Might be the most mismanaged brand I’ve seen. M$ had it right during the early 360 era. Make affordable hardware, make up the loss with accessories and a subscription, and release fun games that cater to actual gamers. The Peter Moore era at M$ really was something. If M$ kept with that game plan and not try to make Kinect a thing, they could have won that era.
The one big flaw of that era was the RROD. I GET that the replacement policy was that every bricked machine was replaced for free but it created two new problem: Firstly, it made MS consoles be seen as inferior products. Hard to defend their manufacturing capabilities when you had so many of your consoles brick. And secondly, it created a lack of intimacy. You have a machine that lasts you for years and, when it is retired, you remember all the good times you had. When you go through more consoles than the school slut goes through boyfriends, you know there is an issue. You cannot form an attachment to a console under those circumstances.
Saturn Sonic may not have had many games, but it easily had the best vibes and aesthetics of all Sonic eras .
Sonic 3d Saturn as well... specifically both Gene Gadget and Panic Puppet stages along with Robotnik's theme. 90's Richard Jacques was top-tier stuff. Between him and other people like CoLD SToRAGE with Wipeout, video game music was kickin back then.
Why the gay Kratos one? Not even the third one? Peak Kratos?
Problem is minimum 30% net profit is tech industry standard for established businesses. If "Xbox" were it's own company making the profits it does now they would have activist investors and private equity trying to take over.
Consoles are sold at a loss (or a very thin margin) but are loss leaders for everything else attached to it. Controllers, games, GamePass, XBoxlive, all of those items run at a much higher margin then the console itself.
I'm sure they could bounce back somewhat if they lessened the price of Game Pass and go through their Activision backlog beyond Call of Duty and regularly drop feed those IPs. I heard something about those Transformers games being interested in relaunching that franchise.
The problem is that for 4 generations, their MO was to act like a start-up and they never really learned. They just threw money at Xbox and expected their competition to implode first. That did not work out.
I wish people would stop saying this. Sea of Thieves is Rare's most successful game of all time, and one of Microsoft's biggest releases over the last 10 years. They wish all their studios could put out hits like that.
Xbox relaunching a franchise? They've already cancelled some reboots, though Perfect Dark looked like garbage and the new Fable game looks equally awful.
The problem is that Rare has been a Microsoft Studio since 2002 and has only really made 2 "good" games (Sea of Thieves and Viva Pinata) and a whole bunch of shovelware garbage. Prior to 2002 Rare was one of the greatest video game developers to ever exist so to take them over 23 years and only get one middling/profitable game is wild.
Now compare that to Rare's output from the Xbox 360, original Xbox and Nintendo 64.
More Sea of Thieves. And can you blame them? They released the game on Steam and sold 5+ million copies, and then they released it on PlayStation where it sold 1.8+ million copies (and these figures are from around the launch of their respective platforms, so I expect it to be much higher in 2025). And that's not accounting for their in-game store revenue, season passes, etc.
