It’s funny cause they did this with the Xbox One too, they started off with full on console exclusives and when the Xbox One fell apart they shifted to PC and eventually going day and date. This is similar but now it’s competing consoles.
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We spent years cheering Xbox on with acquisitions and the ABK saga and it’s gonna end up killing the brand as we know it
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Back to PC gaming for me I guess. As a Dreamcast stan, its sad to see Xbox go the way of Sega. Ill play my Series S and X until the wheels fall off, but no more Xbox hardware for me… assuming they keep making hardware.
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Indiana Jones only few month later?!? Not years but months?!? Xbox is becoming more useless!
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Honestly, there’s still time to call it off. See the outrage, eat the L on those ports and cancel those plans.
I get the financial arguments, but it would seem the xbox leadership are prepared to completely devalue the hardware… such massive contradictions to Spencer’s messenging.
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Paying Disney to make the game exclusive and then releasing it to PS5. Yeah, this definitely wasn’t Phil’s idea. Some higher up probably destroyed Xbox plans and changed everything.
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It’s case by case tho. Redfall was a flop so it won’t be ported, Starfield was a major success so it will lol
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This feels like it’s coming from the top and the fact that this even seems to be a consideration to me shows they are completely clueless
They ain’t changing shit and if this isn’t a Phil decisions there’s only like 3 people above him in Satya, Hood and Stuart so this is on them most likely
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The one thing I can agree with is that this 100% reeks of MS financial reps steering the ship. Short term gains without understanding how it affects the brand as a whole.
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The problem with Xbox under Nadella is that they seem to get impatient when their moves don’t flourish right away.
I actually have a set of examples that are very similar to the current situation.
1-2014: Phil takes over after the Don Mattrick disaster, immediately removes the Kinect and makes it optional, great move, they go hard on the 2014 holidays with great bundles and deals and great exclusives and sell a ton of consoles, almost catching up to PS4 sales in the US.
2015: They still value exclusives and pay for a big one with Tomb Raider, Halo 5, Gears Ultimate remaster, Forza Motorsport 6, great year in terms of exclusives tbh but this year they lost the COD marketing and exclusive perks which was synonymous with the Xbox brand for nearly a decade, sales are still great in North America, still surpassing the Xbox 360 in the same timeframe by great margins and on pace to surpass the 360 in North America, at this rate Xbox One sale were also on pace to match or surpass the 360’s lifetime.
2016: They get Quantum Break early in the year, sales weren’t great for it and PS4 is about to release Uncharted 4, Xbox sales still weren’t bad but it is clear that they would not surpass the 360 outside or even in North America by this point, mainly due to their lack of effort outside of the USA and UK and later that year they got Forza Horizon 3 and Gears 4. But people are starting to notice that Xbox doesn’t take risks with their studios and doesn’t let them branch out, one of the reasons why Bungie left, PS4 Pro launched this year.
This year they also started to prepare for next gen but the next several years you’ll notice a shift away from the traditional console generations, a huge miss read of the market would happen here but we wouldn’t know until years later by 2022 or so, this year 2016 is when Xbox should’ve started to buy studios left and right and preparing for a big next gen launch in 2020, because the next several years would see a massive rise in Playstation popularity and brand power and Xbox was going to go ahead against that.
2017: Studios start closing, RIP Lionhead and others, RIP Scalebound lol. Xbox announces they’re going all in on PC as well, implementing the Xbox and PC strategy and play anywhere, great, Microsoft owns Windows after all so it was only a matter of time but you notice something, their efforts in the last 3 years didn’t improve their console sales like they actually hoped it would so they’re now not investing in first party outside of the studios they already had and a few small studios they had partnered with like Moon and Undead Labs and the Cuphead and Limbo devs… all very small while Sony was here announcing massive AAA first party games and third party partnerships, thus they create Game Pass, Xbox One X comes out this year which was an amazing console at the time.
2018: They announce that all future Xbox games would launch on Game Pass, they go all in on the Game Pass strategy, thinking that games on a sub service at launch would bring more people to their ecosystem and that they would be able to compete this way with Sony, thus they start preparing for this future where games would be played through Streaming… in their minds this future was just 5 years away and Google and Amazon would be their future main competitors, they didn’t really prepare for an amazing console launch like they should’ve been doing and were once again preparing for an unknown and uncertain future.
