- The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter
- The problem according to them is profit margin - around 150-160 million
So first of all, they are big! Secondly they are not at a loss. They just have a "thin, non-growing margin". So to fix all this they are trimming down, so they can "return to growth" (which I think is ridiculous).
Some points -
- They are huge business even now - 5 billion per quarter revenue is no joke
- They did not have to buy all those studios
- They looked at Netflix, and wanted the sweet monthly subscription cash stream
- Then they did not have to give away popular games day one on Game Pass
- And finally, they did not have to raise Game Pass prices to improve the profit margins. Of course, consumers pulled out.
- Once again, short term vision, crazy decisions, bad spending spree and a constant need to "make numbers go up" and who has to pay for all this?
150M at 5B revenue is not great: that's 3% margin!
The bigger issue is that console manufacturer revenue is highly cyclical. This is hard to see in e.g. Xbox and Sony since they are both part of a larger conglomerate, but really obvious for nintendo.
You generally have a cycle of
- "Launch": high marketing costs, low/negative HW margins
- "Mid-cycle": lowering manufacturing costs, large game sales, high margin DLCs
- "end-of-cycle": falling HW sales, fewer exclusives (-> preparation for next gen), fewer consumers (-> waiting for next gen). Here you usually have maximum profits since you don't subsidize HW and marketing is minimal (platforms are already locked in)
Generally you have to establish a big userbase during the mid-cycle such that you can levarage it during the late-cycle to be able to afford next-gen. Xbox has the big issue that their mid-cycle was catastrophic, which means they now don't have the console base to get into the next generation:
If they have 3% margin _right now_ in the end-of-cycle where marketing and development costs are at their lowest, this does not bode well for the overall health of the business.
That was true historically but is no longer the case. Even last gen manufacturing costs didn't go down as much as they used to. This current gen they actually increased multiple times.
The cheapest xbox should cost 129. Instead it is $399. That is how consoles work. It gets cheaper, the back catalog grows and now you have a mass market item that ideally could source games from anywhere.
Consoles losing physical media and not allowing 3rd party app stores, or gasp, the ability to run user programs is going to kill the consoles. Expensive and marginal future utility.
Exactly, it seems their only way to make money is charging for online play which used to be $5/m and now $10/m for Game Pass Essential. Now that their high console prices aren't getting new players, the only play is to squeeze the existing ones and increasing the cost to play online.
They actually tried this a few months back when Game Pass Ultimate went from $20/m to $30/m. I cancelled my sub and went to essential. Then Asha backtracks and reduces it to $22/m and people are like wow, she will save Xbox. No, it just shows me they probably saw so much churn, especially from long-time subs, that they backtracked.
I've always thought it was borderline crazy that Xbox charged a monthly fee and I never had an Xbox for that reason. It always made me wonder how many people they failed to bring into their ecosystem for that reason.
> Oy vey maybe this kind of money grubbery is not good for our society.
No, it's a signal from the market that the product being sold is not wanted by the market.
They've mismanaged all their IP pursuing that yummy subscription revenue. Turns out gamers really don't like to buy subscriptions. As a poster downthread pointed out, the games that are not always-on and subscription-based are doing fine. It's the recent AAA model of subscription that is bleeding money.
> Oh yeah I forgot 5 BILLION dollar in revenue is a signal that the market does not want your product
Doesn't matter how big the revenue is if the market is not interested at the price you are selling.
I mean, by your logic, if I sell a dollar for 64c, and do $5b revenue, that's an indication that the market does indeed want the product, but not an indication that the market wants the product at the price you need to sell at to stay in business.
They are not selling at a loss though. The real issue here is that businesses such as Microsoft do not exist to serve a market or make enough money to survive and pay their employees. They exist to increase the value of their owner's shares. This is predicated on an unsustainable model of continual growth, with the expectation that every market they operate in can produce high margins and endless expansion. But demand is not infinite and persistent high margins are the exception, not the norm.
Maybe it isn't a loss, but as an investor (never directly in them), I consider 3% profit margin a bad sign - at that return I'd prefer a savings account: FDIC insurance means that after accounting for risks the savings account is better. I know stock returns don't directly track profit margin, but that is one input into the complex consideration of stocks.
You are right, and this is why not everything should be a stock. Whatever they will cut to avoid emitting "a bad sign", may involve:
* firing people
* making services worse
* sacrificing their own future
Whether it actually does involve those things is effectively arbitrary, because the consideration of the "bad sign" is also arbitrary. If there is no objective value judgement of their operation there is no objective value judgement in their streamlining either, so all bets are off.
Overall they are not selling at a loss, but parts of what they're selling are being sold at a loss. The market is telling them to slim the f- down and get rid of those money-losing parts.
This is all normal and justifiable. Where is the logic that corporations need to preserve dysfunctional parts of their operations?
Corporations don’t need to, no. But they are systems, and it’s a beginner mistake to assume changing one part is going to affect the whole in some simple, predictable, logical way.
That sounds like an extremely lame excuse to preserve money losing activities.
I'll counter by saying that pruning off failing things is not only good, it's the core of capitalism. Creative destruction, as Schumpeter called it. You get efficiency by hunting down and eliminating inefficiency, redeploying the resources elsewhere.
> pruning off failing things is not only good, it's the core of capitalism
It's quite serious that you see "being good" as something inferior to "the core of capitalism".
Also, the core of capitalism is making money for private individuals, nothing more, nothing less. Whether that's done with or without "failing things", is really beside the point.
The core of capitalism is about where ownership of capital (value producing assets) resides, that is, by private individuals.
What private individuals choose to do with their capital, chase infinite growth and profit or sit on it, is up to them. This is as opposed to say, state ownership of capital.
People confuse the stock market with capitalism. You don't need a stock market for capitalism to function. Publicly traded companies in the United States are legally bound to maximize profit (Dodge vs. Ford Motor Co.)
Error is rampant. I saw a quote saying the difference between a good business and bad one is the good one makes the right decision 60% of time, the bad one 40% of the time.
So errors abound, and have to be subsequently corrected. This correction process is as natural to capitalism as breathing is to you being alive. Without it, things would rapidly grind to a halt. We see this in sclerotic centrally planned economies where errors persist for much longer.
It's a lot more than $1.07 future money, a mortgage is more like $2 or these days $5
If you're offering even 25 year 75% LTV mortgages at such a low interest rate it's $1.07 future money you're going bankrupt. And these days people are taking 30 year, 95% LTV or even asking for 40 year 100% LTV which is fully batshit.
Why is it that every person who tries to make these dumb arguments in favor of destructive capitalistic greed always attempts to make it look like the multi-billion dollar profitable business is somehow self-sacrificing or a force of good? "If I sell a dollar for 64 cents!", yea, as if that's even close to what's happening.
If capitalistic greed is so destructive than why are you living in the most successful and highest quality of life society in history? You can find a cave somewhere to camp in if you want, or go to North Korea, etc.
I'm sadly not living in one of the very nice-to-live Nordic countries.
This level of greed is also relatively new, and was pretty well managed by previous (30~ years ago?) administrations. There's an obvious direct correlation between the rapid growth in wealth of the top 1%, businesses becoming increasingly anti-consumer, degrading quality of life amongst the average person, etc. It isn't something inherent to capitalism, it's something inherent to unmanaged 'trickle down economics' capitalism and societies built on individualism above all else.
The issue is both. They're inefficient in that they hire too many people to work on things people don't want. They collate all of their workforce and capital into projects that will perform poorly, rather than splitting that up between different projects that will individually vary but have a much healthier release and lifetime. The thing that people very high up in the organization lose a view on is that while there are operating costs to running multiple individual small projects, overall they balance themselves out because the risk isn't concentrated and each budget is an entity unto itself that doesn't affect the others. A supermassive failure like Concord however takes everyone's budgets and puts it into one giant project that has to succeed well beyond reasonable or even sustainable returns because now you have the costs of the core developers, the half dozen assistant studios, and the dozens to hundreds of asset producers on contract. And because of that you have to target as many demographics as possible, which for marketers means shaving off as many of the pieces that are necessary for complex mechanisms functioning within their niche but are incongruous with the other complex mechanisms that have been deemed as appealing. In other words, they're gambling their entire income on the equivalent of a spaceship boat plane car that can't land on water, can't re-enter the atmosphere, can't drive on the roads because it's too big, and is awful to fly because it's all of those other things.
What's not to understand that when you're having to spend 4.85B in order to get 5B in revenue makes your business quite risky. You want to be operating on larger margins than that
Pretty normal margin in some kinds of businesses, like supermarkets. Then again, supermarkets aren’t likely to see all their customers leave at the drop of a hat.
The scale is also very different. Costco earned $70.53 billion in a recent quarter (not 5B here). Their operating margin is 3.93%, which is also healthier.
The awareness of a poor return on investment is a good thing for society. We want to do more with fewer resources.
Making terrible decisions, such as investing in distractions for your company and consumers, and then letting your workforce pay the tab.. is the thing that is not great for society.
Who is the "we" here? Because the profit margin not being high enough is certainly not a problem for consumers. The only people who should care about that are the company's shareholders and "shareholders" certainly isn't synonymous with "society".
Making crazy changes like squeezing out every last dollar out of your existing, loyal customers (looking at any PE firm ever) certainly affects the wind I'd wager.
Absolutely, and plenty of companies have made that mistake.
But the point is locking up money in a 3% margin business doesn’t impress investors.
So you either need to improve the margin with lower costs or higher price (or both). Or bail from the market entirely and put your money in something that makes more money.
What makes more money? The investment is all in AI because TINA - There Is No Alternative. There's too much money in the system to cover all reasonable investments, so it fills up all reasonable investments and many unreasonable ones too.
Our society has a finite capacity to do projects and to run industrial processes. We want that finite capacity to provide as much quality of life as possible (and as much expansion of our capacity to do projects and run processes as possible), and achieving that is a thorny intellectual problem, which for many centuries in our society has been solved mostly by lawyers and judges knowledgeable about corporate law, stock markets, corporate managers, accountants and investors. This entire ecosystem is predicated on the assumption that investor will try to maximize their return of investment, which is strongly correlated with profit margin.
