> Our business today is not healthy. We are operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. We
Oof. We're making money, but we want to make more. So we're firing people.
Resetting Xbox
431–440 of 981 posts
Re: Resetting Xbox
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. The inflation rate is about 3%, so the people at Xbox worked very hard all year to have about the same value they put into it.
Only if you count the value of the games produced as $0
That's pretty accurate when you consider the unfiltered slop produced by studios like Bethesda, Blizzard, Activision, King and most other Microsoft XBox studios.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#433This 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…
Another thing that is crazy to me (and maybe this is a premonition) is that if you play MS games online on Xbox, you have to have a subscription, but if you play on other platforms you can play for free. They are literally punishing their own users with additional fees. I thought this was just Minecraft, which is why my kids and I always play Minecraft on our iPads instead of on the Xbox, but when I recently bought Forza Horizon 6 I was amazed to see that I could play online with other players for free, whereas on Xbox I had to pay to play online in Forza Horizon 4 and 5. So they are basically saying "you gave us a bunch of money for hardware? Cool, now give us more money every month to use it online!" It's absurd, and it's one of the things that drove me away from Xbox. I also have friends who have been lifelong Xbox fans who have had enough and are leaving for Steam.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xbox used to have remote play together, via mixer. You could allow any viewer to play along side you, from the browser. Microsoft killed it
the latency on this can't be good
A lot of games are less latency-constrained than you'd expect. FPSes are obviously rough with input lag, but stuff that's turn based and even many platformers feel "good enough" up to like 150ms
Re: Resetting Xbox
#435> 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.
This is how well structured teams have worked for a long time.
It sounds pretty similar, for example, to team structure ideas proposed by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man Month from 1975.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#436Earlier 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."
I liked your reference.
And if Russ is blowing $100M a year on lifestyle and still has those numbers then he’s winning at life.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. The inflation rate is about 3%, so the people at Xbox worked very hard all year to have about the same value they put into it.
Only if you count the value of the games produced as $0
So, even worse than 0, if we’re saying the value of games is not measurable but substantial?
Re: Resetting Xbox
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can guarantee you Asha has been making this move for years.
Based on what? This just feels like baseless conjecture given she hasn’t been at Microsoft for that long.
"I can guarantee you" without any backing evidence is the very definition of "Source: trust me bro". I think at this point this is just trolling.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#439This 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 -…
> 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.
There is absolutely no reason to be in sync with Sony on their console release date. They could have effectively released consoles bit more frequently. But they choose not to do so. Their acquisition has been questionable - Activision/Blizzard.
At the end of the day, the employee pay the price for bad management decision which they keep on making.
Re: Resetting Xbox
#440> 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
Fascinating. The death of management is happening all throughout software.