It’s still a total joke, but people are too emotional to think rational.
Not only that, the game pass logo was on all the first party games in the developer direct, 19 days ago.
Indiana Jones and The Great Circle™ is coming later this year to Xbox Series X|S and PC and will be available day one on Game Pass.
Don’t be naive Xheads.
I can see some MS execs refusing to support Xbox in the way Playstation gets support exactly because of Playstation’s margins. I think there can be sound questioning of that, if they see that the already dominant brand needs to spend like that just to mostly sustain status quo, then for Xbox to just hope be on a close level, the spend would really be insane and on a loss leading operation for a long while.
This post is not in defence of any strategy or decision they made or make.
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I’m sorry, but Microsoft spend $80 billion on two publishers. To say they don’t support Xbox is false.
But we can all assume why they change the strategy. Maybe the current plan is not working. Who knows.
I never thought that buying ABK was to support Xbox in the sense fans may think.
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They did it with Peter Moore, also under Phil’s tenure marketing and localisations were gutted piece by piece over the years, so this particular instance is 100% on him. Even Mattrick’s lead Xbox had global presence, I mean. The issue when you cut advertizing&localisation within enterntainment is that your presence outside anglosphere diminishes, it’s inevitable.
I would have traded ABK for a more effective Xbox, but we never had it outside some moment here and there in the last 10 years.
Regardless of what they say (bar an incredible u-turn and apology to fans), I think my days with Xbox will end alongside XSX gen, I’m too old to keep listening to ther bullshit. 
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I dunno about that. I still remember how people ( including Jez ) signal boosted that rumor about Fable having dev issues and needing to switch to UE5 that originated on 4Chan.
They’re about to presumably get what they’ve always wanted. I’d be excited too!
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in the way Playstation gets support
Yes, Xbox definitely did get support from MS (at least $8 billion for first party expansion that’s focused on Xbox, I’m not counting ABK) but it wasn’t to chase Playstation directly imo. They had to present a vision combining PC, subscription, and cloud. I think, actually I believe that if Xbox wanted to get funding to chase Playstation in the more traditional console way that Playstation is dominating, MS wouldn’t support it.
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Yeah, I mean, imagine offering a sought after (everywhere, not US only) entertainment product (like they did in the past, worst sin of all imo, forgetting the right way), what horror.
Unfortunately, I think it’s exactly that, entertainment margins are too slim for MS and after they prevented Sony to conquer living room, they disengaged. They started to spend the big bucks again only because they think to leverage Azure with gaming (also because publishers are better assets than money in the bank), but it’s still a pipe dream.
After the wishy-washyness of the last two years, I’m 100% positive about it, never once Xbox mattered during the drama, it was always about cloud and overall market share. And that was a yellow alert.
I know it’s the same account I posted earlier, but I saw this too. There is no plans at MS to change this.
https://twitter.com/KoreaXboxnews/status/1755269187180859486
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Oh this is a given, they were shown a vision of a future where most people would be streaming games through any device of their choice and subscribing to services to play games and Microsoft executives want this above the traditional market where everyone plays on hardware, they believed they could reach hundreds of millions of people with streaming and they probably still can but definitely that fast, it will take a few decades for this to be a possibility, if Spencer’s pitch was to grow their current console install base and focus on that first instead of trying to get to the future first before everyone else then Microsoft probably shuts down his request for extra investment right there and the Bethesda acquisition never happens, much less ABK.
I’m not talking about them never having done it, they definitely did it back then, I’m talking doing it again after fumbling it, now in a much more competitive market with today’s budgets…they probably noped out of that idea with the most initial math lol
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Maybe, maybe not. The roi argument and also the digital library one are mostly bullcrap to justify their failure. Most of users don’t care about old library and apparently the current roi is also not enough, the irony. Thy made a bet on the wrong horse, again. It’s that simple imo. They tought subs would have taken the lion share vs traditional sales because of Netflix. Another irony is that maybe will be true, but they are folding too early, again.
Although Im sure its an insignificant market, the same happened here in Colombia. In the 360 days you would get bombarded by xbox ads everywhere. I just dont understand why they gave up in the marketing department and the expansion.
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They’ve been backing it all along. And nothing from Microsoft (not yet, at least) even suggests that the original strategy has changed. What are we even talking about here? We’ll know next week for sure but to take a gander at what a trillion dollar company is thinking or doing with some of that $3 trillion is a fool’s errand. Stop!
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It’s exactly because they care about money that this can’t possibly be real, because many if not all players will just abandon Xbox. I sure as hell will, there would be no real reason to stay anymore. I would probably miss some of the cooler third party titles they sometimes have on there but meh, plenty to play as it is.
This can’t be real.
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Opportunity cost, I guess. Allocating the budget in the, what they think, most efficient way. Why spend budget in korea to gain a little at best if they can spend it in a market they have a foothold and gain more. Just speculation of course.
But why people keep talking about tv ads is beyond me anyway. What’s next? Xbox lost the focus in newspaper ads?
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Do you think next week they will somehow low-key confirm there will be a new gen of Xbox consoles to “reassure” hardcore fans?
I’m leaning towards what Idas said in regards to the first check in with the CMA regarding ABK remedies was originally scheduled for a few weeks from now, which aligns to the rumor that this Xbox business update was originally scheduled for spring.
If that’s true, and they’re just moving that update forward, then we’ll likely hear about updated points of view on software, services and hardware.
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The big elephant in the room for me is Gamepass.
We know they want (wanted?) Gamepass to be the center of their strategy going forwards, but Xbox console hardware is the backbone of the subscription base right now. Not PC, not other devices, not streaming. No. Xbox consoles are where the subscribers mostly congregate.
That’s why a third party strategy is such an explosive revelation, i.e. because it’ll undermine the console userbase… & the Gamepass subscription base by association. It means MS would be giving people less incentive to buy the hardware upon which Gamepass has the most subscribers.
I mean if MS wanted to get tough (some tough love?) they could do a whole lot of stuff to their own playerbase before pulling the third party nuclear option, i.e. such as eliminating the rewards program (it’s still very generous & can be easily used to fund Gamepass subscriptions), upping the price, creating tiers or anything else which gets more money out of their current players, like Sony does.
So it would be wild if MS decided Gamepass wasn’t the future anymore & that third party game sales on PlayStation & Nintendo were worth more than making money from their own customers. Because IMO there’s no real way to reconcile all these objectives. It’s just factual that releasing all their Xbox games on other platforms would result in lower Xbox sales.