Is a low profit margin a problem for consumers or is it the company's "money grubbery" of not being satisfied with that profit margin that is causing the problem?
When XBOX fires a bunch of people and shutters studios leading to fewer games with worse support, that's a problem for consumers.
I think people often forget that in a society we rely on companies making and serving things. They make our food and our medicine and build our homes and make our games. It's a good thing when their finances are healthy. It's a bad thing when they form monopolies and rent-seek.
How is making more and more every fiscal year "healthy"?
This is madness and it doesn't make any sense besides the one case where you pursue a monopoly.
All of this has nothing to do with the consumer of the product besides the fact that he'll get a worse and worse product while simultaneously being forced to pay more and more. Enshitification is aresult of this "healthy" business culture.
> How is making more and more every fiscal year "healthy"?
Because if they didn't make a return on their investment, they would invest their money elsewhere. When you have money you want a return. You can invest it into games, or cars, or phones, or mining, or healthcare. Whatever you invest it in, you want to be justified for your risk because you can lose money. Sometimes you can lose all of it. If you're really risk averse you just put it all into a bank account on low interest. A lot of European investors do this, which is why their technological innovations are falling well behind the US.
If you want more games with better support, we all benefit if they're making a profit on their investments.
Once again, what is the actual problem here? The company was making a profit at their current employment level. They are laying people off and shuttering studios because that profit isn't enough for them. This entire argument keeps coming back to "money grubbery".
One of those terrible decisions was probably hiring too many developers, how do you suggest they fix that issue, besides changing leadership?
Many of those developers may not have the job elsewhere, or job paying much less. They now have the experience working in a proper software engineering environment.
Our society uses return on investment (which is correlated with profit margin) to decide what projects and what processes our society's workers will focus on.
So for example, if I can make twice as much money as a software developer as I can as a musician, that is strong evidence that my doing the former kind of work will benefit society about twice as much as my doing the latter kind of work.
I disagree. "Benefit society" means something that can't be defined or tracked so easily. And consumer behavior is heavily biased by things that aren't optimized to benefit society. I have in mind this book, Hooked by Nir Eyal: https://www.nirandfar.com/hooked/
We should try our best to improve our society. Sometimes that will mean doing things that are economically inefficient. Your example of Stanford professor Nir Eyal is an excellent illustration: by advising corporate managers and product designers how to fulfill their role in our economic system more efficiently, Nir Eyal made our society worse.
We should expect more from our elite professors. Nir Eyal should've known better than to make a career out of studying how deliberately to addict users. But we should also expect our professors, politicians and policymakers to understand the basics of our economic system and to understand when a proposed change to our society sounds good or feels good, but has severe adverse effects on economic efficiency that outweigh the societal benefits. Those aren't the only proposed changes we should avoid, but they form an important class of them.
Not exactly - stocks are already sold, you don't run out of cash from the stock price going down. You only run out of cash if you want to sell more stock to raise more cash (this happens, but it is somewhat rare).
However the owners are still going to be mad because their cash is down and they will demand changes to fix that.
But doesn't that make situation even worse? They likely would be 100B+ market cap/total asset value if spun off into independent company, but not able to generate even 1B in annual profit? Activision Blizzard managed 1.5B income/20% margin by themselves before being bought by Xbox -- and somehow whole of Xbox now earns less?
It didn't destroy itself, it was intentionally harvested and the husk was sold to the highest bidder. The original leadership is long gone, the shareholders got their money back long ago, and the staff has turned over significantly. The Blizzard of yore is long gone, and that's ok.
HackerNews is where I find informed commentary on tech stuff because places like reddit are hollowed out and useless for it. I don't care one bit about cretins like VCs.
Considered as a raw percentage in a vacuum, sure, I guess, but we're talking about...
- A company which has undertaken a concerted, long-term effort to consolidate the industry under its umbrella (something they themselves call out as a problem in this post), reducing consumer choice
- A company which has captured a significant chunk of the console market. They're one of the big three (alongside Sony and Nintendo), and have been since the early 2000s, arguably, for crying out loud.
At a certain size (typically as measured by market capture) the expectation for growth needs to be reality checked. This is still $150M of pure gravy every single year. Sure, this is going to a corporation, but that's more money than most people could possibly dream of earning in ten lifetimes.
Every year. For a company that's already putting money towards opex in the form of developing new games and new content for existing ones, for a ridiculously broad portfolio.
To be clear: it is Microsoft's and Xbox's prerogative to pursue more profit, but I reserve the right to call this out as absurd under the circumstances.
If you want to make the argument that Xbox has suffered from a lack of focus in the past decade (... or even longer), or that there's been mismanagement (I would say since around the time 343 got created), then those are fair arguments, though I don't think those are justifications, on their own, for cutting thousands in headcount.
Allowing this org to balloon to fourteen levels of management on any vertical is a joke. Allowing the absorption of so much of the game dev industry and still being unhappy with $150M in annual profit after being such an active participant in the oligolpolization of console gaming is just a bit unserious.
> This is still $150M of pure gravy every single year. Sure, this is going to a corporation, but that's more money than most people could possibly dream of earning in ten lifetimes.
That actually seems... tiny? Xbox is nearly 17,000 employees. That's like $8k in profit per employee. That's worse than big box retailers and like 1/100th of what is common in big tech and (to the letter's point) far worse than their biggest competitor.
Like sure at least you can say they aren't losing money, but Nadella can't be looking at that after just spending 75 billion on Activision Blizzard and be happy with it as the status quo.
EDIT: BTW these numbers you quoted from OP are quarterly, not annual
I agree that at some point you do, but again I think the fact that Sony Playstation is doing this with larger annual revenue, less studios, AND better margins is an indicator that it isn't the problem here.
> This is still $150M of pure gravy every single year.
The issue is rate of return. They are evidently spending $4.85bn on Xbox per year. The US federal interest rate is 3.5% so if you just put that money in US bonds you would get about $175M per year of much purer simpler gravy.
Russ: "Anyway, next thing you know, we IPO, stock triples in a day and AOL gobbles us up. All of a sudden, I'm 22 years young and I'm worth 1.2 billion. Now a couple decades later, I'm worth 1.4. You do the math."
Richard: "Okay. Well, that's a gain of $200 million over 20 years. Um, 16.66 repeating. That's less than 1% return. Inflation is, like, 1.7. I think CDs are 2%. So that's less than a CD."
I know this is a TV show reference and a point about investment strategy but...
If I had 1.2 billion dollars I wouldn't care what investment strategy I had. I've got enough to spend $30k a day for 100 years. At any age, that'll do.
In generally spending increases to cover income. 30k per day sounds like a lot, but it isn't hard to spend that once you get used to having that much to spend. Your mansion with the heated indoor pool is expensive to maintain. Plus you probably have a vacation mansion someplace. Then you see a nice yacht and think "why not" - more costs. You aren't flying coach to get to all those things - and one day you realize your bills are more than the 30k/day you have to spend and you are broke despite being objectively rich.
It sounds like a nice problem to have, but it appears to be very stressful from what I can tell. (I'd still like to have it, and like most I think that I personally wouldn't get that far over my head)
You are correct that we really don't know how we'd act unless we were in that situation. And like you, I hope I'd be vaguely sensible.
Two things, stand out to me though.
1. how you frame it might help with how you spend it. Which is to say that when shopping for a mansion "I've got 1.2 billion" likely leads to a different outcome than "I have 30k per day. I'll have to save up for it."
2. once chasing money is not a major thing in your life, what do you do for meaning?
> but it appears to be very stressful from what I can tell.
sounds like there is a win-win in there somewhere. I wonder what that would look like.
for real though, what are we talking about here? 30k a day is not enough because ... habits? plus, it's incredibly hard to spend that much. that's exactly why, after a certain point, it's basically impossible to get rid of wealth.
What does enough mean? That's why I didn't use that word. Beans and rice is enough, but I'm glad I can afford nicer food. I don't need as large a house as I have and yet my house is modest by modern standards, and I would like larger.
I'm not arguing your idea that there is a point where you no longer can find anything to spend money on. However that point is different for different wealthy people and I don't know and you don't likely don't know either where your limit is or my limit would be. It would not surprise me if I personally had the money and decided to buy a yacht and then later sold it when I realized that while it sounds good I wasn't actually using it. But I don't know. Maybe if I had the money to afford a nice yacht I would use it all the time. Similar for those mansions. Would I live in a mansion or would I buy one first test symbol and then realize I didn't actually care and downgrade? I know someone who has made a lot of money remodeling the mansions of rich people who have decided downsize. For them downsize includes a master bedroom that is bigger than my entire house. And there were other bedrooms in that mansion, but it is still a down size.
Well, maybe we need to decide as a society what exactly enough means. I'd argue that anything above 100m is excessive, especially while other people are literally starving. But sure, let's say anything up until the first billion.
I can't argue the point as well as educated economists can. I'd like to point you to Gabriel Zucman, for instance. What really got me in the end is this: he proposes a 2% wealth tax. It's not a number out of thin air, he actually reasons very well how he got there. You know how much the average billionaire wealth increased over the last years, annually? It's 6%. So it's not even suggesting "you need to have less". It's suggesting "you should accumulate more a little slower than before".
Also, sorry, I really can't emphasise with people who got so used to having a yacht that they cannot imagine life without one anymore. It's peak consumerism, individualism, capitalism. My take is that we need to rethink _some_ things.
That is an ideal way of seeing this. As a for-profit company their priority is shareholder value, so the focus isn't "people paid and games were made", it's the money left-over, and even more importantly that the number must grow.
It's a question of "value created" vs "value captured". They captured about as much value as the risk-free rate of return.
Value that is created but not captured (e.g. the value of consumers enjoying games and consoles above and beyond the price that those consumers paid) is typically not considered when making business decisions.
No, because the customers bought the games. That means the customers valued the games at some value higher than the purchase price. There's a ton of surplus value for society produced as part of this process that doesn't end up on a company's balance sheet.
That's pretty accurate when you consider the unfiltered slop produced by studios like Bethesda, Blizzard, Activision, King and most other Microsoft XBox studios.
