Microsoft’s gaming division was pretty respected in the industry for a long time. Lots of people give them (deserved) flack over Kinect for the Cbox One, but what really drove them over the cliff was buying all these studios to make Gamepass more attractive. It was actually a good deal for everyone when it was mostly games that were older, but when they started doing day-1 releases of first party games and buying studios to add to the number of games getting that day-1 release it turned sour.
A bunch of games that early adopters would previously have paid 60 bucks for were suddenly included in theit $7/month subscription, so tons of people who would have been buying 10 games a year were suddenly spending less than a hundred bucks on new Xbox games because enough new stuff was coming to Gamepass they could stay busy, so all these AAA releases that cost $100 to make were losing money.
So they raised the process of gamepass to try and keep up, but didn’t. Then they bought Activision and lost their lunch when Call of Duty sales plummeted because millions of people with Gamepass who had been buying it annually didn’t.
So they increased the price of gamepass so high everyone canceled, removing the only reason many of them were still using Xbox over Playstation, and at the same time the consoles skyrocketed in price.
Now they aren’t including Call of Duty from Gamepass for the first year and taking the price partway down, which was a good start to righting the ship but too late.
Chasing the Netflix model doesn’t work if you do it dumb. Netflix didn’t buy all the other studios to make their original programs. They did make some internal studios, but they mainly partnered with existing studios to make specific programs. Instead of buying Bethesda, they could have partnered with them on specific games, which would have been better for the games, the studio, Microsoft, and Xbox customers. But buying Bethesda was a simpler brute-force solution they employed dozens of times.They became an even dumber Embracer Group. Embracer at least they had a (dumb) plan to sell off the assets. Microsoft bought a bunch of studios with no plan for how to make it profitable.
The problem with what you’re saying is that they’ve always bought out other studios and then fucked them up. Going all the way back to their original IP Halo; Halo was a product of Bungie, a Mac exclusive game company at the time. Halo was originally going to be Apple’s big jump into gaming. The release of Halo was delayed to port it to the Xbox and today… today Bungie barely exists and all of their IPs are owned by MS.
Xbox was a passion project, Bill Gates was obsessed with getting Microsoft into the living room. Once Bill Gates left, and later Steve Balmer left, there was nobody left who gave a shit about this passion project and it became a money grab. So Microsoft went back to doing what it does best, buying people out and running their IPs into the ground.
The problem with what you’re saying is that they’ve always bought out other studios and then fucked them up.
Just replace “they” with “all publicly-traded companies”. That is the nature of buyouts and short-term stock market thinking. Just look at all of the buyouts EA turned to shit. Or Activision. Or countless other smaller studios that have died to larger buyouts.
If a company gets bought out by a corporation like this, they know what they are getting into.
I reckon that’s less about Microsoft and more about Bungie though. Bungie are primarily responsible for their own downfall with some terrible management decisions.
Microsoft were very good to Bungie from the beginning in terms of finance and support, and Halo on Mac would never have had the same impact as Halo on Xbox.
It’s been over 20 years since Bungie left Microsoft. In this case, I think it’s unfair to blame Microsoft for what they’ve since become.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Microsoft’s gaming division was pretty respected in the industry for a long time. Lots of people give them (deserved) flack over Kinect for the Cbox One, but what really drove them over the cliff was buying all these studios to make Gamepass more attractive. It was actually a good deal for everyone when it was mostly games that were older, but when they started doing day-1 releases of first party games and buying studios to add to the number of games getting that day-1 release it turned sour.
A bunch of games that early adopters would previously have paid 60 bucks for were suddenly included in theit $7/month subscription, so tons of people who would have been buying 10 games a year were suddenly spending less than a hundred bucks on new Xbox games because enough new stuff was coming to Gamepass they could stay busy, so all these AAA releases that cost $100 to make were losing money.
So they raised the process of gamepass to try and keep up, but didn’t. Then they bought Activision and lost their lunch when Call of Duty sales plummeted because millions of people with Gamepass who had been buying it annually didn’t.
So they increased the price of gamepass so high everyone canceled, removing the only reason many of them were still using Xbox over Playstation, and at the same time the consoles skyrocketed in price.
Now they aren’t including Call of Duty from Gamepass for the first year and taking the price partway down, which was a good start to righting the ship but too late.
Chasing the Netflix model doesn’t work if you do it dumb. Netflix didn’t buy all the other studios to make their original programs. They did make some internal studios, but they mainly partnered with existing studios to make specific programs. Instead of buying Bethesda, they could have partnered with them on specific games, which would have been better for the games, the studio, Microsoft, and Xbox customers. But buying Bethesda was a simpler brute-force solution they employed dozens of times.They became an even dumber Embracer Group. Embracer at least they had a (dumb) plan to sell off the assets. Microsoft bought a bunch of studios with no plan for how to make it profitable.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
The problem with what you’re saying is that they’ve always bought out other studios and then fucked them up. Going all the way back to their original IP Halo; Halo was a product of Bungie, a Mac exclusive game company at the time. Halo was originally going to be Apple’s big jump into gaming. The release of Halo was delayed to port it to the Xbox and today… today Bungie barely exists and all of their IPs are owned by MS.
Xbox was a passion project, Bill Gates was obsessed with getting Microsoft into the living room. Once Bill Gates left, and later Steve Balmer left, there was nobody left who gave a shit about this passion project and it became a money grab. So Microsoft went back to doing what it does best, buying people out and running their IPs into the ground.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
Just replace “they” with “all publicly-traded companies”. That is the nature of buyouts and short-term stock market thinking. Just look at all of the buyouts EA turned to shit. Or Activision. Or countless other smaller studios that have died to larger buyouts.
If a company gets bought out by a corporation like this, they know what they are getting into.
febrile@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Phil Spencer was a good steward I think for a long time, but he didn’t make the decisions to buy all the studios.
Quicky@piefed.social 5 hours ago
I reckon that’s less about Microsoft and more about Bungie though. Bungie are primarily responsible for their own downfall with some terrible management decisions.
Microsoft were very good to Bungie from the beginning in terms of finance and support, and Halo on Mac would never have had the same impact as Halo on Xbox.
It’s been over 20 years since Bungie left Microsoft. In this case, I think it’s unfair to blame Microsoft for what they’ve since become.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
I was blaming Microsoft for what they became 20 years ago.
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
While this is a great detailed explanation, it still sounds like very poor decision making that would be obvious to anyway except out of touch execs.