oh good, hes self aware and willing to admit to his mistakes, i actually respect that.
I still don’t believe he ever genuinely thought that. Microsoft hasn’t even been a good steward of its own brands.
Everything they touch turns to shit in a uniquely Microslop way.
Back in the Windows 7 era it was. But not anymore
When was Microsoft ever??? Sorry but you knew back then what you know now.
Microsoft’s gaming division was pretty respected in the industry for a long time. Lots of people give them (deserved) flack over Kinect for the Cbox One, but what really drove them over the cliff was buying all these studios to make Gamepass more attractive. It was actually a good deal for everyone when it was mostly games that were older, but when they started doing day-1 releases of first party games and buying studios to add to the number of games getting that day-1 release it turned sour.
A bunch of games that early adopters would previously have paid 60 bucks for were suddenly included in theit $7/month subscription, so tons of people who would have been buying 10 games a year were suddenly spending less than a hundred bucks on new Xbox games because enough new stuff was coming to Gamepass they could stay busy, so all these AAA releases that cost $100 to make were losing money.
So they raised the process of gamepass to try and keep up, but didn’t. Then they bought Activision and lost their lunch when Call of Duty sales plummeted because millions of people with Gamepass who had been buying it annually didn’t.
So they increased the price of gamepass so high everyone canceled, removing the only reason many of them were still using Xbox over Playstation, and at the same time the consoles skyrocketed in price.
Now they aren’t including Call of Duty from Gamepass for the first year and taking the price partway down, which was a good start to righting the ship but too late.
Chasing the Netflix model doesn’t work if you do it dumb. Netflix didn’t buy all the other studios to make their original programs. They did make some internal studios, but they mainly partnered with existing studios to make specific programs. Instead of buying Bethesda, they could have partnered with them on specific games, which would have been better for the games, the studio, Microsoft, and Xbox customers. But buying Bethesda was a simpler brute-force solution they employed dozens of times.They became an even dumber Embracer Group. Embracer at least they had a (dumb) plan to sell off the assets. Microsoft bought a bunch of studios with no plan for how to make it profitable.
The problem with what you’re saying is that they’ve always bought out other studios and then fucked them up. Going all the way back to their original IP Halo; Halo was a product of Bungie, a Mac exclusive game company at the time. Halo was originally going to be Apple’s big jump into gaming. The release of Halo was delayed to port it to the Xbox and today… today Bungie barely exists and all of their IPs are owned by MS.
Xbox was a passion project, Bill Gates was obsessed with getting Microsoft into the living room. Once Bill Gates left, and later Steve Balmer left, there was nobody left who gave a shit about this passion project and it became a money grab. So Microsoft went back to doing what it does best, buying people out and running their IPs into the ground.
The problem with what you’re saying is that they’ve always bought out other studios and then fucked them up.
Just replace “they” with “all publicly-traded companies”. That is the nature of buyouts and short-term stock market thinking. Just look at all of the buyouts EA turned to shit. Or Activision. Or countless other smaller studios that have died to larger buyouts.
If a company gets bought out by a corporation like this, they know what they are getting into.
Phil Spencer was a good steward (edit: of Xbox) I think for a long time, but he didn’t make the decisions to buy all the studios.
While this is a great detailed explanation, it still sounds like very poor decision making that would be obvious to anyone except out of touch execs.
I remember when Microsoft bought GitHub everyone was worried.
And then, they actually made it a little better while not burning it down.
There was a time during the 2010s that seemed like big companies had learned not to ruin a good thing.
They’re actively burning it down. The website often has issues while navigating etc. (while logged in), I frequently have to refresh after clicking on a link because it still isn’t loaded 10s+ later, or because issues/PRs search just won’t load results. The uptime is terrible, if you’re using multiple of their systems they don’t even hit 99% every month anymore.
Aggregate uptime for the last 90 days doesn’t even hit a single 9 anymore: https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/#about
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For a man I always believed to be extremely intelligent, that was a moronic thing to say at the time and sounds even more stupid now. I am sure the large amount of money he received for that deal made him did a lot of encouraging him to be optimistic. I mean I get it, people that pay me millions of dollars would likely seem pretty good to me in the moment, but come the fuck on.
Buy it back, John!
(I have no idea how business actually works)
I thought Shwarma was supposed to be halal.
