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Resetting Xbox

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Re: Resetting Xbox

#531

Post by kridsdale1 »

boca_honey wrote: post #512
wincy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where Nintendo is at. It’s hilarious how much fun me and my kids are having playing games like Animal Crossing, Super Smash Bros, Mario Party, Pokemon Pokopia, and the surprise smash hit has been Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream. My kids make all the neighbors and have them get married and laugh about it and it’s just such a goofy concept. The graphics are good enough that you no longer notice there’s graphic…

Nintendo is great for children, yes. I wish there were something like them for a more mature audience.

What does this mean exactly? Because Mature games are designed to appeal to 14 year old boys.

Are you referring to some kind of David Lynch of gaming?

Re: Resetting Xbox

#532

Post by sakex »

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…

3% profit margin means you're better off selling the business and investing the cash into US bonds at current rates.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#533

Post by TheTon »

healsdata wrote: post #519
corimaith wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mismanagement here was actually Microsoft giving studios free reign and they flopped with projects like Starfield. This needs to be understood really within the larger industry trend of quality decline of AAA, which I suspect has to do with changes in overall dev culture and discourse than corporate decisions. There hasn't been a time when developers have been more disconnected from their audience than now.

> There hasn't been a time when developers have been more disconnected from their audience than now. There are studios that routinely put out games that people love. For example, my wife and I will happily pre-order the next co-op game from Hazelight Studios. FromSoftware, Ghost Ship Games, and others fall into the same boat for many people. The difference, in my opinion, is that games from these studios don't focus…

At one point you could have said the same thing about Blizzard, that everything they did was gold. It’s hard to pinpoint where they went wrong, but it’s not clear to me that it was business model or game format related. Like, WoW was a fabulous success from day 1 and it was a live service game.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#534

Post by rtpg »

nxc18 wrote: post #402
dagmx wrote: post #20

This is incredibly sad for a lot of my friends who are finding themselves out of work despite delivering well received products. But at the same time I appreciate the candor of Asha saying that the corporate management are to blame and letting studios go back to being independent where possible. Phil Spencer really messed up. Everyone in the industry knew Microsoft were making bad calls trying to dig themselves a hol…

I don’t think Phil had any other options while existing under Satya and a relentless push to services revenue. If Windows can’t make a case for itself without moving heavily to services (advertising and pushing 365, primarily), how could Xbox? I’m not really sure how the C-suite is escaping blame here.

Buying Activision was a Phil decision. Not spending 67 billion dollars puts you in a different place

Re: Resetting Xbox

#535

Post by johnnyanmac »

orpheansodality wrote: post #348
johnnyanmac wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Double Fine (one of the studios being chopped) has released 2 games since 2021, Keeper (191 peak player count on steam) and Kiln (163 peak players); these would be flops even for a normal indie game, for a studio getting Microsoft salaries those are enormous flops. Hard to really say. Kiln and Keeper can easily be made up for by the sales of Psychonauts 2. I'm sure an indie Double Fine would not have been able to ma…

did you mean Pentiment, led by Josh Sawyer at Obsidian?

Yes, apologies for the misspelling. Very likely another game that wouldn't "succeed" in a traditional release, but would potentially get people into a subscription service.

Despite that loss leading strategy, Obsidian has had quite a few other releases that did to make up for that side project. So the studio would overall be in the green despite that.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#536

Post by bobthebob »

nonethewiser wrote: post #488
rybosworld wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That messaging is for investors. To a dev's ears, it's a meaningless thing to say. It reminds me when Elon took over twitter and made a comment to the effect of "we need to rethink the entire tech stack from the ground up". Someone asked Elon what was wrong with the tech stack, and he called them a jackass.

It's quite insane that twitter went from 7500 -> 1500 employees and the site didn't implode. 80% of the people gone.

Shhhhh don’t mention this!

Re: Resetting Xbox

#537

Post by bobthebob »

forbiddenvoid wrote: post #272
CyanLite2 wrote: post #264

GamePass has awful choices of game, save or one two. Nobody wants to pay $35 a month for games (that sporadically disappear) which can be purchased outright at full retail price for $70.

I mean, no one except the 30 million or so people who are paying for it. I'm quite happy with the GamePass selection, and I consider it an excellent value for me.

Right? Talk about losing the pulse here. Millions of people would rather pay monthly for thousands of games vs $70 for one?

Re: Resetting Xbox

#538

Post by monkpit »

tracker1 wrote: post #75
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…

To me, the graphics abilities have been there for a decade... what we need are better games and gameplay. More fun games without gotcha, pay to win, loot box efforts. Too much effort is going for dazzling graphics at the expense of overall gameplay. How many people are still playing CoD, WoW and so many other games from over a decade ago? How many refreshes of Final Fantasy have we seen? The graphics can only carry y…

> gotcha

Gacha?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gacha_game

Re: Resetting Xbox

#539

Post by boca_honey »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #531
boca_honey wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nintendo is great for children, yes. I wish there were something like them for a more mature audience.

What does this mean exactly? Because Mature games are designed to appeal to 14 year old boys. Are you referring to some kind of David Lynch of gaming?

Yeah, I don't mean "mature" in the sense of the rating system, which does in fact mean "made for 14-year-old boys."

I don't like or understand David Lynch, but you get what I'm trying to say. There is no one in the video game landscape doing something similar to what Welles or Kurosawa did in cinema, or what Yorgos Lanthimos and Ari Aster are doing now (or Matt Reeves and Guillermo del Toro, if you're not into arthouse stuff).

Every time someone argues about this, they cite the same old examples (Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, some narrative indie game)... but those examples usually lack in gameplay, which is, in my opinion, the most important part of what makes a video game its own medium.

I hope to see in my lifetime someone do to video games what the French did to cinema in the 50s and the Americans did in the 60s: graduating the medium from a disposable entertainment artifact into an art form for the ages. The medium is still young, it's not impossible.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#540

Post by Narishma »

WarmWash wrote: post #230
WorldMaker wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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.

At those prices consoles would no longer make sense. I don't think there would be enough people who could afford them to have a good enough install base for AAA games. And non-AAA games don't need any more hardware than what we already had last gen.
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