Providing comically impactful help for leaders of creative teams pre-product/market fit
I think one of the things that's so frustrating about Xbox's recent studio closures is that it is stark contrast to the things they *say*. They say they want original, interesting games, but then they shutter Tango. They say they want to take big swings at live service stuff, but then release Redfall in a disastrous state and don't have the bottle to fix it before shuttering the studio. They say they want interesting, original content, but then close studios working on original content to bolster Call of Duty. Xbox needs platform-defining exclusives. But they've also shown they don't have the understanding to ship stuff that can legitimately compete with what Sony's doing with Playstation's first parties. What happened to Starfield? Redfall flopped. Halo Infinite's SP "infiniteness" faceplanted. Halo Infinite's multiplayer took years to sort out a fatally awful progression system, and it still mostly sucks, but who cares because no one's playing it. Forza Motorsport bombed. Where is Gears? Where is the next thing from id? From MachineGames? When it's one studio flailing around, maybe it's the studio. When it's ***everything*** under the Xbox Game Studios banner, it's a different situation entirely. What the hell are they doing over there? But the point is, when you see closures of studios when the platform is totally failing to deliver anything of meaningful, differentiating value to players... it's time to call it. Phil Spencer's driven the Xbox into irrelevance. How you could spend hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve *so little* is genuinely shocking to me.
Mario B
7mo
https://www.statista.com/statistics/831590/microsoft-quarterly-gaming-revenue/ compared to https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/msft/revenue/ (specifically 2019-2024 ... almost doubled from 119 -> 211) Gaming isnt growing at the same pace as the rest of Microsoft's revenue. That will cause pressure internally until they start posting 10-20% YoY returns tracking with their overall revenue, not 3 flat quarters + 1 jump cyclically as we see in the last 5 years. Until that cycle is broken the business unit is going to receive extreme pressure to show YoY growth. Windows doesnt need to show growth, as its on 90%+ of desktops (and data mining, $$$). Thats a strategic loss leader (if needed). Gaming at Microsoft (~20B) is not 90% of the 250B+ global gaming market, so it has to continue to grow YoY; $20B for FY2023 is barely 10% of MS's overall revenue If they start to "lose" money in gaming, or the stock were to dip heavily, we'd see significant contraction as they re-invest in other, higher growth divisions. Its not uncommon to shudder or divest a 10% of revenue business unit if the stock drops 30-40% to save higher growth divisions. Tl;dr- I agree. They need to show growth, or contract, sit on the IPs & become a publisher =(
Worldbuilding
7moIt’s BILLIONS spent to achieve so little