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Resetting Xbox

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Re: Resetting Xbox

#591

Post by wodenokoto »

nkrisc wrote: post #214

Reading this made me remember why I stopped playing my Xbox One: never-ending updates. I never played it very frequently so I disabled the sleep mode so it wouldn’t just stay on in my media cabinet heating my house. But of course that meant any time I spontaneously felt like using it there were 10 minutes of updates to download, so I would get annoyed and just do something else. Oh it can also play movies? Sorry movi…

While there are plenty of online updates on the switch, I never remember not being able to play a game without first running an update.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#592

Post by bargainbin »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #304
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…

Microsoft: Moves AI exec to Xbox exec. Xbox exec: Deletes AI from games. Color me surprised. Anyone who's been paying attention to Halo for the past 15 years knew there was bad management the entire time. (Halo used to be the game that everyone wanted to have and to be; now it's an also-ran due to self-sabotage.) The first step is admitting you have a problem, so good job there, keep following through.

Halo Infinite was the moment I knew Xbox was gone. The core game engine was the best Halo has ever felt, but everything around it reeked of incompetent management.

Giving a player a reward for putting in effort is one of the fundamental principles of game design. If you remove all the rewards, what incentive do they have to play?

Their response to player backlash which was essentially “deny, defer, gaslight and ignore” killed the online community for it within a couple of months, and I think they dropped what little content support it had within two years as well, after initially marketing it as a long-term “live service game”.

Blatant incompetence, how Microsoft ever let itself get in this state I’ll never understand.

Also I can’t even remember the campaign story. Was there an angel or something? It was a cliffhanger about some new enemy, as if they’ll ever make another game?

I just remembered the monstrosity that is the Halo TV series as well now, ah god… it’s been a rough decade.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#593

Post by antiframe »

nananana9 wrote: post #568

You've changed, Microsoft. Saving the console is trivial, they're just afraid to do it. "Minecraft and CoD are now Xbox exclusive".

If I am unable to play Minecraft any longer because I have to buy a shit ass XBOX, I will never buy another piece of software (or hardware) from them. My $5 in 2009 came with a guarantee I would have access (and free updates) to Minecraft forever. Microsoft not honoring that agreement, which they said they would, is a step too far. I already signed up for a shit ass Microsoft account to keep access, and I said to myself that was the last hoop I would jump through.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#594

Post by altairprime »

jordwest wrote: post #556
altairprime wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The velocity up or down of { the rate of growth of profit } is the profit-linked factor that drives stock prices go up or down. Not the simple velocity of profits. The market demands corporations compete with cumulative interest to increase share prices, and that’s never a sustainable path.

Ah wow of course, I think you just made something click for me. It's strange how we take interest on cash as a law of nature, when the original intention might have been nothing more than compensation for the risk the lender was taking on. Now the risk (on bank deposits, govt bonds etc at least) has effectively been removed so the interest rate is the baseline expectation. So compound interest is underpinning the inf…

Yeah, modern stock-market capitalism is, at its core, the layering of a 'second derivative' layer — growth in rate of growth of profit year-over-year — on top of the 'first derivative' — growth in profit year-over-year — that most non-financiers consider it to be. If you've read/seen "The Big Short" it helps immensely to consider how the layering of bets, tranches, and insurance is not the first time the financial industry has implemented widespread layering, it's just the first widely recognized time they've done so.

This is also why the market tolerates destructive private equity firms: their sole purpose is to create growth in the second derivate; that they 'pull up the ladder behind them', so to speak, by killing the business and terminating investment gains for investors in the first-derivative tier (market stockholders) and zeroth-derivative tier (capital investors), and that they kill great products in a market so that buyers are forced to buy shitty products, are recursively beneficial to more efficient cycles of vampirism.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#597

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Fully spot on, I really don't get late capitalism, it feels pretty much back to a feudal society, with big tech replacing the lords up in the castle.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#598

Post by pjmlp »

jrmg wrote: post #413
davidgnz wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Buy a plethora of studios IIRC Xbox had been criticized for quite a while at that point for having very few exclusive/first-party games worth buying an Xbox for. I always assumed this move was to try and fix that problem.

The (an?) incoherency with that is that this was happening at the same time as the ‘everything’s an Xbox’ strategy that saw them produce games for other platforms too.

That was a side effect from ABK acquisition, they bought studios that traditionally were cross platform, the year long acquisition discussion always promised not to touch them in that regard.

So you end up with this schizophrenic way that XBox became more of a publisher than a console brand, with a leadership used to cross platform (Sarah Bond), thus ‘everything’s an Xbox’ pivot for the "curve must always go up".

Re: Resetting Xbox

#599

Post by 7thpower »

Drupon wrote: post #579
mattalex wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: that's 3% margin! Oy vey maybe this kind of money grubbery is not good for our society.

The awareness of a poor return on investment is a good thing for society. We want to do more with fewer resources.

Making terrible decisions, such as investing in distractions for your company and consumers, and then letting your workforce pay the tab.. is the thing that is not great for society.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#600

Post by pjmlp »

AlexandrB wrote: post #369
jrmg wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood the esteem Phil Spencer was held in, seemingly both by fans and industry insiders. I never understood Phil’s strategy. Buy a plethora of studios. Pay an order of magnitude over the odds for the big ones - just to be sure you get them! ‘Rescue’ smaller ones of questionable financial value - as part of Xbox they’d somehow be successful enough to justify the price paid. Heavily manage the studio heads…

> Buy a plethora of studios. To be fair to Phil Spencer, this was the strategy across the industry right after COVID. Remember the shopping spree Embracer Group went on between 2020 and 2022? I think we were in an e-sports & live service bubble that has now popped.

Yeah, but most of them weren't platform owners, thus did not had the issue of exclusives vs cross-platform.
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