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Resetting Xbox

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Re: Resetting Xbox

#861

Post by Rohansi »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #515
jjcm wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those are maintenance + loot box on existing games. Sure, it still takes art and craft, but not the same kind of development work.

Valve is still working on new things. See this section, specifically the bottom.

https://box2d.org/posts/2026/06/announcing-box3d/#valve-to-t...

Re: Resetting Xbox

#863

Post by tommit »

bluGill wrote: post #856
_carbyau_ wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is a TV show reference and a point about investment strategy but... If I had 1.2 billion dollars I wouldn't care what investment strategy I had. I've got enough to spend $30k a day for 100 years. At any age, that'll do.

In generally spending increases to cover income. 30k per day sounds like a lot, but it isn't hard to spend that once you get used to having that much to spend. Your mansion with the heated indoor pool is expensive to maintain. Plus you probably have a vacation mansion someplace. Then you see a nice yacht and think "why not" - more costs. You aren't flying coach to get to all those things - and one day you realize you…

> but it appears to be very stressful from what I can tell.

sounds like there is a win-win in there somewhere. I wonder what that would look like.

for real though, what are we talking about here? 30k a day is not enough because ... habits? plus, it's incredibly hard to spend that much. that's exactly why, after a certain point, it's basically impossible to get rid of wealth.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#865

Post by mynameajeff »

simoncion wrote: post #832
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kojima is precisely what happens when you stop thinking of games as actual an interactive entertainment format and start thinking of it as a "cinematic experience" instead. And for Western devs, we have Rockstar doing that. RDR2 is a wonderful movie, but a pretty poor game. Unfortunately, they forgot what medium they were working with.

> RDR2 is a wonderful movie... It's a decent movie, yeah. > ... but a pretty poor game. I disagree. > Unfortunately, they forgot what medium they were working with. I strongly disagree. You didn't like what RDR2 was doing, and that's fine. I had a blast with it, but I'm the kind of psycho that loves games whose big thing is traversing gorgeous terrain. Similarly, there are games that people absolutely adore that I ab…

Agreed, I was shocked to see a second person saying that RDR2 is movie not a game and the gameplays the weakest part, which was confusing to me as someone who spent a LOT more time enjoying the game than touching the main story and cinematics, and know people personally in the same boat, but then I realized I was about to just reply to the same guy with the same take under another post about gaming and not a super common reoccuring opinion haha

Re: Resetting Xbox

#866

Post by khurs »

jrmg wrote: post #317
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Wasn't it a strategy to have exclusives on xBox and take games away from Playstation?

Re: Resetting Xbox

#867

Post by khurs »

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.

Concerns about competition regulators stopping the acquisition? so they said for next x years we guarantee won't be exclusive?

Re: Resetting Xbox

#868

Post by Yokolos »

jsemrau wrote: post #497
chrisfosterelli wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's on the publisher and owner to guide studios in a direction that makes money. That's literally their purpose. If these studios aren't releasing anything and they aren't making money, that's on Microsoft. So things aren't better if these studios are gone. The same people who managed this mess for ten years are still there. If you're not going to do anything to ensure these studios actually do what you need them to, I don't understand what the point was of acquisitions.

Re: Resetting Xbox

#869

Post by khurs »

Elephant in the room?

Maybe Microsoft is spending so much on AI that it is being forced to re-evaluating short term strategy in other business areas as financial have changed.

So perhaps in long term all these studio's making exclusives and getting people hooked on the Game Pass at a short term low price would have worked if they had dominated market share over playstation. But AI Data Warehouse & Power Plants funding and taking large stakes in multiple AI companies has depleted the cash.

And harder to raise money now hype is clearing and expectations of what AI can actually deliver are lowering, as per OpenAI's struggle to IPO.

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