Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Resetting Xbox

news.xbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 981 posts

Re: Resetting Xbox

#491

Post by nonethewiser »

msftgreed wrote: post #328

This is purely greed on Microsoft's point. They absolutely have a profitable business with some great games, and they are sad that their management decisions led to this outcome. But it's the rank and file who will pay the price for these poor management decisions. Like it always is. To hear that the new boss wants to increase capitalization on Minecraft, to make it more like a Roblox, is horrifying and truly goes to…

Their margins are 3% and they lost 64 cents per 1 dollar invested. It's just the reality-facing move. Everything you want from XBOX becomes more possible (not necessarily likely, but possible) when they stop lighting money on fire.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#492

Post by jjcm »

mvdtnz wrote: post #474
jjcm wrote: post #269

What's fascinating to me are the Valve comparables here. 17B ARR vs 20B ARR At the end of the day there are two strong differences here. Valve has always been lead by people who were game devs, and have always conveyed a message that the gaming experience matters most. Xbox was led by Phil Spencer, who at least was known as being an avid gamer, but in his tenure pushed for things like xbox game pass to drive continua…

Valve doesn't make games. (within the margin of error).

A non-trivial amount of their ARR is still from Valve-made games. Counterstrike still nets a bit over 1b per year from just case unboxings, and Dota is in the hundreds of millions. I wouldn't call 8-10% a margin of error.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#493

Post by tonyhart7 »

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…

seems like you don't understand business

I don't usually take HN audience seriously when talking about economics

Re: Resetting Xbox

#494

Post by tonyhart7 »

jonhohle wrote: post #484
mattfrommars wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 questiona…

As a Blizzard and Overwatch fan, the acquisition has not been ideal. Activision nearly ended competitive professional Overwatch and significantly scaled back their big esports events to look more profitable. Lately, they seem to be chasing Marvel Rivals for no good reason, but at least in the younger competitive leagues, Rivals is picking up steam and Overwatch no longer looks like a contender, despite being signific…

nah, overwatch current situation is stemming from horrendous blizzard decision of OW2 release

sure Rivals is strong competition but remember time where Marvel Rivals didn't exist, OW is already dying by then

Re: Resetting Xbox

#495

Post by KennyBlanken »

aranelsurion wrote: post #428
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's obsession with prestige cinematic bloat Sony has been pretty successful with that though, and there was a time where they pushed many fan favourites in the cinematic genre. They aren’t arcadey games like Nintendo ones of course, but something like The Last of Us has its own value and audience. It sells too.

I played TLoU and while the story was interesting, the feeling of being steered, forcefully and constantly, was very frustrating.

"Press this button exactly when the game tells you" and "as soon as you cross this exact point, this exact enemy will appear" - that's year-2000-ish (or worse) gaming tech.

The final confrontation was essentially ruined because the designers apparently never thought you'd use a sniper rifle, so you can set off a deafening shot that kills an enemy and the other enemies don't even notice the shot because it apparently happened outside their detection range.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#496

Post by tonyhart7 »

dom96 wrote: post #347
mjr00 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No missing "k", really just 191 players. https://steamdb.info/app/3043580/

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"?

by this logic, no one would buy E33 at steam because its day one gamepass title

Re: Resetting Xbox

#497

Post by jsemrau »

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…

Over the last 8 years

Undead Labs has shipped nothing Compulsion shipped South of Midnight topping at ~1600 players on Steam Ninja Theory has shipped Bleeding Edge and Hellblade 2 and Double Fine shipped Keeper and Kiln.

It's a net positive that these studios and this culture is gone. I am sure that food was amazing.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#498

Post by tonyhart7 »

bombcar wrote: post #425
Dylan16807 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kind of person that actually cancels gamepass within a month is the kind of person to actually trade in the game. And with an efficient trading market they'd get more than a few bucks so early on.

True, they set themselves up for "the only people who subscribe are those who use/abuse the subscription" - which is a recipe for failure.

by that logic then every subscription is a dud since they could just use heavily in few months and cancel for the rest of the year

but that's not happen in reality, people forgot to cancel

Re: Resetting Xbox

#499

Post by jordwest »

> While those businesses have created meaningful value, they did not grow at the pace we expected.

That this is seen as a problem tells you everything about business today.

It has to be explosive growth or it’s pointless, according to execs and shareholders.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#500

Post by darth_avocado »

darth_avocado wrote: post #116
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…

> Then they did not have to give away popular games day one on Game Pass A company that sells consoles complaining about not having enough games after 25 years in business and acquiring most popular game studios is hilarious. They keep cutting game studios, killing games and then set ambitious profit margins. At some point you have to question, do the people in charge understand their own business at all? They just g…

Edit: even though i inaccurately associated Bungee with MS, they are not. However, the comment stands when you replace it with any of the other successful studios like Bethesda, Id software, Blizzard etc. A bunch of studios and their ips were gutted not because their games sucked, but because they didn’t meet the profits Microsoft expected, which is ridiculous.
Post reply on HN