But the revenue is coming out of the same org. That $5bn revenue only exists because of the $4.85bn expense. That money doesn't exist to put into bonds unless it's coming out of the games org. They can only make their margin percent look better by making their absolute margin $150mm worse.
Another point of view is that your people are so good that their division turns a profit under mismanagement. It costs MS negative hundred mil to keep the whole thing spun up on a bad day.
You’re saying that they should take the money people pay to buy Xboxes and put it in T-bills instead of delivering Xboxes? What happens when people ask where the Xbox they ordered is?
> This is still $150M of pure gravy every single year
You're neglecting to consider that any time they acquire a studio or have a flop or two -- poof goes that $150M and probably more. It's not a risk-free venture. Entertainment is all about hits, and misses hurt.
Would you put up $5K to win $150 on a hypothetical roulette wheel that hits 90% of the time? The math's not perfect obviously but Xbox is a somewhat similar situation. Microsoft is putting up nearly $5B a year to make $150M. They'd be better off stuffing the $5B into bonds or something. There is a point where the returns aren't high enough to justify the expenses when risk is taken into consideration.
ROI lags. If they laid off 90% of the Xbox division and left only enough to keep the lights on (they don't run their own factories I guess), then they'd still get nearly the same amount of income the next year with far lower costs. Of course revenue would start to sharply decline as the number of games produced was much lower, as the tech became obsolete. But it's not like revenue would evaporate instantly.
So they could do that and invest the income they still get into bonds, and then that would be where the returns come from.
They don't want to do that obviously, hence why Xbox needs reform.
Sure, 3% is terrible. But the point is you spent a fortune buying all these studios-- aka key strategic intellectual properties-- and then you manage them badly. Then you just sell or shut them down at their absolute bottom and you end up just destroying value.
Older forms of media understand this. WB loses money and its still really valuable because people see the potential of Batman, Harry Potter etc.
IP studios are really valuable because they can drive attention to your platforms. Try starting a premium streaming service or a console without IP. But you can't manage it like tech. It's not going to grow all the time and returns are uncertain.
MSFT could be in the XBox as a platform business. They could have a few in house studios to prime the platform pump. Once it started being a content business they got lost.
The mismanagement here was actually Microsoft giving studios free reign and they flopped with projects like Starfield. This needs to be understood really within the larger industry trend of quality decline of AAA, which I suspect has to do with changes in overall dev culture and discourse than corporate decisions. There hasn't been a time when developers have been more disconnected from their audience than now.
> There hasn't been a time when developers have been more disconnected from their audience than now.
There are studios that routinely put out games that people love. For example, my wife and I will happily pre-order the next co-op game from Hazelight Studios. FromSoftware, Ghost Ship Games, and others fall into the same boat for many people.
The difference, in my opinion, is that games from these studios don't focus on creating an "always on" service, microtransactions, day-1 DLC, MRR, etc. Those things that blight games made by corporate studios are evidence of corporate executives putting their thumb on the scale.
There's only so much you can do, as a developer, to polish a turd.
With the obvious exception of Elden Ring, most of the games from these studios are quite modest small to medium sized projects.
I wish devs would stop trying to make every game an uber-game. They need all the monetization because they've already blown the budget before work even started.
Nintendo figured this out. When will the other big players?
At one point you could have said the same thing about Blizzard, that everything they did was gold. It’s hard to pinpoint where they went wrong, but it’s not clear to me that it was business model or game format related. Like, WoW was a fabulous success from day 1 and it was a live service game.
For games like Starfield, monetization isn't even the main issue but rather political ideology. You can only do so much ESG-approved preaching before customers go elsewhere.
> There hasn't been a time when developers have been more disconnected from their audience than now.
I'm curious what you mean by this. It seems like gamers have never been more vocal and there have never been more avenues (social media, short form video platforms, etc.) for them to voice their opinions than we have now.
How exactly do you know that developers have never been more disconnected from their audience? And how would that be relevant to declining AAA game quality when it's the responsibility of management and leadership to ensure the quality of the final product?
I think developers = studio in this case, management included. It’s the same issue as Hollywood really, making content for a loud minority will not generate revenue.
Compare how Marvel Rival performs to any Marvel Hollywood content after Endgame.
One way is developers making game for far left silicon valley ideologes when their audience is full of horny young males. I.e. the game is primarily designed to push an agenda rather than be fun.
This is a trope that's more than a few years out of date. Silicon Valley is run by Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and many other executives who are completely devoted to the current administration; even Tim Cook bent the knee and donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration.
And what does "far left" mean in this context? Is it the abolition of private property and the creation of a communist utopia? Or are we talking about basic equal rights and a slightly more progressive tax system?
Without a bit more clarity, comments like yours come off as being uninformed at best, ignorant at worst.
Free rein is bad management by definition. You don’t need a manager to have free rein.
I’d be curious what you think the changes in dev culture are. I have worked for or with a lot of these studios and to me they have different cultures. But I could be missing the forest for the trees. MSFT has one culture that imo lacks a creative vision.
Depends, Tesco (the UKs largest supermarket chain - one of the largest in the world) on average net about 2.5-3% profit on a given year and they have to do a lot more than pump out a game or two every few years.
The thing to understand here is the risk premium. Tesco is less risky on many levels. It also does not live inside a tech company that has really high gross margins.
I just don’t know how great the IPs at Xbox game studios are. They have a few staples but most studios they bought have struggled to put out any major successes in the last 5+ years. There’s only a few Pokémon’s and Harry potters out there. They even ran Halo to the ground ffs
I assume a bunch of them print pretty reliably, like Call of Duty, when you're not using them as a loss leader on an expensive subscription that nobody wants.
> The bigger issue is that console manufacturer revenue is highly cyclical. This is hard to see in e.g. Xbox and Sony since they are both part of a larger conglomerate, but really obvious for nintendo.
There is absolutely no reason to be in sync with Sony on their console release date. They could have effectively released consoles bit more frequently. But they choose not to do so. Their acquisition has been questionable - Activision/Blizzard.
At the end of the day, the employee pay the price for bad management decision which they keep on making.
As a Blizzard and Overwatch fan, the acquisition has not been ideal. Activision nearly ended competitive professional Overwatch and significantly scaled back their big esports events to look more profitable. Lately, they seem to be chasing Marvel Rivals for no good reason, but at least in the younger competitive leagues, Rivals is picking up steam and Overwatch no longer looks like a contender, despite being significantly more balanced competitive play.
It’s possible stadium sized esports wasn’t directly profitable or was break-even, but seems like it could have had the potential to catapult the idea into the mainstream when there are 7 figure prize pots, and the games are accurate to anyone with equipment.
Overwatch released in 2016, but the merger took place in 2008. I feel like overwatch was always more of an Activision game than a Blizzard game. Or at least, pre-World of Warcraft Blizzard would never have entered that genre of gaming.
You do need to be somewhat in sync. Too early and you get Dreamcast effect where the customer isn’t ready for a new console. Too late and your customers bought the competition (I’ll call this the PS3 effect).
Nintendo get a pass because Switch is a very different console, closer to Game Boy.
Reads to me like multiplayer and server-side games incur a hefty infrastructure cost that eats into their profits, subscriptions notwithstanding. Maybe XBox should focus more on single-player exclusives. They certainly have enough studios to do it.
It has been really really long since I read anything on HN with someone that has some basic understanding of business. May be all is not lost.
Yes. 3% margin is lower than inflation of US treasury rate. As some business would even call it borderline charity. It is also not a commodity market, which means it is not healthy. And any headwind is going to be damaging.
Development costs are far from their lowest at end-of-cycle.
That's exactly when the prototype development kits come out of small scale testing (maybe tens of units, all incredibly expensive bespoke units, probably hand soldered and assembled), production ramped up a little and the evaluation kits are produced and distributed to first party studios and large third party studios, with thousands of consoles produced with the expectation that their lifespan is likely only going to be 3-6 months. These are then extensively tested by developers, both to see what needs to be done to get their launch titles actually working on the machine, but often very serious hardware bugs are found in this period that may require fixes to the chips themselves or software workarounds that affect performance. For some of the recent console launches there have been 2 or 3 rounds of evaluation kits in a year, and the previous evaluation kits are effectively bricked.
After the evaluation kits seem to have converged on a final product, the development kits are produced to ideally match the final version of the evaluation kits, but again these are tested before production is ramped up because some things do change (most trivially the case, even if the board is fine). At this point tens of thousands of dev kits are produced, each different enough to retail kits (more memory, maybe extra ports, etc), usually at least 6 months to a year before console launch so studios can make a final push on the launch day or first quarter titles, and in the background the same evaluation process for retail kits (usually just stripped down from the development kits, but usually different cases etc) starts, and eventually a final design for the retail product is produced that's good enough for manufacture.
This time is definitely not just when the console manufacturers kick back and rake in their profits, this is when they're already spending big on the final push to get to the point where they even have a new console to start a new cycle with.
Separate to the console manufacturing side, the years before release are when big money is spent getting studios on board to produce launch titles, because without those, the console will be dead on arrival.
TLDR: revenues at the end of the console cycle aren't funding the next generation, because it's probably already been in development since the launch of the current console, rather those end-of-cycle revenues are hopefully paying off the gamble they took funding development for the current generation.
>> 150M at 5B revenue is not great: that's 3% margin!
and yet everybody - including Microsoft - is in a big rush to sell us AI services, which could look an awful lot like a historical utility business. 3% will be a dream return in that scenario!
AWS isn't a utility because utilities sell commodities for which you can switch to a competitor easily, as you're buying the same thing. There are companies selling similar products to AWS but none that sell AWS itself.
Early utilities tend to not be built on standards. See how early electric utilities within a country or even a city couldn't agree on voltage, frequency, phase, or even AC vs DC.
Still, there is a difference of degree. The engineering cost of making one city's electrical grid compatible with the consumers of a different city's grid were much lower (even if one grid was AC and the other DC) than the engineering cost of moving from AWS to a competitor because electricity is not that complicated.
Also, I doubt anyone was referring to electricity as a commodity in the early days before the industry developed standards.
most utilities are natural monopolies. The cost to run wires/pipes to my house are a significant portion of the cost to serving me, so you wouldn't run wires to my house in hopes that I buy from you later.
