Phil Spencer’s acquisition plan:
Step 1: Buy studios to make exclusives and booster Game Pass subs and Xbox consoles sales
Step 2: Release the games on competitors platforms (which don’t have Game Pass) anyway.
Step 3: Close the studio you acquired.
Step 4: Profit?
Something CLEARLY wasn’t planned right.
Hi-fi Rush on PS5 must’ve really bombed then.
This is all terrible and a sad reminder that the ABK deal was the catylist for getting all the Microsoft big-wigs to look at Xbox more closely and demand a return on their investment.
I now wish that deal never went thru as the Xbox we all knew and loved no longer exists.
I’m seeing the fears for Ninja Theory, Obsidian, Double Fine, Compulsion etc here and I do get it. Fuck man, I’m hoping for the best.
Passively attacking people for providing context is a no go. I’ve not seen anyone defend Xbox here, if I missed something please let me know, but there is a massive difference between highlighting an industry-wide problem and defending the closure of studios.
Same
Based on what Brad said, those fears are unfounded; also, there is a lot of glossing over financial realities here, but people without intimate knowledge are going to feel the way they feel… and those actually affected by this have every right to feel everything that they do.
I just feel as if trying to argue sales and performance metric semantics, and framing it as ‘well “”“X”“” did this poorly, it’s no wonder they closed’ is horrifically tone deaf tot he creatives that lost their jobs. what do these comments provide ? who are they for?
I see your point, but Microsoft also said that Hi-Fi Rush was a success, and look at what happened. I won’t believe in anything until they prove themselves to be trustworthy again.
Yeah, I got ya.
It’s best to just wait and see. We probably will get a full story by Jason and we’ll have more to work with.
how many more closures to satisfy ‘financial realities’ do we have to go through to finally understand that
maybe the execs and suits in these positions are not good at their job at all.
Yep.
This is entirely Xbox/Microsoft’s fault. They chose to shadow-drop Hi-Fi Rush rather than giving it the roll out and marketing it deserved, and then acted all surprised when barely anyone bought it. Now Xbox have lost one of their best studios because of it. Absolute hacks. Aaron Greenberg or whoever it was that made that call should have lost their job, not the hard working people at Tango.
ABK had to be the biggest fucking monkey’s Paw ever.
Obsidian will be fine as they’re development machines - they pump out games regularly, without spending huge amounts of money and they’ve a good fanbase particularly on PC that seems to buy their games (I’m a massive fan of many of their games too).
The smaller ones I am a little concerned for - if you do something a bit more “out there” or wacky, and take a risk, we always thought Xbox would have their back and allow experimentation that we’d get to try out on Game Pass.
Microsoft Gaming seems far less cuddly than Xbox, and if they have to justify their existence then less risks will be taken, and yes even then some of those studios may eventually go 
Only three years after completing the purchase and only one game from Tango and Arkane Austin to decide their future, they were not given a chance to try even one more game…
When the response is “I’m done with Xbox”… only to “jump ship” to a company that literally just got through several waves of layoffs and closes studios without a big acquisition to “justify” the move, I’m not sure which is more tone deaf at this point. So the same questions/attacks you’re levying at people passively could be directed right back at some of you.
The entire system is the problem, not an individual company, and by focusing on the individual you let all those others slide instead of allowing for systemic change to occur, but that’s just my two cents.
Everyone says this, but I’m not sure this wouldn’t be happening anyway. By all accounts, Satya was the driving factor to get ABK, so this “new era” of Xbox was probably going to happen with or without ABK.
At one point people need to learn that there’s a difference between saying stuff and meaning/doing stuff.
Xbox leadership hasn’t been trustworthy for years.
Yeah, same here. Goddamn it.
Just like I would remind people that ABK literally told everyone that the layoffs would have been even more extensive had the merger not completed, I would be willing to bet that Arkane Austin and Tango were on the chopping block when Bethesda was looking for a buyer (again, I’m almost certain there’s a court quote to suggest the same).
Again, not a defense at all, just the financial realities of an economy dictated by an unsustainable obsession with growth.
Making it abundandtly clear: I, and everyone else as far as I can tell, are all upset by this news and in a just-society, there is no ethical/moral justification for these closures or any of those that have happened over the last 18 months across the industry.