Resetting Xbox(news.xbox.com) |
Resetting Xbox(news.xbox.com) |
- The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter - The problem according to them is profit margin - around 150-160 million
So first of all, they are big! Secondly they are not at a loss. They just have a "thin, non-growing margin". So to fix all this they are trimming down, so they can "return to growth" (which I think is ridiculous).
Some points -
- They are huge business even now - 5 billion per quarter revenue is no joke
- They did not have to buy all those studios
- They looked at Netflix, and wanted the sweet monthly subscription cash stream
- Then they did not have to give away popular games day one on Game Pass
- And finally, they did not have to raise Game Pass prices to improve the profit margins. Of course, consumers pulled out.
- Once again, short term vision, crazy decisions, bad spending spree and a constant need to "make numbers go up" and who has to pay for all this?
With the money being spent on AAA titles these days, they are not going to make any money without increasing the price of Game Pass majorly. The big price bump they quickly backtracked on was an attempt to make Game Pass somewhere closer to being profitable.
> So first of all, they are big! Secondly they are not at a loss. They just have a "thin, non-growing margin". So to fix all this they are trimming down, so they can "return to growth" (which I think is ridiculous).
How is that profit margin distributed though? King (Candy Crush etc) and Mojang (Minecraft) are specifically called out as money-makers, it's possible that they're carrying the majority of profits while everything else is a dud:
> We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio; in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested.
As an example, Double Fine (one of the studios being chopped) has released 2 games since 2021, Keeper (191 peak player count on steam) and Kiln (163 peak players); these would be flops even for a normal indie game, for a studio getting Microsoft salaries those are enormous flops.
Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. It's more art than engineering and they can barely manage the engineering with all the intervention from marketing and HR in their products.
To me it's mostly unfortunate that this has left PlayStation with no direct competition because they've noticed and leaned into the not-giving-a-shit attitude after they had such a great console generation with the PS4. It's kinda crazy that we're already almost due for a new console generation and there's very little appetite for new consoles after this generation where it feels like it barely got started. And between graphics almost certainly at the point of diminishing returns, and hardware prices like they are right now, I can't imagine there's a market to sell something more capable than current gen consoles. The industry is in a very strange state.
It is neither possible nor desirable to own every great independent studio. We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio
> We can't afford it, and it's a bad investment anyway
But they've already spent the money. They spent about 70 billion on activision blizzard. That was and still is an outrageous amount of money that will take fever to break even let alone turn a profit.
But at the same time I appreciate the candor of Asha saying that the corporate management are to blame and letting studios go back to being independent where possible.
Phil Spencer really messed up. Everyone in the industry knew Microsoft were making bad calls trying to dig themselves a hole with gamepass and simultaneously digging a hole with their acquisition spree. I’m glad that Asha is laying this bare even though it sucks to be brought in as the hatchet person.
This is an example of the glass cliff and I’m hoping she can help right the ship. I think they need to split to a wholly owned subsidiary rather than be in Microsoft proper, and I expect that to be announced at the Q1 investor meetings.
Phil really dug their hole deep. Microsoft themselves encouraged it. It’s been a decade of sheer incompetence at the highest level so I’m hoping they can right this without taking out half the industry in their wake.
She has done everything but focus on delivering games (product).
b) She's been in the role for 4ish months, not years.
xbox-specific issues aside, this proposes an interesting view of the future of work.
Call of Duty alone lost $300 million: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/04/microsofts-game-pass-...
I look forward to the source code leaks.
Yeah, that's a bullshit number. It's like when people provide piracy counts as lost direct sales, a lot of people will download something for free, those same people won't always pay full price if they can't download it for free.
I downloaded a TON of games from Game Pass, played <1hr, and uninstalled. Without GP I would have just never bought the game.
South of Midnight took 7 years to make and cost $100 million to make... yet sold hardly any copies and I'm not even sure who they were trying to make it for.
Meanwhile you have studios like Sandfall and Warhorse pumping out games on a fraction of the budget that ship millions (and imho, make better games).
Expedition 33 was on game pass and still sold 8 million copies.
I mean, if you're assuming that Microsoft had a fully hands-off approach to managing these companies after buying them, then sure. It's not clear to me that you can make a compelling claim about whether the issues were from the bottom or the top just by looking at the final outputs.
This reads like something from The Office.