With due fairness, these are two different sets of leaders and two different strategies.
A lot of the strategy you outlined -- buying all these studios, replicating netflix, giving away day one games, raising game pass -- was a strategy put in place by Phil Spencer. Phil pushed for this investment with the promise it would pay off later for MS. He's talked publicly about having to convince Nadella to put up ungodly amounts of cash for these investments and about how the bar for expected return was very very high. It seems like it clearly hasn't worked out to Microsoft's expectations or they've lost patience for waiting, and Phil has now "retired to spend more time with his family" (i.e. been fired).
Now Asha is here and presumably has a mandate to fix this and get back the profit margins that were expected from xbox. Sarah Bond, the xbox president, has resigned, and with this letter it seems the previous Xbox COO is out too. There is clearly a huge shift in Xbox leadership happening and it shouldn't be surprising that Asha -- who is known as a business-driven executive and not a 'gamer' -- is going to be reverting a lot of previous strategy decisions.
My 2c is that Phil's strategy made sense on paper, but I don't think they were able to manage this many studios in practice: nearly all the studios they bought have failed to produce the number of games expected on time or on budget. It also turned out that overly cheap gamepass would cannibalize their business and overly expensive gamepass turned away subscribers. I think the netflix model isn't something you can speedrun and execution of it turned out to be very hard and expensive. Maybe it would've worked out with more time but it seems Nadella didn't think so anymore.
I never understood the esteem Phil Spencer was held in, seemingly both by fans and industry insiders. I never understood Phil’s strategy.
Buy a plethora of studios. Pay an order of magnitude over the odds for the big ones - just to be sure you get them! ‘Rescue’ smaller ones of questionable financial value - as part of Xbox they’d somehow be successful enough to justify the price paid. Heavily manage the studio heads - but, uh, also give them total creative freedom - and allow them to make niche games. Sell hardware at a loss - but also make the games available on all platforms. Don’t allow any software that takes advantage of your most powerful hardware, because it also has to run on the other, less powerful console you are also selling. Also, the future is streaming! But, uh, maybe not!
Not just the strategy, but almost every aspect of the ‘strategy’, was incoherent - as current management is very close to outright saying.
I’ll admit to being ‘out of gaming’ for that era (I’m a pandemic gaming-returner), but I wasn’t aware of that. Was his reach bigger than his official title?
Wikipedia doesn’t show him in an ‘overall leader’ role until 2014, a year into the relatively disastrous Xbox One era.
He was very visible, giving interviews to the mainstream press and presenting games on stage at E3 as early as 2010. I'd also argue that while he wasn't the top dog of all things Xbox from 2009 to 2013, Head of Microsoft Studios is still a pretty big deal and arguably the quality of games matters more than the hardware. Also keep in mind that he rolled back a lot of the - from the perspective of the core gaming audience - disastrous Xbox One launch (TV focus, Kinect bundle) after taking over. There's an argument to be made that Xbox the console wouldn't have survived this long without him. That said, he caught a lot more flak in recent years and IMHO deservedly so.
IIRC Xbox had been criticized for quite a while at that point for having very few exclusive/first-party games worth buying an Xbox for. I always assumed this move was to try and fix that problem.
The (an?) incoherency with that is that this was happening at the same time as the ‘everything’s an Xbox’ strategy that saw them produce games for other platforms too.
That was a side effect from ABK acquisition, they bought studios that traditionally were cross platform, the year long acquisition discussion always promised not to touch them in that regard.
So you end up with this schizophrenic way that XBox became more of a publisher than a console brand, with a leadership used to cross platform (Sarah Bond), thus ‘everything’s an Xbox’ pivot for the "curve must always go up".
To be fair to Phil Spencer, this was the strategy across the industry right after COVID. Remember the shopping spree Embracer Group went on between 2020 and 2022? I think we were in an e-sports & live service bubble that has now popped.
Which games of their output were Xbox exclusive? They were basically transitioning into a publishing house with no real hardware impact. In fact what did Phil in finally was trying to sabotage the hardware brand itself with the 'This is an Xbox' campaign. I said out loud when I saw the first ad, 'Phil will get shitcanned for this.'
Acquiring a game studio only makes sense if you see a way to make it grow either by providing capital or better management. E.g. Activision acquired Treyarch in 2001 for $20M, which was probably 4-5x of its annual profit at the time. Seeing that very few people played (or even heard of) Die By The Sword or Draconus you could imagine that there was still a room to grow so there was a good chance you break even on your investment even sooner than 5 years and start making profit for yourself. Treyarch, who did not need to do the sports games contracts anymore and could hire more people, proceeded to making Spiderman and, later, CoD. I believe Spiderman alone made way more than $20M spent in the acquisition.
Buying Activision for 20x of its annual profit, on the other hand, makes zero sense. ABK was not lacking capital, had the same MBA management Microsoft has and did not have much room to grow, Blizzard alone had 5K employees. Their IPs had long time since plateaued or had been in decline already. What was Microsoft plan to increase profit? Switch everyone to Teams? Put more people to work on CoD and release 2-3 CoDs per year, hoping they all will sell as well as the annual CoD? The more realistic path to return of the investment could come from increasing Xbox's share of the market by making their newly acquired IPs Xbox exclusive. But they did not do even that.
IMO, at the time, it was to buy ABK and make CoD an Xbox exclusive. That clearly didn't play out when everyone screamed about it being (rightly!) anticompetitive, and so they had to resign themselves to accepting that day 1 gamepass exclusive was going to be their way to get people to switch over from PS. That also didn't work.
The 'K' part of ABK was also probably going to be their way to drive mobile into Xbox as well with their 'everything is an Xbox' push at the time.
Even if they had made it exclusive, $70B is too much for this. CoD sales would fall - not everyone buying it would go out and buy an Xbox, Xbox hardware sales would raise. Let's be optimistic and say every CoD player (including ones who already bought Xbox ) goes out and buys another Xbox and then buys 2 xboxes in the next generation. So it's ~20M more Xboxes sold. To break even on this investment in 10 years MS has to make ~$2400 from each console sold over lifetime ($68B - 10*$2B annual profit = $48B over 20M extra units). Of course, if each sold Xbox made that much money they would not sell them for $400, they'd pay you to get one.
Yeah, they could have spent the money on founding new studios. With that sheer amount of money you could pretty much poach any talent you wanted too, but it wouldn't be as obviously anticompetitive.
Instead, they paid way over the odds for IPs that seem past their prime.
IMHO, there is no room for a 70B investment in games at this time. The industry is mature and won't be growing any time soon, at least in the West. There had been a rush of investors founding new studios and propping old ones in the past decade but the vast majority of those had already been wiped out. And all of those were probably just a fraction of what Microsoft had spent just in this acquisition.
Another crazy deal like this is the EA's buyout, I wonder if it will come through or the investors will eventually realize that they are not going to see their money ever again.
Phil and the likes were too hands-off on these studios post-acquisition. They got too complacent enjoying steady paychecks over years of delays while working on their niche games that only highlight their artistic vision over generally fun gameplay. That's where they failed. The Activision/Blizzard acquisition and GamePass fumble were just a nail on the coffin
Yes, I agree. I empathize with Phil in spirit on it. He's a real gamer and tried to create a space for the developers to do their own thing and create what they want. But it doesn't seem to have been great business.
I remember the glowing praise at the time for the policy of being hands off and allowing studios to cook. Gamers all over the world were very happy about that approach. Unfortunately it looks like many studios do in fact require hands-on management to make tough calls and keep things moving. I'll remember this next time studios complain about management interference.
We already saw this during the Kickstarter era where all the temporarily confused AAA studios sold themselves as having been held back by unreasonable publishers all this time only to produce the most bland and still unfinished games now that they were funded directly by fans.
You need two different types of management. You need the creative type who understands what customers want and ensures that is what you deliver. You need the financial type that understands profit margins.
If the company lacks either, or either gets too much power they are in trouble. Creative types will spend too much money on things that are nice but won't deliver enough value and so the company goes bankrupt. Financial types don't understand what customers want and optimize away all the expensive creative value the customers buy.
Note that the above applies to every type of company. Exactly what "creative" means is different for different industries, and some need it more than other (how much innovation do you need in soap?...). It always applies though so you need to ensure you get both types in leadership positions even though they don't like or understand each other.
Yeah, cool, but right now they're axing idsoft, which was anything but "artistic vision over fun gameplay". What they did also pretty much kills idtech as a viable engine.
Now with all these layoffs, most likely the numbers will change, but how many are aware that Microsoft actually owns a big chunck of well known studios?
One reason is that from the public eyes they kept their names and independence from Microsoft/XBox branding.
Undead Labs has shipped nothing
Compulsion shipped South of Midnight topping at ~1600 players on Steam
Ninja Theory has shipped Bleeding Edge and Hellblade 2
and
Double Fine shipped Keeper and Kiln.
It's a net positive that these studios and this culture is gone.
I am sure that food was amazing.
It's on the publisher and owner to guide studios in a direction that makes money. That's literally their purpose. If these studios aren't releasing anything and they aren't making money, that's on Microsoft. So things aren't better if these studios are gone. The same people who managed this mess for ten years are still there. If you're not going to do anything to ensure these studios actually do what you need them to, I don't understand what the point was of acquisitions.
It was a risky bet that became even higher risk when MSFT spent ~$80 billion dollars rolling up game studios near the peak of the historic COVID gaming bubble. They bet it would greatly increase Game Pass sub growth. Instead, Game Pass sub growth slowed down. At the time I thought it was a reasonable plan - but not at the prices MSFT was paying for content. Then the DRAM drought killed hardware sales to gamers forcing the issue.
They were the cheapest DVD player you could buy for a while, and they were also the most available DVD player. That changed fairly quick, but at launch they were your best value. (though dedicated DVD players generally had better controls)
I certainly enjoyed gaming their rewards system for years on a series S. $300 for the box, maybe spent $40 over roughly 4 years for gamepass. It was nice while it lasted!
I totally agree. Being able to buy three-year cards for gold and then convert them to GP for $1 was an absolutely killer deal in terms of bang-for-buck. I stopped renewing once they closed that 'loop-hole' personally, I only play a few games a year (and usually ones that are on sale) so full price game pass just never made any financial sense for me. I already spend less than that per month and play whatever I want.
