Phil Spencer blames capitalism for being bad at his job
(www.pcgamer.com)
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This one is easy. You get back to growth by remembering the demand side of supply and demand. Sell gamers what they actually want rather than dictating what they will get and ignoring all of their complaints about it. You can please your customers and thrive or you can please the ivory tower intelligentsia and die. You can't do both, so choose.
You mean gamers don't want space bullshit that have expressionless characters like Starfield?
That's why they hate capitalism: they cannot push their politics AND run a successful business at the same time, so they choose to run businesses into the ground and blame everyone but themselves.
They will choose to die and I won't weep for them.
I mean I can immediately improve sales in Xbox:
Re nude Cortana and make it standard that any female characters have to LOOK like female characters
Stop all ESG shit so no just disparaging men for being men
Copy Helldivers 2 microtransactions where you can pay for new stuff or earn it in game so it's more 'pay to skip'
I just think at the root of the woes of all these gaming studios and divisions is none of them actually PLAY games, all they see is a profit margin so have no idea on how to make a product for the customers they are appealing to.
It is a sad state of affairs that evil has become so common that even consumer are arguing for a lesser evil as solution.
They would have to do more than this to save Halo.
Bonnie Ross was basically the Kathleen Kennedy of Xbox, and under her they’ve had the same bullshit of hiring people who didn’t like the original games.
They need to throw out everything post-Bungie, disband 343, and take a break. Then bring back Martin O’Donnell and some of the original devs and artists in a few years.
I'd like to add 3 things:
Give Forza 2023 a proper career mode like FM4 that takes full advantage of the game's car and circuit roster and includes a variety of modes like circuit racing, off road racing, drifting, drag racing, etc. Make it lengthy enough to feel like meaningful progression is possible and fully playable for those without an Internet connection.
Broker deals with the licensed race series from FM6-7 like IMSA, IndyCar, NASCAR, Repco Supercars, etc. to include their current cars and flesh out their selection of paint jobs for them. This would considerably boost Forza 2023's connection to real world motorsports.
Release a patch for Horizon 5 that quietly removes the pronouns from the character customization, especially in the wake of the research from the past few years that confirms them as a symptom of a mental illness.
This is an argument, and in my opinion a fallacy, they constantly perpetuate to call out capitalism. It's part of what's broken with the stock market too, and he's not wrong they will be unhappy with him along with driving his stock price way down if he doesn't present growth. The thing is, a continuous flow of steady profit, without growth, is still healthy capitalism (excluding adjusting the not-growth for rampant inflation). If you make a game that every year makes a $10M profit consistently every year, that should be celebrated as success. The commies just don't want to look at that because they only listed to wall street talking heads and speculators screaming for growth, growth, growth, as what is and only is capitalism.
Regarding Xbox though, can they even make consistently profiting games? The proportion of total gamers : those playing Microsoft games is what's really broken. How about just making some fun games without preaching a ridiculous message, and see where that gets you.
Infinite growth is a sort of ponzi-nomics that funnels stock cycles, and the bizarre idea that you can forecast your company's profits for the next 5 years with total accuracy. Everything in the market is based on this idea that it is predictable when every single person involved knows it is not. So when the unpredictable happens, suddenly the government gets called in to change reality to match their projections.
If we actually lived in a pure capitalist system, then Xbox Games That Has Never Shown a Profit wouldn't exist.
Oh, dear we are in the planned economy of the ccp, it was just hidden by a extra layer of words, haha
The problem is investment money.
Go back to the days of rolling past profits into future ventures.
Instead they have an addiction to VC cash. He's right about perpetual growth, because everybody is leveraged to hell and if you make money and turn a profit a new round of investors buy in and now you need to do better and bigger. It's not enough to tread water because you will just break even paying back the investment.
This didn't used to be a thing.
The industry practically operates on the premise of taking out a second mortgage so you can improve your house and then use the higher valuation to take out a third mortgage to pay back the second one, robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Every game now costs $600 million to make and has to sell $4 billion to pay everybody back, and then they need $800 million for the next game so they borrow it and need to sell $5 billion.
