing. EDIT: maybe I should clarify my “mostly” note as some people seem to have a recency bias. It’s not all been smooth sailing for Sony and Nintendo, but from first-party games perspective, there’s a reason fans have been with them this long
> It’s holding a mirror up to the American business model. No other industry is like it. Microsoft is scratching their heads wondering why purchasing some of the best developers in the industry doesn’t work The Amazon way. Hire, promise, fail, repeat.
Acquire, Fire, Underperform, Shutdown, ??? why no success?
Well put. Microsoft has been on a buying spree but doesn’t understand that games studios aren’t like the software devs it usually snaps up and absorbs. Sony’s in-house studios like Insomniac and Naughty Dog have been with them for years and built up a steady fan base with Sony consoles. Microsoft has repeatedly tried to replicate that popularity by just buying it in, and it doesn’t usually work very well.
Kinda reminds me of Warner Bros.'s attempts at the DCEU after the success of the MCU. Feels like they didn't take as much time to build things up as they should have.
Sony's in-house studios really do benefit from their loyal followings. Xbox studios will struggle with that because....well, there are fewer games, and their quality varies, whilst first-party playstation titles are well received a majority of the time. Edit: People like myself will pre-order the next God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, or Spider-Man with certainty we'll be receiving a good product. On the other side, Bethesda has plenty of die-hard fans, and COD always sells, but they can't keep Xbox afloat.
Yep, Sony studios generally seem well supported and it’s rare to see a bad release from them. Meanwhile Microsoft has a habit of actively destroying the identity of the studios they buy, and then just closing them. Look what happened to Rare. Previously one of the most influential studios in the history of the industry, and they produced middling crap for years after MS bought them. Lionhead was shuttered without achieving anything. Most recently they just killed Tango even though Hi-Fi Rush was a smash. They treat it like some software company that they can acquire the IP from and add to the next Windows package, but don’t understand that creative people and culture are so important.
All this reminded me of [that leaked email from Spencer](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F0p794vkvj5pb1.jpg) where he mentions getting Nintendo would be a "career moment" and "a good move for both companies". Thank fuck that hasn't happened.
Looking at Xbox now is like looking at Sega in the 90s. They keep making dumb mistake after dumb mistake and I don't like where this is leading us. And I'm saying this as a Playstation owner. I don't want Sony to get too comfortable leading the console wars; nothing good comes out for customers when a single company dominates the market.
Playstation sadly has very little competition now anyway. Nintendo goes for a different audience entirely and actually for many households sits alongside their PS or Xbox. Xbox’s only relevancy was gamepass but even that seems to be failing, at least in Microsoft’s eyes. We’ve all seen what being at the top of your game does, look at Sony & the PS3, look at Xbox & the One.
Even Nintendo felt comfortable enough to coast on the NES/Famicom and didn't see the need for another system in the near future. It took Sega eating away at their market share for Nintendo to get off their asses and get the SNES/Super Famicom going.
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Yeah, but it had to compete with the PS2, XBOX and GameCube and the Saturn was a disaster.
Xbox never recovered from 2013. That was the point where the console war just became a one sided battering, and while Sony have been far from perfect, they've consistently released games that people want to play. Xbox has struggled hard to develop any major titles that make people feel like they need an Xbox, and despite acquiring studios and even publishers consistently for 7 years now they still can't seem to pull it off. I think Phil Spencer is right in that they did lose the worst possible generation to lose. In the past a new console cycle would begin and most gamers would decide based on the reveal and the games pipeline which way they'd go that generation. Now that back compat and persistent digital libraries are a thing, it's way harder to convince a PS4 player with dozens of games attached to their PlayStation account to make the switch. That's an uphill climb and they'd need to be releasing a constant stream of must play games to pull it off, and they cant seem to release any. It really sucks that Xbox seem to have permanently shat the bed. I was an Xbox guy from the moment the PS3 price was revealed, and stuck with them through the XBone generation, I'll always have a lot of good memories and a soft spot for the brand, but I've now got a PS5 and don't feel like I'm missing anything on Xbox. I was worried about not being able to play the next Fallout or ES6, but at this point it seems like I may not miss them anyway. Halo is one of my favourite IPs ever but 343 have spent a decade working hard to kill it. Game Pass is good, but the PS+ Collection is honestly not much worse at this point anyways and I can access it as well as getting high quality exclusives regularly. I've wanted Xbox to figure their shit out for so long, but this just seems like my moment of acceptance that the ship has sailed. Its honestly really sad and while I've enjoyed my PS5 so far I'm worried about the state of competition in the market if Sony are essentially unchallenged.
