We’ve almost reached the end of the 1st half of 2024, and Xbox has had more studio closures than first party game releases in the year so far.
At this rate in a couple years there’ll be nothing left of all those studios they bought recently.
That’s by design. Force your opposition to sell, bankrupt them and write off the loses. Shrink the industry and force players to sign up for your subscription services.
I’m not a fan, but it’s hard to see this wasn’t their plan from the get go
The industry historically hasn’t shrunk when studios close like this. There just ends up being more bespoke studios all over the world with former developers from those studios.
It seems weird for a platform holder to do this.
They also now own all of the IP those studios created.
Sure, but what good is an IP if you can’t generate new products to attract and keep users?
What really gets me, and this touches on your comment, is that the execs said that they need to have the teams make what they specialize in. And then they turn around and force all the studios to make games that not at all anything they’ve ever made before.
They don’t care about being a platform holder
I guess you can do that when you own Windows.
The sad part is this might actually end up being a net positive in the long run. Their two biggest acquisitions were Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard, one company that has started their decline and another that is deep into it.
Microsoft pissing away $100B to buy these companies only to turn around and kill them 5-10 years later will end up breaking up the gaming conglomerates that have killed the western games industry. The only sad part is all the people that will lose their jobs and all the classic IP that will be squandered.
In a way, in Activision/Blizzard’s case, it seems more like it slightly postponed their death.
Tango Gameworks, however, was murdered.
Enhance, embrace, extinguish. That’s the Microsoft way, their success has always and will always be built off the backs of others they’ve fucked over.
kinda hard to make video games if you keep laying off the people who make video games…
my heart goes out to those in the industry going through all this crap, man
In just four years, they have lost Toys for Bob (developer of Spyro Reignited and Crash 4), Arkane Austin (Prey 2017), and Tango (Evil Within, Hi-Fi Rush). I wish I had the money to casually buy some great dev studios, including the makers of a GOTY contender, and casually kill them off a few years later.
I know they are in panic mode right now, but I honestly don’t know what their plan is at this point. I doubt even they know. Watching the situation from the outside, it’s almost comical how MS has mismanaged everything for years. I live in Europe and I’ve never seen Xbox marketed anywhere. GamePass is supposedly their priority, and barely anyone I know who is interested in gaming knows that it even exists. The whole deal with the service was delivering first party games day one, yet failed to deliver anything worth buying four years into the new generation, while most of what they actually released was already in the works prior the acquisition. They bought dozens of studios, and mismanaged every single one of them. Fuck, they couldn’t even settle on the cover for their game cases for half a year when their new box released.
The only good thing out of this debacle is that people have finally realized how utterly incompetent Phil Spencer is. I remember the days when fanboys were parroting his lies and kept talking about how “Phil is a gamer just like us”, just because he showed up on the stage in a shitty t-shirt. Too bad it took xbox fucking dying for them to realize, but I guess it’s better later than never.
Hey, quite a few people bought Game Pass for a month to try out Cities: Skylines 2, because it was quite a lot cheaper than the game itself (and considering the poor state the game was released in, probably not much more than a month of replay value anyway)
Its almost like none of you remember microsoft in the dot com era.
Did no one just intuitely understand this was going to be a consequence of aquiring blizzard-activision?
In other news trees of green
Trees of green what, is the real question.
Did they just want to buy the IPs? Why throw Billions at video game development, only to cut out the development part?
Microsoft has always been more than happy to make the market smaller by buying the competition and discontinuing their products shortly after. For some reason people didn’t think Xbox would do the same?
I’m not entirely sure but wasn’t this Bill Gates’s business strategy back in the 90s or so?
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish in 1998, Bill Gates stated: “One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people’s browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities. Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destory [sic] Windows.”
Not just Gates, but all higher ups at Microsoft think this way. It’s kind of naive to think Xbox would be different IMHO.
Business plan? You mean capitalism? They are just participating in the system.
One could argue to get exclusivity of said IPs for their subscription service. They haven’t pulled the trigger yet, it’s possible they have aborted the plan entirely. I wonder if they even know what they’re doing.
I really hope this bites them if the industry goes less IP-centric. We’ve gotten a slow build of “From the developers of…” fan hype, and I don’t think a big “2” matters as much as it used to.
Elden Ring, Overwatch, Cyberpunk, Genshin Impact, were all technically “new franchises” but built insane followings off either good marketing or high knowledge of their studio. So now all MS can do is copy the death path of their parrot studios like 343 Industries and The Coalition, which were built to try to tentpole their old franchises made by better studios.
Corporate Greed ruining everything and MS having no real direction.
Welcome to Capitalism
