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Resetting Xbox

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Re: Resetting Xbox

#221

Post by PaulHoule »

draculero wrote: post #144
righthand wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's this little concept of "cultural sensitivity". Given the size of the King thing it would even be fair to have somebody who had a serious Candy Crush habit.

At least they didn't create a fake profile for her the way Elon Musk made one.

I think the "glass cliff" is going to claim another victim.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#222

Post by Narishma »

mattalex wrote: post #207
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…

150M at 5B revenue is not great: that's 3% margin! The bigger issue is that console manufacturer revenue is highly cyclical. This is hard to see in e.g. Xbox and Sony since they are both part of a larger conglomerate, but really obvious for nintendo. You generally have a cycle of - "Launch": high marketing costs, low/negative HW margins - "Mid-cycle": lowering manufacturing costs, large game sales, high margin DLCs -…

> "Mid-cycle": lowering manufacturing costs,

That was true historically but is no longer the case. Even last gen manufacturing costs didn't go down as much as they used to. This current gen they actually increased multiple times.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#223

Post by righthand »

dagmx wrote: post #181
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…

How would Asha pull him out? How do you think she even had that kind of authority or seniority?

By making big arguments to C-suite that were invested in the company’s direction. Same thing that happens in meetings where some dumbass says something like “we could build a cookie banner ourselves or pay Y company $12k/yr to run our cookie banner”. C-suite is full of these types of people that just make baseless arguments. Most management is not knowledgeable in their domain.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#224

Post by coleca »

colechristensen wrote: post #91

>we will help independent creators succeed by providing open development tools and audiences to realize their vision. Bravo! >Today, in some parts of the company, work passes through as many as 14 layers of management. LMAO – reset approved.

Unfortunately, the 14 layers of management are also responsible for deciding how the 14 layers will get cut. It's likely that all or most all of the middle management will survive but the ICs doing the real work will be the ones that take the hit.

I saw the same thing happen at Amazon. They claimed to be reducing layers of management in 2024/25, yet all that happened was a shuffling of the boxes on the org chart a bit and cuts to the ICs. Managers that had too many reports were forced to give some up for managers with too few, but most managers stayed in place.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#225

Post by dzonga »

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…

Sony - having cinematic bloat makes sense for them. They've nailed the story driven games such as Last of Us.

however for Xbox they were not really good at story driven games, but good at Live Games such as Halo.

with Live Games - you iterate on game play, maps, skins - live events i.e community building without alienating people by dabbing in social justice.

End of day - these are all marketing problems & lack of capable leadership who knows their core audience.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#226

Post by manytimesaway »

speak_plainly wrote: post #38
manytimesaway wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, my bad. I agree with your analysis.

Although Nintendo is still following the path of "gaming enshittification" with lesser budgets; and I would argue that Star Fox mostly sells because there's barely anything to play on that 500$ thing...

Re: Resetting Xbox

#227

Post by Forgeties79 »

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #120
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…

With due fairness, these are two different sets of leaders and two different strategies. A lot of the strategy you outlined -- buying all these studios, replicating netflix, giving away day one games, raising game pass -- was a strategy put in place by Phil Spencer. Phil pushed for this investment with the promise it would pay off later for MS. He's talked publicly about having to convince Nadella to put up ungodly a…

I certainly enjoyed gaming their rewards system for years on a series S. $300 for the box, maybe spent $40 over roughly 4 years for gamepass. It was nice while it lasted!

Re: Resetting Xbox

#228

Post by bronson »

> In addition, Mojang and King will now report directly to me.

Darn it! The ONE studio that I really wanted them to set free and go back to how well things worked before, and they tighten their grip. Whyyyy?

Re: Resetting Xbox

#229

Post by hbn »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #191
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…

Traditionally if you're going to play through a game in a couple weeks and then not own it anymore, that means you sell it and someone else buys it for their own couple weeks, and the company should be happy if they make $15 per person in the chain. Also this is part of why I'm really worried about how weak the concept of game ownership is getting. See also how anyone buying GTA6 near launch will be unable to resell…

The writing's been on the wall about physical games going away for quite some time now.

You can tell the PS5 was designed to be a digital-first system by the disc drive slapped on the side like a tumour hanging off the otherwise symmetrical body.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#230

Post by WarmWash »

WorldMaker wrote: post #78
MisterTea wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

$200 in 1985 (NES launch price/date), adjusted for inflation is just shy of $600 in 2026. RAM and GPU prices are really hurting the consoles right now, but compared to inflation benchmarks up until about 2020 they were considerably below inflation.

If there are next gen consoles, they will likely be over $1k with current memory prices.
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