391–400 of 981 posts
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…
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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 -…
> 150M at 5B revenue is not great Considered as a raw percentage in a vacuum, sure, I guess, but we're talking about... - A company which has undertaken a concerted, long-term effort to consolidate the industry under its umbrella (something they themselves call out as a problem in this post), reducing consumer choice - A company which has captured a significant chunk of the console market. They're one of the big thre…
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…
Buying Activision for 20x of its annual profit, on the other hand, makes zero sense. ABK was not lacking capital, had the same MBA management Microsoft has and did not have much room to grow, Blizzard alone had 5K employees. Their IPs had long time since plateaued or had been in decline already. What was Microsoft plan to increase profit? Switch everyone to Teams? Put more people to work on CoD and release 2-3 CoDs per year, hoping they all will sell as well as the annual CoD? The more realistic path to return of the investment could come from increasing Xbox's share of the market by making their newly acquired IPs Xbox exclusive. But they did not do even that.
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> 150M at 5B revenue is not great Considered as a raw percentage in a vacuum, sure, I guess, but we're talking about... - A company which has undertaken a concerted, long-term effort to consolidate the industry under its umbrella (something they themselves call out as a problem in this post), reducing consumer choice - A company which has captured a significant chunk of the console market. They're one of the big thre…
> This is still $150M of pure gravy every single year You're neglecting to consider that any time they acquire a studio or have a flop or two -- poof goes that $150M and probably more. It's not a risk-free venture. Entertainment is all about hits, and misses hurt. Would you put up $5K to win $150 on a hypothetical roulette wheel that hits 90% of the time? The math's not perfect obviously but Xbox is a somewhat simila…
As said elsewhere in the thread:
> You’re saying that they should take the money people pay to buy Xboxes and put it in T-bills instead of delivering Xboxes?
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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.
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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…
Nintendo, the company who released the Wii, wiiU, gameboy color, game boy advance, DS, 2DS, 3DS; all of which are similar but vaguely incompatible?
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>> 150M at 5B revenue is not great: that's 3% margin! and yet everybody - including Microsoft - is in a big rush to sell us AI services, which could look an awful lot like a historical utility business. 3% will be a dream return in that scenario!
AWS is essentially a utility and gets way better than 3%.
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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% m…
Being a Steam competitor involves making a store that's actually good. All the other major stores/platforms don't really seem to give a shit, to be frank. Steam has like 20x their feature set, and the gap appears to be still growing. If anything, it should be easier to make cool new features when you own the hardware side of the platform experience too, but no, it's Steam that has stuff like remote play together, not…
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Could this be due to the games being available on Game Pass? Why would anyone buy them on Steam if they can play them on Game Pass for "free"?
You've got that backwards. It's free and STILL has no players.
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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…
> acrimoniously splitting from the traditional studio system. Yeah, he split from the traditional studio system to create... his own traditional studio system. Kojima is precisely what happens when you stop thinking of games as actual an interactive entertainment format and start thinking of it as a "cinematic experience" instead. Death Stranding is only a game by the narrowest of margins. What it is is a movie with…
Perhaps you are mistaking them with Ubisoft's open world games? or describing another installment of Life is Strange?