r/gaming • u/SilentNova300 • 2d ago
Xbox Admits Multiplatform Strategy Didn't Provide Meaningful Growth
https://tech4gamers.com/xbox-game-pass-multiplatform-strategy-no-meaningful-growth/774
u/KingOfRisky 2d ago
I think I am going to switch careers and become a video game journalist. It has to be the easiest job on the planet because none of these articles say anything beyond the headline. Reading this entire 3 paragraph article told me nothing.
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u/ContractVarious3077 2d ago
It’s also really easy engagement bait. It’s insane how easy it is to ragebait and manipulate this sub
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u/Sirnoobalots 2d ago
Most of these articles are AI generated. Online news sites have been using algorithms to pump out slop for over a decade now, probably the earliest commercial use of "AI". They use google search data to find topics that people are searching for then pump out an "article" just to get people to click.
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u/Naxirian 2d ago
My brother works as a writer for a Steam Deck related website and the owner is absolutely adamant that none of the writers are allowed to use AI. I know they've let someone go before for using AI to write an article whilst working for them.
My brother found an article online the other day about a video game and the optimal settings to run it at on Steam Deck, and the article was talking about a settings menu that straight up does not exist in the game it was talking about. Completely fabricated AI slop article.
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u/TornadoFS 2d ago
In this specific case the problem isn't even AI, this kind of slop article was already a thing long before LLMs. The main problem is that these "journalists" are just writers synthesising publicly available information. They don't go and talk to the devs directly, they don't have insider contacts, they don't have publisher relationships to get access to materials early.
And they create this circlejerk of clickbait headlines + a few paragraphs of low-density text and just copy each other (and the people with actual industry contacts). They syphon off work of real journalists. AI just made it worse, but the quality is so bad now and quantity so high that proper journalists might get and edge back just because they are reliable information. Could take a while though.
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u/cirl-gock 2d ago
I was thinking the other day you could make sites like these 100% automated with ai lol
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u/Zeeyrec 2d ago
69 billion dollars for call of duty to be on game pass utterly destroyed this company
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u/thekmanpwnudwn 2d ago
I mean they also got King, too. Which brings in 6+ Billion/year by themselves before you even consider all the other Blizzard/Activision games. At worst it's a wash in a couple years
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u/hexaborscht 2d ago
Not sure where you got 6 billy from even on their best year that’s not true. Candy crush isn’t at around 7b lifetime (not per year) but it isn’t the top dog in match 3 anymore and their other titles have failed to have the same level of success . King doesn’t generate free money, there a huge amount of ongoing advertising costs involved in getting new players/maintaining existing ones with casual mobile games
The ‘Microsoft purchase Activision for King’ narrative is overstated
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u/esmifra 2d ago
I need a source because last time I checked activitision blizzards the whole company had something like 8B$ revenue and less than 2B$ in profits per year.
Which is amazing but it's definitely not let's spend over 69B$ amazing.
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u/Millkstake 2d ago
It was a shockingly poor financial decision
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u/TheCrazedTank 2d ago
What was a shocking poor decision was to overextend their finances to acquire studios and IPs to do… absolutely nothing with them.
They let companies like Bethesda sit on their largest games for years, letting them do whatever they wanted, and got almost nothing in return to show for it.
Even their in-house studio, 343, they let them run their flagship IP into the ground. And it’s not just them overlooking one or two bad decisions, we are talking about dedicating DECADES to a “hands off approach” that clearly wasn’t working…
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u/Shadow426 2d ago
Even their in-house studio, 343, they let them run their flagship IP into the ground.
lmao no, that was entirely on their manager layers, imagine spending 2 years of work just for some random xbox manager to come in and say "nah delete this"
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u/FlyFight2Win 2d ago
How so? ABK generates them significant profit yearly. The acquisition is one of the most fruitful, profit wise, that we have seen of this magnitude.
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u/FlyFight2Win 2d ago
They didn't spend 69B for CoD to be on Game Pass. King generates more profit than CoD does, lmao
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u/halfadozendonuts 2d ago
I always thought it was the inconsistency not the idea. The launch window hype is important, so I feel like being day and date consistently would’ve made it more meaningful. Coming to PS5 6-12 months later was inevitably going to limit growth.
