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.

On the other hand, do you think Phil Spencer is close to scoring that successful game?

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.