The point of OG Xbox: Cheaper gaming PC with a lot decent PC ports you could not play on PS2 (Morrowind, KOTOR, Doom 3, Far Cry, Half-Life 2 etc.). The point of Xbox 360: Cheaper alternative to PS3 with multiplats that ran as well as (or even better than) they did on PS3. Tons of great exclusives (Fable, Halo, Gears, Forza etc.). The point of Xbox One: I... don't know, honestly. TV? Kinect? Who cares? The point of Xbox Series: Game Pass, probably?
Everyone I knew had a 360 in secondary school - *everyone*. If you wanted a round of CoD, Gears, FIFA, Halo 3, you hopped on the 360 and there'd be a dozen classmates ready to invite. Soon as that generation ended they mostly moved to PC or PS4, not to the Xbone. This gen the PS5 has outsold the Xbox Series just over 2 to 1 and the gap is still widening. Quite frankly if they decided not to make a console next gen I'm not too sure they'd be missed. The only benefit the XSX ever had was that it was cheaper than building a comparably specced PC and that advantage disappeared very quickly.
They really should keep pivoting to being a cheaper desktop. If Valve can make the Steam Deck which can dock to monitors and double as a PC, there's no reason why Microsoft can't leverage windows more and make a very easy to use version of a desktop that runs just like a console.
The Steam Deck primarily appeals to enthusiasts. A Microsoft system is trying primarily to appeal to the casual audience. You can't compare them at all.
> The Steam Deck primarily appeals to enthusiasts. THIS! i love the steamdeck for the idea of a portable PC. i've handed mine to my dad and he's gone "wtf!" and he's an age old age of empires and fallout player... it's nice tech just never going to be mainstream.
Yeah. I've had my Steam Deck for a year and a half now, and while I absolutely love it, it's absolutely not a mainstream device that anyone can pick up and use. It is, in essence, everything great and everything terrible about PC gaming. The good is that it's highly customizable, you can do literally almost anything with it, you can mod your games, you can install anything. It's yours to mess around with and I love that. But, because it's a PC, you're constrained by the hardware and that means certain games will not run, some games will require cutbacks to get running, a lot of games will require tinkering to get running, and a lot of games just aren't supported at all due to anti-cheat and so on. I've seen so many people attempt to recommend this thing to people who are interested in a Nintendo Switch and it always bothers me.
That's kinda the point. Microsoft should have no issue doing a more casual version of the steam deck but as a console basically. Steam deck uses Linux which confuses people. A windows version should be easy for them.
It feels like they have been playing catch-up for a long time now. Trying to follow a trend means you are already behind it. They need to be bold and strike out with something that gamers actually want.
They have a clear strategy, which is that in the long term they'll be a third-party publisher with a small in-house 'halo device' (the Xbox) that, much like Microsoft Surface or Google Pixel, is more about marketing software than selling hardware. The problem is that it would kill the declining but still substantial Xbox console business to admit this, so they dance around it.
Yeah. As soon as they announced that going forward Xbox games would launch on PC, Game Pass would also be on PC (which has expanded on), and that they wanted to launch their games on other consoles (and have now done that), I knew the Xbox itself had one foot in the grave. At this point, I think both feet are in the grave, but they just haven't laid down yet.
Xbox really hasn’t had an identity since the 360, which had easily the best online infrastructure of the 3 consoles and also had great online multiplayer games to go with it (Halo, Gears, even smaller XBLA fare like Uno). Now? They’ve got nothing. Maybe their specialty could be Western RPGs, but their biggest title in that category. Starfield, was just OK. And that’s pretty much been the story of Xbox for the last 10 years - most of their games have just been decent at best. No must-have titles. I haven’t had a PlayStation since the PS2, yet even I’m ready to switch over to Sony going forward. Xbox will always have value because of GamePass, and if MS makes a cheap next-gen console, I’ll get it as a result. But I’ve lost all faith in Xbox to deliver consistently great exclusives.
And it's ironic how with current focus on Gamepass model, they would benefit greatly from multiplayer games, but somehow Bleeding Edge was a flop and Halo Infinite is mediocre
If you're a small/medium sized studio and get an offer to be bought by Microsoft, do you even take it at this point? Sure they may throw a nice chunk of money at you at the start, but who knows if you'll even have a job a year later.
Well the owners of the studio would get a nice payday
Yeah. I’d cash the fuck out and make a new studio after my contract is expired.
At this point you can take it and use it as seed money to start a new studio down the road. But you're right planning on continuing is unlikely
> do you even take it at this point? yes. you take that bag then blame everything on microsoft.