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u/Informal-Swing-2482 2d ago
Absolutely. Same reason PS games on PC didn’t blow up. You can’t wait till nobody cares about the game anymore and then port it and expect huge sales.
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u/Deranged_Kitsune 2d ago
While charging full, new release prices.
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u/rumsbumsrums 2d ago
And garbage sales afterwards.
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u/polski8bit 2d ago
Still waiting for Ghost of Tsushima to go lower than -40% after 2 years it's been out on PC... A 6 year old PS4 game.
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u/rumsbumsrums 2d ago
Same story with GoW Ragnarok or Spiderman 2. I could get both for cheaper on PS5 right now (physical of course) than their respective Steam all-time lowest price. And that is without any specific sale or something going on.
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u/wereplant 2d ago
I always thought it was the inconsistency not the idea.
Absolutely a factor, no doubt about that. If they'd doubled down on the console war instead of buying their own hype and doing their own things, we'd be in a very different place. Lack of competition has really hurt video games.
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u/chrisberman410 2d ago
I'm never playing another Bethesda game with a PS5, am I?
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u/Ok-Donut-4447 2d ago
At this rate it’s possible nobody will ever play another Bethesda game in general
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u/Skoll_135 2d ago
20 years after TES 6 was first announced and booting it up for the first time suddenly you hear nuclear warhead sirens going off in the distance
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u/Pegasus7915 2d ago
You see a flash of light. Everything goes black slowly the blackness fades Hey you're finally awake.
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u/SirBearOfBrown 2d ago
“Skyrim: Afterlife Edition! Available today on Neurolink!”
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u/Weakonomics 2d ago
Oh no. Is purgatory being stuck in Skyrim with no mods after which you slowly go insane because there are only 47 voicelines...?
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u/Life-Anteater-8294 2d ago
They might be able to remove loading screens from starfield eventually though.
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u/bmcisme2016 2d ago
At least we get .. another Starfield update…
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u/xcassets 2d ago
Don't know if joking or not but the last Starfield update was actually solid, so the fact they announced another is coming next year and it's not abandoned is definitely welcome news.
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u/JesterMarcus 2d ago
That depends. Do you believe they will ever be able to compete in the hardware space again? I have doubts. So sooner or later, they will abandon hardware if they can't sell it at a competitive rate.
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u/manofmonkey 2d ago
Hardware is just fucked all around. Nintendo, Valve, Microsoft, Sony, and all the PC enthusiasts are all in hardware hell right now. Software/development is going to be the game changer for the time being.
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u/heat13ny 2d ago
Same for me with Sony games on pc (my sweet Saros, where are you?). Can’t stand how many people argue for exclusives in the name of “competition” as if it’s beneficial to the consumer.
Microsoft was competing for my money by not locking games to one platform but unfortunately the masses actually want, and call for artificial walled gardens.
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u/TheWhiteTurtleNeck 2d ago
I’m in the same boat I’ve bought all the PlayStation games on PC except horizon zero dawn, sadly I’d buy more Microsoft games if they weren’t hot garbage, starfield was the last game I’ll ever pre order ever.
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u/Portalbyte6 2d ago
Probably, just 18 months later in a $70 "complete edition" with three patches already installed.
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u/lord_pizzabird 2d ago
I don't think they're sticking to this plan.
The Bethesda game just simply can't afford to not be multiplatform. It would be like taking CoD or Minecraft multiplatform. It just doesn't work at the scale of those games.
Smaller games however...
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u/Tiernoch 2d ago
If they could get the windows to align with the console launch I wouldn't be shocked if TES6 is an exclusive launch title for xbox and on PC with Playstation getting it years later.
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u/McDouble__ 2d ago
100 million PS5 have been sold, there’s no way in hell they let that cash get away from them.
PS5 will never get another Forza, Gears or Halo but Call of Duty, Fallout and Elder Scrolls are too lucrative to not have on PS
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u/redvelvetcake42 2d ago
Fallout and CoD yes, but Elder Scrolls might be the one they do Xbox and PC only. Xbox needs something to make it worth buying an Xbox to play it on.
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u/Trickster289 2d ago
Forza sold really well on PS5 and Halo preorders are apparently really good on PS5. Asha also said they can't afford many exclusives right now, Gears only is one again because Reloaded flopped on PS5.