So, Phil gets a golden parachute, and all the studios that got bough up because of him will be "set free" if they're lucky and disbanded if they're not. Yay for capitalism...
> - The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter - The problem according to them is profit margin - around 150-160 million
> So first of all, they are big! Secondly they are not at a loss. They just have a "thin, non-growing margin". So to fix all this they are trimming down, so they can "return to growth" (which I think is ridiculous).
How is that profit margin distributed though? King (Candy Crush etc) and Mojang (Minecraft) are specifically called out as money-makers, it's possible that they're carrying the majority of profits while everything else is a dud:
> We have also learned that we are not the best home for every type of studio; in a typical year, we lost 64 cents for every dollar we invested.
As an example, Double Fine (one of the studios being chopped) has released 2 games since 2021, Keeper (191 peak player count on steam) and Kiln (163 peak players); these would be flops even for a normal indie game, for a studio getting Microsoft salaries those are enormous flops.
On the margins, that's crazy thin for the size of the org... One bad quarter could turn from a few million in profits to hundreds of millions in losses. It's too close, and there's no way to build/store funds for any kind of storm at that level.
Now, I think the vast majority of the pain is more than self-inflicted... I think actual business, marketing and focus need to start taking priority over idealistic political PoV. Let the games target their natural audiences and have the broadest appeal... at a certain point, trying to gain 1% of audience means alienating 25% or more.
This is the industry in general though, and why you see so many historical AAA studios go bankrupt after one bad game.
The problem was that if you kept a studio small and lean, you were often at the mercy of predatory publishers who controlled the distribution channels (pre-network, physical media).
So most studios tried to vertically and horizontally integrate into conglomerates: own their own publishing + have a diversified enough pipeline of games that one flop wouldn't take down the entire works.
Unfortunately, that works at Activision (pre-Blizzard) and EA (00s) scale, but not Microsoft scale (where you essentially own a large chunk of all studios).
This was a reckoning long in coming, as MS XBOX leadership, after some initially brilliant ideas, got high on their own supply and forgot they couldn't endlessly acquire more studio with their parents' cash.
Tbh, they probably should have lured away one of Berkshire Hathaway's acquisition people and put them in a go / no-go decision role.
It's the acquisition price, product, and financials that make something a good deal or not, but XBOX spent the last 10 years valuing potential acquisitions on intangibles (synergy, strategy, if we don't they will, etc).
If you're a grocery chain you know exactly how much an item costs and exactly how much you sell it for. You also simply order more or less stock of the item depending on how it's selling.
If you're a video game company, you invest millions of dollars in a project up front, for years, and you don't know until after release whether you:
- Make back all the money you spent plus a healthy profit on top.
- Just break even, but you lost the opportunity cost of all the other things that money could have been spent on with better utility.
- Your game flops and you wasted all the money you spent developing it.
It's also highly uneven. Extremely likely that King (Candy Crush) and Mojang (Minecraft) are making a ton of money, and everything else is a money pit where you pour in millions of dollars and you don't even make your money back.
The stores themselves aren't losing money if there's a natural disaster.. the farm does, the distributor likely does.. but not the store. The store just raises prices against future inventory pricing, often ahead of the inventory itself.
food demand is pretty inelastic their margins are low but they're fairly consistent. modern games can have budgets of a few hundred million dollars with absolutely no guarantee of sales. at those margins 1 failed triple ai have could wipe out several years of profits.
>Double Fine (one of the studios being chopped) has released 2 games since 2021, Keeper (191 peak player count on steam) and Kiln (163 peak players); these would be flops even for a normal indie game, for a studio getting Microsoft salaries those are enormous flops.
Hard to really say. Kiln and Keeper can easily be made up for by the sales of Psychonauts 2. I'm sure an indie Double Fine would not have been able to make those kinds of games.
This takes me back to Pertinent, another small game from a reputable studio, had its main writer saying that "this kind of game would not be possible without Gamepass". Which I 100% believe. Microsoft definitely didn't buy Double Fine trying to make the next Fortnite, but that arthouse strategy clearly isn't a factor these days.
DF basically got paid to goof off an a very expensive city. MS basically bankrolled their hangout and chill lifestyle. Day to day was basically them having mildly interesting discussions about their personal lives and easily solvable creative/ technical stuff that went round and round.
Double Fine has been an indie studio for longer than Xbox has been invested in games. And as far as I know they've been situated on San Francisco for that entire time. They didn't just bumble into a trillionaire company and lounge on the job security.
Those kinds of statements show a misunderstanding of both the studio and how the games industry works. Any one of those engineers could have gotten into a FAANG the traditional way and doubled, if not tripled, their salary on arguably less involved problems than what they go through creating a real time game.
Its also likely why Schafer chose to take the studio back rather than go the route of finding a new publisher to work under. He still wants to work on games for a little longer rather than get a last paycheck and retire early.
Psychonauts 2 was funded we-got-kickstarter-at-home and already well into development before MS acquired DF. If anything this exemplifies that DF did not function under MS if they couldn't replicate that post-acquisition.
Ehh, Microsoft still got to reap the profits of it.
And yes, no one expects a brand new IP to have the same odds of success as a old IP that's become a cult classic. DF's strategy and directions were not to make the most profitable, safe release because that's not why you buy a studio like DF.
Yes, apologies for the misspelling. Very likely another game that wouldn't "succeed" in a traditional release, but would potentially get people into a subscription service.
Despite that loss leading strategy, Obsidian has had quite a few other releases that did to make up for that side project. So the studio would overall be in the green despite that.
Keeper needs an optimization pass so badly. Once I finished the first zone the framerate dropped to the floor on my Steam Deck. Presumably it runs okay on the current XBox, but it sure feels like Double Fine's attention has moved on and will never return.
Absolutely drop-dead gorgeous but I don't think I am going to ever finish it until I get a Deck 3/4 in like 5-7 years.
You can easily compare to the figures for other games that are also on GamePass. Another Crab's Treasure, for example, had 4.7k Steam players on launch, of a similar nicheness stratum.
The split is usually not a multiple. There are people with computers, and people with xboxes. If there are that few people on steam, there are probably a similar number on Xbox. Not 10x or 100x, and at least 100X would be what you need for that game to be worth further investment.
What evidence do you have for this? It doesn't pass the sniff test: why would anyone buy a game for full price when they can get it for far less by just grabbing a cheaper subscription? (that they can cancel any time)
> Only people without GamePass subscription and no desire to get it for even a month or two would buy the game on Steam
So the majority of people?
I jest, but I honestly don't know anyone who consults the GamePass offerings before making a decision on whether or not to buy a game. It's Steam or pirate.
Completely anecdotal (which i think both of us are guilty of) but i generally keep my PC game pass subscription active, and will check if games are on there before getting them elsewhere. I don’t really know how to measure how many people are doing that though.
Xbox around 2021 had around a 12% profit margin and the gaming industry as a whole was around 17-22% . In 2023 the target for the division was put to 30% . We see this new restructuring because the target was put this high. Microsoft really wanted Game Pass to be a steam competitor which is pretty much what everyone in the industry tries to do and fails. The push for Game Pass prices to be higher was to get the 30% margin and that didn't work out. They aren't operating at a loss they are operating at a goal and they failed the goal. From other child comments many studios they bought probably were below average. We can see this restructuring basically is that they failed the target, the old guard went out as the new guard came in.
>Microsoft really wanted Game Pass to be a steam competitor which is pretty much what everyone in the industry tries to do and fails.
Gamepass is quite literally the most anti-steam strategy ever. It's a massive loss leading (or rather, low margin leading) service relying on a pseudo-rental service to provide value. Steam got to where it is by keeping all its costs lean and developing a service around taking a cut from premium digital goods.
>From other child comments many studios they bought probably were below average.
In revenue, maybe. That's the fault of Microsoft in two fronts. One for purchasing game studios who always operated at low margins, and two for directing them to focus on quality over budget. Double Fine and Ninja Theory aren't studios you buy with an expectation of 30% ROI in 6 years (ignoring the pandemic in the middle of that). Let alone when you explicitly tell them not to worry about finances.
On an artistic level, Hellblade was an insutry darling and about as close as you can get to an "oscar-bait" of a game. It's something you buy for prestige. Double Fine is a very seasoned indie studio who delivered several cult classics. You buy that for a brand that gives you variety from the current "online FPS juggernaut". Those strategies changed dramatically over the decade.
I wrote a while ago about how companies seem to have gotten the idea into their head that subscriptions are unconditionally good, rather than a contingent good based on the exact circumstances of the subscription: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2023/streampocalypse-and-first-pri...
Gamepass as a subscription to make sure you always have something to play, that has a lot of old games or indie games and other games that have no commercial value makes sense to me. The back catalog for any of the current consoles is plenty deep with games that have lost their ability to move units independently but still have a lot of value and can also give that perception of value. Such a plan is picking up pennies, but it's a lot of pennies.
I've never understood putting your new releases out on gamepass and bragging about that as your primary value proposition. Many new games are, say, 20-30 hour experiences, assuming you play them from start to finish once. One does not need to spend too much time with "this % of other players got this achievement" to see how many players tend to drop off of a game even that long. So if you put your new game that you would have sold for $60-80 dollars to me directly and it translates to three weeks of engagement on your $15-ish/month (depending on level) subscription, it's hard to see how that is an economic win. Put that game on Gamepass in a year or two, sure, that can make sense, but on release? And that not as a mistake, but a deliberate strategy? I can not fathom the mindset that leads to that.
As a deal for customers it seems to have been pretty good but I've never understood how Microsoft expected to make money on that plan. The streaming-video proposition of making a high-budget release to keep your subscribers makes quite a bit more sense, you could never have counted on getting $70 out of a customer for those anyhow, and even that economic proposition I think has proved more complicated than the streaming companies expected. The Gamepass model has just seemed insane.
I expect it to move to more like what I described at the beginning. As a way to turn a lot of old and hard-to-monetize content into a subscription stream it's brilliant. As a way of releasing new AAA titles it's crazy. Movie studios played with that model and I don't think they liked it at all.