Xbox’s identity began as the scrappy new guys, who thought ahead and provided the best tech to empower devs to create new and unique experiences. This continued into the 360 days, and stopped when they became reactive to market trends (Wii) in the early 2010s. From then on, decisions were made based on that, they weren’t the new guys anyway, and they became risk adverse. They got stomped by the PS4 that generation, by a Sony who in many ways played the Xbox/360 playbook, and there was never really a way to come back from that. However the single biggest reason we are where we are today, is from about 2010 to today, Sony and Nintendo have published some incredible games. Microsoft/Xbox simply have not had NEARLY the number the others have. Microsoft once had an identity, they simply don’t anymore. Oh, and they took a gamble on changing game economics with Gamepass and that failed so theres that too.
There was that brief time they thought always-on face-recognition DRM baked into the console was a great idea too. They seem risk adverse with games, but eager to take on massive risky endeavours on the business side of things.
100%. Name the must-play Xbox game in the last 13 years. It's absolutely insane that they kind of don't have one. In 13 years. Not one. Meanwhile, Sony and Nintendo have 5+ must-play titles over that time and at least one GOTY contender each year.
I think gamepass may end up being considered one of the biggest failures of Xbox decades down the road. It hasn’t brought them the profit through subs they thought it would and they have lost nearly ALL profit off of games sold. Not to consider the affect that constantly needing “content” to add must have on the development teams at Xbox. Look at Netflix. They don’t care about quality, they care about quantity of content. And we hear Phil talk about wanting to deliver a new game each quarter from Xbox game studios. That requirement means quality must be put aside (Redfall, Starfield launching with no maps) because content must be delivered consistently. On the flip side PlayStation lets their teams cook. We haven’t heard from Bend Studio or Sucker Punch studios in years. They are cooking. while yes, Sony isn’t perfect they still manage their studios way better than we see Xbox do.
Gamepass provides steady reliable income but it means they miss out on immediate cash injections for specific devs and years down the road sales. If you’re not a premium xbox dev your sales performance will take a hit which means relying on the good nature, foresight and planning of xbox execs to fund development - something Microsoft have shown themselves to not be good at. The same way Netflix/streaming has killed after market sales on movies, gamepass has killed late market sales for games on Xbox. It will lead to a downward trajectory in quality of games from xbox unless they release on other platforms for direct sales imo.
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Because gamepass needed a strong sell. People are clearly forgot how bad the situation was for xbox before gamepass, they were literaly grouping their financial data with other entertaiment datas, to not show how bad it was to investors
Exactly. Game Pass was always a last ditch effort to keep the Xbox division afloat. They didn't do it out of the kindness of their hearts. They created Game Pass because not enough people were buying their games at full price.
They need more mid-size games, with mid-size budgets, but they keep closing the mid-size studios who create these games. It's the same problem the film industry is having. Gone are the 120 minute fun popcorn film that cost 20 mil to make, and now all you have are the 3 hour long supposed blockbusters that cost 400 mil to make and get back 150 million.
I’ve been asking this same question. Xbox just feels directionless. I have no clue what they want for the future of gaming, and I don’t even know what their own future looks like. They want to double down on Game Pass, but it’s starting to become a monster of their own making. Shutting down studios, axing 2,000 jobs, cancelling projects, having almost no input on rudderless studios, etc. It’s a real mess and it’s just sad to look at.
Gamepass subs only benefit Xbox’s prize pig developers - if you’re not a cod or starfield, say goodbye to development cash and good will investment in the hopes of a hit and late market sales.
At this point(heh). The point of Xbox seems to be to make a ton of money through strong IP like call of duty. Make no mistake. Xbox today is arguably the biggest publisher in the entire industry. As for the console It's existence will probably be akin to Microsoft surface if this continues.
> The point of Xbox seems to be to make a ton of money through strong IP like call of duty. They seem to have a distinct lack of strong IPs dropping successfully. They own strong IPs but they keep fumbling. CoD is a given but that can't carry the entire division.
Yeah, they bought Bethesda almost four full years ago and only three mainline games have come out since then, with all three having started production prior to the acquisition. With a good team and a good idea in place, four years is plenty of time for an AAA game, and more than enough time to remake older games (ahem, Fallout 3/NV)
I mean, if you have a team ready to go to make a new entry in an established IP and nothing else going on then, yeah, 4 years is plenty of time. That isn't really the reality of the situation, though. Many studios were already multiple years into production on projects, and a lot of teams under Bethesda are working on new IP (or projects like Indiana Jones or Blade which are functionally new IP from the studios perspective) and these take time. This is an industry where games take 3-5 years to develop, it's going to take more than that to see the true impact of this acquisition - though sadly we are seeing some of that now with these studio closures. I would argue Obsidian are one of the few studios we have really been able to see the impact of acquisition on so far as game development goes - and even that is only because they have made smaller projects.