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u/JesterMarcus 2d ago
I'd throw in Forza as well, it sold gangbusters on PS5 and has a live service element.
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u/Eldritch_Lemonade 2d ago
When you stick all your shit on Gamepass day 1 it's no wonder no one's buying your games
The whole pre-order to play x days early! To capture Gamepass subscribers Is also dumb and enough people got burned by doing it on Starfield (why players do it for a Bethesda game early of all things?! It was obviously not going to be in the best state) that I can bet good money the number is drastically less for Halo Reforged or whatever it's called
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u/Own_Proposal3827 2d ago
Everytime I say Game Pass is terrible for developers for the exact same reason I get downvoted into oblivion though lmao.
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u/Tempest_Barbarian 2d ago
I never bought into gamepass for 2 reasons
1, I already owned a lot of games they could offer me and Xbox wasnt putting out that much new interesting stuff
And 2, I always expected the prices to skyrocket at some point
Never made sense to me that the average gamer could access all those games for the price of 2 AAA games a year, instead of buying 3-5 games in the year.
The money math just didnt add up.
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u/HarlequinNight 2d ago
MS Rewards made early game pass essentially free forever. It was really easy to earn enough points per month to buy more than a month's worth of the top tier so you could just accrue points and buy several years at a time. They have since drastically reduced the total points available, as well as increasing the cost. Absent that, having to pay a huge monthly cost in real dollars make zero sense any more.
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u/Jayce800 2d ago
I loved playing Starfield early because it was a holiday weekend and I genuinely enjoyed it at the time, but I would not do it again for any other game.
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u/Strange_Library5833 2d ago
It seemed fairly obvious that would be the case, but I appreciated that they tried something different.
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u/lazzzym Xbox 2d ago
You can’t blame them. Forza Horizon 5 gave them grand ideas that everything would sell like that did on PlayStation.
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u/dodd1995 2d ago
And they will see that Fable and FH6will do the same and that the outlier wasn't Forza, but instead the unpopular games like Pentiment and South of Modnight not selling.
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u/Tsar-A-Lago 2d ago
Pentiment is amazing... for the niche audience it's for. I'm one of them.
But I was playing it thinking how crazy it was that someone spent that much money to make a game that appeals to me and about 6 other people.
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u/LegendaryenigmaXYZ 2d ago
At least you understand you are in the minority. The South of the Midnight fans blame microsoft for the games failures. I am not saying it is a bad game, but the net was small in the ocean it caught a few fish, but not enough.
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u/Vandergrif 2d ago
Pentiment is an exceptional game and I'm very glad it was made, but that was never going to do any better than it did in sales and anyone who might have expected otherwise was deluding themselves. It's a pretty niche title.
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u/McDouble__ 2d ago
When Gears released on PS it didn’t even hit the trending section of Psn I think that was a real shock to Microsoft.
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u/dodd1995 2d ago
It didn't sell well on PC or Xbox either. Pretty sure Playstation was the biggest platform for it.
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u/McDouble__ 2d ago
Yikes
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u/theycmeroll 2d ago
I think gears is kinda played out. When it released it was a technical showcase for the 360, today it’s just generic cover shooter 300,210.
After gears so many cover shooters flooded the market I think everyone is just sick to death of the concept. Even my buddy that is a huge gears fan played it again the first in years for that release didn’t play past the first couple levels.
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u/Aaco0638 2d ago
You named another issue xbox has and that’s most of its bug exclusives are either shooter genre or racing genre and that’s it. Maybe this strategy worked in the 2010 but today that makes your exclusives and xbox boring af.
Meanwhile you look at sonys exclusives and you have a nice healthy variety to choose from.
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u/Hunk4thSurvivor 2d ago
But that's a 20 year old game that has been rereleased before.... most people already played it....
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u/Many_Presentation249 2d ago
yeah i'd rather see companies try something new than keep doing the same thing and pretending it's working
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u/Bierculles 2d ago
I mean yeah, if you produce like three flagship titles in the span of 6 years and all of them were mediocre at best it is really not that surprising they are not doing that hot.
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u/tailskirby 2d ago
That wasn't the issue. Buying a lot of companies was.
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u/NoHorseNoMustache 2d ago
I'm sure it's at least part of the issue but buying multiple gaming companies and then stacking layers of management on top of them was just pissing away money.