I think this also speaks to an emphasis on volume over quality. A good product will turn a profit, but the current trend is to try to make everything so big to conquer some theoretical market share. Get big, don't worry about whether or not your product is good or if your production cycle is sustainable, just get Amazon big or burn down the whole industry trying.
It's absurd.
Make a good product and you will make enough money to pay everyone and fund the next product. Repeat ad nauseam. You now have a thriving and successful company.
It is underappreciated in the mainstream how irregulated wall st is, just like health care, travel, banking, and any other despised industry of modern society. Capitalism would be letting stock markets decide if insider trading is permissible, not federal congress. Quarterly obsession is a combination of a forced framework and a century of abysmal financial policy.
He's been president for ten years now, and the brand has receded every year.
How do you show growth? By selling product so people give you more money.
Why do you want growth? So investors give us more money.
this is all capitalisms fault
This is BS. What he’s actually saying is “I want to put out more ideological woke nonsense but if we do the company will fail, so I can’t, but I’ll keep trying!”
They really blame free speech and the ability for the target markets to share notes such as which games were infected with SBI-types or not. The only way they can get this shit to sell is tricking the audience (woke sequels and mid/late game subversion usually). Once people catch on and start making lists the gig is up and they can't even get the initial novel purchases anymore.
You bought all those studios, and recently a bunch more.
Are they making games?
Every time MS buys a studio, it's a countdown to a studio making nothing.
Being bought by MS is a death sentence. They either wind up making a spin off title for a franchise that hasn't seen the light of day in a decade that winds up sucking and the studio closes, or they make nothing, die off and have to close anyway.
I have yet to see an MS purchased studio make something outstanding and survive.
EA at least has the courtesy to kill a studio. MS keeps you around as a vestigial limb.
Maybe I can buy an Xbox with virtue points.
The only good thing revealed is the possibility of 3rd party stores being a think on Xbox. It's almost like the market has dictated and rewarded Valve for having the best model of game distribution. A commie like Phil prob can't put that together and will instead back into something he should have done all along
Does anyone here think Phil Spencer has done a good job as Xbox CEO?
The games media fawns over this guy, but I don't quite understand the hype for him.
It seems like the Xbox brand has a bit of an identity crisis. Microsoft itself has been particularly meddlesome in the development process, they canceled promising titles like Scalebound and let other franchises lay dormant, they're really pushing the ESG garbage, the brand only seems as big as it is because of the mergers that have their own anti competitive implications, Spencer himself wants to ban players across every online platform for "hate speech", and it seems they currently only really have 2 big name franchises; Forza and Halo.
Furthermore, feel free to disagree with me on this, but I'm not sure I see the advantage of Game Pass, especially as someone who doesn't care to play online. You have to pay a base fee on top of the additional cost for individual games. I tend to wait for the price of a game I want to play to come down; and I learn about said games from forums like this one. Wouldn't it make more sense to pay the game's MSRP up front and not just more directly support the developers, but have a working copy you have more ownership of? And not have to worry about looking for a specific game, only to see it delisted because you decided you needed more time to see whether you truly wanted to purchase it or not?
Lately, it seems that Game Pass itself seems to reward bare bones, exploitative live service game design. Look at Forza 2023, which was apparently specifically designed for Game Pass users. The career mode was bare bones at launch, the game itself was riddled with technical issues, its campaign only got new events through this live service model; and the events themselves disappear after a certain time. Forza 2023 also requires an Internet connection to save progress, and seems to require extensive amounts of grinding to make meaningful progression in the game.
If that's the sort of game Game Pass seems to incentivize the creation of, I'm not sure that's a gaming experience for me; especially if other gaming companies try to replicate it.
At that point, a game feels more like a full time job rather than something fun.
Maybe I'm just an out of touch dinosaur. But I don't quite see how Phil Spencer's ideas benefit the customer. I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts on what Phil Spencer has done for the Xbox brand.
No disagree here, you're spot-on. There is literally no advantage to Game Pass for gamers, since the bigger it becomes as a service, the less ownership you have over the product.
