Report: Microsoft explored selling or spinning off Xbox division after Phil Spencer's exit

Submitted ⁨⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ampersandrew@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

https://thegamepost.com/microsoft-explored-selling-spinning-off-xbox/

Original report comes from the paywalled The Information, that they tried to sell to private equity for $100B-$150B, but that it was short lived and fell through. This backs what a lot of us have been thinking based on the moves Sharma has been making, that they track with a sell-off of the Xbox brand.

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tachikoma@lemmy.today ⁨48⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
100 billion for xbox brand? Why is it priced so high? It’s not worth that much. 😏

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robomuffin79@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Complete idiots working at Microsoft. Sharma clearly has no real interest in gaming and together with her management, she will drive it further into the ground before selling off the remains. As a lifelong PlayStation owner, I welcomed the competition as Sony only got their act together when XBox excelled. If the console disappears, Sony will take their customers for a ride

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- EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Sony has clearly already begun the ride and it’s been a rough few months already
  
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  - warm@kbin.earth ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Sony began the ride a long time ago. They could not give a fuck about consumers. I dont think many people will buy the next console generation anyway, considering we are looking at $1000+ price tags.
    
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Tetsuo@jlai.lu ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Fuck Xbox. They fired everyone that made Hi-Fi Rush. They were led by morons.

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DarkCloud@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨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!

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- randomaside@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨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 development jobs are dream jobs where you don’t do “real work”.
  
  You should feel lucky just to have this job. You can be this lucky too.
  
  You can defraud your parents by taking this college program but really you’re just playing video games. Your parents are dumb.
  
  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.
  
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  - 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.
    
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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth ⁨17⁩ ⁨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.
    
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  - 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.
    
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  - 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.
    
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  - lemmyng@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    So the route that David Zaslav took with Warner Bros. to make it easier to sell to Paramount.
    
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- thingsiplay@lemmy.ml ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I don’t think Nintendo operates like that: cnbc.com/…/nintendo-ceo-once-halved-salary-to-pre…
  
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  - 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.
    
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  - psx_crab@lemmy.zip ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Iwata is just different. It definitely won’t happen today.
    
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  - pycorax@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨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.
    
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- einlander@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Investors!, Investors!, Investors!, Investors!
  
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CoconutLove@lemmy.today ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It sucks because they bought all this IP that basically won’t be turned into new games

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sleepmode@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
it had all the telltale signs from the get go. Bring in fall guy. Suddenly raise service prices to unignorable level. Force attrition. Excuse to kill it and studios. Announce big plans to distract. Gut studios more. Get called out. Explain pivot. Resume gutting. Get called out. Announce vapor ware. Distract distract distract. jingles keys All carefully balanced for the two week news/memory cycle.

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- Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  remember glass ceiling, thats why the fall “guy” is sharma, a women. often used by failing corporations to deflect blame on a woman.
  
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  - JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I still remember Reddit bringing in Ellen Pao to take the blame for their first big wave of “censorship”. (If you consider banning communities dedicated to hating fat people or minorities censorship.)
    
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JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The idea of Xbox being sold or spun off has been around at least since Satya took over. He’s very business focused. I’m guessing “play” isn’t a big part of his life.

I’m sure behind the scenes Phil convinced Satya that he could make Xbox a viable business on par with Windows, and was given a deadline to make it happen. He was partially successful but never got it to the line item necessary, partly because Windows kept growing too, and faster. And, unfortunately for Phil, Xbox Series failed to sell. I’m guessing there won’t be another console generation.

Satya sees it as a failed experiment, I’d bet, and now it’s time to get it properly wrapped up and shoveled off. I think it’s too big to just shutter it, but it will be hard to find a buyer too.

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- ozymandias117@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Xbox was only created to help vendor lock-in for Windows.
  
  The X in Xbox was DirectX, the goal was to get developers off of OpenGL.
  
  With the rise of Vulkan, and DX12 being extremely similar, there’s little reason for Xbox to exist from Microsoft’s perspective
  
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  - Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Not to mention proton and dx2vk handle playing directx games on Linux more reliably than most linux native games (at least in my experience… If a game doesn’t work, odds are it’s using the steam linux runtime and switching to proton gets it to work).
    
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Ertain@feddit.online ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Yeah, it looked like MS was going to sell off or somehow get rid of Xbox.

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- Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  they have to justify keeping thier AI slop generator/development afloat somehow.
  
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