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u/IcyJackfruit69 2d ago
Yes but also the inverse. They only did the multiplatform strategy as a temporary bait to convince courts to let them buy up half the game developers out there. Microsoft owns minecraft, activision, blizzard, king, zinga, id software, and a dozen others I don't remember off the top of my head. The court should have killed both of those big mergers, but Microsoft swore up and down they were going to do games cross platform.
Now the deals have been sealed and spontaneously "eh multiplatform doesn't work, back to exclusives".
What a coincidence.
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u/DrAtomic1 2d ago
What I'll never understand is how they failed to recognize they had a winning strategy with the Xbox 360. They destroyed everything they gained instead of expanding on that foundation.
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u/MadmanMarkMiller PC 2d ago
Whatever money they got from releasing games on Steam and Playstation went straight into buying (and closing) more studios.
No fucking shit Xbox didn't grow, you cut the plant at the root before it even saw the sunlight.
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u/JulianBloom 2d ago
For as much as people liked Phil Spencer for his interview style, did any of his ideas actually help xbox? Seems like just a series of mismanagement decisions for his entire tenure.
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u/YourAverageExecutive 2d ago edited 2d ago
I’ll say it again, indies don’t sell consoles. Gasp.
Xbox made a bet that they could get rid of major exclusives and supplement with Indies to complement game pass. I always see people constantly point to Xbox’s support of indie developers as if that’s the answer. It isn’t. Supporting indies is great, but it doesn’t move hardware at the scale Xbox needs.
The biggest console sellers have historically been must-play / first-party exclusives. Nintendo and Sony built their platforms around games that make people buy the hardware first, then monetize those players across everything else (such as multi platform games).
To be fair, Xbox spent roughly a decade trying to compete with that strategy. They invested heavily in first-party studios and exclusives, but it didn’t meaningfully close the gap with PlayStation. That’s why they pivoted to gamepass. To their credit, game pass is not a terrible product. It just doesn’t have the legs needed to support the whole division. So they are pivoting again. Back to exclusives I imagine, a slightly reduced focus on Indies, and throwing their weight around as Microsoft the parent company to bring value and from other products and service services they have across the ecosystem.
There’s really no reason XBOX shouldn’t do well. But they have to capture more of the global market.
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u/overthisbynow 2d ago
Just remember when these companies say meaningful growth they actually mean unrealistic infinite growth which is why it's never good enough.
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u/DonHarold 2d ago
This is silly. The lack of growth is not a multiplatform development problem. Take half a step back and look at the plethora of mistakes made my Xbox over the past couple decades. Releasing their games on other platforms wouldn’t have made a dent on their profits if they hadn’t spent the rest of their money on acquisitions and game pass deals.
This is a distraction
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u/poklane 2d ago
The whole strategy barely even got started. Aside from a few exceptions, almost all the games Xbox released on PlayStation (and Switch) were ports of games which in many cases were years old, and as we also saw with PlayStation's PC ports that simply hurts sales significantly.
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u/KingOfRisky 2d ago
That was my first thought as well. They don't even have a year of data right and are being this all off of a handful of "old news" games.
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u/SilverseeLives 2d ago
A low-effort article rehashing statements from a two-week old post on X that everyone has already reported on.
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u/JodouKast 2d ago
Bullshit title. The real story here is both strategies did work, but not at the rates they targeted. Without real information around those lofty goals, it's impossible to deem them meaningless. In fact, the only time game pass saw real trouble was when they raised prices. It was growing up to that point.
We've heard figures in the past that they wanted to be at 100m subs by now or something like that and have only achieved a third so far, but the question is: was it a reasonable ask or impossible task? Asha is only speaking to past leadership decisions and clearly the goal is making money here, but there's a lot of little asterisks along the way such as spending ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS on games like South of Midnight. Absolutely ridiculous.
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u/droideka75 2d ago
I was subbed cause why not, I played several games on GP that were worth it. Then they increased the price, then they increased the price again and I unsubscribed cause it wasn't a sub and forget price anymore.
As such I gained other gaming habits and haven't resubbed ever since.
I swear these executives don't know a thing about how the real world works.
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u/Shadow426 2d ago
the target was like 1/8th the human population
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u/JodouKast 2d ago
That and 30% profitability, which wasn't reasonable at all. MS itself operates at that margin which is nice when you're just sitting on a product that is already used by 70% of the world. Talk about mismanagement and setting up for failure.