Interest in physical media has actually been on the upswing, and, with Sony announcing their plans to abandon physical media, it feels like MS has a chance be the "good guys" like what Sony did to MS when MS threatened to ruin physical media prior to the Xbox One release.
However, I'm expecting Microsoft to simply follow Sony's path, because I think they are already going down a path that favors digital-only, and I also think they just don't care to distinguish themselves. It seems like Xbox's claim to fame for the past few years is "It has game pass, and it can play a lot of the same games PlayStation can."
Good old times. The last time I tried to buy something on Xbox it fails miserable with multiple cryptic error messages - mostly around my credit card.
No problem though to biy the game on my mac via browser and then after a few more settings actually showed up on my xbox.
> Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions will return to management and transition to independent studios with their IP, catalog, and runway for their next games. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have entered terms to join new ownership with funding to complete and grow Senua and State of Decay 3. In France, Arkane’s management is beginning required consultation with its Works Council to review potential strategic options.
I want XBOX to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day
Seriously, I cannot fathom why you would say this. Innumeracy? Narcissistic delusion? Stealth launch for a new industrial human cloning project?
But they kept increasing the cost of Game Pass with no new features, the platform has seemed stagnant, and honestly I can't tell you why my Series X is better than my Xbox One. Literally I don't see a difference. I'm sure there is one but as a user I really didn't feel like it was a big step up. I bought it because I had every other Xbox and it seemed like the next logical step.
That coupled with most games feeling like lootboxes wrapped in just enough of a game to justify calling it one, at higher and higher price points, all while trying to get more money after they've taken your $70/$80 for the base game. Oh wait, you bought the poor-person $70 version? You really need to the Ultra Collectors Edition Gold Special Release Version for $120. Oh also, make sure you are buying the season pass...
Meanwhile I buy games on my steam deck and/or from indie developers for a max of $30 and get way more gameplay/fun that the "AAA" games (which have largely sucked IMHO).
I'm over here playing Mass Effect 1-3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and other games OVER A DECADE AGO. They are the only games not completely ruined by lootboxes, always-online BS, or trying to sell you a shell of a game with extras you have to buy [0]. I was excited for Starfield (Skyrim in space!!) but it was a complete bust. After spending, quite literally, 1000's of hours in Skyrim (and buying and rebuying the Anniversary/Special/Collector's edition enough times to be embarrassing) I could not get excited about Starfield and stopped playing after a few hours. The new Halo was meh, I played through it and the open world was somewhat cool but I guess they wanted to do seasons of new content and I have zero interest in that. Give me a solid single player game, that's all I want. I cancelled Game Pass after realizing I was paying an absurd amount of money to play a single game (Deep Rock Galactic).
I think I'll stick to my Steam Deck which I enjoy way more than my Series X.
[0] Yes, Skyrim/Fallout had expansion content but it's tame compared to most games today.
Not even national security institutions operate like this
Microsoft cuts 4,800 Jobs, Half from Xbox division
I haven't bought a console since the Xbox360 and Wii. But I have a friend who still games pretty heavily and is low income. He can not afford the latest PS5 and is still on a PS4. We were talking the other day and he said "I love consoles because they are simpler and cheaper than a PC but now I can't afford either. The graphics aren't getting much better so what am I paying for? What happened to $400-$500 consoles? Remember when consoles were 200-300?" Of course those last few prices were 90/00's but I agree, the cost of a new console is quite insane for not much gain.
And even then, already the PS4/XbOne generation added stratification making it more "PC-like" with the XbOne-X having heftier hardware (not to mention it being PC-like compared to PS1/PS2/PS3/Xbox360), that then continued with the Xbox-series-X and Xbox-series-S.
Consoles aren't specialized hardware for "magic experiences" and everyone knows this, it's just another "device" that happens to be connected to a TV with a controller where people are gatekeeping software availability.
Compared to: - PlayStation 5 - PlayStation 5 Pro
or: - Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Switch OLED - Nintendo Switch Lite
Anyone who's literate in English (and knows that OLED means "nicer screen") can immediately rank the PlayStations and Switches into "good, better, best". But with the Xbox, how is anyone supposed to know which one is which? Is the Series version better or worse? Is it a whole new generation, with whatever backwards-compatability implications that a new generation brings? I need a chart and I probably still won't be able to tell you if you ask me in a month.