They don't. But again, most people growing up these days are growing up in a post-physical market. Majority of their access to entertainment products comes from digital access. It's all they know. it's why you'll be hard pressed to find a young gamer these days who has an issue with DLC, seasonal passes, battle passes, microtransactions, loot boxes, etc. It's all par the course for them. The next generation of gamers won't even know what non-live service games are, unless they play classics from before 2010.
The guy he replaced -- Don Mattrick -- was the one responsible for pushing Xbox in its current direction, the "all digital future". The thing was, he was ten years too early, and (rightfully so) there was pushback by the market, who recoiled at losing rights and access to products. There were some shills who touted the "you never had any rights to games before", but most people rightfully pointed out that you could access cartridges and discs whenever you wanted without digital rights access.
Gamers abandoning Xbox during that era was Microsoft's wake-up call, and Phil Spencer said everything right at the time to accommodate goodwill from gamers. He walked back a lot of Mattrick's talking points and tried to play nice with Nintendo and Sony; he talked openly about supporting cross-platform play and paid a lot of lip-service to strengthening the Xbox brand through third-party support (something Microsoft lacked for ages).
Spencer, essentially, was a good politician and played his hand well.
But as we're all seeing, he was all talk. Everything Mattrick started with the Xbox One is continuing on full-steam ahead with whatever the current line of Xbox consoles are. Almost all media entertainment now is digital or streaming, so most people don't even protest if a game is unavailable on a physical disc.
Spencer, however, has moved on to the next big phase: programming the next generation with ESG/DEI propaganda.
Microsoft has had a decade to build good games, and have consistently chosen not to. In the face of all the SBI stuff, they have doubled down on ugly female characters and even had an edict slip publicly about ensuring devs keep making ugly females, since they seem intent on not publishing anything aimed at straight White/Asian male gamers.
I would have been curious to see what Spencer could have done had he been designated his role as head of Xbox to actually make good games instead of toeing the corporate line of brainwashing what few Xbox customers they have left. If the console industry was actually competitive instead of pushing regressive Marxist (socio)politics, I'm curious if he could have wrangled in some third-party exclusives to actually publish good games?
I guess in some separate time-line that is playing out and gamers are enjoying (or hating) whatever it is they're producing. But in the Clownworld time-line, we're getting more man-hating nigress afro-lesbians forced into derivative, boring shooters constantly taking the piss out of its core demographic.
I mean even the old guard seems to be routed to some extent and talking about it like it is no problem. Some time we get a small bump of resistance like the Diablo phone game but overall, it seems like the modern man is a convert until the electricity goes out.
You're sadly right.
Do you think he'll succeed at pushing the wokeness?
In my opinion, he's seeing a similar pushback like the one Mattrick saw in 2013. More people are beginning to see DEI/ESG for the predatory scam that it is and really becoming vocal in their opposition to it.
I think the opposition to the wokeness is at an all time high, perhaps even bigger than when Trump was President.
That's a good question.
In the same way that there are protests and pushback against wokeness in record droves, there are also a lot of people who have become complacent with it. For instance, if I bring up Baldur's Gate 3 being woke in any general news/gaming/media channel, the average person will have a conniption and defend the game to the death that it's "not woke" and just a "great game". I was recently watching one video where they were comparing character creators and someone said that Baldur's Gate 3 had one of the best character creators they've played. It left me scratching my head because it's not even in the top 10, and has a ton of severe limitations compared to even older games like Black Desert Online, which, to my knowledge, is still probably the best out there.
All that is to say, while a lot of people are now awake to the DEI/ESG nonsense, and while you're right that opposition to wokeness is at an all-time high (especially with anything coming out of the house of the mouse, or policies from Labour/Democratic politicians) there's also still an unfortunate amount of people still wholly complacent to it all. The normies.
I think if Spencer could land one or two big AAA successes for Xbox that are just decent enough (they don't even have to be good, just decent), and still kept pushing woke nonsense in subsidiary support titles, then yeah, they will succeed in pushing wokeness.
Even now, look at Sony -- almost all their major titles are woke. But Helldivers 2 has made people forget about it for the most part, and Stellar Blade has people convinced that wokeness on PlayStation is mostly dead. It's just two games. Are they enough to convince people to buy the next woke Naughty Dog outing? I guess time will tell.
