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Resetting Xbox

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Re: Resetting Xbox

#141

Post by rybosworld »

VikingCoder wrote: post #83

"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.

That messaging is for investors. To a dev's ears, it's a meaningless thing to say.

It reminds me when Elon took over twitter and made a comment to the effect of "we need to rethink the entire tech stack from the ground up". Someone asked Elon what was wrong with the tech stack, and he called them a jackass.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#142

Post by ErneX »

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…

I read that when they designed the Xbox Series S and X they knew it was going to be difficult to lower prices down the road because wafer costs were increasing every year. Which is why they launched with 2 models from the get go, one cheaper than the other. And even so they were losing between 100 and 200 dollars per console.

Now things are even worse with the RAM and SSD components crisis. The Series S has now the price of the Series X when it launched.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#143

Post by rightbyte »

BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #35
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.

Maybe MS paid the publisher full price for your "see what it is about"? Wouldn't be anything but Uber or Moviepass.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#144

Post by draculero »

righthand wrote: post #30
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…

Well this is the new Xbox boss, Aska Sharma trying to course correct her own actions after pushing out Phil Spencer (and team). Phil had a deep understanding of the game world about profit margins and how the Xbox is essentially a stake in keeping Microsoft in the minds of consumers, a place in the home. Aska has a shallow understanding and sees only the financials and wanted to increase profits. Now she is burning i…

Just out of curiosity, I checked her Wikipedia page and this caught my eye:

> Sharma posted in 2026 that she had recently begun playing video games under the gamertag AMRAHSAHSA to "learn and understand" the games industry

Imagine running the Xbox division and only just now picking up a controller.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#145

Post by tracker1 »

ryandrake wrote: post #111
wholinator2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's woke about xbox?

Yea, I'd love to hear specifics. OP is all over this thread vaguely insinuating about "political content" but notably hasn't yet pointed out any specific examples that are objectionable.

[flagged]

Re: Resetting Xbox

#147

Post by ErneX »

joshstrange wrote: post #61
BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Last year, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft estimated it had lost $300 million in direct sales of Call of Duty games due to the title’s inclusion in Game Pass, according to an anonymous employee. Yeah, that's a bullshit number. It's like when people provide piracy counts as lost direct sales, a lot of people will download something for free, those same people won't always pay full price if they can't download it f…

Gamepass devalued games in my opinion. If you “train” your user base to get used to not buy games they will. It also did not help they were almost giving Gamepass away for nothing. You could chain multiple offers and get like 3 years or more of the best tier for the price of less than 2 games.

They never had the user base to sustain so many studios making AAA games under a subscription model.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#148

Post by grg0 »

z3phyr wrote: post #128
tracker1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the graphics abilities have been there for a decade... what we need are better games and gameplay. More fun games without gotcha, pay to win, loot box efforts. Too much effort is going for dazzling graphics at the expense of overall gameplay. How many people are still playing CoD, WoW and so many other games from over a decade ago? How many refreshes of Final Fantasy have we seen? The graphics can only carry y…

Also dazzling graphics has been mostly visual instead of experiential, that is, with the advances in GPU capabilities, we do get beautiful effects, but the intractability with the said infra is seems to be stagnant (and in some cases regressed) The way things interact in the game world peaked around mid 2000s, just in time when CPUs started to not follow moors law. As of now, interactive environments are still almost…

I think graphics peaked ~2015. But interaction still leaves a lot to be desired; we still have slipping and characters who can't walk stairs in AAA games to this day. Making characters more physically grounded and present seems like the obvious thing to improve to me.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#149

Post by [deleted] »

WorldMaker wrote: post #49
scott_w wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Xbox has been profitable almost continuously since a few years into the Xbox 360. It's fascinating how "profitable but low margins" equates to "struggling" to so many.

[deleted]

Re: Resetting Xbox

#150

Post by YackerLose »

wincy wrote: post #100
tracker1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the graphics abilities have been there for a decade... what we need are better games and gameplay. More fun games without gotcha, pay to win, loot box efforts. Too much effort is going for dazzling graphics at the expense of overall gameplay. How many people are still playing CoD, WoW and so many other games from over a decade ago? How many refreshes of Final Fantasy have we seen? The graphics can only carry y…

This is where Nintendo is at. It’s hilarious how much fun me and my kids are having playing games like Animal Crossing, Super Smash Bros, Mario Party, Pokemon Pokopia, and the surprise smash hit has been Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. My kids make all the neighbors and have them get married and laugh about it and it’s just such a goofy concept. The graphics are good enough that you no longer notice there’s graphic…

Tomodachi Life sounds like The Sims but with rounded corners.
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