Phil Spencer was a good steward I think for a long time, but he didn’t make the decisions to buy all the studios.
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.
febrile@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Quicky@piefed.social 3 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 3 hours ago
I was blaming Microsoft for what they became 20 years ago.
Quicky@piefed.social 3 hours ago
They became wildly successful. As far as I remember, it was Bungie who were the driver behind leaving Microsoft because they wanted to move on to other IP, as opposed to being “The Halo company”.
I can’t blame them for that, but it’s not Microsoft’s fault that what they did afterwards was a shadow of their former glory.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Then they shouldn’t have allowed themselves to be bought out.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 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.