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Resetting Xbox

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Re: Resetting Xbox

#81

Post by badprose »

kristjansson wrote: post #32

> 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.

Isn't this basically the same structure they currently use i.e. individual contributors, managers, and producers?

Re: Resetting Xbox

#82

Post by zitterbewegung »

rockyj wrote: post #24

This is a total mess IMHO. - The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter - The problem according to them is profit margin - around 150-160 million So first of all, they are big! Secondly they are not at a loss. They just have a "thin, non-growing margin". So to fix all this they are trimming down, so they can "return to growth" (which I think is ridiculous). Some points - - They are huge business even now - 5 bi…

Xbox around 2021 had around a 12% profit margin and the gaming industry as a whole was around 17-22% . In 2023 the target for the division was put to 30% . We see this new restructuring because the target was put this high. Microsoft really wanted Game Pass to be a steam competitor which is pretty much what everyone in the industry tries to do and fails. The push for Game Pass prices to be higher was to get the 30% margin and that didn't work out. They aren't operating at a loss they are operating at a goal and they failed the goal. From other child comments many studios they bought probably were below average. We can see this restructuring basically is that they failed the target, the old guard went out as the new guard came in.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-23/microsoft...

Re: Resetting Xbox

#83

Post by VikingCoder »

"And we will streamline how we work across our tools, with a cleaner code base, shared services, and 50% reduced vendor spend."

How will they achieve cleaner code, with fewer workers? Seems like a well-intentioned platitude.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#84

Post by biggestfan »

MisterTea wrote: post #51
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…

> And between graphics almost certainly at the point of diminishing returns, and hardware prices like they are right now, I can't imagine there's a market to sell something more capable than current gen consoles. I haven't bought a console since the Xbox360 and Wii. But I have a friend who still games pretty heavily and is low income. He can not afford the latest PS5 and is still on a PS4. We were talking the other d…

> Of course those last few prices were 90/00's

Two years ago, you could get an XBOX/Switch for 300, or a PS/Steam Deck for 400. Granted, the PS and XBOX were digital only. But now the cheapest XBOX is 500, the Switch 2 will soon also be 500, the PS5 starts at 600, and the Steam Deck is 789. Things have been going up slowly, but the last year has been absolutely killer.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#85

Post by WhereIsTheTruth »

scott_w wrote: post #44
righthand wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (prod…

Just looking at Sharma’s history, she rejoined MS in 2024. Xbox was struggling long before that, so I don’t see how anyone can blame Sharma for the past 10 years…

Ratio of consoles sold Xbox vs PS5 was 1:3 before that, after that it fell in the 1:10 territories (december 2025)

Using Phil as a scapegoat and Sharma as the savior is disingenuous.. and is honestly pretty consistent with how i view Microslop: opportunists, tasteless, and visionless executives, shareholders and fanboys

The fall of Xbox started before the launch of thier current gen:

- HW: they announced 2 SKUs, with polar opposite performance profiles

- SW: their system sellers got delayed to couple years

The reset needs to happen at the highest executive order, not at the lowest, workers implement whatever project was greenlit

People chose PS5/Switch over Xbox (it now sells 3x less than Switch 1, wich is a previous gen console), people see through the lies of the media

Re: Resetting Xbox

#86

Post by wholinator2 »

tracker1 wrote: post #70
hbn wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game Pass was never a sustainable business model. People liked it because when a new game came out, they could buy a month of game pass for like $15, play through the game in a couple weeks, and cancel. It was a really good deal because Microsoft has spent the past decade+ trying to recover from their terrible fumble of the Xbox One launch, so they were subsidizing gamers to come back to their platform. With the mone…

[flagged]

What's woke about xbox?

Re: Resetting Xbox

#87

Post by etempleton »

rockyj wrote: post #24

This is a total mess IMHO. - The make around 5 billion in revenue per quarter - The problem according to them is profit margin - around 150-160 million So first of all, they are big! Secondly they are not at a loss. They just have a "thin, non-growing margin". So to fix all this they are trimming down, so they can "return to growth" (which I think is ridiculous). Some points - - They are huge business even now - 5 bi…

Completely agree. Their problem is that corporate wants more money to funnel back into AI and it is really inconvenient that Xbox provides only a couple billion dollars per month whereas Office and Cloud provide many more billions. What a complete joke.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#89

Post by bobbob1921 »

maples37 wrote: post #66
whizzter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Microsoft also didn't do themselves any favor with that naming scheme. In the current generation (I think?), you have: - Xbox X - Xbox S - Xbox Series X - Xbox Series S Compared to: - PlayStation 5 - PlayStation 5 Pro or: - Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Switch OLED - Nintendo Switch Lite Anyone who's literate in English (and knows that OLED means "nicer screen") can immediately rank the PlayStations and Switches into "g…

This is absolutely correct, I game on Xbox pretty much every day or every other day, I have been with Xbox since 360 or whatever the first one was called. I am still constantly confused by the naming. There also was another revision to the top of the line Xbox series X and the Xbox series X digital edition. I can’t imagine someone looking at the naming scheme pre-release and saying yes, let’s go with that.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#90

Post by 999900000999 »

piltdownman wrote: post #26
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…

To some extent - but you can't get away with Hollywood Accounting Practices in the same way. Also one must consider the likes of Hideo Kojima who can sell ~7 million copies of a new IP that is effectively a cinematic Walking Simulator as an Auteur acrimoniously splitting from the traditional studio system. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 also shipped over 5.4 million copies as a AA, in what is also arguably an interactiv…

A walking simulator that has you fighting between multiple dimensions and is one of the best looking games of its generation.
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