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Resetting Xbox

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Re: Resetting Xbox

#741

Post by inigyou »

refurb wrote: post #739
tommit wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making crazy changes like squeezing out every last dollar out of your existing, loyal customers (looking at any PE firm ever) certainly affects the wind I'd wager.

Absolutely, and plenty of companies have made that mistake. But the point is locking up money in a 3% margin business doesn’t impress investors. So you either need to improve the margin with lower costs or higher price (or both). Or bail from the market entirely and put your money in something that makes more money.

What makes more money? The investment is all in AI because TINA - There Is No Alternative. There's too much money in the system to cover all reasonable investments, so it fills up all reasonable investments and many unreasonable ones too.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#742

Post by venzaspa »

pandaman wrote: post #508
weakened_malloc wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What was Microsoft plan to increase profit? IMO, at the time, it was to buy ABK and make CoD an Xbox exclusive. That clearly didn't play out when everyone screamed about it being (rightly!) anticompetitive, and so they had to resign themselves to accepting that day 1 gamepass exclusive was going to be their way to get people to switch over from PS. That also didn't work. The 'K' part of ABK was also probably going…

Even if they had made it exclusive, $70B is too much for this. CoD sales would fall - not everyone buying it would go out and buy an Xbox, Xbox hardware sales would raise. Let's be optimistic and say every CoD player (including ones who already bought Xbox ) goes out and buys another Xbox and then buys 2 xboxes in the next generation. So it's ~20M more Xboxes sold. To break even on this investment in 10 years MS has…

CoD is just one title though, the deal included WoW and Candy Crush and the rest of the Activision IP.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#743

Post by account42 »

jamiek88 wrote: post #112
wholinator2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's woke about xbox?

Anyone else deeply deeply weary in their bones about people doing this? I hate this timeline. We can’t even talk about fucking corporate margins without some chud shoehorning some of this shit in.

The corporate margins are the result of this shit being shoehorned into games.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#744

Post by robertlagrant »

robertlagrant wrote: post #671
jerf wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a while ago about how companies seem to have gotten the idea into their head that subscriptions are unconditionally good, rather than a contingent good based on the exact circumstances of the subscription: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2023/streampocalypse-and-first-pri... Gamepass as a subscription to make sure you always have something to play, that has a lot of old games or indie games and other games that hav…

> So if you put your new game that you would have sold for $60-80 dollars to me directly and it translates to three weeks of engagement on your $15-ish/month (depending on level) subscription, it's hard to see how that is an economic win. Put that game on Gamepass in a year or two, sure, that can make sense, but on release? I think that's what I thought it would be, too. XboX has a really good track record of backwar…

> and can have access to an increasingly vast back catalogue of older games

By this I meant via a subscription.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#745

Post by markus_zhang »

tills13 wrote: post #561
urbnspacecowboy wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entire post text: > This post was about the insider news I got this morning that a majority of Id's studio is being laid off, including most (if not all) coders.

Even in the age of AI how the hell can you make a game without programmers?

Maybe they will just pump up remakes in other engines, like UE.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#746

Post by reactordev »

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…

a couple are symptoms of their problems and the others are causes. They lack the understanding to know which ones. They tried (and failed) to build a subscription model out of game renting while cannibalizing the very studios they purchased. There was no saying no. They were going to take you over whether you wanted them to or not. They would also scheme to half-ass your marketing partnership so you wouldn't make targets so you would be vulnerable to a take over. It's Microsoft at it's finest. A lesson in Greed Above All Else.

https://wccftech.com/xbox-layoffs-gut-id-obsidian-zenimax-on...

Re: Resetting Xbox

#747

Post by account42 »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #345
brikym wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems really odd to have a Netflix consumption model for games. Generally people want to play a few favourite games for a long time and get very skilled at them. You just don't need to churn through content like movies.

I don’t think that’s really true. Both exist. I would say single player games tend to content in the range of 10+ hours. Think First Light, Ghost of Yotei in recent years. Competitive and multiplayer games will tend more towards what you are thinking. CSGO, FIFA, and of course many others. But I feel like even that doesn’t really capture the full range of everything.

You see 10 hours for indies and art games maybe. For big budget full price games people expect at least 60+ hours, which is why they tend to be full of padding.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#749

Post by mlrtime »

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?

Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll... not quite 14 but close.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#750

Post by account42 »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #572
tayo42 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude seemed prevelant at Blizzard too based on a book I read (Play Nice)they wouldn't fund anything that wasn't a billionaire dollar idea. Never ending growth and profits just seem to ruin everything

That’s because the risk of making novel games is large.

Which is a problem for smaller studios but something that should average out at microsofts scale if they kept individual games reasonably small.
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