Also one must consider the likes of Hideo Kojima who can sell ~7 million copies of a new IP that is effectively a cinematic Walking Simulator as an Auteur acrimoniously splitting from the traditional studio system.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 also shipped over 5.4 million copies as a AA, in what is also arguably an interactive cinematic on-rails RPG.
God of war is plainly movie on rails compared to E33
Nintendo also shipped Metroid Prime 4, with massive delays and unsatisfied customers, following the same "interactive Hollywood" philosophy which disappointed Metroid fans.
Same thing goes for Star Fox, a remake of a remake of a remake, with poor visual and dialogue choices.
And meanwhile, the same silent push for digital-only, forced upgrades and the like...
I'm not convinced that Metroid at least really is a great data point for "Nintendo is ruining things in-house". From Wikipedia[1]:
> Nintendo announced Metroid Prime 4 with a teaser trailer during the Nintendo Direct presentation at E3 2017, and announced that Retro Studios, who developed the previous main Prime games, would not be involved.[15][16] In February 2018, Eurogamer reported that Prime 4 was being developed by Bandai Namco Studios in Japan and Singapore.
> In January 2019, the Nintendo EPD manager Shinya Takahashi announced that development had restarted under Retro with Tanabe remaining as producer. Takahashi said the previous studio had not met Nintendo's standards and that the decision to restart was not taken lightly.[21] Shortly after, Nintendo reevaluated Prime 4 after noticing changing attitudes towards open-world games, but maintained the direction as the development was already taking longer than planned. The team ignored new developments in action and shooting games to prioritize the adventure elements.
There's a perspective where this is almost the exact opposite of the problem being discussed about Microsoft. They chose to let it get developed externally, suffered delays, and by the time they moved it back in-house, the ecosystem had moved from under them. They probably could have chosen to rethink everything and delay it further, but they also arguably could have avoided having to make that call by keeping it in-house and letting the studio who made the previous entries work on it from the start and landing it in time that the original vision still fit what people wanted.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroid_Prime_4:_Beyond#Develo...
A remake (1) of a remake (2) of a remake (3)
(1) A remake (Switch 2 Starfox, a remake of StarFox 64)
(2) StarFox 64 (A remake of Super Nintendo's StarFox)
(3) ??? I don't know what the 3rd level of remake you mention is, but I'm curious!
Not only that, but RAM/GPU/SSD prices going up so much recently (which is especially jarring for SSDs, which for like a decade had been getting more affordable; I bought a 120 GB SATA SSD in 2012 for around $100, and I was able to buy a 1 TB m.2 one for around the same price a few years ago) is starting to equalize pricing for PC gaming. In 2022, the initial Steam Deck launched for just $400, and it continued to be offered at that price for a few years, which made it cheaper than the Switch 2 launch price.
I feel like if I were a console manufacturer, I would be trying to figure out a way to take advantage of that. Other than price (previously), the other obvious selling point of PC gaming is more control over your system, so there could be an opening to try to lure away wayward PC gamers with some changes that give them a bit more control on the console. I agree with you that I can't really imagine Microsoft doing this though.
I doubt that they will go back to where Sony are now.
I agree. However, I do think they would get some positive attention (and some accompanying sales) if they were to backtrack and announce a console more like the 360.
It feels doable if they care to do it. Physical media should still be viable for holding all the game data for a while longer. Blurays can manage up to 128 GB, and I think the average game install size is ~60GB right now, giving most games some room to grow.
The biggest issue with a strategy like that is that they're, like you said, pushing digital-only hard already, and they're also trying to save money, so the idea of spending more money to make future consoles with disk drives, and to make disks, is unlikely to appeal to them.
It is a shame, though, because it seems like the Xbox 360 will have been widely viewed as peak Xbox until the end of Xbox.
1. a long dragged out distraction over decades trying to make it work
2. a painful but quick 40B write down and the ability to refocus the company on better projects tomorrow
.. then they are, quite rightly imo, going to pick #2. In fact I would assume this going to be the next announcment.
A few years into the generation they updated the Xbox One, putting it into a smaller form factor called the Xbox One S, and at the same time released a spec bump model called the Xbox One X. I don't believe any of these are still available for purchase.
The new generation has the smaller/lower-powered Xbox Series S, and the higher-specced Xbox Series X. Leaving the overall generation with seemingly no name, other than "Xbox Series" I guess?
But yes, the names are terrible because S and X both refer to consoles from last gen and current gen.