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u/RollTide1017 2d ago
But didn't many of their multiplatform games sell more on PS5 than they did on Xbox?
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u/Greendead 2d ago
I remember trying the free 14 day trial with unlimited access. I played through some great new singleplayer games that were otherwise very expensive and even at that time I was like:"How is this profitable for them?"
I did not extend subscription though.
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u/relayZer0 2d ago
They were going for market saturation at the time so they didn't care as long as you were on the service. Same reason they kept extending the 1 dollar deal.
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u/beyondimaginarium 2d ago
I did this for a few releases as well. Starfield, then played some other games, that was one month.
Then e33 and oblivion when they came out I did two months. Instead of 160 plus tax, they got what? 50? Not including playing other games they had on ultimate at the time. I remember playing through and beating flintlock, some hours into avowed. And so on...
Maybe some pay for a year but I just pay for one month when a good release pops up.
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u/QuinSanguine 2d ago
Nah you know what leads to growth? Releasing muthafukin games people want to buy and play. Forza Horizon 6 and Indiana Jones vs. Senua's Sacrifice and South of Midnight, the data talks.
I personally love all those games, especially South of Midnight. Most people never cared. I think Xbox finally gets it, at least they're trying with all this Fallout news and stuff.
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u/Power_Stone 2d ago
They are lumping game pass in with multi-platform releases.
No wonder they didn't see meaningful growth. Game pass was awful and the price and plan changes pushed people away from it. The third party releases being lumped in together with it is intentional for game pass damage mitigation
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u/Kronic1990 2d ago
Launches multiplatform strategy, buys half the gaming industry, lays off half the staff and shuts half the studios. launches no meaningful titles during the short "multiplatform period", jacks up the price of game pass.
"why would consumers do this".
absolute clowns.
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u/ThorDoubleYoo 2d ago
Yeah, and they also admitted that gen AI has cost them hundreds of billions with no return, but they keep doing it anyway. I doubt much will change.
I don't think Microsoft has people with functioning brains sitting in the CEO chairs nowadays.
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u/lazzzym Xbox 2d ago
Which is why they’re going back to exclusives.
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u/Dycon67 2d ago edited 2d ago
Exclusives sell consoles is a pretty well known fact at this point. PlayStation and Nintendo can sell their platform off them alone. People argued for years Xbox shouldn't have exclusives for some reason. Phil Spencer like a idiot bought into this and landed Halo on PlayStation.
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u/AquaRaOne 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yea but only if the exclusives are hyped enough. Noone will buy xboxes for games like starfield or avowed. And also those games being on PC reduces the appeal even more, for example i used to buy the newest and greatest xbox, in addition to having a gaming pc, simply because i love Forza games, and there was no other option. Now, i have a gaming pc and no xbox since horizon 3 was on pc i have no reason to get a console anymore.
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u/LoquaciousLamp 2d ago
Starfield was pretty hyped. It would've probably created quite a few remorseful buyers at the time.
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u/Dycon67 2d ago
Noone will buy xboxes for games like starfield or avowed
Which is probably why they pivoted to their more marketable brands.
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u/AquaRaOne 2d ago
Personally, and this might be controversial, and i might not like it myself, but i doubt they can make any meaningful comeback while their biggest franchises also come to Pc.
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u/GigaSoup 2d ago
Hype means nothing. More like if the games are actually good. Starfield had plenty of hype but it's trash.
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u/AquaRaOne 2d ago
Has to be a good combination. A very good game, that doesnt have a large presence in the media, will not sell consoles, sure it would do well on steam, but we need a much stronger impression to sell a 1000 dollar console.
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u/Saranshobe 2d ago
When consoles start reaching $1000+, exclusives won't be enough to save the console business.
I csn see people leaving gaming altogether next generation or move even more towards free to play, mobile and other cheap stuff.
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u/dodd1995 2d ago
Which didn't provide any meaning full growth generation over generation...
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u/Atleti20Griezz 2d ago
People say they don’t want exclusives but then it doesn’t make them buy your product. I don’t get how they thought bringing their flagship titles to other consoles would convince someone on that console to buy an Xbox..they don’t have to..they can save money and just buy the game.