> So if you put your new game that you would have sold for $60-80 dollars to me directly and it translates to three weeks of engagement on your $15-ish/month (depending on level) subscription, it's hard to see how that is an economic win. Put that game on Gamepass in a year or two, sure, that can make sense, but on release?
I think that's what I thought it would be, too. XboX has a really good track record of backwards compatibility. I can (and do, occasionally) play 360 games on my series X.
A model where people can buy the latest games, can not only keep them but play them forever on future consoles, and can have access to an increasingly vast back catalogue of older games, seems like a huge win. And maybe each full price new game gets them a bit of a discount on their next month's game pass, to make it slightly better value than the playstation equivalent full priced game.
But they didn't seem to want to do anything like that.
I _think_ the thinking is that not everyone is going to buy more than a couple full priced new releases per year (in general). $80 or whatever is just too much for most people to drop on a game they "might" like. On the other hand, most people would have few reservations being perpetually subscribed to a service that lets them play every new game "for free" (so long as they keep rolling in on a monthly basis). Theoretically, the subscription money would exceed what they'd normally collect from the average person buying the usual 2 or 3 full priced games per year.
Where I think it breaks down is quite a number of gamers are hopelessly addicted to playing all the latest games, all day every day. MS is surely losing money when those guys substitute buying physical games for a subscription.
I agree that's what they seem to have been thinking.
I don't entirely understand... well... from a rational perspective anyhow, of course companies are not entirely rational... why it didn't become clear that this was a silly idea and not working. It's easy to make Gamepass stop cannibalizing your main game sales. You don't need a big announcement, you don't need to advertise your plans. You don't need a huge internal political fight. You just... stop. You just stop putting your brand new AAA games on your cheap subscription service plan. You don't even have to remove the old ones, they turn into your old AAA games naturally in the fullness of time. Nobody has to lose face. It's easy. It's like falling off a log.
The logic of day 1 releases, at least how it seemed to me, was that a % of those people who get gamepass just to play the game for cheaper would stick around. That’s potentially worth way more than 1x $60 (now $70-$80) sale. That didn’t happen I guess
It’s funny how a strategy like this would work on me, but I am a busy adult who doesn’t really game.
Compare that to my nephews who have a lot of time for gaming, but they’re always fighting to scrounge up the money for another month of Nintendo online or Xbox online and go without it for at least half the year
Being a Steam competitor involves making a store that's actually good. All the other major stores/platforms don't really seem to give a shit, to be frank. Steam has like 20x their feature set, and the gap appears to be still growing.
If anything, it should be easier to make cool new features when you own the hardware side of the platform experience too, but no, it's Steam that has stuff like remote play together, not PSN or Xbox.
I don't know if I care about the features, what I do care about is the games and a lean-back experience which is not sweaty. I play games to escape the drudgery of software development and the last thing I want to do is mess with an .INI file.
I love the Steam Deck because it feels like a consumer electronics device: it has the reliability of Linux but not the sweat. The Steam Deck is the only device I've seen that works 100% perfectly with Airpods, for instance, including Apple devices.
I was at Best Buy the other day and saw an ASUS device that looked pretty cool until I picked it up and saw a Windows desktop with fonts not scaled appropriately for the size of the device. Like, wazzup? Steam Big Picture turns my big Windows machine at home into a game console and does the same for my Mac Mini. How is it you can have the back of frickin' Microsoft and not be able to do the same?
Not to say that Steam isn't packed with features that are valuable to many gamers, but just having a great selection of games that "just work" and knowing I can enjoy my investment on the devices I have now and devices I get in the future is worth a lot.
I think it's one of those things where people only care about a small percentage of the features, but which small percentage varies.
For example, I used the example of remote play together, which is very neat and a lot of people love it, but I personally don't use it.
On the other hand, I make extensive use of Steam's gifting feature, including its ability to handle multiple gifts to multiple people in a single transaction, and to schedule exactly when those gifts will land. And this is something that the other major stores don't seem to support at all, a big advantage for Steam for me, but I'm sure there's many people who don't care at all about gifting.
It used to be that you could get gift keys/links that worked just like any steam key you can buy outside Steam and you could gift those to people in whatever manner and on whatever schedule you wanted. I liked that a lot more than a gifting feature built into the store no matter how well designed it is.
Microsoft is focused on AI and enterprise sales. I don't think they're institutionally capable of making a good end-user experience. You might just as well ask why SAP makes bad UIs - it's because the executives just don't really care.
I still love developing for the .NET Framework using C#. However, the number of reasons to keep using anything made by Microsoft continues to dwindle with each passing year.
As you already said, Azure is awful and only in second place behind AWS because of how much worse Google Cloud Platform is. Windows is back to sucking again, this time so hard that I'm seriously considering learning Linux and/or switching to macOS on my home system, & playing games on SteamOS instead. I almost never use Microsoft Office anymore, outside of household budgeting spreadsheets that I could easily work with LibreOffice instead.
> As you already said, Azure is awful and only in second place behind AWS because of how much worse Google Cloud Platform is.
I expect Azure is in second place because Windows-only shops use it because of the Official Microsoft Active Directory integration (which might be called Entra now?).
For basic "Create a VM, attach disks and networking, and use it as a computer." tasks, it is my professional experience that Azure is the worst of the Big Three US "cloud" providers by far. Their "control plane" is flaky and unreliable, so it's something that you'll probably only notice if you create, destroy, or modify VMs a lot. [0]
If you have a support contract, Azure makes it much easier to talk to a human than GCP does, but I never encountered an issue that they were able to solve. "File a ticket, but don't expect support to be able to help because they won't understand the problem, and it will eventually go away." was the lesson I eventually learned.
[0] And the word on the street is that a huge chunk of Github's reliability problems are caused because of the move from AWS to Azure. Having used all three pretty extensively, I believe the rumors.
> The Steam Deck is the only device I've seen that works 100% perfectly with Airpods, for instance, including Apple devices.
Oh weird, mine have always made weird clicks and dropped audio here and there and shit like that when using them with my Deck.
They don’t do that when I use them with my Franken-PC bazzite machine. Instead, that one disconnects my BT mouse a couple times an hour and sometimes seems to stop processing BT keyboard input and “queue up” my presses instead, to be processed at random intervals over the next minute or so. Both of which are fun when playing games.
> Steam Big Picture turns my big Windows machine at home into a game console and does the same for my Mac Mini.
Well it turned mine into a 2000s linux/wine debugfest flashback when I wanted to play GTA IV: Ballad of Gay Tony... Also don't get me started on having to keep the poweroff button pushed on the xbox controller for mouse emulation for games not having controller support in the menus. It is far from the polished experience you had, but possibly I just held it wrong.
GTA IV: Ballad of Gay Tony is listed as silver on protondb, meaning 'works with tweaks', so that sounds about right. Things obviously aren't perfect. That last 10% of games is a massive pain, since every game is different (all the ones that are well behaved are in the first 90% that already work).
yeah like i assume this is better by now, but when gamepass was relatively new i got a free month with my laptop but just installing games would frequently fail, same with updating them. same with epic games for that matter, though not that bad. also at the time the xbox app would install everything in this readonly directory that you couldnt even access with admin rights, which ofc made modding impossible and also after reinstalling windows left me with an external harddrive where i wasnt allowed to delete a huge folder of games... fixed this by mounting it in linux.....
If they want to be Steam competitor, then at least they should have more clear branding. Currently they put xbox to anything game related, but it's not cross platform. At least when I had xbox, they had separate gamepass subscription for different platforms with different set of games. Games that you buy on xbox store on console in most cases also are not shared with your PC. And all their first party games are available on steam, while a lot of indie games probably are not in their store.
They really should make a choice between xbox as separate platform and xbox as windows pc. I has been like 10 years where they were kept advertising it as some kind of single ecosystem, while it was not
I can share nearly my entire steam library (~23 years worth) with my kids. There is no way in hell Sony or Microsoft will ever allow that. In fact, I've had to re-buy Minecraft because their account migration was such a shit show. They cannot and will not ever come anywhere close to competing with Steam on this feature. For that alone, I will never buy a console. Just glad I built PCs for my kids before the AI boom...
The Xbox can't even reliably play video trailers of the games MS in theory want to sell you. They don't even require every game to have a video. They don't even require every game to have a screenshot, as I've encountered some that don't even do that! Fundamentally unserious about making a good experience.
Yeah, there's lots of stuff in Steam that I never use and don't even understand. Like the Steam Points and the Trading Cards and Steam Level and so on.
But the purchasing experience is top notch and they even have a generous refund policy. It's just lightyears ahead of the competition.
A lot of games are less latency-constrained than you'd expect. FPSes are obviously rough with input lag, but stuff that's turn based and even many platformers feel "good enough" up to like 150ms
Steam is competent at what it does and has been for decades. No other online game store is as good as what it does: Nintendo, Epic, Microsoft, & Sony have all failed to do well what Steam has gotten better at over the course of 2+ decades.
People would likely juggle the use of two stores if the value proposition was great enough. But it isn't, which is why Steam dominates and all their competitors operate in comparatively tiny fiefdoms.
Steam has problems but it also has a vast feature set. The family sharing and refund policy are both seriously great, for example. Personal calendar is also really, really cool (and bad for my wallet).
Play anywhere is a killer feature for me (that's a game license that works on multiple platforms). Before steam deck came out it meant I could swap between PC and TV seamlessly. Should've been on every game they sold.
Game Pass was never a sustainable business model. People liked it because when a new game came out, they could buy a month of game pass for like $15, play through the game in a couple weeks, and cancel. It was a really good deal because Microsoft has spent the past decade+ trying to recover from their terrible fumble of the Xbox One launch, so they were subsidizing gamers to come back to their platform.
With the money being spent on AAA titles these days, they are not going to make any money without increasing the price of Game Pass majorly. The big price bump they quickly backtracked on was an attempt to make Game Pass somewhere closer to being profitable.
Traditionally if you're going to play through a game in a couple weeks and then not own it anymore, that means you sell it and someone else buys it for their own couple weeks, and the company should be happy if they make $15 per person in the chain.
Also this is part of why I'm really worried about how weak the concept of game ownership is getting.
