alt Hacker NewsI fundamentally do not understand the direction of Xbox. Microsoft seems to lack the commitment to any strategy and seems unwilling to wait for investments to pay off before trying to cut perceived losses.
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My guess is that Asha Sharma is re-enacting the plot of the film The Producers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Producers_(1967_film)
While I agree, a confusing part for non gamers, is to differentiate Xbox, the games console, from Xbox, the business unit, from Xbox, the Microsoft games publishing business.
Only Xbox, the games console, is having a bad time, the publishing part is doing great with movie licenses, and all the studios that belong to Microsoft, regardless where they sell their games.
XBox was fine up to the Xbox One -- that's when the XBox was co-oped for some broader push for the living room computing and broadcast television integration right at the time this was on the out.
The next failure was Xbox Live. The video game market is a hit-based market with big tent-pole franchises doing large launches. For a modern example, look at the hype around GTA6. Launches sold games and exclusives sold consoles. Microsoft put huge game launches on Xbox Live for their relatively low monthly cost and lost millions on those launches.
They also bought a bunch of game studios which is a terrible strategy for a console maker. Meta made the same mistake with the Quest.
It's was never the lack of commitment to a strategy -- it was just having the wrong strategy to begin with.
As someone who was a die hard Xbox fan since the original all the way up to the One X… Microsoft are just terrible. Getting rid of exclusives, constantly focusing on the wrong things, it’s just a mess. Terrible leadership.
My “hot take”: they’re going the direction of Disney/Marvel hybrid. Have a few handful of IPs that are extremely successful, milk it out with licensing deals in every vertical (toys, games, merch, cross-dlcs, books, etc). They’re just missing theme parks. The actual game development portion would probably be very small.
I think they genuinely don't know what to do other than to keep the lights on. The original goal for the Xbox program was to take back American presence in gaming, which they achieved, but shutting down Xbox will undo that with Nintendo still around and Chinese phone games making banks.
Saw an xbox/ikea ad at ikea the other day and was just very confused. (master chief with a ikea wrench)
it's easy. imagine a bunch of execs with kids. the execs don't play any video games. their kids aren't allowed any screentime. okay, now they're trying to make a product whose primary audience is Bart Simpson. do you see how that leadership is completely disconnected from their audience?
they already heading towards that direction but unfortunately AI happen
so they switch course midway to focus at AI
There are rumours that Microsoft is internally demanding 30% margin from Xbox, and the gaming industry simply doesn't operate with those types of margins long term and it's not even in a position to dictate industry pricing.
It's like the entire company is only satisfied with being #1.
The whole thing is very confused and lacks consistency. The latest rumours are they are going to break up its Game Pass subscription offering so there are different subscriptions for multiplayer, cloud, games, etc. Isn't that the opposite of an effective subscription strategy?