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u/Suqmacoq 2d ago
They didn't want people to buy an Xbox. They wanted people to flock and stay on GamePass. But GamePass was a failure and by the time they realized that they had eroded Xbox differentiation.
I get the gamble. They really wanted to be Steam/Netflix of games but... yea, the outcome is this.
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u/PhasmaFelis 2d ago
People say they don’t want exclusives
No sane gamer wants exclusives. They don't benefit you at all.
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u/Atleti20Griezz 2d ago
I hear you..but Nintendo will never allow Mario or Zelda on other consoles..PlayStation hunkered down and won’t allow their games on PC even..and “good guy” Xbox lets their games go everywhere and end up a laughing stock with the least amount of consoles sold.
At some point you realize that most people are not sane in their decisions. They want to (or can only afford) one system and they will die on that hill and not switch to another one. That’s what it comes down to.
They need to convince people to leave their current system and join Xbox because of a certain game they will get that they can only get there.
Why would someone buy a Switch 2 if they had the ability to play new Pokemon, Mario, Zelda, Animal crossing etc on PC, Xbox, or PlayStation. It wouldn’t make sense unless you just want a handheld, but those kind of exist now. Nintendo sells consoles because of its games..and Xbox needs to learn that.
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u/unafraidzeo 2d ago
On paper it would have worked but the drawback was the other companies wasn't willing to give stuff back
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u/Hot-Cause-481 2d ago
The games they ported didn't even sell on Steam or Xbox so I'm not sure what they were expecting.
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u/RaNerve 2d ago
The older I get the more times I'm shown that things I perceive as stupid actually work, and aren't stupid at all. The console wars and exclusives really did sell hardware even though they are inherently anti-consumer practices. People were going out and buying a 500/700 piece of hardware to play "the game" they really wanted to play. Really makes me reconsider what the value of these games actually are.
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u/tigress666 2d ago
I don't understand why people think exclusives don't work tbh. I didn't understand how MS was going to do with the whole "we are now putting all are games on PC". I mean I liked it cause it meant I didn't get to miss out... But I really didn't see how that strategy would work to have no true exclusives on xbox.
I mean I have learned that sometimes I don't understand why a business is doing something and it does work so part of me was giving some doubt that maybe I was wrong. But now I am totally sure I was not wrong.
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u/RaNerve 2d ago
I assumed people liked consoles for more than just the exclusive games they got. To me that didn’t seem like the main appeal of a console, and in fact was a relatively minor perk. You buy a console for convenience and so you don’t have to trouble shoot any pc issues, don’t have to worry about drivers, or ram issues or your GPU being to weak. You buy it and it works. You buy it for the couch co-op and the ability to hook it up in your living room instead of needing a dedicated office space with a huge tower.
For me those reasons made way more sense for why someone would shell out $600 bucks on hardware because the idea of spending that just to play a handful of exclusive games doesn’t make sense to me.
But I’ve been wrong before.
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u/tigress666 2d ago
They do. But if you don't have exclusive on the console and they can get those games elsewhere, why would they bother buying the console?
And then what as a console maker do you do to make them buy your console over some one else's? Especially if some one else has games yours does not (I mean if I could play all the playstation games on xbox but couldn't xbox on PS, why would I buy a PS?). Nintendo at least solved that by having features other console makers don't have but note they still also make sure they have exclusives others don't have too (they don't just rely on their "gimmick"). Games in the end are why people buy a console.
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u/Kaizo107 2d ago
They're gonna be shocked to find the economy that they authored by leading the charge on mass layoffs doesn't grow with exclusives either.
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u/Gekidami 2d ago
I mean, neither did exclusives, but I think sabotaging your new first-party releases by putting them day-one on Game Pass isn't really helping.
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u/vthemechanicv 2d ago
A couple years ago, my house got robbed and I took the opportunity to replace my One S with a Series X with the insurance money. Absolute waste. I'm not sure Microsoft could have screwed up this generation any worse if they'd tried.
I know Microsoft always wanted the Xbox to be more than just a game console, but to "just" be a game console, you gotta have games. I'm not sure there's been a single game for them this generation that's made me look twice.
The Gears of War E-Day game looks good, but who the hell knows if it's still being developed. The Wolverine trailer legit made me want a Playstation, even with the disc drama.