See also how anyone buying GTA6 near launch will be unable to resell it.
The kind of person that actually cancels gamepass within a month is the kind of person to actually trade in the game. And with an efficient trading market they'd get more than a few bucks so early on.
Not necessarily. I was never the type to trade in physical games, but recently for Forza 6 I could either pay $99AUD to "own" the game, or buy one month of the PC game pass for $15AUD. An obvious choice.
The friend I played the game with did the same. Honestly, if they didn't include Forza 6 in Game Pass we both would've purchased it full price.
I see what you mean, but I think gamers on a budget will cancel. Other gamers would've paid full price for 12 games and instead paid $15 each for 12 games.
The writing's been on the wall about physical games going away for quite some time now.
You can tell the PS5 was designed to be a digital-first system by the disc drive slapped on the side like a tumour hanging off the otherwise symmetrical body.
I don't mind physical copies dropping in importance, and all else equal I even like the move to digital, but we desperately need to fix ownership of digital copies and stop having loopholes around "it's just a license".
How can you say that? No credible reporting has proven that there ever will be a version of GTA 6 on a disc. The physical versions that are announced will all consist of a one-time code.
I very much doubt a typical AAA game is bought new then resold 3 times on average. Very much doubt. And even if the used game market does cannibalise new games, they also generate a demand. Some gamers will pay full price knowing they can recoup some of it on the used market. Some of those gamers may not have made the purchase otherwise. Game Pass does not perform the same function.
Yea, I'd love to hear specifics. OP is all over this thread vaguely insinuating about "political content" but notably hasn't yet pointed out any specific examples that are objectionable.
None of those examples are political. They might be things you don't like, which is fine, but that doesn't make them politics. What makes the attractiveness of a 3D game character "politics"? What makes a useless gay side quest politics, but a similar useless straight side quest not-politics?
Having a realistic amount of LGBTQ people/interactions in a big story shouldn't qualify as "political". Removing it for certain markets is much more political, and they should not do that, but I get the impression that isn't the outcome you want.
Edit: Also the average level in the real world is a lot more than 1%. 1% is like just the trans portion.
Just so I understand your objection, they are woke because in the game one of their studios made, the woman in the game wasn't attractive enough for you?
The top Reddit comment there pretty much sums this whole discussion up. I can't believe I dragged myself into this. It's just Gamergate again and again. I should have known.
It's by design. The outrage merchants post day in and out to signal allegiance to this bizarre cult.
People also don't respect how WILDLY influential GamerGate as been. There's good arguments to be made that Trump and his shitty White House would never have come to pass if not for moot re-enabling political discussions on 4chan at the behest of some combo of Epstein and Bannon, explicitly to stoke reactionary rage at anything "gay" in games.
Like don't get me wrong it's deeply stupid and perhaps respect is the wrong word, but it's crazy how much those old events are shaping current culture war nonsense.
Those metrics are hugely misleading because they account for current fiscal year revenue and margins.
For Xbox being what it is today, which is mostly about the subscription and not the hardware console or the exclusives, you have to compound their acquisition frenzy of 2018-2020 or so, which totals about 75 billion+.
They didn't want the developers nor the catalog. What Microsoft wanted is to change the economics and dynamics of the entire games industry, to make it Netflix-like (play what's in the catalog today, pay monthly even if you don't play anything) vs. what Steam offers (purchase once, own "forever", even if it's de-listed).
But that didn't play out. Optimistic estimates put total revenue for Xbox since then in the 20B ballpark. At a ~5% margin (as other commenters have pointed out) the profit is about 1B dollars.
It means that after almost a decade, the entirety of Xbox is in the red for about 74 billion dollars, which is 74 billion away from breaking even.
Steam still dominates PC gaming. Xbox consoles can't be more irrelevant today.
This isn't about over-hiring or AI. It was a bet at the executive level that went horribly wrong. They can still do things like selling IPs at a bargain to compensate, but still. Horribly wrong.
Note: Microsoft doesn't publish hard factual data so the numbers above are somewhat speculative (e.g. "analysts data")
It seems really odd to have a Netflix consumption model for games. Generally people want to play a few favourite games for a long time and get very skilled at them. You just don't need to churn through content like movies.
You see 10 hours for indies and art games maybe. For big budget full price games people expect at least 60+ hours, which is why they tend to be full of padding.
The vast majority of "gamers" play freemium "games" on their phone. The next largest likely buy a console for one or two games, and maybe pick up another now and then (back in college one person's lamecube was permanently playing smash bros; another was on golden-eye - the two xboxes were for halo and madden respectively).
> Then they did not have to give away popular games day one on Game Pass
A company that sells consoles complaining about not having enough games after 25 years in business and acquiring most popular game studios is hilarious.
They keep cutting game studios, killing games and then set ambitious profit margins. At some point you have to question, do the people in charge understand their own business at all?
They just gutted bungee and basically killed Destiny 2, not because the game won’t sell, but because it won’t generate the profits they unrealistically set.
While Bungie had historically been tied to Xbox / Microsoft during the Halo era, Bungie spun out to be its own company in 2007, and then was bought by Sony in 2022. It was Sony, not Microsoft, driving the most recent layoffs at Bungie.
It seems like a simple fact is often overlooked: you can't just throw money at art and expect it to be good, no matter the form. Netflix tried it and ended up with a lot of weak stuff, Microsoft did the same with similar results. Most games these days are just copies or rehashes of others, not original, full of clichés or old-fashioned mechanics. Acquired studios tried to mash up different ideas, hoping it would stick, often with really bad results, like Redfall. It's like the E.T. game disaster, but forty years later and spanned across the whole company. Hardware is great, GamePass is great, but Microsoft can't produce games.
One thing money can do is enable polish - you might not be able to directly force the next great game, but you can make your games excellently coded and polished.
Polish and Microsoft is a funny pairing over the last few years. More and more things are coming apart at the seams as the vibe-coded duct tape is failing.
Edit: even though i inaccurately associated Bungee with MS, they are not. However, the comment stands when you replace it with any of the other successful studios like Bethesda, Id software, Blizzard etc. A bunch of studios and their ips were gutted not because their games sucked, but because they didn’t meet the profits Microsoft expected, which is ridiculous.
It comes across to me as a really honest letter. At least they are talking about spinning out studios instead of shutting them down, I think that plays better than previous announcements. (e.g. make a hit game like Hi-Fi Rush and get shut down!)
Completely agree. Their problem is that corporate wants more money to funnel back into AI and it is really inconvenient that Xbox provides only a couple billion dollars per month whereas Office and Cloud provide many more billions. What a complete joke.
> - Then they did not have to give away popular games day one on Game Pass
> - And finally, they did not have to raise Game Pass prices to improve the profit margins. Of course, consumers pulled out.
I saw this coming from day one. The instant they did Netflix for Games, it was going to gut their margins. And then the inevitable pullback, either holding new games for months or raising the price, was going to kill the value proposition.
They said "This will make us a mint" and celebrated the victory years too early.
Another thing that is crazy to me (and maybe this is a premonition) is that if you play MS games online on Xbox, you have to have a subscription, but if you play on other platforms you can play for free. They are literally punishing their own users with additional fees. I thought this was just Minecraft, which is why my kids and I always play Minecraft on our iPads instead of on the Xbox, but when I recently bought Forza Horizon 6 I was amazed to see that I could play online with other players for free, whereas on Xbox I had to pay to play online in Forza Horizon 4 and 5. So they are basically saying "you gave us a bunch of money for hardware? Cool, now give us more money every month to use it online!" It's absurd, and it's one of the things that drove me away from Xbox. I also have friends who have been lifelong Xbox fans who have had enough and are leaving for Steam.
Yeah, I forgot to mention that the pay-to-play even applies to multiplayer within your own LAN. I just verified that nothing had changed since I last played: you are unable to join LAN games unless you buy a monthly xbox pass. Complete BS.
50 years ago, publicly listed companies understood that chasing short-term growth targets undermined long-term sustainability. The current failure mode is not an inherent property of being a publicly listed company, it's a consequence of incompetent leadership and bad regulatory policy.
"Chasing the highest margins" is almost the entire point of a market based economy, and is the main selling point for capitalism. I get your complaint, but if you reframe it I think it isn't the real problem here.
The whole point of a market-based economy is to allocate resources to making things people actually want. How does the market figure out what people want more of? Well, profit margin. If someone is making a lot of profit selling something, that is a really good sign that people want more of that thing. Other people see the high profit margin, and move to get into that business. More of that thing is created, and people's demand is satisfied.
The high profit margin is the signal (and the incentive) to get more of that thing.
In other words "Compulsively chasing only the highest margins" can be rephrased as "investing in things that people want more of"
>"Chasing the highest margins" is almost the entire point of a market based economy, and is the main selling point for capitalism
That's news to the ALDI brothers and Henry Ford. Capitalism used to be about the exact opposite. We moved from low volume - high margin, extractive feudal-like economics to consumer capitalism, high volume low margin. You create wealth by churning out commodities at low margins that the average worker could buy.
The tech industry is trying to exactly reverse this, as Varoufakis appropriately points out, by returning to techno-feudalism where you're not a consumer but a sort of platform serf. High volume commodity markets is exactly what these people try to eliminate to return to a kind of direct resource extraction.
I don't think those previous capitalists were any different than the ones today, they just didn't have the same opportunity. It wasn't possible to build a company the size of modern ones with the technology at the time.
Look, I am not saying there aren't horrible flaws with capitalism. There are a ton, and we should, as a society, work to mitigate them.
I just don't think the solution to the problem is for us to ask capitalists to not seek the highest margin. This is not a problem that is fixed by people just being more moral.
I agree with the mess part. I also feel like a reset is necessary and they are messing it up more right from the start. Fourteen layers of management? That's insane. But 3200 layoffs is a hell of a lot more than middle management cruft. Asha certainly has her hands full over there and the honeymoon period - if there even was one - is definitely over.
If everyone thinks like that, no jobs are created. Xbox hires a ton of people and creates genuine value for consumers. Okay, that last part you can question, but I’m an original Xbox-er so I believe in it.
3% profit should be totally fine for any business. The planet is cooked, I think we can live with the shareholders making a bit less.
