I think more people talk about MS shuttering the whole thing down rather than straight up selling. Who even would want to buy XBox? The brand has lost most of its value. Obviously, some studios and IPs under it are absolutely still quite precious, but the overarching ecosystem just is not.

I have no idea what the big picture is at Xbox anymore but I don't see why Microsoft would have green lit the new deal with kojima productions if they planned to spin Xbox off.

Doesn't add up but what does anymore I guess.

They simply wasted way too much money buying studios in that land war with Sony. It’s now becoming apparent that most of those studios were significantly overvalued with their productive years behind them. Now here is where MS stands, and much of that investment isn’t going to be worth much. Who wants a studio that can’t make a game in less than 9 years? MS is trying to get them back to productive.

OnasiI think more people talk about MS shuttering the whole thing down rather than straight up selling. Who even would want to buy XBox? The brand has lost most of its value. Obviously, some studios and IPs under it are absolutely still quite precious, but the overarching ecosystem just is not.

I bet that lots of the big players would love to get Xbox, instant foothold in lots of markets, and all it takes is a few "must have" games before people come flooding back

another saudi deal incoming?

Nutella is trying really hard to turn Microsoft into new IBM, so selling Xbox would make sense...

Personally, I think they are crazy if they do that... Not because Xbox have a some extra value, but because their withdrawal from gaming will have even worse impact than their withdrawal from mobile arena.

And don't get me started about Microsoft stock price, it is about as useful for prediction as GDP for countries is...

bad1080another saudi deal incoming?

Hardly, they are broke...

'What is an Xbox'?

:roll: :roll: :roll:

Nobody knows

Helix becoming Surface Pro Gaming (brand transfer to MS in order to not have a marketing spending budget, launches with any other MS Surface product) and pushing harder on the Game Pass not to lose relevance, but to rival GeForce Now and Luna is my bet where these guys are headed.

Lack of focus is killing them over and over.

Whatever you do, it takes time - and they one day want to buy all game studios, next day want to battle GeForce Now, tomorrow... Who knows.

It was NET, then UWP, then Xamarin, then WinUI 1, 2, 3, xyz...

And of course, over time all these became failures... P

Aleksandar_038Lack of focus is killing them over and over.

Whatever you do, it takes time - and they one day want to buy all game studios, next day want to battle GeForce Now, tomorrow... Who knows.

It was NET, then UWP, then Xamarin, then WinUI 1, 2, 3, xyz...

And of course, over time all these became failures... P

Its not just lack of focus. Its a focus on the wrong things.

We see the same shit going on at other big publishers like EA and Ubi. A huge part of the operation, and that even permeates the individual studios and the work they do, has absolutely fuck all to do with actual gaming content.

These companies are busy making monetary clusterfucks, dark pattern fueled income streams, recurring income streams, etc. That's where the focus is. So they ARE focused, for sure. They are laser focused on extracting money from their players.

All of them have forgotten that the basic ingredient that's required to even GET players, is to actually have content players can't go without. THAT is why Microsoft took shortcuts: buying Actiblizz for CoD and Diablo and the rest, buying Minecraft to capture the kids, etc. They thought they 'could own the content people play' and then proceed to strangle said people with a continuous stream of.... nothing new, but everything they already had.

Its the same paradigm as what Guillemot has been caught saying to investors about AC when he released Unity: 'We'll give players more of what they already have and want'. And so it was. And now Ubisoft and Microsoft are both struggling.

Meanwhile, the gaming industry at large is posting record YoY revenue numbers, despite wars, component crises, and price increases. These suckers are on a downward spiral, indie devs are up and up, and everything that's NOT a big posterchild sequel is rapidly gaining in popularity while the market also diversifies further and further. We get more platforms, more content can be played on various devices, etc. If there is one key take away of all this: content is everything. And all the fluff around it is a capital waste, gamers understand all those platforms are just middle men and they will find the shortest path to the experience they seek. Take note of the rise of emulation, too.

Soon there won't be a gap between mobile and PC anymore, and that's when it gets really funny for all these corporations trying to buy the gaming world and pocket the money. They ain't pocketing much, I predict, as every gamer or dev can create a killer app in an afternoon: all it takes is having an original idea and executing it right. Gaming has been democratized at this point and the genie won't get back in the bottle. We own this market already, as consumers, we direct it, and we adjust it. The communities are super powerful. You will own nothing and be happy? Haha. Think again :) We already own it all and are laughing our asses off as corpos keep trying to take it away. We move faster and break things faster, too, and have been documented breaking company brands if they don't listen to us, the most recent casualty clearly being XBOX.

Vayra86'What is an Xbox'?

:roll: :roll: :roll:

Nobody knows

🫴🦋
is this an xbox?

Vayra86Meanwhile, the gaming industry at large is posting record YoY revenue numbers, despite wars, component crises, and price increases. These suckers are on a downward spiral, indie devs are up and up, and everything that's NOT a big posterchild sequel is rapidly gaining in popularity while the market also diversifies further and further. We get more platforms, more content can be played on various devices, etc. If there is one key take away of all this: content is everything. And all the fluff around it is a capital waste, gamers understand all those platforms are just middle men and they will find the shortest path to the experience they seek. Take note of the rise of emulation, too.

Ironically, the legacy studios were warned repeatedly by smaller studios and indie groups not to ignore the fanbases.

Larian Studios drew flak for stating that studios don't need to be massive to make a good game, and that it's ridiculous that with all those bodies, those studios can't make a game (mostly) within budget, (mostly) on time, and (definitely) memorable for fans, or for that matter, make multiple games covering different IP in that same timeframe it took them to make Baldur's Gate 3.

Expedition 33's team also mentioned that they kept their team small to help keep focus on making a good game first. Sure, they had some outside investment, but that was thanks to one of them being very good at negotiating and leveraging what already solid base they had.

And even more recently, Pocketpair stated they only hire individuals who have at least 100 hours of gaming on Steam, because they're a gaming studio first and publishing studio second, and want to make and support fun games by gamers in touch with the gaming community. They also kept their heads down during the lawsuits and ended up winning against the giant, Nintendo.

And on a wider field, while there's been a massive collapse in Western gaming studios with all the layoffs, Eastern/Asian studios have continued to slowly climb up in hiring, as they continue to focus on gamers first, and have also restricted team bloat and CEO payouts.

Corporations are presented as some epitome of efficiency but truth is that moat of them are horribly ineffeicient.

So, once some studio stops being small studio and start to be corporation, or part of corporation, efficiency dwindles, focus is lost and everything goes sideways...

You think Nestle or Dupont are terribly efficient? No, they simply have monopolistic positions that allow them to suffocate competition... Otherwise, they are terribly inefficent corpos...

However, gaming is speciifc, and on this front, size doesn't matter much...