It sure seems that the reason they’re shutting down or selling off so many studios is to make Xbox a leaner purchase offering. Because shutting down or otherwise divesting yourself from all of those developers is counter to what a healthy console business ought to do.
Comment on Report: Microsoft explored selling or spinning off Xbox division after Phil Spencer's exit
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Microsoft shuts down studios like it’s no one’s business. I don’t know of a single big tech company that supports devs.
Game developers are seen as free labour… Then companies wonder why their new consoles/systems flop.
DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!..
…DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!
…DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth 18 hours ago
Even shedding their studios, Xbox is such a huge brand, who could possibly afford it? The only people I could imagine would have the means and desire to buy Xbox from Microsoft are Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, or the Saudi government. You know, the worst people on the planet.
lemmyng@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
The only people I could imagine would have the means and desire to buy Xbox from Microsoft are Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, or the Saudi government.
sigh That’s gonna be the end goal, huh? Wouldn’t surprise me if it ends up in the hands of Bonesaw or the Ellisons.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Not only is it a huge brand, it’s also a struggling brand. Like as disappointing as Sony has been lately and while I do have some regret that I got a PS5, I have never once wished I had instead gotten an xbox.
HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth 5 hours ago
First of all, you must be excited to see all the new opportunities that came out of the PS5 jailbreak. Popping in a PS2 disc and playing on a PCSX2 fork made specifically for the PS5, that's some cool shit.
Second, despite the truth in your statement, I don't think the world oligarchs have any qualms about Xbox being a struggling brand. Rather, they see it as an opportunity to further cement their media empires for a century or more. "I already own the news media, social media, and print media, but what if I also owned the medium of games as well?" They don't want a single art form to escape their grasp and coalesce/spread dissent.
unitedwithme@lemmy.today 17 hours ago
Not that I want to float ideas, but Zuck & Bezos have tried to get into the gaming space before.
I will sell every Xbox I have, and figure out a way to sell my 17-18yo gamer profile, 60k+ gamerscore, and 300+digital game library on eBay if one of those assholes buys the brand!
Hegar@fedia.io 17 hours ago
to make Xbox a leaner purchase offering
Elegantly worded. So many decisions of their incomprehensible decisions suddenly make sense.
MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com 18 hours ago
I think purchasing them was actually the bigger mistake then selling them. If you’re selling hardware at a discount because you plan on making money via the games then you probably want a lot of independent studios paying you to make games on your platform. Maybe offering special incentives for exclusive titles or something, but realistically having some flagship exclusives that may be in house and a healthy 3rd party dev community seems like it makes the most sense. You can sit back and print money once the console is made just by owning the platform. One company cannot realistically oversee the development of enough studios to make that model work. In my opinion, you need a lot of studios to make a lot of games to make your hardware compelling. I’m sure some people use their console as a dedicated COD or 2K or [insert game here] machine, but I no longer buy consoles because there just wasn’t enough to play on them to make it worthwhile for me.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Budgets got higher, which made multiplatform releases just about mandatory. Making third party games exclusive isn’t working out, in general. I don’t know that that’s a genie you can put back in the bottle anymore.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
the issue was Sony was killing them on exclusives. bloodbourne, god of war, spider-man, last of us, horizon, astrobot, Ghost of, etc etc
lemmyng@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
So the route that David Zaslav took with Warner Bros. to make it easier to sell to Paramount.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 17 hours ago
I don’t think Nintendo operates like that: cnbc.com/…/nintendo-ceo-once-halved-salary-to-pre…
dustyData@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
That one is always misleading. It’s a known Japanese corporate move. As the article says, called “hansei”. Culturally regarded as an empty public gesture done exclusively to save the company’s public image. It works as a PR move, and it obviously did here, since it happened in 2013 and people still talk about it.
But, it actually does nothing financially, and usually none of the money saved goes anywhere. Nintendo avoided layoffs because they hoard liquidity. Have done so since the 80’s. Their revenue could collapse and they could lose money for a decade and still not reach bankruptcy. That is far more unique to tech corporations than halving executive’s pay. It is what actually has been protecting Nintendo from their failures. They still exploit and abuse employees just like every other Japanese corporation.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 9 hours ago
That one is always misleading. It’s a known Japanese corporate move.
Doesn’t make it misleading, it is something that happened. I never read Sony did this before. Which other company did that, other than Nintendo?
But, it actually does nothing financially, and usually none of the money saved goes anywhere.
Where do you get that?
Their revenue could collapse and they could lose money for a decade and still not reach bankruptcy.
Not true. Nintendo has huge pile of money in reserve. Otherwise they couldn’t have survived the devastating Wii U.
It is what actually has been protecting Nintendo from their failures.
So because it saves Nintendo from their failures, does mean its misleading to write articles that Nintendo did it?
They still exploit and abuse employees just like every other Japanese corporation.
In what way and where did you got that? Are there reports about Nintendo doing it?
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
Iwata is just different. It definitely won’t happen today.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
When did Nintendo do mass layoffs? Nintendo is just not in a position where they buy lot of companies, then mass layoff (or cut salary in halve) when a game does disappoint. So you are right that it won’t happen today, but for different reasons. I’m convinced that they would probably take a hit themselves, instead laying off huge part of their developers. This is one of the few things I actually like about Nintendo; and overall I don’t like Nintendo anymore. The mass layoffs issue is a Western world phenomenon mostly (but not exclusively, just a tendency).
pycorax@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Is Nintendo big tech though? They seem kinda too specific to a sub section of an industry unlike the other companies that typically come to mind when big tech is mentioned.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
Depends on what Big Tech and how big it is means to you. If we speak about the biggest tech companies ruling the world, then Nintendo isn’t it. But Nintendo is in my opinion big and a tech company. I mean even Netflix can count as big tech company, depending on the definition, and they are not as big nor do they something different than video streaming: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech
einlander@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Investors!, Investors!, Investors!, Investors!
randomaside@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 hours ago
“Game developers are seen as free labour” I emphatically agree.
There used to be a commercial for a school called Westwood College Online University. The gist of it was in the commercial it showed two dudes playing video-games. The infamous “tighten up the graphics on level three” commercial.
The message of this commercial pissed off so many people at the time but I often think people misread its intentions. A lot of folks would say to me “This is a joke, video-games are much harder to make. This school is a joke too.”
The message I got from it was much more sinister. It suggests three things simultaneously:
Video game jobs from that era into the 2000s were looking for eager young people to make games because these adult-children were often suburban, middle class kids with support systems in place. Studios could offer unpaid internships for any opportunity to work at their “dream job”. When in reality, these parents were effectively paying these studios to hire their children. They had hopes that their children could climb a corporate ladder starting at a higher level. Their parents often were boomers with access to that wealth.
TLDR; I 100% agree with you. The video game industry is the way it is because it’s been addicted to free labor for a long time. They have failed to cultivate and retain talent with developers “burning out” after five years on average. They break common sense labor rules and violate workers’ rights unlike any other tech industry. Everyone in that industry just complied for years because they were brain washed to believe they were “so lucky” to have this job.
I’m not surprised this is where it ended up.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Osan@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I usually think of the video game industry as having the bad aspects of both the tech industry and the media industry.