Jim Ryan was the PlayStation head when the wokeness at that brand was at a peak.
Hiroki Tatoki has taken his place. He's from Japan, so he may very well have a firmer focus on making quality games that entertain everyone- which is exactly what Japanese gamers have been wanting (Japan as a whole does not seem happy with the globalists' push to force them to accept wokeness one bit.)
Quite the contrast from his predecessor, who must have signed most of the decision making over to the California division.
From what you've said about those two games, he may have come in at just the right time.
I'm not holding my breath or anything, but he seems like he's actually trying to get publishers and developers to knock it off with the wokeness.
The disgusting, ignorant way the PlayStation social media team and the U.S. division responded to the aftermath of the 2020 Summer of Love made me wary about buying a PS5.
However, games like Tekken 8 and Elden Ring do look rather tempting, and I heard the wokest personnel like Neil Cuckmann could very well be leaving the industry altogether- or at least have far less influence.
Perhaps I'm being too optimistic, but it looks like things might finally be heading in the right direction for the PlayStation brand again.
On the other hand, do you think Phil Spencer is close to scoring that successful game? FH5 was sort of there, but its numbers could very well have just been boosted by Game Pass' existence. And Halo Infinite and FM 2023 seem to have disappointed players so far and are cited as examples of what's wrong with the current Xbox brand.
That's an extremely cogent point about Tatoki taking over. I haven't been following the minutiae of the industry anywhere near as closely as I used to (thanks to the wokeness in media escalating to absurd degrees I've kind of retreated to other hobbies over the year). But what you say could track with a newfound direction for PlayStation with Helldivers 2 and Stellar Blade leading the way, and Tekken 8 seemingly being part of the wave of games actually aimed at the core demographic of gamers.
The real tell will be what proper first-party titles look like coming down the pipeline, and whether they will buffer the support of the three aforementioned titles with other non-woke games, or if they will use those games to try to win back gamers and then bombard them with wokeness, similar to what Netflix does with the first season of a show being somewhat decent and then the subsequent seasons being full-on propaganda.
Hard to say. CDPR went woke but managed to recover thanks to the Cyberpunk anime, and now people have mostly forgiven them, so they now have leeway to fail or succeed again with whatever they make next. Microsoft went woke and has had nothing to recover them since all their supporting media is also still woke, like that Halo TV show. So it's not like they can leverage their current line-up of games based on cross-media success, because they have none. Had the Halo TV show been cool and successful, it might have rekindled interest in Halo Infinite, and then that would have been their success story, much like Edgerunners rekindling interest in Cyberpunk 2077.
Unless they have something special waiting in the wings or in development at one of the countless studios they've usurped, then no, I don't think they're close. Spencer isn't a dumb guy, though; he has to see the writing on the wall. No one wants to play Fugly Fable, or that voodoo-themed SBI game. But if I had to guess, Spencer will keep politicking his way through each quarter while more woke titles release.
If push comes to shove he might scout for an indie game still in development and purchase exclusivity rights for it to try to score some good goy points. Something cheap and fun, like Palworld, or that game where you play as a modern soldier in medieval times. Those kinds of AA-titles might be the fallback plan if things keep imploding for the Xbox brand.
fucking commies love to shit on the very model they are trying so hard to subvert
Make better games on smaller budgets. Not everything has to be a live service behemoth. Stop buying studios. Stop hiring product managers instead of designers and artists. Product managers can't create shit other than monetization models.
Release smaller titles, more often. Invest in your talent, that's equally as valuable as your tech. Talent is the reason, the value, that they snatch up so many studios. Mentor your own fucking talent, pay them so they stick around, and you'll create your own value and growth. Make a new Bioware or Blizzard in spirit. All it takes is a gamer first attitude and getting a few based recruiters. None of this HR slop.
Could not have said this better myself.
I mean everyone knows the revolutionary gaming consoles and studios that came from communist shit holes. Excluding Tetris of course
He was doing all the right steps to do well buy acquiring studios to fill the void of their lack of exclusives, then he allowed ESG to be injected into everything and screwed the pooch. The lack of a merit based hiring policy would also be a large factor.