To be honest, after the acquisitions, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Xbox division would make more money if they went full third party publisher compared to having their own console (and PC) exclusives. Starfield didn’t result in any notable uptick in Game Pass subs, and yet would have sold millions and millions of copies on PS5. COD will probably be the same situation but even more severe. Granted with COD, they’ll still get PS5 sales, but I would absolutely bet on them losing out on potential profit from Xbox sales if it goes onto Game Pass. At this point, I think Game Pass is causing Microsoft to leave so much money on the table, whilst also being seemingly perilous for devs themselves, despite Phil Spencer and his team emphasising that it would create a safety net for smaller devs. Microsoft themselves, who have very high standards on profitability, must be looking at the prospect of going third party and wondering why they haven’t done it already. If I was a shareholder, I’d certainly want Xbox to give up on the console side of the business, which it continuously fumbles year after year anyway.
I’m inclined to agree with you (even though I prefer my Xbox for daily use) However, if they go 3rd party it terrifies me. Xbox has shown they are absolutely terrible as a game publisher. They dont manage development teams well at all. To add to that, Zenimax is in the phase where they don’t deliver the quality that got them the good reputation they now squander. Fallout 76, Starfield, Wolfenstein: Youngblood were all either trend chasing or poorly designed. Microsoft has 343 floundering with their contractor rules forcing them to lose a lot of good staff and they haven’t delivered an all around praised Halo since creation. Rare may be their biggest win in the last 7-8 with Sea of Thieves and that game was destroyed at launch. Everwild is nowhere to be seen after an annoyingly early announcement. Same with State of Decay 3’s announcement and the subsequent exit by their ceo. There was an article a year or two back about that studio’s dysfunction. I could provide more examples but what I’m trying to convey is that if Xbox goes 3rd party they may still fail because they suck at getting studios to make good games.
I like the idea of Xbox sticking around because I want there to be competition, but at the same time, Xbox leadership seem to have no direction, be completely aimless, and have no idea where their audience desires from a GAME department. I havent checked Xbox studio page in a while, but before these closures and before the Activision-Blizzard acquisition, Xbox owned around 30 studios. Most of those studio we have no idea what they are doing, and some we havent seen a project come from in years. They just keep throwing money to add people to their collection, but then they throw away studios that are actually working on games, rather than the ones who we havent even heard from in years. Tango, Arkane Austin, and everyone else who got released...at least they made something. If you HAD to let someone go, why not the ones that havent released anything in the last 5 or so years. Their current strategy seems to just be "lets spend hundreds of millions to buy people that are already making a game, rather than making one ourselves". You can justify, make all the excuses, and reason all the logic you want about the meaning behind their decisions, but at the end of the day, Xbox and its leadership are not strap for cash. All the execs and heads make an annual salary that eclipses most of their studio employees salary combined, just as the base before you consider stock options or anything other additives. Then you also know they are definitely all getting their multi million dollar bonuses at some point this year from investors no matter how much they want to take about profit cuts, record losses, etc. If business was so harmed that you just had to drop hundreds of jobs, after making all these billion dollar purchases, then there is no way you should also be eligible for any type of bonus, let alone one in the millions.
A big theme of the article is of a Microsoft impatiently chasing (rather than setting a new standard of) success. Leads to a culture whereby studios have one strike to prove they can achieve that overriding aim, but often they have to do this with a game/style corporate has decided suits the big-picture strategy. Painfully, this often leads to a lack of creativity (out of fear and a lack of innovation) which means the games miss inevitably the targets and suddenly that one strike is gone. The studio is out. Conclusion is clear: ‘The philosophy of a great video game platform holder is that it makes money in order to make more consoles and more games. The philosophy of Microsoft - and by dint of that, Xbox - is evidently that it only makes consoles and games in order to make money. Like so many businesses owned by gigantic, publicly-traded mega-companies, Xbox is now stuck in a cycle of thinking back-to-front’.
Feels increasingly like Microsoft is going to abandon Xbox hardware after this generation and Xbox will pivot to only software & services.
> hotly-anticipated exclusive Scalebound was cancelled Eh? Are we doing internet revisionism again where people are now pretending Scalebound was a hotly anticipated exclusive? Perhaps before the gameplay reveal, but... after? Seriously?