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.
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.
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.
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