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Resetting Xbox

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Re: Resetting Xbox

#331

Post by theeyescanner »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #314
spenczar5 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is still $150M of pure gravy every single year. The issue is rate of return. They are evidently spending $4.85bn on Xbox per year. The US federal interest rate is 3.5% so if you just put that money in US bonds you would get about $175M per year of much purer simpler gravy.

Russ: "Anyway, next thing you know, we IPO, stock triples in a day and AOL gobbles us up. All of a sudden, I'm 22 years young and I'm worth 1.2 billion. Now a couple decades later, I'm worth 1.4. You do the math." Richard: "Okay. Well, that's a gain of $200 million over 20 years. Um, 16.66 repeating. That's less than 1% return. Inflation is, like, 1.7. I think CDs are 2%. So that's less than a CD."

[flagged]

Re: Resetting Xbox

#332

Post by msftgreed »

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…

> Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming.

That's the thing -- for a while they had figured out gaming. The xbox and 360 were solid consoles with lots of great internal and external games. Halo was incredible.

Then the company did the thing that Amazon did, Blizzard is doing, and all the big tech companies do -- they thought their big war chest meant they should make bigger games. Budgets ballooned, game timelines extended. Now they are stuck with games and studios with 10 year dev cycles trying to create the biggest, the most incredible, the most expensive games.

There's SO many devs out there making incredible games for fractions of the cost. It's a shame Microsoft (and others) keep thinking that reaching for bigger means better outcomes. No one wants "the game only Microsoft can make", everyone wants another great Zelda. Or Gears of War. Or Satisfactory. Or Mina the Hollower. Or UFO 50. Or Animal Well.

Hell, people want a game about shelving 3000 books in an Arcane library. Let games be smaller, more exploratory, more creative experiences. Let your studios get weird with it. Let them explore spaces and take risks. Stop sinking tens of billions into games. Start sinking tens of millions into them.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#333

Post by blanched »

WorldMaker wrote: post #74
1970-01-01 wrote: post #5

They will just continue smash thru exactly what is killing them because they do not know how to reset. More micro transactions, Halo 14-39, games launching before they're ready, price increases, etc. All of that looks good on paper, so they will take no action against. The XBOX is hitting icebergs, and instead of slowing down, they will just call for more speed.

Microsoft laid off most of its Halo talent in a previous lay off cycle, stripping 343 Industries of most of its staff and rebooting it as Halo Studios as a shell to mostly outsource development to other companies in the way that Call of Duty was built on the game development equivalent of sweat shops. They've already shown that they don't have the guts to make Halo 14-39, they seem to be only doing yet another remake…

What is Halo 14-39? Google wasn’t helpful for me.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#334

Post by hx8 »

Telaneo wrote: post #206

Can't say I'm surprised. I can't see a reasonable path for Xbox to do anything but just stay alive other than as MS's overarching gaming brand. Xbox is on the losing side of the consoles, with no distinguishing features to speak of. You buy a console to play games and for it to be convenient. Xbox is no more or less convenient than a Playstation, and what few exclusives there are left are on Sony's side of the fence.…

The people I know that like Xbox like Game Pass and Buy Once Play Anywhere. Xbox is the value proposition for people that want to play on Console + {PC/Handheld}.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#335

Post by 1970-01-01 »

blanched wrote: post #333
WorldMaker wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft laid off most of its Halo talent in a previous lay off cycle, stripping 343 Industries of most of its staff and rebooting it as Halo Studios as a shell to mostly outsource development to other companies in the way that Call of Duty was built on the game development equivalent of sweat shops. They've already shown that they don't have the guts to make Halo 14-39, they seem to be only doing yet another remake…

What is Halo 14-39? Google wasn’t helpful for me.

Rapid release schedule

Re: Resetting Xbox

#337

Post by [deleted] »

12_throw_away wrote: post #59

I want XBOX to be one of the few companies that entertains more than a billion people each day "more than a billion"? What are we doing here? Do you have any idea what your target market is? Surely someone in your organization can provide you with a good stretch goal ... >10% of all humans using an XBox daily is not that. Seriously, I cannot fathom why you would say this. Innumeracy? Narcissistic delusion? Stealth la…

[deleted]

Re: Resetting Xbox

#338

Post by awakeasleep »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #285
jerf wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a while ago about how companies seem to have gotten the idea into their head that subscriptions are unconditionally good, rather than a contingent good based on the exact circumstances of the subscription: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2023/streampocalypse-and-first-pri... Gamepass as a subscription to make sure you always have something to play, that has a lot of old games or indie games and other games that hav…

The logic of day 1 releases, at least how it seemed to me, was that a % of those people who get gamepass just to play the game for cheaper would stick around. That’s potentially worth way more than 1x $60 (now $70-$80) sale. That didn’t happen I guess

It’s funny how a strategy like this would work on me, but I am a busy adult who doesn’t really game.

Compare that to my nephews who have a lot of time for gaming, but they’re always fighting to scrounge up the money for another month of Nintendo online or Xbox online and go without it for at least half the year

Re: Resetting Xbox

#339

Post by caconym_ »

msftgreed wrote: post #332
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…

> Microsoft is never going to figure out gaming. That's the thing -- for a while they had figured out gaming. The xbox and 360 were solid consoles with lots of great internal and external games. Halo was incredible. Then the company did the thing that Amazon did, Blizzard is doing, and all the big tech companies do -- they thought their big war chest meant they should make bigger games. Budgets ballooned, game timeli…

I think another big issue they have is their insistence that most (ideally all?) of the people working on their games should be temporary employees. When your most valuable studios get out of the business of providing secure and sustainable employment, you lose the ability to build institutional expertise. When you treat your creatives like a commodity, you'll get generic assets and writing regardless of budget. When you focus on everything but the games themselves, it shouldn't come as a surprise that your big franchises degenerate into undifferentiated revenuemaxxing slop and unique new projects that might get people excited die on the vine.

Overall I think western AAA game development is dead. The executive class killed it with their greed and incompetence, and as long as these huge corporations are allowed to keep buying smaller studios/publishers and shutting them down a few years later, nothing is going to change.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#340

Post by jshen »

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…

That's a 3% margin which is unsustainable. It's less return than you can get from buying treasuries, which means that if they don't improve it they will go out of business.
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