Does this mean that Starfield and Forza Motorsport could be the last first party games with a physical edition? Now we know why Hellblade II is digital only…
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To be fair the original Hellblade was digital only too
Jez says this about their support teams, but I’m reading comments about how horrible their support was all the same. So now I can’t help but wonder how high quality it really was.
Still, a very fucked up situation all around.
Yes, but before Ninja Theory wasn’t part of Xbox and therefore the budget was limited for a developer without a publisher: now it is no longer a problem.
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Just to out this into perspective, when Disney bought Fox around 4000 folk ended up being laid off, following the merger.
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I’m 99% digital nowadays but I don’t like this. Without the “competition” from physical, prices on games will climb even further I fear.
Also I do enjoy being able to purchase some cool editions of my favourite games for display purposes. I hope there will continue to be physical special editions around.
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If they ever go full digital I think they’re likely going to go the Starfield special edition route, where we got a credit chip with a game code on it.
So for Forza we could get a car key or mini liscense plates with the code on it, along with whatever else is part of it.
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I wouldn’t be opposed to that, I have no need for discs or such and a digital code included is fine.
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All job losses suck regardless but if there was any job that was likely to get gutted it was stuff revolving around retail physical stuff
Painfully obvious the direction gaming but in particular Xbox is going, physical is dead on Xbox and consumers have already shown them they no longer care about it
Insane they can fire 2k people without shutting down any studios and only one game being canceled. That has to mean that the support staff everywhere is just gutted?
I wonder what all this means for the future of Xbox. Many questions arise, but it is now clear that we are going to see big changes coming. I hope it’s for the best, but I admit that it worries me a little.
Like can happen it seems like Jez jumped the gun on this one
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Jez, jumping the gun with an emotional response? Never… 
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This was always inevitable, but the speed of change to digital only is understandably sooner than imagined. I guess they have the FA’s look at the risk and maybe it wasn’t that hard of a decision. I have my xbox games on a physical ssd and even copied for the second console, can’t do that with physical discs. On the job loss front, retail teams might be going, but the game server side for digital distribution has increased staffing.
Physical presence is still very important in a lot of places worldwide though and something MS should be focusing on as it would definitely help with sales. There’s a good reason why Apple has Apple Stores, gives you much more visibility!
The only thing we know about physical and Microsoft is that the majority of their customers don’t buy it. I’m not sure how you can assume it would “help with sales”. They know infinitely more than we do on this subject.
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Words to live by with most of these baseless assertions. Yes, by definition, it’s baseless because in this particular case, we know how small of a footprint physical is these days and we don’t have any evidence to counter internal data.
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Do we know the roles of the fired people? I have my doubts the current tech and gaming job market can absorb these numbers in any way.
Loosing almost 20 percent of your workforce can’t be good for business. Who is doing these jobs now? If i would lose 20 percent of my team we would need replacements to do our work asap.
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