The times when companies only restructured when they were actually making losses are long gone. Today, if they "underperform" (i.e. they're not as profitable as the stock market thinks they should be), investors want to see blood today rather that tomorrow.
> And finally, they did not have to raise Game Pass prices to improve the profit margins. Of course, consumers pulled out.
Myself and 2 of my friends stopped our subscriptions the day that happened and never went back. I know it’s anecdotal but I’m happy to see others did the same.
Spencer's strategy for Xbox was very 2010 coded: rely on the billion/trillion dollar company to undercut the competition and gather market share and leverage. Classic embrace, extend, extinguish. That's why they bought a bunch of arthouse studios who don't immediately make money, invested hard in a subscription service that was wildly unprofitable (a strategy that even TV services couldn't make profitable, mind you), and focus on moving software more than hardware.
That strategy shifted dramatically between rising interest rates, a cooling consumer market, business uncertainties, and companies simply wanted to throw any excess fat into the AI rat race. So those art house studios were removed, Gamepass needs to enshittify pre-maturely,production needs to slow from a variety of offerings to the usual safe and sure releases. And of course, the biggest expense needs to be trimmed down on: because no one is stopping them from doing it in the US.
The number will still go up, but in different ways. They aren't doing this because they are in the red, they are doing it because they want all the money instead of a lot of it.
That's a 3% margin which is unsustainable. It's less return than you can get from buying treasuries, which means that if they don't improve it they will go out of business.
This is the frustrating thing reading these comments, where people seem to assume that any profit margin is good enough to sustain a business.
People see a 3% return and think, "Well, they aren't losing money so there is no reason they can't just keep doing business as usual." What this idea is missing is that the investors in a company aren't choosing between "keep my money in this company" and "sit on the cash", they are choosing between "keep my money in this company" and "invest my money somewhere else"
In other words, you aren't just looking at direct returns on an investment, you also have to think of the OPPORTUNITY COST of the investment. By keeping their money invested in a business making 3% returns, they can't invest that money somewhere else.
It's more like evolution through natural selection. If you can buy a treasury that returns 3.6%, you will NOT invest money in a business that has more risk, is only returning 3%, and has no believable growth story. Even worse, if you own shares in that company, you will sell them and shift the investment dollars to something with better returns or better chance for growth.
It's this competition that leads to prosperity, the alternative is central planning which leads to poverty.
You also missed the part where they positioned themselves as the value offering. That's gonna be hard to beat whilst still achieving "return to growth".
I wonder how are they taking in 5 billion per quarter when their latest console barely outsold the first Xbox. I doubt it was making a bit less than 5 billion per quarter with quotes like "Ultimately, Microsoft lost an accumulative total of $4 billion from the Xbox, only managing to turn a profit at the end of 2004." on wikipedia.
So how are two consoles with roughly the same sales numbers so far apart in revenue?
> - The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter - The problem according to them is profit margin - around 150-160 million
How are they still doing 5 billions in revenue per quarter? Are Xbox and games still sold? In my area they seem to have disappeared from the physical stores alley. I realized that a few weeks ago there were Playstation and Nintendo products in the video game area but no Xbox anything.
a couple are symptoms of their problems and the others are causes. They lack the understanding to know which ones. They tried (and failed) to build a subscription model out of game renting while cannibalizing the very studios they purchased. There was no saying no. They were going to take you over whether you wanted them to or not. They would also scheme to half-ass your marketing partnership so you wouldn't make targets so you would be vulnerable to a take over. It's Microsoft at it's finest. A lesson in Greed Above All Else.
xbox is not a startup and neither m$ a vc. the board is not in love with gaming to continue sponsoring it. but if the solution is to make it even worse to game in their platform, then i hope this crashes and burns for good.
Well this is the new Xbox boss, Aska Sharma trying to course correct her own actions after pushing out Phil Spencer (and team). Phil had a deep understanding of the game world about profit margins and how the Xbox is essentially a stake in keeping Microsoft in the minds of consumers, a place in the home. Aska has a shallow understanding and sees only the financials and wanted to increase profits. Now she is burning it all down to try and “reset” and replace people with LLMs to increase profit margins. I imagine she will be pushed out herself end of year or next Spring (2027) once her naïve plan back fires.
A part of me wants to be generous in interpreting that and say, OK, maybe it's the first time she's playing games semi-seriously in order to understand the capital G Gamer. Surely she's played games before, like say, the Sims, Bejeweled, Mario Kart, or picked up a Nintendo DS or Switch in her lifetime. Heck, even Wii Sports should count here in some capacity. Most people have played games casually in their lifetime by this point.
The other part of me though says that, no, it is in fact pretty possible that she hasn't played any video games of note, other than Wii Sports that one time. And even if she has played games casually, is it really too much to ask to have the person leading the Xbox brand be someone who can press the X button on their controller and not be confused by that?
It's a publicly listed company. They needed someone without the emotional attachment to 'Gaming', but with business nous, to make the decisions needed to meet her mandate, which is to ultimately increase shareholder value.
A 'Gamer' would have found that more difficult to do.
Would we say that about any other industry? Can you run a film studio if you have never watched a film in your life? Can you run a publishing house if you’ve never read a novel?
I should have been more clear and my initial comment didn't portray the intent: sometimes Good business decisions requires a longer time horizon for the strategy to play out.
But with companies on the stock exchange, Good business practice often comes at the expense of market perception -> share price. And when that happens, there is a lot of pressure on the Board -> CEO to ensure gains are being shown immediately.
So my comment isn't to suggest that a Gamer could be a good person to run the business with good business nous, it's that their experience in the industry would most likely lead them to make decisions that are Good but need a longer horizon, vs immediate impact to satisfy the shareholders.
It happens with any company, and we're starting to see this happen with Apple as well. As their main product lines have started to taper off in growth, they have needed to do things to offset that, often making decisions that are contrary to what Apple would usually stand for or would not have considered, say, 15 years ago.
I should have been more clear and my initial comment didn't portray the intent: sometimes Good business decisions requires a longer time horizon for the strategy to play out.
But with companies on the stock exchange, Good business practice often comes at the expense of market perception -> share price. And when that happens, there is a lot of pressure on the Board -> CEO to ensure gains are being shown immediately.
So my comment isn't to suggest that a Gamer could be a good person to run the business with good business nous, it's that their experience in the industry would most likely lead them to make decisions that are Good but need a longer horizon, vs immediate impact to satisfy the shareholders.
It happens with any company, and we're starting to see this happen with Apple as well. As their main product lines have started to taper off in growth, they have needed to do things to offset that, often making decisions that are contrary to what Apple would usually stand for or would not have considered, say, 15 years ago.
There's this little concept of "cultural sensitivity". Given the size of the King thing it would even be fair to have somebody who had a serious Candy Crush habit.
At least they didn't create a fake profile for her the way Elon Musk made one.
I think the "glass cliff" is going to claim another victim.
Asha came from the AI division of Microsoft, she didn’t pop out of nowhere. She is strongly tied to the Microsoft LLM plays.
IMO Phil was very clearly pushed out by “AI will cut costs talk”. No one makes huge investments into acquiring companies and then suddenly retires (after running the division successfully for decades) and none of his underlings were promoted into the role, they all left when he did.
I think Phil was pushed out by the complete failure of his strategic vision when confronted with reality. He had a vision of growth and prestige, and money would follow. I loved his vision in its grandiose and lofty goals, but he completely failed to capture any of the "how to make it happen". It stays a fantasy.
She’s been in her position for less than 6 months. All of the problems were under Phil, so I don’t understand what you mean by course correcting her own actions
I don't really have an opinion on Sharma since she's very green, but Phil Spencer's tenure was an unmitigated disaster. The strategy of rolling up studios and trying to grow through GamePass both completely backfired, with the studios producing few and generally unsuccessful games, and GamePass failing to convert casual players while demolishing your take from your hardcore players.
Was definitely time for major change at XBOX. Is this the right direction? I have no idea.
Don’t know why this is being downvoted because it’s absolutely on the money. She’s a very green exec that is doing the classic “change everything to make it look like I’m doing something” while also not really achieving anything.
The rebrand to ‘XBOX’ is a good example of how they’re already out of ideas
Might work if you don’t: out-price your hardware, get rid of disc trays, make GamePass expensive, force Microsoft accounts and online mandates, buy up every studio and force them to out out crappy updates,… ahm, no it’s the users, they’re getting old and cranky.
Yikes, I bought every Xbox console and plenty of day-1 releases, but skipped the last gen when it became clear that the platform isn’t about gamers anymore.
Triple-As are also getting tiresome, so I think plenty of people are happy to get a cheaper title on Steam that feels like better value.
Yeah, we had every playstation since the original, and a vast library of games. Admittedly I ended up with a digital PS5 (gift), so I ended up in the digital ecosystem. This will hurry me up into buying a disc drive for it I suppose.
I tend to agree about the lackluster AAA industry, but I don't think that's the gamers 'fault' for wanting indie games, more private equity and the share market environment forcing developers to generate slop as opposed to good titles. It's a sad way that the broader economy is going in that regard.
I didn’t mean to go with the easy, default criticism of AAAs as slop and repetitive; it’s just that _lots_ of smaller devs/studios are putting out excellent gameplay and/or narratives.
Revenue is just not a useful concept to understand the state of a company. I can easily generate revenue by simply exploding costs. Blockbuster had huge revenue.
If we talked about costs as much as we talk about revenue (which carries roughly the same amount of information) people would judge theses reports very differently.
- The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter - The problem according to them is profit margin - around 150-160 million
So first of all, they are big! Secondly they are not at a loss. They just have a "thin, non-growing margin". So to fix all this they are trimming down, so they can "return to growth" (which I think is ridiculous).
Some points -
- They are huge business even now - 5 billion per quarter revenue is no joke
- They did not have to buy all those studios
- They looked at Netflix, and wanted the sweet monthly subscription cash stream
- Then they did not have to give away popular games day one on Game Pass
- And finally, they did not have to raise Game Pass prices to improve the profit margins. Of course, consumers pulled out.
- Once again, short term vision, crazy decisions, bad spending spree and a constant need to "make numbers go up" and who has to pay for all this?