Original report comes from the paywalled The Information, that they tried to sell to private equity for $100B-$150B, but that it was short lived and fell through. This backs what a lot of us have been thinking based on the moves Sharma has been making, that they track with a sell-off of the Xbox brand.
100 billion for xbox brand? Why is it priced so high? It’s not worth that much. 😏
Complete idiots working at Microsoft. Sharma clearly has no real interest in gaming and together with her management, she will drive it further into the ground before selling off the remains. As a lifelong PlayStation owner, I welcomed the competition as Sony only got their act together when XBox excelled. If the console disappears, Sony will take their customers for a ride
Sony has clearly already begun the ride and it’s been a rough few months already
Sony began the ride a long time ago. They could not give a fuck about consumers. I dont think many people will buy the next console generation anyway, considering we are looking at $1000+ price tags.
The idea of Xbox being sold or spun off has been around at least since Satya took over. He’s very business focused. I’m guessing “play” isn’t a big part of his life.
I’m sure behind the scenes Phil convinced Satya that he could make Xbox a viable business on par with Windows, and was given a deadline to make it happen. He was partially successful but never got it to the line item necessary, partly because Windows kept growing too, and faster. And, unfortunately for Phil, Xbox Series failed to sell. I’m guessing there won’t be another console generation.
Satya sees it as a failed experiment, I’d bet, and now it’s time to get it properly wrapped up and shoveled off. I think it’s too big to just shutter it, but it will be hard to find a buyer too.
Xbox was only created to help vendor lock-in for Windows.
The X in Xbox was DirectX, the goal was to get developers off of OpenGL.
With the rise of Vulkan, and DX12 being extremely similar, there’s little reason for Xbox to exist from Microsoft’s perspective
Not to mention proton and dx2vk handle playing directx games on Linux more reliably than most linux native games (at least in my experience… If a game doesn’t work, odds are it’s using the steam linux runtime and switching to proton gets it to work).
it had all the telltale signs from the get go. Bring in fall guy. Suddenly raise service prices to unignorable level. Force attrition. Excuse to kill it and studios. Announce big plans to distract. Gut studios more. Get called out. Explain pivot. Resume gutting. Get called out. Announce vapor ware. Distract distract distract. jingles keys All carefully balanced for the two week news/memory cycle.
remember glass ceiling, thats why the fall “guy” is sharma, a women. often used by failing corporations to deflect blame on a woman.
I still remember Reddit bringing in Ellen Pao to take the blame for their first big wave of “censorship”. (If you consider banning communities dedicated to hating fat people or minorities censorship.)
It sucks because they bought all this IP that basically won’t be turned into new games
Microsoft shuts down studios like it’s no one’s business. I don’t know of a single big tech company that supports devs.
Game developers are seen as free labour… Then companies wonder why their new consoles/systems flop.
DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!..
…DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!
…DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!
“Game developers are seen as free labour” I emphatically agree.
There used to be a commercial for a school called Westwood College Online University. The gist of it was in the commercial it showed two dudes playing video-games. The infamous “tighten up the graphics on level three” commercial.
The message of this commercial pissed off so many people at the time but I often think people misread its intentions. A lot of folks would say to me “This is a joke, video-games are much harder to make. This school is a joke too.”
The message I got from it was much more sinister. It suggests three things simultaneously:
- video game development jobs are dream jobs where you don’t do “real work”.
- You should feel lucky just to have this job. You can be this lucky too.
- You can defraud your parents by taking this college program but really you’re just playing video games. Your parents are dumb.
Video game jobs from that era into the 2000s were looking for eager young people to make games because these adult-children were often suburban, middle class kids with support systems in place. Studios could offer unpaid internships for any opportunity to work at their “dream job”. When in reality, these parents were effectively paying these studios to hire their children. They had hopes that their children could climb a corporate ladder starting at a higher level. Their parents often were boomers with access to that wealth.
TLDR; I 100% agree with you. The video game industry is the way it is because it’s been addicted to free labor for a long time. They have failed to cultivate and retain talent with developers “burning out” after five years on average. They break common sense labor rules and violate workers’ rights unlike any other tech industry. Everyone in that industry just complied for years because they were brain washed to believe they were “so lucky” to have this job.
I’m not surprised this is where it ended up.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I usually think of the video game industry as having the bad aspects of both the tech industry and the media industry.
It sure seems that the reason they’re shutting down or selling off so many studios is to make Xbox a leaner purchase offering. Because shutting down or otherwise divesting yourself from all of those developers is counter to what a healthy console business ought to do.
Even shedding their studios, Xbox is such a huge brand, who could possibly afford it? The only people I could imagine would have the means and desire to buy Xbox from Microsoft are Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, or the Saudi government. You know, the worst people on the planet.
Not only is it a huge brand, it’s also a struggling brand. Like as disappointing as Sony has been lately and while I do have some regret that I got a PS5, I have never once wished I had instead gotten an xbox.