Now here we are, Game Pass didn’t take off as fast or get as big as they envisioned… their neglect and total incompetence in the console market means that Series isn’t even selling like the Xbox One was, their lack of first party investment sooner means that games are taking much longer to release…
Now just 3 years into this generation Microsoft is changing strategies as the CFO said not long ago, it seems like just like before they had expectations they didn’t meet and at the time they thought they would meet them and suddenly changed strategies, Nintendo and Sony didn’t get here being like this but they got here by doing two things: making great exclusives and putting in huge efforts year after year to become global companies.
How many times has Xbox been dead in Japan? Like 3-4 times but Xbox would always come back but FOR REAL this time we promise!! I’m actually surprised they seem to be having good support from there this generation, I’ll give them that, but outside of NA and UK they never put in the right effort, I see people all the time who complain about it in Europe, lack of localization and no marketing at all.
If Sony and Nintendo were able to become global organizations then there was literally zero excuse for Microsoft, they are so much richer than these two combined it’s not even funny, so much so that they could buy them tomorrow and make that money back in the next 2 years.
What happened here was a total lack of competent leadership, who could understand the gaming industry, the last time Xbox had those types of leaders was right before Mattrick took over, Peter Moore and J Allard.
Phil isn’t horrible but he just wasn’t the right guy to take on and prepare for the next generation, maybe it wasn’t all his fault though, very possible all the poor decisions were due to Microsoft pressuring him or something but I just don’t know, 10 years at his position and he was never able to get proper consumer support for Xbox in Europe and make Xbox an actual existing brand over there this generation, anyway the end for Xbox hardware feels like it’s near, we’ll see.
To be clear I’m not blaming Phil at all but his bosses for their impatience,.
Because Phil was never the real boss, he has people he answers to and they are very impatient.
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As I have said in the previous post, this is where the industry is going. PlayStation are probably thinking about it too, considering they have 60 million consoles sold but one 5 million of them are buying Spiderman 2, and they’re losing money.
The system agnostic future is coming and it is going to be amazing, and we need to shift past this idea of a wee box being your kingdom.
It will bring in so much extra revenue to Xbox studios, meaning more games and better games and those games will end up on Day One on Game Pass, on Xbox and PC, and later on PlayStation for purchase.
I’m saying, they see the outrage before anything official should give them an indication. It’s a better chance calling it off now than going through and maybe not having another chance at it… Idk
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Microsoft’s tract record for consumer products has not been exactly great, makes me sceptical if they are gonna succeed at all.
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Yeah, definitely seems the Microsoft leadership have lost patience in waiting for division dividends.. and overruled them.
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So Indiana just a few months after Xbox, so I’m guessing TES VI is just day and date for everything? I can see it. Probably won’t take long before everything is day and date.
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I have just seen Jon’s article on Starfield (and Tom’s on Indiana Jones) and decided to revisit this thread (which I muted day 1) just to see what shitstorm was unraveling over here and I wasn’t disappointed.
I have always leaned on the BS side of this rumour but now it’s clear Xbox are shitting the bed just like they did with the Xbox One. How f***ing stupid can they be?!
Even if Hi-fi Rush and Starfield are only going multiplatform because they had already worked on PS versions it sets a precedent that nothing is exclusive to Xbox and it will eventually come to PS.
I have been on the fence for a few months now about ditching consoles and going back to PC as they have both PS & Xbox exclusives and this will basically make my decision for me. There’s no more point spending money in a ecosystem which will eventually become redundant.
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My point is that the fact they are short sighted enough to consider a brand killing move like this a good idea, I doubt they care about backlash, they are in their own bubble
I said it a while back but Xbox’s or rather MS biggest enemy in the gaming space was never Sony, it was themselves, Xbox never stood a chance with MS at the helm, they just don’t get gaming
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WHAT THE F… IS MS DOING??? That’s it i am building a PC because i will never give Sony my hard earned money.
Leaving Xbox feels like a second divorce, but this time will Nvidia get my money instead of the divorce lawyer.
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Time and time again, Microsoft proper has shown that it does not get consumer-facing products. Frankly speaking, they haven’t had overwhelming success with really any of them: Zune failed and never took off, Mixer failed and never took off, Windows Phone failed and never took off, Skype was set up for success and they screwed it up and it has floundered, Surface is floundering, and Xbox, outside of the 360 generation, has never been anything but a distant third. They clearly want to treat Xbox like their enterprise-centric products (Office, Windows, Azure) and release their content everywhere, but they don’t have a near monopoly like they do with Windows. This move will, eventually, kill Xbox. Microsoft gaming might make more money, but if you thought the Series X is selling poorly, just wait until next generation. I don’t see any situation in which Xbox sales cater, gamepass subs dip, not grow, and maybe Microsoft Gaming makes money, but at this point, Sega reincarnate is just waiting to happen.
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