Xbox Game Studios Stupidity Hate Thread Game Pass Edition

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Round 2 is happening
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The Doom Slayer said:
Truly amazing. Imagine owning Halo, Gears, COD, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, and a ton of other shit... and you STILL can't make it work. This is like biblical levels of incompetence.
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They had a somewhat rise back with the emulator memes.
I expect when they can't be sold anymore there will be a kernel hack to allow og emulation mode back for free.
Xbox is just living off Xbox live & Wow subscriptions.
 
The Last Stand said:
Are they not selling well or is stock too little to handle?
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It's Microsoft pulling them. When GTA6 is released they should want consoles on shelves. Same with the holidays. Pulling Xbox units from every retail store in America is another signal that they are suicidal with their console brand. Imagine GTA6 gets released and the only console you can physically purchase from a local store is a Playstation.
 
TheHarbinger said:
It's Microsoft pulling them. When GTA6 is released they should want consoles on shelves. Same with the holidays. Pulling Xbox units from every retail store in America is another signal that they are suicidal with their console brand. Imagine GTA6 gets released and the only console you can physically purchase from a local store is a Playstation.
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What business sense does that make? MS ups the price of their consoles, only to pull remaining stock from brick and mortar stores? Even Sony isn't that stupid.
 
When I saw Microsoft’s massive buying spree, I’ll admit I bought into the hype. It seemed like Xbox would dominate everyone.

I’m sure even Sony felt the pressure, as they bought Bungie in what appeared to be a direct response. Sony definitely panicked.Owning Call of Duty and Halo alone should’ve been enough to crush everyone else—except maybe kid-friendly Nintendo—easily.

But it turned out to be a complete nothingburger. Microsoft spent billions for essentially nothing.

Xbox practically imploded without Gabe, Sony, or Nintendo having to lift a finger.Honestly, this failure is so colossal that it makes Concord’s flop seem minor by comparison.

So many brands and IPs wasted. What the hell happened? With all their resources they should be the kings.
 
Mystery Spy said:
When I saw Microsoft’s massive buying spree, I’ll admit I bought into the hype. It seemed like Xbox would dominate everyone.
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I got the opposite reaction, it reeked of desperation.
At best they were dropping their previous flagship titles to become the Elder Scrolls and Call of Duty console, but every single time Microsoft buys out a company productivity craters.
It's hilarious looking back at previous Xbox E3 events and go, "Cancelled, development hell, cancelled, awful game, awful game, cancelled, sports game, indie slop, awful game."
 
The Last Stand said:
What business sense does that make? MS ups the price of their consoles, only to pull remaining stock from brick and mortar stores? Even Sony isn't that stupid.
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It makes business sense if you consider this Microsoft slowly retreating from the console market. It would cause a huge headache for microsoft to suddenly leave the market but be stuck with several hundred thousand consoles.

So you just quietly stop production, sell through your backlog, and tell retailers "supply chain issue" when they ask for more until you're ready to actually formally announce you're giving up. You also ride out various commitments and contracts and don't renew new ones (which is why studios get to finish games before being gutted if they're close) behind the scenes as well.

They're on Step #3 (seemingly) right now.

It called "sunsetting" and it happens all the time.
 
Tanner Glass said:
So you just quietly stop production, sell through your backlog, and tell retailers "supply chain issue" when they ask for more until you're ready to actually formally announce you're giving up. You also ride out various commitments and contracts and don't renew new ones (which is why studios get to finish games before being gutted if they're close) behind the scenes as well.
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Why when one of the biggest games is coming out next year?
 
The Last Stand said:
Why when one of the biggest games is coming out next year?
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Because (I'd wager) xbox has been floundering for 12 years and some higher up (probably the CEO) is sick of burning though gigantic piles of cash (possibly trillions) in the video game sector where it's very apparent that no one at Xbox Studios has any idea what the fuck they are doing.

They already own Minecraft, World of Warcraft/Overwatch/Hearthstone, all of Call of Duty, Halo, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, etc. They have so many IPs they literally cannot make games for all of them (Fable, Perfect Dark, anything else Rare, New Vegas, etc) - so while Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to make Rockstar Games a boatload of cash, it's going to be chump change to Microsoft.

If they can't survive on ~65% profit on first party titles - they aren't going to care at all about the ~15% for 3rd party sales, assuming that Rockstar hasn't used it's size to try and fuck Microsoft out of a few more percentage points. Even if every Playstation 5 on the planet exploded the day before GTA6 released - and GTA6 sold 100,000,000 copies at $79.99 each and you could only buy it on Xbox, they'd be looking at a profit if around $1.2 billion dollars - which sounds like a lot until you realize that Microsoft has spent hundreds of billions on trying to prop up the games division and that $1.2 billion is their version of you finding a $20 in a pair of jeans you rarely wear.

I'd go so far to guess that as Microsoft began it's shift into AI investing, probably ~6 years ago, the sunsetting of Xbox started and they'll probably spin down into a full on third party developer for Sony/PC.

on top of that, besides GTA6 - what else is there? Outer Worlds 2? Grounded 2? The Tony Hawk remaster?
 
It is utterly insane to me to look at what Xbox was in their prime and what Xbox is right now. It is a train wreck in slow motion and everything points to be entirely intentional. So next round it is going to be Sony and Nintendo in the console space and their strategies are so different there is barely any overlap in their audiences. They are going to squeeze dry their own users for every red cent they can.

There is the saying: "Nature hates a vacuum" and I'm wondering with the upcoming absence of Xbox in the console hardware space if another company may step up to offer an alternative.

We know Valve is working on their Freemont set-up box for the living room but it is just a PC with SteamOS at the end of the day. Are there even any other companies that may want to venture into this space? or I'm over thinking it and it is is not a viable business model for a newcomer?
 
Belvedere said:
Are there even any other companies that may want to venture into this space? or I'm over thinking it and it is is not a viable business model for a newcomer?
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You would need to convince the public that your game box is more worthwhile than other established game boxes. You also need a way to mass-produce them, and get developers onboard to make games exclusively for yours.

That microconsole fad from the 2010s more or less showed off what happened when literally whos started throwing their all into making game consoles. It didn't end well. Even Mad Catz made one before they went bankrupt. Apart from the novelty factor, there's just no place for them. You can sell your indie games on Steam and the current consoles relatively effortlessly anyway, so why would you want to limit your game to one small upstart where you'll get a fraction of the playerbase? Even Epic tried to just buy off a whole bunch of big-name ones to keep them off of Steam, and that didn't work out.

You just can't do it. The last time you could was about 40 years ago, when CPUs were 8 bit and AAA studios didn't exist.
 
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