Resetting Xbox • Hacker News Board

Re: Resetting Xbox

#31

Post by WorldMaker » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 3:53 PM UTC

ChocolateGod wrote: post #8

WorldMaker wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Millions of people played South of Midnight even if sales didn't reflect it. Xbox Game Pass has done a lot to make Xbox sales figures hard to compare.

How many people would have played if it wasn't on Game Pass though? I doubt many. Expedition 33 was on game pass and still sold 8 million copies.

At least from what I saw the game had a huge amount of hype leading up to its launch and the thing that kept people from buying it was just playing enough of it on Game Pass. For some players it was too short and everything they wanted to accomplish was easily done with Game Pass shortly after its launch. For other players like me we bounced off of its tone while playing it. The stop motion animated intro felt like a bait and switch going into its game play, and I had a bunch of uncomfortable feelings about cultural appropriation from a Montreal studio trying to capture a "deep South bayou" aesthetic and failing at some of the subtleties, from what I saw.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#32

Post by kristjansson » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 3:53 PM UTC

> We will deliver success through a flatter organization that is built around makers (individual contributors focused on building), player-coaches (leaders who remain deeply involved in the work while developing their teams), and directly responsible individuals (DRIs) who own key decisions and outcomes.

xbox-specific issues aside, this proposes an interesting view of the future of work.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#33

Post by franze » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC

When I bought my XBox i spent half a day setting up an account and payments.

Good old times. The last time I tried to buy something on Xbox it fails miserable with multiple cryptic error messages - mostly around my credit card.

No problem though to biy the game on my mac via browser and then after a few more settings actually showed up on my xbox.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#34

Post by righthand » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

dagmx wrote: post #20

This is incredibly sad for a lot of my friends who are finding themselves out of work despite delivering well received products. But at the same time I appreciate the candor of Asha saying that the corporate management are to blame and letting studios go back to being independent where possible. Phil Spencer really messed up. Everyone in the industry knew Microsoft were making bad calls trying to dig themselves a hol…

I disagree, it wasn’t Phil that dug a hole but Asha who pushed Phil out with no plan. Why is Asha finally revealing her plan years later if she was such a good fit? She came in trying to automate away peoples jobs with AI for the last year or so and that is obviously failing. It wasn’t Phil that invested the entire company’s well being on stochastic parrots.

She has done everything but focus on delivering games (product).

Re: Resetting Xbox

#35

Post by BadBadJellyBean » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 3:59 PM UTC

tangenter wrote: post #7

Game Pass has caused a lot of direct sales losses to game developers in favor of Microsoft trying to find a Netflix-like cash cow for itself. The numbers never added up, but it is not a surprise everyone nodded and went along with it. I wonder what the career repercussions would be for speaking up - but it doesn’t matter because they are getting fired anyway. Call of Duty alone lost $300 million: https://arstechnica.…

I was always very skeptical of the $300 million figure. It sounded like the same math that the movie industry used for pirating. If I was subscribed to Game Pass I might have downloaded CoD to see what it's about. That doesn't mean I would have paid full price for it.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#36

Post by WorldMaker » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

dcrazy wrote: post #13

Centigonal wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in the press release. > Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions will return to management and transition to independent studios with their IP, catalog, and runway for their next games. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have entered terms to join new ownership with funding to complete and grow Senua and State of Decay 3. In France, Arkane’s management is beginning required consultation with its Works Council to r…

Yeah, that is what I was referring to about the lack of detail on restructuring. I want to know if people are losing their jobs and/or titles are being cancelled as part of these sales.

Senua and State of Decay 3 are the only currently announced titles of the studios in question and it does say that those games will be completed by their studios under their new owner. It's still an interesting mystery who the new owner will be, though.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#37

Post by righthand » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #28

> We will reduce management layers to no more than 5, and where possible, 3. This reads like something from The Office.

Michael begging Oscar to tell the shareholders how to save the company.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#38

Post by speak_plainly » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:00 PM UTC

manytimesaway wrote: post #19

speak_plainly wrote: post #11

At some point, the games industry decided it wanted to be interactive Hollywood, and the consequences are entirely predictable. Meanwhile, Nintendo just quietly shipped 3.8 million units of Tomodachi Life in two weeks, and 4 million of Pokopia in five. They're making actual games. Sony's obsession with prestige cinematic bloat, like Xbox, has also put them in a slow-motion death spiral that's going to become painfull…

Things are not that black and white. Nintendo also shipped Metroid Prime 4, with massive delays and unsatisfied customers, following the same "interactive Hollywood" philosophy which disappointed Metroid fans. Same thing goes for Star Fox, a remake of a remake of a remake, with poor visual and dialogue choices. And meanwhile, the same silent push for digital-only, forced upgrades and the like...

What I mean by "interactive Hollywood" is a game with a $200M+ budget that relies entirely on high-fidelity graphics and cinematic stories to differentiate itself, while offering almost zero new gameplay innovation.

Neither of your examples fit that description. Metroid Prime 4 wasn't chasing Hollywood cinematic design; it was a highly targeted attempt by producer Kensuke Tanabe to make a tight, isolated first-person exploration formula resonate (especially in Japan where it has consistently failed). Its goals are mechanical, not cinematic. Meanwhile, Star Fox is a classic arcade rail-shooter remake with modernized cutscenes, not a prestige movie-game. Early sales data shows it's actually working well, too, having just debuted at #1 on the physical charts in Japan and nearly doubling Star Fox Zero's launch week in the UK.

Ultimately, Nintendo operates like a Consumer Packaged Goods company. They treat their library of IPs like a diversified product portfolio rather than betting the farm on individual interactive movies. They use massive, high-margin, mechanics-first games like Tomodachi Life and Pokopia to generate enormous cash reserves. They then use those profits to subsidize legacy IPs like Metroid or Star Fox to keep core fans happy and feed their broader brand ecosystem. Because Nintendo spreads its risk across a wide spectrum of lower-budget games, they can easily absorb a minor product flop. Sony's interactive Hollywood model sinks $300M into a single basket, meaning one bad miss can completely wreck a studio.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#39

Post by calvinmorrison » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

"Today, in some parts of the company, work passes through as many as 14 layers of management. Our platform teams are 40% larger than they were at the start of this generation, even as our player base and playtime have declined. "

Re: Resetting Xbox

#40

Post by whizzter » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:03 PM UTC

hbn wrote: post #16

It was pretty rich seeing armchair video game industry analysts act like the new CEO was gonna usher in a new age for Microsoft's gaming division because she got to announce the updated logo and some games that would have obviously been in development long before she became CEO. Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. It's more art than engineering and they can barely manage the engineering with all the interv…

The pandemic and scalpers really destroyed peoples apetite for the "new thing" when this generation came out, and with that boost missing studios saw little point in going exclusive perpetuating the vicious cycle, it's just in the past few years that there's really been exclusives for this generation that didn't also support older consoles.

And even then, already the PS4/XbOne generation added stratification making it more "PC-like" with the XbOne-X having heftier hardware (not to mention it being PC-like compared to PS1/PS2/PS3/Xbox360), that then continued with the Xbox-series-X and Xbox-series-S.

Consoles aren't specialized hardware for "magic experiences" and everyone knows this, it's just another "device" that happens to be connected to a TV with a controller where people are gatekeeping software availability.