I wouldn’t rate Phil Spencer too highly either, though. He was the face behind these massive buyouts in the first place. He set the strategy for Xbox’s very lackluster console offering this generation. And he went all in on “You’ll own nothing and like it” with GamePass.

The studios that Xbox spent so much money on don’t appear to have really paid for themselves yet. With games being made at a glacial pace, you have not only the large sum of cash spent on the buyouts to worry about, but years of additional salaries, infrastructure, and services to pay before profit starts coming in. GamePass also appears to have been a major investment that hasn’t quite paid off, what with them now denying new contracts to third party studios while they reevaluate its business model.