First of all, you must be excited to see all the new opportunities that came out of the PS5 jailbreak. Popping in a PS2 disc and playing on a PCSX2 fork made specifically for the PS5, that’s some cool shit.
Second, despite the truth in your statement, I don’t think the world oligarchs have any qualms about Xbox being a struggling brand. Rather, they see it as an opportunity to further cement their media empires for a century or more. “I already own the news media, social media, and print media, but what if I also owned the medium of games as well?” They don’t want a single art form to escape their grasp and coalesce/spread dissent.
Oh I’ll have to check that out. I’ve been letting it update when it wanted and kinda assumed I had missed the window of breakable versions.
But yeah, your second paragraph is also accurate sounding to me. Though I do wonder if they see the video game market similar to the other media markets, considering how no one seems to be able to compete very well with Valve.
The only people I could imagine would have the means and desire to buy Xbox from Microsoft are Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, or the Saudi government.
sigh That’s gonna be the end goal, huh? Wouldn’t surprise me if it ends up in the hands of Bonesaw or the Ellisons.
Not that I want to float ideas, but Zuck & Bezos have tried to get into the gaming space before.
I will sell every Xbox I have, and figure out a way to sell my 17-18yo gamer profile, 60k+ gamerscore, and 300+digital game library on eBay if one of those assholes buys the brand!
So the route that David Zaslav took with Warner Bros. to make it easier to sell to Paramount.
to make Xbox a leaner purchase offering
Elegantly worded. So many decisions of their incomprehensible decisions suddenly make sense.
I think purchasing them was actually the bigger mistake then selling them. If you’re selling hardware at a discount because you plan on making money via the games then you probably want a lot of independent studios paying you to make games on your platform. Maybe offering special incentives for exclusive titles or something, but realistically having some flagship exclusives that may be in house and a healthy 3rd party dev community seems like it makes the most sense. You can sit back and print money once the console is made just by owning the platform. One company cannot realistically oversee the development of enough studios to make that model work. In my opinion, you need a lot of studios to make a lot of games to make your hardware compelling. I’m sure some people use their console as a dedicated COD or 2K or [insert game here] machine, but I no longer buy consoles because there just wasn’t enough to play on them to make it worthwhile for me.
Budgets got higher, which made multiplatform releases just about mandatory. Making third party games exclusive isn’t working out, in general. I don’t know that that’s a genie you can put back in the bottle anymore.
the issue was Sony was killing them on exclusives. god of war, spider-man, last of us, horizon, astrobot, Ghost of, etc etc
I don’t think Nintendo operates like that: https://www.cnbc.com/make-it/2024/02/13/nintendo-ceo-once-halved-salary-to-prevent-layoffs-why-thats-uncommon.html
That one is always misleading. It’s a known Japanese corporate move. As the article says, called “hansei”. Culturally regarded as an empty public gesture done exclusively to save the company’s public image. It works as a PR move, and it obviously did here, since it happened in 2013 and people still talk about it.
But, it actually does nothing financially, and usually none of the money saved goes anywhere. Nintendo avoided layoffs because they hoard liquidity. Have done so since the 80’s. Their revenue could collapse and they could lose money for a decade and still not reach bankruptcy. That is far more unique to tech corporations than halving executive’s pay. It is what actually has been protecting Nintendo from their failures. They still exploit and abuse employees just like every other Japanese corporation.
That one is always misleading. It’s a known Japanese corporate move.
Doesn’t make it misleading, it is something that happened. I never read Sony did this before. Which other company did that, other than Nintendo?
But, it actually does nothing financially, and usually none of the money saved goes anywhere.
Where do you get that?
(Edited a quote and reply away, because I was too dumb to read correctly.)
It is what actually has been protecting Nintendo from their failures.
So because it saves Nintendo from their failures, does mean its misleading to write articles that Nintendo did it?
They still exploit and abuse employees just like every other Japanese corporation.
In what way and where did you got that? Are there reports about Nintendo doing it?
Iwata is just different. It definitely won’t happen today.
When did Nintendo do mass layoffs? Nintendo is just not in a position where they buy lot of companies, then mass layoff (or cut salary in halve) when a game does disappoint. So you are right that it won’t happen today, but for different reasons. I’m convinced that they would probably take a hit themselves, instead laying off huge part of their developers. This is one of the few things I actually like about Nintendo; and overall I don’t like Nintendo anymore. The mass layoffs issue is a Western world phenomenon mostly (but not exclusively, just a tendency).
Is Nintendo big tech though? They seem kinda too specific to a sub section of an industry unlike the other companies that typically come to mind when big tech is mentioned.
Depends on what Big Tech and how big it is means to you. If we speak about the biggest tech companies ruling the world, then Nintendo isn’t it. But Nintendo is in my opinion big and a tech company. I mean even Netflix can count as big tech company, depending on the definition, and they are not as big nor do they something different than video streaming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech
Investors!, Investors!, Investors!, Investors!