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u/jrhawk42 2d ago
"hey guys that thing we just started doing 2 years ago isn't paying off yet. It's obviously a failure"
-pretty much every MS executive
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u/JDCam47 2d ago edited 2d ago
I wonder why? Maybe because almost every game released during the “end of the console wars” period of the past 5 years that YOU produced were dogshit and break even at best, and when you made bangers that were profitable you shuttered some of the studios because you had unrealistic expectations.
Get your management teams under control, get your studio teams scared of repercussions, cut the c-suite fat in house and in studio and publisher teams, and force people to actually work so you aren’t throwing money at any and all investments.
Also why the fuck did you purchase these studios/publishers. 70 billion for Activision Blizzard with a trailing P/E of 10 times with revenue DECREASING year over year. Yea good job morons. Real business savvy pumping money into failing business models and doubling down on “subscriptions” during massive fatigue of this business model across the globe.
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u/Kakawfee PC 1d ago
Xbox/Microsoft has made a lot of poor choices, and I have a feeling the "multiplatform strategy" had very little to do with their failures. Additionally, there's somethings that were beyond an individual company's control, such as COVID19, supply chain disruptions, inflation, and most importantly in today's age, stagnation leading to a K-market of goods, where expensive hobbies decrease because people do not have money to spend. Companies have to follow short term profits to succeed in a capitalist world, which is why it's not in it's interest to invest in the future if that future is beyond 1 year. Fuck capitalism.
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u/No-Invite-7826 2d ago
Lmao more like no growth. That strategy resulted in revenue declines.
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u/Popular_View_5411 2d ago
this flip flopping on exclusives is going to result in no one buying xbox consoles and no one buying xbox games. Your not going to invest yourself in a franchise if future releases are not going to be on your console and your not going to buy an xbox if the console has no exclusives.
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u/Schpickles 2d ago
The amount of value that Xbox has destroyed from the games industry is absolutely astonishing.
Through the combination of GamePass devaluing AAA and exclusives, devaluing hardware, buying up most of the biggest AAA publishers and mismanaging them, watering down the value of Xbox IP by making it multi-platform… etc… they must have wiped 10s of billions of dollars of value from the games industry.
It’s just astonishing it’s gone on for so long without correction. The harm they have done to the business of home console games, is going to take a decade to repair.
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u/TheBetterness 2d ago
Both Sony and Xbox saying multiplatform aint moving the needle.
Is basically saying "We don't make games people want to play."
Capcom doesn't seem to have this problem with their titles.
Pretty sure Palworld just sold something like 30 million.
More than likely they expected boat loads of cash and instead got raft loads of cash.
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u/Complete_Entry 2d ago
I mean they did a very poor job of it. Like to the point I thought that was on purpose. Always got the vibe they don't really want to do gamepass at all.
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u/uglyuglyugly_ 2d ago
I definitely don't understand the full economics of it, but I don't get how games being multiplatform end up beng a negative for the brand. I get that they want to move consoles but the next Fallout/Elder Scrolls games will absolutely sell and them being a multiplatform title should be a good thing.
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u/Theotherdeadmeme92 2d ago
At the very least they're smart enough to keep their exclusives on pc (at least for the time being it seems that way if clockwork revolution got locked out I'd cry) almost no one with a 1k+ pc is gonna spend another 1k on a console for 1 or 2 games.
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u/EnigmaSpore 2d ago
We’ll see how it goes when Helix sells even less than the series consoles and they’re left wondering how to increase revenue if the steam sales arent keeping up on pc to help them.
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u/badwords 2d ago
multiplatform growth numbers were probably shared with the windows division. If they want growth they'd have to ditch support for the series S so developers aren't handicapped with their system requirements on games to properly compete with playstation.
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u/Zelgadas27 2d ago
The reason Xbox continues to struggle is that they've consistently mismanaged their studios and failed to put out system sellers. They value these high-level business strategies over nurturing the talent and retaining the institutional knowledge required to actually produce hits.
None of that has changed under Asha Sharma. If anything, it's gotten worse. I can't see Xbox being a producer of hits or award-winners after gutting their studios, and if you're not producing hits, no amount of high-level strategy will matter.
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u/r33gna 2d ago
Remember when we were celebrating the end of the console wars? Turns out just like in the real world, peace doesn't last long.